Chapter Twenty
Emily knew the communal greenhouse from those afternoons that spring when she had picked up the twins there after school-when, ostensibly, they had been learning about plants and herbs with some of the women at Sage Messner’s. But she had never been inside it at night and she had never seen it so crowded: In her mind, it was always just her girls and two or three older women, and the skies high above the glass ceiling were likely to be blue.
Not now. The wind and the rain were lashing the great panes of glass against their metal framing, and there were at least three censers burning what John had told her with unrestrained pride was frankincense Clary had transplanted from Oman. There must have been twenty or twenty-five of her neighbors present tonight, women and men she was likely to meet on the streets of Littleton and Bethel-the people she had viewed as an extended family of sorts throughout the last couple of months-though now they were all dressed in what looked like burgundy-colored choir robes. There were Anise and Clary and Valerian and Sage and Ginger-who gave Alexander a vaguely chaste kiss on the cheek and then insisted on looking at the wound on his upper arm, her eyes going back and forth between the puncture wound and Emily-and Celandine, the female trooper who had come to Emily’s home that frightening night when Garnet found the skull in the dirt in the basement. She saw her girls’ schoolteacher. In addition, there were another three or four women Emily didn’t recognize. And there were the men, their spouses and partners, and John quickly climbed into a robe and joined Peyton and Claude, where they stood beside a waist-high black marble basin, the column a spiral of interlocking carved vines. There was something unrecognizable about all of them this evening, something far more profound than the reality that they were dressed in red robes: They’d stood and swayed and stomped their feet in a barely controlled frenzy when Anise and John had first nudged the girls into the greenhouse. They were all a little giddy, and Emily couldn’t decide if it was more like a religious rapture or the adrenaline rush that accompanies a nighttime bonfire at a beach in high summer. Some of the assemblage were drinking from identical ceramic goblets with leaves carved into the cups and the stems, dunking their goblets into that basin as if it were a punch bowl.
The electric heaters were warming the greenhouse, but it was illuminated only by clay oil lamps with corked wicks and tall candles in hurricane vases in the corners. The blue flames from the lamps lined the floor and the edges of the tables, all of which had been pushed against the walls, and the flickering light seemed to lengthen all the shadows. It made everyone look about seven feet tall. And at the end of the greenhouse, where some of the group was gathering now in a great semicircle, beside a pane of glass that opened out, was a wrought-iron cauldron that had to have been at least three feet high, suspended on five squat legs that Emily thought were as thick as her ankles. Beneath it was a small fire, and she couldn’t help but recall John’s cryptic words: What do you think we plan to do with them? Cook them in a stewpot?
Her girls looked more stunned than terrified, but she knew how frightened they were and she thought there was nothing she wanted more than to be able to go and comfort them. No, there was something she did want more than that: She wanted out. She wanted to take her girls and run from this greenhouse and from Bethel. She would stop by Reseda’s and get Chip and then leave northern New Hampshire forever. But two younger men she had never seen before-sons or grandsons of the herbalists, she imagined-stood on either side of her, each grasping one of her arms by the elbow.
The idea crossed her mind that Reseda and Holly were involved. Clearly they were herbalists. But had they convinced Chip that he was possessed and brought him to Reseda’s greenhouse so it would be easier to abduct the twins? Or were those two women unaware of what the rest of the group was doing right now? Emily wanted Chip-the old Chip, the man who had overcome a nearly disastrous childhood and wound up an airline pilot-back and beside her.
She could feel her heart racing; if she weren’t so determined to try to find a way to get her girls out of this greenhouse, she thought she might die. Literally, she might collapse with a heart attack. Her girls were standing on the other side of that massive cauldron, Anise’s and Sage’s hands resting like great bird claws upon their shoulders. The twins were wearing their matching winter jackets, which they really didn’t need because, despite the dampness and chill outside the greenhouse, despite the pane that was open to vent the cauldron, the heaters and the small fire were keeping the place almost toasty. But the girls were still in their pajamas, and Emily was struck by the sight of their baggy pajama pants between the bottoms of their parkas and the tops of their boots. She noticed that Garnet had tucked her pajamas into her boots, but Hallie hadn’t bothered. Anise had allowed Emily to put on a pair of blue jeans, but she was still wearing her nightshirt underneath her coat.
Finally John worked his way through the crowd until he was standing beside her, while Anise stepped forward and smiled at everyone as if she were hosting a cocktail party and wanted to welcome her guests. She pulled her robe tight around her neck, and Emily noticed that, unlike the other robes, hers had a silver clasp. She couldn’t make out the design from where she was standing, but she had a feeling it was some kind of ivy.
“Welcome,” Anise said, spreading her arms and smiling. “The earth is with you!”
“And with you!” responded the gathering.
“We merge blood with seed!” she cried, staring down at the dirt floor, enraptured.
“We merge seed with soul!” they replied.
“And soul with earth-”
“To be born anew!”
“Yes,” agreed Anise. “To be born anew.” She looked up and gazed at the gathering and shook her head in wonderment, and everyone watched her expectantly. “We did it. You did it. We have earth. We have twins. And we have… our recipe.” Valerian held open before Anise a thick book, and Emily thought it resembled the one that Anise had given Garnet, and the crowd in the greenhouse murmured their approval.
“To the earth and seeds!” John cried out in a toast, raising his goblet, and everyone drank with him. “To the twins!” he added. “Hear, hear!”
“To the twins!” the gathering shouted back, a loud and powerful and almost orgiastic chorus.
Emily craned her neck to read the title of the book, and her heart sank: The Complete Book of Divination and Mediation with Animals and Humans. She watched the flushed faces of the adults as their eyes darted back and forth between Anise and her girls and started to cry. Anise noticed but was unmoved. Then she pulled from a pocket at the front of her cape what looked like a bouquet of Italian parsley, but Emily was confident it was instead a plant that was both venomous and rare-something discovered or bred by these women from seeds they had found in some exotic corner of the planet. Anise pulled off the leaves and dropped them into the cauldron, as if they were merely bay leaves for a stew.
“John,” Emily whispered, her voice urgent and quavering, “please, let us go. If we can help you, we will. You know that. But, please, please let us go. I’m begging you: Please don’t hurt my girls.”
John’s eyes looked a little watery, too, and his profile a bit less regal: She wondered if perhaps he was weakening. But it was only age. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he smiled and shook his head firmly. “This is hard for all of us. I understand. I really do. But we only need one and it will all be over soon.”
Emily recalled what Reseda had told her, but still it seemed too cruel to be true. “You only need one… what? One of my children?”
He nodded. “It’s a very intense ritual, a very complicated process. A complicated recipe. You need the right person-the right genes-and the right plants. You need a twin, and, according to the formula, the blood has to have been forged by a great trauma.” He raised his eyebrows and breathed in deeply through his nose. “Tansy never forgave us-or herself. But our intentions were good, Verbena. You have to believe me. And the fact is, it worked with Sawyer. It was awfully effective. I am so sorry about what happened to the boy, but the tincture worked. Sadly, nothing from nature lasts forever, and now we need, well, boosters. We need more.”
“Did you kill Sawyer? Are you saying he didn’t kill himself?”
“You must think we’re absolute fiends,” John said, and he actually chuckled. “Besides, I’m a lawyer. You can’t possibly believe that I would confess to something like that! Now, you should pay attention,” he admonished her. “We both should.”
Celandine was approaching Anise with a potted plant, the leaves cochleate and yellow as daffodils, with one spear-shaped bulb rising from the center. The plant was perhaps eighteen inches tall and the bulb the size of a
