Page 33 of Bane Bloom

I gasped and read the last line again. What a strange coincidence! I had an uneasy notion this story wasn’t going to end as happily as mine had, but I couldn’t help reading on.

The disturbed surface of the water caused the boat to drift. Mama fumbled with the oars, but she hadn’t much practice with rowing, and her efforts only caused more drift. She must have panicked, because she followed me into the lake, gripping the boat’s side to stay afloat. Neither of us had learned to swim.

I was thrashing about and shouting for her, and I swallowed a great gulp of water before finally sinking below the surface.

I wasn’t a witness to the rest, but later I learned Mama had let go of the boat when I went under, trying in vain to reach me. A workman’s strong hands came around me, and he swam with me to the shallows, thrusting me into the arms of the other, who was wading out. Then the man went back for Mama.

He emerged from the lake with her in his arms and laid her on the beach. I remember her pale, streaming cheeks, her staring eyes, and her gorse flower–bright dress. I remember him shouting, “Mrs. Bane!” and shoving violently at her back. I was too small to understand and thought he was hurting her. When I began to cry, the other man tried to console me, but I fought him, not aware yet that my mother had drowned.

Papa was called home, and we buried her in the old yard behind St. James’s Church, above the village. Papa and I were never the same. I believed that I had killed Mama, though he said it wasn’t so. He blamed himself for leaving us, yet in my heart I thought some hidden part of him must have blamed me. For it was my curiosity that caused it.

From the day we buried Mama, Papa’s glasshouse became more than intellectual and scientific curiosity. His interests honed to a single pursuit. He left plant medicine behind and began to study plant lore. He consulted books on wortcunning, plant spirits, and fairies. He sought out knowledge about plants specially connected with life, afterlife, and death. He acquired grimoires, too, and as I grew older, I began to study these myself.

Papa’s studies led him to the conclusion that our house—which had been in a crumbling state, overtaken by brambleberry and wildflowers, before its restoration—had been claimed by the fairies. Mama’s life had been taken as revenge for the restoration and our moving into the house. He also believed that somewhere in his books was an answer to returning Mama to us. He thought if he couldn’t discover a plant spirit that would bring her back, he could use his knowledge of botany and horticulture to create one.

Though his efforts did not bear the fruit he had hoped for, the glass workshop where he conducted his botanical experiments gradually became a place of overlapping worlds. His collaboration with fairies and spirits opened a kind of Pandora’s Box, and it gradually disordered his mind.

You might imagine I’d have learned to be wary of elementals, changeable creatures of lake mist and fell shadow, but I delighted in these new companions. And without them, I wouldn’t have you, my bairn.

I closed the book so decisively that it released a puff of dust. I stuffed it back into the drawer and then went to the window. The clouds hung low, obscuring the peaks, and mist drifted over the surface of the lake. Impossible to say whether the sun had set, but the light was going.

My hand felt ice cold as I pushed the casement slightly open so I might hear the cheery sounds of the stream. The shock of what I’d read still gripped me.

Thomas’s grandmother had drowned in the lake trying to save his mother.

And his grandfather had spent the rest of his life trying to bring her back.

Shivering, breaths coming short, I scanned along the beach and around the hut, but Thomas was nowhere in sight. The small window was dark, neither fire nor lamp yet lit.

The other things Prudence had revealed I could hardly let my mind touch. The more I learned about the history of this place, the more unmoored I felt.

Changeable creatures of lake mist and fell shadow.

If I’d understood her rightly, Arthur Bane had treated with offended fairies in his attempts to recover his wife. And then Prudence had, in some manner, done the same—with Thomas being the result.

Was any of this real? Could it all be the result of mental affliction?

I thought of my pink flower-petal woman; was Pine Cottage twisting my mind, as Thomas had warned it would? Or dare I consider the possibility that she might have been one of Prudence’s elementals? And which of these explanations was preferable?

Yet there was a more likely, less fanciful possibility, at least in my own case: fatigue, combined with unfamiliar surroundings and Thomas’s vague warnings. As for the Bane Bloom, there was still my theory of plant defenses to be explored. The most concerning facts about the glasshouse lily—that Carroll had written about it before disappearing and that Thomas had burned his writings—weren’t facts at all, but connections I’d made in my own mind. As Thomas had told me, the term “Bane Bloom” might refer to any plant in the glasshouse.

My mind then made a new concerning connection.

Lily Bane.

Supposing Arthur Bane had worked with fairies and spirits in his attempt to invent a “cure” for death and bring back his wife, what were the chances that a mysterious plant in his glasshouse that sometimes appeared as a lily wasn’t connected with those efforts?

My skin prickled, and I was overcome by an urge to leave the house. As I stood up, I glimpsed a small face near the glasshouse door, and my heart jumped—only to realize it was one of the encroaching trumpet blooms, freshly opened. I hurried to the front door.

The temperature had dropped considerably, and I stepped back in and grabbed a shawl I’d left on the stair railing. I crossed the rose garden and passed under the arbor.

A cool twilight breeze bathed my fevered cheeks. Enough light remained to make out a faint path leading off in the direction of the stream.

Swollen by the earlier rain, the stream surged over its rocky bed. Glancing across the open slope to my left, I tried to follow its curvy silver line up toward the pass. Most of the ground between here and there was open and grassy, and in some places bare red clay, though small trees grew along the stream’s bank. Mist seeped down into the basin from the slope of Fleetwith Pike.

Closing my eyes, I listened to the clean, clear chuckle of water over stones, and it deepened my breaths. I heard the forlorn-sounding opening notes of the call of some waterfowl. Closer, perhaps in the pine trees, the call of a different bird, this one single toned and pulsing. It was soon answered by another more distant call.

I took in a full draught of the green spring air and opened my eyes. All the secrets and strange melancholy that haunted Pine Cottage had not managed to put me off this beautiful country.