Chapter 3
There was no room left in the garden and Amelia was putting things in it anyway.
She knelt at the edge with her sleeves pushed past her elbows, working a chamomile seedling into a gap that was not a gap so much as an act of optimism.
The yarrow beside it had been strangled two seasons running and had grown thin and resentful about it.
The feverfew was doing the strangling and would not be reasoned with.
"You are crowding them," Frederick said.
"I am aware."
"You crowded them last year."
"I am aware of that also." She pressed the soil down around the stem. "Last year I had nowhere else to put them. This year I have thought of somewhere."
Frederick, who had been managing the grounds at Whitfield since before she was born and had watched her arrive at this particular conclusion by degrees over most of a summer, did not look up from his shears.
"The south wall is for roses."
"Not the south wall."
"The orchard border goes to shade at two."
"Not the orchard."
"Then you will want the kitchen garden, and Mrs. Prentice will die on that ground, and I would rather not bury her."
Amelia sat back on her heels and looked east.
Past the hedge, past the lake with its sagging willow, the land rose to a ridge, and on the ridge sat a long dark house with ivy up its whole southern face and two upper windows gone entirely.
She had been able to see the top of its walled garden since she was nine years old. She had never once set foot in it.
Frederick followed her eyes, and his hands went still.
"No," he said.
"You have not heard what I mean to say."
"I have heard it the last three times you did not say it."
"Then you have had ample opportunity to prepare an objection."
"I have one. It is short." He set the shears down on the barrow. "And when you are caught up there, my lady — what then?"
Amelia opened her mouth.
And stopped.
She had, she realized, planned every part of it except that one.
She had planned which flowers and which aspect and what to plant first and how to carry water.
She had not once planned what she would say to a man standing in front of her with his hands on his hips demanding to know what she thought she was doing on Crown land.
She sat back on her heels and worked at it.
"I would explain," she said slowly, "that the house has been standing empty since the year the Duke was hanged, and that in all that time not one person has come to claim it, or lock it, or spend a shilling on its roof. It has no owner. It has an absence of one."
"That will not sound as well aloud as it does in a garden."
"Then I would say that I am not proposing to take anything.
I am proposing to put things in." She wiped her wrist across her forehead and left a streak of earth there.
"There is a walled garden behind that house, south-facing, sheltered on three sides.
Nothing has been taken out of that soil in all those years and nothing has been asked of it.
Every leaf that has fallen in it is still lying where it fell.
Frederick — do you know what that ground will be? "
Frederick did not answer that one.
"And I would say," she went on, gathering, "that Ashcombe has no physician nearer than London and that when there is a bad winter the people here get what I can grow and nothing else, and that at present I can grow it in a garden three feet by four."
"That is two arguments."
"I have more."
"You will not need more." Frederick picked up the shears again. "You will need one, and it will not be for a magistrate."
She looked up.
"And what of your father, my lady?"
Amelia's mouth closed.
"Ah," she said. "Well. There is a difficulty with that."
"There is."
"He would not permit it in a hundred years."
"He would not permit it in his lifetime." Frederick clipped a browned head off the rosemary and dropped it in the barrow. "Though I will say this. If you were to agree to marry a man of his choosing, I daresay he would let you plant things on the moon."
Amelia laughed — genuinely, startled out of her.
And then the sentence caught up with her, and the laugh went out of her face by stages, the way water goes out of a cloth.
"A man of his choosing," she said.
Frederick said nothing.
"What is any of it for, Frederick?" She was still kneeling in the dirt, and her voice had lost all its lightness.
"The name. The land. The wealth. The tenants and the carriage and the nine hundred people in this town who take their hats off when I ride past. What is it for, if it does not buy me the one choice that matters — who I spend the whole of my life beside? "
"It was never meant to buy you that."
"Then it is a poor sort of fortune."
"It is the only sort there is." Frederick straightened, slowly, one hand at the small of his back. "We do not make the rules, my lady. We are born into a world where they are already standing, and we do our best to live inside them. That is all any of us have ever managed."
Amelia looked down at her hands.
