The Glasshouse Murders

The Summons to Edenhall

The sky over the Marches was laid down in bands, the way good wood shows its years, and Verity Pym read it the way she read everything — from the outside, with a draughtsman's distrust. High cirrus combed thin and fraying to the west. Below it a flatter grey, smeared at the edges. Below that the colour of wet slate, already lowering over the hills she had crossed that morning. Three rings of weather, each pressing down upon the last. She had spent her life learning to count such things and to believe what she counted, and she counted now: two days. Two dry days, perhaps, if the wind held its breath; and after that the third band would come down off the Welsh hills and sit on this valley like a hand on a moth.

Two days of working light. She would have to be quick, and she was never quick. She was exact, which was a different and more expensive thing.

The trap turned in off the lane between two stone gateposts whose finials had gone to green velvet, and the famous drive of Edenhall opened ahead of her, half a mile of it, dead straight under a roof of trees. The hired man clicked at the pony and said nothing. He had said nothing for four miles, since the flooded ford, where the water had come up over the hubs and he had looked at her sidelong as though her fare did not cover drowning. Verity held her board flat on her knees, her satchel of pencils and pens between her feet where the splash could not reach them, and looked at the trees because the trees were why anyone came.

She knew the names before she knew the house. A weeping silver lime, leafless now and dripping. A row of incense cedars black against the field. A tulip tree she would have given a week to draw in flower. Somebody a hundred and fifty years ago had planted this avenue knowing he would never walk under its shade grown tall, and that was a kind of faith Verity respected more than most of the kinds she had been offered in church. The trees did not perform. They simply got on with being magnificent at their own pace, indifferent to whether they were admired, and she felt, as she always felt among great trees, both very small and entirely at ease.

Then the cedar.

She had heard of the cedar of Edenhall the way one heard of certain pictures one would never own. It stood where the drive crossed the ha-ha, a cedar of Lebanon two centuries old at least, its lowest limbs grown out flat and level as tables, each as thick as the trunks of ordinary trees, propped here and there on iron crutches gone rusty in the joints. The drive ran directly beneath it. There was no other way to the house; the ha-ha and the wet park saw to that. The pony walked into the tree's shadow and the light went out of the afternoon all at once, and Verity tipped her head back and looked up into a black ceiling of foliage, layer on layer, holding its own weather of held rain, and a slow cold drop found the back of her neck and ran down inside her collar.

A wonderful, terrible old thing. She thought, without troubling to know why she thought it: nothing should be the only way in or out. Then the trap rolled clear, the sky came back, grey as a gull, and the house showed itself across a forecourt of weed-stitched gravel.

Edenhall was Jacobean and damp and had given up pretending otherwise. Tall and narrow, dark stone, a tangle of twisted chimneys, mullioned windows with the leading sprung in places so the panes sat at small disagreeing angles. Ivy had been let into the south corner and was winning. A stain ran down from a blocked gutter like a tear that had been weeping for thirty years. Money had built this and money had left it, and what remained was the bones of grandeur with the flesh gone thin — handsome, proud, and quietly perishing, like an old actor too vain to take a smaller part. Verity priced it automatically, because she had learned to. The roof alone would eat a fortune. Somebody here was spending elsewhere.

She got down stiff, her good shoes finding a puddle at once, and paid the man the agreed sum and not a farthing over, because the agreed sum was most of what she had until the commission was finished and the rest of it banked. Forty pounds for the plate and the studies, half on completion. It was a great deal of money and it was nothing at all, depending on which end of the year one stood at. She stood, this October, at the lean end. She had counted the coins into the man's wet palm and felt the lightness of her purse afterward with the particular attention of a woman who has been hungry and intends never to be surprised by it again.

The trap clopped away down the drive and under the cedar and was gone. Verity stood alone on the gravel with her board and her satchel and the rain beginning to think about itself, and nobody came.

