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Without your help.The phrase landed bitterly, implying that she wasn’t needed after all.
She thanked Mr. Hanover distantly as she replaced the handset, her thoughts in tangled knots.
What would she do now?
Later that night, Louise pulled her shawl tighter against the chill of dusk. Half of the garden stretched out before her was empty. The harvest had begun in earnest, a reaping of what had been sown.
Even after pondering the matter all day, she hadn’t arrivedat a conclusion. If she proceeded with the project as planned, she risked duplicating a federal nursery school. If she halted it, she’d have to trust the government would keep their word, not to mention accept the loss of her deposit money—and a fair bit of pride.
Her father would insist there was a book, somewhere, that she could escape into to find the answer, to give her insight into what to do.
But she’d spent too long escaping, hiding, lying. Even avoiding the last book club meeting because she worried that someone would start talking about guilt, then see her and guess her long-buried secret.
The rest of them could learn more about one another, but she would always be forced to stay a distance removed. Safe. Where no one would know that she’d given her heart to a man who abandoned her, then given up the child they’d had together.
“The past won’t stay buried. That’s the plain, awful truth of it, Louise. It’s only a matter of who’s going to do the digging.”
She stood, leaning against the fence, breathing in the cool scent of turned-over earth ... and thinking of another night, just after Windward Hall had become her legal possession. The night she’d burned her father’s garden.
———
MARCH 1919
Rosebushes crackled as they burned.
Louise watched, entranced, as the flames spread, smoke billowing into the cuttingly cold winter air. The heat that flared off the dried branches twined around the collapsing wooden arbors promised a dramatic, if brief, spectacle.
She’d stationed Father’s servants around the perimeter with buckets of water to douse any sparks that leaped the trench they’d dug, though if she wasn’t mistaken, they watched herwith more fear than they did the fire blazing through the dead patches of gladiolas.
Fine with her. Soon the servants who were not local would leave to work for her brother, who had inherited the Cavendish mansion in New York, freed by her father’s death from their indenture to this lonely Maine coast. Until then, she could bear a wary look or two.
The garden’s trees had been cut down, the hedgerows uprooted, the paving stones dug out of the barely thawed ground one by one. But if she’d had the servants merely pluck out the perennials, they—stubborn things—would simply appear the next year. Besides, it would take far too long. She’d touched the first flame to a rosebush herself, watching the bare, thorny canes curl to black. An appropriate color, one of mourning, for the man who had loved them so well.
Towering above it all from her waist-high pedestal, the statue of Persephone mocked her, beautiful, pure, untouched. Soon, she would be crumbled to gravel, as Louise had ordered Benson to do, despite his protests about the expense. Without a garden, there was no need for a statue, a protector of secret messages containing lovers’ secrets. Not anymore.
Once Oliver had whispered lies of love to her within those tangled bowers. Her father had disappeared into this garden nearly every day, ignoring the young girl who desperately wanted him to take notice of her. Now both had left her alone, and the flames consumed the garden like the wrath of the Almighty.
“Your father had his faults, I’ll admit, but he’s gone.”
The voice at her elbow made her startle, and she relaxed only slightly when she realized it was Delphie, her face in a tight scowl like she’d downed a tumbler of vinegar, waggling a finger at her like she was still a child, scolded for drawing sketches in the margins of her father’s precious books. “You can’t anger him anymore by throwing a hissy fit against his garden. It won’t help.”
“I don’t want it to help,” Louise murmured, watching the pattern of dancing flames before her. “I want it to hurt.”
And though she’d never said it in so many words, she was surprised to find just how true it was.
When Delphie didn’t reply, the words kept coming. “I thought, maybe, it would make me feel something.”
Five months of treating the critically ill, exhausted from the long days with no rest, had numbed her to any emotion. It was all she could do to wake up in the morning, don her bleach-white nursing uniform, and stagger to the hospital-church full of moaning patients separated from one another by the rude curtains she’d hung up. Many citizens of Derby, treated as best she could with limited supplies, recovered after a week of battling the disease. A few—feverish, weakened, and susceptible to pneumonia after the ravages of the Spanish flu—did not.
By Christmas, new cases slowed, but she hadn’t relaxed her precautions, wearing a mask and scrubbing her skin raw each night before returning to Windward Hall, interacting with Father only when absolutely necessary, his care given over to Delphie and others.
And still, he died quietly in the night only a month into 1919. Dr. Hoffman reported symptoms of influenza as a contributing cause, stony eyes regarding her with open hostility.
He would have succumbed to tuberculosis soon regardless. It was a heartless thought, but true, and all that had kept her functioning the past month, through the funeral and the censorious stares from relatives, even her own brother. As if they believed that in saving others, she had killed her own father.
“I didn’t kill him. Or at least I didn’t mean to. He wanted me to serve,”she wanted to shout at all of them.
In the end, Luther Cavendish had looked up from his books and his blooms and done one great unselfish thing. And she had kept her promise. Not one child under her care had died, not even Anthony, her first patient, brought to her in a state ofcoughing, feverish fatigue, like Tiny Tim from the novel her father had loved so much. It had taken two weeks before she’d declared him safe to return to his family, particularly since he had a sister who was just a toddler, but the healthy flush in his cheeks had increased her determination to see her work through.
