Page 7 of The Language of Flowers

I have begun to understand, too, what this house actually is. Beatrice has told me some of it directly — the tinctures, the network, the number, which I have not stopped thinking about since she said it — and the rest I have gathered the way I have always gathered things, by watching what is not said as closely as what is. The locked cabinet in the still room. The ledger Mrs.Prentice keeps that is not a household ledger. The particular care with which letters arrive and are read and, more often than not, burned. I am living inside the machinery of something larger than I could ever understand when I climbed into Vivienne’s borrowed carriage.

I find that it moves me more than I expected to be moved. This is precisely the difficulty.

I have turned it over enough times now that the turning has become its own kind of ritual, one I perform most nights before I let myself sleep. It goes like this: I remind myself that I am four-and-twenty years old, and that the last time I let a feeling I did not fully understand carry me somewhere without first examining it, I spent seven years learning what that particular carelessness cost. I remind myself that gratitude is not the same as belonging, and that Beatrice’s household has been generous to me in ways I have not yet earned and cannot yet repay, and that generosity is not an invitation to want more than what has been offered. I remind myself of all of this, carefully, in order, and then I think about the way she said my name in the corridor that first evening — not Lady Moreton, not any of the careful distances a countess is entitled to keep — and the whole careful ritual comes apart in my hands like wet paper.

I am careful, these days, about what I allow myself to be moved by. I have learned this the slow and expensive way — that feeling something deeply, and then acting from that feeling before I have examined it, is how a seven-and-ten-year-old girl finds herself married to a man three times her age, telling herself it is duty when it is, more simply, that she did not yet know how to want anything for herself and so accepted what was wanted for her instead. I do not intend to make that mistake twice, however differently it might be dressed the second time.

And it is dressed very differently. I will admit that much, alone, at night, in a room no one else can hear my thoughts in.Beatrice Ashford is unlike any woman I have known in London drawing rooms, where every woman I ever met performed one of exactly two available roles — softness or sharpness, warmth or wit, and usually some careful mixture calibrated to whoever was in the room to be impressed. I was never very good at either performance, though I gave years to trying. Beatrice performs nothing. She simply is what she is, certain and capable and occasionally alarming in her certainty, entirely unconcerned with whether the room finds her agreeable. I find I cannot stop noticing this. I find, worse, that I do not particularly want to stop.

But wanting is not the same as acting, and I have spent seven years learning the difference the hard way.

I have no income of my own. Whatever my husband’s family intends to do about my portion, it has not yet been done, and I am, for the present, entirely dependent on the goodwill of women I met a matter of days ago. I have no skill I could point to and say, this is mine, this I built, the way Beatrice can point to her greenhouse and her still room and the decade of careful work behind both. I do not yet know what I like — I have said this to myself so many times now that it has begun to sound less like an admission and more like a fact I am gathering evidence toward, the way Beatrice gathers evidence about a plant before she decides what it needs. I know I liked the smell of the greenhouse on my first morning here. I know I liked watching her hands work, though I am careful not to examine too closely why. Beyond that, very little.

I am going to find out who I am before I let myself want anything else. This is not a punishment I am setting for myself. It is, I think, the first entirely selfish decision I have made in longer than I can remember, and it feels, oddly, like the beginning of something rather than a deprivation.

The letter, the threat, my own eventual independence — these must come first, because they are the only things standing between the woman I am becoming and the woman I was made to be for seven years, and I am not going to trade one unfinished version of myself for another simply because the second one is more interesting to look at across a supper table.

There is the matter of the letter, too, which I have not allowed myself to forget for more than an hour at a stretch since I arrived. Somewhere in London, men are watching a house I no longer live in, waiting for me to lead them somewhere useful. Somewhere, a solicitor named Pemberton is assembling whatever case he intends to make against a decade of work I have only just begun to understand the size of. My own future — my portion, my independence, whatever life comes after this one is settled — depends on that threat being managed before it can do what it is clearly built to do. I am, whatever else I am becoming in this house, still the woman that letter is about. I cannot afford to lose sight of that in favor of a light in a greenhouse window, however much I find myself wanting to.

I go to the window before I put out the candle. Below, past the dark shape of the walled garden, a single light still burns in the greenhouse, small and steady against the black. It is past eleven. She has been down there, by my count, since half past nine.

I stand there longer than I mean to, watching that one window glow among all the others gone dark, and I tell myself that I am only curious about her habits, the way I would be curious about anyone whose household I am, for the present, dependent upon. I do not entirely believe myself. I find, standing at the glass with my own reflection faint and doubled over the garden below, that I do not mind the not-believing nearly as much as I ought to.

