Page 35 of Duke of Moonstone
“Perhaps the yellow roses would look better by the window, Your Grace.”
Frances looked up from the vase she was arranging and considered the suggestion. Mrs. Wells stood beside the side table holding three stems of yellow roses, their petals just beginning to open, and there was something in the way she held them—careful and almost fond—that made Frances smile.
“I think you are right,” Frances said. “The light catches them there. It would be a shame to waste it.”
Mrs. Wells carried the roses to the window and set them in the smaller vase that Frances had placed there two days ago. She adjusted one stem then another, stepping back to assess the effect with the critical eye of a woman who had opinions about flower arrangements and had been keeping them to herself until very recently.
It had been a week.
A week of small, quiet changes that Frances had undertaken to make the manor feel like a home. She had started with fresh flowers from the garden placed in rooms that had not seen a fresh bloom in what appeared to be years.
Then she had opened the curtains wider, moved a chair closer to the fire, and placed a small stack of books on the side table where before, there had been nothing but polished mahogany and silence.
None of it was revolutionary. All of it, taken together, made the room feel as though someone actually lived in it.
“These hyacinths are lovely,” Mrs. Wells said, returning to the main arrangement. She touched one of the purple stems. “I cannot remember the last time we had hyacinths in the house.”
“They were growing beautifully in the gardens. It seemed wrong to leave them all outside.”
“The Dowager Duchess used to have flowers in every room.” Mrs. Wells trimmed a stem with the small scissors Frances had brought down from her sitting room. “When she was well enough to manage the house herself, that is. She had a particular fondness for sweet peas in summer.”
“Did she?”
“Oh, yes. She would have the gardener bring armfuls of them. The whole house smelled of it.” Mrs. Wells paused, the scissors still in her hand. “That was some years ago now.”
Frances tucked a sprig of greenery between two daffodils and said nothing for a moment. She had not yet met the Dowager Duchess. The introduction had been delayed: first by a few days, then by the Duke’s absence, then by what Frances suspected was a combination of his mother’s fluctuating health and his own reluctance to bring the two women in his life into the same room though she could not have said which prospect troubled him more.
“I should like to meet her,” Frances said. “When she is well enough.”
“She would like that very much, Your Grace. She has said so.”
Frances looked up. “She has?”
“Several times.” Mrs. Wells set down the scissors and picked up a cloth to wipe the table where water had dripped. “She asks after you. What you have been doing, whether you are settling in. I have told her about the flowers.”
Something warm moved through Frances’s chest. A woman she had never met, confined to her rooms upstairs, asking after her. Wanting to know about the flowers.
“What did she say?”
Mrs. Wells smiled. It was a small smile, private, the kind that came from a memory rather than the present moment. “She said it was about time.”
Frances laughed. She could not help it. The sound came out before she had decided to let it, bright and sudden in the quiet room, and Mrs. Wells looked pleased in the way that people look pleased when they have caused something good without entirely meaning to.
“Now then.” Frances turned back to the arrangement and considered it with her head tilted. “Do you think the daffodils are too tall? They seem to be drowning the roses.”
“A touch, perhaps.” Mrs. Wells leaned in. “If we trim them by an inch, they will sit better.”
Frances trimmed them. The arrangement came together—yellow and purple and white, spring pressing itself into every corner of the vase—and she stepped back and looked at it and felt, for a moment, the particular satisfaction of having made something beautiful in a place that needed it.
It is not much. But it is something.
“The staff has noticed, Your Grace,” Mrs. Wells said. She was folding the cloth. “The changes, I mean. The flowers and the cushions and—well, all of it.” She paused. “It has been a long while since anyone took an interest in making the house feel like a home.”
The words settled around Frances like a shawl. But then she recalled Eleanor telling her that Alexander’s ‘oppressiveness’ had discouraged her from spending much time in the house.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wells,” she said, “for helping me with all of this. I know it is not how things were done before.”
“No, Your Grace. It is better.”
