“That was sweet of you. Thank you.”
She bustles past you into the kitchen without asking. “Hewitt Dunmore,” she says when she sees him, her voice flat and unreadable, her lips curling up into a withering smile. She places the brownies and the cassoulet on the counter. “It has been aeons. How are you? How is life in the big city?”
“I wouldn’t call St. Johnsbury a big city.”
“Oh, but it dwarfs Bethel. You must love it there. You never, ever seem to come back here.”
He remains silent.
“So, tell me: What has brought you back today? Old home week? Leave something behind in the house?” she asks, her face hard, and she rolls her eyes toward the door to the basement.
“I happened to be driving this way and thought I would see the old place,” he says, his voice a little shaky.
“That’s all? Really?”
He looks down at the tabletop, a small child being chastised. “Really,” he mumbles.
“First time back?”
“First time.”
“Well, I know the captain appreciates visitors enormously.”
“Actually, Anise, I was just leaving.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“Errands,” he says vaguely.
“Well, I hope you two had a nice visit.”
“No complaints,” Hewitt says, reaching for his cane and standing. He clumsily pushes his arms through his jacket sleeves. And then he is gone, limping along the front walkway to his car.
“I’d say he’s a bit strange,” Anise remarks, her voice a little conspiratorial-as if you two are the closest of friends. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t think I’m a real good person to make that call.”
You watch Desdemona pounce upon the circular plastic ring from a milk carton. Accidentally she bats it underneath the stove.
“Are your daughters cat people?”
“Not especially. I think they are ambivalent about Desdemona,” you tell her. “When they were younger, they played with her more.”
She seems to think about this. Then: “How is your stomach? That injury must be pretty well healed by now.”
“It is, thank you. I feel pretty good.”
“I suppose they still have you on some antibiotic?”
“Not anymore.”
She nods, offering no opinion on whether she approves of antibiotics, but you have a feeling that she would have prescribed instead a tincture made from some exotic herb that she grows in her greenhouse. The idea crosses your mind that these women steer clear of doctors, but you don’t honestly believe this. After all, isn’t Valerian a psychiatrist?
Anise hands you one of the brownies. “I baked them this morning,” she says. “Try it.”
You take it and stare at it for a brief moment. When she senses your hesitation, she delicately breaks off a piece and puts it into her own mouth. “I am a fiend for my own cooking,” she says when she has swallowed it. The gesture is oddly intimate.
And so you take a breath. But still you can’t bring yourself to take a bite. “I had a big lunch,” you tell her.
She nods. “Suit yourself,” she says slowly. “I’ll be seeing your girls later today. They can tell you what you missed.”
R eseda was moving among the mad-dog skullcap and the ashwagandha in her greenhouse, tending them with a brass watering can shaped like a crouching gargoyle (the water flowed from its large, round eyes) and a plastic mister with a falcon’s head (in this case, the water emanated from its beak). She was listening more carefully than it might have seemed as Clary and Sage prattled on behind her about how far along her St.- John’s-wort was and how healthy it seemed by comparison to theirs. She understood why they had come by this afternoon, and she suspected they knew that she knew: They were struggling mightily to mask their real thoughts with their enthusiastic blather about the state of her herbs. Moreover, Clary was blinking senselessly, which the woman believed (mistakenly) in some fashion shorted out the connection between her mind and Reseda’s.
Finally, when Reseda turned off the spigot beside the greenhouse hose for the last time, Clary got around to the actual reason for their visit. “You know, Reseda,” she began, hoping her voice sounded offhand, “Anise wants to try again. She thinks the Linton girls offer real potential after what their father went through. The trauma of the plane crash and all. So, we were wondering if perhaps you two could, I don’t know, enter into a period of detente?”
“Anise was over here just the other day,” Reseda said. “You make it sound like the two of us don’t play nicely together in the sandbox.”
Sage chuckled nervously and ran two dry, gnarled fingers underneath the first cerulean blossoms on the memoria. Neither she nor Clary was accustomed to speaking so candidly about Reseda and Anise’s relationship. “Of course you do. You both do. But…”
“Go on.”
“Everyone knows you two aren’t as close as we’d all like. I am about to be completely honest because-” And she paused here. Finishing the sentence as she had originally planned would have meant acknowledging that Reseda knew always what they were thinking and this made it hard for Sage to trust her as deeply as she wanted. And so she switched gears and said instead, “Well, I think Anise is a little threatened by you. And I think you two sometimes work at cross-purposes.”
“Thank you for being so candid, Sage. I appreciate that,” Reseda said agreeably, and she meant it. “Anise doesn’t know you’re telling me this, does she?”
“No. But you can tell her. It isn’t a secret.”
“And what are you planning to say to Anise? I suppose, as part of your shuttle diplomacy, you’re seeing her as well.”
“We are,” Clary admitted. “And we are going to ask her to do nothing without your involvement.”
“She won’t agree to that.”
“You weren’t there the first time we tried,” Clary said. “It was horrible. Everything went wrong. Just… everything. That wouldn’t happen this time.”
“Besides, it wasn’t Anise’s fault,” Sage continued. “It was Tansy’s.”
Reseda watched a block of sun on Baphomet and strolled into the center of the pentagon. She closed her eyes and stared up at the ceiling of the greenhouse for a long moment, savoring the feel of the warmth on her skin. “Have you decided which twin?” she asked, opening her eyes.
“No,” Sage told her. “But Anise is enjoying her afternoons with the girls and getting to know them.”
“I am, too,” Reseda said. “And I like their mother a great deal. Don’t you?”
“She’s very nice. But I can’t say for sure if she’ll ever be one of us.”
“Move too fast and she won’t be. I think it was a mistake to try and start calling her Verbena so soon. Same with the girls.”
“The problem is that Anise doesn’t think she has all that much time. And we have even less. I had given up before the Lintons came into our lives. I had absolutely given up. The first tincture is long gone. And then, magically, they appeared.”
“I would not read too much into the idea that Emily contacted Sheldon Carter in the autumn and wanted to see a house. This was neither some cosmic plan nor one of mine.”
“You don’t have as much interest in the second volume, that’s the problem,” Clary told her, raising her voice slightly in her excitement. “You don’t care as much for the blood potions. But the fact is, the tincture worked. Yes, the child died. But the tincture worked.”
Reseda was struck by how old the pair seemed, how physically decrepit. They weren’t, not really; the truth was, they were in absolutely remarkable shape for their age. But they were aging rapidly now, and that was what
