Chapter 6
The next morning, Amelia had come down to the market with a full basket and had gone home with an empty one, and there was no better trade she knew of.
Mrs. Cobb was waiting by the flour stall same as she had done every third Thursday since the thaw, and she took the little jar Amelia pressed into her hands with the particular carefulness of someone who has learned not to trust her own knees on a staircase and is only now allowing herself to believe they might be trusted again.
"You are a wonder, my lady," she said, turning it over in her hands. "My Thomas says I have not complained about the stairs in a fortnight. A fortnight. He thinks it is a miracle."
"It is meadowsweet," Amelia said. "Not a miracle."
"Well." Mrs. Cobb tucked the jar into her shawl as though it were something that might be stolen. "Whatever you call it, I call it a mercy, and I shall not argue with you about the naming of it."
Amelia laughed and moved on down the row, and it went that way the whole morning — a word here, a nod there, the butcher's boy tipping his cap, old Hodge from the mill asking after her father's gout with a directness he would never have used on the Baron himself.
This was the part of Ashcombe that belonged to her rather than to her name.
Nobody at that market wanted anything from her except what she could actually give them, and she came away from it every time feeling lighter than when she had arrived, as though she had put something down rather than picked something up.
She was still carrying that lightness with her when she came along the lane past Russell Hall, and it was the lightness, she thought afterward, that made her stop.
The gate had never been a gate in her lifetime — only the two stone piers with nothing between them but weeds — and through the gap she could see straight into the grounds the way she always could, except that today the grounds looked different.
The great tangle of nettle and bindweed that had swallowed the fence line for as long as she could remember was gone.
Cut back to bare earth in a long clean swathe, the fence rails exposed and grey behind it, and further in, where the garden proper began, more of the same — briar hauled back, ground cleared, the wreck of the place made suddenly and starkly visible in a way it had never been when it was simply overgrown.
Amelia stood at the gap in the piers for a long moment.
Then, without deciding to, she went in.
She did not go far. Just past the first line of what had once been a rose walk, where the thicket had been cut back hard against the wall and left in heaps to dry, exposing the old stock beneath — gnarled, thick as a man's wrist in places, the kind of rose that took two lifetimes to establish and could be undone in an afternoon by somebody who did not know what he was looking at.
She knelt down in front of it and put her hand to the cut wood.
"You had no idea what you were doing," she said, to the soil, to the roses, to whoever had been through here with a blade and no patience for anything he could not immediately identify.
"Twenty years in that stock. Longer. And you have hauled half of it out with the nettles because it was all the same to you — all just green, all just in the way.
" She pulled a browned cutting free and turned it over in her hands.
"This one might have flowered again. Might have. Now we will never know."
A shadow moved across the ground in front of her.
Amelia went very still, and then turned, and came up onto her feet all in the same motion, her heart suddenly loud in her own ears.
A man was standing a few yards off. Tall, and quiet, and watching her with an expression she could not read at all.
"I am sorry," she said, the words coming out faster than she meant them to. "Please — do not hurt me. I did not mean any harm, I only—"
"I have no intention of hurting you." He said it plainly, without any particular alarm of his own, as though the suggestion itself were the strange thing in the conversation rather than her presence in his garden.
"Though I confess I am more troubled by what happens to a person caught trespassing on another man's land than by the state of his roses.
You might consider which of the two ought to worry you more. "
Amelia felt her face go hot. "I apologize. Truly. I will leave at once."
"Before you go." He took a step, and glanced round at the cleared ground with something that was almost embarrassment. "I would take it as a kindness if you would show me what I have done wrong. You spoke as though I had murdered something."
"You very nearly did." She pointed to the stock behind her. "That rose is older than either of us. It survived twenty years of neglect and one afternoon of your—"
He stepped back to give her room to gesture, and his boot came down on something soft.
"Watch your step!"
It was too late.
