Page 14 of Trouble

‘That’s all right, I have a spare. Now, here we all are. Shall we set off?’

Setting off! Such a novel idea! Emily turned and fiddled with her own bonnet, so that neither of her charges would see her rolling her eyes. She probably should have insisted that Aster fetch her hat back, but the idea of going three rounds against her over abonnetseemed foolish when she was sure she would need to conserve her energy for further fisticuffs.

It was a perfectly pleasant day outside, which was to say that it wasn’t raining, windy or entirely grey. The watery sun bled through the clouds, and in the distance the sea looked almost blue, a vast improvement on Emily’s first glimpse of it.

Grace kept up a stream of chatter in her ear.

‘Where should we go? There is the coastal path, but it does all sort of look the same. Sometimes there are seals, but they are private creatures, and do not respond well to catcalling. Have you seen the garden yet? Oh, then we shall start there!’

They walked around the outside of the house – ridiculous, Emily thought, that it should ever take more than a minute to travel half the circumference of the place you lived in – and entered the garden.

It was somewhat sheltered from the coastal wind, although it was clear that the bordering trees bore the brunt from their stooped posture and general broken-backed weariness. The ground sloped gently away from the house, so it was a downhill walk along the length of the flower beds, which had likely once been neat and regimented and were now absolutely overflowing.

Emily had never been particularly well versed in types of flowers, but she could see many varieties of roses, overgrown and grappling for space; shocks of marigolds and soft lavender; a vast quantity of plump, furry white and purple daisies. They were the constant in every bed, and in some places had succeeded in defeating the other flowers entirely in a very thorough coup.

‘Aster,’ said Grace, reaching out to touch one with gentle fingers.

Aster didn’t say anything, and Emily was momentarily confused.

‘They’re aster flowers, I mean. Our mother planted them when Aster was born. She loved the garden. Much more than she liked the house.’

Aster the person was grimacing, as if it was deeply embarrassing to be surrounded by the flower you had been named for, but Emily felt momentarily knocked askew as she looked back at the garden around her. She hadn’t thought much about the late Mrs Edwards, but it struck her now how strange it was to care for someone – to plant hundreds of flowers for them – and for those flowers to keep growing so determinedly after you were gone that it was impossible for anybody to gaze upon your garden and not see how much you had loved them.

Amy was the only person Emily could ever imagine loving that much, but demonstrating it with flowers was so saccharine that Amy would probably try to summon a doctor forherif Emily ever so much as seeded a daisy in her name.

‘There are noGraceflowers, of course,’ said Grace sadly. ‘She did plant rue, though, the herb-of-grace.’

‘Yes, and it turned out that it smells absolutely foul and blisters the skin,’ said Aster. ‘We should have swapped names – it would have been far more apt.’

‘You do not smell foul,’ Grace said, and then followed it up with a considered, ‘veryoften, anyway.’

‘But I do blister the skin,’ Aster said, flashing her sister a smile that seemed calculated to look as devil-may-care as possible. Unfortunately, it wasn’t entirely convincing: the Devil did care just atinybit; he just didn’t want anybody to know.

‘Come along,’ Emily said stiffly, wanting to put some distance between herself and the wild clouds of asters. She set a brisk pace, not checking to see if the children were following. It was all toosentimental– the flowers, and the memory of their mother, and the easy back and forth between the Edwards siblings. There was a pitted wall at the back of the garden, with a gate that led out to a track; it was only once she reached it that she realised that neither of the girls was with her.

Aster was the first to catch up.

‘You are walking too fast,’ she said, her voice laden with vitriol. ‘Slowdown.’

Emily took a breath. She counted to three.

‘Aster, if you wish to say something to me, there is no need to—’

‘The things I wish to say toyoucould be listed at length on a speck of dust. Just payattention, would you?’

Emily glanced back at Grace. She was walking at a brisk pace to try to catch up. She looked mostly at ease, if a little short of breath.

Amy had once told Emily that cats were so good at hiding injuries that it was almost impossible to tell that they were hurting; she had been talking about the tomcat who lurked behind their house, mousing and romancing, who had a gash in his leg but was maintaining a stiff upper lip about the whole thing. It was a defence mechanism, born from an instinct not to show weakness at any cost, lest the wolves descend.

Amy had also once told Emily that assuming someone with an illness was constantly on the verge of swooning was the sort of base foolishness that made her want to unravel people’s knitting, which was about as close to true violence as Amy came.

Perhaps Grace was perfectly fine. Perhaps she was not.

Aster seemed to think not.

‘If you are remiss in your care of my sister in any way,’ Aster said quietly, ‘I will most probably kill you.’

Emily flushed hot with the force of her indignation, but before she could say anything, Grace caught up with them, and Aster’s face smoothed over in an instant.