Emma smiled then, and there was something so calm in it that Frances felt, against her will, the first faint loosening of the knot inside her chest.
“By remaining inconvenient whenever necessary,” Emma said through a grin.
Frances laughed before she could help it.
“I mean it,” Emma urged, still smiling. “Marriage did not make me less myself. It simply required that I choose, again and again, not to vanish into what others expected.”
Frances looked down.
“It will be harder for you at first,” Emma continued. “Because this is not the life you imagined, and because it has begun under strain rather than affection. But that does not mean you are doomed to lose yourself in it.”
She reached across the little table and touched Frances’s wrist lightly.
“You are still Frances,” she reminded her. “And unless you choose to abandon her, no marriage can take that from you.”
For a moment Frances could not answer.
The breeze moved softly through the garden, carrying the scent of lemon, fresh grass, and the faint powdery sweetness of early blossoms. At that exact moment, Lilian came skipping back along the path, her hands full of flowers in a manner that suggested she had gathered them with very little regard for symmetry and a great deal of affection.
“These are for you, Aunt Frances,” she announced, holding them out with solemn generosity.
Frances took the little bouquet at once, as though receiving something rare and precious. There were daisies and two slightly crushed primroses, a stem of rosemary that had no business being among them, and one small violet drooping rather pitifully at the side. To Frances, it seemed perfect.
“For me?” she said, with all the gravity the gift deserved. “Then I am the most fortunate lady in all of England.”
Lilian beamed. “I chose the nicest ones. Except the one I kept because it looked like a queen flower.”
Frances nodded. “That was wise. One must always leave room for royalty.”
Lilian nodded, entirely satisfied by this logic, and clambered up beside Frances on the bench without invitation, as children and beloved persons so often did. She at once began a lively account of which flowers butterflies preferred, which she believed they disliked, and whether butterflies had favorite colors in the same way people had favorite puddings.
“I think they like yellow best,” she said. “But perhaps only cheerful butterflies. Sad ones may like blue.”
Frances, still holding the little bouquet in her lap, said, “And how does one distinguish a sad butterfly from a cheerful one?”
Lilian considered this carefully. “By how it flies.”
Frances laughed softly. “There is an answer for everything in your daughter.”
“There always has been,” came Emma’s amused response.
Lilian leaned nearer to Frances, lowering her voice as though imparting a confidence of great delicacy. “And butterflies are very gentle when they land on flowers.”
“Are they indeed?”
“Yes,” Lilian said earnestly. Then, before Frances could guess her intention, the little girl leaned forward and pressed the lightest kiss to her cheek.
Frances blinked.
“That,” Lilian declared proudly, “is how gentle butterflies are when landing on flowers. I read it somewhere.”
For a moment, Frances could not speak. It was such a small thing, a child’s kiss and a child’s odd and lovely explanation. Yet, it touched something in her far more deeply than she would have expected. No one in this garden measured warmth as though it must be earned. No one withheld tenderness until it was safe.
She looked at Lilian’s bright little face, at Emma’s fond expression, at the nearby cradle where the baby still slept in perfect peace, and felt with sudden force what a loving family might truly be, a place where one might be held and not judged smaller for it.
The realization ached.
Frances touched Lilian’s curls lightly. “Then I am very honored to have been treated as a flower.”
