“Are you going inside? I should very much like to accompany you,” I said, moving between her and the gates.
She paused, then pursed her lips. “Very well.” She took a pair of gloves from her pocket. “Put these on and you may come with me.”
“Don’t you need them?” I asked, tugging them into place.
“I know what not to touch,” she informed me with a roll of the eyes. “Now, I know you have heard the warnings, but I shall repeat them again. Touch nothing, smell nothing, and for the love of God, eat nothing once inside these gates.”
I swore obedience and she led me inside. The very air within the gates seemed different, charged with an almost narcotic heaviness.
“Don’t breathe too deeply,” she warned. “That’s theCestrums.”
“Cestrumsare nightshades, are they not?” I asked as we moved further into the garden. The air was heavy with the warm, vegetal breath of the plants.
She led the way as she lectured. She might have been reluctant to keep company with me, but her obvious love of her plants won out over her irritation. She warmed as she spoke of them, dotingly, as a mother will her children. “Together with others, yes. All of myCestrumsare toxic, particularly the one whose perfume you can smell. That isCestrum nocturnum, night-blooming jasmine,” she said, stopping short just in front of a massive shrub starred with small white flowers. “I prefer her colloquial name, lady of the night.” The shrub, in reality a clump of vines tangled together in impenetrable union, reached upwards, snaking its tendrils in spirals that rose far overhead, tangling with the structure behind. As I peered closer through the pointed glossy green leaves, I saw a woman’s face, withered and weathered, the vines wrapped about her throat. I leapt back, causing Mertensia to laugh, a trifle unpleasantly.
“Some of the lads in the village make a living by salvage,” she told me. “They take what they can from ships lost along the islands. Pieces like that they bring to me and I buy them for the garden.”
Belatedly, I realized the sculpture was a figurehead, all that remained of some poor benighted ship dashed to doom upon the rocks. “How very unique,” I said politely.
She pulled a face. “You needn’t worry. There are surprises all over the garden, but none quite so startling as that one. I call her Mercy. Sometimes I talk to her whilst I work.”
This last was said in a tone of near defiance, as if she were daring me to judge her for her eccentricities. “You are fortunate,” I told her.
She blinked. “Fortunate?”
I spread my arms. “To live in such a place. To have full reign here. It is like your own little kingdom and you are the queen.”
She gave a sudden laugh, harsh and rusty, like a child’s squeeze-box that has not been used in a very long time. “I am not the queen. I am nothing but a pawn, moved by the whims of the king,” she added with a glance towards the windows of the castle.
“That would be Malcolm,” I ventured.
“Naturally. The garden, like everything else on this island, belongs to him.”
She turned and began to tie up a slender green tendril.
“Still, he seems to interfere little with you here,” I said, sitting on a modest stone bench. I don’t know if it was my tone—casually inviting—or my posture—relaxed and unhurried—that persuaded her I was not to be got rid of easily. She gave a sigh, then picked up her secateurs, clipping sharply as she spoke.
“Malcolm lets me do as I please,” she admitted. “For now.”
“You expect that to change?”
“It nearly did. But that’s in the past.” The words were spoken with no real desire to confide in me; that much was obvious. But I suspected it had been a very long time since Mertensia had enjoyed intimate conversation with a woman near her own age. I might have maneuvered her into further confidences, but it occurred to me a direct approach was the most likely to bear fruit.
“Mertensia, you were cordial enough when I first arrived, but now you seem to have taken against me. If I have offered you some offense, I should like to know what so that I may apologize or at the very least stay out of your way. Otherwise, I shall sit here and wait for your apology for being frightfully rude to a guest in your home.”
I settled my hands on my lap as she dropped her secateurs. She retrieved them, giving me a baleful look. “I was cordial because I thought I could like you.”
“And you have decided otherwise?”
“Obviously,” she said, snipping viciously at a bit of theCestrum.
“Now we are making progress,” I said.
She was silent a long moment, the only sound the snap of her shears. Suddenly, she turned to me, bursting out with it. “Helen saw you. On the beach yesterday with Stoker.”
“Yes, I know. We had a lively discussion of it over tea yesterday.”
She gaped. “Aren’t you embarrassed? Ashamed? I saidshe saw you.”
