Sorrel looked up to see that it had darkened in the garden. Shadows climbed the brick walls and crawled across the gravel paths. She checked her watch, but the numbers were blurry. She couldn’t use the sundial, crowded as it was with Patience’s bottles. And Anna, how could she be coming? She was long dead and buried. Patience must be confused. Nettie toed her basket of fruit down the path toward the gate.
“We’d better move along if we don’t want the fruit to go over,” she said. “It’ll be no use in my pie.”
Sorrel looked in the basket to see that already the pears were softening and the passion fruit had split open, spilling seeds and flesh in a sticky mass.
“I don’t understand,” Sorrel said. “What’s going on?”
“Oh,” Patience said, “you know you can’t make a garden without us, you shouldn’t have even tried.”
“But it’s beautiful,” Sorrel said, waving at the garden. “It’s perfect.”
“Is it?” Nettie asked, and Sorrel saw that everything was spoiled, every plant and flower and fruit was furred with rot. She thought for a moment that she was back home at the Nursery during the trial when everything went so wrong for the Sisters. She wondered if, in fact, she was in Granite Point and that everything that had happened to her from the invitation to Wiltshire, to meeting Andrew, to the secrets revealed by the garden was just dreams. Perhaps, standing in the center of her own ruined garden, she’d imagined another one entirely.
“This can’t be,” Sorrel said. “You can’t be here, this is mine. The garden is mine, Andrew is mine, my life here belongs to me.”
Patience and Nettie looked at Sorrel with pity.
“Sorrel,” Patience said, “you’ll forget all this once you’re home where you belong.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Sorrel said and began to cry.
Andrew woke her gently. Her mumbling and restless shifting beneath the sheets made him afraid her fever was back, but Sorrel’s brow was cool and dry and other than her confusion as she swam up from her dream, she looked far better than she had only hours before.
“Darling,” he whispered, “come back now.”
WHILE THE LOVERS slept and Sorrel dreamt her way into a nightmare, Gabe gathered his tools. He knew that digging around in the garden would be nasty, unhealthy stuff, so he took a stack of facemasks and a pile of Tyvek bunny suits from the restorer’s offices in the public part of the house. Next he chose his sturdiest shovels and a tarp to hold whatever he unearthed. They would all have to move quickly if they wanted to avoid village gossip.
He drove his materials over in the truck and unloaded everything into a large barrow. The light was good enough until nearly ten these days, so Gabe decided to make his move. Stella brought Graham over, and Andrew left Poppy and Delphine with Sorrel so he could help. None of them had any desire to be witness to what Gabe was certain would be an exhumation.
No matter what the plan, Graham did not take part in the digging. Instead, Gabe cleared away the last of the rotted vegetation, and he and Andrew began together. Stella turned away and gazed in horror at how far the decay or blight or curse had spread. Only the two parterres just beside the gate remained completely untouched. If Sorrel thought she could repair the ravages before she left in little more than a week’s time, Stella could not imagine how.
The first few shovels full of dirt raised a smell as pungent as fox piss. Everyone had their facemasks on, and Gabe and Andrew were in the bunny suits, giving the entire operation an unsuitably comic aspect. In minutes they’d dug beyond the three feet of new soil that had been put in and had begun to reach the rocky pale gray layer beneath. It was harder to make progress here, as the dirt was so fine it kept drifting from the shovels or blowing back into the hole. Gabe sprayed the area with the hose to make the dust lie, and they went back to digging. No one spoke, no bird sang, and not a single bug fizzed through the dusky air.
Andrew and Gabe stopped once to lean on their shovels and drink bottled water under their masks. Stella and Graham stood next to the sundial feeling pointless. It was close to eight when Andrew’s shovel struck something. Everyone jolted at the sound, and Gabe grabbed Andrew’s arm to stop him.
“By hand now,” he signed.
The men went to their knees around the hole. It was not a terribly big hole in a little corner of a garden that might have been anywhere, but Gabe was certain that it was Anna’s grave. They leaned in together, their hands tangling with each other as they scooped. They found a box, wood with leather straps, or at least that’s what the tattered bits around the buckles seemed to be. The box itself was rotted through, stove in on one side perhaps by other shovels or other gardeners. Gabe and Andrew lay down, letting their chests down into the hole and together they brought the box out. It was no bigger than a shoebox, and Stella let out a sob before she gathered herself and stepped forward to the tarp.
“I’ll take that,” she said and removed her mask.
“No, Stella, leave it on,” Graham said.
“I will not approach this victim of your ancestors as if she is the tainted one.”
“You’ve no idea what’s in there,” Graham said.
“It’s not a jack-in-the-box, so you can come closer, dear,” Stella said.
It hardly seemed possible, but as Stella gingerly picked the lid apart, the smell of soot and char drifted out. The bone fragments were clearly visible amidst the gravelly ash and filtered dirt.
“How do we know it’s Anna?” Graham asked.
Stella shook the box gently. “Because of this,” she said and lifted a blackened medallion from the box.
It was hanging from a tangled chain, a flat metal disc with a carved plant or branch in the center. “It’s a rose of Jericho,” she said, “also called Maryam leaf, and traditionally used by midwives during labor.” Stella rubbed it on her sleeve. “This is our Anna.”
CHAPTER 22
Nigella
Andrew spent the night in the chaise by the windows. He wasn’t afraid of falling ill. He was afraid of jinxing Sorrel’s slow but steady recovery. By nightfall she was sipping bone broth brought by Delphine and by ten she was in the kitchen, wobbly but determined to find the éclair Delphine had left for her.
Poppy had left before sunset, buoyed by Sorrel’s improving health and feeling more than a little heroic as she gave the remedy a final shake and left it in the fridge with instructions from Patience for the final dose. She thought that perhaps, after she had her degree, she might spend some time in the colonies, New England to be precise, studying art, and a bit of magic with the Sisters if they were willing.
When she reached the big house, she found her parents and Andrew in the kitchen scrubbing their hands and arms up to the elbow, a puddle of Tyvek coveralls and facemasks by the larder door.
“Result,” her father said when he caught sight of Poppy.
“Oh, Poppy, we found Anna, just where Gabe said she would be!” Stella said. She grabbed a towel off the stove and rubbed as if she’d just been given a poor tour of the Hartlepool nuclear plant.