Chapter 5 — Beatrice
Hellebore
BEATRICE
Supper is a strange, careful thing — neither of us quite willing to speak of the letter in front of the footman, both of us aware that the ordinary conversation we are having instead, about the roads from London and the early blooming of the cherry trees along the drive, is only a kind of waiting.
When the plates are cleared and the door closes behind the last servant, I do not waste time on transition.
“Bring the letter to the library,” I say. “We have work to do before either of us sleeps tonight.”
She does not argue, though I notice — because I have apparently decided to notice everything about her now, a habit I am not yet prepared to examine — that she does not simply obey either.
She rises at her own pace, unhurried, and follows me down the corridor as though the library were her own idea all along.
The letter, laid flat on my desk under the lamp, looks smaller than it has any right to.
I have read it perhaps a dozen times since this morning, and I still find new things in it each time, which tells me either that it has been written with considerable care, or that I am reading it with considerably more attention than I give most correspondence, and I suspect, uncomfortably, that both are true.
“Here,” I say, tapping the second paragraph.
“He references a specific date of transfer — the eleventh of September, last year. That is not a guess. Someone gave him that date, or he has seen a record of it, which means he has a source inside the network, or inside a household that dealt with us directly.”
Eliza leans over the desk, close enough that I am aware of the particular warmth of another person near me, which is not a thing I am often aware of, and reads the line twice.
“My husband kept a ledger of dates,” she says slowly.
“Dates and names, nothing else — I always assumed it was to do with his investments. He was careful that way. Careful about small useless things and careless about the ones that mattered.”
“Would he have recorded a transfer he had no part in?”
“He recorded everything he thought might someday be useful to him. If someone told him a date, he would have written it down, whether or not he understood why it mattered.” She straightens. “You think this came from him.”
“I think it came through him,” I say. “Whether he understood what he was passing along is a different question.”
We work through the rest of it together — she with a memory for her late husband’s habits and associations that proves, within the hour, considerably more useful than I expected from a woman I met eight hours ago, and I with the trained eye of someone who has spent a decade learning to read what people do not say directly.
Two things become clear before the clock strikes ten.
The first: whoever supplied Pemberton with his information has mapped a geography — Kent and Surrey both named, which means he has been collecting for longer than a single season.
The second, and more troubling: the letter uses a phrase, syrup of white bryony, arranged for remedy, that reads, to anyone without training, like a perfectly ordinary reference to a household medicine.
It is not ordinary. White bryony is not a remedy. It is a poison — vicious, fast-acting, entirely unsuitable for the kind of gentle household use the letter implies. No one who has spent real time around an apothecary’s shelf, let alone a working still room, would make that error.
“Someone wrote this who does not know plants,” I say. “Someone who learned the society’s methods secondhand — overheard them, perhaps, or read about them without ever seeing the actual work done.”
“Which means he was close enough to hear about the work, but never close enough to see it.”
“Yes.” I sit back, and something settles into place with the particular satisfying click of a fact finding its correct position.
“There was a clerk. Three years ago. He spent two months at Ashworth Grange, the next estate over — I was told he’d left the county for a position in Bristol.
” I look at the letter again. “I do not think he went to Bristol.”
Eliza is quiet for a moment, watching me with the same close attention she gave the rose print and the lavender and, if I am honest, everything else in this house since she arrived. “So he has been watching for three years,” she says. “And you have only just learned it.”
“Yes.”
“That must be difficult to sit with.”
It is not a question, and I do not treat it as one, though I notice — again, the noticing, which I am beginning to find genuinely tiresome — that no one has said anything like that to me in longer than I can easily place.
Vivienne would have asked what I intend to do about it.
Portia would have asked whether I had been careless.
This woman, who has known me for the length of one afternoon, simply names the thing and lets it sit there, unmanaged, as though feelings are permitted to exist without immediately being converted into strategy.
“It is what it is,” I say, which is not an answer, and she does not press for a better one.
What is left, once the clerk and the date and the toxic misnomer have been accounted for, is the plainer and less comfortable arithmetic.
