The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition)

by Alex Marwood

  At the bottom, I assume it’s safe to turn on the light. A ceiling bulb bathes everything in an unearthly glow that makes me think of vampires. A dreary room. Two long tables and two chairs on wheels, white-painted brick. Plastic trays filled with pieces of paper that have begun to crumble. A line of filing cabinets.

  I go to open them, and the door opens at the top of the stairs and a voice says, ‘Clarion Security. Can you come out, please?’

  There are two of them, and they’re wearing uniforms to make them look like policemen. I know they’re not, though, because they would have said that they were. The hall blazes with light, and the chapel, too.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ I ask, because I’m genuinely intrigued.

  ‘Alarm, love,’ he says.

  Ah. How come it didn’t ring? Are there silent alarms? Have I been tripping them as I’ve walked about the world?

  ‘Can you tell me what you’re doing here?’ he asks.

  I put on my best waif face. Let my jacket drop open so he can see my swollen abdomen. ‘I was looking for somewhere to sleep,’ I say.

  ‘In the basement?’

  I shrug. ‘I’m not proud.’

  ‘Bedrooms usually live upstairs.’

  I shrug again.

  ‘You know you’re breaking and entering, right?’

  ‘I didn’t break anything. The back door was open. I just wanted somewhere to sleep,’ I repeat. ‘It’s cold.’

  I size them up. I think the older one’s my best bet for a calm exit. He looks old enough to have a daughter my age. ‘I’m pregnant,’ I tell them.

  ‘So I see,’ he says, ‘but you’re still breaking and entering. Or trespassing, anyway. Stand there,’ he says, and points to a corner, turns away to speak into his phone as though doing so will somehow prevent me hearing what he says. ‘Terence. Yep, we’ve got a burglar at Finbrough High Street. Call the constab, there’s a love.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I say, ‘please don’t,’ and I look at him, pleading, vulnerable. It doesn’t work. He just stares at me under his peaked cap and I know I’m not going to talk my way out of this. So I take my only other option, and run.

  They’re slow-moving, as I’d hoped: even slower than I am with my limp and baby. The older one has slower legs and the younger a slower brain, and I have muscle memory, and once I start to run my body remembers how to do it, though I’ve not even tried in months. They’re still cursing and bouncing off each other in the hallway by the time I’m halfway up the aisle, and I’ve got the door to the little back room bolted by the time they slam into it and curse some more. I run out through the back door, tear up the alleyway and make for the main road.

  You somersault inside me as I jounce along. Get used to it, baby. Life isn’t easy.

  I jog away from the High Street, since it seems fairly obvious that that will be the way the police will approach the building, then I run up two roads and turn left. And there I slow down, make myself walk slowly, loosely, as if I’m just out for a stroll. Nobody comes looking for me. Perhaps they didn’t even call. I stick my hand out into the London Road, and hope someone will stop soon for the poor pregnant girl.

  Anger makes you careless. I’m not really thinking about who might be in these cars that swish along the darkening road. It takes less than a minute for one to stop, and I get in without even looking through the windscreen. I just throw my backpack into the footwell and don’t even look into the face of the driver before he has stepped on the accelerator. Rage has made me forget another thing that Father always said: that decisions made in anger are seldom wise ones.

  Before the End

  2010–2011

  24 | Romy

  2010

  She’s almost on top of the body before she sees it. A woman. Fallen, by the looks of it, from the high boulders below the dam, and lying face-down in the pool where the big trout dream.

  The woods are silent. Just the quiet singing of the water at her feet. Romy looks away, searches for the comfort of tiny pale patches of night sky between the tree branches. Looks back again. The body is still there.

  Romy feels herself sway in the night air. Something flaps away in the canopy and she jumps.

  That’s her brain, she thinks. I can see her brain.

  She’s broken on the way down. A sharp end of bone sticks through a rip in her sleeve and her head is on crooked. Not the first corpse she’s seen, but the worst, by a long chalk.

  Should I be this calm? she wonders. Am I not meant to be trembling?

