Her Little Flowers by Shannon Morgan

Author:Shannon Morgan [Morgan, Shannon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Francine’s shoulders tightened the moment she stepped inside the manor, sensing a resentful tension that pressed down on her until she stooped under the weight of unsaid truths and false memory.

Grimacing, she forced herself to straighten, then hurried upstairs to check Madeleine’s room. All her clothes were still there, strewn about in typical Madeleine fashion. Francine wasn’t sure if her sister would carry out her threat to leave, for she tended to live in the heat of the moment. Francine hoped she would stay and was sorry they had argued. She needed someone, a living someone, and Madeleine was the only family she had left.

She went back downstairs, grabbed her tray of cleaning detergents, and set to scrubbing the house vigorously in an effort to clear her mind, which was twisted into a jigsaw of broken thoughts, dark suppositions, and uneasy ideas. But no amount of cleaning could rid the air of its edgy sharpness or the brittle hostility leaching from the walls.

Francine put the cleaning stuff away and escaped into the garden to take out her disquiet on the plants she hadn’t got around to pruning yet. Grabbing a pair of pruning shears, she stalked up to the maze of rhododendrons and came over all cold.

She held her breath lest the wisp of memory disappear of Bree as she had once been, alive and vital with youth, intent on something Francine couldn’t see.

Bree turned and pressed a finger to her lips, then she darted out into the sunlight and ran across the wide lawn to the house. Francine hurried after her. Bree opened the front door, then closed it softly behind them.

A murmuring . . . Mum’s voice. Strained, tightly controlled . . . fearful.

Bree took five-year-old Francine’s hand and tiptoed across the foyer. They stopped in front of the closed door of the drawing room, their breath tight and shallow.

A sibilance of wordless whispers . . .

Bree pressed her ear to the door, her face scrunched with concentration . . .

A sharp pain broke Francine’s absorption of the drawing room door, the whispers fading back into the walls as reality righted itself.

She glanced down at her hand; the tip of her pruning shears was rusty with a drop of her blood where she’d gripped them too hard in her fist.

With a tremulous sigh, she tried to grasp the memory again, but it was already fracturing into nothing more than tattered, untethered threads, leaving only a residual impression of trepidation.

She became aware of the quiet ticks and creaks of the manor, its attention turned elsewhere, inwards, away from the drawing room, away from Francine. With a visceral feeling that her home was turning its back on her, she almost cried with the agonizing sense of alienation, overwhelming in its intensity.

Francine fled outside, to the far end of the garden before turning to face her beloved home. Was the manor trying to tell her something? A secret within its walls. A secret so dreadful . . .

“Stop this, Francine!” she shouted to the wide sky and the long shadows creeping across the lawn.

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