The Girl in the Garden

Chapter 8

Ben was sitting in an uncomfortable wooden chair. Mr. Willoughs was standing between him and the door, his arms crossed over his chest, and his thick white eyebrows held stiffly together,  hanging low over his eyes.

Ms. Herrier was pacing the room, stopping to nervously straighten the frame of an old painting as she passed it. It was a landscape featuring a rolling pasture of flowers. Ben found it boring most days, but right now, he would have done anything to be taken to that field rather than sit and listen to the housekeeper's lecture.

"Have we, or have we not, been clear about my expectations?" She asked, peering down her hooked nose at him as if she was a soaring bird of prey sizing up its prey. "Lolly told you not to go near the conservatory, and that was the first thing you did. You were told the garden was off-limits, and then Mr. Willoughs finds you climbing the wall like a hooligan!"

"I'm sorry," Ben said, though he wasn't sorry in the least. "I was just curious, and I saw—"

"I don't care why you did it! You could have fallen, and then what? You break your neck?"

Ben felt a spark of frustration somewhere deep inside of him. It was a familiar spark by now. "I know, but I didn't fall! And I'm telling you, there was someone—"

"And on my watch no less. How do you think Mr. Frederick would feel about that, hmm? Decades of loyal service terminated because his unruly nephew can't follow some simple instructions."

The spark ignited as Ben considered her words. "So, you're not actually worried that I would get hurt. You're just worried that it could get you fired?"

"Don't presume to know what I'm thinking."

"I'm not presuming anything! You said it out loud. I heard you." Ben was standing up from his chair as he spoke. Even though Ms. Herrier was still looking down on him, he felt taller than before, more confident, as the fire inside him turned up the heat. "I'm not even surprised anyway. Nobody actually cares about me or if I'm okay. They shove me around from one place to another, and nobody tells me what's going on."

Ms. Herrier spoke in a quiet tone, "You should sit back down and relax."

"No! I will not sit back down. I am so tired of being told what to do and what not to do by strangers who don't care about me. If I wanna stand, I'll stand, and you can't stop me!" He wasn't just speaking sternly anymore; he was yelling. He kicked the chair he was sitting on, and it soared across the room.

Ms. Herrier let out a shriek, and her hands quickly covered her mouth while she regained her composure. "That's okay," she said, "I understand."

"No, you don't! You don't know what it's like to feel this way! To be abandoned and shoved around!" The inferno inside was raging now. There was no going back. He was about to insult Ms. Herrier. The words that formed in his mind were mortifying; he knew that, but still, he was prepared to strike at the woman with them without any concern for their consequences.

"Oh!" Ms. Herrier shouted, and Ben was distracted from his oncoming tirade. She pointed past Ben to the chair he had kicked aside and called out. "Elmer, the chair!"

Mr. Willoughs grunted as he snapped into action. Ben turned to the chair and saw that it had erupted into flames. Mr. Willoughs was trying to extinguish the fire, but as Ben felt his rage deflating, the chair was reduced to a pile of burned wood and ash. The fire was gone, and so was his anger.

Ben felt like ten seconds passed in the silence that filled the room, but it could have been ten days. He thought about Dylan's hand, about the closet under the stairs at Wexley House. "I, I... I didn't."