  But her training is stronger than her shock. She’s been raised from infancy to face death with equanimity. I’m meant to be harvesting mistletoe, she thinks. What do I do? If I don’t come in with mistletoe at dawn, Ursola will report me to Vita and I’ll be even further from the Infirmary.

  She looks again, for the corpse is sort of fascinating. That white brain, how easily a skull cracks, like walnut.

  Maybe I should see who it is, she thinks, though the coppery shade of the stubbly scalp, even in moonlight, gives a clear indication. She tugs the unbroken sleeve, but it’s waterlogged, heavy. Eventually she has to heave the body like a sack of wet cement onto the bank, onto its back, to verify that it’s Zaria Blake. Eyes wide, lips parted, the gash in her skull black and white in the moonlight.

  She sits on a mossy rock, takes a drink from her water bottle and considers what she should do. I should walk away, she thinks. Pretend I’ve seen nothing. Who would I tell? Or, rather, who would I tell first? They both expect to be top of the list, they’ve each made that clear to me. I’ve kept them both at arm’s length with a steady drip-feed of inconsequential detail, but how could I do that with this?

  Then she hears footsteps, high up in the pasture path that leads from the Guard House to the dam wall. And she’s on her hands and knees in a moment, scrambling for the cover of the bracken behind a tall horse chestnut. She always has the estate to herself at night, apart from the odd patrolling Guard. If someone’s coming here so directly, so boldly, they must know what they’re going to find.

  They don’t like spies, the Guards. They don’t like spies and traitors, unless they’re their spies and traitors, and they don’t like people who question them or answer back. Perhaps it would have been better to show herself straight away and plead her innocence. In the dark, cut off from the moonlight, she feels grateful for her dark colouring, for it helps her disappear into the shadows. If I vanished tonight, she thinks, I would simply vanish, the way people do, and no one would question it. Not out loud, anyway.

  Her vision adjusts to the gloom and she watches them come. It’s Uri, and his Number Two, Jacko, and Dom, one of the soldiers they brought with them from the Dead, and Willow, one of the few girls plucked from the Pigshed to join their ranks.

  Romy concentrates on slowing her breathing, on staying still. A dead body in the night might not make her afraid, but Uri’s soldiers do.

  They pass her, gather around the body. The three men look down at Zaria with absolute indifference. Willow seems to struggle for words.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  Uri shrugs. He’s not bothered. A silence falls that fills the night.

  Romy watches Willow strain to keep her expression blank, to match her comrades’. She mustn’t say the wrong thing, thinks Romy. And she knows that. She’s just found out one of the secrets of the Guard House, and so have I, and if either of us drops our defences we’ll end up just like Zaria.

  Lucien’s children have a high attrition rate. She’s noticed it and other people must have, too. Last year, eleven-year-old Roshin Blake ate yew berries and died in convulsions on the floor of the Pigshed. The year before, Leana Blake, seventeen, caught her sleeve in the hay bailer and bled out from her arm socket while a Healer tried hopelessly to staunch the blood that would not stop coming. They both had honourable burials in the chapel graveyard, of course, but then, as always, nobody spoke of them again. And then Jaivyn slipped off during an outreach expedition to a rock festival i
n the early summer – took his box and his shoes and the weekend’s takings and disappeared with the crowd – and there was hell to pay. Vita herself was in disgrace for a month.

  She worries about her sister.

  Zaria stares at the moon and Willow, after some thought, clears her throat. ‘Those shoes are slippery when they’re wet,’ she says. ‘And the moss on these rocks is horribly loose. Stupid to be climbing there.’

  It’s clearly the right response.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Uri. ‘She’s safe now.’

  The men grunt in approval and Dom switches on a torch. Jacko drops his backpack to the ground and feeds a long expanse of fabric from its top. It’s a canvas duffel bag, big enough to hold a body.

  She assumes they’ll head back up the bank to the Great House, but to her surprise they turn, once they’ve manoeuvred the corpse into its carrier, and head deeper into the woods along the path that runs the length of the river.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks Willow.

