Page 10 of The Language of Flowers

She looks at me for a moment in a way that tells me she has understood exactly what I have not said outright — that there was no one else, in those early years, whose hands I trusted at all, myself included, most days.

She is quiet for a moment, turning a jar of dried skullcap over in her hands, reading the label though she cannot yet fully understand the notation. “The letter,” she says. “The white bryony. You said the name was used incorrectly.”

“Bryonia dioica,” I say. “White bryony. It is not a remedy of any kind — it is a poison, violent and fast enough that no one who has ever handled it would mistake it for something gentle. Whoever wrote that letter used the phrasesyrup of white bryony, arranged for remedyas though it were an ordinary household preparation.”

“Why does the error matter so much? Beyond telling you he isn’t a botanist.”

It is a good question, and I find myself glad she has asked it rather than simply accepting the conclusion I already gave her. “Because it tells us where his information came from,” I say. “A solicitor investigating the society would have access to certain things — estate accounts, apothecary records, perhaps intercepted correspondence. If he encountered a code term for one of our preparations somewhere in those records, andrepeated it in his own letter, he would have repeated it exactly as he found it, unless he tried to sound more knowledgeable than he actually is. This error is the second kind. Someone tried to elaborate on what he had, and elaborated wrong. That tells me he is filling gaps in his knowledge with guesses, not with genuine understanding — which means the actual sum of what he knows is very likely smaller than the letter makes it appear.”

She considers this, and I watch her consider it, the particular stillness that comes over her when she is turning a piece of information over from every side before she accepts it. “So he is more dangerous for what he might convince others he knows,” she says slowly, “than for what he actually knows himself.”

I did not put it in quite those words, even to myself, though I recognize immediately that she is correct, more precisely correct than my own explanation had managed to be. “Yes,” I say. “That is exactly it.”

She asks one more question — a technical one, about how long the crisis tincture keeps once bottled — and then she is quiet, watching me work the last of the mixture through a fine cloth, and the still room is warm enough, and small enough, that I am aware of her in a way I do not entirely have a name for: the particular rhythm of her breathing, quickening slightly when she is working something out in her head, slowing again once she has settled it. I have never noticed anyone’s breathing before. I am not certain when I began noticing hers, only that I have apparently been doing it for some time now, the way one notices a clock ticking in a room only once someone points it out, and then can never quite stop hearing it again.

Vivienne’s letter is somewhere upstairs on my desk, promising a visit within the fortnight, and I ought to be thinking about what state the house needs to be in for it, what accounts need settling, what the decoy letter’s progress requires me to report. I find, instead, that I am thinking about the particular setof Eliza’s shoulders when she concentrates, and the small furrow that appears between her brows when a question has not yet resolved itself to her satisfaction, and I have to remind myself, twice, what I was in the middle of measuring.

I catalog this fact, the way I catalog everything, and I set it aside to be examined later, at some point I do not specify even to myself, when I am prepared to look at it directly.

I am beginning to understand, working beside her in this small warm room that I have shown to almost no one in ten years, that teaching has always been the nearest thing I have to intimacy — the transfer of what I know, offered plainly, without performance, to someone I trust enough to get it right. I have not offered this to anyone in a very long time. I am not at all certain what it means that I am offering it now, so readily, to a woman who arrived at my door with a trunk and a letter less than two months ago.

I tell myself it is simply efficient. I have told myself a great many things lately that do not survive close inspection, and I am beginning to suspect this is one of them.

When the last bottle is filled and labeled and set on the shelf to cool, Eliza helps me clean the worktable without being asked, wiping down the marble surface with the particular care she brings to everything, and I find myself watching her hands rather than the table, and thinking that I have shown a great many people how this work is done, and taught almost none of them anything that mattered beyond the mechanics of it. I have shown her both, in a single afternoon, without quite deciding to, and I do not know yet what that is going to cost either of us.

Chapter 10

Spearmint

ELIZA

The still room has become mine as much as Beatrice’s, in the small, unofficial way that a place becomes shared without either person ever announcing it. I have my own stool now, tucked beside the worktable where I am out of the way of the flame but close enough to see what she is doing, and I have begun, without asking, to fetch the jars she needs before she asks for them, because I have learned where everything lives and because handing her a jar before she has finished reaching for it has become, somehow, one of the more satisfying small acts of my day.

I am paying attention to two things at once, most evenings, and I have stopped pretending to myself that I am only paying attention to one of them.

The evenings have taken on a shape of their own now, separate from the greenhouse hours that came before them. Supper, and then the still room, where the letter waits for us on the corner of the worktable each night as though it has been patiently expecting our return. We have developed a kind of shorthand — she hands me the letter without my asking; I set down whatever I am measuring the moment she finds something worth discussing; neither of us treats the work as an interruption to the evening, because by now the work has simply become what the evening is.

I have written to no one in London about any of this, not even my solicitor, though I suppose there is little enough to write. I find I do not much want to. London has begun to feel like a story I am telling myself about someone I used to be, rather than a place I am waiting to return to.

The preparations themselves are genuinely fascinating — I did not expect this, when I first offered to make myself useful. I expected competence to be dull, the way most competent things are dull to watch even when they are impressive to consider afterward. It is not dull. Beatrice measures with a precision that borders on reverence, and when she explains why a particular proportion matters, she does it the way she explains everything, without simplifying for my benefit and without assuming I cannot follow her if she doesn’t. I have spent seven years being spoken to as though careful explanation would be wasted on me. It is not wasted. I find I retain nearly everything she tells me, the way I have always retained things that were actually explained rather than merely delivered.

The other thing I am paying attention to is Beatrice herself — the particular economy of her movements in this room, no motion wasted, no hesitation, every reach and pour arriving exactly where it needs to be without her seeming to think about it at all. I have watched a great many people move through rooms in my life, cataloging their gestures for what they revealed. I have never watched anyone move the way Beatrice moves in the still room, entirely present, entirely unconcerned with how the moving might appear to someone watching her do it.

Tonight we are working on the letter again, side by side at the worktable, the crisis tincture cooling on the shelf behind us. We have gone over it enough times now that I could recite whole passages from memory, and I am reading it again anyway,because there is something in it I have not yet managed to name, a wrongness beneath the wrongness we have already identified.

“Here,” I say, tapping a line midway down the second page. “He uses the phrasearranged for remedythree times.”

Beatrice leans over to look. “I had noticed the repetition. I assumed it was simply his preferred phrasing.”

“It is. But look at what comes before it each time.” I trace the three instances with my finger. “The first time, he writessyrup of white bryony, arranged for remedy— using the common name. The second time, he writestincture of foxglove, arranged for remedy— common name again. But the third time, here, he writespreparation of Valeriana, arranged for remedy— the botanical name, correctly rendered, no error at all.”

Beatrice is very still, the particular stillness I have come to recognize as the sign that she is thinking faster than her face is willing to show.

“He knows the botanical name for valerian,” I say. “He knows it well enough to use it correctly, without hesitation, in the middle of a sentence otherwise built entirely out of common names. Everywhere else, he reaches for what a layman would reach for. Only once does he reach for something a botanist would know.”

“Which means he did not learn valerian’s name from records or secondhand report,” Beatrice says slowly. “He learned it somewhere he had reason to actually use it. Somewhere he handled the plant itself, or heard its proper name used often enough that it became habit rather than research.”

“An apothecary’s assistant,” I say. “Or someone who spent time in a household where valerian was prepared regularly enough that the name became ordinary to him.”