She was used to that. The hired eye arrived at the tradesmen's hour and waited at whatever door it was waited at. She did not mind it as much as the people who imagined she minded it. From the bottom of the steps she made her inventory: the bell-pull with its broken porcelain knob; the boot-scraper worn to a silver crescent; the great door studded and silvered with age; and, set against the house wall in a long lead trough, a planting of something she did not at first credit — autumn monkshood, Aconitum, still in flower this late, the hooded blossoms a blue so dark it stood at the very edge of black. She bent to it without thinking, the trained reflex, and did not touch. One did not touch monkshood with a bare hand and then go to one's luncheon. The colour was extraordinary. She had never seen the like, and she had seen a good deal.

"You've found the wickedest thing in the garden first," a voice said, "which I always think tells one a great deal about a person."

The woman had come round the corner of the house, not out of its door, and she came with the unhurried, splay-footed walk of someone who has spent fifty years on wet ground. She was past sixty, broad and low, in a coat that had been mended at the cuffs with stitches too neat to hide, a man's scarf wound twice round her throat, and rubber boots to the knee caked grey to the ankle. Under a shapeless felt hat her face was weathered to the colour of a winter pippin and entirely without vanity. She carried a trug of cut stems on one hip and a pair of secateurs in the hand that wasn't holding it, and she looked at Verity with small bright unsurprised eyes, the eyes of a person who has watched a great many things grow and a great many people fail to.

"Miss Pym," she said. "The draughtswoman. You're earlier than the train would have you."

"I came by the early train and the slow trap," Verity said. "I wanted the afternoon."

"For the light." The woman nodded as though this settled something privately to her satisfaction. "Yes. You'll get little enough of it. I'm Cassandra Tarn. My brother is Sir Aubrey." She said the name the way one names a fixed point one has long ago stopped resenting, north on a compass. "Don't shake my hands, they've been in the aconite bed and I've not scrubbed. Come round the side, the front door sticks and there's no one to heave it."

Verity followed her round the corner, over a path of brick laid herringbone and furred green, and liked her at once and entirely, which did not often happen and which she noted as she noted weather. There was nothing put on about Cassandra Tarn. She walked Verity past a border and named it as she went, not to instruct but the way another woman might have touched the heads of children going by — that's the Lenten hellebore, it'll be over before you're hungry for it; martagon there, gone to seed, leave it for the goldfinches; that's a sorbus my brother brought from Yunnan and never could name, so I named it — and the naming was so easeful, so wholly without performance, that Verity understood within thirty yards that whatever else was true of Edenhall, this woman was its memory and very probably its mind. She knew the latitude every plant had come from and the year it had come and what it wanted of the soil. She stooped once to right a fallen stake and tie it without breaking her sentence. She was, Verity thought, the most useful person she had met in a twelvemonth, and plainly the most overlooked; the coat, the mended cuffs, the boots that had outlasted three pairs of better ones. A woman worn down to her usefulness and content there, or schooled to seem so.

"You'll want to see the arum before anything," Cassandra said. "Before the light goes. It's why you've come, and it's the only thing here that keeps its own clock and won't keep yours."

"How near is it?"

"Days. Three, four. I'll not be held to it — it has never once flowered to a promise." She stopped at a low door in a high brick wall and lifted the latch. "I raised it from seed, you know. Eleven years. People say raised of a plant as they'd say it of a hen. Eleven years of frost-watching and a stove kept at blood heat through every coal strike, and one night of it, every ten years, for its trouble and for mine." For a moment something moved under the plain face, quick and gone, like a fish turning under brown water. Then it smoothed. "Mind the step. It's slick."

The step was slick. Beyond it lay a courtyard, and across the courtyard rose the stove-house, and Verity forgot, briefly, that she was poor and cold and a stranger at the side door.

It was a great cathedral of iron and glass, a hundred feet of it, the white-painted ribs sprung up into a barrel of dim wet light, the glass running with the inner weather of warm air against the cold afternoon. Even from the courtyard she could feel the heat leaning out through the door Cassandra opened, soft and thick and smelling of leaf-mould and coke and green growing things — the particular drugged warmth of a hothouse in autumn, that made the rain at her back seem a rumour from another country. And down the centre of it, in a tub the size of a rowing-boat, stood the thing she had been summoned the breadth of England to draw.

