The Chemical Garden Series Books 1-3: Wither, Fever, Sever

I purse my chapped lips, fighting the desire to tell him that if I can go anywhere, I want to go back to Manhattan. I can’t let him know my dreams of escape, because then he’ll never let me go. Truth doesn’t factor into my escape plan.

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I say. “I suppose I was just jealous. You haven’t paid any attention to me, and I thought that if we could have the party here, you would feel better. It would be like a funeral for Rose. You could celebrate your new marriages and move on.”

He looks so taken aback, so touched by my lie, that I almost feel bad about it. I am sorry that his dead wife is being dissected in the basement, her beauty ruined and raped, while I use her name against him. One afternoon, as Rose lay in a sweaty daze, teetering on the edge of consciousness, she made me swear that I would look after Linden, and I promised I would. I didn’t expect to keep that promise, but maybe my lie will at least do him some good in the meantime.

“I wanted to bury her,” he says, “but my father didn’t think it was a good idea. He says we don’t know if the virus she had—” His voice catches, and he takes a moment. “If it would affect the soil. So he gave me her ashes.”

I wait for him to mention the child that was scattered here, but he doesn’t. That is a privacy he means to keep. Or maybe it’s just too painful.

“Are you going to scatter her?” I ask.

“I did,” he says. “Last night after the party. I thought it was time to say good-bye.”

After his tryst with Cecily, I suppose. Even Cecily’s adoration can’t subdue his heartache. But I don’t say anything. Now is not the time to talk about Cecily. Instead we turn, arm in arm, husband and wife, and head back to the sprawling mansion that is covered in ivy. I think of the ivy leaf I’ve hidden for myself in a romance novel that will end happily or tragically, and all the while I wonder whose ashes were really scattered last night.

For the next few nights Linden invites all three of us to dine with him. And on most nights he stays in my bed. All we do is talk and sleep. He lies in the blankets and watches me rub lotion on my hands, brush my hair, close the curtains, and sip my evening tea. I don’t mind his presence so much. I know it would be too much for Jenna, and I would prefer that he leave Cecily alone, because she will let him do anything to her, and her sudden frailty worried me that morning after the party. I know she’s jealous that he’s coming to me now, and I think it’s none of her business, so I answer none of her questions. But Linden and I don’t even touch, except for sometimes when I feel his fingers in my hair sending ripples into my dreams.

He will talk to me until I succumb to exhaustion. Gabriel starts bringing my breakfast at the same time as my sister wives, and he brings extra food for Linden, who will ask for unpredictable things such as a cup of syrup or grapes, which he will eat by dangling the vine over his lips. Gabriel stops hiding June Beans for me, and I miss them. I miss talking to him. We don’t have many chances to so much as look at each other because Linden begins taking me for walks in the daytime.

On warm days he brings all three of us down to the pool. Jenna sunbathes; Cecily somersaults from the diving board with screams of delight that suggest a childhood and freedom she will never have. I spend much of my time underwater, where there are holograms of jellyfish and the ocean floor. Sharks speed toward me and then cut through me, clearing the path for schools of bright yellow and orange fish, whales as big as the pool itself. Sometimes I forget that none of these things are real, and I dive deeper and deeper, searching for Atlantis, and then finding only the bottom of the pool.

There are whole days like this. And it’s nice, I think. Like having freedom. Like having sisters. Even Jenna will dip her toes into the water, give me a little splash. One afternoon Cecily and I conspire to each grab one of her ankles and pull her in. Jenna screams indignantly, and clings to the edge, swearing that we’re awful and she hates us. But eventually she comes out of it. She and I hold hands as we go under; we try to catch holographic guppies.

Linden doesn’t swim, though sometimes he asks us how we’re enjoying the holograms. He’s pale and thin in his swim trunks. He reads architecture magazines while sitting on a damp towel, and I think it means he’s getting ready to work again. Maybe he’ll start to leave the property. Maybe he’ll attend a party. And I will be on his arm. I know my escape will have to be carefully planned and that I won’t be able to simply vanish into the crowd on my first night out. But maybe there will be a televised event. Maybe Rowan will be watching and he’ll see that I’m alive.

One afternoon I run inside to get an extra towel from the cabinet by the door, and I almost careen into Gabriel, who is holding a tray of orange juice in stem glasses. “Sorry,” I say.

“Sounds like you’re having fun,” he says, not quite meeting my eyes. “Excuse me.” He steps around me.

