Chapter 17 The Legend of Holly & Hemlock #2
“Her name was Anwen,” Larkin says, reading the caption aloud. “A healer. Or a witch, depending on who wrote the history.” He flips a few pages, careful not to tear the brittle paper. “She lived here, on this hill, before the first stone was set.”
“Did she curse the land?” I ask.
He snorts. “That’s the convenient version. The real story’s more complicated.”
He scans the next page, mouth moving silently as he parses the archaic script.
“She grew everything from seed,” he says, summarizing.
“Knew the use for every leaf, every root. She had a garden that was the envy of three counties.” He looks up, eyes catching the lamp’s gold.
“But the holly and the hemlock—she planted those as boundaries. To mark her domain. To keep out what she didn’t want. ”
I touch the border on the illustration. The holly is drawn with obsessive detail, every spine and berry rendered in black and red. The hemlock, by contrast, is paler, ghostly, like the shadow of a plant rather than the thing itself.
“Why those two?” I ask.
He flips to another page. “Holly is protective. It’s in every folk remedy, every ward. Hemlock, though, is poison. Together, they make a perfect boundary. You cross it, you’re either blessed or damned, no in-between.”
I look at the next image. It shows a man, tall and severe, his face blotted out by a splotch of brown ink. In the background, Anwen stands among the trees, watching.
“She was in love,” Larkin says, voice gone careful. “With the lord of the nearest estate. He was married, of course, and she was already the subject of rumors, so it was all doomed from the start.”
I let the silence do its work while he reads the notations.
“He died young,” Larkin continues. “No cause listed, but the implication is violence, or suicide. The wife accused Anwen of bewitching him. Had her banished from the funeral, then from the parish.”
“Did she actually curse them?”
Larkin turns a few more pages, the paper so thin I can see the ghost of the next chapter through it.
“Not a curse. More of a—” He searches for the word.
“Blessing gone wrong. She was so furious at being cut off from the man she loved, she cast a spell to keep him near her, forever. To keep anything she loved from ever leaving again.”
I feel a shiver then, not from the cold, but from the way the story fits itself to the contours of my own life.
“She thought it would just bring his ghost back,” Larkin says, “but it spread. It infected the land, then the house, then anyone who ever lived here.” He looks up at me, his usual mask of arrogance gone. “No one leaves Hemlock. Not for long.”
I touch the next illustration. This time, the holly border is so dense it nearly obliterates the image. In the center, a heart—human, not symbolic—is pierced with two spikes: one bright, one dark.
The Latin beneath is messy, but legible enough. “Amor manet,” I read. “Love endures.”
Larkin’s hands are steady, but the muscle in his jaw jumps when he speaks. “She didn’t mean to make it a curse. She just wanted to keep what she had.”
The margins of the page are stained, the ink bled outward in little tidal lines. I see now that it isn’t just water damage—the page is marked with what can only be tears, the salt having eaten through the paper in tiny, perfect circles.
My own eyes prick with the feel of them as I think of her and her lost love.
He turns to the final entry. The script is different, more frantic, as if written in a fever. The words are in Welsh, and I watch as Larkin parses each one with care. His mouth shapes the syllables before his tongue releases them.
“It’s a plea,” he says, voice raw. “A spell of holding. It says: ‘Hold fast what is loved, keep close what is cherished, never release what the heart claims as its own.’”
I repeat the words in my mind, feeling the way they crowd out rational thought.
I look at Larkin. His eyes are not on the book now, but on me, as if waiting for something to manifest.
I close the folio, the cover soft under my fingers. The lamp flickers, throwing our shadows huge against the wall. For a moment, I can’t tell where his ends and mine begins.
I reach out, run my thumb along the holly motif etched into the cover. The prongs catch on my nail, and I think of how boundaries are meant to keep things out, not in. But here, they are reversed. Here, the thorns only grow inward.
Larkin watches me, his face unreadable. But I see the way his hands tremble now, ever so slightly, as if the act of reading the past has changed the shape of his future.
“We should put it back,” he says, finally.
“Not yet,” I reply.
I open the folio to the last page, the words of Anwen burning through the vellum. I read them again, softer, like an invocation. “Hold fast what is loved. Keep close what is cherished. Never release what the heart claims as its own.”
The lamp flickers again, and the air goes cold.
Larkin closes his hand over mine, pinning the book to the table. “The story doesn’t end well,” he says, not letting go. “She never got him back, and the blessing turned into a curse on us all.”
I look at his hand—large, pale, elegant—and then at his eyes, gone black in the lamplight.
“Maybe that’s the point,” I say. “But maybe there’s a way to undo it.”
We sit there, in the half-dark, the weight of the past pressing in from all sides. The house groans above us, the sound of timber shifting in the wind. For a moment, I wonder if Anwen is still here, her curse cycling through generation after generation, waiting for someone to let it rest.
Or maybe, just maybe, she’s watching, hoping that this time, the story will break its own pattern.
Larkin’s hand is still on mine when I say, “Let’s keep reading.”
And so we do.
The hours pass in a succession of lamplight and increasingly frantic page-turning.
Outside, the night comes down fast, erasing the world past the windows, making the library’s oil glow seem brighter and more dangerous.
