Chapter 8 #3
Frederick considered that, and then he smiled, and the smile was small and tired and entirely genuine.
"Somebody's actions always set a thing in motion, my lady," he said. "It is only that we so rarely know whose, until it is a good deal too late to matter."
She had no answer for that.
She left him standing on the path and went up to the house alone.
She did not sleep.
She sat at her desk with a single candle burning low, and pulled a sheet of paper toward her, and began.
Comfrey along the north wall, where the old bed had been.
Chamomile in the beds near the pond, where the ground would hold the wet.
Feverfew wherever the light was hardest, because feverfew did not care how hard the light was.
Beneath each name she wrote a line of instruction — how deep, how far apart, what it wanted and what it would not forgive — the way she had learned to do it years ago, so that whoever came after her with a spade would not have to guess.
It grew to three pages before she judged it finished, and she read it through once more, and folded it twice, and sat listening to the house go quiet around her — her father's door, and then Frederick's, further off, and then nothing at all.
She waited a while longer after that, to be certain.
Then she took a shawl from the back of her chair, and went down the stairs without a candle, feeling her way by memory along the banister, and let herself out through the side door into a night gone cool and very still.
The lane was pale under a thin moon, and the gap in the piers came up faster than she expected, and at the broad stone at the edge of the drive she stopped, and laid the pages flat, and set a small rock on top of them to hold them against the wind.
She stood there a moment longer than the errand required, looking up toward the black shape of the house on the ridge, where nothing moved and no light showed at all.
Then she turned, and walked home through the dark, and did not look back to see whether anyone had come to find them yet.
◆◆◆
Benjamin had not meant to be awake, but sleep had refused him for the better part of an hour, and by now he knew better than to keep arguing with it.
It came the same way it had come for years — no clear image left behind once his eyes were open, only the aftermath of one: his own heart going too hard, his shirt damp through at the collar, and the particular tightness in his jaw that meant he had been clenching it in his sleep again.
He lay still a while, the way he had trained himself to, breathing until his heart agreed to slow with him.
It always did, eventually. It had simply stopped surprising him that it needed to be asked.
He did not try to sleep again after that.
There was no sense in it, and he had learned the shape of these nights well enough by now to know what came next — the restlessness that would not settle into anything, the need to be upright, moving, doing something with his hands until his body remembered it was safe.
He went instead to the broken window of what had been his mother's dressing room, and stood looking out over the dark shape of the garden and the fields beyond it, the way he had taken to doing most nights since he arrived — not for any reason he could have named beyond this one, which he did not examine too closely.
That was how he saw her.
A pale shape at first, no more than a shift in the dark along the lane, and then unmistakably a woman, moving quickly and quietly toward the gap in the piers with something folded under one arm.
She knelt at the broad stone, and was still a moment, and rose again, and was gone back the way she had come almost before he had finished understanding what he was looking at.
He found that he was smiling before he had decided to.
He did not go down at once. He gave her time to reach her own door, whatever door that was, and only then did he go down through the black hall and out into the cool of the night, crossing the wet grass toward the drive.
He found the papers exactly where she had left them, weighted under a small flat stone, and sat down on the front steps to read them by what little the moon offered.
Mr. Sterling,
I must apologize for not keeping my word to inspect the garden in person, as I had intended, and to see it properly managed under my own direction.
Circumstances do not permit it at present.
I ask, in place of that, that you keep your own word, and follow what is written below exactly as it is set down.
He read the rest of it there on the steps — three pages, close-written, a plant to a line, how deep and how far apart and what it wanted and what it would not forgive — and more than once he stopped and lifted his eyes to the dark shape of the garden in front of him, trying to match what she had written to what little he could make out by moonlight, before going back to the page.
By the time he reached the last line the sky had begun, faintly, to grey.
He did not wait for proper light. He went to the scullery for the billhook, and came back, and began working through the list from the top, clearing what she had marked for clearing and leaving what she had marked to be left, and it was slower going than his own instinct would have chosen and considerably more careful.
He was perhaps a third of the way through it when the blade caught the side of his finger — a shallow cut, nothing to it — and he did not stop for it, only closed his hand loosely and kept working, the way he had learned to keep working through a great many things worse than a cut finger.
A gust came through the garden a little later, sudden and short, and the pages — set down on the ground beside him while he worked — lifted and began to go.
He caught them before they had gone more than a foot, closing his hand over them fast, and it was only afterward, straightening, that he saw what he had done. A small dark print, where his cut finger had pressed against the paper. Directly over the word circumstances.
He looked at it a long moment.
Then he let out a slow breath, his jaw tightening once, and folded the pages carefully along their crease, blood and all, and put them away inside his coat.
He went back to the ground, and kept working.