Page 20 of Bane Bloom

“Did Mr. Carroll make much progress while he was here?” I asked.

Thomas frowned. “He was at it for about a week before he disappeared. But as to his progress, I—”

“Couldn’t say.” His brows lifted at my interruption. “All right, good night, Thomas.”

He bobbed his head. “Miss Gray.” He went into the dining room and back out through the kitchen.

Sighing, I picked up a plump, lilac velvet pillow. As I hugged it to my chest, something caught my eye—the trumpet-shaped white blooms on the encroaching vine had opened, peeking out from under the tea table, their centers glowing in the low light.

This room—this house—was an unsettling blend of eerie, otherworldly, and cozy, with its ghosts of the dead and disappeared, atmospheric glasshouse and oddly behaving plants, and touches of faded but homey elegance.

If I hadn’t been sent here for a specific purpose—one that the estate’s only other inhabitant seemed intent on foiling—I could almost imagine falling in love with the place. Exploring its shadows. Its nooks and its crannies. Uncovering its secrets.

I sensed depth and texture and richness here that I had yet to fathom.

Tossing the pillow aside, I got up from the seat and crossed to the casement by the piano. The light of the moon, now high in the sky, reflected gently from the breeze-rippled surface of the lake and limned the peaks and ridges in silver.

I noticed Thomas collecting wood from a neat stack behind his hut. He carried it around to the door and went inside. Light from his fire gleamed in the hut’s window, flickering with his movements.

Turning from the picturesque view, I studied the lovely piano. I reached out and touched one of the black keys, then pressed it gently. Too gently, as it only let out a light thunking sound. I pressed again, and the note sounded loudly in the stillness of the room. I glanced back toward the entryway and dining room, half expecting Thomas to reappear.

But he didn’t, and I pulled out the stool and sat down. I’d taken piano lessons as a girl, but as soon as I’d grown old enough to make head or tail of our finances, I’d stopped, astonished by the amount of money that had gone into them. A few years after that, I sold our piano.

It wasn’t that I hadn’t enjoyed it, but music lessons were for society girls. I was never going to attract a wealthy suitor by playing Mozart, and therefore I couldn’t justify the cost. My talent was only middling, anyway, as I hadn’t been very disciplined. I fidgeted while practicing the piano in a way I never did sketching or painting. I’d learn the pieces I liked and play them over and over rather than learning new, more challenging ones.

Lightly I stroked my fingers over the keys. Then I positioned my hands and played the opening notes to one of Chopin’s nocturnes—a simplified version of it, arranged for beginners. I smiled as it came back to me; at least a decade had passed since I’d touched a piano. Though the instrument was out of tune, this music from my childhood soothed my travel-wrung nerves. I remembered how I’d play for Papa on his birthday and after our modest Christmas feasts.

I remembered the look on his face when I told him I would sell the piano. I’d permitted myself little sympathy for the gleam of tears in his eyes. Why must I be the one to keep us within our means? To be the spoiler of joy and so many things that had made our lives comfortable and pleasant? The memory caused my throat to ache.

I did what I had to. Papa would have ruined us.

After the first dozen or so bars of the piece, I began to struggle, notes fading as my fingers stilled. At last I got up and slid the bench back in.

I went to the mantel for a candlestick and carried it to the reading seat so I could take a closer look at the books there. Maybe there’d be a volume that would help me understand what I’d seen in the glasshouse. As I held the light up to the shelves, I nearly dropped it when I heard the plink of a piano key.

E-flat. The first key I’d pressed, and the opening note to the nocturne.

My heart thumped as I turned, gaze moving over the instrument and around the room. But I was alone.

I took a slow breath and chided myself for being so jumpy. The piano likely hadn’t been played in years. The key had perhaps stuck while I was playing and then unstuck, or something was awry in the instrument’s insides. A rat had made a nest in ours soon after I’d stopped my lessons.

I went back to examining book spines. There were the two volumes of Mrs. Blackwell’s illustrated herbal, along with Culpeper’s The Complete Herbal. I had read both works and recalled no entries for luminescent water lilies or plants that could disguise themselves.

There were other herbals in this collection, as well as what looked like original Latin versions of Carl Linnaeus’s books on taxonomy. I pulled out a few unfamiliar volumes and sat down to page through them. While I didn’t feel very hopeful they would contain information about the mysterious flower, they were a place to start. If Thomas’s grandfather had procured the specimen himself, then surely there would be information about it somewhere in the house.

If Thomas hasn’t burned it.

The first two books had been written for apothecaries and contained more information on preparing medicines than on plant identification. But the slim volume I opened next, Plant Lore of Britain, caused a tingle of excitement. The title page identified the author as Arthur T. Bane and listed the publication date as 1801. In the opening pages, I also found a note acknowledging the support of the London Society of Apothecaries. This one had been written by Thomas’s grandfather!

I’d presumed the glasshouse flower—which had now become “the Bane Bloom” in my mind—was not a native of Britain because I’d never encountered it. Yet the two flowers that it most resembled—water lily and hellebore—were well established here. Water lilies were native, while black hellebore (which, despite the name, produced a white flower) had been here for centuries. It seemed at least possible I might find the curious specimen in Arthur Bane’s book.

I flipped eagerly through the pages, which included many simple but helpful illustrations by the author, only to be disappointed. But I wasn’t discouraged. I might have been right that the plant didn’t grow in England, or perhaps Mr. Bane had discovered it later. Moreover, my curiosity about Thomas’s family was growing, so I was excited to find the book for its own sake.

I had sketched several colorful hellebore varieties growing in gardens along the Thames and knew that blooms started opening in winter, when everything else was still asleep—which suggested the glasshouse wasn’t really the right climate for them. But I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about the plant, and that seemed as good a place as any to start.

I found black hellebore in the book’s alphabetical listing and paged to the entry.

Many of the plants that interest apothecaries today have associations with wortcunning—centuries-old folk healing practices. One such plant is hellebore, which the lore tells us has been used to combat melancholy, protect against evil spirits, and even cure madness.