It had been fortuitous for them all. Now that they’d spoken about it, it had planted the roots of something warm and real in the remains of their previous cold, twisted friendship.
“Tonight, then?” Geraldine asked, almost two hours later as the ladies came back up to the entrance of the gardens.
Mrs. Blickstall was waiting for Jane, seated at a bench near the entrance. She glanced up, but if she found anything odd about the fact that the ladies were walking arm in arm and smiling at one another with genuine pleasure, she didn’t say it.
Genevieve kissed Jane’s cheek, and then Geraldine leaned in and did the same.
“Things will be better now,” Geraldine whispered. “For all of us. You’ll see.” They waved goodbye.
Mrs. Blickstall stood to go.
But somehow, leaving seemed wrong. Jane wasn’t sure why until she remembered what she’d left in the greenhouse. She’d pretended at the time that she hadn’t seen what had happened, but some part of her still saw that shattered plant out of the corner of her eye.
“I need a little longer,” she said.
One lovely thing about bribing her chaperone was that Jane always got her way. Mrs. Blickstall shrugged and subsided into her seat. Jane walked back into the gardens, down the path alongside the brook, back toward the greenhouses.
She was a blight. A poison. A pestilence. She was the enemy of all proper conversation. Grown men would rather be mauled to death by lions than converse with her.
She’d hated everyone for the jests they’d made at her expense.
So when had she started believing them? That she was a plague, that nobody could truly like her? That every word out of her mouth was a burden for others?
She came to the greenhouses and headed back to the desert room. She opened the door, hoping her memory exaggerated the damage. But no. That poor little plant was still in pieces. Bradenton had hit it so hard that it had split all the way to the root.
But it wasn’t a blight or a pestilence. It was just a plant, and it didn’t deserve to die.
Jane didn’t know how to go forward, how to remake the person she had become. She was never going to be like Geraldine or Genevieve with smooth manners and perfect skin. She would always talk too much, say the wrong things, wear the wrong clothing. But maybe…
Maybe things really could change. A little.
And she knew the first thing she needed to do.
Jane had to rap on three doors before one opened at her knock.
Beyond the doorframe, Jane saw a glassed-in room and tiny plastic pots of little seedlings. A woman in a dark dress, covered by a navy smock, her hands in dirt-stained garden gloves, stood at the door. Her eyebrows were raised as she contemplated Jane. She took in Jane’s gown—bright orange-and-cream, with fussy cherubs on her skirts—and those eyebrows went up even farther.
“Well?” the other woman asked. “What is it?”
“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Jane said. “But I was walking in the greenhouses and…there is this cactus. Something happened to it.”
The woman did not look impressed. “It is a cactus,” she said. “They usually look like they’re dying. That’s normal.” She started to close the door.
“No, wait,” Jane said. “It’s been broken to bits. It looks like a boy hit it.”
The woman looked up and sighed. “Oh, very well. Maybe I should have a look.” She turned away, rummaging among items on a metal shelf until she found a small pot, a set of shears, and another pair of gloves. “Let’s go see this cactus.”
Jane trotted down the hall. She’d expected to find an old, hoary gardener, or a young man with calloused hands and a broad accent. But this woman, by her cultured tones and the stiff, starched fabric under her gardening smock, seemed to be a well-bred lady.
“I’m surprised,” Jane said. “I hadn’t thought that the Botanic Gardens would hire a lady.”
“Hire?” The woman huffed. “Don’t be ridiculous. I volunteer.”
The other woman hadn’t spoken a sentence longer than a handful of words and did not give the air of being particularly talkative. “Of course,” Jane said. “I’m sorry.” She wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for. “It’s in here.”
“I know,” the woman replied. “There’s only one greenhouse for the desert succulents.” So saying, she swept into the room. With her smock, she reminded Jane of a nurse—aproned and gloved and ready to fix any ills. Her eyes lit on the plant that Bradenton had destroyed. The center had been smashed to bits, and the little spiky green tentacles lay about it, hewn off.
The lady stopped. “Oh,” she crooned, in a far different voice than the steel-laden one she’d used to converse with Jane. “You poor, poor baby.”
She gathered up the clay pot almost tenderly and gently poked through bits of broken cactus.
“Can you save it?” Jane asked.
“It’s a cactus,” the other woman replied absently. “They grow in deserts. They’ve evolved to withstand sun and slicing sandstorms.” She sounded proud. “You can kill a cactus, but it takes a sustained effort—consistent overwatering and the like. This piece of vandalism?” She shrugged. “This is just an act of propagation.”
So saying, she scooped up a little sand into the smaller pot she’d brought with her. She trimmed the damaged cactus, removing the broken tentacles, piling them on the ground as she worked.
“There,” she finally said. “Now we get to the fun bit.” She picked up the green tentacles and poked them back into the soil. “First there was one cactus, now there are seven, eight…” She took the last piece and stuck it into the pot that she’d filled. “Nine.”
“What? That’s it? No water, no special potions?”
“It’ll take a few months for them to take root,” the woman replied. “Water them only when the sand is dry. But yes, as I said. The cactus is a hard plant to kill.” She handed the pot to Jane. “Here. For you.”
“Oh my goodness,” Jane said in surprise. “Can you do that? Just give me a cactus like that?” She frowned and looked at the woman. “Wait. You’re only a volunteer. You can’t.”
“If you walk out the doors with it, you’ll own it nonetheless,” the woman replied. “I had not thought that the intrepid Miss Jane Fairfield would balk at a little thing like ownership.”