“Nothing to tell,” Eleanor said, now turning to face Grace, who flinched, she couldn’t help it, at the enormous size of Eleanor’s pupils. And something else: a sweet scent that emanated from her.
“I only listen,” Eleanor added. “And I watch, too. People are abominable creatures, Grace. There is nothing in the world that can become so maddeningly wearisome as people, people, people!”*
Grace O’Connell was understandably confused and upset by this interaction, and she did tell Miss Hamm about Eleanor’s glass bead eyes and the way her body seemed somehow more like a carcass than a life, but she herself did not try again with Eleanor.
And then it was too late to try.
By all sound reason, the plants in The Orangerie should have suffered during this period. That or Miss Trills should have noticed the deficit in their care and made up for it, mentioning as much to Eleanor and inquiring about her lapse.
But during those days of Eleanor’s enchantment, The Orangerie positively thrived. The fiery blooms of a once-spindly abutilon plant grew to the size of bonnets and were picked and worn thusly by some of the girls. The Citrus limon Ponderosa trees offered up eight- and nine-pound lemons, and the kitchen began serving lemonade or lemon pie so often that students began to expect such delights. And that expectation alone, Readers, in Rhode Island, in winter, in 1902, was plainly absurd. The poet’s jasmine vines snaked themselves up and around and over the surfaces of The Orangerie, all the while blooming obscenely—truly, obscenely—their blossoms so profuse that it became difficult to navigate the space without their petals brushing your body, their soapy scent wafting.
In fact The Orangerie was so verdant, so fragrant, that the whole campus recognized and remarked upon its change. Faculty members would group together at its doorways and say things like, “If it keeps on like this, we’ll have to send Mary Kingsley in to map it.”*
Of course, Readers: it could not keep on like that forever.
Of course, Readers: Eleanor Faderman could not keep on like that, either.
Please remember too that most of these things were only said about Eleanor Faderman, and were only said to even be known about Eleanor Faderman, after the fact.
The fact of her death, that is.
Given what you now know about The Orangerie during this time, it won’t surprise you to hear that the Brugmansia suaveolens tree growing from the planter that provided Eleanor’s hiding space was more lush with blooms than it had been since being planted there some nine years prior. Those blooms were over a foot in length, hanging in heavy clusters like suspended groups of milk glass vases.
Angel’s trumpets emit a honeyed perfume, one that might have been missed for all the other flowers in The Orangerie right then, but not by Eleanor. This is because they shed their scent at night, and by now, Eleanor Faderman was largely a nocturnal creature, one who could only dimly recollect the translation of the plant’s Latin name: suaveolens, “with a sweet fragrance.” That sweet fragrance clung to her clothing and hair. For hours after her visits she carried the scent of angel’s trumpet.
We cannot be certain that Eleanor Faderman knew just how deadly angel’s trumpets are; it’s also quite possible that she did know this. It wasn’t so many years before that there had been a kind of trend that took place during the long afternoon hours in the parlors of bored women of high social standing: stirring a few drops of angel’s trumpet pollen into one’s tea before settling back to enjoy the rather pleasing delirium that followed. (Or supposedly pleasing delirium, anyway.) And Miss Trills did later say that Eleanor knew some of the attributes of The Orangerie’s various plants better than she herself did. (Though it’s possible that Miss Trills was only showing kindness to the dead when she said that.)
Brugmansia pollen might, by the pinch, produce a (dubiously) pleasant delirium. However, it’s also true that when ingested in more significant quantities it produces a writhing, foam-mouthed, sticky-sweated state of violent hallucination and paralysis that can, if untreated, lead to death.
On December 7, 1902, Eleanor Faderman was found approximately two hours after she was noted absent from the evening meal. It was later discovered that Eleanor had actually been absent the whole day, but given her recent bouts of illness, she was incorrectly believed, by students and faculty alike, to be either in bed or in the sickroom (or in bed in the sickroom), and the matter was not further investigated until made mention of during the meal, which was, it must be said, a particularly bland mutton pie served with a side of roast squash. (Despite a request for tarragon and thyme, no bundles of herbs had been delivered to the kitchen that morning.)
What was eventually made clear is that Eleanor Faderman hadn’t been seen by anyone then living at Brookhants since bedtime the previous evening, which was now some twenty hours before.
Of course, The Orangerie was immediately searched. Where else would anyone think to look for Eleanor Faderman? However, she was not found there, so searches continued elsewhere on campus, including those made by a warily intrepid party of lantern-carrying faculty members who agreed to take on the dark woods, starting, most unfortunately, with the Tricky Thicket.
Thankfully, despite the fruitlessness of the first endeavor, someone thought to again send searchers to The Orangerie for another look, and it was this second group of pitiable students who found Eleanor’s hiding spot beneath the angel’s trumpet tree, and thus found Eleanor herself. Though she was, of course, no longer herself.
And now for another deeply unpleasant bit of historical sightseeing:
A loud first-year named Winifred Garfield, having bent low to peer beneath a potting table, spotted first the red binding of Mary MacLane’s book. Moving closer, looking closer, Winifred saw, at precisely the moment she screamed, that a pale hand still gripped the book. The entirety of Winnie’s view at this moment was the book, the curled fingers, and a bit of wrist and sleeve, but she knew, she knew, that what she was seeing was very wrong.
Once the other students looked behind the planter and understood the cause of Winifred’s continued screaming, one of them, Nora—an older, in-charge type—took her by the hand so that the two of them could go find a teacher. This while the other three students attempted together to push the angel’s trumpet planter, even a few inches, to better reach their classmate. They could not. Their efforts did, though, shake loose several of the tree’s dangling blossoms, which fell heavily upon them, sprinkling their toxic pollen as they did.
Even though the students could not move the planter, it was clear, when she failed to respond to their shouting of her name, and then when their fingers extended to touch her cold body, that Eleanor Faderman was not moving, either. That she would never move again.
Eventually, it was clever Miss Trills who rigged the lever and roller system that moved the planter and allowed them to access Eleanor without crawling in and pulling her out—which no one seemed keen to do.
By that time, The Orangerie had become the somber meeting place for all Brookhants faculty and staff other than those still in the woods (someone had been sent to find them) and the three teachers tasked with the unenviable job of attempting to soothe the riled and rumor-spreading student body, each of which had first been accounted for, and then sent to their dormitories for fitful sleep—if sleep came to them at all.