  ‘What?’ says Jacko. ‘You think bodies bury themselves?’

  ‘She probably thinks the magic pixies do it,’ says Dom. ‘You still believe in magic pixies, 193?’

  Zaria flipflops about inside her wrapper, throwing the Guards off balance in the dark. Romy takes the chance that they are making enough noise, their speeding pulses rendering them deaf to furtive sounds in the woodland, and creeps along in their wake.

  Willow teeters on a patch of slippery mud on the riverbank, barely saves herself. The men, holding fast on to their corners of the bag, roar with laughter as they watch. So strange, the sound of laughter.

  Dead girl. It’s a dead girl, and they’re handling her like meat in a slaughterhouse.

  *

  Halfway down the hill, a set of stepping stones leads across the water to the other side and the men wheel round to cross. ‘We’re going off the estate?’ asks Willow. Her voice is shaking. She’s scared, thinks Romy. More scared even than I am. She knows the stakes here as well as I do. One look, one word out of place, and she’ll be gone along with Zaria, some story concocted of Sapphic assignations or a taste for frippery, and everyone will shrug contemptuously and forget about them. But once she’s gone through with this, once she’s obeyed her orders and overcome her revulsion, Romy knows she will be even more theirs than she was before.

  ‘Set-aside,’ says Uri. ‘Area of outstanding natural beauty. The EU pays us to keep it like this.’

  ‘And a nice bit of armour against the hordes,’ says Dom. ‘By the time they get through those brambles they’ll be too tired to attack. We can pick ’em off one by one as they wade across the stream.’

  And a good place to hide things.

  They drop the bag onto the soggy ground and Jacko starts across the stepping stones to the wild land. The woods on Romy’s side are kept under control naturally, by the daily passage of foragers and guards. Firewood is collected almost before it falls and dead bracken brought up to the light to dry for kindling. Over there, the brambles entwine thick around the feet of the trees and the ferns grow to head height. Romy can’t see how they will get through it, for it grows as thick as treacle.

  Then Jacko simply picks up the landscape and lifts it aside.

  Camouflage. It’s a camouflage of deadfall. She can see, now he’s moved it, that it’s backed with cloth, the fallen sticks and foliage nailed to a frame. Behind it, a path. Clear steps up the bank and an arch of brambles into which to vanish.

  She holds her breath.

  ‘How … many … ?’ pants Willow. ‘Where … ?’

  From up ahead, Jacko’s mocking laugh. ‘That’ll be the secret, 193. And now you know where you’ll end up if you talk about it.’

  Willow shivers, for she knows that this is not an idle threat. ‘I didn’t mean … ’

  ‘Stop making a fuss,’ says Jacko. ‘We’ll be using them for protein come the Great Disaster.’

  25 | Romy

  2010

  The Guards are drilling, and Romy, in the hemlock grove, watches with her knife in her hand, a sack of flower heads open at her feet. It’s such a tough weed, hemlock, that all she can do until the winter is make sure it doesn’t seed, and then dig up the roots when it’s dormant. And besides, dead-heading gives her a reason to hang about the Guard House without attracting attention.

  They have become magnificent. She sees that. Beneath the khaki jackets they wear in public spaces, their muscles ripple and their limbs are strong and straight. Like Lucien’s children, they are gods among the peasants. Twelve of them on morning drill, while twelve sleep off the night and twelve do the day patrol. She watches, notes, imagines the muscle movements. Kick, step, punch, kick, step, punch.

  Romy is good with her knife already. After months of solitary practice, she can flip it from pocket to hand, closed to open, in a second, the hinge oiled assiduously and worked and worked through the nights until it moves as smooth and loose as a falcon’s wing.

  But they’re strong. So strong. Stronger than Romy, stronger than all of them. Watching them punch the air, watching grain dust burst through the canvas of their improvised punch bags, leaves her awestruck. And certain that, were she to take even one on – even Willow – she would go down with the first blow.

