Finally, Someone Tends to Those Fucking Plants

Libbie stood at the doorway to The Orangerie. She was afraid to go inside.

“Shall I get someone else, Principal Brookhants?” Camille Andrews asked from behind her. That even Camille Andrews seemed afraid was more disconcerting still.

“No,” Libbie said. “Thank you, Camille. You’d best return to class.”

“Are you sure, Principal Brookhants?” the girl asked with none of her usual, Beetle-reading verve.

“Very,” Libbie said. “Thank you for coming to find me.”

Libbie watched the girl take one long, final look at the trouble that lay inside The Orangerie, clearly trying to commit it to memory. Camille said she’d been using the lavatory when she’d happened past. Libbie guessed that it was something more than that—likely she’d been dawdling, out of class and meandering the halls—but in either case: Camille was scared. She was out of breath and saucer eyed when she’d come running to Libbie’s office to fetch her and bring her here. No doubt Camille would report this trouble to the whole of her geography class as soon as she returned to it.

Which meant that Libbie needed to make herself go inside right this moment.

She did.

Even from the doorway, the heat escaping The Orangerie had been heavy and wet. Now Libbie felt like she was being pulled under its waves. Her limbs slowed in response and her clothing sucked to her skin.

She had to hike her skirts to step high and over, and sometimes on top of, the many hacked limbs now piled on the floor. She might have been walking in the Tricky Thicket for all the growth strewn about. An axe had been used to chop down anything with a trunk thick enough to be felled by it.

Whether or not it was sentimental to say so, everywhere plants lay bleeding their green and yellow and clear whatever—whatever its correct name, for this was Alex’s area, and not her own—until it ran down the sides of tables and pooled on the floor.

Everywhere planters had been overturned, their dirt cascaded and the life inside smashed or crushed. Or, she soon discovered, covered in chemicals. That explained the smell: floral and metal, fetid and astringent. She spotted various open containers of lye and kerosene. Even canisters of bluestone (technically sulfate of copper) with its crystals like cut gems. There seemed no rhyme or reason for what had been dispensed, or how it had been accomplished—none that Libbie could understand.

The results were the same, regardless: plants split open and melted in death.

At some point it seemed the axe had been abandoned as either too tame or too slow, and great swaths of vines and leaves, flowers and tendrils, had simply been torn at, by the handful—by the clawful, you would think, from looking at them now—ripped and shredded and thrown to the ground.

Near the center of the room, a mass of various blooms and pieces of fruit had been piled together, almost as if wine was to be made. They had been stomped into the floor. Only what remained was not wine; it was instead a stinking, bubbling, brown-and-green mash.

And though, individually, they flicked the air throughout the whole of The Orangerie, the fruit flies and bees, houseflies and, yes, yellow jackets that now swarmed above this pile were as dark and thick as a storm cloud. The closer Libbie went to this swarm, the various sounds these insects made—the buzz and whine and hum—seemed to condense into a singular note, one not unlike the unheeding plucking of a detuned cello string.

Libbie gave this sacrificial pile, for that is what it seemed to her, as wide a berth as was possible and headed to the far end of the room, where thin hairs of black smoke lifted from the chaos below.

Other than Libbie Brookhants, two things appeared to be left living in The Orangerie: the angel’s trumpet tree, and beneath it, Alex the Flirt.

Alex, the singular cause of all this destruction, sat on a throne of leaves and stems and—even now, right now, as Libbie walked toward her—burned stereo cards, one by one.

“Alex,” Libbie called softly, using the voice she typically reserved for the youngest Brookhants students when they were homesick or frightened. “What are you doing, my love?”

“Oh, but you’re so early!” Alex said, her eyes still on the flaming card in her gloved hands. “I didn’t expect you for another half hour. I know, I know it looks mad, Library! I do know it. But I couldn’t wait any longer. And it will make sense to you, I know it will, once I get it all done.”

Libbie moved closer, keeping her steps soft and even. “I’m sure you can explain it.”

“Oh yes. I will. Let me—if I could just finish these first.”

“Are you feeling alright, darling?” Libbie asked.

“Yes, so much better than before.”

She did not look it: her hair was stuck with bits of plant, the sleeves of her dress as well, and the white pinafore she wore over it—Eleanor Faderman’s pinafore, Libbie felt suddenly sure—was as soiled as it had been when Eleanor last wore it.

