Chapter 25 #2
He turned to the final pages, where the pressed leaves gave way to careful drawings of things she had never seen alive, and from an inner pocket of his coat he drew a small paper packet, folded with more care than a soldier generally gave to anything that could not be carried on a rifle.
He opened it. The bloom lay inside, small and pale blue and impossibly whole, given how far it had come.
He pressed it between two blank leaves near the very back of the book, closed the cover over it, and held the whole of it a moment against his chest.
Then he went down the stairs, past Mrs. Miller in the kitchen doorway — who looked him over once, straightened his collar with two fingers, and said nothing at all — and out into the lane.
The lane to Whitfield had never felt so long.
Benjamin walked it with the anthology wrapped again beneath one arm, his coat brushed, his boots blacked.
The gate stood open. The gardens beyond it were green again, new rows turned along the south wall, and somewhere past the hedge he could hear two voices — the Baron's, and Frederick's, arguing amiably over the correct depth for a row of something neither of them had ever planted before this year.
Benjamin stopped at the door.
He had faced Aldric's yard at fourteen. He had faced a camp full of men who spat his name at every dawn for six years running. He had faced Maddox in an open square with rifles ninety yards off and the odds entirely against him.
He had never once, in any of it, felt his hand shake the way it did now, lifted an inch from the knocker.
He knocked anyway.
◆◆◆
Baron Whitfield was at his tea when the maid came in.
He had the newspaper open before him and had not turned a page in some minutes — reading the same column twice, then a third time, as a man does when the words are of some consequence and he wishes to be certain of them.
"My lord. Mr. Russell is at the door."
The Baron did not look up at once. Then he folded the paper along its crease and set it beside his cup.
"Show him in."
Benjamin came into the room with his hat in his hand and something wrapped in oilcloth beneath his arm, and stopped a respectful distance from the table.
"Lord Whitfield."
"Mr. Russell." The Baron gestured to the chair opposite. "You have been away some months."
"I have."
"Sit down."
Benjamin sat. He set the wrapped bundle on his knee and did not touch it further, and the Baron noted that, and said nothing about it.
"I will not waste your time with courtesies, my lord," Benjamin said. "I came here to say three things plainly, and I would ask that you let me say all three before you answer any of them."
The Baron inclined his head.
"The first is that I love your daughter.
" He did not soften it or dress it. "I have loved her, I think, since she knelt in front of a rose I had cut down without knowing what it was and told me exactly what I had done.
I intend to ask her to marry me. But I would not do it under your roof without asking you first, and I would not ask you at all if I did not intend to be honest about the rest."
"Go on."
"The second is that I have moved against Earl Harrington.
Legally, through the proper channels, with evidence I have spent twenty-three years gathering and a man in London I trust to see it through.
I intend to clear my father's name, and my mother's, and my own.
I do not know yet whether I will succeed.
I know only that it has begun, and that I will not stop until it is finished. "
"And the third?"
"The third is that whatever comes of the second — whether my name is cleared or whether it is not — I will not hide it any longer.
From anyone. Least of all from you." Benjamin held the older man's eyes.
"You have every right to refuse me on the strength of that alone.
I would understand it. But I would rather be refused as Benjamin Russell than accepted as anyone else. "
The Baron was silent for a long moment.
Then he reached out, unfolded the newspaper, and turned it round on the table so that it faced Benjamin.
"You are not the only man whose name has been in the papers of late," he said. "A great many names of the aristocracy have grown warm this past month. Some of them a good deal warmer than they would like."
Benjamin glanced down at the column. "I was told. A Duke. A murder. A trial." He looked up. "And the company that Maddox and his men serve."
"Exactly so." The Baron tapped the paper once with one finger. "And it appears that Earl Harrington has made use of that company a good deal more than once over the years. Your case will add to that weight, if it comes to inquiry. I do not think you appreciate quite how heavily it may add."
"He must pay for everything he has done, my lord."
"I agree with you." The Baron said it plainly, without hesitation. "I have not always agreed with you. I would be a liar to pretend otherwise. But I agree with you in this."
He drew the paper back and folded it again, and set it aside, and when he spoke next his voice had changed — quieter, and more careful, the voice of a man setting down something he had carried a long way.
"Now. As to the matter that concerns my daughter.
" He looked at Benjamin directly. "I will be honest with you, Mr. Russell, as you have been honest with me.
I very nearly lost her the night her garden burned.
Not to the fire — she was never in danger from the fire.
To something else. She sat in that chair by the hearth for the better part of two days and did not speak, and did not eat, and did not appear to see any one of us who stood in front of her.
I have buried a wife, Mr. Russell. I did not think I would live to see my daughter's face wear that look while she was still breathing. "
Benjamin said nothing. He did not trust himself to.
"She has recovered. In part. She is rebuilding the garden — she has me on my knees beside her most mornings, and Frederick beside us both, and I have learned more about the correct depth for a comfrey root than I ever wished to know.
" Something moved briefly at the corner of the Baron's mouth, and was gone.
"I will tell you what I saw a few weeks ago.
She was on the floor of a cottage in the village at seven in the morning with her sleeves in a basin, and she had been there fifteen hours, and she was the only person in that room who knew what she was doing.
" He paused. "That is the whole of my daughter, Mr. Russell.
And she came home from it and put her coat on the hook and went back to being quiet.
She was relieved, but the joy is not back in her eyes. "
He rose.
"If you can give her that back," the Baron continued, "I do not care what your name is."
He crossed to the door and set his hand on it, then paused, and looked back.
"She is likely in her room. I will call her down myself."
And he went, leaving Benjamin alone in the quiet with the newspaper folded on the table beside the cooling tea, and the anthology still wrapped and untouched on his knee, and his hands not quite steady on it.
◆◆◆
Amelia came down the stairs faster than she meant to and slowed only at the last of them, because her father was standing at the bottom watching her descend, and there was something in his face she could not read.
"You have a visitor," he said. "In the morning room."
"Who—"
"Go and see."
She went. She had her hand on the door before she let herself believe it, and then she opened it and stopped in the frame, and Benjamin rose from the chair by the window with something wrapped in oilcloth in his hands, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.
He was thinner. Browner across the face, from wind or sun or both. There was a healing scrape along his jaw she had never seen before, and his coat was brushed but the cuffs of it were worn nearly through.
"You look terrible," she said.
"I have looked worse."
"I do not doubt it."
She crossed the room. She did not run — her father was in the hall, and she had not entirely forgotten who she was — but she did not walk either, and when she reached him she took his face in both her hands the way she had done once beneath an ash tree, and looked at it properly.
"You came back."
"I told you I would."
"You told me a great many things, in that letter."
"I meant every one of them." He set the oilcloth bundle down on the small table beside them and unwrapped it, and her breath caught before he had it fully open.
Her anthology. The binding softer than she remembered, one corner of the cover water-stained now, the whole of it looking as though it had crossed a sea and climbed a mountain — because, she supposed, it had.
"I promised I would return it to you in person," he said. "And I promised that if I ever found myself in the presence of one of the plants you had never seen, I would take a piece of it."
He opened the book to the very back — past the pressed leaves, past the careful drawings of things she had only ever copied from other people's books — to two blank pages near the end.
Between them lay a flower.
Small. Pale blue. Five petals, star-shaped, exactly as she had drawn it a hundred times from descriptions she had never quite believed.