The Language of Flowers (The Lavender Society #1)

Chapter 1 — Beatrice

Artemisia

BEATRICE

The greenhouse is warmest just before dawn, when the glass has spent all night holding the day before’s heat and has not yet begun to lose it to the day ahead.

I have always thought this the best hour to work — something which I decided some time ago.

As with all the decisions in my life, I made it alone, without consulting anyone and without any intention of revisiting it.

I am at the distillation apparatus when the first gray light comes through the glass, reducing a batch of valerian and passion flower down to something that will, by noon, be a tincture.

A tincture that will steady a woman’s hands enough to sign a document she does not wish to sign.

The flame beneath the retort is low and even.

The liquid moves the way it is supposed to move.

I watch it because watching it is the entire task at this stage, and because I find I do not mind a task that asks nothing of me but attention.

My hands, when I glance down at them, are already marked with the day’s work — a rim of soil under each nail, a green smear along the side of my thumb where I broke a stem of tansy an hour ago without meaning to.

I do not wear gloves in the greenhouse. I do not like the feel of a barrier between my hands and the thing I am trying to understand.

The shelf above the apparatus holds the results of three weeks’ work, each jar labeled in my own hand, in Latin, in the small precise letters my old governess despaired of and my husband, later, found unbecoming in a wife.

Digitalis purpurea, for the heart, in doses too small to do anything but calm it.

And next to it, a tincture that mimics, for eleven or twelve hours, the particular symptoms and heat of a persistent fever — useful to a woman who needs a doctor to certify she cannot travel, cannot receive visitors, cannot be examined too closely by a solicitor sent to establish that she is fit to sign away her own inheritance.

Beside it, in a smaller jar, the crisis tincture — three drops under the tongue, for the kind of fear that arrives all at once and must be gotten through in the next ten minutes rather than felt in full.

I have sent that one to six women in as many years.

I think of each of them when I make a new batch, though I could not say their names aloud to anyone, not even to Vivienne, who already knows most of them.

There is a jar for the blacksmith’s wife in the village, who has a cough that will not leave her, and who does not know that the remedy I send round with the housekeeper costs me nothing and is not, strictly, part of my work for the society at all.

I like to have something in the greenhouse that is simply useful, without being clever.

And at the far end of the bench, under a square of muslin I have rigged to keep the morning sun off the leaves, is the valerian I have been cultivating for two seasons now — not the common garden variety but a strain I am attempting to coax into flowering earlier, into producing a root with a higher concentration of the compound I actually want.

It has not worked yet. I do not mind that it has not worked yet.

I have found, over the years, that the failing of an experiment tells me nearly as much as its success would, provided I am patient enough to sit with the failure and ask it the right questions.

This is the whole of what I do, most mornings. It does not sound like very much. It is, in fact, everything.

The greenhouse itself is not large — sixty feet by twenty, built by my husband’s grandfather for the growing of pineapples he never successfully grew, and inherited by me along with the dowager title — the earldom itself went to a cousin in Northumberland who has never once troubled to visit it — his debts and the particular freedom that comes to a woman whose husband dies before he can spend everything she brought to the marriage and has no children to speak of.

I converted it in the first winter after his funeral, tearing out the failed pineapple pits and putting in proper raised beds, a working still at the eastern end where the light is best in the mornings, and along the north wall, where the light is worst and therefore kindest to paper, a row of specimen tables I use for cataloging.

It took me the better part of a year to make it what it is now.

I did the work myself, mostly — I have never seen the sense in paying a man to do something I am capable of doing better, and more precisely, on my own.

I am Beatrice Ashford, Dowager Countess of Wyndermere, eight-and-thirty years old, and I have been a founding member of the Lavender Society for ten years, since the year my husband died and left me this house, this land, and a silence so total I did not know what to do with it until I filled it with work.

I did not think of it, at the time, as founding anything — only as doing, with four other women I trusted — Vivienne, Portia, Augusta Rede, and a fifth whose name I will not set down even now, because she is dead and her family still uses it — the thing that seemed obviously necessary once I understood what my own marriage had cost me.

We set out to help one woman, and then another, and by the third, we understood we were building something that would need structure, safe houses, and women who could be trusted to keep a household that asked no questions of whoever arrived in it needing shelter.

Wyndermere became, without my entirely intending it, the most important of those houses — the most remote, the most defensible, the one where the difficult cases are sent when London is no longer safe for them.

I have never taken a lover in the ten years since. In all honesty, I have not permitted myself to want one.

I have never minded any of it. I like being useful in ways I can measure.

