Page 100 of House of Roots and Ruin
My engagement would be broken.
I’d never see Alex again.
I’d be lucky if I wasn’t cast off to an asylum.
Perhaps Camille would visit, lording her sanity and unquestionable rightness over me.
Constance reached out as if to put her hand over mine, drawing me from my spiral of thoughts. But she stopped just short of touching me, indecision written across her features. “Verity…you can tell me anything. I’ll believe you. You don’t have to hold all this on your own.” An intense fervor brightened her eyes. “I won’t tell a soul.”
“You wouldn’t tell Gerard?” I asked cautiously, feeling like an animal approaching a trap, sensing the danger but willing to ignore it for the allure of the promised bait.
She bit back a laugh. “I assure you, he’ll never hear a thing from me.”
My question fell out before I could think through its appropriateness. “Did something happen between you?”
Her head dipped, cheeks red, though I couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger that caused them to burn. “Yes. You could say that.”
“I…” I didn’t know what to say.
I hated that this girl had hurt Dauphine, that her presence in the house was a jagged burr, tearing a marriage apart with its festering thorns. When she was a mere concept, a name listed in some little notebook, one girl out of dozens, it had been so easy to despise her, to dismiss her. She was just a mistress.
But the pained expression etched across her face made my heart ache.
It wasn’t her I hated, or all the women who had come before her.
It was Gerard.
He had brought these girls here, thesemistresses,and when he was done with them, finished wringing out whatever novel pleasure it was he’d found within them, he moved on to the next. I wondered how many girls had left Chauntilalie with those hollow eyes, those burning cheeks.
Constance balled her hands into fists. “None of that matters right now. I need to know about tonight. What happened? What did you see?”
Slowly, in half starts, I told her everything. Hearing the peacocks, spotting Alex in the hall, seeing him walk away. I told her about the servant I’d seen the morning of Dauphine’s party, the one who looked so much like Alexander. How Frederick had seen him too. When I was done, I felt wrung out, impossibly exhausted.
She pressed her lips together, mulling over my tale. “You said you were going to get tea?”
I nodded wearily.
“A cup of chamomile will do you a world of good,” Constance reasoned, glancing toward the rack of tins lining the wall above the sink.
“Not chamomile,” I protested. “The blooming tea. In the purple hexagon.”
With obvious reluctance, she reached on tiptoe to grab it. The tin fell through her fingers and clattered onto the countertop. Constance turned toward me, shaking her head slowly, fearfully. “Oh, Verity. I’m certain this isn’t what you want.”
“Of course it is.” I slid off the stool and busied myself, preparing the kettle of water, lighting the stove. “It’s the only thing that helps me sleep.”
I picked up the tin and removed one of the tightly packed blossoms. Her face wrinkled with disgust and she swatted her hand out, casting the flower into the fire. Constance looked as stunned by her sudden action as I was.
The scent of the burning tea leaves filled the room. It was a familiar scent but I couldn’t place exactly where I’d smelled it before.
Unease flickered through my insides. “What is it?”
“They’re poppy flowers. Poppies,” she repeated with emphasis, as if that was enough to make me understand.
“What…what does that mean? I don’t know anything about…” I stopped short, my words dying away as I remembered the sectioned off area of the greenhouse. “Are they poisonous?”
Her eyebrows furrowed. “Not exactly. But…the pods of the flowers can create a terribly powerful drug. They can cause you to fall into deep sleeps, almost like an unconscious swoon. Some people don’t wake for days. Some…don’t wake at all.”
I recalled my mornings after drinking the tea: waking in the same position I’d fallen asleep in, hot and disoriented, my limbs aching from not shifting at all in sleep. I’d blamed the peacocks for causing such exhaustion, but what if…
