Chapter 15 — Beatrice
Peony
BEATRICE
The letter comes through the ordinary channel — folded inside an innocuous note about lavender oil pricing, the society’s oldest code, so old and so plain that I sometimes forget it is a code at all until I am decoding it without conscious thought, the way a person reads their own handwriting.
It is from a woman in London I have never met and likely never will, one of Vivienne’s contacts, three degrees removed from anyone at Wyndermere.
That is precisely what makes it worth reading carefully.
A remarkable widow in Kent with an unusually fine estate and a particular interest in apothecary.
The subject came up at Lady Hartwell’s card party, mentioned in passing by a guest who had heard it from her sister, who had heard it from someone connected to a Surrey solicitor presently occupied with a property matter of some interest.
I read it twice. I read it a third time, more slowly, the way I read the letter that started all of this — looking not at what is said but at what the saying implies.
It is not malicious. That is the particular cruelty of it.
No one in that drawing room meant harm. A woman repeated an interesting thing she had heard, because interesting things are the currency London trades in, and the woman she told repeated it in turn, because that is what conversation is, an economy of small unearned currency passed hand to hand until it has traveled further than anyone intended and landed somewhere it was never meant to land.
It has landed, now, close enough to Wyndermere that I can feel the weight of it.
Pemberton has a second thread. The decoy bought us weeks, months perhaps, and it is still buying us something — Surrey still holds his men’s attention, by the last report — but a man building a case does not need one thread when he can have two, and a thread that leads, however indirectly, to a remarkable widow in Kent is not a thread I can afford to let run unchecked.
I sit with the letter for a long while after I have finished decoding it, in the library, where I have taken to reading Vivienne’s correspondence since Eliza’s habit of joining me in the greenhouse in the evenings has made the greenhouse feel like the wrong room for anything requiring this particular kind of calculation.
I do not tell myself I am afraid. I have never found that word useful, even in the privacy of my own head, and I am not going to begin finding it useful now.
I tell myself, instead, that this is simply a matter requiring attention — a variable that has shifted, a calculation that must be redone.
I have managed harder problems than this.
I managed an entire marriage’s slow erosion without once losing the thread of who I actually was underneath it, and I am not going to be undone by a card party three counties away.
I begin making the necessary adjustments the following morning, and I tell myself, as I make them, that they are exactly that — adjustments, nothing more, the ordinary tightening of discipline that any competent woman would apply when a threat has grown teeth.
I write to Vivienne, laying out what the letter said and what I intend to do about it.
I write to the housekeeper at Ashworth, confirming what can and cannot be traced back to a clerk three years gone.
I spend the better part of two days on correspondence I could, if I were being entirely honest with myself, have managed in one.
I am not being entirely honest with myself. I understand this, distantly, the way I understand a great many things about my own conduct that I have chosen not to examine too closely.
The evenings change first. I tell Eliza, on the second night, that I have a great deal of correspondence requiring my attention, which is true, and which is also not the reason I say it standing in the greenhouse doorway rather than crossing the threshold the way I have crossed it every evening for weeks.
She looks at me for a moment — that particular reading look she has, the one that found a clerk’s name buried in a botanical slip — and I understand that she has noticed something has shifted, though she does not press.
She has a talent for recognizing exactly how far a door has been opened and declining to force it further, and tonight I am deeply, uncomfortably grateful for that talent, because I am not at all certain the door would survive being forced.
“Of course,” she says, and returns to her illustration, and I go to the library alone, and I tell myself this is simply what the letter requires of me.
The still room becomes professional again, over the following days, in ways I notice only because I am the one enforcing them.
I explain the next preparation’s proportions with the same careful precision I have always used, but I find myself standing a half step further from the worktable than I used to stand, close enough to teach, not close enough to be aware of her breathing changing when she thinks something through.
I tell myself this is simply good sense — that a woman managing a genuine threat cannot afford the particular quality of distraction I have permitted myself these past weeks, that clarity of mind is not a luxury I can spend on anything but the problem actually in front of me.
I find, by the fourth day, that I have become extremely busy.
There is a fence at the property’s eastern edge that genuinely does require attention, and I attend to it personally rather than sending the usual man for it.
There is a delayed shipment of glass for the greenhouse’s north panes that genuinely does require a letter to the supplier, and I write three drafts of it before I am satisfied, though the first draft would have served perfectly well.
I am, by any outside measure, a woman entirely consumed by the ordinary business of an estate under quiet threat.
I catch myself, once, on the fifth evening, standing at my study window watching the light in the blue room come on, and I understand with a small cold clarity that I have arranged an entire week around not crossing certain thresholds, and that I have done this so carefully, so incrementally, that I could produce a perfectly reasonable explanation for every individual choice if anyone thought to ask me for one.
No one has asked. I am not certain anyone but myself has fully noticed yet, which is its own kind of proof that I have managed this the way I manage everything — thoroughly and without a single visible seam.
I tell myself it is strategy. A woman facing a genuine threat to everything she has built cannot afford to be careless, and carelessness, I remind myself, is precisely what love has always looked like to me from the outside — a slow surrender of the vigilance that keeps a person safe, dressed up as something too lovely to refuse.
I have watched women I respected become careless in exactly this way. I have no intention of joining them.
I almost believe myself. I am, after all, extremely good at believing the things I have carefully constructed to be believed, and I have had ten years of practice building a version of myself sturdy enough to survive on belief alone.
I do not let myself finish the thought that follows that one — the thought that begins, if this is only strategy, why does the house feel colder every evening I do not cross the greenhouse threshold — because I have found, over the past several days, that certain thoughts are considerably easier to manage if I decline to let them finish forming at all.
I write to Portia on the sixth day. I tell myself this, too, is strategy — that Portia has connections in London I do not have, that her network reaches drawing rooms mine cannot, that a second pair of experienced eyes on Pemberton’s new thread can only help.
All of this is true. It is also true that I have not written to Portia in the better part of a year, and that I choose this particular week to break that silence, and I am careful, composing the letter, not to examine too closely what that timing might reveal to a woman who has known me since before I knew how to guard myself at all.
She writes back within three days, which is fast even for Portia, and her reply is shorter than I expect, and considerably more direct.
She writes that she will come by Thursday and beneath that, in the smaller hand she uses when she means something to be read only once and then burned, a single line I read four times before I put the letter in the fire:
You do not usually ask for help this quickly, Beatrice. I am curious what else has changed.
I burn the letter as instructed. However, the question in my mind is not so easily burned.