Chapter 3 — Beatrice
Wisteria
BEATRICE
The Digitalis purpurea has outgrown its pot again, which is exactly what I have been waiting three years for it to do.
I have my hands in the soil, easing the root ball free without tearing it, when I hear the gravel outside the greenhouse door shift under a footstep that is not the gardener’s and not the housekeeper’s either — lighter, quicker, unfamiliar with the path.
I do not look up right away. The plant is at the point in its repotting where a moment’s inattention can undo a season’s patience, and I have learned, over ten years, that very little in life cannot wait the ninety seconds it takes to finish a task properly.
Vivienne’s rider was meant to arrive first. A note, delivered by hand, giving me a day, perhaps two, to prepare a room and arrange my face into whatever expression the situation required. That is how it is meant to go.
“My lady.” Mrs. Prentice is in the doorway, and her voice has the particular flatness she uses when she is choosing her words with more care than usual. “There is a Lady Moreton in the entrance hall. With a trunk.”
I set the specimen down, carefully, because even now I will not rush a plant, and look at her properly. “A trunk.”
“Yes, my lady.”
“And no rider came ahead of her.”
“No, my lady.”
I wipe my hands on my apron, which does very little beyond redistributing the soil more evenly across the fabric, and I do not stop to consider my appearance any further than that, because there is a woman in my entrance hall who was not meant to arrive for another day at least, and whatever she has brought with her, it will not improve by my keeping her waiting while I change my dress.
She is standing beneath the Rosa centifolia print when I come in — the framed illustration my grandmother-in-law commissioned decades ago and that I have never had the heart to move, though it is not, in truth, a very good rendering.
Lady Moreton is not looking at it the way most guests look at it, which is to say briefly, politely, and then away.
She is looking at it the way one looks at something one is trying to understand.
Her head is tilted very slightly. Her gloved hand has come up as though to trace the line of a petal and then stopped short of the glass, as though she has only just remembered that touching another woman’s belongings is not generally done.
I take her in before she takes me in — the advantage, I suppose, of being the one who enters a room rather than the one already standing in it.
She is younger than I expected, though I am not certain what I expected, having been given nothing but a date and a name.
Her traveling dress is very fine and entirely wrong for the roads of Kent in early spring, the hem already dark with mud at the edge, and she wears black, properly, correctly, the black of a widow only four days made.
She is, I note with something that is not quite irritation and not quite anything else I have a name for, extremely beautiful in the unbothered way of a woman who has never had cause to think about it.
She turns before I have decided what to say, and there is nothing in her face of the alarm or apology I would expect from a guest arrived a full day early and unannounced. “I am sorry to come without proper notice,” she says. “I understand a rider was meant to precede me. I believe I outran him.”
“You did,” I say. “I am Lady Wyndermere.”
“Eliza Moreton.” A small inclination of her head — not quite a curtsy, not quite its absence either. Her eyes go, briefly, to my hands, to the soil still visible under my nails despite the apron, and I watch her decide not to remark on it, which I find, oddly, more interesting than if she had.
I have been cultivating this particular Digitalis for three years, watching it survive two winters it had no business surviving, and I have learned more from its stubbornness than from most people I have known.
It flowers late, and reluctantly, and only for those patient enough to wait it out.
I think, briefly and uncharitably, that I have no idea yet which kind of guest is standing in my entrance hall — the kind that flowers, or the kind that simply takes root where it is not wanted and cannot be removed without damaging everything around it.
I do not take her to the drawing room. I am aware, as I make the decision, that it is not what is done — that a countess receiving a guest, even an early and unexpected one, ought to offer tea in a room arranged for the purpose, ought to ring for the housekeeper and allow twenty minutes of careful nothing before any real conversation begins.
I have never had much patience for what is done when what is needed is available instead, and what I need, standing in my own entrance hall with a stranger who has arrived carrying whatever crisis brought Vivienne’s urgency, is somewhere I can think.
I lead her back through the house instead, past the library, to the greenhouse, where the Digitalis is still waiting, root-bound and patient, for me to finish what I started.
