Elizabeth and Zenobia

by Jessica Miller

  ‘A respectable amount of time?’

  ‘Before we sneak back inside.’

  ‘Sneak back inside?’

  Even though she wore tinted glasses, I could tell Zenobia was rolling her eyes.

  ‘I really do have to spell everything out for you, don’t I.’ She spoke loud and clear, as if to a very small child. ‘To sneak back inside and continue our search for the Spirit Presence in the East Wing.’

  ‘I don’t know that’s such a good idea,’ I said. ‘Look.’ I pointed up to the house, at the dark shape silhouetted at one of the windows of the dining room.

  Mrs Purswell stood looking out into the garden, at the place where we stood looking back at her.

  ‘We’re stuck out here, then,’ sighed Zenobia. ‘How tedious. You know, I really sensed something in the nursery. It seemed filled with the Spirit Presence. It was positively—well—positively haunted.’

  I nudged a dried tuft of grass with the tip of my shoe.

  The truth was, I had felt the hauntedness too. I had felt it as we stood in the nursery’s thick, dark air. And the feeling had stayed with me, even after we’d closed the door behind us. It was a strange feeling, unpleasant and lingering and sticky, like the feeling of having walked into a cobweb.

  ‘No,’ I lied. I didn’t want to encourage Zenobia. ‘It didn’t seem haunted to me.’

  She sniffed. ‘I’m just more sensitive to these kinds of things than you,’ she said.

  We wandered through the garden. I stopped to pick a flower that proved, on closer inspection, a weed. Then I crouched and watched a snail inch across the earth in front of me. Zenobia stopped only once, to pluck up a bird skull from the ground. ‘It’s just the thing to counteract the blueness of our bedroom,’ she explained.

  We came upon the sundial. Zenobia inspected the shadow that fell across its stone face. ‘Half past nine,’ she said. ‘Quarter to ten at the very latest.’ And she flipped open her watch to check. ‘Nine thirty-three to be precise. Which means hours till Mrs Purswell lets us inside for lunch.’

  ‘Are you bored of the garden already? If you like, we could play—’

  ‘Play? You know I don’t play, Elizabeth.’

  ‘A picnic then? We could make moss sandwiches. It might be fun.’

  ‘A picnic?’ Zenobia pressed a melodramatic hand to her forehead. ‘I think I’m going to be ill.’

  ‘Real people like picnics,’ I muttered.

  Luckily, Zenobia didn’t hear me. She was distracted by a clump of hedge, the one I had seen from the window on our first morning at Witheringe House.

  ‘It’s a maze!’ she called. ‘A hedge maze!’

  I walked to the hedge. I could see it had once been cut into a maze. But now the hedges were bare and so badly overgrown that only a thin path needled between them. The bare branches of the tree at its centre reached out over the ragged hedgerow, and made a shape like a fork of lightning.

  ‘Aren’t hedge mazes supposed to be sort of…green?’ I asked. ‘And not so sharp-looking?’

  ‘Green is a colour much overrated in gardens,’ Zenobia announced. ‘I prefer this grey-brown.’ She slipped through the opening and into the maze. ‘Are you coming in?’

  I paused.

  ‘You said you wanted to do something fun,’ she said. ‘Well, here’s your chance.’

  ‘I guess it might be fun.’ I looked at the maze doubtfully. ‘Puzzles are fun, after all. And a maze is just a kind of puzzle, really.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Zenobia. She snapped her parasol shut and disappeared into the hedges.

  I pushed through after her. Thorns tugged at my clothes. The branches were so thick and twisted I couldn’t see the sun through them.

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ Zenobia said over her shoulder. ‘We might see the skeletons of those who went before us and’—she made her voice low and spooky—‘never came out.’

  I knew she was joking, but I wished she wouldn’t say such things. Already, I had lost sight of the way we had come in. If only I had stayed outside, safe, in the garden.

  ‘Who said I was joking?’ she called back to me.

  I almost hated Zenobia, right at that moment. I wanted nothing more than to be far, far away from her and the cruel ways she made fun of my fears. But I wanted, just as much, to be as close to her as possible, to be reassured I wasn’t alone in this dark—and getting darker—maze.

