Chapter 3 The Groundskeeper #2
“I’m allergic,” I tell him. It’s almost a joke.
He snorts, and I find myself enjoying making him laugh.
At the end of the path, where the trees part and the ground drops away toward the river, Lane stops. He looks at me, really looks, and I’m suddenly aware of the space between us—charged, uncertain, not altogether hostile.
“You’ll want to go back soon,” he says. “Storm coming.”
I look up at the sky. The cloud cover is thickening, bruised and convulsive. There’s the sharp tang of ozone in the air.
“Will it be bad?” I ask.
“First of winter’s always bad.” His eyes linger on my face, then shift to my hands, as if making sure the poisonous plant hadn’t eaten them away.
I nod, unsure what else to do. “See you around?”
He shrugs, but the corners of his mouth turn up, just slightly.
I walk for another fifteen minutes, meandering by the river, and back up a tree-lined path toward the house. I can almost feel his gaze on me the entire time, but acknowledge that’s impossible.
When I reach the vestibule, the lantern is dead. I close the door behind me and lean against it, letting the warmth seep back into my skin.
My hands don’t look any different, but I keep them balled tight in my pockets, just in case.
The second time I see Lane, it’s not by accident.
I’m not sure if that’s his doing or mine.
After the encounter at the hemlock border, I retreat to the house and haunt its rooms in silence, moving from the parlor to the upper corridors and back again, always keeping an ear out for the sounds of the living.
Instead, I find only the ticking of unseen clocks, the rattle of radiators, the muffled heartbeat of an old house in retreat.
I try the library, but the memory of Larkin—his green eyes, his precise, cunning wit—has rendered the space temporarily uninhabitable.
I try the kitchen, but Mrs. Whitby is in conference with another woman, both of them bent over a ledger, their voices too low and secretive to risk interruption.
I climb the stairs, pause outside a locked door that gives off a whiff of lavender and camphor, and find myself, inevitably, peering through the windows toward the garden.
The grounds are empty at first glance. But then I see the slow, deliberate movement at the far end of the terrace—Lane, stooping over a wooden wheelbarrow, loading it with what looks like a body bag, but is just a shroud of root balls and dead stalks.
He lifts the barrow by its battered handles and trundles it toward a copse of skeletal hawthorns.
The gesture is so unhurried, so essentially deliberate, that I can’t look away.
I hesitate at the threshold, then yank the door open and let the cold slap my face. Down the steps, over the same crusted gravel, boots biting at the ice. I tell myself I’m just curious, that I want to see the garden again in brighter daylight, but the truth is less noble. I want to see him.
Lane doesn’t look up until I’m almost on top of him.
The barrow is already tipped, its cargo of rootstock laid out in a careful row along the edge of the path.
He’s wearing the same work jacket as before, and his hair is longer than I remembered, stray strands curled behind his ears. His hands are bare, even in this cold.
“Morning,” he says, as if we’ve done this every day for years.
I nod, feeling strangely shy. “I thought you’d have moved on to something else by now.”
He grunts, straightening. “There’s always something left to do.” He gestures at the wheelbarrow, the roots, the half-excavated bed beside us.
I wait for him to return to his work, but instead he surprises me by speaking again.
“You want to see the real garden?”
I try for indifference, but it comes out as something closer to gratitude. “Lead the way.”
He moves ahead, not bothering to check if I follow.
The paths are narrower here, the boxwood walls rising on either side like the railings of a green labyrinth.
Lane navigates them with the confidence of a man who’s walked these lines for years.
I hurry to keep pace, glancing at the shards of broken frost on the stones, the beads of meltwater clinging to every bare twig.
He pauses at a tangle of what I first take for brambles.
On closer inspection, it’s a mass of thorn apple—datura, if I remember my university botany.
The seed pods are desiccated and gray, their spikes turned inward like closed fists.
Lane cups one in his palm, rolling it gently between his thumb and forefinger.
“Devil’s apple,” he says. “Toxic as hell, but beautiful when it blooms.” He glances sideways. “That’s how most things grow here.”
I bend closer, careful not to touch. “Was this your idea?”
He laughs, the sound low and humorless. “Long before my time. They say Lord Harold planted the first one, for his wife. She put it in tea and nearly finished him.” He flicks the pod onto the path, where it bursts in a tiny star of powder. “Guess she didn’t use enough.”
