Chapter 21
Three more days passed before my ankle healed enough to bear my full weight without the sharp, breathless agony that had kept me confined to my room.
Three days to lie in bed and think about what I had seen in that greenhouse.
The ghost. The vines on the worktable. The journal with its terrible diagram. The memory of being pulled inside M.'s dying body, of experiencing her terror as she clawed at that door with bloodied hands while something grew inside her throat.
Had it been real? Or had the laudanum painted hallucinations over reality, transforming an ordinary greenhouse into a chamber of horrors that existed only in my deteriorating mind?
I needed to know.
The thought consumed me, circling again and again until I could think of little else. I needed to return to that greenhouse to see it with clear eyes unclouded by drugs or pain or the haze of a ghost's memory overlaying my own perceptions.
I needed to prove to myself what he had done to her.
For now, however, it would have to wait.
Agnes sat across from me at the dining table, just the two of us again.
Dr. Ambrose was secluded in his study, still desperately attempting to salvage pages of his damaged journals after Hawthorne’s rampage. He had declined to join us for supper, and in the week that I had been forced to lie in bed, I had not seen him once.
I told myself I did not care, that his absence was a relief after everything that had happened and all the terrible secrets that were now starting to unravel.
But the lie sat bitter on my tongue.
Despite everything I knew and all the horrible things I suspected to be true, I could not put him out of my mind. He occupied my thoughts like a poison I simply refused to believe would harm me, so long as I only allowed myself one small taste.
I pushed the food around my plate, my appetite gone despite Agnes’s excellent cooking. The roasted pheasant and vegetables sat heavy and unappetizing before me, cooling in the candlelight while I moved them from one side of the plate to the other.
The silence stretched between us, comfortable in its familiarity but weighted with things unsaid. Questions I could no longer resist piled high in my throat, refusing to be swallowed any longer.
“Why did you not tell me about Hawthorne?” I asked, keeping my tone casual as I cut into meat I had no intention of eating.
Agnes looked up from her plate, though she did not directly meet my eyes. Her lips parted, a small sigh escaping. “What do you think would happen to Hawthorne if people found out about him?”
I hesitated, turning the answer over. I was a stranger, someone they had been uncertain of trusting. It made sense that they would withhold something so enormous from a person who had been in the house mere weeks. The secrecy stung regardless.
“I suppose I understand your reasoning,” I said. “But I deserved to know the truth, Agnes.”
She set her fork down and folded her hands in her lap with the weighted stillness of someone who had rehearsed this conversation many times without ever quite finding the right words to begin it.
“You’re right,” she said at last. “And I’m sorry for it. We should have told you sooner.”
“Were you there?” I asked. “When Hawthorne was created?”
Agnes’s chin dipped in acknowledgement. She reached for her wine glass, turning the stem between her fingers without drinking.
“I was there for most of it. Not the earlier stages, of course. Dr. Ambrose and his wife began the research long before I understood what they were attempting. But when they assembled Hawthorne, yes. I was there. I helped them.”
“I do not understand,” I said. “How could you allow them to create something so—”
“Monstrous?” Agnes finished for me, a short huff of laughter escaping her. “Despite what happened in the greenhouse, he’s not evil. Dr. Ambrose’s wife loved him fiercely, and you may think it foolish of me to believe, but I think Hawthorne adored her too.”
The affection in her tone made my heart twist. The truth was, I understood why someone might love Hawthorne.
Beneath his frightening exterior and aside from the single violent outburst I had witnessed, he was a gentle creature who simply loved plants, who tended them with a reverence I recognized as genuine.
It made complete sense that a woman who had also loved them would have taken so fondly to him.
“Agnes,” I began carefully, watching her hands around the wine glass. “What happened to Dr. Ambrose’s wife?”
Her hands stilled entirely. She met my gaze for the first time since we had sat down, her eyes tired and honest in equal measure. “I wish I could tell you, Camellia, truly I do. But that is not mine to tell.”
“Then whose is it?”
“Dr. Ambrose’s,” she said, her tone firm beneath its gentleness. “It is his grief, dear. His to share or keep as he sees fit. I will not take that from him.”
I absorbed this, pressing my tongue to the back of my teeth. It did little to ease the suspicions turning in my mind, but I could not fault her reasoning.
“Did he love her?” The question spewed out.
“Of course he did,” she replied, her brows drawing together. “She was everything to him. She was the heart of this house.”
The words carved themselves into my chest letter by letter, raising feelings I could neither name nor dismiss. I stared down at my plate, my vision blurring as I tried to reconcile what Agnes had just said with everything I had witnessed from the ghost.
If he had loved her, then how could he have done something so terrible to her? How could he have experimented on her and left her to die alone?
Perhaps he had not.
The thought arrived quietly, without fanfare, but landed with considerable weight. Perhaps I had assembled the evidence in the wrong order, had drawn the wrong conclusion from the same facts. What if he had not killed her? What if he had tried, and failed, to save her?
What if he intended to try again?
I thought back to the night I had accused him of placing the vine inside her.
He had insisted he had not killed her, but he had said nothing to refute the vine itself.
When I confronted him in the cemetery about continuing his research on the plant that had killed his wife, he had gone silent rather than correcting me.
