Free An Acquaintance with Darkness by Ann Rinaldi

Brontë; and so many others! I ran my fingers over the books, then backed away.
    "Come downstairs now. Meet my charges."
    Downstairs in the large kitchen in back of the house, Maude was at the stove, and six brown children, all under the age of ten, were pulling sticky candy. The girls wore pinafores, the boys large aprons. They were paired off into three sets, and they stood across the table from each other, the gooey caramel-colored candy stretched out between them. Their faces were splotched with flour. They were having a grand time of it, and when Marietta and I came into the room, they didn't stop. She had to clap her hands and silence them to introduce me.

    "All right, all right, now you all will have to finish soon. Dr. Bransby will be back for lunch, and I told him we'd be finished."
    "Help us, help us, Marietta," they begged. They gathered around her, sticky hands and all.
    She handed me an apron. "We'll both help and get the job done."
    I hadn't made candy like this since I was a child. And soon Marietta and I were both helping. Then the candy "set" and we got the children washed and helped Maude pack lunches for them—apples, cheese, biscuits. Six checkered napkins full. Maude made a pitcher of lemonade. They clutched the napkins close, and Marietta had them file out the back door.
    Never had I seen a garden like this. "Is that a grape arbor?" I asked.
    The children were gathering around the arbor, under the vine, and starting to eat their lunches.
    "Not grape," Marietta said. "It's a chocolate vine. See how the branches are covered with small purple-brown flowers? Likely you thought they were grapes. As the afternoon warms, it will produce a sweet-spicy scent. It gets stronger at night. That other vine, growing on the side of the house, is a serpent gourd. The white flowers open late afternoon and bloom all night."

    I nodded and walked across a stone path to the shed.
    "Don't go there," she said. "Nobody goes there. It's Dr. Bransby's laboratory. With some specimens in it."
    "What kind of specimens?"
    "He does experiments on animals. Don't worry. They're all dead." She met my eyes.
    I shivered in the warm sun. "I just wanted to see the rest of the flowers," I said.
    "All right, then, I'll show you. Here. These by the shed wall are mouse plants. Don't they look like mice?"
    They did, all clustered in a bunch like that. The flowers had dark brown tops and white bottoms, and a long tail wound out of each one. "Why are they blooming now?" I asked.
    "I couldn't resist planting them." She beamed. "They aren't nightflowers, but they just look so dear. Like mice having a meeting."
    "What is
that?
"
    "Devil's tongue." She sighed. "I had such trouble growing it. I had to start it in a pot in your uncle's laboratory at the college. Under a skylight. And look how the flies are drawn to it. But it has a certain beauty. Sometimes it grows six inches a day. When it gets to eight feet a long liver-colored tongue will grow out of that green spike. And it will smell of decayed fish."

    Was she mad? "Why do you want to grow something like that?"
    "It has its own beauty. Everything does. Don't you think there is a reason for everything that exists in this world? And everything that happens? Even the bad?"
    "No."
    "I do. Or I wouldn't be standing here talking to you like this now. So much bad has happened to me. I look at it like fertilizer in a garden. It has helped my soul to grow."
    "Well, I've had fertilizer in my life, too, then. But my soul could have done without it."
    "You don't know that yet, do you?"
    Now, what did she mean by that?
    "This," she said, leading me over to a flower with willowlike leaves, "is an evening primrose. It will be yellow at dusk and gives off a lemony scent. This is a night-blooming cereus. The petals that bloom tonight will be white with dark yellow spikes surrounding them. Sometimes I cut one off and bring it into the house. By midnight it will be perfect."

    "Those are the ones Uncle