Page 22 of The Language of Flowers

I do not come here at three in the morning. I have not, in ten years, once needed to. The greenhouse has always been the place I go to be entirely myself, uncomplicated by an audience, and I understand now, standing in it at an hour it has never before seen me keep, that it has stopped being uncomplicated. Eliza’s questions are still in it. The corner of the potting table where she used to sit, turning a specimen over in her hands with a patience I found, before I let myself examine why, entirely disarming. The particular space near the north panes where she stood the first time she asked me about the forget-me-nots, before either of us understood what asking would eventually cost. I have spent a decade in this room without once feeling the absence of a person in it. Tonight it is the only thing I feel.

I look at the illustration for the better part of an hour. It is, I allow myself to admit now, for the first time and far too late, better than my own early work — the line more confident, the shading more patient, the particular way she rendered the blooms in sequence along the spike rather than as a mass of purple, and the gray she found in the stem that everyone else paints green because they expect it to be green. I told her once that it was good. I did not tell her it was better than mine. I did not tell her a great many things, over three months, that I understood clearly and declined to say aloud, and I understand now, sitting with the evidence of her attention in my own two hands, precisely how much that declining has cost both of us.

I have done to her exactly what I swore, ten years ago, I would never do to another living person. I used my own fear as a weapon, and I aimed it at the one person in this house who had done nothing to deserve it, because she was near enough to reach and because striking at her required less courage than striking at the actual source of the fear, which was never Eliza at all. I have organized my entire life — the greenhouse, the still room, the careful architecture of Wyndermere itself — around not being a woman who does that. I did it anyway. The fear simply grew large enough, and when it did, I discovered that ten years of careful self-construction is not, in the end, so very different from the thin performance I once watched my husband produce, when his own fear grew large enough to need somewhere to land.

I think of the word I used, and I think of what it actually meant, spoken aloud in that particular voice, to a woman who spent seven years being told, in exactly that register, that she was insufficient in some precise way a man had troubled himself to specify. I did not invent a new cruelty last night. I borrowed one, without meaning to, from every voice she has spent her whole life learning to withstand, and I understand, sitting herewith the proof of her attention in my hands, that this is very likely the part she will find hardest to forgive, if she forgives any of it at all — not that I was angry, but that my anger arrived wearing a shape she already knew too well to mistake for anything else.

I think, too, of the ten years before her — the ten years I spent building this particular fortress, brick by careful brick, on the theory that if I simply controlled enough of my own life, nothing in it could ever again be taken from me the way my marriage was taken, slowly, with my own consent extracted a little at a time until I no longer recognized the shape of what I had agreed to. I was not wrong to build it. I have helped a great many women over those ten years precisely because I understood, better than most, what it costs to live unguarded in a house that does not deserve the privilege of your unguarding. But I built the fortress high enough, eventually, that I stopped being able to tell the difference between the walls that were protecting me and the walls that were simply keeping everyone else out, Eliza included, and last night I discovered, far too late to spare her the discovering with me, precisely how thin the difference actually was.

I wrote to Vivienne sometime after midnight, in the library, before I came here — I do not remember composing the letter so much as finding myself, afterward, with an empty inkwell and a folded letter ready for the morning post, the words already gone from me and into her hands before I had properly decided to send them. I told her what I had done. I did not soften it. I have spent three months learning, slowly and at considerable cost, that softening a true thing rarely makes it kinder, only less useful, and I did not want kindness from Vivienne tonight. I wanted the thing I have always gone to her for, in the rare moments I have permitted myself to need it: a woman who will not let me look away from myself.

Her reply reaches me before the sun is fully up, carried by a rider she must have sent within the hour of receiving mine, because Vivienne apparently does not sleep when someone she has trained requires correcting. It is three lines. I read it standing at the greenhouse door with the gray light just beginning to come through the glass, and I read it again, and I do not need to read it a third time to understand it.

Portia already suspected as much; I did not need your letter to confirm it, though I am glad you finally sent one. You have spent ten years teaching every woman in this house what she is worth. Apparently you require the lesson yourself. You know what you did and you know why. Fix it, Beatrice.

I fold the letter and I do not burn it. I find, oddly, that I want to keep this one.

The plan arrives in the same hour, and it arrives the way solutions have always arrived for me — not as inspiration, but as something that was sitting in front of me the entire time, obscured only by whatever I was too frightened to look at directly. Pemberton meets his clerk contact every week at the coaching inn in the village; I have known this for a fortnight through channels of my own and did nothing with it, because I was too occupied managing the wrong danger to properly examine the real one. Pemberton also, I know through those same quiet village channels, manages a private condition with preparations from a village apothecary who is, by every account I have gathered, considerably less skilled than he believes himself to be. A respected woman, offering to speak to that apothecary on his behalf — a small, unremarkable kindness, the sort any woman of my situation extends without comment — would require very little to arrange. And a woman carrying, in the course of that same unremarkable conversation, a precise and specific piece of knowledge about the terms under which Lord Moreton retained him — knowledge that would not ruinhim, would not see him prosecuted, but would embarrass him precisely enough, among precisely the men whose good opinion he requires to continue practicing as he does — would be sufficient, I think, to make the entire petition considerably more trouble than it is worth to pursue.

That knowledge is not mine. It never has been. It is Eliza’s, carried out of her husband’s study in the same reticule that once carried the letter that brought her to me, and I have known this for weeks without once considering that it might be the answer rather than simply a fact I happened to possess about her.

I could ask someone else. Portia would do it in an afternoon, without a single wasted word. But the choice of whether to use it belongs to Eliza, not to me, and not to Portia, and I understand, standing here with the lavender illustration still in my hand and the gray light strengthening around me, that pretending otherwise would be one more version of the exact mistake I have just spent an entire night learning I cannot afford to keep making.

