“Nonsense.” She waved the thought away with a flutter of flour-dusted fingers. “You’re no trouble at all.”
She turned briefly to Hawthorne. “Take her trunk upstairs, please, to the guest room at the end of the hall.”
Hawthorne strode forward on command and lifted my trunk as though it weighed nothing, which I could personally attest it did not.
“Don’t mind Hawthorne,” she said, drawing my attention back to her. “He’s… peculiar, but quite helpful.”
Peculiar.
The word seemed grossly insufficient.
“I’m Mrs. Bramblewick,” she continued, her smile returning. “But you must call me Agnes. We’re not very formal here, and I’ve never had much patience for stiff titles.”
“It is lovely to meet you, Agnes,” I replied honestly, a small tension easing inside me at the simplicity of her kindness. “I am Camellia Reed.”
“A pleasure, dear,” she said sweetly, though a guardedness lingered beneath the warmth. “Come, let me show you to your room. I’m sure you'll want to settle in before Dr. Ambrose expects you in the greenhouse.”
As we climbed the stairs, my attention drifted back to Hawthorne ahead of us. I could not help noticing that he moved without the natural rhythm of a living body. There was no sway to his gait, no subtle shifting of weight, only a smooth, continuous ascent.
Like a corpse on strings,the voice offered as it watched through my eyes.
I frowned, unable to keep the questions crowding my tongue silent any longer. “Agnes,” I began, lowering my voice so Hawthorne would not overhear. “Is there something wrong with him?”
She glanced at me, her lips pressing together as she considered the answer longer than the question warranted. “Wrong with him?” she repeated lightly. “Nothing at all. He simply is what he is.”
The answer sat uneasily between us, but the rebuke was clear enough. I inclined my head and swallowed any further inquiries.
We reached the second floor and Agnes led me down a corridor lined with closed doors, each one identical in shape and color—save one.
It caught my attention at once.
The handle was different from all the others—brass, intricately shaped into a rose in full efflorescence, each petal expertly layered and open, frozen at the exact instant before decay would begin its work. Someone had spent considerable time creating it with the attention one lavished on a deeply cherished thing.
Or person.
My steps slowed without conscious decision. The brass rose held me there, a strange sensation passing through me and growing more insistent with each step I took away from the door.
Open it!The voice came with such force that I started, nearly tripping over my own feet.
You know you want to, it urged, softer now.
It took a conscious effort not to give in.
Agnes paused at the end of the hall and opened the door, revealing a modest but comfortable room. It was clean and well-appointed with a narrow bed, a washstand, a wardrobe, and a small desk positioned beneath the window to catch what little light the sun provided. It was functional and impersonal, a room prepared for a guest rather than someone meant to remain.
“Here we are,” Agnes said. “I’ve put fresh linens on the bed and there’s water in the pitcher. The fire’s laid if you need it.”
“Thank you,” I murmured, glancing around.
I crossed to a small table where a porcelain vase held freshly cut flowers, their petals just beginning to unfurl in shades of pale pink, cream, and red. I brushed one lightly with my fingertips, silk-soft tissue giving beneath my touch.
They were dying already—severed from the root that fed them, and condemned to that neat and predictable theater of decay. Within days, the petals would curl inward, collapsing upon themselves as slow starvation hollowed them from within. The edges would turn first, a creeping brown rot deepening to black, spreading like gangrene through flesh.One by one, they would loosen their grip on the stems that had tethered them to life, falling in silent surrender to gravity and time.
No one would mourn them. No one ever mourned rotten things.
They would be swept away without ceremony, discarded in some forgotten corner of the garden where the earth waited with patient, ravenous hunger. The soil would swallow them whole, pulling them down into darkness where roots could feast on their decomposing matter—transforming death into new growth without even an ounce of remorse for the life it had consumed.
I smiled.