Silence that had felt, at the time, like admission.
Perhaps it had been grief instead. The grief of a man who knew what the vine had done and could not stop working with it because the alternative was accepting that she was gone and staying gone.
Had M. been ill? Had Dr. Ambrose’s broken heart refused to release her, and had he reached for the only tool he believed might return what he had lost? Had he grafted Verdant Vespera into her body when she was already dying, trying to reverse what he could not by ordinary means?
The image of the journal’s anatomical diagram floated to the surface of my thoughts—the woman’s throat opened, the vine threaded through her exposed structures.
“Do you know that he is still researching the vine that was used to create Hawthorne?” I asked, omitting the fact that I believed he used it on his wife as well.
Agnes went very still, refusing to meet my gaze. Then she nodded once. “Yes, I know.”
Searing heat rose in my chest, burning as the words I had not meant to say forced themselves out anyway. “How can you be so careless about this, Agnes? You know what he did to his wife… you know what the vine did to her, do you not?”
She said nothing. Her lips thinned as she pressed them together so hard the corners of her mouth turned white.
“Answer me,” I demanded, but she still said nothing.
I set down my fork, the metal clinking and bouncing off the fine china.
I had to go back to the greenhouse.
I stood abruptly, my chair scraping against the floor hard enough to nearly topple it. “Keep your secrets.”
I fled, slipping down the corridor toward the garden exit and glancing over my shoulder to be sure she had not followed.
The night air hit me like cold water when I pushed through the door—sharp and clarifying after the stuffed warmth of the dining room, carrying the scent of moss on stone and the green, living smell of the garden in darkness.
The moon hung full overhead, flooding the overgrown paths with silver light. The greenhouse structures gleamed at the far end of the garden, their glass panes fracturing the moonlight into fragments, a dozen broken reflections of the same pale face.
I walked toward the third one without slowing.
The door swung open with a protesting creak, and I stepped across the threshold.
The greenhouse was as I remembered. Overgrown and wild, plants sprawling across every surface in untended profusion, vines that had escaped their containers climbing the walls in thick curtains.
The air was dense with humidity and the deep green smell of unchecked growth, underlaid with something sweeter and more cloying that clung to the back of my throat like a memory of incense.
The worktable at the center stood empty.
The Verdant Vespera vines were gone, leaving only the ghost of their presence—faint marks in the dust where they had lain, a fading green luminescence absorbed into the wood itself.
I crossed to it and trailed my fingers over the surface, tracing those absent shapes. Perhaps Dr. Ambrose had completed his research while I was confined to bed. Perhaps he had moved the cuttings elsewhere, finished whatever extractions required them, and set his attention to whatever came next.
Or perhaps he was ready to repeat his experiment.
The thought settled in my chest with the weight of something dropped from a great height, the impact reverberating outward through my ribs.
That’s why he hired you, the voice murmured with the satisfaction of someone who was thoroughly enjoying my plight. You look just like his dead wife.
I pushed the thought away and moved to the desk.
The journal lay open exactly where I had left it, the page exactly as I remembered—the anatomical diagram of a woman’s body with her throat exposed and labeled, skin peeled back to reveal the structures beneath, Verdant Vespera threaded through it all.
It was real. Every terrible inch of it was real.
I told you, the voice whispered, vindicated. You were here. She showed you what she felt when she died. And now you know what he did to her and what he plans to do to you.
I snatched the journal up with hands that had gone unsteady and began flipping through the pages—research notes in dense script, observations about growth rates and sap properties, detailed drawings of the vine’s cellular structure and the conditions under which its bioluminescence intensified.
There was page after page of what appeared to be the original documentation, the vine’s earliest study, its first extractions, and the painstaking accumulation of data.
My companion surged forward suddenly, stilling my hands on the page with the vine drawing with a force that locked my fingers in place.
I stared at the rendering, my pulse quickening as its attention poured through my veins.
Wound around the vine’s main structure was a thinner tendril, fine as thread, bearing tiny flowers that wove themselves through the Verdant Vespera, as though the two plants had grown into each other over time.
My hands lifted the journal closer to my face without my consciously directing them to, bringing the image into sharpening focus. My vision narrowed to the drawing, and then an image forced itself through the surface of my thoughts with the violence of something that had been held down too long.
The small white flower glowing softly in my cupped palm, its petals pulsing with that yellow-green glow, alive with something I had spent months trying to classify and failed. My fingers moving over the smooth petals, feeling the warmth of them, and watching the light strengthen beneath my touch.
Then I was in the greenhouse, and the flower was still in my hand. I held it above the waste bin. A devastating sadness moved through me so completely that my chest ached with the weight of it, a grief with no clear origin, mourning something I had not yet lost but understood I was about to.
I let go of the flower.
It dropped in slow motion, turning once as it fell, its petals catching the lamplight, glowing briefly and beautifully in the dark air of the greenhouse before disappearing into the bin.
The greenhouse door opened with a creak that fractured the vision into splinters.
I spun around, my heart slamming against my ribs. The pen and the flower and the warm light dissolved at once, replaced by the cold moonlight streaming through dirty glass—and a rage so consuming that it stole my breath.
Dr. Ambrose stood in the doorway.