She follows without a word of protest, which I note and set aside to consider later.
Most guests, led away from the drawing room and toward a workroom still smelling of turned earth, would say something — a polite question about the destination, a small laugh to cover the strangeness of it.
She says nothing at all. She simply follows, taking in the house as we pass through it: the portraits she does not linger over, the worn patch in the library carpet she does notice, the door to the still room, closed, that she looks at for exactly one second longer than the others.
I add this to what I am gathering about her, the way I add a new specimen to a catalog before I know yet what use it will be.
The moment we come through the greenhouse door, she stops. “It smells extraordinary in here.”
I have owned this greenhouse for ten years.
I have shown it to duchesses and vicars’ wives and, on one memorable occasion, a bishop who spent the entire visit looking faintly alarmed by the humidity.
Not one of them has ever said that. Most people find it overwhelming — the wet green weight of it, the mingled sharpness of a hundred different plants none of them can name.
I find I do not have a ready response, and so I say nothing, and go back to the potting bench, and finish settling the Digitalis into its new pot while she stands a few feet away, looking at everything with the same unhurried attention she gave the rose print.
She does not sit, though there is a stool near the specimen tables she is welcome to.
She stands instead, hands folded, in the particular posture of a woman who has learned to make herself small in other people’s rooms without ever quite disappearing from them.
It is not shyness. I recognize it, distantly, as something closer to strategy, and I file that away too.
“You have the letter,” I say, when the plant is settled and I can no longer justify delaying the conversation with soil.
She produces it from her reticule without hesitation — no fumbling, no performance of reluctance, simply the letter, held out.
I take it with hands that are, I realize a beat too late, still faintly marked with earth, and I read it there, standing at my own workbench, twice through, because the first reading tells me it is serious and the second tells me precisely how serious.
I do not let my face portray anything while I read.
This is not difficult; it is, if anything, the easiest thing I do.
But something in the room changes anyway — the air feels more careful, as though even the plants have understood that whatever has just entered this greenhouse is not going to be simple.
Here is what I know, reading it a second time: this woman is four-and-twenty years old.
She was married seven years to a man three times her age and was widowed four days past. She has no history with the society, no training in its discretion, no tested loyalty beyond Vivienne’s word for her, and she has arrived at my home a full day ahead of any warning, carrying a letter that names Wyndermere by address and references transactions I would very much prefer remained unreferenced by anyone outside these walls.
She is, in every practical sense I can measure, the most significant risk to reach this house in a decade.
She is also, at this moment, standing in front of my specimen of Lavandula angustifolia with the particular stillness of someone who would very much like to understand how a thing works, and has not yet asked permission to find out.
No. Absolutely not. I have spent ten years building a life that does not require surprises, and whatever Vivienne intends by sending this woman to me — whatever debt or emergency or careful strategic reasoning sits behind it — I am not going to let a stranger with a trunk and an unnerving talent for stillness disturb the order I have made here.
I fold the letter along its existing creases and set it on the bench, and I tell myself, quite firmly, that this is a problem to be solved and managed, like any other, and that the solving of it will not require me to feel anything about the solving.
I almost believe it.
“This is serious,” I say, because it needs saying aloud, if only to hear how it sounds outside my own head. “More serious than I think you understand yet.”
“I gathered that much from Vivienne,” she says. “She is not a woman who overstates things.”
“No,” I agree. “She isn’t.”
I look at the letter again, though I have already memorized its contents, but it is easier than looking at her.
When I do look up, she has moved to the specimen table and is looking at the lavender the way she looked at the rose print in the hall — not politely, not for the sake of conversation, but as though the plant itself might tell her something if she paid it close enough attention.
I do not know yet what I am going to do with her.
I know, with the particular clarity I reserve for facts I would rather not examine too closely, that whatever it is, it is not going to be simple, and that some part of me — some small, unmanaged, entirely inconvenient part — is already interested in finding out.
Absolutely not, I think again, more firmly this time, and I go to ring for tea after all.