“He’ll bother me.”
Dominic sighed, folded up the paper, and placed it down on Maddy’s desk.
“If it’s not going to work, that’s fine,” he said. “I’ll see if Reg Knickle can do it. Or maybe Jeremy can spare Harold Babock.”
Maddy sat down at her desk, as if to signal her decision was final, when her gaze came to rest on the social column.
Troubling Rumours…
Her stomach clenched at the thought that Everwell might be in danger. Danger from an enemy she couldn’t fight. She could hear Phillipa, Eloise and Dominic talking behind her, brainstorming on who could help him with this case. And while there were a million reasons to stay right where she was sitting, there was four reasons why she had to stand up.
“I will do this on one condition,” Maddy said, pulling herself to her feet and looking to Phillipa. “Mrs. Turnbull agrees to find the source of those rumours and silence them.”
“Maddy, are you certain?” Phillipa asked.
“No,” she said. “Phillipa, you’ll have to talk to her. But if you can get her to agree, then yes. I’ll do it.”
Maddy spent a restless night regretting her decision. There seemed no book that could distract her, and not even pouring her frustration out on her sparring bag seemed to help. She spent half the night hoping there would be some urgent message from Dominic, advising them that Mrs. Turnbull had no wish for help, but instead, Elouise had come to the door the next morning with a note for Phillipa that Dominic and Mrs. Turnbull would be by for tea to discuss the terms. Phillipa seemed pleased by this turn of events, but it had put Maddy into such a spin she’d burned the morning porridge. Phillipa graciously started another pot and ordered Maddy out of the kitchen and into her garden.
Maddy stood in the midst of her little rose labyrinth. Some of the blooms were past their prime, but the air was still beautifully perfumed by the mass of white tender blooms of her Madame Hardy roses that had been gifted to her by Tilda and Lady Em when she’d first arrived at Everwell. They’d been joined by other varieties, including the Complicatas, with their yellow centres and happy pink petals, and dramatic deep hues of the Charles de Mills. Her garden grew and flourished, but Everwell was changing, and that unsettled her more than she cared to admit. While Elouise and Gemma were still intimately involved with The Everwell Society—both the public facing society and the matters handled by the Scandalous Spinsters, they no longer lived under Everwell’s roof. They still took many of their evening meals at Everwell as they always had, and those meals were more boisterous with the added numbers of husbands and extended households that had come to gather, particularly on Sundays. Indeed, Lady Em and Tilda, Everwell’s matriarchs, had mused of the necessity of an addition to the dining room to house them all.
But the evenings were quieter. Elouise’s regular spot on the settee was now empty. And Gemma no longer practiced as often with Maddy in their training area in the carriage house.
Something had shifted, and it unsettled Maddy in a way she couldn’t quite hold on to.
And so, as she sat here on a pleasant July afternoon, about to embark on a quiet afternoon of doing something that she on any other day would have been perfectly content to do, Maddy found herself wrestling with this thing, this mood, that was hard to pin down. It had crept under her skin and stretched every last nerve of her being. Something unsettled. She felt it in her bones.
She moved through the verge, the leaves gleaming in different shades of green, some shiny, others not, her heart springing in anticipation as she approached the heart of it. There was something magical about roses. Their petals were such silky soft, delicate little things, so beautifully scented that, for just a moment, Madeline Murray could pretend that she was pretty just by being surrounded by their perfume. They didn’t care if she was too tall, too fat, too grumpy, or too much of whatever it was that made the world see her the way they did. They made her feel beautiful just by being near them. And for that, she would tend to these flowers to her dying day.
There were delicate white ones, bold red ones, and a host of pinks in between. The bright pink Duc de Cambridge were a particular favourite, though it was hard to choose. But she loved them, prickles and all.
Moving toward the centre was her latest achievement—the spectacular and demanding Reine des Violettes. It was one of the few climbers in her collection, a lush, brilliant pink quartered bloom surrounded by bright green leaves. She’d managed to train it over an old section of fence, next to which she nestled a beautiful wooden bench. It provided the perfect canopy and escape to read on a warm summer day.
“There you are, my darling,” she said, her heart filling up with anticipation. It was silly, and only upon pain of death would she share how much these roses meant to her. How essential they were. She approached them with the same enthusiasm and reverence she’d imagined she might approach a lover—and imagination was all she had. Which was fine. Maddy had long ago given up the idea that any man would want her for more than the dowry her father had bestowed on her, and she’d rarely seen a man that either inspired any particular excitement, nor gave her any indication that she would give them any.
Until yesterday. And then, that was someone toying with her for his own purposes.
Maddy’s gaze swept over the bush, covered in lively pink blooms, framed by bright green leaves. Her heart leapt into her chest as she examined several leaves on one of the closest stems. Marring the shiny smooth surface of the leaves were a host of sickly black spots.
She swallowed back her disappointment. One couldn’t garden if they weren’t prepared to go toe to toe with a host of things impossible to control—weather, pests, and diseases. Every season brought forward expectation and heartbreak. The last time Maddy dealt with blackspot, it had infected one entire corner of her labyrinth, and there was still a bare spot from where the blight had completely destroyed one of her tender new varieties.
She stalked off to the small garden shed, her mood shifting from mere discontent to some else—something between the sharp, jagged edges of panic and rage. She pushed up the latch on the shed and stepped in, grabbed her freshly sharpened pruning scissors, then spun around to leave. In her haste, she knocked over a small stack of tiny clay pots, one smashing to pieces at her feet.
Fuck.
She bent over and picked up the shards, her mother’s voice in her head, chastising Maddy for her foul language. Ladies do not use such foul language, Madeline. It’s base, beastly behaviour.
A good thing, then, that few would have considered Madeline Murray a lady. And a very good thing that her fellow teachers at the Everwell School never expected her to be. Maddy didn’t believe in a god, but if she did, she would thank the relevant deity for the day Phillipa Hartley brought her to Everwell. They hadn’t asked too many questions, nor judged her for her dubious past. And for that, and so many other things, she would protect them and Everwell and everything it stood for with her life, if necessary. And that included her beloved roses.
She set the clay shards on a nearby shelf and took a moment to calm herself. Panic caused mistakes.
The other side of panic was anger—emotion Maddy had struggled with for far too long. Harnessed, it could be useful, and on occasion, when battling a particularly difficult opponent, Maddy dipped into its dark power to help her fight through fatigue or pain. But it could inflict unintended harm. As she walked back toward her diseased rose bush, pruners in one hand, and an empty wooden bucket in the other, she worked to rid herself of the unruly swirl of emotion that would spiral. Instead, she focused on what she could manage. Yes, black spot was bad. Yes, she might lose her entire rosebush. But could she attack the problem and do her best to protect it?
Also yes.
June had been particularly damp, which no doubt contributed to the arrival of the fungus, but after weeks of wet weather, the sky overhead was a brilliant blue, with only a wisp of cloud in the sky. When she was younger, Maddy’s mother used to scold her for not wearing a bonnet, letting her fair skin redden and freckle. It was one of many things her mother scolded her for.
Maddy pushed off that unwanted memory, revived as she approached her beloved garden, now lush with peonies, hollyhocks and lavender. Soon the echinacea would be blooming. The landscape was alive, the low buzz of bees searching for pollen, and butterflies dining on milkweed. Milkweed wasn’t generally favoured in more fashionable gardens, where only seeds from Europe were prized. The local species, considered lesser in many eyes, were ripped out of the earth they’d been home to and protected for thousands of years.
