Blight
The first week of business surpassed even Violet’s wildest, most far-fetched dreams. Each night, after her doors closed, she retreated to the greenhouse and let her imagination run wild with growth.
Ranunculus, peonies, tulips, lilies, and daffodils; lavender, daisies, sweet peas, and orchids.
By now she had been practicing for weeks—she was pulling flowers into existence with a flick of her fingers, and she barely noticed the stinging sensation anymore.
Perhaps this “being good” thing wouldn’t be so difficult after all.
Still, she’d never grown so much in so short a time, not even in Guy’s gardens, and some nights, she found herself collapsing into bed too tired to even dream.
Last night was not one of those nights. Violet woke before the sun, sweating, feeling the weight of that damn purple cloak, the itch of thorns sharpening her features. Guy’s voice was still in her ear.
You are nothing without me.
She quickly made her bed, got dressed, and combed her fingers through her hair, disappointed when Guy’s ghost followed her to the kitchen.
What do you think you’re doing, petal?
The dream had been nothing out of the ordinary, but as she poured her teakettle with shaking hands and pocketed an apple from the bowl she kept on her table, Violet wondered if the memories of what she’d done in her past life, not to mention the imagined judgment from a dead man, would ever truly leave her.
It had been over a month since he was defeated, she reassured herself as she slipped downstairs and out the back door, her fingers brushing over the jagged trench of her scar, trying not to remember how she’d come by it. Shadowfade’s was the only world she knew. Healing would take time.
“Good morning,” she said to Nathaniel when she opened the greenhouse door. He was at his worktable, Daisy curled up on top of his feet, fast asleep.
Violet still caught him watching her, but after that day in the woods she’d begun watching him right back.
She’d acquainted herself with the way his brow furrowed when he measured ingredients, how he wrote his notes with his left hand but stirred his cauldron with his right.
How he chewed on a leaf from his mint plant when he was thinking, and hummed snippets of melodies to Daisy, and smiled most reliably whenever Pru brought him a steaming mug of tea.
Her observations had grown to quite a comprehensive list, she found, though she had no idea what to do with it all.
“Good morning,” he said politely back, his eyes on whatever he had set bubbling in the tabletop cauldron at his workspace.
She hadn’t seen anything like this concoction when she went into the apothecary, and her interest was even more piqued, though she was hesitant to ask him lest she stain the stilted kindness he’d shown her when he came into her shop on opening day.
Alchemy, she supposed. Her thoughts turned to an alchemist she’d known at Shadowfade Castle—one of Guy’s best, and one of Violet’s most bitter rivals.
From the moment he’d arrived, he’d set his sights on making her life miserable, and in a lot of ways, he’d succeeded.
He was a cruel manipulator and had given Violet no cause to feel kindly toward alchemists.
Prickly though Nathaniel Marsh may be, it was a good reminder to Violet that he was nothing like the villains of her past. The man swung her patience like a pendulum, making her resolve to ignore him one moment and befriend him the next.
Violet prided herself on being able to present a calm face to the world, even when a storm brewed inside her.
But something about Nathaniel oiled the inside of the mask she wore, making it difficult to keep it on her face without slipping, even when she used both hands and all her considerable might.
As she arranged bouquets and magically propagated a few clippings into pots of soil until they were lush and leafy, working side by side in silence with him in the greenhouse, Violet tried to puzzle out why that was. She failed.
By the time lunch rolled around, Violet’s mood had lightened.
She took orders for a birthday bouquet, her mind ablaze with possibilities for the design.
She finished taking notes, Bartleby’s vines drooping lazily over her shoulders from his perch on the shelf above her, and absently swiped him aside whenever it seemed he was trying to strangle her.
“Who will water you if you kill me?” she muttered with a dark sigh, slipping from his hold for the third time.
Bartleby retreated, and a moment later, the bell above the door jingled.
“Hello!” she said brightly, her eyes shifting when she realized her new customer was a gnome, and therefore about three feet shorter than she’d anticipated. At the sight of his shapeless yellow hat, she smiled in recognition. “We’ve met, I believe. At the market a few weeks ago. Jerome, right?”
Jerome the Gnome nodded curtly. “Aye. I suppose that’ll make you Violet Thistlewaite.”
“That’s me!”
