Chapter 40 Flora Britannica
Flora Britannica
Oh, Harry. All these years I’ve been writing you—you must have been so vexed.
Papa’s death was three weeks ago. Mamma and I have spent the last few weeks overseeing the removal of our belongings.
It was a tiresome business. Mr. Collins sent multiple letters each day, which both poured forth sympathy for our loss and also managed to imply that he suspected we would make off with things that belonged to him.
He begged us to take all the time we needed, to be in no hurry to quit our abode, while at the same time informing us that his family would take possession at the end of the month.
It is tiresome work, but it grows a little easier each day.
For the first time in years, I can call my blood my own.
Little by little, my strength has returned.
My figure, too, has begun to fill out the dresses that had sagged around my wasted frame.
Mamma seems grimly determined to eat everything on the farm that we can, and she presses all the best cuts and the richest cream upon me.
This morning, my mother called me into the place I had so rarely been allowed: my father’s study.
“Mary! Mary, come here, child, I want you!”
At the strident sound of my mother’s voice, I reluctantly put aside the book I was reading whilst curled up on the windowsill.
No doubt my mother wanted company for a morning visit, or someone to do the fine needlework on a napkin she was sewing, or something else like that.
But Quindley says, “a young lady is not to become obstinate or stubborn, but she must obey her parents in all things, as she will later obey her husband,” and I had not been strictly adhering to Quindley’s strictures lately, so I resolved to do as she asked with no complaint. Poor relations must behave themselves.
Golden morning sunlight poured over Papa’s volumes, making the dust motes dance as I slipped over the forbidden threshold.
I looked around silently, looking for my favorite volumes like I was greeting old friends.
Hello, Newton. Hello, Homer. Hello, publication of the Royal Astronomical Society, containing comets and nebulae discovered by Caroline Herschel.
If only I had an astronomer brother I could keep house for.
Mamma, a streak of dust smudged across the frill of her cap, popped up from behind my father’s desk. “There you are. I’ve a task for you, Miss Mary.”
“Yes, ma’am? I can dust in here, if you wish.”
“Dust! I’ll thank you not to talk such nonsense.” She shook her head, puffing as she got to her feet. “No, your task is all these books. We must know what we have before they’re got rid of.”
I felt cold. “Got rid of?”
“Well, yes. Some will stay with the house, when we—” She swallowed, then continued. “In any case, we need to know which ones are to be Collins’s and which can be sold.”
Sold. Of course. Most of these books would come to Mr. Collins as part of the estate. I would never see them again. The rest would go, since we no longer had an income or a house to keep them in.
Well. At least I could say goodbye.
“I should be glad to make a catalogue for you, ma’am,” I said. “I know the provenance and ownership quite well.”
“Good, yes, I thought you might.” She patted something behind the desk. “You’d best start with these.”
I came around the desk to find a small wooden chest I did not recognize. Mamma lifted the lid. Within were a half-dozen books I had never seen before.
My fingers itched with the old book lust even as I felt a pang of irritation. There were books in our house that I did not know? Outrageous.
“These must be the valuable ones,” my mother said hopefully. “They were locked in a chest, hidden beneath his desk. See what you can find, please, dear.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said absently, already drawing forth the first volume.
All afternoon I sat in that puddle of sunlight, just as I had when I was a child, soaking luxuriantly in book after book after book.
My mother was not entirely correct—some of the books, I realized, my father had put away not because they were valuable but because they violated some kind of decency act.
My face flamed at the illustrations in a certain French volume with a long title.
So graphically did it illustrate the act of copulation—not to mention a number of acts so exotic I am not sure what to call them—that I quickly put it aside and covered it with a pillow.
Curiosity soon made me take it up again, and then I thought of my own father looking at these pictures and stuffed it under three pillows. And I thought Fanny Hill was bad.
We shall have to see what to do with those, Harry. Indecent they may be, but I suspect they are not without value. I wonder what Tim Lucas would give me for them.
Some of the books, however, were just what my mother surmised—rare volumes, first editions, everything my father thought the greatest and dearest of his collection.
There was a large folio edition of Smith’s geology monograph, with colored plates so lovely they took my breath away, and an astronomical map that said it was made by the Herschels themselves—how did he get a hold of such a thing?
Then, at the bottom, I found one more book.
It did not appear as fine as some of the others. It was just two little green volumes, volumes 1 and 2. I picked one up.
