The Night Gardener (27 page)

She removed one of the letters from its envelope. Like every other letter in the stack, it ended the same way: with Ma and Da promising that they would come soon and then giving Molly one final instruction:
stay put.
Molly said the words aloud, and this time she did not hear Ma’s voice in her head. Instead, she heard a distant, more hollow voice. A voice like the wind.

Molly did not even know what she was doing as she approached the stove. She crouched down and opened the iron door to the oven. Hot air swept over her face. The embers inside were still red. Molly ran her fingers over the stack of letters. Her bottom lip shook as she tried to form the words that might help her let go. “Good-bye,” she said, sliding the envelopes into the stove.

Molly blinked through tears as fire licked up the side of the paper, consuming the letters …

“No!” She snatched the envelopes back from the oven, burning
her hand. She smothered the flames in her apron. The envelopes were singed on one end, but they had been saved. She had saved them. Molly closed her eyes, clutching them against her breast.

“I’m sorry …” She sobbed. “I’m sorry …” But she did not even know whom she was talking to.

Crash!

Molly heard a noise outside. She hurriedly tucked the letters back into her pocket. “Is that you, mum?” she called, opening the door.

There was no reply.

Molly ran toward the garden. “Mum?” A shattered teacup lay on the ground. The cart was overturned. Mistress Windsor lay on the gravel, not moving.

Molly grabbed hold of the woman and shook her. “What’s happened?” Constance was ice-cold to the touch. Her eyes were turned up in her head. Her dark lips were parted, and from them Molly could feel no breath.

“Kip! Master Windsor!” she cried. “Someone help!”

olly stepped into Mistress Windsor’s bedroom. “Doctor, I’ve brought more water.” She held up a sort of wineskin made from India rubber. It was filled with boiling water that made it almost too hot to hold.

“At her feet, girl,” the doctor said.

Constance Windsor lay in bed, tossing her head back and forth, muttering under her breath. Molly went to the end of the bed, which was piled high with nearly a dozen blankets. She pulled the blankets back to reveal Constance’s bare feet. Molly felt uncomfortable handling them. They were macilent, clammy, and far too cold. She slid the bag of hot water beneath the feet and retucked the blankets under the mattress.

“Oh, Connie … my sweet poor Connie.” Master Windsor stood by the far wall, wringing his hands. His hair was disheveled, and his face was gray with stubble. It had been two days since his wife had collapsed in the garden. In all that time, he had not left her side.

Doctor Crouch took a measurement of the patient’s head with a
pincer tool. “Seems normal enough …,” he muttered, consulting a chart on the bedside table. He wore gold spectacles on the very end of his nose, which forced him to tilt his whole head to look at people—not that he ever bothered looking at Molly. He opened his black leather bag and removed a sort of copper funnel, the small end of which he put into his ear. He held the other end over Mistress Windsor’s chest and listened for a few seconds. “Hrmmmm … very peculiar …”

Bertrand stepped forward. “Wh-wh-what is it?”

The doctor removed a little book from his vest and, consulting his pocket watch, made a notation. He spoke as he wrote. “Heart rate and eye movement lead me to believe that your wife is not asleep. Rather, she is caught in a sort of ether state—something
between
sleeping and waking. Call it suspended somnambulism.” He made a pleased face. “Yes, that’s just the name for it!” He quickly scribbled another note to himself, chuckling. “Crouch, old boy … just wait until the academy hears of this …”

“Surely there’s a cure,” Bertrand said in a tone befitting a question.

Doctor Crouch finished writing. “Bed rest. And not just for her. The mysterious fever I witnessed in your family before has clearly accelerated. I fear it will only be a matter of time until the rest of you succumb.”

Molly cleared her throat. “You’re not gonna try leeches, sir?” This was what healers had always done in Molly’s village back home. They were supposed to draw poison from the blood.

“Leeches?” The man snorted. “Does this woman look like she has fluids to spare? Next I suppose you’ll tell me to ply her with nightshade or bathe her in quicksilver. My girl, we are on the cusp of a
modern
age—and with it comes modern medicine.” He dug a fat hand through his bag and removed a small bottle. “Take this laudanum, for example. Wonderful stuff! I have a few drops in my tea each morning to calm the nerves.”

Molly felt her cheeks burn. The man had a way of talking that made her feel stupid. “I’ll go check on supper,” she said. She lowered her head and retreated to the hall. Alistair and Penny were huddled outside the door.

“Is Mummy all right?” Penny asked, craning her neck to see into the room.

“Of course not,” muttered Alistair, his mouth stuffed with peppermints. “That’s why Father called the doctor, dummy.”

“Hush, both of you,” Molly said. She stroked Penny’s hair. “Your mum’ll be fine. Doctor Crouch is the best in England—maybe the world. Why, I heard that when Napoleon got his head chopped off, it was the good doctor who stitched it back on.”

“Napoleon was poisoned,” Alistair corrected. “And that was thirty years ago.”

Molly eyed the bag of sweets in his plump hand. “Perhaps you’ve had enough of those,” she said.

Alistair glared at her, chewing like a cow. “You’re probably right.” He spit out a huge glob of sticky peppermint goo. It landed on the
floor with a wet plop. He smiled. “You should clean that up. Someone might slip.”

Before Molly could respond, a door slammed behind her. Master Windsor rushed from his wife’s room, fists clenched. He marched right past Molly and the children, who had to leap aside to avoid being knocked over.

