What Grew in the Garden
Chapter twenty-three
Violet
Violet woke to the low, familiar ache in her belly and lay still in the dark, sorting through what she felt.
Relief was the first of it. She was not carrying a child into a house where wives did not survive their carrying.
But underneath, unwanted and undeniable, was its opposite.
Some part of her she had not consulted had wanted a child.
Something of his that would not leave with the dawn.
She was still sitting with both feelings when the morning post came up, and among the cards was her mother’s hand, crossed and recrossed to spare the paper. She broke the seal and read it standing at the window in her dressing gown with the grey light coming in.
The Circle was agreed. The third leaf was belladonna, not the harmless cousin any of them might keep in a drawer, but deadly nightshade, dried and steeped and dressed to pass for it.
Her mother’s final lines were not in the language of herbs.
Come home, Violet. Comfort means naught to any of us without your safety. Come home. I beg you.
Violet folded the letter small and put it in her pocket. She stood at the window for some time. The garden was grey below her, the paths empty, the house quiet around her in a way that no longer felt like peace.
She could not carry this alone. And there was only one person in the house she trusted because she had seen his face in the dark of a carriage when he told her about Elizabeth, and no man living could have worn that grief and been the one who caused it.
She would tell him tonight. She would take him where the walls could not carry it.
Violet found Henry in his study after dinner, the lamp drawn close and a stack of correspondence at his elbow. He rose when she came in, one of the courtesies he never once forgot, even on the nights he could barely look at her.
“Violet.”
“I am sorry to disturb you. Will you walk with me? In the garden.”
He looked at the black windows, then at her. He did not ask why and followed.
The cold met them at the door. The paths lay grey under a thin moon, and the house stood lit at their backs, every window a held breath.
She drew him away from it, onto the gravel, until the light fell behind them and there was only the crunch of their own steps and somewhere distantly, the muffled rush of the subterranean stream.
“I did not want to say this where the walls could carry it,” she said.
He turned his head toward her but did not speak. They walked.
“You asked me to tell you when my courses came.” She kept her eyes on the pale line of the path. “They came. Last night.”
A few steps passed in silence.
“Are you well?”
“I am well. It is what it is.”
They walked the length of the south border without speaking. The boxwood hedge threw a low dark line along one side, and the moon found the gravel between their feet. She could hear his breathing, steady and close. “There is more,” she said at last.
He stopped. She felt him turn toward her in the dark.
“The tea. The special blend that Mr Vexley orders from the apothecary.” She saw Henry’s face harden and drew a breath.
“What of it?”
“I saved the leaves and took them to my mother, and my mother took them to a circle of women who have spent their lives in stillrooms.” She let that sink in before continuing. “They are agreed. The third leaf is belladonna.”
She heard the gravel shift under his weight. He had gone still.
“The fertility tea, they called it. It was never meant to help me conceive.”
The silence that followed had a quality she could feel against her skin. The garden was very dark. The house behind them glowed at every window like something watching.
“How much of it have you had since we last talked? Your afternoon teas.” His voice came low and fast. “Violet. How much?”
“Very little. I was able to pour most of it away when Sarah did not sit with me.” She put her hand on his arm because she could feel the tension in him through the dark. “I am well. I promise you.”
His hand covered hers on his arm and pressed it there. “Smart woman.” The words came out rough. “You must be the cleverest woman I know.” His voice was strained.
They stood for a moment. The moon had gone behind a cloud and the garden was nearly black. She could feel his breath on her cheek as she looked up at him.
“After I set the stillroom to rights, the taste disappeared. The belladonna went out of the tea.”
“They know,” he said. “They know you would find it.”
“Yes.”
He released her hand and walked a few paces ahead, then turned back. She could see the outline of him against the faint grey of the path—tall, rigid, his shoulders squared the way they went when he was holding something down.
“There is something else,” she said. “And it is worse.”
She heard his breath leave him. “Go on.”
“Elizabeth.” She said the name carefully, the way one sets down something fragile.
“The belladonna, in small doses over weeks. It does not kill outright. It convinces. A woman taking it might fix upon a single certainty that is not true, and no physician alive could argue her out of it. She would believe it the way she believed her own name.”
The silence stretched. She could not see his face, but she heard the sound he made, a sound for which language had no word.
“She believed the child was dead,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Because of belladonna,” he said.
“Yes.”
“It was not dead.”
“No.”
He was quiet for so long that she began to wonder if he had heard her. Then the gravel shifted. He came back to her out of the dark, and when he was close enough to see, she saw that his face was wet.
She had never seen him weep. She had seen him angry, cold, drunk, tender, and afraid. She had not seen this. She did not look away.
“Henry.” She stepped closer, close enough to feel his breath on her forehead. “You do not have a curse. It is not your love that kills.”
He closed his eyes. She watched his countenance begin the slow work of undoing what almost two decades of grief had built.
She lifted her hand to his jaw, where the wet had run, and he did not turn away from it as she had half expected. He leaned into her palm instead, the smallest movement, a man too tired to keep holding himself up alone. So she closed the last of the distance and put her arms around him.
For a moment he stood inside her arms without answering them, then something gave.
His arms came around her, one hand spread wide on her shoulder blade and the other on her waist. He pressed her against him until there was no space left between them.
He bowed his head to her temple. She felt the breath go out of him against her neck, ragged, and then again, steadier.
She held on and let him be held and felt the great rigid weight of him slowly cease to brace itself.
“Thank you,” he said, against the skin of her cheek. “Thank you.”
She stayed with him in the garden until his breathing steadied. Then she left him with the dark because some grief is owed its privacy, and this was his to do alone.
The fear she had carried since the wedding had not gone. But it had halved. His doom was hers now, and hers was his, and there was, against all reason, comfort in it.