Page 4 of The Language of Flowers

I do not let my face portray anything while I read. This is not difficult; it is, if anything, the easiest thing I do. But something in the room changes anyway — the air feels more careful, as though even the plants have understood that whatever has just entered this greenhouse is not going to be simple.

Here is what I know, reading it a second time: this woman is four-and-twenty years old. She was married seven years to a man three times her age and was widowed four days past. She has no history with the society, no training in its discretion, no tested loyalty beyond Vivienne’s word for her, and she has arrived at my home a full day ahead of any warning, carrying a letter that names Wyndermere by address and references transactions I would very much prefer remained unreferenced by anyone outside these walls.

She is, in every practical sense I can measure, the most significant risk to reach this house in a decade.

She is also, at this moment, standing in front of my specimen of Lavandula angustifolia with the particular stillness of someone who would very much like to understand how a thing works, and has not yet asked permission to find out.

No. Absolutely not.I have spent ten years building a life that does not require surprises, and whatever Vivienne intends by sending this woman to me — whatever debt or emergency or careful strategic reasoning sits behind it — I am not going to let a stranger with a trunk and an unnerving talent for stillness disturb the order I have made here. I fold the letter along its existing creases and set it on the bench, and I tell myself, quite firmly, that this is a problem to be solved and managed, like any other, and that the solving of it will not require me to feel anything about the solving.

I almost believe it.

“This is serious,” I say, because it needs saying aloud, if only to hear how it sounds outside my own head. “More serious than I think you understand yet.”

“I gathered that much from Vivienne,” she says. “She is not a woman who overstates things.”

“No,” I agree. “She isn’t.”

I look at the letter again, though I have already memorized its contents, but it is easier than looking at her. When I do look up, she has moved to the specimen table and is looking at the lavender the way she looked at the rose print in the hall — not politely, not for the sake of conversation, but as though the plant itself might tell her something if she paid it close enough attention.

I do not know yet what I am going to do with her. I know, with the particular clarity I reserve for facts I would rather not examine too closely, that whatever it is, it is not going to be simple, and that some part of me — some small, unmanaged, entirely inconvenient part — is already interested in finding out.

Absolutely not, I think again, more firmly this time, and I go to ring for tea after all.

Chapter 4

Anemone

ELIZA

The housekeeper’s name is Mrs. Prentice, and she has the particular efficient kindness of a woman who has run a large house for a long time and has stopped being surprised by anything that arrives at its door. She does not ask why I have come a day earlier than expected, or why I traveled with such haste that my trunk arrived half-fastened. She simply says, “This way, my lady,” and takes me up a staircase that smells faintly of beeswax and something green I cannot yet place, and shows me to a room that looks out over a walled garden gone soft and gray in the early spring light.

“The blue room,” she says, unnecessarily, since the walls are the color of a robin’s egg and there is no mistaking it. “Her ladyship thought you’d like the garden view.”

I do not ask how her ladyship arranged an opinion about what I would like before she had met me. I have learned, over seven years, to accept small kindnesses without interrogating them, because interrogating them is a way of refusing them, and I find I am tired of refusing things.

The house is large. This is not, in itself, remarkable — my husband’s house in Grosvenor Square was large, and every room in it made itself known as belonging to him, arranged around his preferences, his comforts, his particular understanding of how a room ought to make a visitor feel small. This house islarge in a different way. It does not announce an owner so much as accommodate one, comfortably, the way a well-worn coat accommodates the person who has shaped it over years of wearing it. I stand at the window for a moment before Mrs. Prentice leaves me, looking down at the garden, and I have the strange sensation of being somewhere that is occupied without being crowded — a rare enough quality in houses, in my experience, and rarer still in the people who own them.

I do not unpack. I am not yet certain I am staying, whatever Vivienne’s instructions implied, and I have learned not to make myself too comfortable in a place before I know its rules.

Vivienne had given me little enough to go on. A name — Lady Wyndermere — and an address, and the particular instruction, delivered with no more warmth than the rest of our conversation, that I was to tell her everything, withhold nothing, and trust that whatever she decided to do with the information would be the correct thing to do. I had asked, foolishly perhaps, what sort of woman I was going into the care of. Vivienne had considered the question for a moment longer than I expected and said only, “The sort who will not waste your time telling you what you wish to hear.” I had thought, on the road, that this sounded less like a comfort than a warning. Standing now in a room chosen, apparently, for the view I would like, I am no longer certain it was meant as either.

I go back downstairs instead, meaning only to look for something to occupy the next quarter hour before whatever formal reception is meant to happen, happens. There is a framed illustration in the entrance hall — a cabbage rose, rendered in careful watercolor, old enough that the paper has yellowed slightly at the edges. It is not, if I am honest, a particularly skilled rendering. The shading on the outer petals is uncertain, and whoever painted it clearly struggled with the particular way a rose’s center coils in on itself. But there is something in theattempt that holds me — the evidence of a hand that was trying very hard to see the thing correctly, rather than merely trying to produce something pleasant to look at.

I am still considering it, my head tilted, my hand half-raised toward the glass before I remember myself, when I hear a door and turn to find a woman crossing the hall toward me with soil visible under her fingernails and a stained apron still tied at her waist.

This is the first thing I notice about Beatrice Ashford, Dowager Countess of Wyndermere: the soil. Not her face, which is handsome in the particular unadorned way of a woman who has never troubled herself much with how she is perceived, and not her bearing, which is very upright and entirely unhurried despite what must have been a hasty walk from wherever she was interrupted. The soil. I have spent seven years in rooms full of people who understood, instinctively, exactly what impression they were making at every moment — my husband among the very worst of them, a man who could not enter a room without first calculating its effect on him. This woman has clearly not given the matter a single thought. She has simply come as she was, because whatever she was doing before I arrived mattered more to her, in that moment, than the fact of my arrival.

I find this enormously interesting. I could not entirely explain why.

“I am sorry to come without proper notice,” I tell her, because it is true and because it seems the correct thing to open with. “I understand a rider was meant to precede me. I believe I outran him.”

“You did,” she says. “I am Lady Wyndermere.”

I give her my name. I watch her eyes go to my traveling dress, entirely too fine for a house with earth under its mistress’s nails, and then to my face, and I have the peculiar experience — rareenough that I notice it happening — of being unable to read a single thing in her expression while she does it. I am good at reading people. I have had to be. It is, along with my composure, the skill I have relied upon most heavily for seven years, the ability to know within moments what a room requires of me and to become it. I cannot read this woman at all, and I find that this makes me want to look at her longer, not less.

She does not lead me to a drawing room. I note this, and say nothing, because I have already decided — somewhere between the entrance hall and whatever room I am now being led toward — that I would rather follow this woman’s instincts than insist on the forms I know. We pass a library with a worn patch in its carpet exactly where a chair would be pulled close to the fire on a cold evening. We pass a closed door I do not ask about, though something in the particular plainness of it, unlike every other door in the corridor, makes me want to.

The room she brings me to is a greenhouse — vast, glass-roofed, warm with the particular damp heat of a hundred growing things, and I stop just inside the door because the smell of it has reached me before anything else has, and it is, I realize with something like surprise, the first thing I have breathed in three days that I have not immediately tried to interpret for what it reveals about the person standing near me. I have spent three days breathing my husband’s tobacco and beeswax and the particular staleness of a house being slowly inventoried. This smells like something alive.