Page 60 of Holly & Hemlock
He flips to another page. “Holly is protective. It’s in every folk remedy, every ward. Hemlock, though, is poison. Together, they make a perfect boundary. You cross it, you’re either blessed or damned, no in-between.”
I look at the next image. It shows a man, tall and severe, his face blotted out by a splotch of brown ink. In the background, Anwen stands among the trees, watching.
“She was in love,” Larkin says, voice gone careful. “With the lord of the nearest estate. He was married, of course, andshe was already the subject of rumors, so it was all doomed from the start.”
I let the silence do its work while he reads the notations.
“He died young,” Larkin continues. “No cause listed, but the implication is violence, or suicide. The wife accused Anwen of bewitching him. Had her banished from the funeral, then from the parish.”
“Did she actually curse them?”
Larkin turns a few more pages, the paper so thin I can see the ghost of the next chapter through it. “Not a curse. More of a—” He searches for the word. “Blessing gone wrong. She was so furious at being cut off from the man she loved, she cast a spell to keep him near her, forever. To keep anything she loved from ever leaving again.”
I feel a shiver then, not from the cold, but from the way the story fits itself to the contours of my own life.
“She thought it would just bring his ghost back,” Larkin says, “but it spread. It infected the land, then the house, then anyone who ever lived here.” He looks up at me, his usual mask of arrogance gone. “No one leaves Hemlock. Not for long.”
I touch the next illustration. This time, the holly border is so dense it nearly obliterates the image. In the center, a heart—human, not symbolic—is pierced with two spikes: one bright, one dark.
The Latin beneath is messy, but legible enough. “Amor manet,” I read. “Love endures.”
Larkin’s hands are steady, but the muscle in his jaw jumps when he speaks. “She didn’t mean to make it a curse. She just wanted to keep what she had.”
The margins of the page are stained, the ink bled outward in little tidal lines. I see now that it isn’t just water damage—the page is marked with what can only be tears,the salt having eaten through the paper in tiny, perfect circles.
My own eyes prick with the feel of them as I think of her and her lost love.
He turns to the final entry. The script is different, more frantic, as if written in a fever. The words are in Welsh, and I watch as Larkin parses each one with care. His mouth shapes the syllables before his tongue releases them.
“It’s a plea,” he says, voice raw. “A spell of holding. It says: ‘Hold fast what is loved, keep close what is cherished, never release what the heart claims as its own.’”
I repeat the words in my mind, feeling the way they crowd out rational thought.
I look at Larkin. His eyes are not on the book now, but on me, as if waiting for something to manifest.
I close the folio, the cover soft under my fingers. The lamp flickers, throwing our shadows huge against the wall. For a moment, I can’t tell where his ends and mine begins.
I reach out, run my thumb along the holly motif etched into the cover. The prongs catch on my nail, and I think of how boundaries are meant to keep things out, not in. But here, they are reversed. Here, the thorns only grow inward.
Larkin watches me, his face unreadable. But I see the way his hands tremble now, ever so slightly, as if the act of reading the past has changed the shape of his future.
“We should put it back,” he says, finally.
“Not yet,” I reply.
I open the folio to the last page, the words of Anwen burning through the vellum. I read them again, softer, like an invocation. “Hold fast what is loved. Keep close what is cherished. Never release what the heart claims as its own.”
The lamp flickers again, and the air goes cold.
Larkin closes his hand over mine, pinning the book to thetable. “The story doesn’t end well,” he says, not letting go. “She never got him back, and the blessing turned into a curse on us all.”
I look at his hand—large, pale, elegant—and then at his eyes, gone black in the lamplight.
“Maybe that’s the point,” I say. “But maybe there’s a way to undo it.”
We sit there, in the half-dark, the weight of the past pressing in from all sides. The house groans above us, the sound of timber shifting in the wind. For a moment, I wonder if Anwen is still here, her curse cycling through generation after generation, waiting for someone to let it rest.
Or maybe, just maybe, she’s watching, hoping that this time, the story will break its own pattern.
