A Stranger in the Garden Read Free Page B

He’d sent the magic forth. But something had gone wrong. Something always went wrong before the Grue. The searching tentacles snapped back. . . .
    He realized then that Gwen had been talking to him, and he looked at her again with the Grue’s intense hunger. “It lures the insects in with honey-sweetness,” she said. “And then”—she clapped her hands together—“it catapults them into a trap, like so!”
    A plant after my own heart, the Grue murmured.
    You have no heart, Charles thought back at him.
    Neither do you. Do what must be done and be quick about it. This fog provides us the perfect opportunity.
    “I should like to see more of your estate, sir,” he said to Darwin. “That is, if you’re willing to show me.”
    Darwin nodded and escorted them out. He took them to the place he called his Sandwalk, a gravel path through privet and boxwoods, overlooking a meadow on one side and woven with ancient trees and mistletoe on the other.
    “The Light Side and the Dark Side,” Gwen said, gesturing. She grabbed Charles’s hand again and pulled him forward.
    He looked down at her. “Which side will we walk on?”
    Gwen tilted her head as she gazed up at him. “I think the Dark Side suits you better. Don’t you think so?”
    “Most assuredly,” he murmured.
    Darwin held up a hand when Gwen reached for him. “You go on ahead, dear. I would like to talk with Mr. Waddingly alone for a bit. Don’t go too far, please.”
    Again she regarded them with the piercing stare of a bird. Then she nodded and was off down the Dark Side in the span of a wink.
    “I wanted to speak to you where only the trees can hear us,” Darwin said.
    Charles waited. The Grue was encouraging him to seize the Saint again.
    “Before you even think of harming me,” Darwin said, “I have protection.” He pulled a chain from under his collar. From it hung a tiny vial filled with dark liquid. “I take this every day. It is made of the holy waters of Malvern and several proprietary herbs. My blood is rife with it. You would not enjoy me anymore.”
    The Grue snarled within at the mention of Malvern. A memory surfaced of a circle of beings of light forcing a dark man into a pool of bubbling water. Charles shook his head. “I think there’s some mistake. . . .”
    “There can be no mistake!” Darwin said. “I saw you when you appeared in my garden. It was just the same as when the Shining One appeared to me in the jungles of South America. I was surprised you did not offer me the same bargain.”
    “What sort of bargain?” Charles asked warily.
    “She wanted to be returned to her homeland. She had been exiled. In exchange for her passage, she promised me understanding. She promised the ability to comprehend the vast scheme of evolution, that all the stumbling blocks I’d met in my life’s work would come clear.”
    Charles listened with fascination. The Grue was silent. This was apparently a development he had not anticipated.
    “I did what she asked. It seemed a small price to pay for the knowledge she gave me. But a parasite, as any good scientist knows, often weakens the host. I just did not expect how much I would be weakened. I was ill unto death by the time we arrived back in England.” Darwin paused, looking out across the fog-ridden fields.
    “I have never told any of this to anyone. It is peculiar that the first one I would tell would be another of your kind,” Darwin finally said.
    “I am listening,” the Grue said through Charles’s lips.
    “So, I am correct. I recognize the timbre of that voice.” Darwin looked at Charles and smiled ruefully. “I thought perhaps I’d gone mad when I saw you. What do you want with the boy?”
    “The same that my kinswoman wanted from you—safe passage,” the Grue said.
    “But it is never safe, is it?” Darwin said. “When I returned, she spied my beloved daughter Annie. And instead of doing as she’d promised, she took up house in my Annie. I took her to Malvern.