Worst of all was her eye, her left, swollen to nearly shut, puffed and pink, her view from it cut in half.

“Alex,” Libbie said. “Darling, what’s happened to your eye?” It was painful for Libbie to even look at it. Doing so somehow made her feel a sharp pulse within the bruise on her hip, the one she’d gained when she’d slipped against the tub, in the bathroom with Adelaide. It was a bruise that would not heal, even now, weeks and weeks later.

“These cards Sara brought you, they’re tricky,” Alex said. “Tricky-tricky like Sara—only I’m onto their ways. Something tried to escape one of them but it’s fine, now. It will all be fine, soon as I finish.”

“How did you hurt your eye, Alex?” Libbie asked again. Her hip seized and she winced.

“I was making my notes,” Alex said, still watching the flame before her. “I was checking these cards, you know I have to, now, daily. In one, the yellow jackets clouded the room like smoke. As I watched, they splintered and one flew at me. I couldn’t understand it! It came closer and closer, growing larger and larger, until it escaped the card and was on me.” She looked up at Libbie, smiled a terrible smile, and said, “I burned that card first. I could hear the other yellow jackets left inside it hiss and pop as I did. They’re only ashes now.”

Libbie was holding her breath in disbelief, but if she kept that up in this heat she would faint.

“I know you can’t see it yet,” Alex said easily. “I know. I don’t think you want to see it. You never have. But I can see it for both of us. And now I’m making such good progress! We just need to kill off the bad and start again. I do have the orchard left, and the thicket, but you can help with those, when it’s time. We can cut it all down in its growing season. First, I’ll explain it—you have to let me explain it to you—and then you’ll help me, and then we’ll set it right and start again. Start clean here, as we always should have done.”

Libbie nodded. She tried to keep her face placid as a puddle.

But Alex shook her head like she was trying to knock something loose. “Adelaide will have to go. She’ll go with Max, I don’t know where.” Her voice had turned into a flat singsong. “And Hanna and Caspar will go, too. None of Harold’s people can stay when we start again. None of Harold at all.”

Carefully, slowly, Libbie knelt beside Alex. The flame on the card Alex was burning was at its bottom now, very little image left to go before it reached the soiled fingertips of her gloves.

“Careful,” Libbie said.

“So careful,” Alex said, laying the card in the ash pile so that it could finish its burning there.

“And all of these are wrong, too?” Libbie asked. She’d picked up the small stack of yet-to-be-burned cards.

“Oh do be careful,” Alex said, taking them from Libbie as if they were lit dynamite. “These are the most corrupt. I’ve saved the worst for last. One even shows the book, plain as day.” She looked around, her eyes glazed, at the downed leaves and plants. “I can show you. I thought I had the viewer here. It might be a risk to do it—I’m not sure—”

“You already did show me,” Libbie said. She had to interrupt Alex. It hurt to hear this madness, to be steady and not show revulsion to it. “Yesterday, remember? We looked together yesterday, in my study.”

Alex had shown Libbie the cards the day before, the day she was supposed to be home resting after the trifle incident of the previous evening, when she’d accused Adelaide of trying to poison her. (With yellow jackets! It was lunacy.) But Alex hadn’t spent her day home resting: she’d spent it plotting.

When Libbie had returned from campus that afternoon, Alex had come to find her atop the tower—already a bad sign that she made that climb. She’d brought with her the stereo cards and her notes about them. Those notes were a jumble of indecipherability. But even if the things she had been writing were nonsensical, it had frightened Libbie to see Alex’s typically measured penmanship switch from looping scrawl to minuscule scratch and back again.

But the cards themselves—and Libbie had made a point to view each of them, all fourteen—were the same images they had always been, exactly as Sara Dahlgren had brought them from France: risqué, still in poor taste, but hardly sinister. Alex went on and on about changes to the wallpaper or in the bouquet on table, but how could Libbie be expected to remember what these unimportant attributes had looked like in the first place? Who pays attention to the pattern in the wallpaper when two women in silk robes are fondling in the foreground?

Alex. Her Alex is who.

