Page 17 of The Language of Flowers

I write to Portia on the sixth day. I tell myself this, too, is strategy — that Portia has connections in London I do not have, that her network reaches drawing rooms mine cannot, that a second pair of experienced eyes on Pemberton’s new thread can only help. All of this is true. It is also true that I have not written to Portia in the better part of a year, and that I choose this particular week to break that silence, and I am careful, composing the letter, not to examine too closely what that timing might reveal to a woman who has known me since before I knew how to guard myself at all.

She writes back within three days, which is fast even for Portia, and her reply is shorter than I expect, and considerably more direct. She writes that she will come by Thursday and beneath that, in the smaller hand she uses when she means something to be read only once and then burned, a single line I read four times before I put the letter in the fire:

You do not usually ask for help this quickly, Beatrice. I am curious what else has changed.

I burn the letter as instructed. However, the question in my mind is not so easily burned.

Chapter 16

Foxglove

ELIZA

Lady Portia Hale arrives on a Thursday, and I understand within a quarter of an hour of meeting her that she is not the sort of woman a person manages to deceive by accident.

She is two-and-fifty, silver-haired, dressed with a precision that makes my own careful toilette feel suddenly amateur, and she has a way of looking at a person that reminds me, unpleasantly, of the first fortnight of my marriage, when I had not yet learned that certain rooms required certain performances and was still being sorted, by everyone who met me, into categories I did not choose for myself. Portia is not unkind about it. She is warm, in fact, charming in a way that costs her nothing and appears effortless, and she asks after my journey to Wyndermere and my views on the season’s weather with every appearance of genuine interest. But underneath the warmth I feel her assessing me the way an experienced solicitor assesses a new clause in a contract — not hostile, simply thorough, determined to understand precisely what risk I represent before she decides how much of herself to extend toward me.

“So you are the widow from London,” she says, over the soup, in a tone that makes the words sound like a hypothesis she has been testing since she arrived.

“I am the widow from London,” I agree, and something in my own steadiness seems to please her, because the corner of her mouth moves in a way that is almost, though not quite, approval.

“Beatrice tells me you found the clerk’s name,” Portia says, turning the conversation with the easy confidence of a woman accustomed to directing it wherever she likes. “In the letter. A botanical slip, she said, something about valerian.”

“I noticed a pattern he did not seem to know he was leaving behind,” I say. “It was not so much cleverness as patience. I have read a great many letters in my life, looking for exactly that kind of pattern, though never before for quite this purpose.”

“No,” Portia says, and something in her face sharpens with interest rather than suspicion, which I find, unexpectedly, that I am grateful for. “I imagine you have read a great many letters, in your former situation, looking for what a man was not quite saying.” She does not make this unkind. She says it the way Beatrice might identify a plant’s genus — a simple observation, offered without cruelty, that happens to land somewhere tender. “That skill is rarer than people credit, and more useful to this society than half the fortunes we’ve been left. I hope you understand its value.”

“I am beginning to,” I say, and I find I mean it, though a fortnight ago I would not have known how to answer such a question at all.

Beatrice, across the table, says nothing, but I feel her attention on me for the length of that exchange, warmer than anything she has offered me directly since Portia’s letter arrived four days ago, and I hold on to that warmth for the rest of the meal the way a person holds on to the last of a fire’s heat once the room has begun to cool.

Beatrice is quieter at dinner than I have seen her in weeks — not cold, precisely, but careful in a way that has become familiar to me over the past several days and that I still have notfound a comfortable name for. She answers Portia’s questions about the estate, about the letter’s progress, about Fenwick and the forged correspondence Vivienne’s clerk has by now nearly completed, with her usual precision, but I notice, the way I notice most things about her now, that she does not once look at me while she speaks, and that this not-looking has the particular deliberate quality of something being managed rather than something simply happening.

After dinner, the two of them withdraw to the library, and I understand, without being told, that I am not meant to follow.

I do not mind this, or I should say, I tell myself I do not mind it, which is not quite the same thing. I go instead to the still room to finish measuring out a compound Beatrice began that afternoon and did not have time to complete, work that genuinely needs doing and that I am glad, this evening, to have as an excuse for my hands to be occupied. I am on my way back through the corridor sometime later, the compound safely decanted and cooling, when I pass close enough to the library door to hear voices through it — not the words, the door is too heavy and my steps too quiet for that, but the shape of the conversation, the particular register two people use when they have stopped discussing plans and started discussing something else.

I hear the wordrisk.

I hear, a moment later, unmistakably, my own name.

I do not stop walking. I want to — every part of me that spent seven years learning to read what a closed door conceals wants very much to stop, to stand very still, to try to catch enough of the actual words to know precisely what conclusion is being drawn about me on the other side of that door. I have spent my whole life being discussed in rooms I was not permitted to enter, my marriage arranged by people who consulted everyone but me, my worth assessed by relatives and solicitors and,eventually, by the particular silent judgment of an entire London season deciding what to make of a widow whose husband died under circumstances no one quite wanted to name aloud. I thought, arriving at Wyndermere, that I had left rooms like that behind me.

I go upstairs instead. It costs me something to do so, more than I expect it to, and I sit for a long while on the edge of the bed in the blue room once I arrive there, not undressing, not doing anything at all beyond breathing carefully and reminding myself that I do not, in fact, know what was said. I know a word. I know my own name attached to it. I do not know the sentence those two things belonged to, and I have learned, the hard way, exactly how much damage a person can do to herself filling in a sentence she never actually heard.

I fail to convince myself entirely. I have never been especially good at believing things I have only just invented for my own comfort.

Portia finds me the following morning in the walled garden, where I have gone to cut lavender for the still room and, if I am honest, to have some task that keeps my hands busy and my face turned away from the house. She falls into step beside me without asking permission, the way Vivienne does, though her version of the habit feels less like an inspection and more like simple companionship.

“You are wondering what was said last night,” she says, without preamble, cutting a stem of her own with more confidence than skill.

“I am trying not to wonder,” I say, “without much success.”

“A sensible policy, badly executed. I sympathize — I have never managed it either.” She examines the stem in her hand, then sets it in my basket rather than her own. “I will tell you what I told her, since you are plainly going to hear some garbled version of it eventually and I would rather you had the accurateone. I asked whether she had considered what it costs the society if Pemberton discovers there is more than an estate and a reputation at stake here. Whether her judgment could be trusted to remain what it has always been, now that there is a great deal more for her to lose.”

I feel something in my chest go very still. “And what did she say?”

“She said her judgment has never once failed the society, and that it is not going to begin failing now.” Portia looks at me directly, the assessing look I noticed the moment we met, though it has softened somewhat overnight into something closer to plain curiosity. “I believe her, for what it is worth. I have known Beatrice Ashford a long time. She does not make promises about her own abilities lightly, and she has never once broken one that I know of.” She cuts another stem.