Chapter 12 — Eliza
Myrtle
ELIZA
Vivienne Cavendish, in person, over the course of two days, is nothing like the woman I met in a London sitting room three months ago, frightened and half-composed and desperate for any instruction that would tell me what to do next.
That woman I remember mostly through the fog of my own panic — a severe voice, a set of instructions, the particular relief of being told plainly what was expected of me.
This woman studies me the way she studies everything, with an attention so complete it feels almost physical, and then, apparently satisfied by whatever she has concluded, more or less leaves me alone to prove her right.
I like her enormously. I had not expected to.
She asks me, on the first afternoon, to walk her through the letter’s construction, and I do, and when I finish she says, “That is very good work,” in a voice that carries no more warmth than her ordinary speaking voice and somehow lands harder for it.
I do not know what to say back. I have spent seven years being told I performed adequately, correctly, appropriately — never once that the thing itself was good, on its own merits, regardless of who had produced it.
I look down at the letter rather than answer, because I do not entirely trust my own face at that moment, and I am aware, without looking up, that Beatrice is watching me not-answer with an expression I cannot read and very much want to.
The plan comes together with an efficiency that would have seemed impossible to me three months ago — a magistrate’s clerk in Maidstone, forged correspondence, a false trail solid enough that Pemberton will have no reason to look past it.
Vivienne discusses the details with Beatrice in the particular shorthand of two women who have solved a great many problems together over a great many years, and I sit at the edge of it, useful where I can be, quiet where I cannot, and understand, watching them, that I am seeing the actual machinery of the thing I have been living inside for three months.
It is less mysterious than I imagined, and somehow more impressive for that.
Nothing about it is magic. It is simply two women who refuse to accept that a problem cannot be solved, applying themselves to it until it yields.
Vivienne leaves on the third morning. Before she goes, she takes my hand — an oddly formal gesture, for a woman who has spent two days treating me with the brisk efficiency she extends to competent staff — and says, “You’ve done more for this society in three months than some members manage in three years. I hope you know that.”
I do not know that. I am not certain, standing in the entrance hall watching her carriage pull away, that I know very much of anything about myself with real confidence yet.
But I know that I want to keep finding out, and that wanting it here, in this house, feels entirely different from wanting anything ever felt in the seven years before it.
I spend a long time that afternoon turning over a thought I have been circling for weeks without quite letting myself land on it, which is this: that I came to Wyndermere with a single, narrow ambition — to survive the letter, to survive Pemberton, to emerge from the whole business with enough of myself intact to build some small, careful life afterward, somewhere quiet, where no one would ever again have occasion to tell me what was expected of me.
I had not imagined, in any of the versions of that careful future I allowed myself, that the life I actually wanted might already be the one I was living in the meantime.
I had certainly not imagined wanting it enough to be frightened by the wanting.
I am careful, still, the way I have taught myself to be careful — turning the thought over, testing its weight, looking for the flaw in it the way Beatrice looks for the flaw in a letter.
I find that I cannot locate one, only the old habitual suspicion that anything wanted this plainly must eventually be paid for, a suspicion seven years of marriage taught me so thoroughly that I no longer notice when I am reasoning from it.
But Wyndermere is not Moreton’s house, and Beatrice is not Moreton, and I am beginning, slowly, to trust that a good thing does not have to be a debt collected later.
Maybe, I think, and do not finish the thought, because I have not yet earned the right to finish it, not even alone, not even in my own head.
Maybe this could simply be allowed to work.
I have been working on the lavender illustration for a week now — not the quick practice sketch from that first lesson, but a proper plate, the kind meant to be finished rather than merely attempted, every stem and bloom studied and restudied until I trust my own hand to render it honestly.
I finish it the evening after Vivienne departs, in the last of the daylight, and when I hold it up to look at what I have made, I understand, with a small shock of recognition, that it is good.
Not good for a beginner. Not good considering the circumstances.
Good, plainly, the way Vivienne meant it when she said the words to me over the letter — a thing made well, regardless of who made it.
It is also, I realize, a plant I have come to know entirely through Beatrice.
Every choice on the page — the particular gray of the stem, the sequence of blooms along the spike, the sepals I once got right by instinct and have now gotten right by understanding — carries some trace of an evening she stood beside me and told me what to actually look for.
I have made something, finally, that is unmistakably mine, and it would not exist at all without her.
I worked on it most evenings in the still room while she measured and decanted beside me, neither of us speaking much, the two of us occupying the same small silence the way we have learned to occupy most silences now, without strain.
Twice she leaned over my shoulder to look at what I had done so far and said nothing at all, only made a small sound of approval low in her throat that I have come to recognize as worth more than most people’s speeches, and went back to her own work, and I found myself smiling down at the page for the better part of a minute afterward for no reason I would have been able to explain to anyone who asked.
I did not let her see the drawing finished, once I understood it was actually going to be good.
I wanted, for reasons I only partly understood at the time and understand a great deal better now, to give it to her whole, the way a thing is given rather than merely shown.
I take it down to the greenhouse.
I stop once, on the path between the house and the walled garden, and nearly turn back.
