Chapter 16 — Eliza
Foxglove
ELIZA
Lady Portia Hale arrives on a Thursday, and I understand within a quarter of an hour of meeting her that she is not the sort of woman a person manages to deceive by accident.
She is two-and-fifty, silver-haired, dressed with a precision that makes my own careful toilette feel suddenly amateur, and she has a way of looking at a person that reminds me, unpleasantly, of the first fortnight of my marriage, when I had not yet learned that certain rooms required certain performances and was still being sorted, by everyone who met me, into categories I did not choose for myself.
Portia is not unkind about it. She is warm, in fact, charming in a way that costs her nothing and appears effortless, and she asks after my journey to Wyndermere and my views on the season’s weather with every appearance of genuine interest. But underneath the warmth I feel her assessing me the way an experienced solicitor assesses a new clause in a contract — not hostile, simply thorough, determined to understand precisely what risk I represent before she decides how much of herself to extend toward me.
“So you are the widow from London,” she says, over the soup, in a tone that makes the words sound like a hypothesis she has been testing since she arrived.
“I am the widow from London,” I agree, and something in my own steadiness seems to please her, because the corner of her mouth moves in a way that is almost, though not quite, approval.
“Beatrice tells me you found the clerk’s name,” Portia says, turning the conversation with the easy confidence of a woman accustomed to directing it wherever she likes. “In the letter. A botanical slip, she said, something about valerian.”
“I noticed a pattern he did not seem to know he was leaving behind,” I say. “It was not so much cleverness as patience. I have read a great many letters in my life, looking for exactly that kind of pattern, though never before for quite this purpose.”
“No,” Portia says, and something in her face sharpens with interest rather than suspicion, which I find, unexpectedly, that I am grateful for.
“I imagine you have read a great many letters, in your former situation, looking for what a man was not quite saying.” She does not make this unkind.
She says it the way Beatrice might identify a plant’s genus — a simple observation, offered without cruelty, that happens to land somewhere tender.
“That skill is rarer than people credit, and more useful to this society than half the fortunes we’ve been left. I hope you understand its value.”
“I am beginning to,” I say, and I find I mean it, though a fortnight ago I would not have known how to answer such a question at all.
Beatrice, across the table, says nothing, but I feel her attention on me for the length of that exchange, warmer than anything she has offered me directly since Portia’s letter arrived four days ago, and I hold on to that warmth for the rest of the meal the way a person holds on to the last of a fire’s heat once the room has begun to cool.
Beatrice is quieter at dinner than I have seen her in weeks — not cold, precisely, but careful in a way that has become familiar to me over the past several days and that I still have not found a comfortable name for.
She answers Portia’s questions about the estate, about the letter’s progress, about Fenwick and the forged correspondence Vivienne’s clerk has by now nearly completed, with her usual precision, but I notice, the way I notice most things about her now, that she does not once look at me while she speaks, and that this not-looking has the particular deliberate quality of something being managed rather than something simply happening.
After dinner, the two of them withdraw to the library, and I understand, without being told, that I am not meant to follow.
I do not mind this, or I should say, I tell myself I do not mind it, which is not quite the same thing.
I go instead to the still room to finish measuring out a compound Beatrice began that afternoon and did not have time to complete, work that genuinely needs doing and that I am glad, this evening, to have as an excuse for my hands to be occupied.
I am on my way back through the corridor sometime later, the compound safely decanted and cooling, when I pass close enough to the library door to hear voices through it — not the words, the door is too heavy and my steps too quiet for that, but the shape of the conversation, the particular register two people use when they have stopped discussing plans and started discussing something else.
I hear the word risk.
I hear, a moment later, unmistakably, my own name.
I do not stop walking. I want to — every part of me that spent seven years learning to read what a closed door conceals wants very much to stop, to stand very still, to try to catch enough of the actual words to know precisely what conclusion is being drawn about me on the other side of that door.
I have spent my whole life being discussed in rooms I was not permitted to enter, my marriage arranged by people who consulted everyone but me, my worth assessed by relatives and solicitors and, eventually, by the particular silent judgment of an entire London season deciding what to make of a widow whose husband died under circumstances no one quite wanted to name aloud.
I thought, arriving at Wyndermere, that I had left rooms like that behind me.