  So I stayed close, close enough that I could feel the hem of her skirt swishing against the front of my legs.

  ‘Ooh!’ she went up on tiptoes. ‘I just caught a glimpse of the centre.’

  ‘Where?’ I strained to see.

  ‘We’ll be there soon. You know, there are old stories of mazes used to trap terrible monsters.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I said softly.

  ‘Like the minotaur,’ she went on, ‘in the labyrinth. If anyone was unlucky enough to get lost in the labyrinth, the minotaur would eat them.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘Stop, Zenobia,’ I said. ‘That’s enough.’

  ‘Crunch on their bones,’ she said. ‘Suck on their blood.’

  The hedges either side of me pressed too close. ‘Please stop!’ My voice was hoarse. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’

  Zenobia turned and looked at me scornfully. ‘I said it was just a story, didn’t I.’

  ‘Stories can be scary, too,’ I whispered.

  The hedge opened out into a clearing at the centre of the maze. A dark twisty shape rose up. I gasped and hid myself as best I could against the scratchy hedge, until Zenobia found me and dragged me into the clearing.

  ‘See?’ she pointed. ‘There’s no monster. Only a tree. A very fine-looking tree, if you ask me.’

  Up close, the tree only looked even more horrible than it had from afar. It was grey and bare and its roots had come all unstuck from the ground. They waved, brittle and bone-pale, in the air.

  ‘I always do prefer dead trees,’ said Zenobia, ‘to living ones. There’s something so starkly dramatic about dead trees, I always think.’

  ‘Not quite dead,’ I said and I showed her a thin strand of roots that still stretched from the base of the trunk into the soil.

  Zenobia prodded the roots with the point of her shoe. ‘But not alive for much longer, I shouldn’t think.’

  I looked at my scuffed shoes and my torn stockings. The twisted tree-roots gave me a twisted feeling in my stomach.

  Zenobia made a face. ‘Honestly, Elizabeth, only you would be scared of a tree.’

  Still, she went faster going out of the maze than she had going in, and she gave my hand a quick squeeze when I stumbled out after her into the garden.

  We walked together up the path that led right to the end of the garden. It grew steeper and steeper until it reached the top of the hill. There, the garden stopped and the earth dropped away sharply. Beyond were fields of long grass punctuated by stone fences. In the distance we could see a spindled spire and a handful of slate rooves that belonged, I guessed, to the houses of Witheringe Green.

  In one of the fields was a figure, head bent down. It was Father. He stooped to inspect something. A flower? A fern? I was too far away to tell. He took out his notebook and wrote in it. My heart lifted a little inside me.

  I watched him for a while, until rain splattered in my hair and over my shoulders. I tipped my face to the sky, which was now hung with heavy clouds.

  Zenobia grinned triumphantly at the darkening sky. ‘Mrs Purswell can hardly expect you to stay outside now! Quickly’—she tugged on my sleeve—‘to the East Wing, and the Spirit Presence! If we hurry, we can lift the Veil to the World Beyond before lunchtime!’

  She started back to the house, pulling me after her. But the rain grew heavier and wind started to whip.

  Soon the rain was like a sheet of glass in front of us. I couldn’t see the house through it.

  But there, on the ridge, was the falling-down shed I had seen from the blue guest bedroom window. I tugged at Zenobia’s wrist and I
dragged her towards it. ‘In here,’ I said.

  The shed, when we reached it, was dirty and green with moss on the outside. But inside it was warm. Its walls and floor were covered in plants. They climbed over trellises and filled flowerpots. Real, green, living plants. I took a breath in and the smell and taste of soil filled my lungs.

  ‘What is this place?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘It’s the nursery,’ came a voice. A deep, soft voice that slithered snake-like over the ‘s’ sounds.

  I started. Even Zenobia started. She let her bird skull fall from her hand.

  Looking through the plants I saw that the voice belonged to a man. His skin was white and shiny, like the skin of an onion or a leek. I couldn’t decide if he was very old or very young. He wore a soil-clotted shirt and faded old gardening gloves. He was standing at a workbench in the middle of the room. Before him was a potted plant. It was very beautiful. Its leaves were pale green and peeking out from between them were pale pink flowers with petals as ruffly as lace petticoats.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you.’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said the man, and I noticed how pleasant his voice was in my ears. ‘This is your house after all, Miss Elizabeth. I am only the gardener. May I say, it’s good to have your father back at Witheringe House, and you here with him. But you are without your mother?’

