Page 10 of Bane Bloom

Don’t let him cow you. He works for the Society, and so do you.

As far as that, we were equals.

Recalling the other Society employee whom I’d learned about today, I said, “Can you tell me anything about what happened to the man who was here before me? Mrs. Foss told me he has gone missing.”

Thomas blinked a couple of times and adjusted his feet on the board. “They didn’t tell you up in London?”

I felt a niggle of dread. “I’m afraid not. Mrs. Foss said you thought you saw him go into the lake shortly before he went missing.”

Thomas frowned. “May have. Or may have been a trick of the moonlight.”

“Did you go out and check?” Belatedly, I realized this might be taken as an accusation. I was running short of patience for his grunts and terse replies.

His frown hardened. “I’m paid to keep the garden and grounds, not watch over apothecaries. This country is wild still. Not like your big, smoking city. Best keep that in mind, Miss Gray.”

His warning dealt me a stab of fear—but also touched off my temper. I shifted on the seat. “Thomas, I’ve got the idea you don’t much like my being here. Or maybe you don’t much like me. But both of us have a job to do at Pine Cottage, and while I’ll do my best to keep out of your way, I think we’ll get on with it easier if you can bring yourself to show me a little civility.”

Again his head slowly turned. Again my breath stopped. “I don’t like you. I don’t dislike you. We have nothing at all to do with each other.”

I lifted my chin, though I trembled. “That is untrue, and I think you must know it. We have the same employer.”

Something glinted in his cold, clear eyes, and they rounded slightly. “Calling me a liar and threatening me.”

For heaven’s sake. What a beginning! I let out a frustrated breath, but I attempted to soften my voice as I replied, “Of course I’m not. I’m only trying to make a case for the cessation of hostilities.”

He studied my face a moment before narrowing his eyes again and turning back to the road. Then he let out another grunt. I began to believe my predecessor might actually have drowned himself in the lake.

“The House Will Find It Out”

Thomas

She’s well nettled now.

Confused and hurt, too, by her expression. Yet I could not be sorry for it. She had no more business here than Mr. Carroll had.

Until Carroll, the apothecaries had not set foot in Pine Cottage since my mother was a child, when my grandfather had them all out to see the glasshouse they’d paid for. After the sudden death of my grandmother, the madness and tragedy kept them away. When, a couple of decades later, my grandfather joined her, my mother took matters into her own hands, using wortcunning and fairy glamour to float a veil over the place, so that anyone who so much as thought of it would find themselves sleepy and drifting. Which had left us in peace here for many years.

The spell was her most powerful, and she’d prayed it might outlive her.

But three years after her death, the apothecaries had sent Carroll, green and overeager. He vanished no more than a week later, and I dared hope that might be the end of it. That it would frighten them off, or they’d decide Carroll’s cataloging efforts were more trouble than they were worth.

Now, six months later, they’d sent a young woman alone with no associate or companion, not even telling her of the fellow’s fate. I’d grown up with no high opinion of the apothecaries, but this was knavery, plain and simple.

And worse, this woman was hungry. I could feel it, like fingers plucking at the whisper-thin filaments that connected us to other souls.

People came to this place with their hunger, and the house could sense it, same as the snake oil hucksters who sometimes stopped in the village on their way to the market at Keswick. There was only so much I could do to protect them.

I cut my eyes at her a few times as she took everything in. The otherworldly tract of woodland with its bluebell glade, part of the small estate that belonged to Pine Cottage. A fine, whitewashed farmhouse looking down on us from the slope above the road as we left the woods—Graham Farm, run by another man left isolated by death. Shaggy Galloway cows grazed in the pasture next to the house, wide white stripes circling their middles like corsets. Herdwick sheep, too, with their sooty wool. A gray collie dog gave a halfhearted yap from the other side of an old stone fence as we rolled past.

Though I’d subdued her with my roughness, her eyes remained bright with wonder at this new world. Even as her hunger frightened me, I felt the heaviness of my existence lightened by her obvious delight with all she was seeing. With all the things I took for granted because they made up the unending sameness of my days.

What had drawn her here? What is it she hungers for?

Whatever it is, the house will find it out.

I let out a long and measured sigh. This woman was no concern of mine, no more than Carroll had been. The Society could send them one after another if they liked, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had magic, but I was not my mother. And I worked for the apothecaries, as Miss Gray had reminded me only a moment ago.

But they don’t own me. It’s the house that owns me.