Chapter 19 I Can Make Her Worse #3
They exited Rosefell Hall and descended past the terrace through a little wood, among larks singing and brambles clinging. The pleasure grounds were set in the valley below the house, down wide steps overgrown with mats of juniper.
The morning was silver with wetness. The moors shimmered with it, save for lines crisscrossing them where a fox or a hare had passed in the night.
The air was thick with suspended moisture.
Each leaf had a scabbard of dew. Clouds hung between the sun and the earth like a veil.
There was density to it: rain was coming.
As in the libraries, Osric enjoyed Fairhrim’s discovery.
They passed broken fountains spouting ivy rather than water, a walk of sculpted Greek gods, a water lily–choked pond, a topiary whose hedges still held echoes of long-ago shapes (a swan had become a dragon; a dog had become a warg).
They strolled through large parterres dedicated to blooming in the four seasons, now uniformly weed save for one or two flowers, glowing like jewels.
They passed marble balustrades, embroidered in lichen, that led nowhere.
They discovered a mock-Gothic folly, once built to look ruined and now truly ruined.
Its pediment crumbled; time had made the artificial real.
The aviary’s inhabitants were long gone, though sparrows now nested among the trelliswork, and scolded Osric and Fairhrim as they walked past. The butterfly garden was erased; in fact, Osric hadn’t realised they were walking through it until Fairhrim paused at the moss-covered remains of a sundial. She pushed the moss away from its face.
“Oh,” she said. “They’ve put carvings of the Papilionoidea life cycle, instead of numbers.”
“What time is it now?” asked Osric.
“Egg,” said Fairhrim.
“Useful,” said Osric.
Down what had once been white gravel paths, they wandered, into the rusting remains of the hothouses. The fernery was a jungle—the ferns hadn’t required tending and thrived, joyous in shadowy, wet neglect.
They came to the largest hothouse, which had once held the estate’s most prized botanical collections. Now there was nothing but bramble and broken terra-cotta. A fig vine wreathed the entrance; last season’s fruit oozed and rotted upon it.
It was late summer. Autumn was around the corner. How strange that the smell of decay should remind one of spring.
Osric’s and Fairhrim’s steps crackled over leaf litter and shattered glass as they went into the hothouse.
An animal had taken to eating there and left carcasses behind.
Some hardier roses still clung to life in spite of decades of abandonment and did their best to sweeten the air, but their buds, tiny and cankered, failed to open.
Fairhrim reached for a malformed pink one.
The bud fell to the ground at her touch, sad and unlovely.
The hothouse’s aisles were tiled in cracked black and white lozenges. Fairhrim moved through the collapsing, overgrown rows, trying to decipher cultivar names on brass plates.
“It seems a pity,” she said as she traversed the romantic desolation.
“You reap what you sow, I suppose,” said Osric.
“You’ve never thought of fixing it up?”
“To what end?”
“I thought you loved beautiful things.”
“Some things are too far gone to fix. The house. The grounds. Me,” Osric added tragically.
Fairhrim cast a look over her shoulder, accompanied by the ironic arch of an eyebrow. “I disagree.”
“What is your thesis?”
“There’s latent good in it all, including you.”
“Did Lady Windermere get you with the drug, too?”
“You saved those nurses and children at the asylum. You didn’t bargain with me for a price for the information. The letters you’ve just given me could also have commanded a fee. Don’t think I didn’t notice.”
None of it was for Good, Osric wanted to say. It was for you.
Or were those the same thing?
“Just buying your favour for future negotiations,” said Osric.
Fairhrim’s eyes ran up and down his face gently, as though she read him like a page, as though she found him sad.
“Don’t look at me like that,” said Osric. “I’m rotten from the inside out. Like the whole of this place. I’ve even got bloody seith rot.”
“A medical condition doesn’t a leitmotif make,” said Fairhrim.
Osric followed her through the shadows and decay, this sepulchre that was his inheritance, aggravated that she thought she had the authority to read him like that, and tell him what he was.
“There’s no reform,” he said. “There’s no fixing. I’m the worst of the worst. I’ve done too much wrong.”
“Roses thrive on bonemeal,” commented Fairhrim irrelevantly.
She stopped at the very end of the hothouse.
And she, whom nothing could startle, gasped, “Oh.”
Daylight drew a luminous path through the glass roof to her feet.
There—a desperate triumph among the rot—a single white rose had bloomed. It was imperfect; its petals were browned and frayed, its leaves withered. But it bloomed.
“That’s the thing about decay,” said Fairhrim. “Death becomes life again, inevitably. Beauty grows from rotted things.”
They stood in silence. Motes of dust glimmered like gold.
The rose stretched upwards through bones and broken glass and its own mutilation, in search of grace.