Chapter 21 — Beatrice
Ivy
BEATRICE
I do not remember deciding to come to the greenhouse.
I remember only that the library grew too small to hold what I had just done, and that my feet carried me here the way they have carried me here every morning for ten years, out of habit rather than intention, and that by the time I noticed where I was standing it was already past two, and the lamp was already lit, and I had already taken the lavender illustration down from the shelf where I keep it and set it on the potting table in front of me, as though looking at it long enough might produce a different version of tonight than the one I actually made.
I do not come here at three in the morning.
I have not, in ten years, once needed to.
The greenhouse has always been the place I go to be entirely myself, uncomplicated by an audience, and I understand now, standing in it at an hour it has never before seen me keep, that it has stopped being uncomplicated.
Eliza’s questions are still in it. The corner of the potting table where she used to sit, turning a specimen over in her hands with a patience I found, before I let myself examine why, entirely disarming.
The particular space near the north panes where she stood the first time she asked me about the forget-me-nots, before either of us understood what asking would eventually cost. I have spent a decade in this room without once feeling the absence of a person in it. Tonight it is the only thing I feel.
I look at the illustration for the better part of an hour.
It is, I allow myself to admit now, for the first time and far too late, better than my own early work — the line more confident, the shading more patient, the particular way she rendered the blooms in sequence along the spike rather than as a mass of purple, and the gray she found in the stem that everyone else paints green because they expect it to be green.
I told her once that it was good. I did not tell her it was better than mine.
I did not tell her a great many things, over three months, that I understood clearly and declined to say aloud, and I understand now, sitting with the evidence of her attention in my own two hands, precisely how much that declining has cost both of us.
I have done to her exactly what I swore, ten years ago, I would never do to another living person.
I used my own fear as a weapon, and I aimed it at the one person in this house who had done nothing to deserve it, because she was near enough to reach and because striking at her required less courage than striking at the actual source of the fear, which was never Eliza at all.
I have organized my entire life — the greenhouse, the still room, the careful architecture of Wyndermere itself — around not being a woman who does that.
I did it anyway. The fear simply grew large enough, and when it did, I discovered that ten years of careful self-construction is not, in the end, so very different from the thin performance I once watched my husband produce, when his own fear grew large enough to need somewhere to land.
I think of the word I used, and I think of what it actually meant, spoken aloud in that particular voice, to a woman who spent seven years being told, in exactly that register, that she was insufficient in some precise way a man had troubled himself to specify.
I did not invent a new cruelty last night.
I borrowed one, without meaning to, from every voice she has spent her whole life learning to withstand, and I understand, sitting here with the proof of her attention in my hands, that this is very likely the part she will find hardest to forgive, if she forgives any of it at all — not that I was angry, but that my anger arrived wearing a shape she already knew too well to mistake for anything else.
I think, too, of the ten years before her — the ten years I spent building this particular fortress, brick by careful brick, on the theory that if I simply controlled enough of my own life, nothing in it could ever again be taken from me the way my marriage was taken, slowly, with my own consent extracted a little at a time until I no longer recognized the shape of what I had agreed to.
I was not wrong to build it. I have helped a great many women over those ten years precisely because I understood, better than most, what it costs to live unguarded in a house that does not deserve the privilege of your unguarding.
But I built the fortress high enough, eventually, that I stopped being able to tell the difference between the walls that were protecting me and the walls that were simply keeping everyone else out, Eliza included, and last night I discovered, far too late to spare her the discovering with me, precisely how thin the difference actually was.
I wrote to Vivienne sometime after midnight, in the library, before I came here — I do not remember composing the letter so much as finding myself, afterward, with an empty inkwell and a folded letter ready for the morning post, the words already gone from me and into her hands before I had properly decided to send them.
I told her what I had done. I did not soften it.
I have spent three months learning, slowly and at considerable cost, that softening a true thing rarely makes it kinder, only less useful, and I did not want kindness from Vivienne tonight.
I wanted the thing I have always gone to her for, in the rare moments I have permitted myself to need it: a woman who will not let me look away from myself.
Her reply reaches me before the sun is fully up, carried by a rider she must have sent within the hour of receiving mine, because Vivienne apparently does not sleep when someone she has trained requires correcting.
It is three lines. I read it standing at the greenhouse door with the gray light just beginning to come through the glass, and I read it again, and I do not need to read it a third time to understand it.
Portia already suspected as much; I did not need your letter to confirm it, though I am glad you finally sent one. You have spent ten years teaching every woman in this house what she is worth. Apparently you require the lesson yourself. You know what you did and you know why. Fix it, Beatrice.
I fold the letter and I do not burn it. I find, oddly, that I want to keep this one.
The plan arrives in the same hour, and it arrives the way solutions have always arrived for me — not as inspiration, but as something that was sitting in front of me the entire time, obscured only by whatever I was too frightened to look at directly.
Pemberton meets his clerk contact every week at the coaching inn in the village; I have known this for a fortnight through channels of my own and did nothing with it, because I was too occupied managing the wrong danger to properly examine the real one.
Pemberton also, I know through those same quiet village channels, manages a private condition with preparations from a village apothecary who is, by every account I have gathered, considerably less skilled than he believes himself to be.
A respected woman, offering to speak to that apothecary on his behalf — a small, unremarkable kindness, the sort any woman of my situation extends without comment — would require very little to arrange.
And a woman carrying, in the course of that same unremarkable conversation, a precise and specific piece of knowledge about the terms under which Lord Moreton retained him — knowledge that would not ruin him, would not see him prosecuted, but would embarrass him precisely enough, among precisely the men whose good opinion he requires to continue practicing as he does — would be sufficient, I think, to make the entire petition considerably more trouble than it is worth to pursue.
That knowledge is not mine. It never has been.
It is Eliza’s, carried out of her husband’s study in the same reticule that once carried the letter that brought her to me, and I have known this for weeks without once considering that it might be the answer rather than simply a fact I happened to possess about her.
I could ask someone else. Portia would do it in an afternoon, without a single wasted word.
But the choice of whether to use it belongs to Eliza, not to me, and not to Portia, and I understand, standing here with the lavender illustration still in my hand and the gray light strengthening around me, that pretending otherwise would be one more version of the exact mistake I have just spent an entire night learning I cannot afford to keep making.
I turn the plan over once more, testing it for the particular flaw I have learned to expect in anything that arrives this easily, and I find, this time, that the flaw is not in the plan itself but in what I very nearly did with it — walk into her room this morning already carrying a solution, already deciding on her behalf what her own information was worth spending, exactly as I decided, a week ago, what her own judgment was worth trusting.
I have spent ten years being careful with everyone else’s autonomy but my own.
I am not going to spend this morning being careless with Eliza’s, on top of everything else I have already cost her.
There is also, underneath the plan, a plainer question I have been declining to ask myself since the moment she said I’ll leave in the morning — whether I am walking up these stairs to fix a problem, or whether I am walking up these stairs because I cannot bear the shape of a house with her trunk already in the hall.
I do not think the two are separable any longer, and I have decided, standing here with the light coming up properly now through the glass, that I am done pretending they are.
I set the illustration down. I do not put it back on the shelf.
I leave it where I can see it, on the potting table, in the place she used to sit, and I go up through the quiet house toward the blue room, rehearsing nothing this time, because I have already discovered, once tonight, precisely what rehearsal is worth when the person on the other side of a door deserves better than a performance.