  Only thirty-six of them – thirty-seven including Uri – but they would be strong enough to destroy us all, she thinks. None of us is trained for fighting, despite Uri’s long-unfulfilled promise to teach us. Am I the only one who sees it? Vita must, I’m sure of it. But he’s Lucien’s son and he might yet be the One, and in the end that will surely count against her.

  She has read enough history to know that a usurper is only a usurper if they fail. And that the vanquished end up in unmarked graves.

  The beehives are kept in their own little section of the orchard, fenced off with high evergreen hedges to keep the children out and largely avoided by people afraid of stings. When the Beemaster is on the road, he leaves her to manage the day-to-day maintenance, and she often has the whole place to herself and a reason to be there. She has never known such luxurious privacy. And it gives her a place, every morning and every evening, to drill. If she can’t find a way to prepare her fellow Drones for the onslaught, she can at least prepare herself. She does what she’s seen the Guards do. The jumps, the kicks, the lunges. Punches the air with her fists and slices it with the sides of her hands. She bends and lifts and crawls on knees and elbows, pirouettes on the spot until the earth stops spinning, hangs from branches and slowly learns to pull herself up.

  If you want to survive, you need to be prepared. Every moment of her education has taught her that.

  When the feasts approach, she watches through the slaughterhouse window to see how the butchers handle their knives. Looks to understand the casual way with which they find a jugular, cut a tendon. Volunteers to help dress the carcasses, so she can accustom herself to the feel of death.

  Zaria’s glassy eyes stare up at the moon in her dreams.

  She runs between assignments. Willow can run from the bottom of the drive to the top of the moor, a rise of three hundred and sixty feet, in fifteen minutes, so Romy must at least be faster than Willow.

  She’s running one day from the physic garden to the moor, where she’s set a hive to gather nectar from the blooming bell heather, when little Ilo drops the bucket of water he’s been bumping against his shins on his way to the chickens’ trough, and falls into step beside her. He’s seven years old now – the age at which they’re old enough to work in the afternoons and take the blame for their mishaps – and growing handsome, his eyes blue and his hair blond like a proper child of the Ark. Romy glances at him as he keeps pace with her, surprised by how fast he seems able to run.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be doing chores?’ she asks. She’s only been running for six weeks, and is delighted to find that she is already able to conduct a rudimentary conversation while doing it, even when going uphill.

  ‘I can help you,’ he replies, and there’s barely a
pant as he says it. Romy feels a bit resentful. It doesn’t seem entirely fair that she’s been training all this time to do things this child with legs two-thirds the length of her own can do with ease. He’s a natural athlete, a born survivor.

  ‘I’m not sure I need help,’ she says.

  She likes Ilo. Always has. But she’s been out of the Pigshed and working for a year now, and he’s matured so much in that time that he already seems like a semi-stranger.

  ‘Everybody needs help, though, don’t they?’ he asks. ‘I thought that was the whole point? That we can’t do it all alone?’

  ‘I suppose you have a point,’ she tells him. ‘Better keep up, though. I don’t have time to dawdle just to support weaklings.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ he says cheerfully, and pulls ahead of her on the path.

  The boy can run like a greyhound. Romy is hard pressed to even maintain her dignity beside the little squit. They pound up the moorland track, eyes fixed to the ground for treacherous flints. Romy can no longer talk. It is all she can do to push through the burn in her lungs and the sweet-sharp rush of lactic acid in her legs. She can’t allow herself to be beaten by a seven-year-old. She finds another ounce of will and forges ahead. Ilo laughs out loud and passes her as though on wings.

  At the top of the moor, by the tumbledown slate wall that marks the border between their land and the National Trust’s, they collapse into the heather by the beehive. Prickling, scratching stems above and yielding peat beneath. No longer cooled by the breeze of speed, Romy feels sweat burst from her skin and her face turn purple. She is blown: spent. Rolls onto her back and feels the ache of exhaustion sweep through her limbs.

  ‘Where the hell did you learn to run like that?’