They were alone, the two of them, except for the old gardener who held onto her arm as she walked. It was the height of the summer now and the gardens were a riot of colors and scents. She showed him her rhododendron, her hyacinths, with spikes of red flowers, her blood-red chrysanthemums. Thick yellow bees burrowed for pollen, rubbing their setaceous bodies over the open blooms in a silent ecstasy. She led him through an arch cut into a high wall of spinous hedges. Here the hedgerows were trimmed into some sort of a maze, flowers fronting tall walls of barberry bristling with thorns, barberry hiding paths of primrose and blue lobelia that spun around in circles, leading to still more barberry. She asked him about himself as they walked, listening without comment. Her cane was gnarled. The old gardener, holding her arm as he walked beside her, was silent beneath his wide straw hat. They wove slowly past bunches of phlox and violet sage, past peals of bellshaped digitalis, alongside spiny rows of purple globe thistle.

“You some sort of gardener?” I asked Grimes.

“Everyone needs a hobby, what of it?”

“Just asking is all.”

They walked in a seemingly directionless path in that maze until they found themselves in the center of a very formal space scribed by tall circular hedges, edged with astilbe and gay-feather and gaudy red hollyhock on tall, reedy spires. In the center of the space was an oval of rich, dark earth, out of which bloomed bunches of gorgeous violet irises above a sea of pale yellow jewelweed. At one end of the oval was a statue of a naked woman reaching up to the heavens, her delicate bare feet resting on a huge marble base, studded with pillars, encrusted with brass medallions, the word “SHAW” engraved deep into the stone. Across the oval garden from the statue was a marble bench, situated under a white wooden arch infested with giant orange trumpet flowers, their stamens red as tongues. The gardener deposited the old woman on the bench and she bade Grimes to sit beside her with two pats of the marble. As they sat together the gardener took out a pair of shears and began to trim the foliage behind them with shivery little clips of the blades.

“This is our favorite place in all the world,” rasped Grandmother Shaw.

“It is beautiful,” said Grimes.

“We come here every day, no matter the weather. We feel all the power of the land in this place. We used to come here as children, too, but it has developed more meaning for us as we’ve grown older and more doddering. Mr. Shaw’s ashes are in an urn beneath the statue of Aphrodite. More treasures are buried in this earth, keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here. We come every day and think of him and them and replenish ourselves with all the power in this dark, rich earth.”

“Your husband must have been quite a man,” he said.

“He was, yes,” she said. “In the last days of his life he had become intensely spiritual in a way open only to the scathed. You intend to marry our Jacqueline.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We take our marriage vows very seriously in this family. When we promise to marry it is for forever.”

“I love Jacqueline very much. Forever is too short a time to be with her.”

“We are sure you felt that for your present wife too,” she said.

She was referring, of course, to Grimes’s wife of seven years, mother of his two children, keeper of his house, rememberer of his family’s birthdays and anniversaries, planner of the family vacations, his wife, about whom he hadn’t yet gotten around to telling Jacqueline. They had been childhood sweethearts, he and his wife, had dated all through high school, her parents had put him through dental school by mortgaging their house. It had been the shock of her life when he moved out to live with Jacqueline Shaw.

“That marriage was a mistake. I didn’t know what love was until I met your granddaughter.”

“Yes, great wealth has that effect on people. Your private investigator did tell you the value of our family’s holdings, didn’t he?”

“I love Jacqueline,” he said, rising from the bench with evident indignation. “And if you’re implying that my intentions are…”

“Sit down, Mr. Grimes,” she said, staring up at him with that opaque blue eye. “We need no histrionics between us. We were very impressed with the hiring of your investigator. It shows an initiative all too rare in this family. Sit down and don’t presume to understand our intentions here.”

He stared at her for a moment, but half her face smiled at him as she patted the bench once again, and so he sat. The gardener grunted and kneeled behind them, searching on his hands and knees for the tiniest weeds poking through the rich black mulch.

“Those purple spikes over there are from our favorite plant in this garden. Dictamnus albus. The gas plant. On windless summer evenings, if you put a match to its blossoms, the vapor of the flowers will burn ever so faintly, as if the spirits buried in this earth are igniting through its fragrant blooms. Jacqueline has always been a morose little girl, she had the melancholia from the start. Whether you marry her for her sadness or her money is no concern of ours.”

He began to object but she raised her hand and silenced him.

“We are simply grateful she has found someone to care for her no matter what tragedies will inevitably befall her. But we want you to understand what it means to be a member of our family before it is too late for you.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. It is beyond your imagining.”

The gardener grunted as he stood once more and began again with the shears.

“Our blood is bad, Mr. Grimes, weak, it has been defiled. Where there was strength in my father there is only decay now. My sister died of bad blood, my son has been ruined by it. The result is the weakness evident in my grandchildren. If you marry Jacqueline you must never have children. To do so would be to court disaster. You must join us in refusing to allow the weaknesses in our family’s gene pool to survive. Let it die, let it fade away. We are different from those pathetic others who try so futilely to keep alive a malignant genetic line at all costs. All that’s left of our physical bodies is rot. Everything of value has already been transferred to the wealth.”

The old lady sighed and turned her head away.

“Our wealth has been hard earned, Mr. Grimes, earned with blood and bone, more pain than you could ever know. But whatever remains of my father and his progeny, and of my husband too, still lives in the corpus of our family’s holdings, their hearts still beat, their souls still flourish through the tentacles of our wealth. Everything we have done in what was left to us of our lives was to honor their sacrifice and to maintain the body of their existence towards three divine purposes. Conciliation, expiation, redemption.”

Each of the last three words was spoken with the strength and clarity of a great iron bell. Grimes was too frightened to respond. The chiming of the gardener’s shears grew louder, the pace of his cuts increased.

“Our three divine purposes have almost completely been achieved and we will never allow an outsider to undo what it has taken generations of our family to accomplish. You won’t be squandering our money, Mr. Grimes. You won’t gamble it away like Edward or invest it foolishly like Robert. Your sole duty will be to preserve the family fortune, to tend it and make it grow, to treat it with all the care required by the frailest orchid to satisfy its purpose. And we want to be absolutely clear on one thing. You will never leave poor Jacqueline and take a piece of her money with you. That will not be allowed. Our wealth was hard won by blood and has been defended by blood. Don’t doubt it for a moment. Our father was a great and powerful man and he taught us well.”