Page 16 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

Does he touch everything that way, she wondered, and immediately shut down the unhelpful thought.

They gathered the flags without talking. When she reached for the moisture meter he’d already picked it up, turning it over in his big hands and checking the casing.

“Cracked here.” He showed her the hairline crack along the seam. “I’ll replace it.”

“You will not. It still works.” She took it back before he could argue. “You people. One crack and you throw the whole thing out.”

“You people?”

“Rich people.”

“Ah.” He stood, and offered a hand to help her up. She looked at it. Huge and grey and tipped with long black claws that could open a man like an envelope. She put her hand in it. He drew her to her feet as though she weighed nothing, and let go the moment she was steady, which she noticed and refused to think about.

“I came back to check moisture levels,” she said, aiming for the practical. “Before I costed the drainage. Do you want to come with me?”

The offer emerged before she could stop it, but he simply nodded and fell in beside her without a word, matching his pace to hers. She worked her way down towards the river end of the property, marking specimens and taking moisture readings. Somehow he ended up in charge of the clipboard again, writing down the numbers as she called them out.

At the bottom of the property they reached the wall she’d noticed the day before and thought about all night. The wall must have come down a dozen years ago. A whole eight-foot section of it lay tumbled across the slope in a long, mossy heap, the stones settled into the earth as though they had grown there, and a world had grown up around it. Fern fronds unfurled from every crevice, thick and green in the shade.

“Look at this.” She crouched reverently next to the plants covering the fallen wall. “Polypody all along the top, and that’s maidenhair spleenwort in the deepest shade, which is what you’d expect, and then—” She leaned in, her eyes widening. “Oh. That’s a walking fern.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s wonderful. It’s rare in this county and it’s fussy and you can’t make it grow anywhere it doesn’t want to be.” She traced the air above one long narrow frond to where the tip of it arched down and rooted into the moss where it touched. “It’s called walking fern because it walks. The leaf tips lean over until they reach the ground, and then they root, and then the next one does the same thing. That’s how it spreads. A few inches at a time, for years.”

“On my wall?”

“Only on your wall.” She wiped her hands down her thighs. “It wants lime in the soil and there’s no lime in this area. But somebody built that wall with lime mortar a hundred years ago, and it’s been leaching out of the joints ever since. That’s the only reason any of this is here.” She caught herself beaming and made herself stop. “Somebody built a wall, and the wall fell down. A dozen years of nobody caring about the fallen wall turned it into the best fern bank I’ve ever seen outside a preserve. You can’t design this. It just happens, if you’re lucky.”

“I’ll have it rebuilt,” he said thoughtfully.

She turned her head very slowly.

“You’ll what?”

“The wall. It’s collapsed.” He was frowning down at the tumbled stone, all business now. “I’ll have it rebuilt. Properly footed this time. The original had no foundation, that’s why it went. A week’s work, less if I do the stonework myself.”

Something cold and ugly crawled up the back of her throat, and it wasn’t fear this time. It was the sound of her mother-in-law’s voice at a dinner table saying we did think Toby might attend somewhere with a little more polish. It was every wealthy person she’d ever met who looked at something that worked perfectly well and decided it was too old or too untidy to keep.

“Of course you will,” she said, her voice hard. “It doesn’t look right, does it? A bit of tumbledown wall, a bit of untidy green. It doesn’t match the nice restored balustrade. You’d like it all squared off and repointed so it photographs well for whoever you’re trying to impress.”

He blinked.

“That’s not⁠—”

“I told you.” She stood, knowing her voice was rising and unable to stop it. “I told you the very first day. You said money’s no object like that was reassuring, and it isn’t. It’s the opposite, because it means every single time I find something worth saving you’ll want to improve it. To buy a better one. That is a walking fern, Garrick. Nobody could sell it to you, and you want to knock it down because it offends your sense of… of tidiness⁠—”

“Maris.”

“—and I’m not going to stand here and watch you⁠—”

“Maris.”

She stopped. He hadn’t raised his voice. Instead he’d lowered it, and that reached her faster than shouting would have.

“It’s not about how it looks,” he said carefully. “I don’t care how it looks. But there’s a sidewalk twelve feet below us, and children walk to school along it every morning. When the rest of that section goes—and it will go because it’s not structurally sound—a ton of stone comes down on them.” His jaw worked. “That’s what I care about. Not the photographs.”

Oh.