There’s a rhythm to our walk: Lane points out a plant or a ruin, tells a story or a name, and I listen, letting his voice fill in the spaces the cold leaves behind.
He knows every genus, every hybrid, every failed experiment and every survivor.
The estate, in his mouth, becomes a legend of spite and hunger and inadvertent beauty.
At the center of the maze, we arrive at a clearing.
Someone—Lane, almost certainly—has swept the leaves into rough, concentric circles, exposing the pattern of stones beneath.
In the middle stands a bare magnolia, its branches scarred by wind and age but already swollen with emerging buds. Interesting.
Lane touches one of the buds, almost reverently. “In spring, this one’s always first. Doesn’t wait for warmth, just pushes out and takes its chances.”
I look up at him, at the planes of his face, at the way the winter light softens the scars and deepens the shadows. He’s a handsome man, but his roughness disguises it. There’s a gravity to him that makes everything else seem frivolous. He looks real. Raw.
He notices my gaze and looks away, as if embarrassed. “My father used to call these hope flowers,” he says, voice rough. “Said if you got a good bloom, it meant the year would go easy. Never did for us.”
I wonder what he means, but I know better than to ask.
Instead, I ask “Do you live in the house? I haven’t seen you around.”
He shakes his head. “Got a cottage out back by the river. Used to join old Miss Maeve for dinner sometimes, though.” He almost smiles at the memory and that does something to my insides.
“I didn’t know. You’ll have to join me—or, us—from now on.”
His face twists like he knows I was referring to Larkin. “S’okay. I manage.”
“I’m sure you do, but that’s not the point. The house is too big for one or two people. The more the merrier, I think.”
“Fine.” And that’s all he has to say about it. Just a lukewarm commitment. I can’t help but smile at his simple reactions, but tamp it down.
“You know a lot about plants,” I say after a short silence.
He shrugs, but there’s pride in it. “Better than knowing about people.”
I laugh, and the sound breaks the hush of the maze. Lane seems startled, then pleased.
We circle the clearing, our breath streaming in white plumes.
He shows me the twisted remains of a rose garden, the climbing vines trained into cruel geometries against the old stone, the beds of foxglove and hellebore and aconite.
It’s a murderers’ row of botanicals, every one beautiful and deadly.
“Why so many poisons?” I ask.
Lane runs a hand over a cluster of monkshood, the flowers long gone but the stems still rigid.
“It’s a kind of tradition. Story goes, the Vales always liked to test the limits.
” He stops, studies me for a moment. “Most people who come here can’t tell the difference between what’ll kill you and what won’t. But you—” He trails off.
“But me what?”
He shrugs. “You pay attention. Most city people walk straight into it.”
I want to ask how he knows where I’m from, but realize it doesn’t matter. Everything about me, from my shoes to the cut of my coat, is a dead giveaway. I wonder what he thinks of me, this trespasser with no history, this reluctant heir.
We complete the circuit of the maze and emerge at a low stone bench, carved with a family crest—my family’s crest, I suppose—that’s been eroded into near-illegibility.
Lane sits, stretching his legs out in front of him.
I hesitate, then join him, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his body.
He studies the garden, not looking at me. “You planning to keep the place?” he asks, voice careful.
I consider lying, but the truth is easier. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what that means yet. The house, the grounds, Mrs. Whitby’s formality . . . it’s all more overwhelming than I expected.”
He nods, as if this is the only acceptable answer. “Place like this, it’ll make up your mind for you.”
We sit in silence, the kind that would be awkward if it weren’t so peaceful.
The wind stirs the branches overhead, and the magnolia shivers.
I think about what Lane said, about hope flowers and hard years and tradition.
I wonder what it would be like to belong to something the way he belongs to this garden—to have your roots sunk so deep you can’t be dug out, not without killing the whole damn thing.
Lane stands, dusts off his hands. “Storm’s close now. Better head in before it gets dark.”
I nod, reluctant to leave the maze behind. As we retrace our path, I notice that Lane walks more slowly this time, matching my pace. When we reach the main path, he stops and faces me, his expression unreadable.
“If you need anything,” he says, “I’m always out here.”
I try to think of a clever reply, but all I manage is, “Thank you.” My voice cracks on the last word, and I curse myself for it.
He gives me a look—a long, searching look—and then turns away, vanishing between the hedges without another word.
I watch him go, feeling the cold settle into my bones. When I finally head back to the house, the sky is almost black, and the first fat flakes of snow are beginning to fall.