Page 5 of The Language of Flowers

“It smells extraordinary in here,” I say, before I have decided to say anything at all.

She stops. Something crosses her face — surprise, I think, though it is gone before I can be certain — and then she says nothing, and goes to a workbench where a plant sits half out of its pot, and continues what she was doing before I interrupted her morning.

I do not ask questions. I have learned, in new houses under new rules, that the wisest thing to do in the first hour is watch and stay quiet, and so I watch her hands, sure and quick despite the soil already on them, easing the roots of the plant free without disturbing them, and I watch the greenhouse itself — the ordered rows, the labeled jars along one wall, the particular attention evident in every surface, as though nothing here has been placed by accident.

“You have the letter,” she says at last, not looking up.

I take it from my reticule and hold it out. She takes it with earth-marked fingers and reads it, and reads it again, and I watch her face while she does, the way I have learned to watch every face that matters, searching for the flicker that will tell me what she is actually thinking beneath whatever she chooses to show me.

I find nothing. Her composure is total — not performed, the way mine is performed, built carefully over years to hide what sits behind it, but something that seems to come from somewhere else entirely, some deeper and more settled place I do not yet have a name for. I have spent my whole life being extremely good at reading people. This woman, I understand within the space of a single silent minute, is going to require far closer observation than I have ever given anyone.

When she finally sets the letter down, she says only, “This is serious. More serious than I think you understand yet.”

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

“No,” Lady Wyndermere agrees. “She isn’t.”

She looks at the letter a moment longer, and then at me, and something settles in her expression that I cannot quite name — not welcome, exactly, but not refusal either. “We will need to discuss what this means,” she says. “You should stay for supper.”

I was not certain, an hour ago, that I would be staying for anything at all.

“Of course,” I say.

She goes to ring for tea, and I am left alone for a moment among the specimen tables, and I find myself thinking — absurdly, given everything that has happened in the last three days, given the letter and the men watching my townhouse and the danger I still do not fully understand — that I would very much like to see this greenhouse again tomorrow.

I think of my husband’s house, four days and thirty miles away, still being inventoried by men with ledgers who will finish long before I ever return to see the results. I think of the seven years I spent learning exactly what that house required of me, down to the smallest gesture, until I could no longer say with any confidence which of my habits were truly mine and which had simply been trained into me by a man who preferred a wife who did not surprise him. Nothing in this greenhouse has asked me to be anything at all. I find I do not know what to do with that, except to stand very still and let it be true for a moment longer before someone comes to tell me what happens next.

I do not know yet what that means. I only know that I have not, in longer than I can easily remember, wanted to see anything again quite this much.

Chapter 5

Hellebore

BEATRICE

Supper is a strange, careful thing — neither of us quite willing to speak of the letter in front of the footman, both of us aware that the ordinary conversation we are having instead, about the roads from London and the early blooming of the cherry trees along the drive, is only a kind of waiting. When the plates are cleared and the door closes behind the last servant, I do not waste time on transition.

“Bring the letter to the library,” I say. “We have work to do before either of us sleeps tonight.”

She does not argue, though I notice — because I have apparently decided to notice everything about her now, a habit I am not yet prepared to examine — that she does not simply obey either. She rises at her own pace, unhurried, and follows me down the corridor as though the library were her own idea all along.

The letter, laid flat on my desk under the lamp, looks smaller than it has any right to. I have read it perhaps a dozen times since this morning, and I still find new things in it each time, which tells me either that it has been written with considerable care, or that I am reading it with considerably more attention than I give most correspondence, and I suspect, uncomfortably, that both are true.

“Here,” I say, tapping the second paragraph. “He references a specific date of transfer — the eleventh of September, last year. That is not a guess. Someone gave him that date, or he has seen a record of it, which means he has a source inside the network, or inside a household that dealt with us directly.”

Eliza leans over the desk, close enough that I am aware of the particular warmth of another person near me, which is not a thing I am often aware of, and reads the line twice. “My husband kept a ledger of dates,” she says slowly. “Dates and names, nothing else — I always assumed it was to do with his investments. He was careful that way. Careful about small useless things and careless about the ones that mattered.”

“Would he have recorded a transfer he had no part in?”

“He recorded everything he thought might someday be useful to him. If someone told him a date, he would have written it down, whether or not he understood why it mattered.” She straightens. “You think this came from him.”

“I think it came through him,” I say. “Whether he understood what he was passing along is a different question.”

We work through the rest of it together — she with a memory for her late husband’s habits and associations that proves, within the hour, considerably more useful than I expected from a woman I met eight hours ago, and I with the trained eye of someone who has spent a decade learning to read what people do not say directly. Two things become clear before the clock strikes ten. The first: whoever supplied Pemberton with his information has mapped a geography — Kent and Surrey both named, which means he has been collecting for longer than a single season. The second, and more troubling: the letter uses a phrase,syrup of white bryony, arranged for remedy, that reads, to anyone without training, like a perfectly ordinary reference to a household medicine.

It is not ordinary. White bryony is not a remedy. It is a poison — vicious, fast-acting, entirely unsuitable for the kind of gentle household use the letter implies. No one who has spent real time around an apothecary’s shelf, let alone a working still room, would make that error.

“Someone wrote this who does not know plants,” I say. “Someone who learned the society’s methods secondhand — overheard them, perhaps, or read about them without ever seeing the actual work done.”