Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
“Aunt Frances!” Lilian Ashwell flung herself at Frances with all the warmth and certainty of childhood, even before Frances had scarcely stepped onto the lawn. She laughed and bent to catch the little girl, who smelled of sunshine, crushed grass and the faint sweetness of strawberry jam.
“Papa said I might pick every flower that was not important, and I have decided that, since all of them are equally important, I shall pick them all.”
“That is a dangerous principle,” Frances said, kissing her cheek. “You will leave your father no garden at all.”
Lilian drew back, entirely untroubled. “Then we shall plant another.”
It was impossible not to smile at such logic.
The morning was mild, touched by one of those soft early-spring brightnesses that made even familiar places appear gentler.
At the far end of the garden, near a low stone path lined with pale budding shrubs, Emma was sitting beneath the light shade of a flowering tree with a glass of lemonade before her.
Beside her stood a cradle that had been brought out into the sun, its little hood casting a delicate shelter over the sleeping baby within.
The scene possessed such quiet domestic ease that Frances felt, for a fleeting instant, as though she had wandered into someone else’s life entirely.
Emma rose at once when she saw her. “Frances, darling.”
There was no formality in the greeting, only love. Frances crossed the grass and let herself be embraced. Emma held her tightly for a moment, and in that simple pressure Frances felt the dangerous stirring of emotion she had spent several days keeping carefully subdued.
“You look tired,” Emma mused, drawing back to study her.
“That is because everyone has spent the last two days informing me that my life is altered.”
Emma’s mouth softened in something that was half sympathy and half amusement. “Well, that’s because it is.”
Frances sat beside her. “You are not meant to agree so quickly.”
“I am not agreeing with them,” Emma assured her. “Only with the fact.”
Lilian had already darted away again, crouching among the flowerbeds with solemn industry, selecting blossoms according to principles known only to herself.
The baby slept undisturbed in the cradle, with one tiny hand curled near its cheek.
Bees drifted lazily among the early blooms. Somewhere beyond the hedge, a bird sang with offensive cheerfulness.
Emma poured lemonade into a fresh glass and handed it to Frances. “Drink that first. Then tell me how you truly are.”
Frances took the glass, though her fingers closed around it more for occupation than thirst. The coolness of it was pleasant against her skin.
“How do you suppose I am?”
Emma gave her a look. “Do not be difficult, not with me.”
Frances looked down into the pale yellow surface of the lemonade. It seemed easier, somehow, to watch the light tremble in the glass than to meet her sister’s eyes.
“I am…” She stopped and began again. “I am less certain than everyone wishes me to be.”
Emma said nothing, and because she said nothing, Frances went on.
“They speak of it as though the thing were settled merely because I agreed. As though consent were peace.” She let out a small breath. “It is not peace.”
How could any of it be peace when she was on the threshold of tying her life to a man she didn’t know, a man who had a secret child he refused to divulge anything about?
“No,” Emma agreed quietly. “It rarely is at first.”
Frances lifted her gaze then. “Were you afraid?”
Emma smiled faintly. “Terribly.”
“You did not seem so.”
Emma smiled. “I was too proud to show it.”
That, at least, was familiar enough to make Frances’s mouth twitch.
Emma folded her hands in her lap. “What is it you fear most?”
The question settled between them with surprising weight.
Frances could have answered a dozen ways.
She feared the strangeness of marrying a man she did not truly know.
She feared Andrew’s reserve, the secrets he plainly carried, and the child at the center of all this mystery.
She feared walking toward a life shaped more by necessity than desire.
But none of those were her deepest fear.
She looked toward Lilian, who had begun arranging her gathered flowers into groups of importance. Then, her gaze fell upon the cradle, where Emma’s younger child slept in perfect unconscious trust.
“I… am afraid of disappearing,” Frances confessed.
Emma’s expression changed very slightly, as if the answer had not surprised her, only saddened her.
Frances went on before she could stop herself.
“I have spent years watching women become what marriage required of them. Softer where they wished to be sharp. Silent where they wished to speak. Smaller, always smaller, until all that remained was what suited everyone else.” Her fingers tightened around the glass.
“I do not know how to become a wife without losing the part of me that is myself.”
The words, once spoken, left her feeling at once foolish and exposed.
Emma did not laugh. Instead, she leaned back slightly in her chair, considering Frances with that steady, affectionate intelligence which had always made confession both easier and more dangerous.
“Marriage can demand things,” she revealed. “Compromise, patience, more humility than one would prefer.” Her mouth curved. “And occasional restraint, which in your case may prove the hardest trial of all.”
Frances gave her a reproachful look, though a reluctant smile threatened it.
“But it need not require your disappearance,” Emma continued more seriously. “Not unless you surrender yourself willingly.”
Frances frowned faintly. “That sounds very noble. I am not sure it is useful.”
“It is useful because it is true.”
Emma turned her gaze toward the cradle, where the baby slept one breath after another, as if peace were the natural condition of the world.
“When I married Philip,” she divulged, “I was afraid, too. Not of him precisely, though he was formidable enough to alarm anyone with sense, but of what the life would ask of me, of whether I should still be myself within it.”
“And are you?”
Emma looked back at her. “Without a doubt.”
Frances studied her sister’s face, searching perhaps for some sign that the confidence was forced or borrowed for comfort’s sake. She found none. Emma looked different from the girl she had once been. She was warmer perhaps, steadier and more deeply rooted in herself, but never diminished.