“Wait,” I say. I glance over my shoulder to be sure none of the others, lounging and splashing at the pool on the other side of the glass door, are watching. Gabriel turns to face me. “Are you mad at me for something?” I ask.

“No. I just didn’t think you had time to speak to an attendant anymore,” he says. I am not liking the darkness in his normally gentle eyes. “Now that you’re the wife of a House Governor.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” I say.

“There’s nothing to explain, Lady Rhine,” he says. That’s technically what the help is supposed to call me, but I guess I don’t have the right air to carry it, because around the house I have always been Rhine. Or blondie. Though Gabriel is right, I haven’t been able to speak to anyone but Linden and my sister wives for days. I miss sitting on the kitchen counter and talking to the cooks, and I miss talking to Gabriel. I miss the June Beans, and I’m running low on my supply in the drawer. But these are hardly things I can say in Linden’s or Housemaster Vaughn’s presence, and I never see Gabriel anymore unless at least one of them is nearby.

“What is it?” I say. “What did I do?”

“I guess I just didn’t expect you to fall for the House Governor so easily,” he says.

It’s such an absurd thought that I laugh and choke on the word “What?”

“I live in the same house, you know,” he says. “I bring you breakfast every morning.”

He’s wrong, so horribly wrong. And I am so offended that I abandon any intentions to correct him. “You didn’t expect me to share a bed with my own husband?” I say.

“I guess I didn’t,” he says. And then he opens the sliding glass door and steps out into the sunshine, leaving me to stand there, dripping wet, teeth chattering, wondering what the hell this place has made me become.

At dinner I am silent. Linden asks me if the food is all right, and I wait until Gabriel has finished pouring my sparkling water before I nod. I really want to pull Gabriel aside and talk to him. I want to explain that he’s wrong about Linden and me. But Housemaster Vaughn is sitting at the table, and his presence makes me keep my head down.

In the elevator after dinner, Gabriel escorts us to our floor. I try to catch his gaze, but he seems to be deliberately avoiding me.

Cecily stands beside me and rubs her temples. “Why are the lights so bright?” she says.

The doors open, and Jenna and I get out on our floor, but Cecily doesn’t move.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

And that’s when I notice how pale she is. Her face glistens in a sheen of sweat. “I don’t feel right,” she says. As soon as the sentence is uttered, her eyes flutter up into her head, and Gabriel just catches her as she collapses into a lifeless heap.

of them rushing into and out of Cecily’s room like in a busy anthill. Housemaster Vaughn is there, and Linden is pacing back and forth over the threshold. Jenna and I are herded into our bedrooms, and I sit at my dressing table, too stunned and worried to try for sleep.

Should I have told Linden how awful she looked the morning after the party? He would have listened to me. I should have reminded him that she’s only a child. He doesn’t realize these obvious things, and I should have intervened.

Is she bleeding? Is she dying? Earlier today she was fine.

I press my ear to my door, trying to overhear something other than the incomprehensible mutterings across the hall. When the door opens, I almost fall over. Gabriel is peering into the room. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he says softly. I move out of the way to let him in, and he closes the door behind him. It’s unusual to see him in my bedroom without a tray in his hands.

“I wanted to see if you were okay,” he says. There’s no bitterness in his tone. His eyes are their familiar peaceful blue, with none of the resentment I saw earlier today. Maybe he’s just set all that ugliness aside for the moment, but I’m so relieved by his familiarity that I hug him.

He tenses at first, stunned, and then he wraps his arms around me, and I feel his chin rest on the top of my head.

“It’s been awful,” I say.

“I know,” he says, and I feel his arms shift. I’ve never been this close to him before. He’s taller and sturdier than Linden, who is a few pounds from blowing away. And he smells like the kitchen, like all the noise and energy and things boiling and baking.

“You don’t know,” I say, inching away just enough to look at him. A sort of gentle haze has taken over his face; he looks flushed. “It’s not just Cecily. All of us are suffering in this marriage. Jenna hates him, you know. And I know how Linden looks at me—like I’m Rose. It’s my only defense to play along, but it’s so exhausting at night to have him lying beside me, muttering her name in his sleep. It’s like he’s erasing me, a little more every day.”

“He couldn’t erase you,” Gabriel assures me.

“And you,” I say. “Don’t you ever call me Lady Rhine. I heard how it sounded for the first time today, and I hate it. It’s not right at all.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’m sorry. Anything you and the House Governor do is none of my business.”