I close the curtain before I can stand there any longer, and I go to bed, and I do not dream about a greenhouse full of light,because I do not permit myself dreams I have not first decided I am allowed to have.

I am nearly certain that is not how dreams work. I fall asleep anyway, telling myself it will do for now.

Chapter 7

Thyme

BEATRICE

Three weeks, and the evenings have developed a shape I do not remember agreeing to.

Eliza comes to the greenhouse after supper. She does not announce this as a habit; it simply began, some ten days ago, and has not stopped since, and I have not once asked her not to. She does not perform usefulness while she is here, which I find I appreciate more than I expected to. She does not hover at my elbow offering to hold things I have not asked her to hold, the way certain guests believe themselves obligated to demonstrate interest. She sits, usually on the stool near the specimen tables, and when she has a question she asks it, and when she does not, she is simply quiet, and the quiet is not the strained, waiting kind most people bring into a room with them. It is closer to the quiet of the greenhouse itself before she arrives — full, rather than empty.

I have started listening for her step on the gravel. This is the part I do not examine too closely.

Three weeks is not a long time. I remind myself of this fact with some regularity, usually in the mornings, when the greenhouse is still mine alone and I have not yet had occasion to feel the particular alteration in the air that arrives with her in the evenings. Three weeks ago I had never met this woman. Three weeks ago Wyndermere was exactly the size it had beenfor ten years, and I understood every corner of it, and nothing in it surprised me, and I had considered this a satisfactory state of affairs rather than a deprivation. I am not certain, any longer, which of those two words is the more accurate one, and I dislike very much not being certain.

The decoy letter has gone out — Vivienne’s clerk drafted it with the appropriate official flourishes, and it is, by now, somewhere on its way toward convincing Pemberton’s investigation that Wyndermere’s secrets live in a Surrey property that does not exist in any form he will find useful. It has bought us time, though none of us knows precisely how much. In the meantime, the household has folded Eliza into its rhythms with a completeness that would alarm me, if I allowed myself to sit with it for more than a moment at a stretch. Mrs. Prentice has stopped referring to her as “the guest” and started referring to her as “her ladyship,” unprompted, the way staff do when they have quietly decided something before their employer has gotten around to deciding it herself. The blue room no longer looks like a room prepared for a stranger. It looks, when I have occasion to pass it, lived in.

Tonight she has stopped at the east wall, where a row of framed illustrations hangs between two of the taller windows — plates I did myself, years ago, before I stopped. I know the moment she has found them because the quality of her stillness changes, becomes the particular attentive stillness she brings to anything she is trying to understand rather than merely admire. I do not go to her. I continue what I am doing, which tonight is nothing more demanding than pruning the dead growth from a rosemary that has gotten leggy over the winter, and I wait to see whether she will ask.

She does not ask that night. She asks the housekeeper the next morning — I learn this only because Mrs. Prentice mentions it to me in passing, in the particular careful way Mrs. Prenticementions things she suspects I might want to know but has decided are not, strictly, her business to comment on.Her ladyship, years ago, before she stopped,is apparently the whole of what Mrs. Prentice offered, which is more than I would have offered myself, and exactly as much as needed saying.

That evening, Eliza comes to the greenhouse as usual, and sits as usual, and after perhaps twenty minutes of comfortable nothing, she asks: “Did you stop because of something? Or did you simply stop?”

I do not turn from the distillation I am tending. “I found it useful for my botanical work,” I say. “At some point I had enough reference illustrations, and there was no longer a reason to continue.”

It is not an answer, and I know it is not an answer even as I say it, and I suspect she knows it too, because she does not press. She has a talent, I am beginning to understand, for recognizing exactly how far a door has been opened and declining to force it any wider than that. This ought to make her easier to be around. I find, instead, that it makes me want to open the door further myself, which is a different problem entirely.

A pause. “Might I try?”

I should say no. I have a dozen reasons ready, none of which I particularly want to examine, all of which amount to the same plain fact: that showing someone how I see a thing is a considerably more intimate act than showing them what I know, and I have not done the former for anyone in longer than I care to count. I turn from the apparatus. She is watching me with an expression that is not quite hopeful and not quite braced for refusal — simply open, the way she seems to hold most things, waiting to see what will be done with them rather than working to influence the outcome.

“Come here,” I say, before I have finished deciding to say it.