Chapter 7 — Beatrice
Thyme
BEATRICE
Three weeks, and the evenings have developed a shape I do not remember agreeing to.
Eliza comes to the greenhouse after supper.
She does not announce this as a habit; it simply began, some ten days ago, and has not stopped since, and I have not once asked her not to.
She does not perform usefulness while she is here, which I find I appreciate more than I expected to.
She does not hover at my elbow offering to hold things I have not asked her to hold, the way certain guests believe themselves obligated to demonstrate interest. She sits, usually on the stool near the specimen tables, and when she has a question she asks it, and when she does not, she is simply quiet, and the quiet is not the strained, waiting kind most people bring into a room with them.
It is closer to the quiet of the greenhouse itself before she arrives — full, rather than empty.
I have started listening for her step on the gravel. This is the part I do not examine too closely.
Three weeks is not a long time. I remind myself of this fact with some regularity, usually in the mornings, when the greenhouse is still mine alone and I have not yet had occasion to feel the particular alteration in the air that arrives with her in the evenings.
Three weeks ago I had never met this woman.
Three weeks ago Wyndermere was exactly the size it had been for ten years, and I understood every corner of it, and nothing in it surprised me, and I had considered this a satisfactory state of affairs rather than a deprivation.
I am not certain, any longer, which of those two words is the more accurate one, and I dislike very much not being certain.
The decoy letter has gone out — Vivienne’s clerk drafted it with the appropriate official flourishes, and it is, by now, somewhere on its way toward convincing Pemberton’s investigation that Wyndermere’s secrets live in a Surrey property that does not exist in any form he will find useful.
It has bought us time, though none of us knows precisely how much.
In the meantime, the household has folded Eliza into its rhythms with a completeness that would alarm me, if I allowed myself to sit with it for more than a moment at a stretch.
Mrs. Prentice has stopped referring to her as “the guest” and started referring to her as “her ladyship,” unprompted, the way staff do when they have quietly decided something before their employer has gotten around to deciding it herself.
The blue room no longer looks like a room prepared for a stranger.
It looks, when I have occasion to pass it, lived in.
Tonight she has stopped at the east wall, where a row of framed illustrations hangs between two of the taller windows — plates I did myself, years ago, before I stopped.
I know the moment she has found them because the quality of her stillness changes, becomes the particular attentive stillness she brings to anything she is trying to understand rather than merely admire.
I do not go to her. I continue what I am doing, which tonight is nothing more demanding than pruning the dead growth from a rosemary that has gotten leggy over the winter, and I wait to see whether she will ask.
She does not ask that night. She asks the housekeeper the next morning — I learn this only because Mrs. Prentice mentions it to me in passing, in the particular careful way Mrs. Prentice mentions things she suspects I might want to know but has decided are not, strictly, her business to comment on.
Her ladyship, years ago, before she stopped, is apparently the whole of what Mrs. Prentice offered, which is more than I would have offered myself, and exactly as much as needed saying.
That evening, Eliza comes to the greenhouse as usual, and sits as usual, and after perhaps twenty minutes of comfortable nothing, she asks: “Did you stop because of something? Or did you simply stop?”
I do not turn from the distillation I am tending. “I found it useful for my botanical work,” I say. “At some point I had enough reference illustrations, and there was no longer a reason to continue.”
It is not an answer, and I know it is not an answer even as I say it, and I suspect she knows it too, because she does not press.
She has a talent, I am beginning to understand, for recognizing exactly how far a door has been opened and declining to force it any wider than that.
This ought to make her easier to be around.
I find, instead, that it makes me want to open the door further myself, which is a different problem entirely.
A pause. “Might I try?”
I should say no. I have a dozen reasons ready, none of which I particularly want to examine, all of which amount to the same plain fact: that showing someone how I see a thing is a considerably more intimate act than showing them what I know, and I have not done the former for anyone in longer than I care to count.
I turn from the apparatus. She is watching me with an expression that is not quite hopeful and not quite braced for refusal — simply open, the way she seems to hold most things, waiting to see what will be done with them rather than working to influence the outcome.
“Come here,” I say, before I have finished deciding to say it.
I bring her to the specimen table where a fresh cutting of Lavandula angustifolia sits in a jar of water, waiting for me to press it.
“Not the impression of it,” I tell her, setting a sheet of paper and a pencil in front of her.
“The plant itself. Look at the structure of the flower spike — how the individual blooms sit along the stem, not as a mass but as a series. Look at how the color changes from base to tip, darker where it’s newest. Look at the particular gray in the stem — it isn’t green, not really, though everyone paints it green because they expect it to be. ”
I have shown a great many people how to look at a plant over the years — apprentices, the occasional interested guest, Mrs. Prentice’s niece who wanted to learn to press flowers properly — and none of them have looked quite the way Eliza looks now, with the whole of her attention gathered into a single narrow point, as though the rest of the greenhouse, and the rest of the evening, and possibly the rest of the world, has simply ceased to require her notice.
She draws. It takes her the better part of half an hour, and I do not hover, because hovering would defeat the purpose, but I am aware of her the entire time in the particular way I am usually only aware of a distillation nearing its critical point — a low, constant attention I cannot quite turn off.
I busy myself with the rosemary again, and then with a tray of seedlings that do not, in truth, require my attention this evening, because I find that if I do not give my hands something to do, they will find their own way toward the specimen table, and I am not prepared to examine what I would do once they arrived there.
The greenhouse is quiet except for the small sounds of her working — the scratch of pencil, the occasional soft exhale when a line does not go where she intended it to go, the rustle of her sleeve against the table’s edge.
I have worked in this room in silence for ten years.
I do not think I have ever found the silence quite this occupied before.
When she sets down the pencil, the drawing is not good.
I want to be precise about this, even in the privacy of my own head: the proportions are slightly wrong, the shading uneven, the perspective on the lower blooms flattened in a way that suggests she has not yet learned to think in three dimensions on a flat page. It is not good.
It is also not wrong. She has understood the thing I actually meant — the sequence of the blooms along the spike, the particular quality of gray in the stem that is not green no matter what convention expects.
She has seen the plant rather than her idea of the plant, on her very first attempt, which took me the better part of a year to manage when I was learning.
I look at it for a long moment. I do not say any of this.
The silence stretches longer than a silence generally ought to, in company, and I am aware that she is watching me not-speak with the same close attention she gives everything else, and I understand, distantly, that she is very likely reading the silence as a verdict, and that the verdict she is reading it as is probably not the correct one.
I do not correct her. I find I cannot, not tonight, not with words — that saying aloud what I actually think of the drawing would require saying something adjacent to it that I am not yet prepared to say, and so I let the silence do the work instead, and hope, without any real confidence that hope is warranted, that she will someday understand it as the compliment it was.
This is generous of me, I tell myself, later, alone at the workbench after she has gone up to bed. Teaching is generous. It is a kindness one extends to someone eager to learn, nothing more complicated than that.
I do not entirely believe myself. I have not entirely believed myself about a number of things since a trunk arrived in my entrance hall three weeks ago, and I am beginning to suspect that the tally of things I no longer entirely believe about my own conduct is going to keep growing, whether or not I am prepared for the sum.
I bank the fire under the last apparatus, later than I mean to, and go up long after the house has gone dark, and I do not, when I pass the blue room’s closed door, allow myself to slow down.
I consider this a small victory. I am aware, even as I count it, that the fact I need to count it at all is not a good sign.