At the bottom of the pool, the Queen saw strange things. Things she had never seen before. A gauzy white net. A wooden horse. And, one day, a girl. The girl was so joyful that the Queen almost forgot she was sad.
She called the King, and the King and Queen watched the girl playing with the white gauzy net, lifting it over her head and swooping it through the air, laughing. The King and Queen wondered what it would be like if the little girl was theirs. They thought that if they could have the girl, even for a short time, they wouldn’t feel so sad. They might not feel sad at all.
Perhaps, they thought, they could borrow the girl. Just for a little while.
I was fast asleep when I felt the blanket slipping off me. I fumbled it back over myself.
The blanket jerked away. I yanked it back.
Then the blanket was gone and cold air washed over me. My eyes snapped open. The blanket was levitating three inches above me. Zenobia stood by the bed, muttering and staring intently at the floating blanket. I snatched it out of the air, wrapped it, shawl-like, around me and swung my legs over the side of the bed.
‘I was sleeping,’ I told her.
‘Which is precisely why I was forced to wake you up.’
‘It’s Saturday.’
‘It certainly is. You have no lessons. Your father has locked himself in his study and he won’t be out for hours. Mrs Purswell’s gone into Witheringe Green for groceries and Miss Clemency has accompanied her—I believe she’s buying hat-ribbon or some other equally ghastly thing. So there is no one to disturb us.’
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. ‘No one to disturb us doing what? And why are you dressed like that?’
Zenobia wore her tinted glasses and carried her black silk parasol.
‘Because the sun’s out,’ she said, ‘which is a shame, though it can’t be helped.’ She narrowed her eyes and scowled out the window as if she might scare the sun out of the sky, but it stayed where it was, shining and round. ‘In all other respects, however, it’s a fine day for hunting mushrooms.’
‘Mushrooms?’
Zenobia opened The Poisoner’s Alphabet and read:
‘While many mushrooms varietals are harmless, others, such as the death-cap mushroom (Amanita phalloides) secrete deadly amounts of poison invisible to the untrained eye.’
‘Why would you want to go looking for poisonous mushrooms?’ I asked, my mouth foaming with toothpaste. And then my insides turned heavy and cold. I spat into the basin and whipped around. ‘Zenobia, you don’t mean to—’
‘I’m not going to poison anyone,’ she snapped. ‘I’m a poison enthusiast, Elizabeth, not a poisoner—a fine, yet vital, distinction. I simply think it would be thrilling to find a specimen of the deadly Amanita phalloides, to come so close to something so fatal. Don’t you?’
Rather than answer the question, I bent over my shoes.
‘Hurry up,’ said Zenobia. ‘The Poisoner’s Alphabet clearly states that the best time to look for death caps is morning.’
I didn’t want to spend Saturday in the garden. I had planned to comb the house for clues that might lead me to Tourmaline. But an idea was starting to form in my head. A morning in the garden, I thought, might not be a waste of time after all.
I fumbled with my shoelaces. ‘You go ahead,’ I said. ‘I’ll catch you up.’
After Zenobia left the room, I felt under the mattress for where I had hidden the photograph of Tourmaline. I slipped it into my pocket.
Outside, I shivered. The ground was damp and dewy and its coldness came up through the soles of my shoes. Zenobia stalked ahead of me, making for the sundial.
Halfway there, she crouched. ‘Elizabeth!’ she called back over her shoulder.
I came and looked at the place where she had parted the long grass with her hands.
‘Aren’t they beautiful?’ she breathed.
Truthfully, I didn’t like the look of them. I much preferred the common toadstool, with its cheery red cap and white spots. These were small and glowering. Their pointed caps had the same colour and shine as a bruise faded to green. Zenobia poked one until it bent over and showed its inky underfrilling.
‘They’re very…singular looking,’ I said at last.
‘Singular,’ said Zenobia, enthralled. ‘Yes, that’s exactly the word for them.’
My fingers touched the photograph in my pocket. I wanted more than ever to find out about Tourmaline. I intended to go back to the nursery to talk to the gardener. And I meant to go back alone.
