Chapter 17 — Beatrice
Lavender
BEATRICE
I have rehearsed this conversation for two days, in the careful, exhaustive way I rehearse everything that frightens me, and I still do not know, standing outside the blue room’s door with my hand raised to knock, whether I have found the right words or simply the words I can manage to say without my voice breaking in the middle of them.
I knock. Eliza’s voice, from within, tells me to come in, and I do, and she looks up from the illustration table with an expression that is already, I notice, bracing itself for something — she has grown too good at reading me these past weeks for me to arrive at her door unannounced and expect her not to understand, before I have said a single word, that this is not a social call.
“We cannot afford distraction.” I have decided, in my two days of rehearsal, that beginning plainly is kinder than circling the point the way I circle everything else.
“Not now. Not with Pemberton’s second thread active, not with Portia’s questions still unanswered, not with the whole of the society’s safety resting, in some part, on my judgment remaining exactly what it has always been. The society’s work is too important.”
Eliza sets down her pen very carefully, the way a person sets down something she does not trust her hand to hold steady much longer. “I am aware of the stakes, Beatrice.”
“I know you are.” This is true, and saying it does not make the next part easier.
“I am not explaining this well. What I mean is that we are both adults. We understand the difference between what is real and what is simply circumstance — two people thrown together by a letter and a threat, feeling things that are, under the particular pressure of the moment, entirely understandable, and entirely separate from what either of us can actually afford to build on while that pressure remains.”
I cannot look her in the eyes while I say this.
I look instead at the illustration table, at the corner of a drawing I recognize as the forget-me-not, still unfinished, and I fix my eyes on the small blue flowers rather than on whatever my own words are doing to the woman sitting in front of them, because I have already decided, in my two days of rehearsal, that I am not going to be able to manage this at all if I have to watch it land.
“Circumstance,” Eliza repeats. Her voice is very even. It is the particular evenness I have come to recognize, over three months, as the sound a person makes when they have decided, deliberately, not to let a room see what is actually happening underneath the words.
“Circumstance,” I say again, because I have run out of other words and do not trust myself to reach for new ones.
“I think it would be wise for us to set it aside. Until this is resolved. Until I can trust my own judgment again without wondering whether I am protecting the society or simply protecting what I want to be true.”
The room is very quiet. I am aware of the particular quality of that quiet the way I am aware of everything in this house now, too finely, too completely, and I find myself wishing, absurdly, that I had never learned to notice a silence this closely.
“All right,” Eliza says.
That is all. Two words, offered without argument, without a single question, and I feel them land somewhere considerably lower than I expected two such small words to reach.
I had rehearsed, in my two days of preparation, a dozen different versions of what she might say in response — anger, I had prepared for; grief, I had prepared for, though badly; a request for explanation I was not certain I could survive giving.
I had not prepared for this — for her simply agreeing, cleanly, without a single crack showing in the agreement, because I understand, watching her pick her pen back up and return her attention to the page, that she has had a great deal of practice accepting exactly this kind of sentence from exactly this kind of room, and that she is very, very good at it.
I understand, too, distantly, that this is precisely the composure I have spent three months coming to love in her, and that I have just asked her to turn it against me, and that she has done so instantly, without hesitation, because it is the only tool she has ever been permitted to keep.
I make myself look at her once, before I lose whatever courage brought me to this door at all.
Her face has not changed in any way a stranger would notice — the same careful stillness, the same composed set of her mouth — but I have spent three months learning the particular grammar of her face the way I once learned the grammar of a difficult plant, and I see it: the smallest tightening at the corner of her eyes, gone almost before I register it, the exact place where seven years of practice have taught her to absorb a blow without letting it show anywhere the room might notice.
I have seen that tightening described to me once, secondhand, by a woman who escaped a house very like the one Eliza escaped.
I did not expect to be the one who put it there.
“Thank you for understanding,” I say, which is not what I mean, though I could not in this moment, name what I actually mean if my life depended on it.
She does not answer. She is drawing again — the forget-me-not, the small blue petals, her hand as steady as it has ever been, and I understand that she is not going to finish this conversation for me, that she has decided, in the space of those two words, precisely how much of herself she is willing to spend on it, and that the amount is considerably less than I deserve.
I let myself out. I close the door with the particular careful quiet of someone who does not trust the latch to behave itself if handled at ordinary speed, and I stand in the corridor for a long moment afterward, the word circumstance still sitting in my mouth like something I swallowed too quickly and cannot quite settle.
I do not know how I said it. I mean that literally — I do not know, standing here now, precisely which words I actually used and which I only rehearsed and never spoke, the whole conversation already collapsing into something I cannot entirely reconstruct, the way a person cannot entirely reconstruct the moment just before an accident, only the plain unbearable fact of the aftermath.
I go back to the greenhouse, because I do not know what else to do with myself, and because the greenhouse has been, for ten years, the one place at Wyndermere where I have never once had to explain myself to anyone.
Tonight it does not feel like that. Tonight it feels exactly as large as it actually is, glass and brick and specimen tables and nothing else, no particular set of footsteps likely to cross its threshold before the evening is through, because I have just spent considerable care ensuring that they will not.
I stand among the lavender beds for a long while, in the last of the daylight, and I think about the particular meaning the society has always assigned this plant, half in earnest and half as a private joke among ourselves — distrust, an old and unkind meaning for a flower we have built an entire secret language around, and I understand, standing here now with my own hands not quite steady at my sides, precisely why that meaning has never once struck me as unkind before tonight.
I have chosen distrust. Not of Pemberton, though I have plenty of that to spare.
Distrust of myself — of my own judgment, freshly proven fallible by the very fact that I wanted something enough to nearly forget, for three whole months, how dangerous wanting has always been for a woman in my position.
I tell myself this is prudence. I have told myself a great many things these past two weeks, and I am beginning, standing here in the cooling evening air with the lavender’s particular sharp sweetness all around me, to run out of ways to believe them.
I think of Vivienne’s question in this very bed of lavender, weeks ago now, and the particular satisfaction on her face when I would not answer it.
I think of Portia’s letter, the smaller hand, the single line I burned along with the rest of it.
I wonder, standing here with my own two words still unaccounted for — circumstance, offered instead of the truth — what either of them would make of tonight’s conversation, and I find I already know.
Neither of them would have said it the way I said it. Neither of them would have needed to.
I do not go back inside for a long while.
I let the light fail entirely around me, and I let the greenhouse become, for one evening, exactly what I built it to be ten years ago — a room that requires nothing of me but my own presence, no explanation, no accounting, no particular set of footsteps expected to cross its threshold before I am ready for them.
I had forgotten, I realize, standing here in the dark among my own careful cultivation, how much smaller that used to feel, before I knew what the alternative could be.