She had seen it only in photographs and in one bad lithograph, and the photographs had lied by making it ordinary. Amorphophallus titanum. The titan arum. A single monstrous folded bud, taller than a man, the great furled spathe still shut tight and ribbed like a closed parasol, the pale green of it bruised toward purple along the seams, and inside, she knew, the spadix building, the seven-foot spire that on its one night would heat itself like a fevered body and pour out the stench of carrion to call the carrion-flies across the dark. It was grotesque and it was beautiful and it was the single most arresting living thing she had ever stood before, and her hand, without being asked, had already opened her satchel.

She did not draw. There was no light and no time and she had not yet been engaged in the room by anyone who could engage her. But she took out her watch — the steel half-hunter that had been her aunt's, the only object she carried everywhere, scratched on the case and dead accurate — and she noted the hour against the bud as a sailor notes a star, because she worked by the hour and always had, every study marked with the minute it was begun and the minute it was left, so that a plate of hers was not a portrait but a record, a thing you could stand a man's life on. Four minutes past three. She would remember that she had thought, four minutes past three, I have never wanted to draw anything so much in my life.

"Cassandra. Have you brought her in by the coal door."

The voice came down the length of the glasshouse before its owner did, and the temperature of the place seemed to drop a degree though the stove roared on. Sir Aubrey Tarn came toward them out of the green dimness, and the photographs had not lied about him; if anything he was larger than his fame. A big handsome ruin of a man of nearly seventy, white-maned, high-coloured, in a Norfolk jacket and a yellow muffler, walking with a stick he plainly did not need and used as a sceptre. Behind him at a careful distance came a tall stooped man in working clothes with grey in his moustache and soil worked permanently into the creases of his hands — the gardener, Verity thought, Goode, the head man, who did not raise his eyes.

"Sir Aubrey." Verity put out her hand.

He took it in both of his, warm and dry and practised, and his smile arrived complete, brilliant, aimed. "Miss Pym. The redoubtable Miss Pym. Bostock at Kew tells me you are the finest hand in England and a tartar about your fee, and I find I admire both." The charm was real; that was the trick of it. He turned it on her like a lamp. "You shall have the run of the place and all the heat the boiler can throw. Cassandra — " and the lamp went out, just like that, the warmth dropping clean out of his voice as he spoke past Verity to his sister, not looking at her — "I asked you to have her shown to her room and given tea before she was brought traipsing through the wet. Must everything be done at the kitchen end? And Goode." Still not raising his voice; that was worse. "The third light from the door is cracked again. I'll not lose this bloom to your economies. See to it tonight."

"Sir," said Goode, to the floor.

Cassandra had gone quite still and quite pleasant, the trug on her hip, her face arranged into nothing at all, and Verity, who drew faces for her bread and knew them the way a butcher knows joints, saw the cost of that nothing and looked away from it out of courtesy, the way one looks away from a stranger's grief.

"The barometer's still falling," Cassandra said, evenly, to the glass. "It's down a tenth since noon. There'll be weather by Thursday, and once the ford's up there's only the drive, and once the wind's in the cedar I'd not stand under it."

"Then we shall all be cosy and besieged and Miss Pym shall draw uninterrupted," said Sir Aubrey, recovering his good humour as quickly as he had spent his sister's. "Let it blow. Edenhall has stood three hundred years. It will outlast a shower." He had turned to the great folded bud, and his face changed in the way men's faces change before the things they love or the things they own, and with Sir Aubrey Tarn there was, Verity already suspected, no daylight between the two. He laid his broad hand flat against the cold inner glass beside the arum as though laying it on a flank, proprietary, tender, certain.

"It will open within the week, Miss Pym," he said, low, almost to himself. "And you will draw it as no one ever has."

But Verity was not looking at him, nor quite at the flower. She was looking past his shoulder to where Cassandra stood in the wet green light with her ruined boots and her mended cuffs, gazing up at the great bud she had carried eleven years through frost and coal strikes and her brother's contempt — and on the plain weathered face was such a brightness, such a naked, sustaining, unguarded love, that Verity caught her breath and held it; and Sir Aubrey, his hand on the glass, his eyes on his prize, did not see his sister's face at all.