It occurs to me, absurdly, that I am nervous in a way I have not been nervous since my first morning here, trunk in hand, uncertain of my welcome.
This is a different uncertainty entirely, one I do not have a tidy name for, though I suspect, walking the rest of the way with the illustration held carefully against my chest so the evening air will not catch it, that I have simply been refusing to name it for some time now, the way Beatrice refused to name whatever Vivienne saw so plainly in the lavender bed. I do not turn back.
The light at this hour is the particular filtered green and gold I have come to love best in this house — the sun low enough that it comes through the glass sideways, catching the dust and the damp air and turning the whole room the color of something suspended in amber.
Beatrice is at the workbench, not doing anything in particular, which is rare enough that I understand she has been waiting, whether or not she would admit it.
She takes the illustration from my hands and looks at it for a long time — longer than she looked at the first one, longer than seems strictly necessary for a piece of paper, however carefully made.
“You’ve done it to the whole plant now,” she says finally. “Not just the sepals. All of it.” She looks up at me, and there is nothing careful left in her expression, nothing held back the way she usually holds things back. “This is extraordinary, Eliza.”
No one has ever said my name like that. I have heard it said a great many ways in four-and-twenty years — dutifully, coldly, correctly, the way one says a word one has memorized rather than a word one means.
Beatrice says it like she has been wanting to say it all evening and has only now allowed herself.
I do not decide to close the distance between us. I am simply, suddenly, closer than I was, close enough to see that her hand is not quite steady around the edge of the illustration, close enough to watch her breath catch and hold.
“Beatrice,” I say, and it is not a question, and it is not anything I have planned to say, and it is the truest word I have spoken since I arrived at this house.
She sets the illustration down without looking away from me.
“Eliza.” My name again, lower this time, rougher, and then her hand is at my jaw, careful even now, even here, and I close the last of the distance myself because I have spent three months learning to choose things for myself and I am not going to stop now, not with this, not with her.
The kiss is not careful for long. Whatever restraint either of us has been keeping — weeks of it, months of it, built up behind glass the way I once told her I kept everything behind glass — breaks at once, entirely, and there is nothing careful left in either of us.
Her hands find the fastenings of my dress with the same sure economy she brings to everything, no hesitation, no fumbling, and I am pulling at her apron strings with considerably less skill and considerably more urgency, and neither of us laughs at how little either of us manages gracefully, because there is no room left for anything but this.
She backs me against the worktable, and the jars rattle, and neither of us cares.
Her mouth moves from mine to my throat and I hear myself make a sound I have never made in my life, low and helpless, and her hands are everywhere at once — steady even now, even wrecked, because steadiness is simply what her hands are — and I am gasping her name into the green-gold light before I have any real sense of how we arrived here, only that I never want to arrive anywhere else again.
It does not last long. It does not need to.
Three months of not touching each other collapses into perhaps a quarter of an hour that leaves us both breathless, my back against the worktable’s edge, her forehead against my collarbone, her breath as unsteady as mine, both of us shaking slightly in the aftermath the way a plant shakes when a storm finally breaks after too many days of pressure building in the air.
“Well,” Beatrice says eventually, into my skin, and I feel her mouth curve against me — the closest thing to a laugh I have ever heard from her.
“Well,” I agree, and hold on to her a moment longer, because I am not yet ready for either of us to be steady again.
She draws back, eventually, just far enough to look at me properly, and there is something in her face I have not seen there before — not the careful watchfulness she brings to a letter, not the fond exasperation she sometimes turns on me across the supper table, but something unguarded, almost startled, as though she has surprised herself as thoroughly as she has surprised me.
She reaches up and tucks a loosened strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that undoes me rather more than anything that came before it.
“I did not plan this,” she says, and there is the ghost of some older, unfinished question underneath it, one I do not know the shape of but recognize all the same, the way one recognizes a door has been standing ajar for some time before anyone finally walks through it.
“Neither did I.” I catch her hand before it can withdraw and hold it against my cheek instead. “I am not sorry for it.”
“No.” She considers this, turning it over the way she turns over everything, and something in her expression settles, decides itself.
“Nor am I.” She looks toward the illustration, still lying where she set it down on the worktable, lavender rendered in every particular I learned from her.
“I believe,” she says slowly, “that you had better stay a good while longer than either of us originally planned.”
I feel the thought I would not let myself finish this afternoon complete itself quietly, without any of the fear I expected to feel when it finally did. “I believe I had,” I say, “better stay as long as you’ll have me.”
“Then that is settled,” Beatrice says, in the same voice she uses to settle household accounts and forged correspondence and clerks three years gone, as though the matter of my staying were simply one more problem that had been patiently worked at until it yielded, and I find I love her a little for saying it that way, plainly, without any of the softening London would have insisted on.
Outside, the light has gone from gold to blue, and somewhere in the house a clock strikes the hour, and neither of us moves to acknowledge it.
For the first time since I arrived at Wyndermere with a trunk and a letter and no idea what I was walking into, I am not thinking about London, or Pemberton, or my own uncertain future.
I am thinking only that I have never, in my life, wanted to stay anywhere as much as I want to stay exactly here.