I straightened up. ‘I think I see another patch over there,’ I lied.
‘Over where?’
I looked around desperately for a landmark. ‘Over there by the…by the hedge maze. Perhaps I should go and take a closer look?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You might look inside the maze, too. According to The Poisoner’s Alphabet, death caps grow best in patches of dark shade.’
‘I’ll be sure to look, then,’ I lied again.
I made my way towards the maze. I could feel Zenobia’s eyes on me, watching as I went.
Zenobia was still watching me when I reached the hedge maze. Would she ever take her eyes off me?
Before I knew it, I had given her a small wave and stepped inside.
I had only taken a few shallow steps before the entrance was obscured. All I could see around me was the dark choking maze, and the bare spiky branches of the dead tree at its centre, reaching out over the hedges. The thump of my heart pounded in my ears. What if I did get lost? What if I couldn’t find my way out again? What if no one came looking for me?
I needed to get out. I started back the way I had come, but every turn only seemed to lead me deeper into the maze.
I breathed deep to stop my rising panic.
Finally, a shaft of sunlight fell across my path. I was at the maze’s entrance. I ventured a peek at Zenobia.
Her eyes were fixed on the ground.
Here was my chance.
I crept out of the maze, resolving never to go in there again. I dashed up the hill, slipping from tree to tree so Zenobia wouldn’t see me. I edged along the crest until I came to the moss-covered nursery shed.
I opened the door.
Weaving through trellises and past flowerbeds, I made my way to the worktable. It was covered, as before, with saplings and clods of soil and heavy garden tools. I picked up a pair of shears and felt the weight of them in my hands.
I looked around. There was no one there but me.
Perhaps Father was right and I had just imagined—
‘Be careful with those,’ came a soft light voice. ‘You could lose a finger. Or more.’
I dropped the shears on the table, filled with relief. I hadn’t imagined the gardener after all. He stood there, real as could be, brushing crumbs of dirt from his waistcoat with his gloved hands.
‘I’m glad to see you again,’ I said. ‘I remember you said you’d worked at Witheringe House a long time. And so I thought you’d be the best person to ask.’
‘To ask about what?’ he asked.
I took the photograph from my pocket and placed it on the table.
The gardener’s smile pulled down into a grim line. He jerked the shears away from me and began to sharpen them against a whetstone. The blades of the shears made bright loud sparks where they ground against the stone.
‘I don’t have time to talk today,’ he said over the noise of the shears and the stone. ‘I’m very busy.’
Odd. He hadn’t seemed busy. ‘Busy with what?’ I asked.
The gardener tested the sharpness of the shears against his gloved thumb. He seemed satisfied. Then he brought the jaws of the shears together around a sapling. It snipped easily in half, and its sap spilled over the table.
‘Busy with grafting,’ he said at last. He pointed to a flowerbed. Growing there was the plant with the pale pink flowers. I looked at it and saw how the cultivar had bent and twisted around the rootstock. Already there were places where the rootstock and cultivar were
tangled so tightly together they were more like one plant than two. The new plant was still covered in leaves and its flowers still smelled like powdered sugar, but there was something nasty and misshapen about it.
The plant with pale pink flowers wasn’t the only one in the flowerbed. Since I had last been in the nursery it seemed the gardener had been busy grafting. He had chosen strange-looking plants to graft—plants I had never seen in any garden before. One had a layer of soft silky fur growing over its leaves. Another was covered in blossoms of a colour somewhere between yellow and orange that I was sure didn’t have a name.
The gardener stood behind me. ‘They’re very fine, aren’t they?’ He sounded pleased. Proud, even.
‘Yes,’ I said, though I didn’t think the poor twisted plants looked fine at all. They looked wrong.
‘And if you think these are fine’—he stopped and cleared his throat—‘but I shouldn’t say.’
‘Shouldn’t say what?’ I moved down the length of the flowerbed and stopped to inspect the last plant. Its rootstock was a swarthy shrub nearly bare of leaves. Grafted to it with twine was a plant covered with mauve flowers. Their petals were long and curved and sharp-looking, like sword blades.