The Poison Garden

There was dew still on the hemlock when Verity came down, and Miss Cassandra Tarn was already in the walled garden, naming each plant the way other women named children.

"That is Conium maculatum," she said, not turning, as if she had heard the gate or smelled the morning change. "Hemlock. You will know it by the purple on the stem — there, the blotching, as though someone had bruised it with a thumb. The smell is the test. Crush a leaf." She did, between two fingers, and held them up. "Mouse. Stale mouse. Socrates drank it and complained of nothing but cold creeping up his legs until it reached the heart. The Greeks were very calm about it. I have never understood the calm."

Verity took the offered fingers and breathed in. Mouse, yes — and under it something green and oily that she would not have had a word for the day before. She set it in her memory beside the smell of the stove-house, the warm rot waiting under the glass, and the cold glass under Sir Aubrey's hand the evening past. It will open within the week, Miss Pym, and you will draw it as no one ever has. She had not slept much on the strength of it.

"You're early up, Miss Tarn."

"The garden is mine before nine," Cassandra said. "After nine it belongs to whoever wants to be seen admiring it." She had a flat brown coat buttoned to the throat and a man's felt hat going soft at the brim, and she moved down the gravel paths with the ease of a woman who could have walked them blind. She was sixty if she was a day, dowdy as a wren, the kind of woman a railway porter looked straight through. Verity, who had spent her life being looked straight through, recognised her at once and liked her on the instant.

The walled garden was famous. Verity had read of it in the catalogues, that careful boastful prose Sir Aubrey put out under his own name — the celebrated Poison Garden at Edenhall, the finest collection of toxic flora under cultivation in the British Isles — and she had expected something theatrical, skull-and-crossbones plaques, a frisson laid on for visitors. There was none of that. It was only a beautiful old kitchen garden behind eight feet of warm brick, the borders deep and immaculate, the autumn coming on in bronze and rust, and the dangerous things growing among the harmless in the ordinary democracy of a border, so that you had to know.

"Foxglove," Cassandra said, stopping at a stand of tall dying spires, the lower bells gone to seed-pods like little brown urns. "Digitalis purpurea. You'll have it in every Welsh hedge for nothing, which is the joke of it. The leaf gives us digitalin — for the heart, you understand, to steady a heart that races or stumbles. The dose that saves and the dose that kills are not far apart. A grain too much and the heart slows, and slows, and the patient sees everything in a green-yellow haze, as if the world had gone underwater, and then it stops." She touched a dead spire with one ungloved finger, almost tenderly. "We grow it for Dr. Quill. He takes the dried leaf from us each season and makes up his tinctures. It is the only useful poison in the place; the rest are simply themselves."

"You supply the doctor?"

"We supply half the county its physic, in our quiet way. My brother likes the arboretum and the orchids and the great loud rarities. The real work goes on in the beds nobody photographs." She said it without bitterness, the way one states a temperature. Verity filed it.

They went on. Cassandra named monkshood — Aconitum, the helmet-flower, the hoods a blue so deep it was nearly ink, leaning in their ranks like a row of cowled monks at vespers — and here her voice changed, slowed, took on the timbre of real love.

"Aconite is the queen of them," she said. "Wolfsbane. The old people called it the queen of poisons and they were right, for she keeps her own counsel. Every part — root, leaf, the flower, the very pollen — carries it. Aconitine. You may take it in through the skin if your hands are cut; the gardeners who weed her barehanded learn to respect her. It begins as a tingling. The lips first, then the tongue, a numbness, a creeping pins-and-needles down the limbs, a cold that is not cold." She drew her finger along her own jaw, illustrating, and Verity found herself swallowing. "Then the heart loses its rhythm. It is said to be among the cruellest, because the mind stays clear to the last and watches itself go. But it leaves no mark a coroner can read — that was its reputation among the poisoners of the Renaissance, who were thorough students. The body simply fails. A weak heart, they say, and bury it."

