Chapter 11 #2
I had heard the clock toll midnight while I was frantically throwing the lock on the door. No matter how I calculated, the possum had been alive on the balcony until almost dawn, separated from me by no more than a pane of glass.
The time of death hardly matters, does it? It didn’t get in, and what’s an hour or two either way?
Yet despite that, it troubled me to think of the poor mad thing lying outside the door all night. Both because it had been suffering, and because I could not escape the feeling that it had been waiting for me to unlock the door so that it could finally get inside.
I went back to my room in a mood that had passed through pensive and come out the other side. Possums with wolf worms in the brain. Halder’s excitement. The sketchbooks.
Dear Lord, the sketchbooks.
I picked one up, flipped through it, and set it down again. Louisa. What had become of her? Had she died? Had she gotten away safely? Had Halder really killed her lover?
Who might know more? If Mrs. Kent didn’t want to talk, who would?
The image of Ma Kersey dropped into my head, fully formed, like a page ripped from the gossip rag of the gods. I would bet my eyeteeth that she knows what happened to Louisa. Possibly before Louisa did.
I snatched up my own sketchbook and went to find out.
“You want to see Ma Kersey?” Mrs. Kent gave me a wary look, as if a rabbit had just announced its desire to pay a visit to the wolf. “What for?”
I’d run the housekeeper to earth two doors down from the studio, where she was determinedly airing out a guest bedroom. Furniture huddled under sheets like the ghost of occupations past.
Fortunately, I had already thought of an answer to this question. “I draw plants,” I said. “Well, I used to. For my father, you see. I like them a lot more than bugs.”
Mrs. Kent smiled, though she still looked a trifle puzzled. “I can understand that. Plants, eh? Flowers and such?”
“Yes, but also … here, it’s easier to show you.
” I fetched the Botanica from my room and opened it to my favorite page, the jack-in-the-pulpit.
A strange little vase of a plant, with dark streaks running up from the base, and the spadix tucked inside like a tongue in a toad’s mouth, and another illustration alongside it, of the bright orange fruit that clung to it later in the year.
Mrs. Kent gazed at it for a long time, turning the pages almost reverently. “So this is what you do…” she murmured.
I felt a sudden stab of embarrassment. Had I really not shown her any of my work?
No, I hadn’t. However good a job I did on the screwworm larvae, it wasn’t the sort of thing I could imagine showing Mrs. Kent, and I’ve never been the sort of person to show off my sketchbooks.
And yet she was, by leaps and bounds, the closest thing I had to a friend in this place.
I cleared my throat awkwardly. “Yes. That’s what I’ve been doing in the studio all day. Only bugs, not plants.”
“Virginia bluebells,” she said softly, running a fingertip over the page. “These were my mother’s favorite.”
I had no idea what to say.
“You have quite a gift,” said Mrs. Kent, handing the book back to me. She cleared her throat and straightened her back, apparently realizing that she’d been poring over the book for the last few minutes instead of working. “What’s it to do with Ma Kersey though?”
“Plants,” I explained. The deception, which hadn’t bothered me in the slightest five minutes ago, suddenly seemed like a betrayal.
Nevertheless, I had started down this road, and suddenly changing my mind would sound even stranger.
“You said she was good at doctoring. A person like that uses a lot of herbs—they always do—and I wanted to ask her about some of what she uses. Father was very interested in things like pollination and seed dispersal, but he never cared much for things like medicinal uses. I did. Do.”
Mrs. Kent nodded. “Ah, yeah, herbs. She does a spring tonic that’ll curl your toes and chase the winter right out of your bones.
” She fanned the air with her apron. A little breeze forced its way through the sluggish heat and stirred the furniture covers.
“Right. She’s not hard to find. Just go left as you come to the road and go about a mile down, maybe a little bit more.
You’ll cross two roads, and then there’s an itty-bitty drive with about five houses on it.
Hers is the last one in the row.” She paused, eyeing me up and down.
“She likes people to ask her for advice. She’ll probably be happy to tell you.
But I’d take her a little gift anyway, just in case. ”
I set out the next morning with a satchel I’d borrowed from Jackson slung over one shoulder.
Despite leaving early enough that it was still cool, I can’t say that it was a particularly pleasant walk.