“It’s not that!” I cry, and put my hands firmly on his shoulders. I lower my voice, just in case anyone might be standing in the hall outside. “It will be the very coldest day in hell before Linden Ashby has his way with me, all right?” I almost keep talking. I almost tell him about my plan to escape, but I decide against it. For now that will remain my secret. “Do you believe me?” I say.

“I never believed otherwise,” he says. “But I saw him in your bed and—I don’t know. It got to me.”

“Yeah, well, it gets to me, too.” I laugh a little, and he follows my lead. I break away and sit on the edge of my mattress. “So, what’s happening with Cecily?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Housemaster Vaughn is in there with a few of the house doctors.” He watches my face drop. “But, hey, listen. I’m sure she’s all right. If it was very serious, they would have moved her to a hospital in the city.”

I look at my hands in my lap and sigh.

“Can I get you anything?” Gabriel says. “What about tea? Or some strawberries. You hardly ate at dinner.”

I don’t want tea or strawberries. I don’t want Gabriel to be my attendant right now. I want him to sit here with me and be my friend. I want to know he won’t be punished for it later. I want us both to be free.

Maybe if I ever work out a plan to escape, I can bring him with me. I think he would like the harbor.

But I don’t know how to say all of this in a way that won’t make me seem weak, so all that comes out is, “Tell me about yourself.”

“Myself?” He looks confused.

“Yes,” I say, patting the mattress.

“You know all there is to know,” he says, sitting beside me.

“Not true,” I say. “Where were you born? What’s your favorite season? Anything.”

“Here. Florida,” he says. “I remember a woman in a red dress with curly brown hair. Maybe she was my mother, I’m not sure. And summer. What about you?” The last part is said with a smile. He smiles so infrequently that I consider each one a sort of trophy.

“Fall is my favorite,” I say. He already knows about Manhattan, and that my parents died when I was twelve.

I’m thinking up another round of questions when there’s a knock at the door. Gabriel stands and smoothes out the wrinkles in the comforter where he sat. I grab the empty glass on my nightstand in case I need to pretend I was asking him for a refill. “Come in,” I say.

It’s Elle, Cecily’s domestic. Her eyes are wild with excitement. “Guess what I’ve come to tell you,” she says. “You’ll never guess. Cecily is going to have a baby!”

In the weeks that follow, Linden devotes so much time to Cecily that I become the invisible bride again. I know this lack of attention is bad for my escape plan, but I can’t help feeling a little less burdened without his constant presence, at least for now. When Gabriel brings breakfast to my room, he and I are free to talk once again. He’s the only attendant bringing meals to the wives’ floor, so he brings me breakfast early, while my sister wives are asleep, although Cecily’s sleep pattern has become more erratic as her pregnancy progresses.

Spending time with Gabriel is nothing like the obligatory time spent with my husband. I can be honest with Gabriel. I can tell him that I miss Manhattan, which had once seemed to me like the biggest place in the world, but now feels as distant as a star.

“There used to be more boroughs dividing the city—Brooklyn, I think, and Queens, and a few others. But they called it all Manhattan after they added the lighthouses and new harbors, and they labeled the boroughs by their purpose. Mine is factories and shipping. To the west is fishing, and to the east is mostly residences.”

“Why?” Gabriel asks, biting into a piece of toast from my breakfast tray. He’s sitting on the ottoman, by the window, and the morning light brightens the ring of blue around his pupils.

“Don’t know.” I roll onto my stomach and rest my chin on my arms. “Maybe it got too confusing trying to keep all those boroughs straight; they’re mostly industrialized, aside from the residences. Maybe the president couldn’t bother to learn the difference.”

“Sounds stifling,” he says.

“A little,” I admit, “but the buildings are hundreds of years old, some of them. When I was little, I used to pretend I was leaving my front door and stepping into the past. I used to pretend …” My voice trails off. I trace my finger along the seam of my blanket.

“What?” Gabriel asks, leaning toward me.

“I’ve never said it out loud before,” I say, just now realizing it. “But I used to pretend I was going out into the twenty-first century, and I’d see people who were all different ages, and I’d get to grow up and be just like them.” There’s a long silence, and I keep my eyes on the seam because suddenly it’s difficult to look at Gabriel. But I can feel him looking at me. And after a few seconds he comes to the edge of my bed; I feel the mattress dip slightly under his weight.

“Forget it,” I say, trying to manage a laugh. “It’s dumb.”

