Page 25 of The Language of Flowers

“The society needs women who look at things until they understand them. Women who look at things and see what isnotbeing said,” she says, not turning around. “There are a great many women who can be taught. There are considerably fewer who arrive already knowing how.” Finally, she turns and there is something in her face I have rarely seen there — not quite warmth, Vivienne does not deal often in warmth, but a kind of respect she extends sparingly and never without cause.

“I should like Eliza Moreton to join us properly. Formally. Not as your guest, Beatrice, and not as an asset borrowed for a single afternoon’s work. As one of us.”

She does not wait for my answer, because she has not, in fact, been asking for it.

“Send her to me next week,” she says, already reaching for her gloves. “I imagine she will have opinions about how it ought to be done. I find I am rather looking forward to hearing them.”

I walk her to the carriage myself, which I do not ordinarily trouble to do, and she pauses before climbing in, studying me for a moment with the same unhurried attention she gave the illustration.

“You look considerably less like a woman guarding a fortress than you did the last time I called,” she says. “It suits you.”

“I have had a difficult month.”

“You have had anecessarymonth.” She settles her gloves and does not soften the observation with anything further, which I have learned is precisely how Vivienne offers her kindest words — plainly, without flourish, so that a person cannot mistake them for anything less than what they are. “Do not squander what it taught you, Beatrice. It is a costly enough lesson that I should hate to see you require it twice.”

A moment before I believe our conversation to be concluded, she offers, “I should know.” With a nod that says she will not be offering more than she has already said.

The carriage pulls away before I can decide whether her statement was praise or a warning. I stand in the drive a while longer deciding it was very likely both, and that Vivienne would consider that the correct answer as well.

Chapter 24

Lavender

ELIZA

The letter from the family’s solicitor arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, in the ordinary morning post, and I read it twice at the breakfast table before I fully understand what it is telling me. My portion is confirmed. Not contested, not negotiated down to some grudging fraction of what I am owed, but confirmed, in full. Beatrice’s man at the Inns of Court came to very little in the end — he read the settlement, wrote back that the contested provision would very likely stand, and advised me to accept whatever fraction the family offered before they thought better of offering one. I did not accept it. I wrote to him myself instead, and told him which of my husband’s account books the provision had been drafted against, and where in that house those books were kept, and which of my husband’s brothers had been in the room while the drafting was done. None of it was anything he had thought to ask me, because it had not occurred to him that the widow might be the person in possession of the facts. He wrote back within the week in an entirely different tone. Vivienne handled the rest, with the particular efficient discretion she brings to everything, and described it to me afterward in exactly four sentences, as though dismantling a hostile estate’s legal position were a matter of no more consequence than rearranging a dinner table. But the four sentences began with mine.

I am, for the first time in my life, a woman with money that is entirely her own, answerable to no husband, no solicitor, no family eager to remind me how little I am owed. I sit with the letter for a long while after Beatrice has gone out to the greenhouse, turning the fact of it over the way I turn over most things now, testing it for a flaw I have learned to expect and, increasingly, do not find.

I have not made any arrangements to leave. As I read the letter a third time, I know I am not going to.

I went to Vivienne the week after Pemberton’s withdrawal, as she instructed, and I will admit I expected something more ceremonial than what I received — a formal induction, perhaps, or at minimum a speech. Instead she poured me tea, asked three precise questions about how I had actually assembled the documents I brought to that parlor meeting, and then told me, without further preamble, that I was now a member of theLavender Societyand that she expected me to say so plainly if I ever disagreed with a decision made in my presence, because she had no use for a woman who nodded along in a room and complained afterward in a carriage. I told her I had never been especially good at nodding along, only obliged to. She said she was aware, and that it was rather the point.

I have not yet told Beatrice how much that afternoon meant to me — not the induction itself, though it mattered, but the plainness of it, the way Vivienne simply assumed I belonged there and required nothing further of me to prove it. I am still learning how to say a thing like that aloud without dressing it up first in something smaller. I am getting better at it. I intend to tell her soon.

The Season has begun its slow turn toward autumn, the light coming through the greenhouse glass thinner and more golden than it was in June, and Wyndermere has settled into a rhythm I no longer think of as new. I go out to the greenhousemost mornings now, not because I am summoned but because it is simply where I go, the way another woman might go to a drawing room or a garden of her own choosing, and I find Beatrice already at her apparatus, as she always is, and I take my place at the illustration table, and neither of us remarks on the ordinariness of it because the ordinariness is, itself, the entire point.

I am working on theValeriana officinalisplate this morning — the centerpiece, Beatrice says, of the manual we have begun building together, though she will not yet tell me precisely what it will contain beyond the botanical record it appears to be. I understand enough of the shape of it to know that my illustrations and her preparations are meant to sit side by side in it, cross-referenced in some manner she has not fully explained, and that the society considers it important work. I find I do not mind not yet knowing every particular. I have learned, this year, that some things reveal themselves properly only once they are finished, and I am content to let this one take its time.

Mrs. Prentice has stopped asking, most mornings, whether I will be breaking my fast in the blue room or the family dining room, because she has learned, along with the rest of the household, that the answer is invariably wherever Beatrice already is. I do not know precisely when the household’s understanding of my situation shifted from guest to something else entirely, only that it happened so gradually that I cannot now locate the particular morning it became true, the way I could not, watching the forget-me-nots along the north path in June, locate the particular day they had finished blooming and simply become a part of the ordinary landscape of the place.

“You have the secondary root wrong,” Beatrice says, setting down her mortar and crossing to look over my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her along my back before she has said another word. “It branches here, not there. It isa common enough error — most illustrators draw the root the way they imagine a root ought to look, rather than the way this particular root actually grows.”

“Show me,” I say, and she does, her hand closing briefly over mine to guide the pencil, and it is an ordinary correction of an ordinary error, except that neither of us moves apart once the correction is finished. I have come to understand that the question she is actually asking has very little to do with root structure.

“Beatrice.” I do not turn around. “Ask me properly.”

She is quiet for a moment, and then her mouth finds the curve of my neck, unhurried, and I feel her smile against my skin before she speaks. “Would you care to walk to the village with me this afternoon?”

“That was not the question you meant to ask.”

“No,” she agrees, and her hand slides forward along my collarbone, slow and certain, the pencil finally slipping from my fingers because I have entirely stopped needing it. “But I find I have grown rather fond of asking you things sideways. You always know precisely what I mean.”

I turn in her arms, finally, and there is nothing urgent in the way she kisses me, none of the desperate collapsing hunger of the morning she came to the blue room with the trunk still half-packed against the wall, nothing to prove and nothing left to apologize for. This is something else entirely — unhurried, familiar, the particular ease of two people who have long since stopped needing to rush toward each other because we both know that neither of us is going anywhere.

“The door,” I say, against her mouth, and she reaches without looking and turns the greenhouse latch, because we have learned precisely which hours the household leaves us alone here and precisely how long they last.

She undresses me slowly, here among her own careful cultivation, with a thoroughness that has nothing hurried in it at all — her mouth following the path her hands have already mapped a dozen times now, patient in a way that makes me understand, all over again, that patience and intensity are not opposites for her, only two instruments in the same steady hand. She lays me back against the folded blanket beneath the potting table, unhurried, and takes her time at my breast, my ribs, the soft skin of my stomach, until I am arching into her mouth saying her name only once, quietly, and she answers by finding exactly the place that answers the unasked demand.