Page 11 of Bane Bloom

My mother once told me the house would protect me if I but kept its secrets. Yet things change. Nothing endures.

It now occurred to me that this wakened interest in my grandfather’s apothecary garden might be more meaningful than a spell worn thin. What if they meant to sell the place at last? The Lake Country was being discovered. Every year, more people came. Pine Cottage was likely more valuable than it ever had been.

If it was sold, there would be no place in this world left for me, and I would lose what remained of my humanity. More than once over the long and lonely years, I’d thought that might not be the worst thing. Somehow, in the last hour, that had changed. There were things of this world that were still beyond my understanding. Some that might be worth my knowing.

Glancing again at my passenger, I saw her expression had softened, and she wore a placid smile. I looked quickly away so as not to disturb her moment of peace.

I was caught in the middle, as I had been all my life. Caught between the secrets and desires of others. Caught between worlds.

Caught with me now was this woman, with all her hope and determination showing so plainly on her face. And all the pain that she hid, easy enough to see if you looked hard enough, lurking just behind her dark eyes.

Pine Cottage

When we came out of the woods, the road bore us over pastureland below a farmhouse as finally the view opened out onto the lake. Spectacular, fog-veiled peaks surrounded the dark, oblong body of water on all sides. We’d traveled southeastwardly, I believed, from one end of the lake to the other. I had studied a map before leaving London, so I knew another lake, Crummock Water, lay out of sight beyond the valley and village we’d left behind.

Though I’d laughed at Papa’s anxiety about Vikings, I’d read that Norsemen had in fact settled in the Buttermere Valley centuries ago. It was said they fiercely fought the invading forces of William the Conqueror. The dramatic scenery made this easy to imagine.

How I hoped Thomas and I weren’t about to play out this conflict on a smaller scale.

He’d gone silent now, and probably just as well. I risked a quick glance and found no lingering evidence of the flash of anger he’d shown. His expression was as unreadable as it had been for most of our brief acquaintance.

Returning my gaze to the road, which had dwindled to a faint track, I saw a lone house on the shoreline not far ahead of us, and the track came to an end at a small stable between us and the house.

The ground in front of the house and its entry garden rose gradually toward the foot of a high, steep hill, or “fell,” with a striking pyramidal shape—Fleetwith Pike, I later learned. My eyes followed a silvery ribbon of water that dropped down its face.

The area right around the house and garden was mostly open, covered by tall grasses and here and there a tree. Beyond the house, a line of tall pines extended along the shore, and beyond that began a thicker forest.

The house itself was a two-story whitewashed stone dwelling with a thatch roof, and door and window frames painted yellow. Though clearly constructed in another century, it was every bit the cozy getaway the name suggested. I could just glimpse the glasshouse on its far side—a southern exposure, if my sense of direction hadn’t failed me.

The place had a swath of shingle beach, and between the beach and the house, an upturned boat rested atop a much smaller stone structure, bright moss covering the boat’s exposed wood underside. The structure had both door and window; the weathered, wide-bottomed dinghy was serving as a roof, its pointed bow overhanging the door, with the transom at the rear. An outbuilding of some kind. It made me think of the houseboat home of the Peggottys in Mr. Dickens’s serial David Copperfield, which I’d been reading to Papa in the evenings.

Resting alongside it was a smaller boat that looked sound enough to still serve its intended function.

The pony nickered as we drew up to the stable and yard. A short distance from the stable was a smaller hut that I guessed was the privy for the house.

Thomas climbed down from the cart, and I did the same—raising my hem, carefully turning and lowering a foot to the rung—before he could offer any assistance. I was feeling sullen and sore over his repeated rebuffs of my attempts to haul us onto less rocky ground.

He began unhitching the mare and said, “Go on to the house, and I’ll bring your trunks.”

“Thank you,” I replied defeatedly.

As I walked along a footpath that wended through the waving grasses toward the front of the house, I resolved not to let his behavior color my first impressions of the place. Some of my original excitement returned as I caught glimpses of ridges and pointed peaks through the shifting fog, and as my gaze wandered to the quietly rippling surface of the lake.

I passed under an arbor and through an open gate into a rose garden with a gravel walk that led to the green front door. The bushes bore many colorful buds but no flowers yet.

At last I took hold of the tarnished doorknob. The door stuck, and I gripped the knob harder and gave it a shove. It released with a creak and a bang. Annie said Mr. Carroll had come in the autumn, and I supposed the house had stood empty since then.

As I crossed the threshold into a small entry hall, I felt a draft of cool air, which seemed to confirm my notion that the place had been shut up tight for some months. Before me was a stair to the upper floor, and to my right and left were dining and sitting rooms. I noticed fires burning in both hearths and thought I must have imagined the draft. The cottage was in fact quite warm and inviting.

I immediately spotted a door to the glasshouse in the sitting room. The upper half of the wooden door was clear glass, and through it the lush greenery of the apothecary garden beckoned like a portal to another world, raising another flutter of excitement.

I took off my gloves to set them on the entry table and noticed that various objects littered its surface—pebbles of different sizes and colors, fragments of wood smoothed by water, and the sun-bleached bones of small creatures. The most impressive of these was a fish skull, looking like something up from the netherworld without its skin and scales. One of the people who’d lived or stayed here had apparently been something of a magpie. A veil of dust lay over the table and all its objects.

A coat-tree stood to one side of the door, and a longcase clock to the other. I removed my mantle and hung it up before stepping into the sitting room.

The room had a pleasing kind of shabby elegance, the fading floral wallpaper missing strips in places, showing the plaster beneath. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling before the fireplace, feeling wholly out of place—and yet at the same time, not. Healthy ferns in great chipped urns rested on pedestals near the window, and smaller plants rested on other surfaces.

On the nearer end of the room, between the glasshouse door and the fireplace, stood a most striking piece of furniture. Constructed of heavy wood washed in a chalky moss color—beautifully carved with vines, flowers painted a pale purple, and impish faces and flourishes—it was a kind of bookcase that contained its own cushioned reading seat at the base. The sides of the case extended out around the ends of the seat to partially enclose it, like a reading nook. The front edges of these sides were thicker pieces of wood carved like columns, and in the base of the reading bench were two drawers.