Page 16 of The Language of Flowers

“Thank you,” I say, and sit, and something in my chest that has been tight since I woke loosens by some careful, incremental degree.

“Vivienne’s clerk in Maidstone should have the forged correspondence ready within the week,” she says, in precisely the voice she uses for household accounts, and I understand, gratefully, that she is offering me the ordinary — the letter, the plan, the shape of the morning as it would have been shaped yesterday — because the ordinary is a kind of gift this morning, a way of sayingwe are still exactly who we were, only more sowithout having to say it in words neither of us is quite ready for yet.

“Good,” I say, and we talk about Pemberton, and Fenwick, and the timeline of the thing that has occupied every corner of my attention since a trunk arrived at my old life’s door, and it is, in every particular, an ordinary morning at Wyndermere.

Mrs. Prentice comes and goes with the toast rack and does not so much as glance between us twice, which I take, at first, for simple discretion, until I catch the particular set of her mouth on her second pass through the room — not disapproval, nothing so unkind as disapproval, but the small satisfied look of a woman who has quietly known something for weeks and is pleased to see it finally confirmed. I feel my face heat, and Beatrice, watching me feel it, does not look away, which I find I do not mind nearly as much as I might have expected to.

Except that the room is different. Except that I catch her watching me over the rim of her teacup in a way she does not trouble to disguise, and she catches me doing precisely the same, and neither of us looks away first, and both of us are smiling by the time Mrs. Prentice comes in with the post.

The threat has not vanished. I understand this clearly enough not to be careless about it — Pemberton is still out there, still assembling whatever case he means to make, and my own portion is still unsettled, my own future still, in the plainest sense, undecided. But for the first time since I climbed into Vivienne’s borrowed carriage with a single trunk and no planbeyond survival, I find I am thinking less about what I am fleeing and more about what I am moving toward.

After breakfast, Beatrice goes back to the greenhouse, as she does every morning, and I stand at the kitchen window for a while and watch her go — the particular unhurried certainty of her walk across the garden, the way the household simply continues around her absence as though her presence in the greenhouse were as fixed a fact as the sun coming up. I think about what it will be to have the widow’s portion secured. I think about what it will be to have Pemberton’s threat resolved. I think about what this house looks like on the other side of all of it, once the letter is answered and the danger has passed and there is nothing left standing between the life I am currently living and the life I might simply be permitted to keep.

I do not have an answer yet for what comes after. I only have the plain, undeniable shape of what I want, watching her cross the garden toward the glass house that has become, somehow, the center of everything I have.

I want to stay.

I want to stay here with Beatrice.

Chapter 15

Peony

BEATRICE

The letter comes through the ordinary channel — folded inside an innocuous note about lavender oil pricing, the society’s oldest code, so old and so plain that I sometimes forget it is a code at all until I am decoding it without conscious thought, the way a person reads their own handwriting. It is from a woman in London I have never met and likely never will, one of Vivienne’s contacts, three degrees removed from anyone at Wyndermere. That is precisely what makes it worth reading carefully.

A remarkable widow in Kent with an unusually fine estate and a particular interest in apothecary. The subject came up at Lady Hartwell’s card party, mentioned in passing by a guest who had heard it from her sister, who had heard it from someone connected to a Surrey solicitor presently occupied with a property matter of some interest.

I read it twice. I read it a third time, more slowly, the way I read the letter that started all of this — looking not at what is said but at what the saying implies.

It is not malicious. That is the particular cruelty of it. No one in that drawing room meant harm. A woman repeated an interesting thing she had heard, because interesting things are the currency London trades in, and the woman she told repeated it in turn, because that is what conversation is, an economy of small unearned currency passed hand to hand until it hastraveled further than anyone intended and landed somewhere it was never meant to land. It has landed, now, close enough to Wyndermere that I can feel the weight of it.

Pemberton has a second thread. The decoy bought us weeks, months perhaps, and it is still buying us something — Surrey still holds his men’s attention, by the last report — but a man building a case does not need one thread when he can have two, and a thread that leads, however indirectly, toa remarkable widow in Kentis not a thread I can afford to let run unchecked.

