Page 20 of The Language of Flowers

I think of the forget-me-not, unfinished on my table, the small blue flowers I stopped working on the evening Beatrice came to my door. I had told myself I would not finish it — that finishing it felt, somehow, like finishing something else I was no longer permitted to claim. But I go to the illustration table one evening near the end of it, and I take up the pencil, and I find that my hand has not forgotten what it knows, whatever else has changed around it.

I finish it that night, every stem and bloom rendered exactly as I intended weeks ago, before any of this — before Portia, before the corridor, before Whitfield’s careful threat dressed up as courtesy. It is good. I do not need anyone else’s verdict on that this time. I know it the way I have learned to know a great many things about myself these past three months, plainly, without waiting for permission.

I pin it to the wall above the illustration table, where I will see it every morning whether or not I choose to look. It is a small thing, a single sheet of paper, unremarkable to anyone who does not know what it cost to finish it. But I made it anyway, in the middle of everything currently being taken from me or withheld or quietly managed on my behalf, and it is mine, and it is here, and no one — not Beatrice, not Pemberton, not a well-dressed man with careful threats outside a draper’s shop — gets to decide otherwise.

Chapter 19

Rue

BEATRICE

The letter arrives just after ten, while I am in the still room measuring valerian root for a preparation I already suspect will sit unfinished for longer than I intend to examine directly. I know before I break the seal that it is not an ordinary letter. The messenger’s face tells me first — that particular careful blankness a man wears when he has been instructed not to guess at what he is carrying, and has obeyed the instruction so thoroughly that the not-guessing has become its own kind of announcement.

Pemberton has prepared a petition. Not a rumor passed hand to hand through drawing rooms, not a thread quietly pulled by a solicitor’s clerk — a formal document, ready to be laid before a private gathering of solicitors and three magistrates known to be sympathetic to the families who retained him. A civil inquiry into the financial dealings of a set of named widows across Kent and Surrey. I read the names twice before I permit myself to understand that mine is among them, and I read it a third time after that, because some part of me is still hoping the third reading will produce a different list than the first two did.

It will not. I know precisely how much evidence a man like Pemberton requires before he commits something to formal petition rather than private inquiry, and I know, reading the particular careful phrasing of what he claims to have compiled,that it is enough. Enough to cost me Wyndermere. Enough to cost a dozen other women considerably more than an estate.

I think of them, briefly, before I think of myself — a widow in Surrey who has not slept a full night since her husband’s family began circling her jointure; a woman two counties north whose new situation, quietly arranged through the society eighteen months ago, would not survive a single afternoon of formal scrutiny. I have spent ten years building the particular architecture that keeps women like them invisible to men like Pemberton, and I understand, standing in the still room with his petition in my hand, that the architecture has just been tested in a way it has never been tested before, and that I do not yet know whether it will hold.

I stand at the still room worktable with the letter in my hand and I feel the whole careful architecture of the last ten years narrow, all at once, to this single sheet of paper, and I understand, with a clarity that arrives instead of panic rather than alongside it, that I do not actually know how much Pemberton has. I know what the petition claims. I do not know what else might be sitting in a file somewhere in London, waiting to be added to it — what other threads have reached him since the letter about Lady Hartwell’s card party, what other conversations in what other drawing rooms have traveled further than anyone intended and landed somewhere I have not yet learned to fear.

I need to know everything. Every unusual encounter, every stray word, every small thing that might have seemed, at the time, too minor to mention. I go looking for Eliza with exactly this thought in my head and no other, and I tell myself, crossing the garden toward the illustration table where I expect to find her, that this is simply due diligence — the ordinary, necessary accounting of a woman who cannot afford to be surprised twice by the same danger.

She is in the blue room, not the greenhouse, folding linen with the particular unhurried way she brings to everything, and she looks up when I come to the door with an expression that is already, I notice even through the noise in my own head, faintly braced.

“The letter,” I say, and I hold it up, though she cannot read it from across the room. “Pemberton has prepared a formal petition. My name is on it. I need to know everything — anything at all, however small it seemed — that has happened since the letter about the card party. I cannot afford to be told about a danger after it has already become one.”