‘All this,’ he said and he waved a hand over the plants, ‘is just practice. Soon, I shall graft something very special.’
In between the mauve sword-blade flowers, I saw a flash of red. I reached in through the branches and pulled out a small red shoe. When I touched it, a strange shiver prickled through me. I couldn’t say whether it was a shiver of fear or of something else. Maybe this was what Zenobia meant by a frisson.
‘It will be a grafting like none that has ever been attempted before,’ said the gardener.
I looked closer at the shoe. It was made from leather and it fastened at one side with a copper buckle.
‘Whose shoe is this?’ I asked the gardener.
His eyes narrowed. ‘No one’s,’ he snapped. ‘Now come away from there. These plants are very delicate.’
I stayed where I was, frowning at the shoe in my hand.
The gardener’s voice turned crafty and coaxing. ‘If you come away from there, Miss Elizabeth, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about Tourmaline.’ He beckoned for me to join him at the other side of the worktable.
And I did join him. But not before I stuffed the red shoe into my pocket.
The gardener peered at the photograph. When he looked up he said, ‘The truth about Tourmaline is that she disappeared.’
‘People don’t disappear,’ I said.
‘Tourmaline did. It was a fine day, the day she vanished. She was playing in the garden with Henry. Henry, it seems, spied a butterfly—a fritillary butterfly, quite uncommon at that time of year—and wanted a closer look. Tourmaline ran to fetch his butterfly net. And she never came back.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘No one knows. She was nowhere to be found. They turned the house inside out looking for her. The whole village scoured the hills and fields for a sign of her. But there was none. It’s as I said. She disappeared.’
‘It doesn’t make sense,’ I said. ‘She must have gone somewhere.’ I reached for the photograph but the gardener lifted it out of my grasp. He turned his wide smile on me, but this time I didn’t find it kind at all.
‘Wherever Tourmaline is,’ he said, ‘she’s very well hidden. So well hidden, she’ll never be found.’ He pressed the photograph back into my hands.
‘I should leave you to your work, I think,’ I said.
‘Goodbye for now, then,’ said the gardener. His smile turned wider. ‘But it won’t be too long, I think, before I see you again, Miss Elizabeth.’
‘That would be nice,’ I said, and I hoped he couldn’t tell that I wasn’t telling the truth.
I stood outside the nursery shed. Sunlight fell on the photograph, right across Tourmaline’s face.
I felt my blood stop in my veins.
I knew where I had seen her before.
I looked at Zenobia, further down the hill, still bent over her toadstools. She would notice soon that I had taken too long coming back. But I would worry about her later.
I hurried down through the orchard. I went into the house through the kitchen, through the cool, floury larder and past the blazing stove, and up the stairs into the front room. I went to the tapestry. I felt the weight of it in my hand. And I pushed it aside.
9
THE WALLPAPER GIRL
In the nursery, I tore open the curtains. As soon as the sunlight came in, I was dazzled by the wallpaper. Its green was so bright, I couldn’t look straight at it without my eyes shifting and sliding around. It felt to me that the plants and vines in the pattern were shifting and sliding around, too. Squinting the green away, I went to the place above the wainscoting where I had seen the wallpaper girl last.
She wasn’t there.
I turned in a slow circle. I didn’t see the girl. But I did see the tree that covered most of one wall. It had grown, I thought, even bigger since the last time I saw it. Now it branched out over the walls and crept up over the ceiling. A tangled beard of lichen sprouted from its trunk and two deep knots were set, like eyes, into its rough bark. Over the knots that looked like eyes, dark spiky leaves twisted in the shape of a crown.
A shiver needled down my spine. Looking at it, I knew the tree was more than just a tree. I knew it was the Plant King.
I searched the wallpaper again, inch by inch. At last, I found the wallpaper girl beneath the murky mirror. I held the photograph of Tourmaline up close to her face. Tourmaline’s hair was coaxed into ringlets and the wallpaper girl’s was bushy and wild. Tourmaline’s dress was spotless and the wallpaper girl’s was stained and crumpled. Tourmaline had a heart-shaped freckle on her left cheek and the wallpaper girl had a heart-shaped freckle on her right cheek.
