Chapter 24 — Eliza
Lavender
ELIZA
The letter from the family’s solicitor arrives on an ordinary Tuesday, in the ordinary morning post, and I read it twice at the breakfast table before I fully understand what it is telling me.
My portion is confirmed. Not contested, not negotiated down to some grudging fraction of what I am owed, but confirmed, in full.
Beatrice’s man at the Inns of Court came to very little in the end — he read the settlement, wrote back that the contested provision would very likely stand, and advised me to accept whatever fraction the family offered before they thought better of offering one.
I did not accept it. I wrote to him myself instead, and told him which of my husband’s account books the provision had been drafted against, and where in that house those books were kept, and which of my husband’s brothers had been in the room while the drafting was done.
None of it was anything he had thought to ask me, because it had not occurred to him that the widow might be the person in possession of the facts.
He wrote back within the week in an entirely different tone.
Vivienne handled the rest, with the particular efficient discretion she brings to everything, and described it to me afterward in exactly four sentences, as though dismantling a hostile estate’s legal position were a matter of no more consequence than rearranging a dinner table. But the four sentences began with mine.
I am, for the first time in my life, a woman with money that is entirely her own, answerable to no husband, no solicitor, no family eager to remind me how little I am owed.
I sit with the letter for a long while after Beatrice has gone out to the greenhouse, turning the fact of it over the way I turn over most things now, testing it for a flaw I have learned to expect and, increasingly, do not find.
I have not made any arrangements to leave. As I read the letter a third time, I know I am not going to.
I went to Vivienne the week after Pemberton’s withdrawal, as she instructed, and I will admit I expected something more ceremonial than what I received — a formal induction, perhaps, or at minimum a speech.
Instead she poured me tea, asked three precise questions about how I had actually assembled the documents I brought to that parlor meeting, and then told me, without further preamble, that I was now a member of the Lavender Society and that she expected me to say so plainly if I ever disagreed with a decision made in my presence, because she had no use for a woman who nodded along in a room and complained afterward in a carriage.
I told her I had never been especially good at nodding along, only obliged to.
She said she was aware, and that it was rather the point.
I have not yet told Beatrice how much that afternoon meant to me — not the induction itself, though it mattered, but the plainness of it, the way Vivienne simply assumed I belonged there and required nothing further of me to prove it.
I am still learning how to say a thing like that aloud without dressing it up first in something smaller.
I am getting better at it. I intend to tell her soon.
The Season has begun its slow turn toward autumn, the light coming through the greenhouse glass thinner and more golden than it was in June, and Wyndermere has settled into a rhythm I no longer think of as new.
I go out to the greenhouse most mornings now, not because I am summoned but because it is simply where I go, the way another woman might go to a drawing room or a garden of her own choosing, and I find Beatrice already at her apparatus, as she always is, and I take my place at the illustration table, and neither of us remarks on the ordinariness of it because the ordinariness is, itself, the entire point.
I am working on the Valeriana officinalis plate this morning — the centerpiece, Beatrice says, of the manual we have begun building together, though she will not yet tell me precisely what it will contain beyond the botanical record it appears to be.
I understand enough of the shape of it to know that my illustrations and her preparations are meant to sit side by side in it, cross-referenced in some manner she has not fully explained, and that the society considers it important work.
I find I do not mind not yet knowing every particular.
I have learned, this year, that some things reveal themselves properly only once they are finished, and I am content to let this one take its time.
Mrs. Prentice has stopped asking, most mornings, whether I will be breaking my fast in the blue room or the family dining room, because she has learned, along with the rest of the household, that the answer is invariably wherever Beatrice already is.
I do not know precisely when the household’s understanding of my situation shifted from guest to something else entirely, only that it happened so gradually that I cannot now locate the particular morning it became true, the way I could not, watching the forget-me-nots along the north path in June, locate the particular day they had finished blooming and simply become a part of the ordinary landscape of the place.
“You have the secondary root wrong,” Beatrice says, setting down her mortar and crossing to look over my shoulder, close enough that I can feel the warmth of her along my back before she has said another word.
“It branches here, not there. It is a common enough error — most illustrators draw the root the way they imagine a root ought to look, rather than the way this particular root actually grows.”
“Show me,” I say, and she does, her hand closing briefly over mine to guide the pencil, and it is an ordinary correction of an ordinary error, except that neither of us moves apart once the correction is finished.
I have come to understand that the question she is actually asking has very little to do with root structure.
“Beatrice.” I do not turn around. “Ask me properly.”
She is quiet for a moment, and then her mouth finds the curve of my neck, unhurried, and I feel her smile against my skin before she speaks. “Would you care to walk to the village with me this afternoon?”
“That was not the question you meant to ask.”
“No,” she agrees, and her hand slides forward along my collarbone, slow and certain, the pencil finally slipping from my fingers because I have entirely stopped needing it. “But I find I have grown rather fond of asking you things sideways. You always know precisely what I mean.”
I turn in her arms, finally, and there is nothing urgent in the way she kisses me, none of the desperate collapsing hunger of the morning she came to the blue room with the trunk still half-packed against the wall, nothing to prove and nothing left to apologize for.
This is something else entirely — unhurried, familiar, the particular ease of two people who have long since stopped needing to rush toward each other because we both know that neither of us is going anywhere.
