Read Chapter 6: The Missing Gardener

The rain had stopped, leaving the garden glittering and raw. I found Merrick at the far edge of the rose beds, his hands buried in the wet soil, coaxing a tangled stem back toward its stake. His sleeves were rolled past his elbows, and for the first time I noticed the pale scars crisscrossing his forearms—old, silvered things, like the roots of some forgotten plant.

“Tomas,” I said. “The man who kept this garden before you.”

Merrick didn’t look up. His fingers worked the earth with practiced patience. “You’ve been thinking.”

“I’ve been asking the wrong questions, apparently. You told me that yourself.”

A pause. The wind lifted a strand of hair across his face, and he tucked it behind his ear with the back of a muddy wrist. “Tomas left. Years ago.”

“Left,” I repeated. “Or disappeared.”

“The distinction was never clear.” He straightened, wiping his hands on his trousers. His eyes found mine, and I saw something flicker there—wariness, or grief. It was hard to tell with Merrick. It was always hard to tell. “He was the keeper before me. Knew the house better than I ever will. One morning he was gone. No note. No goodbye. The cabinet was locked when I found it, and that was that.”

“And no one thought that was strange?”

“The house has its own way of keeping secrets, Miss Ash. Those who leave Merryn House rarely want to be followed.”

I thought of Lillian. Of the way she’d hung up on me, the anger in her voice, the unfinished sentence that had died with her. She had been running *toward* the house, the letter had said. Not away from me. Toward what?

“Where did he stay?” I asked. “When he wasn’t in the main house?”

Merrick studied me for a long moment, and I had the sense he was weighing something—whether I was worth the truth, or whether I would crack under it. Then he nodded toward the eastern hedge. “There’s a shed at the edge of the property. He kept his tools there, his things. I haven’t opened it since he left.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s his,” Merrick said simply. “The house gave it to him, same as it gives everything to those who belong here. I had no right to take it back.”

He turned and walked toward the manor, his boots squelching in the wet grass, and I let him go. But I did not follow him inside. Instead, I crossed the lawn toward the hedge, my heart beating a little too fast, the ring heavy and cold in my pocket where I had taken to carrying it.

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The shed was smaller than I’d imagined, tucked against the cliff edge behind a thicket of brambles and sea holly. Its wooden walls had been weathered to a soft grey, and a rusty padlock hung on the door, but it was open—the latch loose, the chain dangling. Someone had been here since Merrick had last closed it. Or perhaps the house had opened it for me.

I paused at the threshold. The air inside smelled of dry earth and cut stems, of tobacco and something older, something like the salt that crusted every surface of this place. A single window, grimy with years of sea spray, let in a dull grey light.

The bench caught my eye immediately. It was built into the far wall, a heavy plank of oak worn smooth in the centre, and on its edge someone had carved a name with a knife, deep and deliberate.

TOMAS.

Below it, smaller, almost an afterthought: *He planted what he could not keep.*

I ran my fingers over the letters. The carving was old—years old, certainly—but the wood beneath it was pale, as if the marks had been made recently. I looked closer. The grain was fresh. Splinters clung to the edges of the grooves.

Someone had been here. Recently. Within weeks, days even.

I turned in a slow circle. The shed was mostly empty—a few rusted trowels hanging from hooks, a coil of frayed rope, an empty seed box. But on a narrow shelf above the bench sat a small ceramic pot, chipped at the rim, filled with dried soil. Beside it, folded into a neat square, was a scrap of paper.

I don’t know why I reached for it. Some instinct, some pull, like the ones I’d felt all week—the sense that the house was not a place but a hand, guiding me toward something I was not yet ready to see.

The paper was yellowed at the edges but the ink was fresh. Just one line, in the same sloping hand as the letters beneath my door:

*He left because he saw what I was writing for him.*

My breath caught. I read it again. Then a third time, the words rearranging themselves in my mind like stones shifting underfoot.

Tomas hadn’t left because he’d wanted to. He’d seen his letter. The house had written to him, shown him something true, and he had run—all the way down the cliff path, out of the gate, into whatever life waited beyond Merryn House’s reach.

But he hadn’t taken his tools. His bench. His clothes, if he’d had any here. And he hadn’t taken the pot, which stood on the shelf like an offering, the soil still dark and damp.

I knelt and touched the earth in the pot. It was wet. Recently watered.

The shed was cold, but I felt a prickle at the back of my neck, a sensation that had nothing to do with the wind. I straightened and looked out the window, across the garden toward the manor. Merrick was gone from the rose beds. The house stood grey and patient against the sky, its windows dark, watching.

Someone was still tending this place. Someone who knew Tomas. Someone who had watered his plants long after he’d gone.

I folded the note and slipped it into my pocket beside the ring. The two objects sat together, cold against the fabric, and I had the strangest sense that they belonged to the same story—the ring that had come to me in the attic, the letter that had appeared beneath my door, the name carved into the bench of a man who had seen too much and fled.

On my way back to the house, I stopped at the eastern wall, where a narrow strip of garden had been left to run wild. Among the nettles and bindweed, something caught my eye—a headstone, low and weathered, half-swallowed by moss. I knelt and brushed the growth away.

The name was barely legible, worn by a century of sea wind, but I could make it out.

TOMAS MERRYN. *1842–1887.*

And beneath it, in smaller letters, a single line that made my blood run cold:

*He stayed too long, and the house kept him.*

I stood there for a long moment, the wind whipping my hair across my face, the ring pressing against my thigh. There had been another Tomas, then—a Merryn, from the house’s own line, dead over a century ago. Not the same man. It couldn’t be the same man.

But the carving in the shed was fresh. And the soil in the pot was damp. And the house, I was beginning to understand, had a way of repeating itself.

I turned and walked back toward the manor, my heart beating in my throat. Merrick was waiting in the doorway, his face unreadable.

“You found the shed,” he said. Not a question.

“I found the bench,” I said. “And the pot. Someone’s been watering his plants, Merrick. Someone—or something—has been there recently.”

His jaw tightened. He looked past me, toward the cliff, and for a moment I saw something in his face I hadn’t expected: fear.

“Tomas was not the first,” he said quietly. “He will not be the last. The house writes to all of us eventually, Miss Ash. The only question is what we do when we read what it has to say.”

“And what did it write to you?”

His eyes met mine, dark and old, full of years I would never understand. Then he turned and walked inside, leaving me alone on the threshold with the wind and the salt and the growing certainty that I had not come to this house by accident—that I had been called here, like Tomas, like Isobel, like all the others whose names were carved into the bones of this place.

I took out the ring and slipped it onto my finger. It was cold at first, then warm—too warm, as if it had absorbed something from the house itself.

And beneath my door that evening, when I finally climbed the stairs, there was a new letter. The handwriting was the same. But this time, it was addressed to me by name.

*Elowen,* it began. *You are closer than you know. Ask Merrick what he buried.*