Chapter 4 — Eliza
Anemone
ELIZA
The housekeeper’s name is Mrs. Prentice, and she has the particular efficient kindness of a woman who has run a large house for a long time and has stopped being surprised by anything that arrives at its door.
She does not ask why I have come a day earlier than expected, or why I traveled with such haste that my trunk arrived half-fastened.
She simply says, “This way, my lady,” and takes me up a staircase that smells faintly of beeswax and something green I cannot yet place, and shows me to a room that looks out over a walled garden gone soft and gray in the early spring light.
“The blue room,” she says, unnecessarily, since the walls are the color of a robin’s egg and there is no mistaking it. “Her ladyship thought you’d like the garden view.”
I do not ask how her ladyship arranged an opinion about what I would like before she had met me. I have learned, over seven years, to accept small kindnesses without interrogating them, because interrogating them is a way of refusing them, and I find I am tired of refusing things.
The house is large. This is not, in itself, remarkable — my husband’s house in Grosvenor Square was large, and every room in it made itself known as belonging to him, arranged around his preferences, his comforts, his particular understanding of how a room ought to make a visitor feel small.
This house is large in a different way. It does not announce an owner so much as accommodate one, comfortably, the way a well-worn coat accommodates the person who has shaped it over years of wearing it.
I stand at the window for a moment before Mrs. Prentice leaves me, looking down at the garden, and I have the strange sensation of being somewhere that is occupied without being crowded — a rare enough quality in houses, in my experience, and rarer still in the people who own them.
I do not unpack. I am not yet certain I am staying, whatever Vivienne’s instructions implied, and I have learned not to make myself too comfortable in a place before I know its rules.
Vivienne had given me little enough to go on.
A name — Lady Wyndermere — and an address, and the particular instruction, delivered with no more warmth than the rest of our conversation, that I was to tell her everything, withhold nothing, and trust that whatever she decided to do with the information would be the correct thing to do.
I had asked, foolishly perhaps, what sort of woman I was going into the care of.
Vivienne had considered the question for a moment longer than I expected and said only, “The sort who will not waste your time telling you what you wish to hear.” I had thought, on the road, that this sounded less like a comfort than a warning.
Standing now in a room chosen, apparently, for the view I would like, I am no longer certain it was meant as either.
I go back downstairs instead, meaning only to look for something to occupy the next quarter hour before whatever formal reception is meant to happen, happens.
There is a framed illustration in the entrance hall — a cabbage rose, rendered in careful watercolor, old enough that the paper has yellowed slightly at the edges.
It is not, if I am honest, a particularly skilled rendering.
The shading on the outer petals is uncertain, and whoever painted it clearly struggled with the particular way a rose’s center coils in on itself.
But there is something in the attempt that holds me — the evidence of a hand that was trying very hard to see the thing correctly, rather than merely trying to produce something pleasant to look at.
I am still considering it, my head tilted, my hand half-raised toward the glass before I remember myself, when I hear a door and turn to find a woman crossing the hall toward me with soil visible under her fingernails and a stained apron still tied at her waist.
This is the first thing I notice about Beatrice Ashford, Dowager Countess of Wyndermere: the soil.
Not her face, which is handsome in the particular unadorned way of a woman who has never troubled herself much with how she is perceived, and not her bearing, which is very upright and entirely unhurried despite what must have been a hasty walk from wherever she was interrupted.
The soil. I have spent seven years in rooms full of people who understood, instinctively, exactly what impression they were making at every moment — my husband among the very worst of them, a man who could not enter a room without first calculating its effect on him.
This woman has clearly not given the matter a single thought.
She has simply come as she was, because whatever she was doing before I arrived mattered more to her, in that moment, than the fact of my arrival.
I find this enormously interesting. I could not entirely explain why.
“I am sorry to come without proper notice,” I tell her, because it is true and because it seems the correct thing to open with. “I understand a rider was meant to precede me. I believe I outran him.”
“You did,” she says. “I am Lady Wyndermere.”