Eliza cannot return to London. Pemberton’s men are watching her townhouse; if she goes back, she leads them directly to whatever she does next, and if that next place is another of the society’s houses, she leads them there instead.
She cannot go to a house that has not already been named in evidence Pemberton is holding, because the letter names this one, specifically, by address.
Wyndermere is already compromised. There is, when I turn it over from every angle I can think to turn it, no version of tonight that ends with her leaving.
“You will need to stay,” I say. “For the present. Until we understand the shape of what he actually has.”
“I had assumed as much.” She says this without any particular alarm, which I find, again, more interesting than I would like. “Then I’ll need somewhere to put my trunk.”
I could laugh. I do not, quite, but something in my chest does something adjacent to it, and I have to look back down at the letter to keep my face from doing anything I did not want it to.
I set the letter aside at last, folded along its creases, and for a moment neither of us moves to fill the silence it leaves behind. The fire has burned low enough that Mrs. Prentice will come to see to it soon, and I find myself, absurdly, wishing she would take her time about it.
I tell her more, then, than I strictly need to — more than the letter requires, more than tonight’s practical arithmetic demands.
I tell her what the society actually is, beyond the vague outline Vivienne will have given her in London: the women helped out of marriages that could not be proven cruel in a court of law but were cruel nonetheless, the estates managed quietly by widows and spinsters who understood exactly what it cost to be visible, the network of households, mine among the largest, that exist to catch anyone who falls.
I tell her about the tinctures, in outline.
I tell her that a great deal of what we say to one another we do not write down at all — that the network has its own way of putting a thing in a nosegay or a pressed leaf, because paper can be entered into evidence and a flower cannot.
I do not explain the particulars of it. Tonight is not the night for that.
I tell her how long we have been doing this, and how many.
She listens the way she has listened to everything since she arrived — completely, without interrupting, without performing the small sounds of sympathy most people offer to fill silence. When I finish, she is quiet for a long moment, looking at the fire rather than at me.
“How many,” she says. “In ten years.”
“Sixty-one,” I say. “Sixty-three, if I count the two we did not reach in time. I do count them.”
She nods, once, still watching the fire. “Good,” she says. Just that. One word, entirely without embellishment, and then she says nothing further, as though the matter has been settled to her satisfaction and requires no additional comment.
I find this unexpectedly difficult to sit with.
I have told that number to perhaps six people in ten years, and every one of them has responded with something — admiration, disbelief, a question about how it is managed, a comment on the risk.
No one has simply said good and left it there, as though the number were self-evidently sufficient and anything further would only diminish it.
I do not know what to do with a person who responds to the center of my life’s work with a single unadorned word of approval and then returns her attention to the fire.
I find myself wanting, absurdly, to tell her the rest of it — the ones who did not make it out in time, the two who came to me too late to help, the particular weight of a decade spent doing careful, quiet, necessary work that no one outside a very small circle will ever know she did.
I do not tell her. It is not yet mine to tell, not to a woman who arrived this morning with a trunk and a letter and no history with any of us beyond Vivienne’s word.
But I notice the wanting, and I set it aside to examine later, the way I set aside every other inconvenient thing I have noticed today.
I show her to the blue room myself, rather than ringing for Mrs. Prentice, though I could not entirely explain why, except that the walk gives me a few more minutes in which nothing is required of me beyond company.
“You’ll stay here for the present,” I tell her, at the door. “We’ll work out the rest of it tomorrow. Use whatever you need from the house — the library, the gardens. Ring if you want anything in the night.”
“Thank you,” she says, and then, after a moment: “Good night, Lady Wyndermere.”
“Beatrice,” I say, before I even think.
Something flickers across her face — surprise, or something close to it — and then she says, “Eliza,” as though returning something I had handed her, and goes inside.
I stand in the corridor longer than the moment requires.
I could go up to my own room. I do not. I go back down to the greenhouse instead, where nothing is waiting for me but the plants I left this morning, because I find, standing outside a closed door with her name still recent in my mouth, that I am not yet ready to be alone with whatever this evening has turned out to be.