But the two girls were, in every other way, exactly the same.
I brushed my fingers softly over the wallpaper girl. ‘Tourmaline,’ I whispered.
And then I looked down at her feet. I saw that she wore, on her left foot, a red shoe, fastened with a brass buckle.
Her right foot was bare.
I looked at the small red shoe I had found in the nursery. I didn’t need to check it against the shoe the wallpaper girl wore to know the two shoes were a pair.
I had wanted to find out what happened to Tourmaline without Zenobia’s help. But that was before I had matched the girl in the photograph with the girl in the wallpaper, and the red shoe from the nursery with the red shoe in the wallpaper.
Now, I needed to tell Zenobia what I had found.
I looked for her all through the house and, when she wasn’t in the house, I looked for her all over the garden. But I didn’t see her for the rest of the day. Mrs Purswell laid a plate for her at dinner. I looked at it guiltily. I knew Zenobia was angry. Because while she sometimes went off and left me alone, I had never gone off and left her. Not until now.
I found her at last in the blue guest bedroom, cultivating a small colony of amanita phalloides in a gap between the floorboards.
‘I’ve been wondering where you were,’ I said.
‘I might say the same for you,’ came the icy reply.
‘I can explain. There was something I had to do.’
This was met with chill silence.
‘If you would let me explain, I’m sure you wouldn’t be so angry.’
Zenobia pretended she hadn’t heard. She bent lower over her death-cap mushrooms.
‘It’s important, what I have to tell you,’ I said. ‘I’ve found something out. About Tourmaline.’
Still, Zenobia said nothing.
I sighed and flopped down on the bed. I reached for ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to calm my mind, but I found I couldn’t concentrate on it.
I was angry at Zenobia. I didn’t think I deserved this silent treatment. But I felt like I might burst if I didn’t tell someone about Tourmaline—and soon.
In
the end, my impatience to tell her what I had discovered won out.
‘Zenobia?’ I said.
She ignored me.
‘Zenobia, I’m sorry,’ I said.
Her ears pricked up and she turned to face me.
‘I shouldn’t have left you on your own,’ I continued. ‘I hope you’ll forgive me when I tell you why I did.’
‘Well’—she tamped the last of the soil around the death-cap stems and brushed dirt crumbs from her fingers—‘retrospectively, I may have overreacted to your going off like that and I’m…’ She paused for an uncomfortably long time.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m…I’m regretful.’
‘Regretful?’
‘I’m penitent. I’m contrite. I’m—’
‘Zenobia, are you trying to tell me you’re sorry, too?’
‘If that’s how you want to interpret it, I can’t stop you. Now, tell me, what have you found out? Is it something very gruesome?’
I explained everything. I started with the book that told the story of the Plant Kingdom and the girl in the nursery wallpaper. I showed Zenobia the photograph that Mrs Purswell had given me and told her how the girl in the wallpaper matched almost exactly with the photograph of Tourmaline. I told her what the gardener had told me, that Tourmaline had just disappeared one day and no trace of her had ever been found. I showed her the red shoe I had found in the nursery, and I told her about the red shoe that was missing from the wallpaper girl’s right foot.
And then, nervously, I explained how I thought the wallpaper in the nursery showed the Plant Kingdom—that the Plant Kingdom, somehow, existed in the nursery wallpaper. And that although I didn’t know how exactly, I was sure Tourmaline had been snatched into the Plant Kingdom and that was why she had never been found. The girl in the wallpaper didn’t just look like Tourmaline. She was Tourmaline.
‘Well,’ said Zenobia when I had finished. ‘Well.’
‘Well?’
‘Well, it’s quite a story, Elizabeth. Quite a fantastically spooky story. I especially like the part where Tourmaline is trapped—frozen!—in a world in the wallpaper.’
Elizabeth and Zenobia Page 9