  ‘She left,’ I said.

  ‘People sometimes do,’ he said mildly. ‘They’re not rooted in the soil, the way plants are.’

  He smiled in a way that made me want to stand closer to him. I went over to the workbench. Zenobia did too. The plants rustled as we moved through them.

  Up close, the plant with the lacy pink flowers smelled like powdered sugar. Zenobia wrinkled her nose. ‘The stench in here,’ she announced, ‘is intolerable.’ She slipped into one of the nursery’s mossy dank corners.

  I stayed where I was, admiring the plant.

  ‘You like it, then?’ asked the gardener.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I like it very much. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite like it before.’

  The gardener smiled. ‘It’s a very fine specimen,’ he said. Then he wrapped one gloved hand around the plant and ripped it from its soil. He held it up, so I could see its thin tangled roots.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I cried.

  ‘Grafting,’ he said. He reached for a large rusted set of shears and cut the plant from its roots. The squeak and scrape of the shears through the plant’s stem made a sound like a shriek—almost like the poor plant was crying out in pain.

  ‘Grafting seems awfully cruel,’ I said.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that, Miss Elizabeth, if you knew how it worked. Grafting is when you take two plants and join them together. This one here is the rootstock.’ He lifted a large shrub with a bulbous trunk and knobbled branches onto the table. ‘It’s got a good strong set of roots. See?’ And with his index finger, he eased one of the roots out of the soil. It was as thick as my thumb. Then he patted it back down.

  ‘And this’—he pointed at the other plant, with its parts laid out on the table—‘is the cultivar. A shoot of the cultivar is joined onto the rootstock, like so.’ He took a length of twine and bound the green stem tightly to the stem of the rootstock, cutting into the shoot so sharply with the twine that it broke open, bleeding sap. ‘And after a while they’ll twist and twine together. The two plants will grow so close together, in fact, that after a time, they’ll just be the one plant. A plant that blossoms with beautiful pink flowers. A plant with thick strong roots, that will live a long time in the soil where its planted.’

  I gathered the broken parts of the green flowering plant towards me. ‘It still doesn’t seem very nice for the clut—the curl—’

  ‘The cultivar,’ he corrected and smiled again—such a kind smile—and swept the plant cuttings onto the floor.

  He reached once more for the shears and I looked away. I didn’t want to watch any more of the grafting. ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I’ve interrupted you long enough.’

  I looked around for Zenobia, but she had disappeared between the plants.

  There was a clattering from the far corner of the shed. ‘Just some pots,’ Zenobia said as she emerged from the greenery. ‘I may have kicked them over accidentally. But look!’ She held up a dead beetle, with one of its sharp pincers dangling askew, and a handful of dead leaves. ‘They’ll go with the bird skull nicely.’

  I looked over my shoulder as I went outside. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ I said to the gardener.

  ‘Likewise,’ he said, still smiling.

  The rain was just a drizzle now. We walked back to the house through fine wet mist.

  ‘Do you think the nursery was a little strange?’ I asked Zenobia.

  ‘In what way strange?’

  ‘It’s so wonderful and green and good-smelling in there. It doesn’t feel like it belongs to Witheringe House at all.’

  ‘There are plenty of green things here in the garden,’ Zenobia said.

  ‘Weeds and nettles,’ I said. ‘No plants, no flowers.’

  ‘The plants in the nursery were altogether too bright and fragrant if you ask me,’ sniffed Zenobia. ‘The only plant I liked was that Frankenstein-plant. It was quite grotesque, I thought, the way the gardener grafted the two of them together. Quite wonderfully brutal.’

  I said nothing. I hadn’t liked the grafting at all—I felt sure it must have been painful for the poor pink-flowered plant. I knew it was silly of me. After all, the gardener had been so kind. And he had explained that grafting was good for the plant. But I couldn’t stop hearing the shriek of the plant snapping between the shears.

