Alexander Ashford
I am in the study trying to read the Fairfax Holdings property prospectus that someone slid under my solicitor's door, and I cannot concentrate because I can hear Charlotte Ellis in the entrance hall below, arguing cheerfully with a delivery driver about whether peonies count as fragile cargo.
The words on the page blur. Something about land valuations and development potential and the particular vulnerability of estates in probate dispute. I have read the same paragraph four times. Each time, her voice cuts through the text like light through curtains, and I lose the thread entirely.
"They're alive," she is saying, her tone patient in the way of someone who has explained this before and expects to explain it again. "Living things need to be right side up. That's not opinion. That's botany."
The driver mumbles something I cannot make out.
"I don't care what the manifest says. The manifest was written by someone who has never kept a peony alive past Tuesday."
I set the prospectus down. Look at it. Pick it up again.
The residence clause Sebastian is using requires continuous occupation of Bodington Estate for the majority of each calendar year.
I have met that requirement for eleven years running.
But the codicil's language contains a procedural ambiguity, something about formal registration of intent that my father's solicitors apparently failed to file, and Sebastian's new friends at Fairfax Holdings have found a developer willing to argue that absence of paperwork means absence of claim.
It is, as Richard Ames put it yesterday, "not good."
"Come on then," Charlotte says from the hall, and I hear multiple footsteps and the careful shuffle of something being carried. "Mind the door frame. That's it. Right side up. See? Not difficult."
I abandon the prospectus and go downstairs without fully deciding to.
She is standing in the entrance hall signing a clipboard, six crates of white peonies stacked behind her on a rolling cart.
The delivery driver looks relieved to be leaving.
Charlotte hands him back his pen and thanks him, already turning toward the flowers with the particular focus I have come to recognise as her working mode.
"Come to inspect the peonies," she says without looking up, "or just avoiding your desk?"
Both. But I do not say that. I come down the remaining stairs and stop at a distance that is probably appropriate for a client observing a contractor.
"The desk was losing anyway."
She glances at me then. Quick, assessing, the same way she looked at the ballroom chandelier before telling me I was wrong about the light.
Her hair is pulled back today, practical, a few strands escaping near her temples.
She is wearing the same boots she wore on the ladder, dirt still visible on the soles.
"These need to go to the ballroom," she says. "The cold in there will keep them dormant until tomorrow. I'll stage them Friday morning before the evening setup."
She lifts the first crate off the cart. It is larger than it looks. She adjusts her grip and starts toward the corridor, and I find myself stepping forward to take the other end before I have consciously decided to help.
"You don't have to." She does not stop walking. "I've been carrying flowers since I was sixteen."
"I am aware you are capable."
"Then why are you holding my crate?"
Because the alternative was watching you carry something heavy while I stood there with my hands empty.
Because the prospectus upstairs contains my brother's signature on a letter of intent and I cannot look at it anymore.
Because you are in my house again and I am finding it difficult to be anywhere else in the building.
"The handles looked uncomfortable," I say.
She makes a sound that might be a laugh. "They're fine."
We carry the crate through the corridor together, past the morning room and the small parlour and the oil painting of my great-grandfather that I have always found vaguely disapproving.
Charlotte sets her end down first when we reach the ballroom, and I follow her lead, placing the crate where she indicates near the cold marble fireplace.
"Five more," she says, and we go back for them.
We work in something close to silence, the rhythm of it settling between us. Lift, carry, set down. She sorts the crates by bloom stage as we go, culling anything with bruised petals without sentiment, tossing the damaged heads into a bucket she has brought for the purpose.
I find myself culling alongside her. Not because she asked.
Because I have been watching her hands and I understand now what she is looking for: the particular droop that means a flower will not last, the browning at the petal edges that signals damage invisible from a distance.
I begin checking stems the way she does, running my thumb along the length to feel for soft spots.
She notices. I see her notice.
She does not comment.
It is the kindest way anyone has ever accepted my help.
"Has the estate been in your family long?" she asks, stripping leaves from stems with quick, efficient motions.
"Since 1748."
She pauses. Sets down her shears. Looks at me with an expression I cannot immediately read.
"That must be a strange thing to carry."
I do not answer immediately. The question is not the polite small talk it could be, delivered the way she delivers it, with that particular directness I have come to associate with her. She is asking something real. She deserves something real in return.
"It is not a weight I was always certain I wanted," I say. The words come out more honest than I intended. I have not said them to anyone, not Oliver, not Richard. Certainly not Sebastian. "The title. The house. The expectation that I would want it simply because it was given."
Charlotte strips another stem. "And now?"
"Now I want it." I hear the edge in my own voice and do not try to soften it. "Because someone else has decided I should not have it."
She does not flinch from the tone. Does not fill the silence with comfortable platitudes about how I am sure it will work out. She simply nods, once, and returns to her work, and the absence of false reassurance is somehow more comforting than any words could be.
We finish the sorting. She packs her tools into her kit bag with the same precision she brings to everything, each item in its designated place. I walk with her toward the service entrance, as I have done both times she has been here, though I could easily let Mrs. Hartley see her out.
At the door, she turns.
"The arch will be finished by Friday evening," she says. "If you have notes on the final arrangement, I'll need them by Thursday morning."
"I have no notes."
"None?"
"You have not given me anything to correct."
Something shifts in her expression. Softens, perhaps, though that is not quite the right word. She holds my gaze for a moment longer than necessary, and I become aware of how close we are standing, the narrow corridor forcing proximity, her shoulder nearly brushing the door frame.
"Thank you for carrying the peonies," she says.
"Thank you for letting me."
She goes. I watch her van pull out of the courtyard and disappear around the corner, and I stand in the service entrance longer than I should, the cold evening air finding its way through my jumper.
When I return to the ballroom, it is empty except for the crates and the flowers she has left staged for tomorrow. The arch framework hangs above, skeletal still, waiting for her hands to complete it.
She has left a single peony head on the stone mantle.
It sits precisely in the spot where the chandelier light pools brightest at this hour, placed with the deliberateness of someone who calculated the angle before setting it down. The petals are white, just beginning to open, perfect.
I look at it for longer than I should.
I go upstairs and try to read the Fairfax prospectus again.
I make it through half a page before I give up, open my phone, and look at the photograph I took of her margin notes from the first meeting.
The pencil marks are still there, quick and unself-conscious.
Ranunculus, poor east light, try anemone.
I do not call anyone. I close the phone. I return to the prospectus with considerably less success than before.
The front bell rings at seven.
Mrs. Hartley answers, and I hear a voice I recognise immediately. The particular warmth. The practiced ease. The tone of a man who expects every door to open.
Sebastian appears in the study doorway before I can decide whether to go down.
He is smiling the smile he uses when he has already decided something.
"Brother," he says. "I thought we should talk."