Chapter 6
Maris snatched her hands back so fast she nearly went over onto the flagstones.
“I thought—” She sat back on her heels with her cheeks flaming. “You weren’t breathing. You were grey. You were exactly the color of the bench, you looked like… I thought something had happened to you.”
“I was resting,” he said gently, as if he were talking to a spooked animal, which did nothing at all for her dignity.
“Gargoyles go into the stone. Sometimes it’s necessary, if we’re injured, for example.
Other times it’s just something we want, the way you want to sit down at the end of a day.
An hour here and there.” He sighed. “I forget it frightens people who haven’t.
Robin walked in on me once and almost threw a mug at my head. ”
“I nearly threw a moisture meter at you.” She looked at the wreckage of her equipment scattered across the gravel and covered her burning face with both hands. “God. Sorry. I made a scene.”
“You were worried about me.”
“I was worried about my contract,” she said, into her palms. “If you die, I don’t get paid.”
The silence went on a little too long. When she lowered her hands he was watching her with an expression that on a less stern face she’d have called a smile trying to break free.
“I heard you,” he said.
“What?”
“In the stone. I’m not entirely gone. I can still hear, but it takes me longer to react.
” He tilted his head, and the leaf finally slid off his shoulder and drifted to the ground between them.
“I knew you’d come through the gate. I heard your footsteps.
I heard your equipment hit the ground.” The smile won its fight, briefly. “I heard you call my name.”
She was going to die. She was going to lie down in the wreckage of her numbered flags and let the ferns grow over her.
“I panicked,” she said with great dignity. “It happens to the best of us. Now are you going to help me pick these up or are you going to sit there enjoying yourself?”
He rose, and kept rising. She’d forgotten exactly how much of him there was.
But then he went down onto one knee beside her and began to gather up the scattered flags.
His claws should have made it clumsy. They didn’t.
He handled each little pennant with extraordinary delicacy, as if he were handling something that might break.
Does he touch everything that way, she wondered, and immediately shut down the unhelpful thought.
They gathered the flags without talking. When she reached for the moisture meter he’d already picked it up, turning it over in his big hands and checking the casing.
“Cracked here.” He showed her the hairline crack along the seam. “I’ll replace it.”
“You will not. It still works.” She took it back before he could argue. “You people. One crack and you throw the whole thing out.”
“You people?”
“Rich people.”
“Ah.” He stood, and offered a hand to help her up.
She looked at it. Huge and grey and tipped with long black claws that could open a man like an envelope.
She put her hand in it. He drew her to her feet as though she weighed nothing, and let go the moment she was steady, which she noticed and refused to think about.
“I came back to check moisture levels,” she said, aiming for the practical. “Before I costed the drainage. Do you want to come with me?”
The offer emerged before she could stop it, but he simply nodded and fell in beside her without a word, matching his pace to hers.
She worked her way down towards the river end of the property, marking specimens and taking moisture readings.
Somehow he ended up in charge of the clipboard again, writing down the numbers as she called them out.
At the bottom of the property they reached the wall she’d noticed the day before and thought about all night.
The wall must have come down a dozen years ago.
A whole eight-foot section of it lay tumbled across the slope in a long, mossy heap, the stones settled into the earth as though they had grown there, and a world had grown up around it.
Fern fronds unfurled from every crevice, thick and green in the shade.
“Look at this.” She crouched reverently next to the plants covering the fallen wall. “Polypody all along the top, and that’s maidenhair spleenwort in the deepest shade, which is what you’d expect, and then—” She leaned in, her eyes widening. “Oh. That’s a walking fern.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s wonderful. It’s rare in this county and it’s fussy and you can’t make it grow anywhere it doesn’t want to be.
” She traced the air above one long narrow frond to where the tip of it arched down and rooted into the moss where it touched.
“It’s called walking fern because it walks.
The leaf tips lean over until they reach the ground, and then they root, and then the next one does the same thing.
That’s how it spreads. A few inches at a time, for years. ”
“On my wall?”
“Only on your wall.” She wiped her hands down her thighs.
“It wants lime in the soil and there’s no lime in this area.
But somebody built that wall with lime mortar a hundred years ago, and it’s been leaching out of the joints ever since.
That’s the only reason any of this is here.
” She caught herself beaming and made herself stop.
“Somebody built a wall, and the wall fell down. A dozen years of nobody caring about the fallen wall turned it into the best fern bank I’ve ever seen outside a preserve.