“The door,” I say, against her mouth, and she reaches without looking and turns the greenhouse latch, because we have learned precisely which hours the household leaves us alone here and precisely how long they last.
She undresses me slowly, here among her own careful cultivation, with a thoroughness that has nothing hurried in it at all — her mouth following the path her hands have already mapped a dozen times now, patient in a way that makes me understand, all over again, that patience and intensity are not opposites for her, only two instruments in the same steady hand.
She lays me back against the folded blanket beneath the potting table, unhurried, and takes her time at my breast, my ribs, the soft skin of my stomach, until I am arching into her mouth saying her name only once, quietly, and she answers by finding exactly the place that answers the unasked demand.
“Tell me,” she murmurs, her mouth at my hip, unhurried, “whether this is still where you want me.”
“You already know the answer.”
“I like hearing you say it,” she says, “more than I have ever liked hearing anything,” and there is nothing left in her voice of the careful woman who once stood in a doorway rationing what she permitted herself to want.
“I need you. Right now. Right where you are.”
I hear myself say the rest of it plainly, without softening any part of it. “With your mouth on my cunt and your fingers inside me.”
She settles between my thighs with an answering smirk and takes me in her mouth, slow and deliberate, her hands closing warm around my hips to hold me steady when I would otherwise rise to meet her.
She does not hurry. She finds the exact rhythm that undoes me and keeps to it, patient, thorough, one hand sliding up to find mine and lace our fingers together as though even now, especially now, she wants nothing between us that is not freely given, and when I finally break it is quiet rather than loud, a long unraveling rather than a shattering, her name the only word I have breath left to say.
She gathers me up before I have even finished trembling and kisses me languidly.
I taste myself faintly on her mouth and find it is what I prefer.
And when her hand finds mine again in the aftermath she simply holds it, entwined, against her heart, as though the holding were its own kind of sentence neither of us needed to finish aloud.
Afterward she gathers me against her, both of us settled on the worn blanket she keeps folded beneath the potting table for exactly no reason I understood until this particular season of our lives, and I lie with my head against her collarbone listening to her heart slow, and I think, not for the first time, that this — this precise, unremarkable, extraordinary morning — is what all the careful architecture of both our lives has been building toward, though neither of us could have known at the time.
“We ought to dress,” Beatrice says, eventually, without moving. “Mrs. Prentice will wonder.”
“Oh, we both know that Mrs. Prentice has not truly wondered in weeks. She is simply wondering for the sake of good manners.”
Beatrice laughs — a low, unguarded sound I have come to treasure precisely because I know how rarely she once permitted herself to make it — and presses her mouth to my hair, and neither of us moves for a while longer regardless.
“I have been meaning to tell you something,” I say, into the quiet, “and I have been putting it off because I did not want to dress it up first in something smaller, and I am trying to stop doing that.”
She goes very still, the particular attentive stillness she brings to anything she has decided matters. “Tell me.”
“Vivienne inducted me properly. Last week. I am a member of the society now, in full, not simply someone useful to it on occasion.” I feel her arms tighten slightly around me.
“I wanted you to be the first person I told, once I actually told anyone, and I have taken an embarrassingly long time getting to it.”
“I already suspected,” Beatrice says, “though I am glad you told me yourself rather than leaving me to go on suspecting.” She presses her mouth to my temple.
“I am proud of you. I do not think I have said that plainly enough, and I find I want to have said it. And to continue to say it, for as long as you allow me.”
We lie there a while longer, the light shifting slowly across the glass above us, and I think about how easily those words might once have frightened me — proud of you, offered without condition, without a performance required first to earn them — and how little they frighten me now.
Without a second thought, I turn to her. “I love you, Beatrice.” I have known it for some time; only now am I saying the words out loud, not just to Beatrice but to myself as well.
“I love you more than words can say, my sweet Eliza.”
I kiss her, deeply, both of us declaring that this is our forever without the need for words.
I finish the Valeriana officinalis plate that afternoon, working at the illustration table with the particular loose, unhurried satisfaction of a body that has been thoroughly and tenderly attended to, and when it is done I begin the next specimen without needing to be asked, because I have learned the manual’s rhythm as well as I have learned everything else about this house.
I draw the lavender growing along the greenhouse’s south wall, the bed Beatrice has tended for ten years and taught me to tend alongside her, rendering each spike of small purple flowers with the same patient attention I have given every specimen since the forget-me-not first taught me how to look at a thing until I understood it completely.
In my working notes, beside the illustration’s title, I write its name in the botanical Latin I have finally learned well enough to use without checking — Lavandula angustifolia.
The key already holds an entry for this plant.
I copied it in myself, weeks ago, in the meaning the society has always used — distrust, which I took at the time for half a jest among women who have every reason to distrust nearly everything, and half not a jest at all.
I did not argue with it then and I am not going to strike it out now.
It was true of this house for a long while, and there was a week this summer when it was the truest thing on the page.
But a plant is permitted more than one meaning, and so, it turns out, is a life.
I leave the first entry where it is, and beneath it, in the small private shorthand I have developed for the manual’s key, I write the plant’s other meaning.
The one that belongs to the particular language this society speaks in tussie-mussies and pressed petals and not words.
The one I understand now not as something reserved for others but as a fact about my own life, plainly true and no longer frightening to write down.
Devotion.