Chapter 14 14

Chapter 14 14
Chapter 14
Daphne's POV

Mrs. Dorothy came back before noon.

She said there was a small walled garden on the east side of the building — accessible through a door at the end of the corridor, the one I had assumed was a storage room. It had been tended at some point, she said, but not recently. She handed me a pair of worn gloves and told me not to overdo it and then looked at me for a moment in that way she had, as though checking something internal before she left.

I found the door and opened it and stood in the frame for a moment taking it in.

It was small, maybe ten metres across, enclosed on all sides by stone walls that had moss growing in the seams. Whatever had been planted there once had mostly gone to seed and tangle — dried stalks, something woody and overgrown along the far wall, a climbing thing that had lost its shape entirely and was now just mass. But the soil was there underneath all of it, dark and patient the way soil always is, and there was a narrow patch along the south-facing wall where the light came in clean and long and something was still, improbably, growing.

I pulled on the gloves and got to work.

There is a particular mercy in physical labour that I had always known and never had a word for until that morning. It is not distraction exactly — the mind doesn't empty, not really. It is more that the mind is given something proportionate to work on. You pull a root and you feel the resistance and then the give. You clear a dead stalk and underneath it the soil is darker, damper, richer than the surface suggested. The work has an honest relationship with effort. You put something in, something comes of it. After years of effort that disappeared into a house that consumed everything and acknowledged nothing, the simple equation of it was almost enough to make me cry.

I didn't cry. I pulled weeds until my shoulders ached and then I kept going.

By the time the light started to shift I had cleared most of the central bed and uncovered what I was fairly sure were the remnants of a herb garden — the dried grey stems of what might have been lavender, something that still faintly smelled of thyme when I crushed a leaf between my fingers. Whoever had planted this had known what they were doing. The structure was still there underneath the neglect, the bones of something that had been cared for once.

I sat back on my heels and looked at it.

The door behind me opened.

I turned, expecting Mrs. Dorothy, and found him instead.

He stopped just outside the doorway as though he had not expected to find anyone there. A brief pause — the kind that lasts less than a second but carries weight — and then he stepped through into the garden and let the door fall closed behind him.

I rose from where I was crouching, pulling the gloves off. My hands were dirty at the wrists where the gloves didn't quite meet my sleeves. I was aware of this in the way I was always aware of small details about my own appearance in his presence, not from vanity but from the older instinct of someone who has spent years reading how they are being perceived by people with power over them.

He wasn't looking at my wrists. He was looking at the cleared bed.

"Mrs. Dorothy said you wanted something to do," he said. It was not quite a question.

"Yes."

He looked at the garden for another moment. "This was my mother's," he said. Just that. No instruction attached to it, no implication that I should stop or continue. Just the information, offered plainly.

I looked at the dried lavender stems. "I didn't know," I said.

"I didn't tell you." He moved further into the space, his hands behind his back, looking at the wall where the climbing plant had taken over. Up close I could see that it was a rose — or had been, once. "She stopped coming out here two years ago. After her health changed."

I said nothing. There was nothing to add that would not have been noise.

He turned and looked at me with that direct, undecorated attention of his. "You've been busy."

"I don't manage stillness well," I said. "I never learned how."

Something moved in his expression. Not pity — I would have felt pity, I had a finely developed sensitivity to it after years of being on the receiving end. It was something quieter than that. More like recognition, which made less sense, because what would a man like him know about having no permission to be still.

"What was it?" he asked. He was looking at the cleared bed again. "Before."

"Lavender, I think. And thyme along the edge." I glanced at the far wall. "I'm not sure about the rose. It's hard to tell the shape of it under all the growth."

He nodded slowly. The morning light had moved and the garden was warmer now, the stone walls holding the heat in a way that made the space feel separate from the rest of the compound. Smaller. Less formal. It occurred to me, standing in it with him, that this was the first time I had seen him somewhere that didn't feel like a room designed to remind you of hierarchy.

He seemed aware of it too, in some way. The set of his shoulders was different here. Not relaxed — I was not sure he was capable of relaxed, not yet, maybe not ever — but less armoured than usual. As though the garden had a jurisdiction the rest of the house didn't.

"I can restore it," I said. The words came out before I had decided to say them. "If that's permitted. It would take time but the structure is still good."

He looked at me.

And for a moment, just one, something passed across his face that was neither authority nor distance nor the careful management of expression I had come to associate with him.

It looked, very briefly, like something that wanted to be grateful and didn't quite know how.

"Yes," he said. "It's permitted."