I give her my name. I watch her eyes go to my traveling dress, entirely too fine for a house with earth under its mistress’s nails, and then to my face, and I have the peculiar experience — rare enough that I notice it happening — of being unable to read a single thing in her expression while she does it.
I am good at reading people. I have had to be.
It is, along with my composure, the skill I have relied upon most heavily for seven years, the ability to know within moments what a room requires of me and to become it.
I cannot read this woman at all, and I find that this makes me want to look at her longer, not less.
She does not lead me to a drawing room. I note this, and say nothing, because I have already decided — somewhere between the entrance hall and whatever room I am now being led toward — that I would rather follow this woman’s instincts than insist on the forms I know.
We pass a library with a worn patch in its carpet exactly where a chair would be pulled close to the fire on a cold evening.
We pass a closed door I do not ask about, though something in the particular plainness of it, unlike every other door in the corridor, makes me want to.
The room she brings me to is a greenhouse — vast, glass-roofed, warm with the particular damp heat of a hundred growing things, and I stop just inside the door because the smell of it has reached me before anything else has, and it is, I realize with something like surprise, the first thing I have breathed in three days that I have not immediately tried to interpret for what it reveals about the person standing near me.
I have spent three days breathing my husband’s tobacco and beeswax and the particular staleness of a house being slowly inventoried. This smells like something alive.
“It smells extraordinary in here,” I say, before I have decided to say anything at all.
She stops. Something crosses her face — surprise, I think, though it is gone before I can be certain — and then she says nothing, and goes to a workbench where a plant sits half out of its pot, and continues what she was doing before I interrupted her morning.
I do not ask questions. I have learned, in new houses under new rules, that the wisest thing to do in the first hour is watch and stay quiet, and so I watch her hands, sure and quick despite the soil already on them, easing the roots of the plant free without disturbing them, and I watch the greenhouse itself — the ordered rows, the labeled jars along one wall, the particular attention evident in every surface, as though nothing here has been placed by accident.
“You have the letter,” she says at last, not looking up.
I take it from my reticule and hold it out.
She takes it with earth-marked fingers and reads it, and reads it again, and I watch her face while she does, the way I have learned to watch every face that matters, searching for the flicker that will tell me what she is actually thinking beneath whatever she chooses to show me.
I find nothing. Her composure is total — not performed, the way mine is performed, built carefully over years to hide what sits behind it, but something that seems to come from somewhere else entirely, some deeper and more settled place I do not yet have a name for.
I have spent my whole life being extremely good at reading people.
This woman, I understand within the space of a single silent minute, is going to require far closer observation than I have ever given anyone.
When she finally sets the letter down, she says only, “This is serious. More serious than I think you understand yet.”
“I gathered that much from Vivienne,” I say. “She is not a woman who overstates things.”
“No,” Lady Wyndermere agrees. “She isn’t.”
She looks at the letter a moment longer, and then at me, and something settles in her expression that I cannot quite name — not welcome, exactly, but not refusal either. “We will need to discuss what this means,” she says. “You should stay for supper.”
I was not certain, an hour ago, that I would be staying for anything at all.
“Of course,” I say.
She goes to ring for tea, and I am left alone for a moment among the specimen tables, and I find myself thinking — absurdly, given everything that has happened in the last three days, given the letter and the men watching my townhouse and the danger I still do not fully understand — that I would very much like to see this greenhouse again tomorrow.
I think of my husband’s house, four days and thirty miles away, still being inventoried by men with ledgers who will finish long before I ever return to see the results.
I think of the seven years I spent learning exactly what that house required of me, down to the smallest gesture, until I could no longer say with any confidence which of my habits were truly mine and which had simply been trained into me by a man who preferred a wife who did not surprise him.
Nothing in this greenhouse has asked me to be anything at all.
I find I do not know what to do with that, except to stand very still and let it be true for a moment longer before someone comes to tell me what happens next.
I do not know yet what that means. I only know that I have not, in longer than I can easily remember, wanted to see anything again quite this much.