The Cloisters(15)
“They let her work around her school schedule?”
He shook his head. “Don’t you know? Girls like Rachel Mondray get whatever they ask for.” He bit off a piece of brown tape and used it to wrap a broken branch of myrrh. The tender way he held back the leaves at odds with the rest of him. “What about you, Ann Stilwell? Are you getting what you ask for?”
The question, and the way he had positioned his body, made me feel trapped against the bench, but I didn’t want to be free.
“Do you know what butcher’s-broom is?” He pointed at the pot on the other side of me.
“I don’t.”
“It’s a member of the asparagus family, but if eaten in large quantities, it can rupture or destroy your red blood cells.”
I looked at the plant with its glossy green leaves and bright red berries.
“We grow a lot of poisons at The Cloisters,” he said. “You’ll have to be careful. Some of them are incredibly beautiful and look edible. They aren’t.”
“Can you show me?” I said, feeling a surge of confidence to ask for what I wanted. Being close to Leo was like holding a hand above an electric current—a sharp, animating pulse—that I had never had the bravery to touch. Now, I yearned to tap my hand against the live wire.
He pushed off his heels and stood up, walking toward a bed of herbs that tumbled and fell over each other; I followed.
“In this bed, we grow hemlock and belladonna, both of which you’ve probably heard of. But we grow others, too, henbane and hound’s-tongue, vervain and mandrake. All herbs found in medieval medicine and magic. In fact, this whole cloister is planted with poisons and remedies you might find in the eleventh or fifteenth century. Those urns over there”—he pointed to a pair of tall stone vessels full of waxy green leaves and pink flowers—“oleander. Very deadly, but also very popular as a poultice in ancient Rome. If you push the leaves aside, you’ll be able to see the labels.”
I leaned forward as he held back a shower of hemlock flowers, revealing a ceramic tile on which was neatly engraved the Latin for hemlock, Conium maculatum.
“Here we have Catananche caerulea,” he said, holding a blue flower between his fingers.
I pulled aside the sinewy vines to find the plaque, which read CUPID’S DART.
“It was believed to cure the love-sick,” he said, his voice low and so close to my neck that I could feel the baby-fine hairs on my nape stand up. The urge to lean in closer surprised me.
He led me toward another bed, a calloused hand on my arm. I felt a blind welling of attraction growing inside me, a feeling that didn’t abate even when I noticed Rachel standing beneath a pointed arch that led out to the garden, her eyes following us. There was something about being watched that made me braver, that made me close the gap between our bodies when Leo moved his hand from my arm to the small of my back, that made me bite the inside of my lip in anticipation. We arrived at a bed full of lemon balm, its warm citrus notes mixing with the lavender and sage that surrounded it.
“It’s even more powerful if you close your eyes,” he said, closing his and taking a deep inhale. Across the courtyard I watched Rachel raise her eyebrow.
“I have to go,” I said.
He followed my gaze to Rachel on the other side of the cloister.
“Of course,” he said. “Rachel always gets what she wants.”
I wanted him to say more, but Rachel held up her wrist and pointed at her watch. Already I had been with Leo for almost a half hour.
“I’m sorry,” I said, not sure how to break away from the strange intimacy of the moment.
When I joined her, Rachel put an arm around my shoulder, casual but possessive. “Having fun?”
“Just learning about plants.”
“And the teacher, too?”
I didn’t look back until we were walking down the passageway toward the library, but when I did, I noticed him trimming a thick hedge, covered in shiny black berries. Belladonna, Leo had said.
CHAPTER FIVE
The night was hot, so hot that my window unit couldn’t keep pace but just heaved and sputtered against the still summer that clung to the streets outside. I lay in bed, resenting every inch of sheet that touched my skin until the sky began to lighten, and thinking of the only place I knew in the city that was reliably cool, with its heavy stone chapels and vaults, decided it was not too early, at quarter to five, to leave for work.
If security was surprised to see me arrive, they didn’t show it. Instead, I was passed a fresh page of the after-hours sign-in book without fanfare, and made my way to the library. In the galleries, the statuettes cast narrow shadows that spidered up the walls. With only early-morning sun for additional light, the precious stones from the reliquaries left watery, colored pools on the floor. My footsteps, the only sound that echoed through the twelfth-century hallways. When I passed a guard slumped in his chair, eyes closed, I didn’t blame him. It was cooler and more comfortable than my apartment, too.
The door to the library was unlocked, but when I pushed it open, there was something different about the space—a thickness to the air and the sulfur smell of matches. I fumbled along the rough stone wall for a light switch before the door closed, taking with it what little light there was. In the dark, I put my hands out in front of me and inched forward until I hit one of the study tables and grasped for the reading lamp, pulling its string until the green glass shade lit up, a sad beacon that sent its illumination onto the oak table, not the room as a whole. I hadn’t noticed that, in the darkness, my breathing had ratcheted up; I only noticed now that it had returned to normal.