120 Blind Dates... And Other Short Stories

A Flower Tells a Secret

Until I came to Amber Hall, I thought the wild, passionate tales of the Yorkshire moors were a a thing of a past and had been buried with the Brontë sisters in Queen Victoria's time. I had devoured their novels at school, and jumped to work there when the job offer came.

The salary was not great, but more than satisfactory for an inexperienced housekeeper like me. To be quite frank, I had thought I would have to join the ranks of the unemployed, so I was relieved when Mr Anfield hired me even though I was a stranger from London. He told me that I had been the only applicant, which surprised me, given the splendour of his magnificent estate and the fortune of the Anfield family. The main house was not nearly as big as the one on Downton Abbey, but it had been built in the 19th century and looked almost medieval with its high, arched windows and old stones. It even exuded a certain atmosphere of gloom, or maybe this was just a product of my youthful imagination because I was the only inhabitant of the house under 50 and financial problems had forced Mr Anfield to reduce the staff to two gardeners, a cook, a butler who doubled as a chauffeur and me, the housekeeper a few years ago. On Tuesdays and Fridays, an old maid, Mrs George, came by to help me. As she explained to me in our first meeting, she had worked her for the past 50 years, ever since she had left school, and had once been Old Mrs Anfield's personal maid.

Old Mrs Anfield was almost 100 years old, blind and battling dementia according to her son, who apart from Mrs George was the only member of the household allowed to enter her room in the attic of the house. I heard her scream every night in the little room in the old servants's quarters that I had been given, and it made my blood curl. I once overheard how Mrs Anfield, who was a former model in her early fifties and thus twenty years younger than her husband, begged him to place his mother in a care home because she couldn't go on living like this.

"Your mother gives me wrinkles and white hair, Darling," she claimed at the breakfast table.

"You know I could never send Mother away," Mr Anfield said firmly. "She has lived here for almost 80 years."

Until I came across a very peculiar flower in Mr Anfield's winter garden, I did not think supernatural forces were at play here, and Old Mrs Anfield was just a very old lady to me. The winter garden was Mr Anfield's pride as he was a collector of rare flowers, so he usually took care of watering the plants himself. Like his mother's room, nobody but him was to enter it actually. Mrs Anfield sometimes made jibes at her husband's expense, claiming that he cared more about these flowers than he did about her.

But one morning, Mr Anfield lay motionless at the bottom of the staircase. Nobody in the house knew for certain what had happened during the night except that everybody seemed to have heard a loud screaming match between him and his mother, but nobody addressed this as Mr Anfield was brought to the nearest hospital. The unspoken question that everybody in the household didn't dare to ask was: Had she pushed her son down the stairs, or had he suffered a heart attack or stroke due the amount of stress he had been exposed? When Mrs Anfield left the house to go to the hospital, she instructed me to take care of the plants.

So far, I had only been able to observe the winter garden from outside when I had taken a walk in the garden. I knew it was beautiful, but I had no idea how magical it was until I set foot in it. Once she had stepped inside, it felt like entering another realm and getting lost in a paradise of some sort.

I noticed the violet flower that stood in the center of the room at once because Mr Anfield had isolated it from the rest of his collection. At first, I thought this was because this exotic-looking flower was so big and seemed to sway in the windless winter garden all the time. It actually looked as if the flower had a life and was dancing. Or perhaps I was just imagining it because I was not an expert on flowers.

Shortly after I had begun to water the plants, I suddenly heard a shrill female voice call out to me, "Beware of the witch!"

I looked around the room and saw nobody. The flower was still swaying.

But as soon as I went on, I heard it again. "Beware of the witch! Beware of her!"

"Excuse me? Who's there?" I asked and must admit that I was a little scared.

The flower swayed even more than before and seemed to say, "Me."

Okay, perhaps I had been working too much. Perhaps Mr Anfield's accident had given me a nasty shock. Perhaps I should quit this job as it definitely wasn't worth losing my mind over it and coming up with visions of talking flowers.

But then, the flower even told me her name, "I'm Adora."

That name threw me completely. Never one to miss the irony of a situation, I asked, "As in, He-Man's twin sister?"

"Martin said that Adora was the most powerful woman in the universe, and that is why he gave me the name." Martin was Mr Anfield, of course.

"Yeah, you could call her that, but she needed a sword to transform into She-Ra first. Why you are talking?" I said, trying not to think too hard about the fact that I was talking to a flower and whoever would see me like this would certainly think I had gone totally crazy.

"Because I was once a human like you. But then the witch turned me into a flower because she wanted to get rid of me," the flower claimed.

"Who is the witch?" I asked, although I had a pretty good idea who.

"Mrs Anfield," the flower whispered as if it was afraid it could be squashed if it said the name. "Martin said she was my sister."

"You're his aunt then?" I asked curiously.

"Apparently, I was his father's first wife."

"Wow!" I said upon hearing such a thing. "Then you must be really old!"

"I am so old that my grave was razed a few years ago because no one remembers me anymore," Adora admitted sadly. "I wish it were different, but just because we want something doesn't necessarily mean that it'll happen."

There was one aspect of her story I didn't understand. Therefore, I asked her, "But why would your sister do this to you?"

"Because she was an ugly witch, and I was the beautiful girl who had tons of suitors like Martin's father. And because she had tried to kill me before, but hadn't succeeded. You see, I had found out about it and wanted to alert the police," the flower said. "At least that's the story Martin has told me. I have no memory of it because the witched erased it after Martin, who was then but a little boy of five or six, had found me among his mother's flowers. She thought she had killed me then with a spell, but Martin found me in the dumpster and nursed me back to health," the flower explained. "Adora was also not the first name he gave me. He would change my names every few years so that his mother wouldn't find out that I was still alive."

"But she is crazy now! There must be a spell, something we can do to help you!" I exclaimed.

"There isn't! I made sure of that!"  I heard someone who was standing behind me say. When I turned around, I recognised a very old lady who was apparently not suffering from dementia at all. She had this hollow laughter that reminded one of all the movie baddies you wanted to avoid in real life. I had no idea how she had escaped from her prison in the attic, but I knew as well as she did that nobody would come to help me if she tried to kill me now.