Epilogue — Beatrice
Epilogue
Primrose
BEATRICE
The manual arrives from the binder in the first true week of spring, a full year almost to the day since a trunk arrived unannounced in my entrance hall with a woman standing beside it who had not yet learned she was allowed to want anything for herself.
I unwrap the first copy at the desk in the library, Eliza looking over my shoulder with the particular held-breath quiet of someone who has spent months trusting all will turn out well and has only now permitted herself to actually believe it.
It is a beautiful object. Leather-bound, the corners gilt-edged, the title stamped in plain unassuming script — A Record of Cultivation at Wyndermere — so ordinary a title that no one outside the society would think to look twice at it.
To any woman who does not know how to read it, it is precisely what it claims to be: one gentlewoman’s careful record of a decade’s botanical work, her preparations noted alongside her companion’s illustrations, gifted with evident pride to forty women across England with a card that reads only With the compliments of the Lavender Society.
To the women who know how to read it, it is something else entirely — a master key, plant names cross-referenced against safe house locations, preparation notes coded to crisis protocols, illustrated with enough precision that anyone who has been taught the cipher can find, in a single glance at a page that looks like nothing more than a pressed specimen and a paragraph of horticultural observation, exactly what she needs to know.
I did not arrive at that decision comfortably.
A bound book is a durable thing, and forty of them are forty houses in which one careless servant or one unlucky search could undo a decade — I have not forgotten that this entire past year began with a single letter naming a single address.
Vivienne and I argued it both ways for the better part of a month.
What decided it was Eliza’s point, which she made once and did not repeat: that the women who need this are already carrying everything they know alone, in their own heads, and that a decade of work which cannot be handed on is not a network at all but a habit that dies with the five of us.
Vivienne called it, when she reviewed the proofs, the most elegant piece of society intelligence she had seen in twenty years.
She did not say so to flatter either of us.
Vivienne does not flatter. She simply said it once and moved on to her tea.
I have turned the sentence over in my mind many times since, understanding it for the rare thing it actually was.
I am, this particular morning, a woman in a life she has chosen.
All of it. Not merely the greenhouse, which I chose a decade ago and have never once regretted, but the whole of what has grown up around it since — the sound of a second set of footsteps on the stairs that I no longer note with any part of my attention, because it has become as unremarkable and as necessary as my own pulse; the illustration table that has stood in the corner of my greenhouse since the summer and will, I suspect, stand there for the rest of my life; the particular quality of a Tuesday morning that requires nothing more of me than showing up to it, exactly as I am, and being received.
Portia came for a fortnight in the autumn and pronounced the arrangement, in her particular unornamented way, “considerably more sensible than most marriages I have witnessed, and I have witnessed a great many.” Vivienne has said nothing at all about it, which I have learned over the years is Vivienne’s way of saying everything.
She simply began, sometime in the winter, addressing her correspondence to Wyndermere in a hand that includes both our names without comment, as though the arrangement had always been so obvious that it did not need remarking on.
I have come to understand that this — Vivienne’s silence, deployed exactly where another woman might have offered congratulations — is as close to a blessing as she is inclined to give.
We work through the afternoon on the manual’s final additions — a handful of specimens still wanting proper illustration before the second printing, the society having already requested one — and Eliza is at the table working on a small, unassuming flower I have always been fond of without quite knowing why, until I watch her render it and understand, all over again, precisely why.
“You have drawn the leaf margin too smooth,” I say, coming to look over her shoulder, close enough that I do not need any excuse at all now for standing this close. “Primula vulgaris has a slightly toothed edge, here, along the lower third.”
“Show me,” she says, and I do, my hand over hers, guiding the smallest correction, and neither of us moves apart once it is finished, because there is no longer any reason to pretend either of us wishes to.
“I have been thinking,” I say, “that we might walk to the village this afternoon. There is nothing in particular that requires it. I simply find I would like to.”
“That is not what you were actually asking,” Eliza says, not looking up from the page, though I can hear the smile in it.
“No,” I admit. “I am still fond of asking you things sideways, through a flower or a walk that requires no real justification. I find directness is not always necessary between two people who have already told each other everything that truly matters.”
“We could still walk to the village,” she says. “I would like that. But you should know I already understood the question, whichever way you asked it.”
I do not doubt that she did. I have stopped being surprised, this past year, by how thoroughly she understands me — not because I have become simpler to read, but because she has never once stopped looking closely enough to see what is actually there, the same patient, total attention she gives every specimen on this table, turned toward me and never once withdrawn.
We are still at our work, the light beginning its slow amber turn toward evening, when Mrs. Prentice brings in the afternoon post, and among the household accounts and a note from Portia about the society’s autumn gathering, there is a letter neither of us recognizes — heavy paper, an elegant, assured hand, a postmark I have to look at twice to be certain I am reading correctly.
Florence.
Eliza brings it to me rather than opening it herself, though I notice she does not go far, and I break the seal at the worktable with soil still faintly under one nail, exactly as I broke the seal on the letter that started all of this, a year and a lifetime ago. Inside is a single card.
I understand you are the women to speak to.
I have recently returned to England after some years abroad, and have heard of your society through a mutual acquaintance I have not seen in a great many years.
I believe I may be of use to you, or you to me.
I am in London for the Season, and would be glad to call at Wyndermere at your convenience.
— S. V., Countess of Bexley.
I read it twice. I do not recognize the name, and I have spent ten years learning nearly every name in England worth knowing, which means either the Countess of Bexley has been very carefully invisible, or she has been somewhere I have not thought to look.
Eliza reads it over my shoulder, and I feel her go very still in the particular way she goes still when she is turning something over rather than simply reacting to it.
“Vivienne will know her,” I say, refilling my own tea though I have not finished the cup already in front of me, because it is, I find, precisely the sort of thing my hands want to do while the rest of me considers what a letter like this might actually mean, arriving now, at the start of a new Season, addressed to two women it should have no earthly reason to have heard of at all.
Eliza is already reaching for the writing paper.
I watch her uncap the ink, unhurried, entirely herself, already halfway to composing whatever she means to say to Vivienne before I have even finished forming the thought myself, and I understand, watching her, that this is simply what we are now — two women who meet whatever arrives at the door together, without needing to discuss first whether we will.
The greenhouse light is amber and low behind us, the manual sits finished and beautiful on the desk between the day’s ordinary correspondence and this new, unaccountable thing, and I find, setting down my tea, that I am not the least bit afraid of what the letter might contain.
I have spent a great deal of my life protecting Wyndermere from whatever might arrive at its door. I find, this particular evening, that I am rather looking forward to finding out.