The Glasshouse Winter

The thermometer by the station door said minus eleven, and someone had drawn a small sad face in the frost beside it.

Iris Fenn stood on the platform at Aldermoor Halt with her suitcase at her feet and her hands pushed so far into her coat pockets that she could feel the seams, and watched the only train of the day pull away into the white. It took its noise with it. What was left was a silence so complete that she could hear the snow settling on the brim of her hat.

Nobody had come to meet her.

The letter was in her inside pocket. She did not need to take it out; she had read it enough times on the journey north to know it by heart. Miss Fenn — My late brother’s collection requires immediate and expert attention. The heating in the glasshouse is adequate, the gardener is not available, and I am told you are the best person in the country for Phalaenopsis. Board and lodging will be provided. The fee is as stated. Come at once. C. Hale.

Not the gardener has left. Not the gardener is unwell. The gardener is not available. Iris had turned the phrase over for three hundred miles and still could not decide what shape it was.

She picked up the suitcase and started to walk.

Aldermoor House was a mile and a half from the Halt, up a drive that had been lined with limes when the family still had the money for limes. Now it was lined with snow, and the limes stood up out of it like the black bones of a much larger animal. Iris kept to the middle, where a single set of cart tracks had frozen into ridges, and tried not to think about her feet.

She saw the glasshouse before she saw the house.

It rose out of the white on the far side of the lawn: a long, high, arched hall of iron and glass, far larger than anything she had imagined from the letter, its roof climbing to a lantern at the centre like a small cathedral somebody had set down in the wrong county. The snow had slid from its steep sides and gathered in drifts against the low walls. And the glass was not white, as she would have expected on a morning like this, frosted blind from edge to edge. The glass was clear. It was wet. Inside, blurred by condensation, she could see green — impossible, crowded, living green — and among the green, here and there, a colour so bright it looked like a mistake. Orange. Violet. A red like a struck match.

Someone was keeping it warm.

* * *

Iris stopped on the drive, the suitcase dragging at her arm, and looked at the chimney that rose from the boiler house at the glasshouse’s northern end. A thin grey thread of smoke went straight up from it into the windless air and vanished.

The gardener was not available. But somebody, every night since November, in the coldest winter in living memory, had been getting up in the dark to stoke that fire.

Behind her, up at the house, a door opened. A woman’s voice carried across the snow, clear and unhurried and not at all surprised.

“Miss Fenn. You found us. I’m afraid you’ve come a very long way to look after a great many things that are already dead.”

Iris looked back at the glasshouse, at the red flower burning behind the glass.

“Not all of them,” she said.