“No,” he says. “It’s not.”

His finger trails after mine, along the blanket, making a straight line up and down, our hands not quite touching. A flood of warmth rushes through me, creating a smile I can’t avoid. There will be no adulthood for me, I know that, and it’s been a long time since I’ve even pretended. I could never share this fantasy with my parents; it would have saddened them. Or with my brother; he would have called it pointless. And so I kept it to myself, forced myself to outgrow it. But now, watching Gabriel’s hand move alongside my own as though we’re playing a game with a set rhythm and method, I let the fantasy return. One day I’ll step outside of this mansion, and there will be the world. The healthy, thriving world, with a beautiful path to the rest of my long life.

“You should see it,” I say. “The city, I mean.”

His voice is soft. “I’d like that.”

There’s a knock at my closed door, and Cecily’s voice asks, “Is Linden in there with you? He was supposed to bring me some hot chocolate.”

“No,” I say.

“But I hear voices,” she says. “Who’s with you?”

Gabriel stands, and I smooth out the blankets as he picks up my breakfast tray from the dressing table.

“Try paging the kitchen,” I tell her. “Maybe someone there knows where he is. Or try Elle.”

She hesitates, knocks again. “Can I come in?”

I sit up, quickly throw the blankets across the mattress, and smooth out the wrinkles, fluff up the pillows. I haven’t done anything wrong, but now I suddenly feel strange about her discovering Gabriel in my room. I cross the room and open the door. “What do you want?” I say.

She pushes past me, stares at Gabriel, sizing him up with her brown eyes.

“I’d better get these dishes to the kitchen,” he says awkwardly. I try to give him an apologetic look over Cecily’s shoulder, but he won’t acknowledge me. He’ll barely even look up from his shoes.

“Well, then, bring up some hot chocolate,” Cecily says. “Extra, extra hot, and don’t put marshmallows in it. You always do that, and they get all melted and gross because it takes you so long to bring it upstairs. Put marshmallows in a bowl on the side. No, bring a whole bag.”

He nods, moves past us. Cecily peers out into the hallway until the elevator doors have closed behind Gabriel. Then she spins to face me. “Why was your door closed?”

“None of your business,” I snap. I realize how suspicious that sounds, but I can’t help it. Talking to Gabriel is one of the few luxuries I have. My sister wife has no right, and yet every right, to take it away.

I sit on the ottoman and pretend to arrange the hair accessories in the top drawer, fuming.

“He’s just an attendant,” Cecily says, walking the length of my room and tracing her finger along the wall. “And he’s stupid, anyway. He never brings enough cream or sugar with the tea, and it takes him so long to bring my meals that the food’s always cold by the time—”

“He’s not stupid,” I interrupt. “You just like to complain.”

“Complain?” she splutters. “Complain? You’re not the one throwing up breakfast every morning. You’re not the one trapped in bed all day because of this stupid pregnancy. I do not think I’m asking for too much when I expect the stupid attendants to do their job, which is to bring me whatever I want.” She drops onto my mattress and folds her arms in defiance. Point made.

From this angle I can see the slight bump coming up under her nightgown. And vaguely I can smell something like vomit under whatever perfume she’s wearing. Her hair is disheveled, her skin pale. And, loathe as I am to admit it, I understand her sour mood. She’s going through more than a girl her age should.

“Here,” I say, reaching into my drawer and handing her one of the red candies Deirdre gave me on my wedding day. “This will settle your stomach a little.”

She takes it and pops it into her mouth with an “mm” of satisfaction.

“And giving birth is going to hurt, you know,” she says. “I might even die.”

“You won’t die,” I say, forcing away the thought that Linden’s mother died in childbirth.

“But I might,” she says. All the challenge has left her voice. She sounds almost afraid as she looks at the candy wrapper in her hand. “So they should get me whatever I want.”

I sit beside her and put my arm around her. She settles her head against my shoulder. “Okay,” I agree. “You should get whatever you want. But you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, you know.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s something my mother used to say,” I tell her. “It means that if you’re nice to people, they’ll be happier to do things for you. Maybe even do a little extra.”

“Is that why you’re so nice to him?” she says.

“Who?”

“That attendant. You’re always talking to him.”

“Maybe,” I say. I feel my cheeks starting to burn. Thankfully Cecily isn’t looking at me. “I’m just being nice, I guess.”

“You shouldn’t be so nice,” she says. “It gives the wrong impression.”