"You make it sound almost admiring."

"I admire competence," said Cassandra, "wherever I find it." She smiled then, the first time, and it was a good smile, dry and quick and gone. "You are not squeamish, Miss Pym. Most people I bring here go a delicate colour at the monkshood and ask whether it's quite safe to be standing near it. As though it might leap."

"I draw what's in front of me," Verity said. "It's hard to be frightened of a thing you're trying to get the shadow right on."

"Yes." Cassandra looked at her properly for the first time, a long plantswoman's appraisal, the kind one gave a specimen of uncertain provenance that might, on inspection, prove rare. "Yes, I think we shall get on."

There was datura against the south wall, the angel's trumpets hanging heavy and creamy and obscene, smelling of nothing in the cool but ready, Cassandra said, to pour out their scent at dusk to fetch the moths. "Thorn-apple. It sends you mad before it kills you — visions, a racing pulse, a thirst nothing slakes. The witches' flying ointment, half of it." And oleander, glossy and southern and sulking in its tub against the frost to come; and a low spreading thing she called hellebore, the Christmas rose's poisonous cousin; and at the bed-ends, modest, the woody nightshade with its last few amethyst-and-gold flowers and its berries coming red. The garden was a pharmacopoeia and an armoury both, and Cassandra walked it like a duchess showing her portraits, and every plant had its name and its history and its precise, lovingly catalogued capacity for harm.

But it was the far bed that caught Verity, and held her, and that she would come back to in her mind a hundred times after.

It stood alone in the warmest corner, raised and edged with old slate, and the monkshood in it was not blue. It was very nearly black — a black with the last drowned purple in its depths, the hoods larger and more sculptural than their cousins along the path, carried on stems so dark they might have been wrought in iron. Even half over, even leaning into October, the bed had an authority the rest of the garden lacked. It looked, Verity thought, like the original of which all the others were copies.

"What is that?"

"That," said Cassandra, and stopped.

Goode had come in. Verity had not heard him; head gardeners did not, she would learn, make a sound they did not intend. He was a big stooped man of sixty or near it, with a face like the bark of something weathered and a great ring of keys riding his belt on a worn leather strap, and he stood at the gate with a flat of seedlings balanced on one forearm and looked at the black bed, and then at Cassandra, and said nothing at all, which was somehow a great deal.

"It is a hybrid of the place," Cassandra said, after a moment, and her voice had gone careful and flat again, the temperature-stating voice. "An Aconitum we — that was raised here. They call it the 'Edenhall.' Nothing remarkable. A darker flower, that is all; it took to this corner." She bent and tucked a fallen stem back among its fellows, and her bare hand was quick and sure among the petals, and Verity thought, she ought to be wearing gloves, she of all people, she just told me about the skin — and saw, then, that there were gloves: a pair of stout gardener's gauntlets folded over the slate edging, soft and dark with use, set down within reach as if she had stripped them off only to feel the plant the better. Beside them lay a knife. Not a clasp-knife but a proper grafting knife, the blade folded, the handle of yellowed ivory worn to the shape of one particular hand, a small thing and very old and very good.

"You raised it," Verity said. It was not a question. She had spent the morning watching this woman name poisons like daughters, and there was no mistaking the way she had said we — that was raised here, the swallowed pronoun, the door shut on a word.

"Things are raised here," Cassandra said. "Edenhall raises them. My brother has the gift of it." She straightened, and she had her face arranged again, and she picked up the gauntlets and the little ivory knife and put the knife away in her coat pocket with the unthinking economy of a woman who had carried it forty years. "Now. You wanted, Sir Aubrey said, to see where the tinctures are kept. The light in there is poor; I hope you don't mind it."

Goode unhooked the ring from his belt. He did it without being asked, which told its own story — that he was the keeper of the keys here, that this was understood, that the asking had been done long ago and need not be repeated. He came across and stood at the door of the potting-store, a squat windowless building of dressed stone built into the angle of the wall, older than the hall behind it, Verity thought, older than anything; and he sorted through the ring with two thick fingers and found a key and turned it, and the lock gave with a heavy domestic click.

