Page 31 of Bane Bloom

I had enough on my hands dealing with Thomas and his changeable behavior.

And our connection had just become more complicated. The two of us shared a kind of bond now. He would forever be the man who’d saved my life. The thought felt melodramatic, yet there was no question that I would have drowned had he not acted to prevent it.

I had no idea how to feel about that.

“Don’t You Want More Than This?”

Thomas

Her question echoed long after I’d left her.

I knew that most people wanted. My grandfather had wanted knowledge, in the name of science at first, and later in the name of love. My mother had wanted her father to be happy, and later she wanted not to be alone. Mr. Carroll, it turned out, had wished for a simpler life. And Miss Gray . . . I was yet unsure what she wanted, though I could feel all the heaviness of her lifetime of grief.

In my boyhood, I had wanted a different life. Rather, a life that was not so different from the people we lived among. But very early I had come to understand that I could not have that, and gradually I drowned such desires.

I was a child of Pine Cottage. As such, I protected the house because it was the same as protecting myself. I was more spirit than creature, haunting this place rather than living a life. A spirit belonged to the past. In the world of the living, a spirit existed only in wild and lonely landscapes, or a house’s nooks and crannies.

Yet there was earth as well as ether to my being. In truth, I belonged nowhere.

“Are you not stuck, too?” I deserved to have my words tossed back at me.

From the moment I first touched her hand, helping her into the cart in the village, I’d begun to feel the faint struggling of my drowned desires. When she’d slipped beneath the surface of the lake, she’d also slipped beneath my own surface, in a way that few things had. A sunset from the top of Fleetwith Pike. A breeze calling the bluebells to dance. The silver flash of a trout in the beck.

I do, very much, want more than this.

But Pine Cottage made a mockery of men’s desires.

Elemental

I could afford to spare no more of my limited time at Pine Cottage trying to puzzle out Thomas Bane. Listening for a moment to the weather instead of my thoughts, I discovered the rain no longer pelted the roof, and the thunder had faded to a gentle rumble in the distance.

Ignoring the temptation to examine book spines and peer into tins—as well as a strange reluctance to leave—I turned and went back to the house.

In the kitchen, I discovered the stove still warm and added some wood from the bin by the door. I smiled to see Annie’s bread round on the worktable. It was truly a work of art, with an arrangement of spring violets, pansies, and herbs pressed and glazed into the crust. It would make a lovely illustration for my kitchen herbal.

Leaving the stove to heat, I peeked into the sitting room—flames danced in the hearth, but Thomas had gone already—and went up and changed out of my wet clothes. As I was lowering my watch pendant back over my head, I noticed I couldn’t hear ticking. I gave the tiny knob a few twists and raised the watch close to my ear, holding my breath.

I’ve drowned it. A hard lump formed in my throat.

I recalled what Thomas had said about me being stuck. I had held on to certain things. My hurt over my mother’s abandonment, which had led me to behave as if she’d died and, in some ways, to carry on pretending even to this day. I always thought of myself as having no mother, not one who had left. It was easier that way. Because accepting that your mother hadn’t loved you enough to stay grew no easier in adulthood. How many times in dreams had I asked her why? I knew what she looked like because Papa had painted her, and her response was always the same as if I’d asked the painting. A silent stare and a half smile.

Straightening and sniffing back tears, I laid the little timepiece on the windowsill, next to the dainty teacup plant, to dry. Perhaps it would revive.

I crossed to the other bedroom for a basket—containing gardening snips and a pair of gloves—that had been left with Carroll’s things. I added the notebook that I’d designated as my glasshouse journal and took the basket downstairs, leaving it in the entryway while I made tea.

Shame though it was to destroy the pretty design, I cut two thick slices of Annie’s bread and slathered them with butter and jam before adding them to the tray with my cup and teapot. I carried the tray to the glasshouse and settled under the fig tree.

My gaze drifted to the pool as I drank my tea, and it was hard to believe I’d ever seen anything but a lily there, with its perfect, orderly clump of sharp-tipped white petals and bright yellow stamens.

I bore the glasshouse no grudge for my mishap the previous evening; it was pleasant to be here again. I welcomed the warmth after the drenching in cold lake water followed by rain, and between that, the tea, and the dry clothes, I began to feel myself again.

Each time I’d visited the garden, the fragrance had been unique, and I supposed it depended on things like temperature and light levels. Currently, the air carried a sweet note that reminded me of orange blossoms.

Eager to get to work, I finished my tea and bread and went back for the basket. I had decided the most orderly approach would be to begin near the sitting room door and work my way inward along the roughly spiral walkway.

There was a rounded bush with thick, glossy leaves and clusters of pale pink flowers to the immediate left of the door. The scent I’d noticed was definitely coming from this plant. “Winter daphne,” according to a painted wooden plaque nailed to a spike and inserted in the soil. The plaque also contained a skull illustration and the words “Pain, skin, eyesight,” then “(China).” I puzzled over the skull but then remembered Prudence’s diary: Fill a thimble to cure, a teacup to kill. It would seem winter daphne had medicinal uses but was also toxic.

On impulse I checked the other side of the plaque, finding the words “Unrequited love.” The descriptor struck me as odd for an apothecary garden. But then I thought about Arthur Bane’s book on plant lore. While I wasn’t familiar with this botanical, its namesake was a figure from mythology—a nymph who had fled the amorous advances of Apollo.