The room shrinks, heatless, each footstep echoing longer than the last. In the back of my mind, I am aware that no one has come to look for us, not Lane, not Whitby—no one. The house is complicit.
Larkin moves through the volumes like a priest through his own apocrypha.
The brass sconces throw our silhouettes onto the wall, grotesque and multiplied, our bodies elongated and entwined even when we stand apart.
The light pools in yellow stains on the paper, illuminating centuries of loss and longing.
If I focus, I can hear the house listening: the movement of air through ducts, the settling of beams, the shivering of old glass.
We piece together the story in fragments, matching notations and birthdates, deeds and half-legible letters. It is all here, if you know how to read the negative space, the tale of a house built to memorialize a wound, to keep it open and raw.
At one point, Larkin finds a sheaf of architectural plans, bound together with string so fine it is almost invisible. He lays them out on the table, weighting the corners with old ink bottles. “Here,” he says, pointing at the ground floor. “See this overlay?”
I lean in. The main hall is set precisely atop an older footprint, a small square labeled “Anwen’s cottage—demolished.” The new house is mapped like a parasite over its host, each new room smothering something older, something essential.
“It’s deliberate,” I say, tracing the lines. “The house isn’t just built here, it’s built out of her.”
Larkin nods, expression severe. “They took her body, her boundary, and made it into architecture.”
There is a horror in it, but also a strange sense of vindication. I have always felt the house as something inside me, not outside; now I see that the reverse is also true.
He brings me another stack of papers. “Look at this,” he says, and flips to a page near the back.
It is a ledger, listing repairs and modifications going back generations.
Some notes are functional: “Replace windows, north face.” Others are less so: “Seal the Blue Room.” “Burn what cannot be buried.”
“Why keep it?” I ask, running my finger down the list.
“Because they believed, even then, that destroying it would only make it stronger. Every time they tried to erase her, she just found another way in.”
We work in silence for a time, and I find myself thinking of the curse as less of a malice and more of a hunger, a craving so deep it outlasts even memory.
“But why did Aunt Maeve think I could break it? She barely knew me. We’re missing something.”
Larkin doesn’t look up from the map he’s annotating, but his voice is deliberate, measured. “Because you’re not of here. You spent your life outside, not feeding the pattern. You’re a clean break. The house can’t use you the way it uses the rest of us.”
“I don’t believe it’s that easy,” I say, but my voice is unconvincing.
He closes the map, folds it with precision. “I do,” he says, and I sense, for the first time, that he is afraid—not of me, but for me.
I stand, pacing the cramped room. My shadow lurches across the walls, trailed by the phantom of Larkin’s, never quite overtaking it. “If the house wants to keep what it loves, then it will never let us go.”
He shrugs, the gesture taut. “Maybe. But maybe you can make it let go.”
He crosses to the window and looks out, seeing nothing but the reflection of his own face, haunted and unfamiliar. “When Maeve died, Whitby told me she saw a woman standing in the garden. She thought it was you. But you weren’t here yet.”
“Anwen,” I say, feeling the name land in the pit of my stomach.
“Maybe,” he says. “Or maybe just what the house wants you to become.”
I return to the table and begin sifting through the remainder of the folio. My hands shake, but I keep searching. Near the bottom, tucked between two blank pages, is a single sheet, heavier than the rest. It is a genealogy, written in a hand I know well. My aunt’s.
It charts the lineage of Anwen’s descendants, the lines converging over centuries until only three names remain: Maeve and Louise, both crossed out in black, and below, my own, underlined twice in blue.
My aunt. My mother. Me.
“Anwen must have had a baby with her lover. That’s the only thing that makes sense if this geneology is accurate.”
I run my finger over the ink, feeling the indentation in the paper. My skin prickles, blood rushing hot through my ears.
Larkin is beside me now, reading over my shoulder. “That’s why she changed the will,” he says quietly. “She might not have figured out how to stop it, but you could. You’re the only one who could.”
My vision blurs at the edges. The lines on the page swim, merge, resolve into something I don’t want to see.
“So what now?” I ask, voice thin as moth wings.
He touches my shoulder, not a comfort but a confirmation. “Now you decide: do you want to be the last link, or the first escape?”
The house groans overhead, a sound like a ribcage giving way.
I close the folio and decide that I will not be a chain. I will not be a shackle, forged from someone else’s longing and passed down like an heirloom rot.
Larkin releases his grip on my shoulder with a friction that’s almost reluctant. For a moment, neither of us moves. There is a sound—somewhere overhead, a distant hallway yielding to the hush of approaching night—but it only deepens the pocket of silence around us.
“We should go,” Larkin says. His voice is hoarse, and he seems abruptly aware of our own smallness, here at the bottom of the house where no one is supposed to see us. “If the house is watching, it’s more dangerous down here than anywhere else.”
I laugh, brittle. “And upstairs is so much safer.”
“Fewer secrets, more eyes,” he counters, and gathers the folio, the genealogy, the map overlays into a careful stack.
We make our way up the stairs, and every footstep seems amplified—wood flexing, air thumping in the risers. At the top, I hesitate. I can feel the pressure of the house behind me, as if every square foot is longing for a different outcome than the one I intend to deliver.