“Where’s he going in such a rush?” Alistair muttered, wiping sticky slobber from his chin.

Molly did not answer; instead she led them both to their bedrooms and instructed them to wash up for supper. When the children were gone, she went to the front hall. Molly knew where Master Windsor had gone. She had seen the key in his hand.

Just as she suspected, the green door at the top of the stairs was open. It sounded like Master Windsor pacing inside. She could hear his strained voice—something between a shout and a whisper. “
I said
, Make her well!” he demanded. “You’re not listening—I need a
cure
! Ointments! Medicines! Anything!”

Molly peered into the room. Master Windsor was facing the tree. Sovereigns, shillings, and pennies spilled from the knothole in front of him. The man charged forward and plunged his arm into the hole, digging beneath the coins. “Enough money! I want”—he pounded his fist against the tree trunk—
“out!”

He slumped to the floor, burying his face in his hands. “I want out …” He uttered a moan, his body heaving with tight sobs.

Molly watched, unable to look away. She had seen men cry before
but never like this. Bertrand Windsor sounded like a lost child, and perhaps he was just that.

She took a careful step into the room. “Master Windsor?”

“Molly!” Bertrand sprang to his feet, wiping tears from his eyes, awkwardly trying to put himself between Molly and the knothole. “I was just t-t-talking to myself about … affairs regarding …”

“It’s all right, sir,” she said, sparing him the indignity of going on. “I know about the tree.”

His alarm crumbled into something resembling defeat. “I s-s-suppose it was only a matter of time.” He sniffled. “I was never much good at keeping secrets.”

Molly knew she was meant to leave, to pretend she hadn’t seen her master in this state. But she knew equally well that she was no normal maid. She was no longer “the help.” She was part of the Windsors’ story now. She removed a handkerchief from her pocket and offered it to him. “You look like you could use it.”

“Th-th-thank you,” he said, wiping his nose. He ran a hand over his pale, unshaven chin. “I must be a dreadful sight.”

Molly pushed her dark hair from her face. “We all are.” She offered a kind smile. “You’re doin’ everythin’ you can for your wife.”

Bertrand nodded, looking down. He creased the handkerchief over and again on itself, as if he could fold it into nothing. For a moment, Molly thought he had forgotten she was there. “It … it wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he said finally. “I had plans to make something of myself, to prove myself to her—”

Molly inched nearer. “Mistress Windsor told me about how hard you tried to make her comfortable.”

“Is that how she put it?” He made a bitter face. “Connie insisted she didn’t care about ‘being comfortable’—but I knew that she did. She deserved more than what a clerk could provide. And I was determined to give it to her. If I couldn’t earn the money through honest work, I would do it through speculation.”

Molly knew that “speculation” was a sort of gambling men did with imaginary money. Money they did not always have. She stared at the man cowering before her. How many times had she silently defended him—imagined him the victim of a cruel and unloving wife? But now, as Molly thought of Constance unconscious in her bed, she knew who the real victim was. “You mighta done wrong, sir. But you did it for right reasons,” she said, trying to hide the judgment from her voice.

“But I
didn’t
do it … That’s the problem. Markets turned, investments went sour. I had to borrow more and more just to keep creditors at bay. The banks seized my accounts, our home, everything!”

“That’s when you came here? To the place where you grew up?”

“I first thought of selling the land,” he said. “But when I returned to this house … and I saw the door—I suddenly remembered everything: how my father’s studies brought us here, how he built a house around the tree to keep its secret, and how one night he and my mother …” He shook his head, warding off some horrible memory.

“What happened to ’em?” Molly said softly.

He smiled like he hadn’t heard her. “When I opened this door,
I found something else.” He held up a single coin. “My wish.” He clenched his fist around the coin, his expression turning to bitterness. “I thought it could save us. You must understand: we had nowhere else to go.”

Molly did understand. She remembered being alone on the streets with Kip. She had been willing to do anything to get him away from that—including bringing him to a house that her every instinct told her was not safe. She folded her arms, warding off a shudder. How well the tree had known just what Master Windsor had needed. Just what
she
had needed. They had, both of them, come to the tree in desperation. But had they just traded one evil for another?

“No matter what I do, things only get worse,” he said absently. “The debt, the loans … It’s like an anaconda, coiled around me, squeezing tighter and tighter.”

Molly stared at a thin branch protruding from the wall—it was indeed snakelike. “We dinna got snakes in Ireland,” she said, a thought forming. “A good saint chased ’em off long ago.”

Bertrand nodded, looking a little confused. “I’d heard that.”

“What we do got is lizards.” She peered out the window, remembering. “Lizards aren’t snakes, but they can still bite. Worse, they’re bad luck in a garden. So folks have an old trick for gettin’ rid of ’em. What you do is wait till just before sundown, when the air’s cool but the lizards ain’t yet gone into their holes. You take a red-hot rock from the fire and set it in the middle of your garden. The lizards—why, they hate the cold, and they’ll come runnin’ straight for that rock and curl
up right on top o’ it. Come mornin’, you’ll wake to find ’em still on that rock, their bodies cooked alive.” She turned back. “You see: the rock saves ’em from chill only to kill ’em in its own way.”

Down the hallway, Molly heard a faint moan. She took a step toward Master Windsor and placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sir. What your wife needs isn’t jewels or money or even medicine.” She nodded toward the open door. “She needs the same thing as that lizard—to get out of the cold.”