Now, through a nearby window revealed only because Alex had torn all the vines from it, Libbie watched their hulking black carriage come to a stop. They had only minutes, maybe not even so long as that, before students and faculty spilled from their classrooms and noticed this fresh horror in The Orangerie.

“Let’s burn them all and be done with it,” Libbie said, reaching into Alex’s lap, the folds of her skirt, for the box of matches. “Quickly, now. So that we can get you home to do the rest.”

“I’m not sure,” Alex said. “I’ve been going one by one. Or—”

“I’m sure this is better,” Libbie said, doing her best Principal Brookhants. She struck the match, its flame at the ready. “These are the worst, you said that, so we’ll burn them together.”

With some reluctance, Alex now fanned the remaining stereoscope cards and tipped them toward Libbie, who lit each along one edge. They caught at once, and encouraged by the surrounding flames, burned more quickly than they had in the singular. Soon only gray ash remained. Alex reached for a nearby watering container and poured its contents over the ash, streaming it away like gray worms.

Libbie didn’t want to ask, but felt she must, before Alex brought it up herself or refused to leave. Gesturing to the angel’s trumpet tree above them, she asked, “What about this? Shall I bring you the axe?”

“There’s no need,” Alex said, steadying herself against the zinc planter as she stood. “By morning it will be the most dead thing in the room. I opened its roots and fed it every poison on campus. It’s drinking death even now.”

Libbie nodded. She could hear the laughter of students out on the lawn. She and Alex needed to go.

Libbie struggled into her coat, a cruel task in such heat. She asked after Alex’s, but Alex was no help in locating it. She stood still, slightly openmouthed, staring with good eye and bad at the sacrificial heap of plant mash and its humming fever of bugs.

Libbie pushed leaves and flowers with her feet, picked up piles of vines, and eventually found the coat dumped on a table. She cleared the bits of plant from it and shook it out. It was new that season, brown wool and flannel with leather trimmings. Libbie usually thought Alex looked particularly fetching in it. Today, though, Alex stuck out her arms at the sides and let herself be dressed like a sleepy child reluctant to leave for church on a winter morning.

Once she had the coat buttoned, Libbie took Alex by the hand—she didn’t want to chance it—and said, “Come with me now, I’ll take you home to rest.” She then led Alex over and around the ruined plants, toward the exterior door. Through the windows she saw students, in clusters and duos, heading toward Main Hall.

“Soon as we’re there, we’ll find Adelaide,” Alex said. Her words were slow and heavy, as if she were selecting them, one at a time, from a dream. “We’ll have to speak to Adelaide. It won’t be pleasant but it’s in her now and she can’t be allowed to stay even another night. Hanna and Caspar we might give a week or two, to make arrangements. But Adelaide goes tonight.” She sounded like she might drift off to sleep even before she finished speaking.

“Yes, we’ll speak to Adelaide,” Libbie said, opening The Orangerie door. At once a blade of winter wind shoved them back.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Brookhants,” a few nearby students called. “And Miss Trills!” a few others hastily, amusedly, added.

“Good afternoon, girls,” Libbie said, pulling Alex along, as quickly as she could. Alex seemed not to register the cold, the nonrotted air, the chattering of approaching students.

They walked quickly, Libbie still steering them, until they were up and into the carriage, the door latched, the wheels moving. Alex was asleep—her eyes closed, mouth in a frown—even before they reached the edge of the woods.

Libbie was grateful for the quiet and time to think—grateful not to have to, for the moment, continue to listen to Alex’s awful theories. The hiccupping of the carriage hurt her bruise. She had not looked at it properly for a day or two, having been so preoccupied with Alex, and she worried about what she would find when she did. She knew she should be treating it, that it really should have healed by now, but when she did look at it, she remembered the night she’d gotten it, which she preferred not to do.

Libbie had settled on a story about that night and she was keeping to it: Adelaide had barged in, raving with fever, while Libbie had still been half asleep in the tub. The yellow jackets, the creeping blackness, the wrong things Adelaide had said, all of those were only figments of her then-addled mind. One additionally addled by Addie in such a state.^* And it did no good to dwell on figments.

Besides, there was Alex to dwell on now, anyway. She was plenty addled herself. And so quickly! How could Libbie have known she’d unspool so quickly? A comment here, an accusation there, but this?

