Chapter 8 — Eliza
Heartsease
ELIZA
I have been looked at a great many times in my life, and told, a great many times, how to appear to see something — how to arrange my face at the opera so it would be understood I appreciated the music without appearing to understand it better than the gentlemen around me, how to look at a painting long enough to seem thoughtful and not so long as to seem peculiar, how to receive a compliment on my needlework with an expression of modest surprise regardless of how much effort the needlework had actually cost me.
I have never, before tonight, been told how to look at a thing itself, with no thought at all for how the looking might appear to anyone watching me do it.
Beatrice stands beside me at the specimen table and tells me to look at the structure of the flower spike — not the general impression of purple that most people would call a lavender and consider the matter settled, but the actual sequence of blooms along the stem, each one distinct, arranged with a logic I have walked past a hundred times without ever once seeing.
She tells me the stem is gray, not green, though every eye that has never been told otherwise will paint it green out of habit.
I look, and for the first time in longer than I can easily place, I am not looking in order to produce an appropriate response.
I am simply looking, because she has asked me to, and because it turns out there is a very great deal to see once someone bothers to point at it properly.
She does not stand close while I work, which I notice and am grateful for, and also notice, more quietly, a small disappointment about, which I do not examine further than that.
She occupies herself instead with a tray of seedlings a few feet away, her back half-turned, giving me the particular kind of privacy that comes from someone choosing not to watch rather than someone simply being elsewhere.
I have been watched my entire life — by my mother, assessing whether I had learned my lesson properly; by my husband, assessing whether I had understood what was required of me that evening; by every drawing room I have ever entered, assessing whether I would perform correctly.
Being deliberately not-watched, by someone who is nonetheless still in the room, is a kindness I do not think I have ever been offered before, and I do not entirely know what to do with it beyond simply accepting it and getting on with the drawing.
I draw. My hand is not skilled — I have had drawing lessons, the ordinary kind given to young ladies expected to fill an album with tasteful watercolors of flowers and ruins, but no one ever taught me to see, only to produce a pleasing likeness of what I was assumed already to understand.
The lavender on my page is not a pleasing likeness of anything.
The proportions drift. The lower blooms flatten where they ought to recede.
I am aware of every fault as I make it, and I keep drawing anyway, because stopping to correct each error would mean losing the thread of what I am actually trying to say with the pencil, which is, I think, closer to the truth than anything I have made with my hands in years.
When I set the pencil down, Beatrice looks at the page for what feels like a very long time and says nothing at all.
I know this silence. I have spent seven years becoming fluent in silences — the kind that means approval withheld until further notice, the kind that means a fault too obvious to require comment, the kind that is simply the sound of someone deciding how disappointed to be before choosing their words.
I brace, without meaning to, for whichever version this one turns out to be.
My hands, folded in my lap now that the pencil is down, go very still.
And then I understand — not all at once, but gradually, the way understanding sometimes arrives sideways rather than head-on — that this silence is none of the ones I know.
Beatrice is not deciding how disappointed to be.
She is simply looking, the way she looks at everything, with the whole of her attention gathered into a single point, and the fact that she has nothing to say is not the absence of a verdict. It is the verdict.
“The sepals,” she says finally, and points to the small green structures cupped beneath the flower spike, which I had rendered without any particular confidence, guessing at their shape more than observing it.
“You’ve got them right.” Four words, delivered in the same flat, precise register she uses to note the temperature of a distillation or the state of a seedling’s roots.
She does not tell me the rest of the drawing is good.
She does not need to. I understand, watching her face while she says it, that this is the highest compliment she is capable of paying, and that she has just paid it to me without any apparent awareness of how much it costs to receive.
She had told me that she herself had always found the sepals difficult to render properly — the particular texture where flower meets stem never quite behaving the way she wanted it to on paper.
I have turned that small admission over tonight more times than it should reasonably require, and I do not intend to stop turning it over anytime soon.
I go to bed that night thinking about the sepals.
The letter from my solicitor arrives two days later, and it is not encouraging.
I read it twice at the breakfast table, in the particular careful way I have learned to read bad news — slowly, without letting my face do anything the room might notice, filing each unwelcome phrase away to be felt properly later, in private.
My husband’s family has retained additional counsel.
They intend to contest not merely the size of my portion but the validity of certain provisions in the will itself, on grounds my solicitor describes, with a lawyer’s caution, as “not without some prospect of success.” I am, in effect, further from my own independence today than I was three weeks ago, not nearer to it.
I fold the letter and set it beside my plate and continue my tea as though nothing in it requires any further attention, which is, I am aware, precisely the performance I promised myself I would try to need less of.
Old habits do not leave simply because one has decided, in a greenhouse, three weeks prior, to become someone slightly different.
I finish my tea. I think about the letter anyway, all day, in the particular background way a stone in one’s shoe makes itself known without ever quite becoming the whole of one’s attention.
I tell Beatrice over supper, because I have learned, in three weeks, that she is the kind of person one tells things to plainly rather than the kind one manages information around, and because I find I want her opinion more than I want to spare either of us the discomfort of the subject.
She listens without interrupting, the way she listens to everything, and when I finish, she asks two questions — precise ones, about the exact wording of the settlement clause and whether the contested provision predates or postdates my marriage — and I answer as best I can, and she is quiet for a moment, turning the answers over.
“I know a man at the Inns of Court,” she says. “He owes the society a favor he has never had occasion to repay. I’ll write to him tonight.”
And she does — not tomorrow, not after supper is properly finished, but immediately, calling for paper while the last course is still on the table, writing with the same focused, economical hand she uses to label her jars, finishing an entire page of dense, precise argument before the footman has cleared the plates.
I watch her do this and think, with a clarity that startles me slightly: she makes things happen.
I have known a great many men who believed themselves to make things happen.
My husband among them — a man who could fill a room with the appearance of consequence, who understood exactly how to be seen arranging a solution, and who very rarely, in seven years, actually arranged one.
He would have made a considerable performance of writing this letter — the summoning of the good pen, the announcement that he was not to be disturbed, the later, careful mention over cards of the trouble he had gone to on someone’s behalf.
Beatrice does not perform the arranging.
She simply arranges, in the time it takes most people to decide whether the matter is worth their trouble, and moves on to the next thing before anyone has finished admiring the first. I do not think it has once occurred to her that the letter might be admired at all.
It is simply a thing that needed doing, and so she has done it.
I go back upstairs after supper and do not, for once, sit uselessly with my own worry.
I take out a fresh sheet of paper instead and begin an illustration of the heartsease growing wild along the south window ledge — small, unassuming flowers, purple and yellow and white all at once, that I have walked past every day without truly seeing until three weeks of lessons taught me to look properly at things I had always simply glanced at before.
No one has asked me to draw this. I am doing it because I want to, which is, I am beginning to understand, a category of action I have had very little practice with.
I work for an hour, perhaps longer, correcting the same small fault three times before I understand what my eye keeps catching on — the way the yellow at the center bleeds too abruptly into the purple, when in the actual flower the color shifts by degrees, one shade earning the next.
I fix it. It is a small thing, the sort of correction no one but myself will likely ever notice, and I find I do not mind that in the slightest. It was never for anyone else to notice.
When I finally look up, the candle has burned low and the house has gone entirely quiet around me, and I realize, with something between surprise and quiet satisfaction, that in all that time I have not thought once about London, or Pemberton, or the letter from my solicitor, or anything at all beyond the particular yellow at the center of a small flower I am only now, at four-and-twenty, learning to truly see.