Chapter 20 — Eliza
Cypress (Reprise)
ELIZA
I have packed before. I remind myself of this while I fold the first of my dresses into the trunk, because it is true, and because true things are easier to hold onto than the particular quality of quiet that has settled over the blue room since I closed the door behind me an hour ago.
I packed to leave my late husband’s house, though a solicitor did the actual arranging of it.
I packed to come here, not knowing what I was coming to.
I am, if nothing else, efficient at this.
My hands know the folding without needing my mind to supervise them, which is fortunate, because my mind is currently occupied elsewhere and shows no particular interest in returning.
I am not going to cry. I decided this somewhere on the stairs, between the blue room’s door and the moment I actually reached it, and I have found, in seven years of practice, that a decision made early and held firmly is considerably easier to keep than one made in the middle of the thing it is meant to prevent.
I fold. I do not cry. Both of these things are true at once, and I am rather proud, distantly, of managing them together.
I know things now that I did not know when I arrived here with a trunk and a letter and no history with any of them beyond Vivienne’s word for me.
I know what it is to make something — to look at a plant until I understand the particular architecture of how it holds itself upright, and put that understanding on paper, and have it be, when I am finished, genuinely good, not merely adequate for a woman with too much time and too little occupation.
I know what it is to be seen clearly by someone who did not require me to be anything other than what I actually was underneath seven years of careful performance.
I know what my own mind does when it is permitted to work without being managed — how much faster it moves, how much more it notices, how much less exhausting it is to simply be curious about a thing instead of calculating what my curiosity might cost me.
I know I am not careless. I know this in a way that surprises me, given how thoroughly the word landed when Beatrice used it, given how long I sat afterward turning it over, testing it the way I test everything now, looking for the place where it might actually be true.
I could not find that place. I went to the village.
A man I had never met spoke to me with a courtesy that concealed a threat carefully enough that I could not have repeated his words to anyone and had them sound like what they were.
I said nothing that could be used. I came home.
I did not tell Beatrice, and that omission was not carelessness — it was a choice, made for reasons I understood clearly at the time and understand still, even now, folding my dresses into a trunk because of it.
I know, too, that Beatrice knows this. I watched her, in the moment after she said frightened and I said it back to her, plainly, and she had nothing to answer it with.
I have spent seven years learning to read the particular silence a person produces when they have just heard something true they cannot argue with, and I did not mistake what I saw on her face for confusion, or for anger still building toward some further point.
I saw a woman who understood, exactly as I finished the sentence, precisely what she had just done, and could not find her way to saying so.
That does not change the fact of the trunk. Knowing a thing and being able to stay in the room where it happened are not, I am learning, the same accomplishment at all.
I think of Whitfield again, the way I have thought of him a dozen times since the confrontation in the blue room, though not, this time, with the particular dread I felt at the draper’s counter.
I think instead of how plainly I told him I owed him nothing, how steady my own voice sounded to my own ear in that moment, and I understand, folding the last of my correspondence into the trunk, that I was not wrong to keep that steadiness for myself rather than hand it immediately to Beatrice for safekeeping.
I have spent seven years being told that withholding anything from a household was itself a kind of deceit.
I do not believe that any longer. A woman is permitted to decide, for herself, what she is ready to say and when, and the deciding is not the same thing as the lying I was once accused of whenever I failed to volunteer an explanation no one had actually asked for.
I go to the illustration table when the dresses are done, meaning only to gather my pencils, and I find myself instead standing in front of it for longer than required, looking at the empty corner where the lavender illustration used to sit before I gave it to Beatrice, the first one, drawn over a week of summer evenings I can still recall with a precision that has nothing to do with the flower itself.
She kept it. I know she kept it — I have seen it since, once, on the potting table in the greenhouse, in a place she clearly did not expect me to notice it — and I find some small, complicated comfort in that, even now, even packing to leave the house where it hangs.
The forget-me-not is still pinned to the wall above the table, where I put it the evening I finished it despite telling myself I would not.
I take it down carefully, working the pin free without tearing the paper, and I roll it the way Beatrice taught me to roll a specimen for transport — loosely, so the ink does not crack along the fold — and I set it with my things.
It is mine. I made it in the middle of everything currently being taken from me or withheld or quietly managed on my behalf, and I am not leaving it behind for someone else to decide what it means.
I sit for a moment on the edge of the bed, the half-packed trunk open in front of me, and I let myself, finally, ask the question I have been declining to finish since the library.
Whether I was wrong to want this. Whether four-and-twenty is too young or Wyndermere too dangerous or my own judgment too unpracticed, seven years being told what I was capable of by a man who had every incentive to convince me it was less than the truth, for me to trust what I felt standing in a greenhouse at dawn watching a woman work with her hands the way other people pray.
I was not wrong. I know this the way I know very few things about myself with any real certainty — not as a hope, not as something I am choosing to believe because the alternative is unbearable, but as a plain fact I have earned the right to state without qualification.
I came here to find out who I was underneath seven years of composed performance, and I have found out.
I am a person who looks at things until I understand them, and makes them into something that tells the truth about what they are, and is not, any longer, frightened of a difficult room simply because it is difficult.
I did not know that about myself when I arrived.
I know it now, and no one — not Beatrice, not Pemberton, not a single unkind word said in fear and regretted the instant it left the room — gets to take that particular knowledge back out of me.
I am allowed to grieve what I am leaving.
I understand this, too, sitting here in the dark with my trunk half full, the two things — the surety and the grief — occupying the same space in me without canceling each other out the way I might once have expected them to.
I am not wrong to have wanted this. I am also going to miss it more than I currently have words for, and I do not think either of those facts requires me to apologize for the other.
I take the small botanical notebook Beatrice gave me in my second week here — plain, cloth-bound, half filled now in my own hand with the names and preparations she taught me at the worktable, valerian and passionflower and the dozen small distinctions between a plant that heals and a plant that merely resembles one.
I did not expect, packing, to want it as badly as I find I do.
I tell myself this is simply practical, that the knowledge in it is mine now regardless of where I sleep tonight, but I know, closing the trunk’s lid over it, that it is something closer to the lavender illustration and the forget-me-not — not a possession so much as evidence, kept close, that the last three months happened to me and cannot be taken back merely because tonight has gone the way it has.
I do not finish packing tonight. I tell myself this is practical — that there is no coach before morning regardless, that Mrs. Prentice will need to arrange the carriage, that there is no particular virtue in finishing a trunk at midnight rather than at dawn — but I know, sitting here with my hands finally still in my lap, that it is something closer to reluctance dressed up as sense, and I am tired enough, tonight, to let it be that without correcting myself.
I look, before I finally lie down, toward the window, and I see what I already knew I would see: the greenhouse, below and across the garden, still lit, long past the hour Beatrice would ordinarily have banked the lamps and gone up to bed.
I do not know what she is doing down there in the dark among her specimens.
I do not let myself wonder for very long.
I lie down instead, on top of the counterpane, still dressed, the trunk open and half-full at the foot of the bed, and I watch that single light through the curtain gap until my eyes will not stay open any longer, and it is still burning, as far as I know, when I finally sleep.