“Tell me, Violet Thistlewaite, do you carry garden soil?” He sneezed suddenly, procuring an enormous red-and-white polka-dot handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at his nose.
“Yes!” She ushered him through the door to the back garden, where she had neatly piled sacks of soil and compost. From the other side of their shared yard, Nathaniel nodded curtly and scooped up a wriggling Daisy before she could bound over to say hello.
As they disappeared into the apothecary, Violet turned her attention back to Jerome. “I carry several different varieties and blends. What are you looking to plant in your garden?”
“That’s a racist stereotype.”
“I beg your pardon?” She stopped short, looking at him.
“Just because I’m a garden gnome, see, doesn’t mean I’m gardening. I don’t even have a garden, mind.”
“I…” It was more the fact that he was looking for garden soil in a garden shop that did it for her, but Violet supposed that line of argument would end about as well as she suspected. “My apologies. I should not have made assumptions.”
“S’alright,” said Jerome the Gardenless Garden Gnome.
“Erm,” Violet replied, unsure how to proceed with customer service. “What kind of soil are you looking for?”
“Something soft,” he said, “and with the right scent.”
“I…”
“For me bed,” said the gnome, taking pity on her at last, it seemed.
His eyes sparkled with mirth at her discomfort.
“Garden gnomes get our best rest tucked into a flower bed. Course, as I’m allergic to flowers, a bed o’ dirt’s the next best thing.
” He sneezed again, as if to punctuate his statement.
“If you’ve any I can sample, I’ll be pleased to tell you exactly what I think of it. ”
Based entirely on this interaction, Violet had no doubt he would.
She obligingly opened one of each of her varieties of soil and provided Jerome with a bucket he could use to sample each one and create a blend that suited his needs.
She watched in fascination as he felt the soil in his fingers and lifted it to his nose, eyes closed, inhaling deeply, even placing the tiniest speck of each kind on his tongue, his lips smacking as he deliberated.
Finally he settled on two sacks of compost and one sack of manure so he could blend it at home.
He stared at the bucket with apparent dismay and sighed gravely.
“It’ll have to do.”
“Er, certainly,” said Violet.
“I’ll need to replace it ’bout twice a month.”
Violet, perking up, offered a ten percent discount if he placed a recurring order.
“Delivery?”
She grimaced. “Not yet. It’s just me in the store, so I haven’t—”
“S’pose it was too much to ask, place like this. I’ll come pick it up. Now, would a tall lady like yourself be willing to help load all this dirt into me cart?”
“Of course,” said Violet, hefting one of the sacks into her arms. It was easily bigger than Jerome himself, and she wondered how he was going to get it off the cart once he was home.
“Once, I’d have been able to do this meself,” he said mournfully, watching Violet heave the bags up onto her back. “Used to be a lot stronger in me youth.”
“It’s no problem,” Violet gasped, clutching the soil.
She was a strong woman, but she needed to purchase a wheelbarrow.
Immediately. Out front, Jerome’s small cart waited, hitched to a pair of goats tethered to a post at the edge of the green.
Violet dutifully loaded the bags one by one, smiling and waving to Pru as she strolled out of the apothecary, cup of tea in hand.
“Rava’s tits, that’s ripe!” Pru exclaimed, waving her free hand in front of her face. “Manure?”
Violet brushed bits of dirt off her apron (a process that, as a person who spent her entire day embroiled in dirt, was entirely in vain). She wrinkled her nose at the putrid smell of decay on the air. “No, that’s something else.”
“Aye,” agreed Jerome. “That’s no soil I’d ever sleep in.”
Violet settled the last of the bags on Jerome’s cart, waved goodbye, and ran back across the street to flip the sign on her door so it read Back in a Few!
“Looking to investigate?” Prudence remarked from her perch against the Marsh Apothecary windowsill. “I’ll come with you.”
She hopped down, maneuvering gracefully around Nathaniel’s A-frame sign.
Violet tried not to roll her eyes as she read his words again—she suspected she was the only one choosing to see their daily chalkboard exchanges as playful.
She thought back to what he’d told her during her first week here.
I reckon you’d find more success selling something that’s actually useful.
The truth was, his words had struck a match against the flinty surface of her heart and ignited her innermost doubts.
What if she couldn’t do this? What if all she was good for was carnage?
What business did a villain like her have trying to open a business like this?