I sit with the letter for a long while after I have finished decoding it, in the library, where I have taken to reading Vivienne’s correspondence since Eliza’s habit of joining me in the greenhouse in the evenings has made the greenhouse feel like the wrong room for anything requiring this particular kind of calculation.

I do not tell myself I am afraid. I have never found that word useful, even in the privacy of my own head, and I am not going to begin finding it useful now. I tell myself, instead, that this is simply a matter requiring attention — a variable that has shifted, a calculation that must be redone. I have managed harder problems than this. I managed an entire marriage’s slow erosion without once losing the thread of who I actually was underneath it, and I am not going to be undone by a card party three counties away.

I begin making the necessary adjustments the following morning, and I tell myself, as I make them, that they are exactly that — adjustments, nothing more, the ordinary tightening of discipline that any competent woman would apply when a threat has grown teeth. I write to Vivienne, laying out what the letter said and what I intend to do about it. I write to the housekeeper at Ashworth, confirming what can and cannot be traced back to a clerk three years gone. I spend the better part of two dayson correspondence I could, if I were being entirely honest with myself, have managed in one.

I am not being entirely honest with myself. I understand this, distantly, the way I understand a great many things about my own conduct that I have chosen not to examine too closely.

The evenings change first. I tell Eliza, on the second night, that I have a great deal of correspondence requiring my attention, which is true, and which is also not the reason I say it standing in the greenhouse doorway rather than crossing the threshold the way I have crossed it every evening for weeks. She looks at me for a moment — that particular reading look she has, the one that found a clerk’s name buried in a botanical slip — and I understand that she has noticed something has shifted, though she does not press. She has a talent for recognizing exactly how far a door has been opened and declining to force it further, and tonight I am deeply, uncomfortably grateful for that talent, because I am not at all certain the door would survive being forced.

“Of course,” she says, and returns to her illustration, and I go to the library alone, and I tell myself this is simply what the letter requires of me.

The still room becomes professional again, over the following days, in ways I notice only because I am the one enforcing them. I explain the next preparation’s proportions with the same careful precision I have always used, but I find myself standing a half step further from the worktable than I used to stand, close enough to teach, not close enough to be aware of her breathing changing when she thinks something through. I tell myself this is simply good sense — that a woman managing a genuine threat cannot afford the particular quality of distraction I have permitted myself these past weeks, that clarity of mind is not a luxury I can spend on anything but the problem actually in front of me.

I find, by the fourth day, that I have become extremely busy. There is a fence at the property’s eastern edge that genuinely does require attention, and I attend to it personally rather than sending the usual man for it. There is a delayed shipment of glass for the greenhouse’s north panes that genuinely does require a letter to the supplier, and I write three drafts of it before I am satisfied, though the first draft would have served perfectly well. I am, by any outside measure, a woman entirely consumed by the ordinary business of an estate under quiet threat.

I catch myself, once, on the fifth evening, standing at my study window watching the light in the blue room come on, and I understand with a small cold clarity that I have arranged an entire week around not crossing certain thresholds, and that I have done this so carefully, so incrementally, that I could produce a perfectly reasonable explanation for every individual choice if anyone thought to ask me for one. No one has asked. I am not certain anyone but myself has fully noticed yet, which is its own kind of proof that I have managed this the way I manage everything — thoroughly and without a single visible seam.

I tell myself it is strategy. A woman facing a genuine threat to everything she has built cannot afford to be careless, and carelessness, I remind myself, is precisely what love has always looked like to me from the outside — a slow surrender of the vigilance that keeps a person safe, dressed up as something too lovely to refuse. I have watched women I respected become careless in exactly this way. I have no intention of joining them.

I almost believe myself. I am, after all, extremely good at believing the things I have carefully constructed to be believed, and I have had ten years of practice building a version of myself sturdy enough to survive on belief alone.

I do not let myself finish the thought that follows that one — the thought that begins,if this is only strategy, why does thehouse feel colder every evening I do not cross the greenhouse threshold— because I have found, over the past several days, that certain thoughts are considerably easier to manage if I decline to let them finish forming at all.