“Of course.”
“If your parents are interrogated, will they go along with it?”
“My parents escaped across the border last year.” Violetta shrugged. “There won’t be a problem.”
Another deep pang in her chest, this time of guilt. I would not abandon you. It hadn’t been an emotional boast—it had been a fact. Violetta had already chosen to throw her lot in with Evelyn, and Evelyn hadn’t even noticed.
They would have time to discuss it on the other side of this, but only if they moved now.
“I need to strip out the more specialized plants, or else Pollard will have too many questions. And we must send the servants home.”
It would be too hard to do what had to be done with others skulking nearby, others threatening to twist and turn with the spreading sickness. Evelyn shuddered at the thought, clawing her hands into her hair in a moment’s fractured weakness. Then she forced them down.
“All of them?” Violetta asked.
“All save you. We will pay them, of course. But they—they must be gone.”
“Won’t Officer Pollard wonder—”
“Not if we tell him Iris fell ill.” It was a feeble excuse; who else would send home their employees and divest themselves of fresh-cooked food and hot-drawn baths? But she was eccentric. She was terrified. He had seen it.
He would understand, if only she could think long enough, work fast enough, to craft the rest of the story.
They called for Violetta’s other maid, who cried out and trembled at seeing Iris’s body, limp and breathing shallowly. Violetta spoke to her in soft, gentle tones that Evelyn could not have managed, and the young woman nodded, going to fetch warm clothes to wrap the body in, and the driver to help bear her to the carriage. Evelyn watched everything, wraithlike and pale in the corner, mind racing. She followed, shoulders hard and tense, as Violetta led her out of the kitchen and to the main hall. She mounted the steps to the second floor, then turned and surveyed the ranks of servants arrayed below her, who looked at the pale-faced, lolling, white-wrapped bundle and whispered.
“All of you will leave this house tonight,” Violetta announced.
The murmurs redoubled, then fell silent.
“Miss Polemia has fallen to plague. We will be sending her to the doctors, in hopes that they can save her, but it is not safe for you here. For your own sakes, please return to your homes. If you do not have a home you can return to outside of the manor, we will pay for your lodging. For all of you, we will have two weeks’ pay in advance delivered tomorrow. Are there any questions?”
Some of the faces staring at her now looked relieved. Others, terrified. The rains were heavy outside, and leaving now would be to risk injury or worse. They might go to the Judiciary, let Pollard know to bring armed men with him when he arrived at dawn. It would have been safer, perhaps, to keep them all here, to lie and lie until she could lie no more.
But let the depths of the ocean rise up and seize her. She could not stay here, knowing she was surrounded by twenty other living, breathing creatures that could become hosts.
The only one left that she could trust was Violetta.
The murmuring began again, and finally, the cook stepped forward. Her worn face was creased with worry.
“My lady,” she said, and she addressed Evelyn directly, daring to look up the steps into Evelyn’s veiled eyes. “What afflicts Iris was no plague. I have seen plague before, in all its forms, and that—that—”
“Get out of this house,” Evelyn said, voice cutting across the room. All fell silent. They were not used to her speaking to them directly, without Violetta acting as mouthpiece. But if they wanted to address her, then she would address them. “Out. Now. All of you.”
“And what of you, my lady?” asked the cook. “What of Miss Fusain?”
“We will remain here,” she said, “until no more trace of illness is in this house or this city.”
Behind the cook, her staff exchanged nervous looks.
They thought she was mad.
They had always thought she was mad.
But they left her all the same.
It took long, aching minutes. Whispers filled the hall, and footsteps, and muffled sobs. Evelyn watched as the driver hoisted Iris gingerly in his arms, as much due to her terribly light weight as out of fear of sickness. She watched as the dying, catatonic girl was taken out to the carriage that waited beneath the portico, spared from the thundering rain but not from the noise. Outside, there was nothing but dark, wet shadows, swaying trees, the hissing of wind.
She thought she could see eyes looking back at her. She turned away, wrapping an arm around herself reflexively.
Soft footsteps beside her, different from the others. Violetta, come back to her side. Evelyn was afraid to look at her, to see if Violetta’s trust had truly firmed, or if her mask was waiting to slip once they were alone together once more.
She was not expecting Violetta to murmur, just loud enough for her to hear, “What do you think she meant, ‘start of ruin’?”
Evelyn shuddered, and took a step away. “I have no idea,” she lied.
Evelyn thundered through the greenhouse, the towering windows that made up three of the four walls watching impassively. She tore up belladonna stalks and aconite blossoms, tossing them into piles destined for the hearth of her bedroom. Soil pushed up painfully beneath her fingernails as she worked, her secateurs clipping out stalks, her fists dragging out roots. There were easier, gentler ways, ways that could have perhaps preserved some of her vast stores, years in the tending, but she eschewed them all in her panic.
The start of ruin.
When Violetta had asked her what it meant, Evelyn had feigned confusion, but she knew. She knew, deep down where her heart struggled against the tight cage of her ribs. The start of ruin had apparently drawn this spreading horror here from the wilds of the sea, had called to the thing inside Urvenon, inside the bryony girl, had drawn Pollard’s attention here with it all. The start of ruin lived in this house.
The start of ruin could only be her.
She had been just a girl when she’d started playing among the plants, and she’d been just a girl when her mother had shown her how to pull the sweet nectar from the yellow blooms of honeysuckle growing in the carefully trained hedges in the classic, manicured gardens that had once surrounded Evelyn’s great house. The wild growth beyond those gardens had been much less wild then, but just as unminded. She hadn’t known not to pick the yellow blossoms that looked so similar to honeysuckle but grew upon curling vines, winding their way into the trees that her mother loved to sit beneath in the afternoons.
Evelyn had gathered a hundred flowers one afternoon, and, thinking only of sweetness, she had carefully filled the bottom of a teacup with the delicate sweet droplets of nectar inside each one. She fought every childish impulse to steal a taste, because her mother deserved all of it. She’d been sick for a spell, and was only just beginning to recover.
The nectar harvested, she’d had the cook make a pot of tea. She’d filled the cup with steaming water and taken it to her mother, who wasn’t yet well enough to go outside, and instead sat in the parlor with her needlepoint.
Her mother had accepted the tea. Another day, she might have sipped lightly, only being polite. But that day, her throat had been dry and scratching still, and she had drained the cup.