Chapter 25 #3
Amelia did not touch it. She stood looking down at it with her hand pressed flat against her sternum, and it was some time before she could speak at all.
"That is not—"
"It is."
"Where did you—"
"I cannot tell you that." He said it gently.
"I gave my word to the people who gave it to me, and their lives depend on my keeping it.
I can tell you that it grows where no sensible person would ever go looking.
I can tell you that it is real, and that I held it in my own hands and watched it dry in cold mountain air, and that the men who tend it would sooner die than let it be found.
And I can tell you that if anyone ever asks where it came from, I will say it appeared on its own, from soil I cannot account for.
" He looked at her. "I hoped you would understand. "
"Understand." Her voice cracked. "Benjamin, you climbed a mountain—"
"I climbed a mountain."
"For a flower."
"For you." He closed the book carefully over the bloom and set it down.
"For the garden they burned. I could not stop them burning it.
I was too late for that. But I could bring you something to plant in the ash that nobody in Ashcombe — nobody in England — has ever grown before.
I could make it better than what they took.
That was the only thing I knew how to do. "
She was crying now, and did not care, and did not wipe it away.
"You are the most infuriating man I have ever met."
"I have been told."
"You go off with a letter and a promise and you leave me to rebuild a garden with my father — my father, on his knees, in the dirt, arguing with Frederick about comfrey—"
"I heard something of it from the lane."
"—and you come back with a scrape on your face and a flower in a book and you stand there as though it were nothing at all—"
"It was not nothing." He caught her hands.
"Amelia. Listen to me. It was not nothing.
I nearly did not come back from it. There were men behind me the whole way up and I did not know, until the last night, whether the people I had gone to find would take my hand or cut it off.
And I went anyway. Because you told me once that everything needed room to grow.
And I have spent twenty-three years in a place with no room in it at all, and then I came to Ashcombe and found you kneeling in front of a rose I had ruined, telling me exactly what I had done — and for the first time in my life I wanted something that was not a battle.
I wanted a garden. I wanted a house with a roof on it and a woman in it who would tell me plainly when I was about to do something foolish.
" He drew a breath. "I have spoken to your father.
He knows what I am, and what I intend, and he has not thrown me out. That is more than I hoped for."
"He has not thrown you out," Amelia repeated, unsteadily. "That is your proposal?"
"That is not my proposal."
He went down onto one knee, there on the morning-room floor with the sun coming in through the window and her mother's anthology on the table between them, and he did not let go of her hands.
"I have no name worth giving you yet," he said.
"It is being argued over in London by better men than me and I do not know how it will end.
I have a house that was a ruin a year ago and is not quite finished now.
I have a housekeeper who has already decided she is your mother-in-law and will not be talked out of it, and a friend who arrived to guard the house and has instead been feeding it.
I have a garden that is half yours already and always was.
" He looked up at her. "I do not know what I can promise you beyond that I will never lie to you again, and I will never leave you standing in the ash of anything, and I will spend the whole of my life trying to be a man worth the risk you took every time you climbed through a hole in a fence to find me.
Marry me, Amelia. Whatever name I end up with. Marry me anyway."
She did not answer at once. She looked down at him — this man who had walked out of a fog on a hillside and taken her whole life apart and put it back together in a shape she had not known it could hold — and then she knelt down on the floor in front of him, so that they were level, and took his face in her hands again.
"You are still terrible at proposals," she said.
"I have not had a great deal of practice."
"You will not need any more." She kissed him, once, and drew back just far enough to say it plainly. "Yes. Whatever name you end up with. Yes."
He closed his eyes.
When he opened them she was smiling — properly, wholly, the way she had not smiled since a night when the sky went orange over Ashcombe — and he thought that if he never saw another thing in his life, that would have been enough.
Behind them, the morning-room door was open perhaps a hand's width. It had been open the whole time.
"Well," said Baron Whitfield, from the hall, to nobody in particular. "That is that, then."
And Frederick, somewhere further off, said something under his breath about the correct depth for planting, and went to fetch a spade.