  Father didn’t come down for lunch. But he was there at dinner. He sat in his usual place, at the opposite end of the table from me.

  ‘How was your day, Father?’ I made my voice as loud as it would go.

  ‘Productive,’ he said. He put down his fork. ‘I spent the afternoon with some extremely interesting specimens of various Asteracea. I think there may be some important connections between the Asteracea Agrianthus and the Asteracea Leucoptera, which have been overlooked in previous studies.’ He returned to his corned beef and spent quite a long time working his knife through the leathery meat.

  I assumed our conversation was finished. But then he looked up at me and said, ‘And what about you, Elizabeth? I’m afraid I’ve left you too much to your own devices since we arrived. Are you settling in well to Witheringe House?’

  ‘It’s different from the old house,’ I said. ‘But I think I could grow to like it. And the garden is much bigger.’

  He swallowed hard and dabbed his moustache with his napkin. ‘The garden’s in a state of disrepair, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m sure the gardener will see to it,’ I said.

  ‘What gardener, Elizabeth?’

  ‘The gardener. I was in the garden today. I met him. In the nursery.’

  Father crumpled his napkin and put it by his plate. ‘Mrs Purswell,’ he said.

  Mrs Purswell stood suddenly beside him.

  ‘Like a magic trick,’ said Zenobia admiringly. ‘You merely need to say her name and’—she snapped her fingers—‘there she is!’

  ‘Mrs Purswell,’ said Father, ‘have you engaged a gardener?’

  ‘I’m yet to find anyone suitable, Dr Murmur,’ she said.

  ‘Then why does Elizabeth tell me she met with the gardener today?’

  ‘I can’t say, sir. There’s certainly no gardener here.’

  Father frowned at me down the length of the table. ‘You know it’s wrong to lie, Elizabeth.’

  ‘I’m not lying! I saw him! And Zenobia did too!’

  ‘Enough.’ Father pushed his plate away. ‘This has gone on long enough.’

  Father spent the rest of the evening alone in the library.

  That night, I couldn’t sleep. At last, I groped in the dark for the candle and for The Plant Kingdom. I sat up
against my pillow and opened the book.

  I read along with the chiming of the clock.

  At eleven thirty I was reading about herbaceous perennials. By eleven forty-five I had progressed to annuals. And then, as the clock struck midnight, I turned the page and was met with the same green, looping script that I had seen—or dreamed—when I had last read the book.

  The Kingdom rejoiced with the birth of the new Prince. At the palace, the flag, which was really a red geranium and not a flag at all, was run up the pole. Every flower in the kingdom burst into bloom and the bees turned giddy with all the pollen.

  The boy grew up to be lovely and loved by all. But on the day of his seventh birthday, he became ill. He turned from green to pale green to nearly white, and his face closed up with pain. The King sent away the grasshoppers he had engaged to play at the celebration and cancelled the rain of rose petals that was to follow the cutting of the cake. The head gardener was called, but he could find nothing wrong—until he turned the Prince’s roots out of the soil and found them spotted and turning soft and shrivelled at their ends. That night, the young Prince died.

  On the next page the looping green writing stopped. I fluttered my fingers through the rest of the book, but all I saw was the dense black type of before. I turned back to find the page written in green. It wasn’t there anymore. I wondered if I had really seen it at all.

  I blew out the candle and lay my head on the pillow, feeling sure I wouldn’t sleep. But I must have slept, because soon I fell into a dream.

  In the dream I was wandering through the hedge maze, alone. The branches caught at my sleeves and my hair. It felt like the maze wanted to swallow me up.

  I woke in a tangle of sheet.

  I had just climbed out of bed when Mrs Purswell appeared at my door. ‘Your father wishes to see you,’ she said. She looked at the hairbrush in my hand and my stockinged feet. ‘Immediately.’

  I jammed my feet into my shoes without lacing them and left my hair unbrushed, and ran to Father’s study.

  I stood at the door, gathering my nerves.

  It was open a crack, and I could see Father at his desk. He was surrounded by flowers. Flowers with cottony white petals and blue star-shaped flowers in specimen jars. Dried flowers tacked onto pieces of card were scattered over his desk. His head was bent over a book. I was glad to see him at work again—and sorry I would have to interrupt.