"I wish things were otherwise," she said.
"So does everyone who has ever lived in a time they did not choose." He said it kindly. "But that is not ours to decide. All we may decide is what to do with the years we are given."
The gravel gave her father away before his voice did.
"Where is she?"
Amelia did not move. She had hidden until she was nineteen, and had eventually concluded it only meant being found later and more angrily.
The Baron Whitfield came round the hedge with his coat open and his color high.
"You have missed Monsieur Girard again."
"I have."
"He came from London. He waited an hour and a quarter." He stopped in front of the garden and looked down at her — at the apron, the earth, the hair coming out of its pins. "And I find you here. On your knees. Where any man riding the lane may see you."
"Mrs. Cobb can climb her own stairs again," Amelia said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Mrs. Cobb. At the mill." She sat back on her heels.
"She could not get up to her own bed in December.
Her son was carrying her. I sent her meadowsweet in October and she has been walking on her own since the thaw, and she came to the gate a fortnight ago to tell me so.
" She held his eyes. "That is what these are for.
That is what I was doing while Monsieur Girard sat in the music room. "
Her father's jaw moved.
"There are physicians for that," he said. "There are apothecaries. There are men who have given their whole lives to the study of it, who have sat examinations, who have degrees—"
"There is not one of them in Ashcombe."
"Then she may send to London."
"On a miller's wage, in December, with a swollen knee." Amelia's voice stayed level. "You have told me since I was a child that this family's first duty is to the people on its land."
"It is." He said it sharply. "By making good decisions.
By managing this estate so there is work and there are cottages with sound roofs and there is grain when the harvest fails.
That is how you care for nine hundred people, Amelia.
Not by growing weeds for swollen ankles.
" His hand cut the air. "You are clever enough to know the difference. Do not pretend to me that you do not."
"Then let us divide it," Amelia said. "You take the decisions. I shall take the swollen ankles."
The silence that came after that had a different quality.
"No," her father said.
"Father—"
"No." He was not shouting, and that was worse. "Your destiny is not tending plants. Your destiny is tending a family. You have blood in your veins that hundreds of years went into making, and it is worth something, and you will not spend it in a flowerbed."
Amelia rose to her feet.
"Worth something," she repeated. "For breeding. And for sitting at the head of another man's table so that his guests may admire what he acquired." She brushed her hands off, hard. "No, thank you."
"Like it or not, that is your part."
"It is not a part. It is a cage with a coat of arms on it."
"It is your life." The Baron's voice finally went up, and two crows came off the beech at the end of the walk.
"Do you imagine I like mine? Do you imagine I chose it?
There are a hundred things I do every month of my life because they must be done by a man in my position and not one of them because I woke wanting to do it.
I raised you to be responsible. I taught you that a person of consequence makes sacrifices.
And here you are, five and twenty, arguing with me about ankles. "
"Sacrifice what, exactly?" Amelia's own voice had risen to meet his. "My happiness. My use. Every hour I might have spent being good at the one thing I am good at — sacrificed, for what? So that a room full of people I do not like can say that I followed the rules?"
"Yes."
It landed flat between them.
"Yes," her father said again, quieter. "Precisely that. Those rules exist for a reason, whether you care to hear it or not, and I will not stand by and watch you ruin your name for a principle you invented at twenty."
He drew a breath and set his shoulders, and when he spoke again it was in the voice he used for the estate books.
"Earl Somerset comes at eleven tomorrow. He is bringing his son. You will be at the table."
"Father—"
"You will go up now and change into something suited to your station, and you will not come down to that table with dirt on you."
He turned and went back up the path.
Frederick had withdrawn some way along the walk while it was happening, and had spent the duration examining a section of hedge that required no examination whatsoever. He came back now at an unhurried pace and stopped beside her.
"Come, my lady," he said. "I shall walk you up to your room."
"Of course you will."
She started up the path with her chin high and her hands filthy, and he fell in a half pace behind her, the way he had since she was six.
"And do you agree with him?"
"It is not for me to agree or disagree."
"That is not an answer, Frederick."
"No," he said. "It is not."