Chapter 331: My Mother Was a Terrible Gardener

Nothing else came.

Aria sat at the kitchen table with the key in her fist and waited for the rest of it. The garden. Her mother’s face. Anything.

The stove ticked. Rain ran down the window over the sink.

She pushed at the memory the way you press a bruise to find where it ends. Pain flared behind her right eye, sudden and sharp, and she sucked in a breath.

Damien’s hand closed over hers.

"Stop."

"I almost had it."

"You had a headache." He didn’t let go. "You’ve slept four hours in two days. It’ll still be there in the morning."

"We have forty-five hours."

"Then you can spend seven of them asleep."

She opened her mouth to argue and yawned instead.

Damien closed the box and tucked it under his arm. Aria kept the key. She fell asleep in the short iron bed with it still in her hand, and when she woke at dawn, it was warm.

***

Ken came back at seven with four paper bags from the village bakery.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway. Fourteen children stopped chewing.

Théo was on the bench beside the stove. He looked at Ken. He looked at the far end of the table, where Damien sat with his coffee. Then he slid off the bench and backed up until he bumped into Margaux.

"Good morning," Ken said carefully.

Nobody answered.

Ken set the bags down and opened the first one, and the smell of butter filled the room. Croissants, dozens of them. Pains au chocolat in the second bag. Brioche in the third.

"I asked the baker how many children live at the chateau," Ken told Aria under his breath. "He knew. He also knew I came with the giant, and he charged me double."

Aria checked her phone. 7:02 a.m. Thirty-six hours.

Margaux came to the table. She looked at the bags, then at Séverine’s empty chair, then at Ken. He held one out to her.

She took it. She counted the rest twice. Then she started handing them out, smallest children first, and when she reached the end of the table there was one whole croissant left over.

She looked at it for a moment. Then she kept it.

Aria had to look at the ceiling.

Théo was the only one who hadn’t taken anything. He stood by the stove with his arms crossed and his chin up, watching Ken the way he watched Damien.

Ken crouched down slowly, like a man approaching a dog that had already bitten him once, and held out a pain au chocolat.

Théo studied him. He studied the pastry. He took it, sniffed it, and bit off a corner.

Then he pointed at Ken and made an announcement to the whole room.

Several children giggled.

Aria looked down the table. "What did he say?"

Damien set down his cup. "That this one is nice."

"And?"

"And the other one is the bad one."

Ken stood up. He did not smile, but he looked like a man trying very hard not to.

Théo climbed onto the bench beside him and finished his pain au chocolat with his shoulder pressed against Ken’s arm, glaring at Damien over every bite.

Under the table, something navy caught Aria’s eye.

The boy with the cut shoes was swinging his feet. He was wearing the sneakers with the white stripe. Every few swings, he stopped and looked down at them.

By eight, Séverine had marched the children out to the garden for chores, and the kitchen belonged to the adults again.

Damien looked at Ken. "Find a plumber."

"For the water heater, sir?"

"Yes."

"Sir, I don’t speak French."

"Then find one who speaks English."

Ken went.

Aria wiped the crumbs off the oak table with her sleeve and opened her mother’s box.

She knew the top journals. She had flipped through them months ago, the night she brought the box home. Recipes in her mother’s slanting English. Lemon cake. Shepherd’s pie. Chicken soup, "for when A. has a cold." She read that line twice and set the book aside.

The ones underneath were different.

The handwriting was the same, but tighter. Every page was ruled into columns. Dates ran down the left margin. Then a plant name in Latin, a number, a compass direction, another number.

[14 avril — Camellia japonica ’Alba’ — 40 — N.-E. — 7]

[2 juillet — Paeonia lactiflora — 12 — S. — 3]

[19 juillet — Lavandula angustifolia — ombre — 9]

Page after page of it.

"These are the ones I couldn’t read," Damien said. He pulled his chair around beside hers. "I thought they were a planting log. Then I tried to make the numbers mean something. Measurements, coordinates, a cipher. Nothing fit."

"They are a planting log." Aria ran her finger down the column. "Sort of."

She stopped at the second line.

Paeonia lactiflora. She knew this one. Bai Shao, white peony root. Granny Shen had prescribed it for half the cramps and fevers in the asylum, and she had made Aria learn the plant from the soil up.

"You don’t plant peonies in July," Aria said slowly. "You plant them in the fall. And you plant them shallow, or they never flower. Twelve centimeters is too deep."

She moved to the next line.

"What’s ombre?"

"Shade."

"Lavender in shade dies. It needs full sun." She went back to the first line. "And nobody puts a camellia forty centimeters down. The roots would rot in a season."

She turned the page. Then the next one. Roses in the wrong month. Bulbs set at depths that would have drowned them. Herbs planted where they couldn’t possibly grow.

"She’d have killed everything," Aria said.

Damien was quiet. "Maybe she was a bad gardener."

Aria reached across the table for the photograph she had left the night before. Her six-year-old self, scowling in the dirt. Her mother, laughing.

Behind them, the beds were crowded with flowers. Every one of them was alive.

"She wasn’t," Aria said.

Damien looked at the photo. Then at the column of impossible instructions.

"So it isn’t about the plants."

"It’s something else dressed up as plants." She flipped to the front of the journal, then to the back. "Look at the dates."

Every entry was from the same year. Spring through winter, one year, and nothing before or after it.

Damien did the math before she could. She saw him do it, his eyes going from the year at the top of the page to the blue ink on the back of the photograph.

"You were six," he said.

Aria turned to the last page.

The final entry sat in its neat columns like all the others. But under it, set apart from the rest, was one line in her mother’s ordinary handwriting. No Latin. No numbers.

[Pour mon trésor, quand elle sera prête.]

Damien leaned in to read it. He was quiet a moment too long.

"For my treasure," he said. "When she’s ready."