Page 8 of The Language of Flowers

I bring her to the specimen table where a fresh cutting of Lavandula angustifolia sits in a jar of water, waiting for me to press it. “Not the impression of it,” I tell her, setting a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of her. “The plant itself. Look at the structure of the flower spike — how the individual blooms sit along the stem, not as a mass but as a series. Look at how the color changes from base to tip, darker where it’s newest. Look at the particular gray in the stem — it isn’t green, not really, though everyone paints it green because they expect it to be.”

I have shown a great many people how to look at a plant over the years — apprentices, the occasional interested guest, Mrs. Prentice’s niece who wanted to learn to press flowers properly — and none of them have looked quite the way Eliza looks now, with the whole of her attention gathered into a single narrow point, as though the rest of the greenhouse, and the rest of the evening, and possibly the rest of the world, has simply ceased to require her notice.

She draws. It takes her the better part of half an hour, and I do not hover, because hovering would defeat the purpose, but I am aware of her the entire time in the particular way I am usually only aware of a distillation nearing its critical point — a low, constant attention I cannot quite turn off.

I busy myself with the rosemary again, and then with a tray of seedlings that do not, in truth, require my attention this evening, because I find that if I do not give my hands something to do, they will find their own way toward the specimen table, and I am not prepared to examine what I would do once they arrived there. The greenhouse is quiet except for the small sounds of her working — the scratch of pencil, the occasional soft exhale when a line does not go where she intended it to go, the rustle of her sleeve against the table’s edge. I have worked in this room in silence for ten years. I do not think I have ever found the silence quite this occupied before.

When she sets down the pencil, the drawing is not good. I want to be precise about this, even in the privacy of my own head: the proportions are slightly wrong, the shading uneven, the perspective on the lower blooms flattened in a way that suggests she has not yet learned to think in three dimensions on a flat page. It is not good.

It is also not wrong. She has understood the thing I actually meant — the sequence of the blooms along the spike, the particular quality of gray in the stem that is not green no matter what convention expects. She has seen the plant rather than her idea of the plant, on her very first attempt, which took me the better part of a year to manage when I was learning.

I look at it for a long moment. I do not say any of this.

The silence stretches longer than a silence generally ought to, in company, and I am aware that she is watching me not-speak with the same close attention she gives everything else, and I understand, distantly, that she is very likely reading the silence as a verdict, and that the verdict she is reading it as is probably not the correct one.

I do not correct her. I find I cannot, not tonight, not with words — that saying aloud what I actually think of the drawing would require saying something adjacent to it that I am not yet prepared to say, and so I let the silence do the work instead, and hope, without any real confidence that hope is warranted, that she will someday understand it as the compliment it was.

This is generous of me,I tell myself, later, alone at the workbench after she has gone up to bed. Teaching is generous. It is a kindness one extends to someone eager to learn, nothing more complicated than that.

I do not entirely believe myself. I have not entirely believed myself about a number of things since a trunk arrived in my entrance hall three weeks ago, and I am beginning to suspect that the tally of things I no longer entirely believe about my ownconduct is going to keep growing, whether or not I am prepared for the sum.

I bank the fire under the last apparatus, later than I mean to, and go up long after the house has gone dark, and I do not, when I pass the blue room’s closed door, allow myself to slow down. I consider this a small victory. I am aware, even as I count it, that the fact I need to count it at all is not a good sign.

Chapter 8

Heartsease

ELIZA

I have been looked at a great many times in my life, and told, a great many times, how to appear to see something — how to arrange my face at the opera so it would be understood I appreciated the music without appearing to understand it better than the gentlemen around me, how to look at a painting long enough to seem thoughtful and not so long as to seem peculiar, how to receive a compliment on my needlework with an expression of modest surprise regardless of how much effort the needlework had actually cost me. I have never, before tonight, been told how to look at a thing itself, with no thought at all for how the looking might appear to anyone watching me do it.

Beatrice stands beside me at the specimen table and tells me to look at the structure of the flower spike — not the general impression of purple that most people would call a lavender and consider the matter settled, but the actual sequence of blooms along the stem, each one distinct, arranged with a logic I have walked past a hundred times without ever once seeing. She tells me the stem is gray, not green, though every eye that has never been told otherwise will paint it green out of habit. I look, and for the first time in longer than I can easily place, I am not looking in order to produce an appropriate response. I am simply looking, because she has asked me to, and because it turns out thereis a very great deal to see once someone bothers to point at it properly.