The weight of the Botanica made the strap dig into my shoulder after the first half mile, and the road itself was in dismal repair.
The recent rain had turned parts of it into sucking mud, and I had to switch which side I walked on multiple times to avoid puddles that resembled small inland seas.
Oh well, it’s still more comfortable than riding in Phelps’s wagon, I thought, with all his talk of devils in the woods.
Presumably he’d been referring to the blood thieves?
I suppressed the urge to look over my shoulder.
There was nothing out here. It had been three years ago.
I’d been roaming around at night myself, and the only thing I’d seen was Halder, who had been quite alarming enough, thank you.
The distance was more like a mile and a half, all told, but the right-hand side opened up after a while, into fields that had been cleared for farmland.
My mind kept returning to the possum, to the hole drilled into its skull … I ordered myself to think about something else.
Fine. Is Halder really a murderer, do you think?
This was not an improvement. I tried to distract myself by identifying the plants that sprung up along the verge—dock and bitter cress, garden vetch, crownbeard and speedwell.
On the side partly shaded by the woods, burgundy wood sorrel put up tiny flowers.
When I ran out of new plants, I went to birdcalls.
The scolding of a Carolina chickadee, the liquid trilling of a hermit thrush, the white-throated sparrow that calls Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody … from low to the ground.
It was with some relief that I reached the turnoff.
The row of houses was just as described.
Ma Kersey’s house stood a little apart, surrounded by a garden that did not so much grow as rampage in all directions.
A few chickens ran screaming from my approach, and a rooster stood on top of a ramshackle henhouse and shouted insults at me in Chicken.
Unlike her birds, Ma Kersey was delighted to see me, or at least did a pretty good imitation, and professed equal delight with the gift I brought her.
I had spent part of the evening carefully drawing a rabbit, based on a few quick sketches I’d done of one that had been hanging around Jackson’s garden, made larger and fluffier with imagination.
I wrote World-Famous Chatham Rabbit underneath, which she read aloud when I presented it to her with some trepidation.
(It’s always awkward to give people art that you’ve made.
It feels egotistical, as if you think so highly of yourself and your skill that you expect other people to be impressed as well.
Even now, when I make my living with that skill, I can never quite shake the feeling that people are humoring me like a child when I give them something I’ve drawn.)
When she had finished admiring the rabbit, she put the drawing up on a high shelf, looking down over the room, then put on the teakettle.
“How you settling in?” asked Ma Kersey. She cocked her head to one side, eyes bird-bright. “How do you like them woods?”
“I love the woods. I grew up tromping through them with my father, painting things.”
“Mmm.”
I wasn’t sure if that was an invitation or not, but I decided to treat it as one. “Though I heard something about some … err … bad things that happened in the woods years ago,” I said cautiously, “but that was a long time ago. Errr … blood thieves?”
Ma Kersey’s bright little eyes narrowed. “Jackson’s been telling you tales, has he?”
I gulped. I didn’t want to get him in trouble, and I had a feeling that Ma Kersey could make quite a lot of trouble if she chose. “He didn’t mean any harm. I’m sure he was just trying to put a scare in the new girl.”
“Mmm.” Ma Kersey poured the tea. “Wasn’t just a story. Some bad things went on back then.”
I was beginning to regret starting down this road at all. Despite the goodwill the Chatham rabbit had won me, the old woman’s tone was, if not hostile, at least chill. “Well,” I said hastily, “he said they caught some people and it all stopped happening.”
“The three-month babies,” she said.
“Beg pardon?”
“Brother and sister, they were.” She shook her head. “Old story. Old gossip. Never mind it. It’s over now. For good, I hope. What’s this you’re wanting to know about plants?”
The phrase “three-month babies” had lodged like a thorn in my brain, but I shook it off and explained about medicinal plants, passing the heavy copy of the Botanica to her.
Ma Kersey read the title aloud, and began to page through it.
When she reached a plant that she knew, she told what she used it for, and she knew a lot of uses.
I hastily pulled out my sketchbook and began taking notes.
It was unlikely that there would ever be another edition of Botanica, but there have been a few books published by female naturalists over the years, and books on herbs and home remedies seem to be of greater interest to publishers.
Perhaps my hasty deception might prove truthful after all.