She dropped the pestle with a loud crack. Stoker stood beside her, his manner gentle. “Mertensia, I am certain it was nothing—” he began.
She shied away from his hand, looking at him with sudden suspicion. “Is that how the two of you play at it? She hurls accusations and you settle the ruffled feathers?”
Stoker did not look at me. “I know it must seem that way—”
“Seem! You are her creature,” she spat. “Dancing to her tune, pretending to be kind when all the time you are waiting, like a spider.”
“You did not answer the question,” I said sharply, calling her attention back to me.
She returned to her work, taking up the pestle with shaking fingers. “Yes, we quarreled. Rosamund decided to show her true colors at last.”
“How?”
The fight seemed to have gone out of her. She ground her herbs as she spoke, her eyes never quite meeting mine, her back half-turned to Stoker. “She told me that things would be different after she married Malcolm. She said she had plans—for the village, for the household. I told her I did not mind if she wanted to make changes in the castle. It was her right as mistress. As long as I had my garden, I would be happy.”
Her voice faltered and I saw her knuckles whiten as she pressed the leaves to powder. “She wanted your garden, didn’t she?”
“All those years of work and she meant to tear it out. She wanted roses and peonies,” Mertensia said, fairly spitting the words. “She meant to pull down the whole poison garden, have the entire thing planted with flowers, pretty things, she said, instead of all those nasty poisonous plants she didn’t like.”
Stoker held himself quite still, but his voice was warm. “That must have felt like a betrayal,” he said.
“It was,” she admitted. She looked at him then, reluctantly, it seemed. “I thought I was going to have a sister of sorts. I’ve never had the knack of making friends easily, but Rosamund attached herself to me at school and for the few short months I was there, we were never apart. But the summer she came to stay here was different to what I expected.”
“How?” I asked gently.
“Difficult. Tiberius and Malcolm were always making such a fuss of her, dancing and riding and rowing. She monopolized them, but I was not surprised. Tiberius and Malcolm had always had a healthy rivalry. It was just the pair of them showing off. When Tiberius left, everything was quieter. I saw almost nothing of Malcolm, but I still never believed anything would come of it. He is just so proud of the island and she was interested in everything.”
She looked down at the dirty green powder in her mortar. “I have ruined this lot,” she said in a dull voice. She threw the powder into the fire and began again with a fresh bunch of leaves. “Then they announced their engagement, and for a few weeks Rosamund seemed different, quieter. I would come upon her at odd moments and she was always just sitting, lost in thought. When she was with Malcolm, her spirits were high. There was a recklessness about her, a sort of devil-may-care gleam in her eye that I could not understand. I would have thought she would have been serene. She had everything she ever wanted. But Rosamund was never serene. There was only brooding silence or that hectic gaiety. Nothing in between. No real happiness, no real love for Malcolm. I finally confronted her the night before they were married. That is when she told me that I needn’t bother myself about her. She had everything planned.”
Mertensia’s hands stilled as she spoke, her voice dreamy, her eyes fixed upon a point in the distance. “She talked for hours, it seemed. She told me all that she wanted to do, every way she meant to take charge of things. I never realized, you see, how much she had resented me when we were at school together. I thought we were equals, miserable little girls bound by our unhappiness. But Rosamund saw things differently. There was a watchfulness to her I had never seen, a brittleness. It created a strange atmosphere that summer. The air was heavy, as if waiting for a storm to break. And then I discovered that she had been taking my place.”
“In what way?” Stoker asked, his voice low and coaxing.
“It has always been the family’s responsibility to take care of the villagers. My mother did it, and before I was old enough, after her death, Trenny used to make the calls. She taught me how to pack the baskets, what to choose to give the most comfort—a broth with wine and egg yolks for a nursing mother, a calf’s-foot jelly for a broken leg, just as I did today. There is not a hearthside on this island beside which I have not sat, warming soup and knitting socks. One day I brewed up a bit of cat’s-claw tonic for old Mrs. Polglase. She has rheumatism quite badly and cat’s-claw is the best remedy. I used to take her a bottle quite regularly, but that summer there was so much to do, I had left it. I felt bad when I realized how long it had been. I took the tonic and went to the Polglase cottage, but when I got there, Rosamund was already there, reading to Mrs. Polglase. She had taken the last bottle of tonic I brewed and brought it with her. They were having a great laugh when I arrived, and it was only the first of many such times. I eventually forbade her from coming into the stillroom to take my remedies, but it did not stop her. She merely smiled like a cat with a cream pot and went about her business. She persuaded Cook to bottle up soup for her and she knitted shawls and carried books with her. People started to talk about how thoughtful she