I go upstairs instead. It costs me something to do so, more than I expect it to, and I sit for a long while on the edge of the bed in the blue room once I arrive there, not undressing, not doing anything at all beyond breathing carefully and reminding myself that I do not, in fact, know what was said.
I know a word. I know my own name attached to it.
I do not know the sentence those two things belonged to, and I have learned, the hard way, exactly how much damage a person can do to herself filling in a sentence she never actually heard.
I fail to convince myself entirely. I have never been especially good at believing things I have only just invented for my own comfort.
Portia finds me the following morning in the walled garden, where I have gone to cut lavender for the still room and, if I am honest, to have some task that keeps my hands busy and my face turned away from the house.
She falls into step beside me without asking permission, the way Vivienne does, though her version of the habit feels less like an inspection and more like simple companionship.
“You are wondering what was said last night,” she says, without preamble, cutting a stem of her own with more confidence than skill.
“I am trying not to wonder,” I say, “without much success.”
“A sensible policy, badly executed. I sympathize — I have never managed it either.” She examines the stem in her hand, then sets it in my basket rather than her own.
“I will tell you what I told her, since you are plainly going to hear some garbled version of it eventually and I would rather you had the accurate one. I asked whether she had considered what it costs the society if Pemberton discovers there is more than an estate and a reputation at stake here. Whether her judgment could be trusted to remain what it has always been, now that there is a great deal more for her to lose.”
I feel something in my chest go very still. “And what did she say?”
“She said her judgment has never once failed the society, and that it is not going to begin failing now.” Portia looks at me directly, the assessing look I noticed the moment we met, though it has softened somewhat overnight into something closer to plain curiosity.
“I believe her, for what it is worth. I have known Beatrice Ashford a long time. She does not make promises about her own abilities lightly, and she has never once broken one that I know of.” She cuts another stem.
“I did not ask her to choose between you and the work, Lady Moreton, whatever the tone of the conversation may have suggested to anyone listening in the corridor. I asked her to be honest with herself about what she is carrying. Those are not the same question, though I understand why they might sound alike through a closed door.”
I do not ask how she knows I was in the corridor. I suspect Portia simply knows a great many things without being told them, the way Beatrice does, the way Vivienne does — the particular occupational habit of women who have spent decades reading what a room does not say aloud.
“Thank you,” I say, “for telling me that plainly.”
“I am two-and-fifty,” Portia says, cutting a final stem and adding it to my basket instead of her own. “I have very little patience left for telling anyone anything otherwise.”
Beatrice has been different for a fortnight now — since before Portia’s letter arrived, if I am honest with the accounting, though Portia’s visit has sharpened whatever this is into something I can no longer politely decline to notice.
Not cold. Beatrice has never once been cold to me, not in three months, not even in our very first conversation in the greenhouse when she plainly wished I would simply disappear back to London.
This is something else, something I recognize with an unpleasant, specific familiarity from seven years of marriage — a person becoming managed, deliberate, every gesture and word passed through some internal accounting before it is permitted to reach me.
I know this particular quality of attention.
I spent seven years living inside a house where every conversation with my husband had already been decided before he opened his mouth, where warmth, when it came at all, arrived pre-measured, like a dose calculated not to do harm.
I did not expect to recognize that same careful measuring in Beatrice. I do not know, yet, what it means that I do.
I go to the illustration table when I can no longer simply sit with the not-knowing, though I do not draw anything.
I take out the forget-me-not instead — unfinished still, the small blue flowers only half rendered, the leaves barely begun — and I look at it for a long time without lifting my pencil, remembering the particular quality of the morning I began it, the lightness I felt watching Beatrice cross the garden and thinking, with a certainty I had not permitted myself in seven years, I want to stay.
I still want to stay. That has not changed, whatever conversation is happening downstairs, whatever word Portia used and Beatrice allowed. I simply no longer know, with the same clean certainty I felt four days ago, whether wanting it is going to be enough.
I have been composed at harder things than this.
I was composed at seven-and-ten, standing in a church accepting vows I had not chosen.
I was composed at four-and-twenty, watching my husband’s solicitor explain, with visible discomfort, precisely how contested my own inheritance was likely to remain.
I know how to hold my face very still while something underneath it comes slowly, quietly apart.
I will be composed at this, too, whatever this turns out to be. I set the illustration down, unfinished, and I do not cry, and I tell myself that not crying is its own kind of victory, though I lie awake a long while afterward listening for footsteps in the corridor that do not come.