Chapter 21 21

Chapter 21 21
Chapter 21
Daphne's POV

The wall fixture was repaired by afternoon.

Two men came with tools and the quiet efficiency of people who had been given a clear instruction and were not going to take longer than necessary about it. I stepped back from the rose and watched them work. The old anchor was replaced entirely, and two new ones added either side of it — more than the original, sturdier, evenly spaced in a way that suggested someone had thought about the load the canes would eventually put on them rather than simply restoring what had been there before.

When they left I stood in front of the wall and looked at the three new fixing points and felt something move in me that was disproportionate to the event.

It was the more than restoring what had been there before that did it. The two extra anchors. The thought that had gone into the weight of future growth rather than just the immediate problem. I had spent my life around people who did the minimum required to maintain appearances and nothing beyond it, and I had learned to calibrate my expectations accordingly, to keep them low and practical and undecorated by hope. And then there were three wall anchors instead of one, and all of it came undone quietly.

I picked up the shears and went back to work.

By the end of the afternoon I had finished the cutting back. The rose stood stripped and spare against the cleaned wall, reduced to its essential structure — the three main canes, several laterals I had kept that looked strong and well-placed, everything else removed. It looked severe. It always did at this stage. The violence of it was necessary and temporary and in a few months you would not be able to tell that it had happened, but standing in front of it now in the thin late light it looked like something that had been through something.

I understood that feeling.

I left the cut stems in a pile near the wall to deal with tomorrow and put the shears away and went inside.

Vera was in the corridor.

Not waiting exactly — she was moving, walking slowly toward the east staircase with a book under her arm, and she stopped when she saw me. Her eyes went to my hands, the thorn-marks visible even without the gloves now, a constellation of small dark punctures across my palms and the backs of my fingers.

"You finished it," she said.

"The cutting back," I said. "The rest will take longer."

She looked at my hands again and then at my face. "Come," she said. Not a question, but gentler than a command. She turned and I followed her back to the sitting room with the thriving plant and the broken-spined books and the blanket over the chair arm.

She found a small tin in the cabinet near the window — some kind of salve, the lid worn smooth from use — and handed it to me without ceremony.

"For the thorn cuts," she said. "Before they stiffen."

I sat down and opened the tin and worked the salve into my hands while she poured tea from a pot that was already made, as though she had expected to be in this room at this hour and had prepared for company on the chance that it materialised.

"I saw what you did to it from the upstairs window," she said, settling into her chair. "The cutting back."

"It looks brutal at this stage," I said.

"Yes," she said. "It does." She cupped her tea. "I couldn't have done it. I tried, once, in the first year it started going wrong. I couldn't make myself take enough off. I kept thinking I was cutting too deep."

"You can't shape it without going deep," I said. "The superficial cuts don't change the structure. They just tidy the surface."

She looked at me over her cup.

"Caspian came and looked at it this morning," she said. "Before you were up. He stood in the garden for quite a while."

I kept my eyes on my hands, working the salve into the spaces between my fingers.

"He doesn't come into that garden," she said. "He hasn't, since I stopped. He said once that it felt like going into a room where someone used to be." She paused. "He's been in it three times this week."

I said nothing. The salve smelled faintly of something herbal, something I couldn't immediately identify, familiar in the way that things are familiar when you have encountered them in a context you can't quite retrieve.

"I'm not telling you this to put weight on you," Vera said. The same thing she had said before, the same disclaimer, and I believed her both times. "I'm telling you because I think you're the only person currently in this house who would understand what it means without needing it explained."

I looked up at her.

"He asked me about you this morning," she said. "Before breakfast. He came and sat in that chair where you're sitting and asked what we had talked about in here." She nodded at the chair. "He hasn't sat in that chair and asked me anything in a very long time."

"What did you tell him," I said.

"The truth," she said. "That we talked about the garden and about lavender and about how the roots of things are often more alive than the surface suggests."

I looked at her steadily.

"He didn't say anything to that," she continued. "He just sat for a while and then got up and went out and twenty minutes later two men arrived to fix the wall fixture."

The fire ticked between us.

Outside the light was going, the grey afternoon collapsing into an early dusk, and the sitting room had taken on the warm compressed quality of a space that knows it's holding something worth holding.

"He put a book out for me last night," I said. "Before I found it. He went back to the library after I left."

Vera looked at me for a long moment.

"Yes," she said quietly. "That's him. That's exactly him." Something moved across her face, old and fond and slightly sorrowful the way love is when it has been tested by a long time. "He doesn't have words for the things he means. He never has. He just does the thing and hopes you're paying enough attention to read it."

I looked down at my hands. The thorn-marks were still visible but already the salve had taken some of the sting out of them.

"I'm paying attention," I said.

She nodded once, slowly, as though this was the answer she had come to this room hoping to hear.

"I know," she said. "So is he."