I like knowing precisely what is asked of me and precisely what I am capable of giving, with no remainder left over to worry about.

It is, I think, the reason my marriage nearly undid me and the reason this life has not: my husband asked for things he would not name, and punished me for guessing wrong, while this society we’ve built asks only what it says it is asking, and trusts me to say plainly when I cannot give it.

I have built ten years on that plainness, and I am not going to apologize for it, to Vivienne or to anyone else.

It is not that I dislike company. I am, when required, an excellent hostess; I can hold a room of society women at exactly the temperature it needs to be held at, warm enough that no one suspects anything of me, cool enough that no one lingers past what is useful.

Vivienne says I have a gift for being unremarkable in company, and she does not mean it as an insult.

It is, in our work, the most valuable gift there is.

But this — the greenhouse, the flame under the retort, the particular quiet of a house that has not yet decided to be awake — this is not company.

This is the only part of my life I have never had to perform.

I built it deliberately, brick by brick and pane by pane, in the two years after my husband died, when I understood for the first time that a woman with land and money and no husband to answer to could, if she was careful and patient, arrange her life so precisely that nothing in it would ever surprise her again.

Wyndermere is the result of that arrangement.

Every room in this house serves a purpose I have chosen for it.

Every hour of my day is spent on work I have chosen to do.

I have not, since my husband died, allowed a single element of disorder to take root here that I did not plant myself, and I have found — this is the part I would not say aloud to anyone, not even in the confessional quiet of my own head at five in the morning — that I do not particularly miss the alternative.

Disorder, in my experience, arrives wearing the face of someone you are meant to love, and asks you to give up everything you have built in exchange for the privilege of being wanted.

I built this instead. I trust it because I made every part of it myself, and because it has never once, in ten years, asked anything of me that I was not willing to give.

The valerian tincture needs another quarter hour.

I use the time to check the shelf again, though I have already checked it twice, and to think — the way I can only at this hour — about the letter that arrived from Vivienne three days ago.

Not a letter, precisely. A note, in her small severe hand, informing me that a situation had arisen in London requiring my particular attention, that details would follow by a more careful route, and that I should expect, in the coming days, to receive a guest.

While I will welcome them as needed, I do not like guests in general.

I have said this to Vivienne more than once, in exactly those words, and she has always looked at me with the particular patience she reserves for people she considers fundamentally correct but tiresomely rigid, and said that the society does not run on my preferences.

She is right, of course. It never has. I built Wyndermere to be useful to women who need somewhere to be safe, and a house that is useful to strangers cannot also be a house that admits no one.

I have made my peace with this contradiction the way I have made my peace with most contradictions in my life: by managing it so thoroughly that it never has occasion to become a crisis.

I do not know who this guest is, or for how long, or what has happened in London that requires my particular attention rather than someone else’s.

Vivienne is not given to vagueness without reason, and the absence of detail in her note has sat with me for three days like a stone in a shoe — not painful, exactly, but impossible to entirely forget about.

The flame gutters, and I turn my attention back to the retort, because whatever is coming will come regardless of what I do with the next fifteen minutes, and the tincture will not distill itself.

This is, I think, the great use of this work: it does not care what I am anxious about.

It only asks that I attend to it, precisely, in the order it requires, and if I do that faithfully enough, the anxiety recedes to somewhere I can manage it.

By the time the liquid has reduced to the exact clouded amber I am watching for, the light through the glass has gone from gray to the pale gold of a proper Kent morning, and I can hear, faintly, the house beginning to wake behind me — a door, a voice, the particular clatter of the kitchen starting its own version of my hour with the retort.

I decant the tincture into a clean bottle, label it in my small careful hand, and set it on the shelf beside the others, where it belongs, in the order I have made for it.

I am certainly not going to disturb any of it for a stranger I have not yet met, whatever London situation requires my particular attention.

And yet — the note has sat with me for three days, and this morning, watching the tincture clear to the precise amber I know means it is finished, I find myself doing something I do not often do: wondering, instead of deciding.

I do not like the feeling. I have spent a great deal of effort making certain I am rarely in a position to do so.

I do not know yet that the order I am accustomed to is about to end.

I would not believe you if you told me. I have spent ten years building a life that requires no one, and I am, this particular dawn, entirely satisfied with the size of it — a countess, a greenhouse, a shelf of labeled jars, a society that trusts me to be exactly as unremarkable and exactly as capable as I have always been.

It has never once occurred to me to ask what it would cost to make the greenhouse big enough for two.

I wipe my hands on my apron, leave the muslin over the valerian, and go in to see what the day requires of me.