Page 26 of The Language of Flowers

“Tell me,” she murmurs, her mouth at my hip, unhurried, “whether this is still where you want me.”

“You already know the answer.”

“I like hearing you say it,” she says, “more than I have ever liked hearing anything,” and there is nothing left in her voice of the careful woman who once stood in a doorway rationing what she permitted herself to want.

“I need you. Right now. Right where you are.”

I hear myself say the rest of it plainly, without softening any part of it. “With your mouth on my cunt and your fingers inside me.”

She settles between my thighs with an answering smirk and takes me in her mouth, slow and deliberate, her hands closing warm around my hips to hold me steady when I would otherwise rise to meet her. She does not hurry. She finds the exact rhythm that undoes me and keeps to it, patient, thorough, one hand sliding up to find mine and lace our fingers together as though even now, especially now, she wants nothing between us that is not freely given, and when I finally break it is quiet rather than loud, a long unraveling rather than a shattering, her name the only word I have breath left to say.

She gathers me up before I have even finished trembling and kisses me languidly. I taste myself faintly on her mouth and find it is what I prefer. And when her hand finds mine again in the aftermath she simply holds it, entwined, against her heart, as though the holding were its own kind of sentence neither of us needed to finish aloud.

Afterward she gathers me against her, both of us settled on the worn blanket she keeps folded beneath the potting table for exactly no reason I understood until this particular season of our lives, and I lie with my head against her collarbone listening to her heart slow, and I think, not for the first time, that this — this precise, unremarkable, extraordinary morning — is what all the careful architecture of both our lives has been building toward, though neither of us could have known at the time.

“We ought to dress,” Beatrice says, eventually, without moving. “Mrs. Prentice will wonder.”

“Oh, we both know that Mrs. Prentice has not trulywonderedin weeks. She is simplywonderingfor the sake of good manners.”

Beatrice laughs — a low, unguarded sound I have come to treasure precisely because I know how rarely she once permitted herself to make it — and presses her mouth to my hair, and neither of us moves for a while longer regardless.

“I have been meaning to tell you something,” I say, into the quiet, “and I have been putting it off because I did not want to dress it up first in something smaller, and I am trying to stop doing that.”

She goes very still, the particular attentive stillness she brings to anything she has decided matters. “Tell me.”

“Vivienne inducted me properly. Last week. I am a member of the society now, in full, not simply someone useful to it on occasion.” I feel her arms tighten slightly around me. “I wantedyou to be the first person I told, once I actually told anyone, and I have taken an embarrassingly long time getting to it.”

“I already suspected,” Beatrice says, “though I am glad you told me yourself rather than leaving me to go on suspecting.” She presses her mouth to my temple. “I am proud of you. I do not think I have said that plainly enough, and I find I want to have said it. And to continue to say it, for as long as you allow me.”

We lie there a while longer, the light shifting slowly across the glass above us, and I think about how easily those words might once have frightened me —proud of you, offered without condition, without a performance required first to earn them — and how little they frighten me now.

Without a second thought, I turn to her. “I love you, Beatrice.” I have known it for some time; only now am I saying the words out loud, not just to Beatrice but to myself as well.

“I love you more than words can say, my sweet Eliza.”

I kiss her, deeply, both of us declaring that this is our forever without the need for words.

I finish theValeriana officinalisplate that afternoon, working at the illustration table with the particular loose, unhurried satisfaction of a body that has been thoroughly and tenderly attended to, and when it is done I begin the next specimen without needing to be asked, because I have learned the manual’s rhythm as well as I have learned everything else about this house. I draw the lavender growing along the greenhouse’s south wall, the bed Beatrice has tended for ten years and taught me to tend alongside her, rendering each spike of small purple flowers with the same patient attention I have given every specimen since the forget-me-not first taught me how to look at a thing until I understood it completely.

In my working notes, beside the illustration’s title, I write its name in the botanical Latin I have finally learned well enoughto use without checking —Lavandula angustifolia.The key already holds an entry for this plant. I copied it in myself, weeks ago, in the meaning the society has always used — distrust, which I took at the time for half a jest among women who have every reason to distrust nearly everything, and half not a jest at all. I did not argue with it then and I am not going to strike it out now. It was true of this house for a long while, and there was a week this summer when it was the truest thing on the page. But a plant is permitted more than one meaning, and so, it turns out, is a life. I leave the first entry where it is, and beneath it, in the small private shorthand I have developed for the manual’s key, I write the plant’sothermeaning. The one that belongs to the particular language this society speaks in tussie-mussies and pressed petals and not words. The one I understand now not as something reserved for others but as a fact about my own life, plainly true and no longer frightening to write down.

Devotion.

Epilogue

Primrose

BEATRICE

The manual arrives from the binder in the first true week of spring, a full year almost to the day since a trunk arrived unannounced in my entrance hall with a woman standing beside it who had not yet learned she was allowed to want anything for herself. I unwrap the first copy at the desk in the library, Eliza looking over my shoulder with the particular held-breath quiet of someone who has spent months trusting all will turn out well and has only now permitted herself to actually believe it.

It is a beautiful object. Leather-bound, the corners gilt-edged, the title stamped in plain unassuming script —A Record of Cultivation at Wyndermere— so ordinary a title that no one outside the society would think to look twice at it. To any woman who does not know how to read it, it is precisely what it claims to be: one gentlewoman’s careful record of a decade’s botanical work, her preparations noted alongside her companion’s illustrations, gifted with evident pride to forty women across England with a card that reads onlyWith the compliments of the Lavender Society.

To the women who know how to read it, it is something else entirely — a master key, plant names cross-referenced against safe house locations, preparation notes coded to crisis protocols, illustrated with enough precision that anyone who has been taught the cipher can find, in a single glance at a page that lookslike nothing more than a pressed specimen and a paragraph of horticultural observation, exactly what she needs to know.

I did not arrive at that decision comfortably. A bound book is a durable thing, and forty of them are forty houses in which one careless servant or one unlucky search could undo a decade — I have not forgotten that this entire past year began with a single letter naming a single address. Vivienne and I argued it both ways for the better part of a month. What decided it was Eliza’s point, which she made once and did not repeat: that the women who need this are already carrying everything they know alone, in their own heads, and that a decade of work which cannot be handed on is not a network at all but a habit that dies with the five of us.

Vivienne called it, when she reviewed the proofs, the most elegant piece of society intelligence she had seen in twenty years. She did not say so to flatter either of us. Vivienne does not flatter. She simply said it once and moved on to her tea. I have turned the sentence over in my mind many times since, understanding it for the rare thing it actually was.