He looked down. A single stem, snapped clean through, its bloom crushed flat into the cleared earth — a rose she had not even seen, small and half-hidden beneath a fold of the cut briar, the one thing in the whole ruined ground that might genuinely have been saved and had just, in the space of a single careless movement, stopped being savable at all.
He went down onto one knee without a word.
Amelia watched him gather the broken stem in his hand, careful of the thorns, turning it gently as though there were still some way to set it right.
There was not. He seemed to understand that almost as soon as he had taken hold of it — the stem hung wrong, the break too clean and too complete — and still he held it a moment longer, his head bowed slightly over it, the way she had seen old soldiers stand over graves at the churchyard on the appointed Sundays.
"Rest easy," he said, quietly, to the flower, and set it down in the grass with something that looked almost like ceremony.
Amelia said nothing for a moment.
"You are right," he said, without looking up. "About the attention it wants. I did not know what I was clearing. I only knew that none of it could be reached until it was gone, and I went at it accordingly." He rose, brushing the earth from his knee. "That was clearly a mistake."
"Clearly," Amelia said, but some of the heat had gone out of her voice.
He looked at her properly then, and she looked back, and neither of them said anything for a beat too long.
"Who are you?" she asked. "And what precisely are you doing on this land — since it seems we are both trespassing on somebody's notions this morning."
"I am not trespassing." He said it simply. "This is Russell Hall. I am its owner."
Amelia's brows rose. "You? There has been no owner here in as long as I remember."
"There is now." He inclined his head slightly. "Benjamin… Sterling."
The name settled between them, ordinary enough, and he said it without any particular weight on it at all — though something moved very briefly behind his eyes as he said it, gone before she could be certain she had seen it.
"Amelia Whitfield," she said. "You are my neighbor, then. Or I am yours. I confess I am not entirely certain which of us has the greater claim, given that I have known this hill my whole life and you have owned it for a matter of days."
"I would not presume to argue the point with a lady, while holding a dead rose."
That surprised a short laugh out of her, before she could stop it.
She glanced past him at the black bones of the house beyond the trees. "Have you seen any ghosts in there yet?"
"Ghosts do not live in abandoned houses," he said. "They live in the minds of men."
"True." Her eyes widened slightly. "I have always thought so myself. They do not haunt places. They haunt dreams."
Something in his face went still, just for a moment, as though she had put her hand on a bruise she had no way of knowing was there.
"Did I say something wrong?" she asked.
"No." He offered a small smile that did not quite reach his eyes. "Not wrong. Only true."
She watched him a little more carefully after that, but let it pass.
"You will need more than a shovel and a strong back to put that place right," she said, looking again toward the house. "Half the roof is gone. The floors are rotted through, and I would not trust the stairs not to give way under me."
"I have noticed." He said it dryly. "I mean to find men in the village who will hire on."
She looked past him then, at the whole ravaged sweep of the garden — the cleared ground, the heaped briar, the roses hacked back to stumps that might or might not recover.
"I can help you with that also," she said. "Half of what was worth saving in this garden is under that heap you have made, and you will not know which half until it is too late to matter."
"I had gathered as much." He looked at the pile with something like resignation. "I do not know one green thing from another, if I am honest. I know how to clear ground. I do not know what deserves to stay on it."
Amelia considered him for a long moment.
"I could tell you," she said. "What deserves to stay. If you would allow it — and if you would agree not to touch another blade to this ground without asking me first. And I will spread word that you are looking for workers."
"That sounds less like an offer of help," Benjamin said, "and more like a treaty with conditions attached."
"It is both." She lifted her chin. "You destroyed what took twenty years to grow. The very least you owe this garden is the chance to be planted properly, by someone who knows what she is doing, rather than torn apart twice."
He was quiet a moment, studying her the way a man studies a proposition he had not expected to receive and is turning over for the trap in it.
"Agreed," he said finally. "On the condition that you tell me plainly when I am about to do something foolish. I have discovered this morning that I require the warning."
"That," said Amelia, "I can promise you without difficulty."