She does not stand close while I work, which I notice and am grateful for, and also notice, more quietly, a small disappointment about, which I do not examine further than that. She occupies herself instead with a tray of seedlings a few feet away, her back half-turned, giving me the particular kind of privacy that comes from someone choosing not to watch rather than someone simply being elsewhere. I have been watched my entire life — by my mother, assessing whether I had learned my lesson properly; by my husband, assessing whether I had understood what was required of me that evening; by every drawing room I have ever entered, assessing whether I would perform correctly. Being deliberately not-watched, by someone who is nonetheless still in the room, is a kindness I do not think I have ever been offered before, and I do not entirely know what to do with it beyond simply accepting it and getting on with the drawing.

I draw. My hand is not skilled — I have had drawing lessons, the ordinary kind given to young ladies expected to fill an album with tasteful watercolors of flowers and ruins, but no one ever taught me to see, only to produce a pleasing likeness of what I was assumed already to understand. The lavender on my page is not a pleasing likeness of anything. The proportions drift. The lower blooms flatten where they ought to recede. I am aware of every fault as I make it, and I keep drawing anyway, because stopping to correct each error would mean losing the thread of what I am actually trying to say with the pencil, which is, I think, closer to the truth than anything I have made with my hands in years.

When I set the pencil down, Beatrice looks at the page for what feels like a very long time and says nothing at all.

I know this silence. I have spent seven years becoming fluent in silences — the kind that means approval withheld until further notice, the kind that means a fault too obvious to require comment, the kind that is simply the sound of someone deciding how disappointed to be before choosing their words. I brace, without meaning to, for whichever version this one turns out to be. My hands, folded in my lap now that the pencil is down, go very still.

And then I understand — not all at once, but gradually, the way understanding sometimes arrives sideways rather than head-on — that this silence is none of the ones I know. Beatrice is not deciding how disappointed to be. She is simply looking, the way she looks at everything, with the whole of her attention gathered into a single point, and the fact that she has nothing to say is not the absence of a verdict. It is the verdict.

“The sepals,” she says finally, and points to the small green structures cupped beneath the flower spike, which I had rendered without any particular confidence, guessing at their shape more than observing it. “You’ve got them right.” Four words, delivered in the same flat, precise register she uses to note the temperature of a distillation or the state of a seedling’s roots. She does not tell me the rest of the drawing is good. She does not need to. I understand, watching her face while she says it, that this is the highest compliment she is capable of paying, and that she has just paid it to me without any apparent awareness of how much it costs to receive.

She had told me that she herself had always found the sepals difficult to render properly — the particular texture where flower meets stem never quite behaving the way she wanted it to on paper. I have turned that small admission over tonight more times than it should reasonably require, and I do not intend to stop turning it over anytime soon.

I go to bed that night thinking about the sepals.

The letter from my solicitor arrives two days later, and it is not encouraging.

I read it twice at the breakfast table, in the particular careful way I have learned to read bad news — slowly, without letting my face do anything the room might notice, filing each unwelcome phrase away to be felt properly later, in private. My husband’s family has retained additional counsel. They intend to contest not merely the size of my portion but the validity of certain provisions in the will itself, on grounds my solicitor describes, with a lawyer’s caution, as “not without some prospect of success.” I am, in effect, further from my own independence today than I was three weeks ago, not nearer to it.

I fold the letter and set it beside my plate and continue my tea as though nothing in it requires any further attention, which is, I am aware, precisely the performance I promised myself I would try to need less of. Old habits do not leave simply because one has decided, in a greenhouse, three weeks prior, to become someone slightly different. I finish my tea. I think about the letter anyway, all day, in the particular background way a stone in one’s shoe makes itself known without ever quite becoming the whole of one’s attention.

I tell Beatrice over supper, because I have learned, in three weeks, that she is the kind of person one tells things to plainly rather than the kind one manages information around, and because I find I want her opinion more than I want to spare either of us the discomfort of the subject.

She listens without interrupting, the way she listens to everything, and when I finish, she asks two questions — precise ones, about the exact wording of the settlement clause and whether the contested provision predates or postdates my marriage — and I answer as best I can, and she is quiet for a moment, turning the answers over.