“How?” Frances asked softly.
Emma smiled then, and there was something so calm in it that Frances felt, against her will, the first faint loosening of the knot inside her chest.
“By remaining inconvenient whenever necessary,” Emma said through a grin.
Frances laughed before she could help it.
“I mean it,” Emma urged, still smiling. “Marriage did not make me less myself. It simply required that I choose, again and again, not to vanish into what others expected.”
Frances looked down.
“It will be harder for you at first,” Emma continued. “Because this is not the life you imagined, and because it has begun under strain rather than affection. But that does not mean you are doomed to lose yourself in it.”
She reached across the little table and touched Frances’s wrist lightly.
“You are still Frances,” she reminded her. “And unless you choose to abandon her, no marriage can take that from you.”
For a moment Frances could not answer.
The breeze moved softly through the garden, carrying the scent of lemon, fresh grass, and the faint powdery sweetness of early blossoms. At that exact moment, Lilian came skipping back along the path, her hands full of flowers in a manner that suggested she had gathered them with very little regard for symmetry and a great deal of affection.
“These are for you, Aunt Frances,” she announced, holding them out with solemn generosity.
Frances took the little bouquet at once, as though receiving something rare and precious. There were daisies and two slightly crushed primroses, a stem of rosemary that had no business being among them, and one small violet drooping rather pitifully at the side. To Frances, it seemed perfect.
“For me?” she said, with all the gravity the gift deserved. “Then I am the most fortunate lady in all of England.”
Lilian beamed. “I chose the nicest ones. Except the one I kept because it looked like a queen flower.”
Frances nodded. “That was wise. One must always leave room for royalty.”
Lilian nodded, entirely satisfied by this logic, and clambered up beside Frances on the bench without invitation, as children and beloved persons so often did.
She at once began a lively account of which flowers butterflies preferred, which she believed they disliked, and whether butterflies had favorite colors in the same way people had favorite puddings.
“I think they like yellow best,” she said. “But perhaps only cheerful butterflies. Sad ones may like blue.”
Frances, still holding the little bouquet in her lap, said, “And how does one distinguish a sad butterfly from a cheerful one?”
Lilian considered this carefully. “By how it flies.”
Frances laughed softly. “There is an answer for everything in your daughter.”
“There always has been,” came Emma’s amused response.
Lilian leaned nearer to Frances, lowering her voice as though imparting a confidence of great delicacy. “And butterflies are very gentle when they land on flowers.”
“Are they indeed?”
“Yes,” Lilian said earnestly. Then, before Frances could guess her intention, the little girl leaned forward and pressed the lightest kiss to her cheek.
Frances blinked.
“That,” Lilian declared proudly, “is how gentle butterflies are when landing on flowers. I read it somewhere.”
For a moment, Frances could not speak. It was such a small thing, a child’s kiss and a child’s odd and lovely explanation.
Yet, it touched something in her far more deeply than she would have expected.
No one in this garden measured warmth as though it must be earned.
No one withheld tenderness until it was safe.
She looked at Lilian’s bright little face, at Emma’s fond expression, at the nearby cradle where the baby still slept in perfect peace, and felt with sudden force what a loving family might truly be, a place where one might be held and not judged smaller for it.
The realization ached.
Frances touched Lilian’s curls lightly. “Then I am very honored to have been treated as a flower.”
“You are prettier than one,” Lilian said promptly.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Frances caressed Lilian’s cheek gently. “I shall treasure both the compliment and the flowers.”
Lilian, having bestowed both with complete satisfaction, slipped down to the grass again and began arranging the remaining stems in rows according to some mysterious principle involving butterflies, queens, and whether petals looked kind.
Time moved quietly after that. The baby woke briefly, made a soft protesting sound, and was soothed back to sleep by Emma’s gentle hand.
The sun shifted higher. The lemonade grew warm in the glasses.
Frances spoke a little more, listened more than she spoke, and felt, if not ease, then at least the comfort of being allowed to be uncertain in a place where uncertainty was not treated as failure.
At last, however, she rose. “I ought to go.”
Emma looked up at once. “Must you?”
Frances smiled faintly. “If I stay much longer, I may forget that the rest of the world exists, and I have a growing suspicion it will not allow itself to be forgotten.”
Lilian sprang upright at once. “You are leaving?”
“I am.”
The child came to her without hesitation and wrapped both arms tightly about Frances’s waist. The force of it was almost comical, but the feeling behind it was not. Frances bent at once and held her close.
“When will you come again?” Lilian asked, her voice muffled in Frances’s gown.
“Soon,” Frances promised, and found that she meant it. “Very soon.”
“You must,” Lilian urged, drawing back enough to look up at her with grave insistence. “Because I shall have more flowers by then, and perhaps a butterfly.”
Frances smiled, though her throat had tightened unexpectedly. “Then I shall certainly come.”
Lilian seemed satisfied by the promise and stepped back, though not far. She remained close, as children did when affection had not yet learned caution.
Frances turned then to Emma, who stood up and drew her into an embrace that was warm, firm, and familiar enough to feel like shelter. Frances closed her eyes briefly against her sister’s shoulder. When Emma drew back, she kept hold of Frances’ hands.
“You will not face this alone,” she assured her quietly.
Frances looked at her, and there was nothing but love in her sister’s eyes.
“I know,” she said.
But the weight of Andrew’s reserve, his unnamed child and his utter secrecy regarding his life lingered like a bitter aftertaste.