Page 9 of Holly & Hemlock
And then Larkin. I have no idea what to make of him. I hadn’t even known he existed and now it seems I’m stuck with him for the time being. It took me about one second to clock his annoyance that I inherited the estate and not him. And he clearly doesn’t have any plans on leaving any time soon. But will he cause actual problems for me, or just be a spoiled nuisance? That remains to be seen.
I refuse to think about the way his hand brushed me, or the look in his eyes when he said good night. I would absolutely not think about the jolt of electricity I felt when he smirked and I could feel his breath on my face.
I was drunk. That’s all it was. Anything else is a complication I don’t need. Or worse.Sabotage?I wouldn’t put it past him. The man was smarmy as all get out.
I look in the mirror and wince. My face looks pale, eyes ghosted with fatigue, lips pressed thin. I swipe on some tinted lip balm, hoping that makes me look less dead. The air in the Blue Room is too warm and too still. I crack the window and inhale a brief shock of frost before heading out.
I navigate the empty house by memory and guesswork. Every board remembers my footfall. The grand staircase exhales a cold draft against my ankles, as if disapproving of my early departure. In the vestibule, the lantern from last night is sputtering, a single burst of flame trapped in glass. I don’t bother with a coat—just grab my scarf, wrap it around my neck, and step into the cold.
Outside, the sky is a gray, the horizon cinched shut by a band of cloud. Hemlock House rises behind me, its gables and chimneys serrating the bruise-colored dawn.
Ahead is the garden, or what passes for it in winter. The first crunch of gravel under my boots sounds indecently loud. I keep walking, hands thrust in my pockets, pulse echoing in the unyielding air.
Beyond the drive, the formal gardens extend in a geometry of paths and terraces, all scored with ice and tangled with the corpses of last summer’s annuals. The boxwoods are clipped but brittle, their leaves fracture at my touch. The flower beds are scabbed over with frost, and the only color comes from a few sullen hellebores, their faces drooping toward the frozen mulch.
It’s a catalog of absence, a museum of dead things.Now this is where I feel at home.
The path leads me toward the old stone wall at the garden’s edge. There, I find a half-hearted border of perennials—foxglove spires, dry as parchment, and clumps of something that might have been lily of the valley, now bleached bone-white by the cold.
But there are other, less savory things, too. A stand of monkshood, its stalks rattling in the wind, and clusters of belladonna berries shriveled but persistent, cling to their stems like beads of old blood.
Hemlock itself—yes, actual hemlock, I note with an interior snort—thrives in the shelter of the wall, white and green and feathery . . . and deeply poisonous.
I wonder if Aunt Maeve had this all planted herself, or if some ancestral sadist designed this garden as a warning or a dare. I run my fingers over the brittle leaves, remembering stories of Socrates and poisonings and women in capes harvesting roots by moonlight. The air is so cold it burns the lining of my nose. I feel sharp, awake, adrenalized.
A movement, sudden and deliberate, interrupts my cataloguing, startling me half to death. From between two yews emerges a man. Not Larkin—this one is even taller, broader, I can tell even with his body crouched. His head brushes the arch of a trellis that even I have to duck beneath and I wonder how he managed to make himself compact enough to walk through it.
He wears a waxed canvas jacket and work pants, the cuffs stiff with mud and rime. His face is as battered as the stone wall behind him, all planes and scars and dark beard. His eyes, when they fix on me, are a shade of gray so pale they look feral. Wolfish.
I freeze. Not out of fear anymore, but because hispresence is so utterly at odds with the dead calm of the garden. He stares at me, then at the stalk of hemlock I’m holding, then back at me. His hands are gloveless, big as spades, the knuckles scarred and red from cold.
I realize I’ve been holding my breath.
“Out early,” he says, his deep voice the sound of gravel under boot.
I drop the hemlock. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He takes this in, unsmiling. “You shouldn’t touch that. Gets under the nails.”
I wipe my hand on my pants, embarrassed and defensive. “I restore paintings for a living. There’s worse stuff in oil pigment.”
He gives a noncommittal grunt, like he’s weighing the truth of that. I expect him to move on, but he just stands there, letting the cold pile up between us.
“You’re the new one,” he says.
I blink. “I guess.”
He scans my face, as if searching for something in particular—a resemblance, a flaw. “Thought you’d be taller,” he says.
I laugh at that. So unexpected. “Sorry to disappoint.”
A long silence. He doesn’t move, but I can feel the temperature drop another degree. I glance past him, looking for a way around, but he blocks the path without even trying.
“Lane Sullivan,” he says, after another beat.
I remember the name from Mrs. Whitby’s tour, the groundskeeper, the one who “knew every secret passage and crack in the walls.” Up close, he looks less like an employee and more like an engine someone left out in the weather for too long. Battered. Rusted. But still so solid.
“Nora Vale,” I say.