I turn the plan over once more, testing it for the particular flaw I have learned to expect in anything that arrives this easily, and I find, this time, that the flaw is not in the plan itself but in what I very nearly did with it — walk into her room this morning already carrying a solution, already deciding on her behalf what her own information was worth spending, exactly as I decided, a week ago, what her own judgment was worth trusting. I have spent ten years being careful with everyone else’s autonomy but my own. I am not going to spend this morning being careless with Eliza’s, on top of everything else I have already cost her.

There is also, underneath the plan, a plainer question I have been declining to ask myself since the moment she saidI’ll leave in the morning— whether I am walking up these stairs to fix a problem, or whether I am walking up these stairs because I cannot bear the shape of a house with her trunk already in thehall. I do not think the two are separable any longer, and I have decided, standing here with the light coming up properly now through the glass, that I am done pretending they are.

I set the illustration down. I do not put it back on the shelf. I leave it where I can see it, on the potting table, in the place she used to sit, and I go up through the quiet house toward the blue room, rehearsing nothing this time, because I have already discovered, once tonight, precisely what rehearsal is worth when the person on the other side of a door deserves better than a performance.

Chapter 22

Heartsease (Reprise)

ELIZA

I tell myself, lying on top of the counterpane with my trunk half-packed at the foot of the bed, that I am simply resting my eyes until the house wakes properly and Mrs. Prentice can be asked about the carriage, but the truth is plainer and less comfortable than that. I am watching the greenhouse light through the gap in the curtain, and I cannot make myself stop, and some part of me that I have not yet forgiven for its own foolishness is waiting to see when it finally goes out.

It is still burning when the gray comes up properly over the garden, and I am still watching it, and I am considering, for the first time since the confrontation, that perhaps composure has its limits after all, when I hear footsteps on the stairs — familiar ones, that I would know in a house full of strangers — and then a knock at my door.

I do not answer right away. I have had, over the past several hours, a great deal of practice deciding how much of myself a given moment is going to cost, and I want, before I open my mouth, to know the answer for this one.

“Come in,” I say, finally, because I find I want to see her more than I want to protect myself from the wanting.

Beatrice opens the door and does not come further than the threshold. She is still dressed in what she was wearing last night — she has not slept either, I understand, looking at her,the particular exhaustion around her eyes unmistakable even in the low morning light — and she stands there for a long moment without speaking, and I understand, watching her, that whatever she has come to say, she has not rehearsed it. Her face is doing nothing to manage what is in it. I have never once seen her arrive anywhere unmanaged, and the sight of it now, unguarded and plainly frightened, does something to the careful wall I built for myself sometime around three in the morning.

“What I said was not about you,” she says. No greeting. No careful opening line. Just those words, plain and simple, and clearly unrehearsed. “I have spent all night trying to find a gentler way to tell you that, and I have decided gentleness is not what either of us needs from me this morning, so I am going to say it plainly instead. It was never about you. It was about me, and about ten years of believing that if I controlled everything within my reach, nothing could ever again be taken from me the way things were taken from me before. Last night something arrived that I could not control, and I did what frightened people do — I aimed it at the nearest person, because striking at you cost me less than admitting what actually frightened me. Portia’s warning was not the cause of what I said. It was only the excuse I reached for, because it was easier to hide behind her judgment than to name my own fear honestly.”

I do not say anything. I am not certain in this moment that I trust my own voice to do what I want it to.

“I am not asking you to stay,” Beatrice says, and something in her own voice catches, briefly, before she steadies it. “I have no right to ask you that, not after last night, and I am not going to spend whatever courage brought me up these stairs on a request I have not earned. I am asking only that you know, before you decide anything, that I see you. That you are not careless — you are the most precise observer I have ever watched work, and I have spent ten years around people who thought precision wasa thing to be suspicious of in a woman, and I let that suspicion speak for me last night instead of the truth, which is that your attention is the finest instrument in this house, finer than my own, and I have been treating it as a danger instead of what it actually is.” She glances, briefly, toward the window, toward the greenhouse below it.

“The illustration on my potting table is not good because you are talented, though you are. It is good because you looked at that flower until you understood it completely, the same way you looked at me, from the very first week, until you understood things about myself I had not yet said aloud. I do not know when I decided that was a problem to be managed rather than the rarest thing I have ever been given. But I decided it, and I am sorry, and I do not expect my apology to undo anything.”

I feel something in my chest come loose, slowly, the way ice comes loose from a roof in the first real thaw — not all at once, but in a long low groan that makes clear the whole structure has already given way even before the first piece falls.

“There is one more thing,” Beatrice says, and her voice steadies further, moving into something more familiar — the particular careful precision I have come to know as the sound of her actually solving a problem rather than performing the solving of one. She tells me, then, plainly and without asking anything of me yet, what she pieced together in the greenhouse before dawn: Pemberton’s weekly meetings with his clerk at the coaching inn, his private condition and his inferior apothecary, the particular shape of leverage that requires nothing more than a respected woman’s ordinary kindness and one carefully chosen piece of information about the terms of his retainer with my husband’s estate — information that exists nowhere but in what I carried out of that townhouse in my own reticule, three months and a lifetime ago.

“The terms,” she says. “Read them again with the account books beside you. Your husband did not retain Pemberton to look into the society. He retained him to make certain the society never looked into what had already been done with your portion — and he was not the only one of them who did it. Three of the families paying for that petition have their own names in your husband’s ledgers, on both sides of precisely the transactions Pemberton claims to be investigating. He has been hired by the men he would have to accuse.”