She watched Alex sleep. Even closed, her injured eye wept yellow trails of pus.

Libbie shuddered. Perhaps, if she’d told Alex about the book, if she’d done so right after Flo and Clara had died, if she’d said, “I gave it to them because I was so happy for the bright rush of their young love.” What then? Could she have prevented this?

But Libbie already knew what then. Alex would have been aghast. She would have fixated on that act and its ties, however thin, to her imaginary rival: Sara Dahlgren. For days after she would have mooned about, blaming Libbie for endorsing those bad young heroines and their worse club by giving them her personal copy of its manual, a copy gifted to her by her former sweetheart. Alex would have pouted. She might have seethed.

And the truth was, she would have been half right to. Yes, Alex was too often jealous. And yes, sometimes Libbie gave her good reason to be.

The fact that she loved Alex, then and now—though differently—did not change the larger fact that Libbie never should have accepted Harold Brookhants’s offer. Oh, she’d thrown herself into building the school and playing her part as the widowed principal, and she was sometimes content to spend her days and nights with Alex, but what she’d wanted most from Harold Brookhants was his promise that she would not have to bend her own life to the will of the one growing within her. And she got that. Mostly. Ava, as per Harold’s instructions and arrangements, was in France, believing herself to be an orphan whose aunt Libbie would one day send for her to come attend her school.^* Libbie had seen her child only a few times since her birth, one of those in a photograph.

The rest of it—the house on the ocean, the school, even the ever after with Alex—these were not Libbie’s dreams fulfilled, not really.

As a schoolgirl, she’d pursued, and won over, Sara Dahlgren. As a young woman, she’d done the same with Alex. And there were others, lesser, in between. Then she’d been careless, found herself pregnant, and had reconnected with Alex only one day before Harold and Madame Verrett and the rest of her life being offered to her over lemon ice at the Palmer Hotel.

Libbie knew she should be grateful. She had so much to be grateful for, and yet . . .

She’d told Harold that she didn’t want to be married, didn’t want to be a wife. And it’s true that she had not been his wife in any sense of that word other than title—and only that for a matter of months before he died—and yet, she was in a kind of marriage, here, with Alex. That’s how Alex understood what they were to each other. And why shouldn’t she?

Only, Libbie’s feelings hadn’t changed: she did not want to be a wife. Not to Harold Brookhants, certainly. But not to Alex, either. She wanted to belong only to herself.

She wanted. She wanted. She wanted.

If there was a curse at Brookhants, Libbie thought, it wasn’t from a book. It was her own resentment and perpetual discontentment. How did Mary MacLane put it? I am a selfish, conceited, impudent little animal, it is true, but, after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of Wanting . . .

Alex stirred as the carriage slowed in Spite Manor’s drive, its wheels clicking against the shells. As she’d slept, her stung eye had sealed shut with a layer of yellow crust, and now she had to wipe at it with her own spittle in order to get it open. It looked very painful, swollen now to purple, and it left her vision there down to a slit the thickness of a sheet of paper.

Nonetheless, as soon as she’d cleared the gunk from it, she again started in about Adelaide, talking to Adelaide, demanding that she leave at once. Her words were as jumbled and fuzzy as her eye. Libbie managed to get her in the door and up the stairs to the bedroom—not to the room they shared at night, but to Alex’s own bedroom—telling her she needed to sleep before supper.

“We’ll take care of it then,” Libbie promised, first helping Alex out of her coat, then her shirtwaist and skirt. Throughout this process, Alex did not assist, but she did not fight, either. Soon she was in only her chemise, the look on her face as hollow as a rotten stump.

Libbie peeled back the bedding and said, “You sleep now and I’ll wake you later and we’ll talk to Addie together.”

“Don’t you go to her alone,” Alex said, a twinge of panic still in her voice though her exhaustion was winning. “I know how she lures you and you let her. I know how you like it, but now it isn’t safe.”

Only once Libbie had agreed did Alex lay her head against the pillow.

“By tonight we’ll have done the job,” Alex said. “The ridding.”

“Yes,” Libbie said. She thought Alex meant Adelaide, that later that night Alex believed they’d be rid of Adelaide. But what Alex really meant was that they’d be rid of the trouble, the Devil, at Brookhants.

Either way, Readers, things did not go as planned.