Inside it was cool and dim and smelled of dust and dried herbs and something medicinal and faintly sweet underneath, and as her eyes adjusted Verity saw shelves to the ceiling, and on the shelves, ranked and labelled, the work of the garden made portable. Brown bottles and blue bottles and squat stone jars; bunches of dried foxglove hung head-down from the beams; trays of seed in twists of paper; and a row of small phials with hand-written labels in a fine slanting hand — Tinct. Digitalis, Tinct. Aconiti, NOT FOR USE, Atropa, root, '31 — the whole quiet armoury of a place that had been distilling itself for two hundred years.

"It is all kept here," Cassandra said, and there it was again, the reverence, plain now and unhidden in the half-dark. She touched a shelf-edge the way a verger touches an altar-rail. "Locked, always. Linus has the key. There is one key." She said it precisely. "My brother had a copy once and lost it down a drain in 1926 and Linus would not cut another; he said one key meant one man answerable, and my brother shouted, and Linus won. It is the only argument I ever saw Linus win." A thin smile. "So. One key, on Linus's belt, and Linus on the place, and that is why nothing has ever gone missing from this room that ought not to."

"Thirty year," Goode said. It was the first thing he had said. His voice was low and slow and came up from somewhere deep, and there was a terse, banked pride in it that he would clearly have died before naming. "Thirty year and nothing's walked. Folk think the danger's the plants. Danger's carelessness." He looked, briefly, at the dark bottles, and then away, and Verity had the sense of a man who took the keeping of poisons as the one indisputable proof that he mattered, and would not have it questioned.

"And the heart-medicine?" Verity asked. "You said you grow for the doctor."

"There." Cassandra nodded to a low shelf where a little blue bottle stood by itself, ribbed glass, a glass stopper, a paper label gone soft. "Sir Aubrey's own. Dr. Quill makes it up from our digitalis — drops, for the heart. My brother has a weak heart; the family has always had it; our father went the same way, mid-word, at his own dinner-table. Aubrey takes his drops last thing each night, the same hour, by the same ritual, regular as the church clock — ten drops in a little water, the bottle back in his dressing-room, the cork given exactly one half-turn. He is a tyrant about it. He says a man with a tired heart who keeps no discipline is a man who means to die." She lifted the small blue bottle, turned it to the door's light so the level showed amber within, set it back in its exact ring of dust. "He will not let me touch it, of course. I only grow the leaf. Aubrey keeps his own counsel about his medicine, as he keeps it about most things."

Verity looked at the blue bottle in its little clearing of dust on the dim shelf, and at the dried foxglove turning slowly overhead, and at the dark queen leaning in her warm corner beyond the open door, and she thought nothing in particular — only that it was a strange and lovely and slightly terrible place, and that she would like, when she had drawn the arum, to make a plate of the black monkshood if Miss Tarn would let her; it had a structure to it.

"I should like to draw that aconite," she said. "The 'Edenhall.' Before the frost takes it."

Something crossed Cassandra's face — pleasure, and then something guarded shutting down on the pleasure, a hand cupped over a candle. "Perhaps," she said. "If there's light enough left in the year. It does not keep."

They went out. The morning had warmed; the dew was off the hemlock now, and the garden had begun, just barely, to belong to anyone who wanted to admire it. Goode held the door. Cassandra drew it to and fitted the key and turned it, and the heavy lock went home, and she withdrew the key from the lock.

And then she did not, at once, give it back.

She stood with the ring in her bare palm — Goode's ring, Goode's key, the one key — and she closed her hand around it, and for a moment, a moment that went on a beat too long, she weighed it there, the way one weighs a thing one is reluctant to set down, the way Verity weighed a good brush before she gave it back to its owner. Her thumb moved once across the worn metal. Her face was turned to the black bed in its corner and had nothing in it at all.

Then she opened her hand and put the ring into Goode's broad palm, and Goode hooked it back onto his belt without a word, and the morning went on.

Verity, who drew what was in front of her, and forgot very little, walked back to the house and did not think of it again for three days.