She is quiet for a moment longer than I expect. It is not the quiet of someone deciding whether to speak. It is the quiet of someone who has already decided, days ago, and is only now finding the door that decision requires.

“There is something,” she says. “I should have told you when it happened. I did not, and I understand now that I should have.”

I feel my whole body go very still, the way it does before a fall, when the body already knows what the mind has not yet caught up to.

She tells me about the man at the draper’s, a fortnight ago, who introduced himself as Whitfield and represents Pemberton directly. He knew her name. He knew her situation — her contested portion, her residence at Wyndermere, the particular vulnerability of a widow whose own affairs remain unsettled. He suggested, in words careful enough that she could not have repeated them to a magistrate and called it a threat, that she might find it advantageous to be helpful, should she happen to possess information about the estate’s owner. She told him she knew very little. She came home. She said nothing to me, then or since, because — she does not finish this part of the sentence, and I do not ask her to.

“A fortnight,” I say again, as though repeating the number might make it smaller. “You have known for a fortnight that Pemberton’s man knows your name, your situation, precisely how to make you useful to him, and you told no one. Not me. Not Vivienne, whose entire network exists to move exactly this kind of information before it becomes dangerous.”

“I told no one,” Eliza agrees, “because I did not know, at the time, that it would become anything more than an unpleasant conversation with a stranger in a shop. I have had a great many unpleasant conversations with men who believed they understood my situation better than I did. I did not think this one required a formal accounting.”

“You should have let me be the judge of that.”

“I have spent seven years letting other people be the judge of what my own encounters required,” she says, and something in her voice sharpens, finally, though it does not rise. “I am not eager to resume the habit.”

I try not to feel it. It arrives all at once anyway, indistinguishable in the first instant from the fear that has been building in me since I broke the seal on Pemberton’s letter, the two feelings so tightly wound together that I cannot, even now, entirely separate what I said next from what I was actually afraid of.

“A fortnight,” I say. “You have known for a fortnight that Pemberton’s man approached you directly, by name, with a threat plain enough that any competent solicitor would recognize it instantly, and you said nothing. To me. In this house, where every piece of information I do not have is a piece of information I cannot defend against.”

“I am aware of what I did not tell you.” Her voice is even. It is the particular evenness I have watched her produce under exactly this kind of pressure before, and some part of me — some part I am not, in this moment, listening to — recognizes itfor what it is: not composure, but armor, deployed because the room has become unsafe.

I do not stop. I cannot. I have rehearsed nothing this time, and the not-rehearsing is its own kind of danger, because everything I say arrives unfiltered, straight from whatever is actually underneath the fear rather than whatever careful version of myself I might have constructed given two days to prepare it.

“You were not equipped for the kind of discretion this situation required,” I say. “I should have understood that from the start. Portia understood it. Portia told me, plainly, that bringing an unknown woman into the center of this work was precisely the liability she had warned me against, and I did not listen, because I wanted—“ I stop myself before the sentence finishes, though the stopping does not undo the having started it. “You should have told me immediately. The moment it happened. Not a fortnight later, not when I forced the question out of you standing in a doorway with an express letter in my hand.”

Eliza sets down the linen very carefully, the way a person sets down something she does not trust her hands to hold much longer, and she does not answer right away. The pause is long enough that I understand, somewhere beneath the noise, that it is itself an answer — that she is deciding, with the same deliberate care she brings to everything, exactly how much of herself this conversation is going to cost her, and whether she is willing to spend it.

“I am not your problem to manage,” she says, finally. “Nor your mistake to correct. I came here because Vivienne asked me to. I have done nothing careless. I went to the village. A man spoke to me. I said nothing to him that could be used against you or anyone else, and I came home.” She looks at me directly, and there is nothing hidden in it, nothing withheld, which issomehow worse than if there had been. “The fact that you are frightened does not make me responsible for it.”

Frightened.The word lands somewhere considerably lower than the sentence around it, because it is true, precisely true, more accurate than anything I said to her, and I have no answer to it that is not also an admission. I open my mouth to say something — I do not know, even now, what I intended it to be — and nothing arrives. I watch myself say nothing, the way I have watched myself do a great many things these past weeks that I understood, even as I did them, that I would regret.