You can’t design this. It just happens, if you’re lucky. ”
“I’ll have it rebuilt,” he said thoughtfully.
She turned her head very slowly.
“You’ll what?”
“The wall. It’s collapsed.” He was frowning down at the tumbled stone, all business now. “I’ll have it rebuilt. Properly footed this time. The original had no foundation, that’s why it went. A week’s work, less if I do the stonework myself.”
Something cold and ugly crawled up the back of her throat, and it wasn’t fear this time.
It was the sound of her mother-in-law’s voice at a dinner table saying we did think Toby might attend somewhere with a little more polish.
It was every wealthy person she’d ever met who looked at something that worked perfectly well and decided it was too old or too untidy to keep.
“Of course you will,” she said, her voice hard. “It doesn’t look right, does it? A bit of tumbledown wall, a bit of untidy green. It doesn’t match the nice restored balustrade. You’d like it all squared off and repointed so it photographs well for whoever you’re trying to impress.”
He blinked.
“That’s not—”
“I told you.” She stood, knowing her voice was rising and unable to stop it.
“I told you the very first day. You said money’s no object like that was reassuring, and it isn’t.
It’s the opposite, because it means every single time I find something worth saving you’ll want to improve it.
To buy a better one. That is a walking fern, Garrick.
Nobody could sell it to you, and you want to knock it down because it offends your sense of… of tidiness—”
“Maris.”
“—and I’m not going to stand here and watch you—”
“Maris.”
She stopped. He hadn’t raised his voice. Instead he’d lowered it, and that reached her faster than shouting would have.
“It’s not about how it looks,” he said carefully.
“I don’t care how it looks. But there’s a sidewalk twelve feet below us, and children walk to school along it every morning.
When the rest of that section goes—and it will go because it’s not structurally sound—a ton of stone comes down on them.
” His jaw worked. “That’s what I care about. Not the photographs.”
Oh.
The cold thing in her throat sat down, embarrassed.
“Oh,” she said, out loud this time, and he sighed.
“I should have led with that.” He rubbed the back of his neck, and for one strange second the biggest, wealthiest, most intimidating male she’d ever met looked almost sheepish. “I lead with the solution. Eric tells me it makes people want to hit me. I’m not good at the part before the solution.”
“No,” she said faintly. “I’m getting that.”
She turned back to the wall and looked at the whole wall rather than just the ferns. Damn. He was right. The part that was still standing was leaning, and she could see the dark crack along the base.
“You’re right,” she said grudgingly. “That’s going to come down.”
“It is.”
“It’ll take most of the wall with it. And half the polypody.” She chewed the inside of her cheek, looking for a solution. “So we don’t rebuild the fallen one.”
“Maris—”
“Hear me out. You’re not the only one who’s good at this.
” She held up a dirty hand. “We leave the fallen wall exactly where it is. Every stone. It stays a fern bank, forever, and you don’t touch a single frond.
We build a new wall behind it. There.” She pointed to the place on the slope.
“Engineered however you want and set back so that when the old section gives way, it just comes down against the new wall and never gets anywhere near the sidewalk. Your ton of stone has nowhere to go, the children never know it happened, and my walking fern dies of old age at a hundred and fifty like it deserves.”
She stopped, blushing. She’d gotten a bit carried away towards the end.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he walked the line she’d indicated, looking at the slope, the standing wall, and the drop to the sidewalk, doing the calculations behind his eyes.
“The footing would need to go deeper on the downhill side,” he said at last. “Given the drop, I’d want to pin it into the bedrock.
There’s an outcrop under that soil, I can feel it.
” He crouched and pressed one broad palm into the earth as if he could read it through his hand, and she was not at all certain that he couldn’t.
“Two courses of dry-stone facing on the garden side so it doesn’t look new, and weep holes at the base.
” He looked up at her, and the gold flared in his eyes again, just for a moment. “It’s a better solution than mine.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
“You could just say thank you.”
“You could just say I was right.”
The smile that broke across that granite face was so unexpected and so warm that she forgot what she had been about to say next.
“You were right,” he said. “You’re going to be right a great deal, I suspect. It’s going to be a long autumn.” He rose to his immense height and smiled down at her.
“All right, little thorn,” he said. “We’ll build your wall.”
“Little—” She narrowed her eyes up at him. “What did you call me?”
But he had already turned and started back towards the house, his wings settling across those enormous shoulders. And she was absolutely and infuriatingly sure that he was still smiling.