“Smith’s Flora Britannica ,” I whispered. “Linnean Society. Volume one.” I flipped open the pages. Oh!
I would not have credited, Harry, that such a shabby-looking little volume, with smudges of dirt and tea stains on the cover, could be so beautiful inside.
The book is an encyclopedia of the plants of Britain, a dense and thorough reference almost entirely in Latin.
It would be a marvelous gift on the strength of that alone.
The margins, though—in the margins, there are flowers.
Someone with great patience, a steady hand, and an assortment of colored inks had annotated Smith’s dry volume with illustrations.
The hairs on my arms stood up as I carefully paged through.
There were cross sections of leaves and stems, berries and seeds, in some places diagrammed carefully and in others painted almost as though the artist had forgotten that he was making a reference book and simply painted flowers for their sheer beauty.
Here on page 23 was Veronica floribus folitariis , English name: germander chickweed, the spiky leaves climbing from the right margin between the words.
Page 244, Viola , the common pansy, the purple and yellow petals so vivid I could almost reach into the page and pluck them.
More than a third of the pages had been so annotated. No wonder, I thought, that my father had locked it away carefully, for it must be the only one of its kind in existence.
I had meant only to take a cursory glance, but the beauty of the thing so beguiled me that I could not stop reading it.
I flipped through page after page, back and forth at random, forsaking my normal systematic approach for a more self-indulgent randomness, mouthing Latin names unfamiliar to me, finding with a shock of happy recognition familiar friends like lily of the valley and dandelion, as well as more exotic blooms.
When I reached page 238— Campanula trachelium , the nettle-leaved bellflower—a slip of paper fell out into my lap. I unfolded it. Instantly, my hands began to shake. Not with anger, however. I knew this handwriting.
The note was in Latin, befitting a scientific tome. Here it is translated into the common tongue.
Dear niece,
Well, dear child, the time has come. The apothecary shakes his head over me. Every day, I lose a little more strength. The fight will soon be over.
One of my only regrets in leaving this life is leaving you.
I never expected that one of my dearest friends would be an eight-year-old girl, but so it is.
You and I, my dear, are two of a kind, and the moments I have spent with you have been some of the happiest of my life. I only wish I could see you grow up.
As I write this, sitting in the window of the rectory, I can see you in the back garden.
Your mother sent you to me for the afternoon, because she could not bear your incessant questions.
She hoped I might be able to answer them, but of course in many things you have already outstripped me.
I do not know why the sky is blue, or how many planets there are yet to be discovered, or what is on the dark side of the moon, or what happens when we die.
When you realized I was answerless, you huffed and took yourself outside, where you presently lie in the grass, observing an anthill, frowning with a concentration that would put any gray-haired member of the Linnean Society to shame.
To make up for this shocking lack of knowledge, I mean to leave you a legacy.
I haven’t any money to speak of, but this little book will be yours.
I have filled it with my own poor attempts at illustrations.
I hope they are of use to you in future, if you continue your research.
If not, I hope they will at least hold happy memories.
I shall place this note between pages 238 and 239, atop the entry for Campanula trachelium, the nettle-leaved bellflower.
Some of these illustrations are copied from plates, but this one I drew from life, on one of my tramps through the countryside.
Is it not pretty? The leaves are edged with stinging nettles, but the flowers tucked among them, if one cares to look, are such a gorgeous dusky purple-blue. It reminds me of you.
Dear little cousin, I am so sorry to leave you all alone.
The world is not always kind to people like you and me.
I wish I could continue to be your teacher.
Pray do not be too lonely. Pray do not try too hard to be other than you are.
Pray continue to learn and continue to ask why, no matter whom you irritate thereby.
Pray look for other nettle-leaved bellflower people, and cling to them when you meet them, never minding the thorns.
Goodbye.
Your loving cousin,
HENRY BENNET.
PS. I hope your father is not too offended by the legacy I left for him.
He always complains of my “tiresome churchy nonsense” whenever I try to engage him on a point of theology.
Therefore I have left him the most tiresome book of sermons in my collection.
Even I have never managed to read all the way through Reverend Quindley’s Admonishments for Godly Young Ladies. Just my final little joke.
A strange sound broke the air. It was a sob. My own.
Swiftly I pushed back from the table. If my tears smudged one of your beautiful illustrations, I would never forgive myself. Just in time, too, for the tears were already spilling down over my cheeks.
I tried to breathe deeply, but another sob broke my breath, and then another.
When one has not cried in more than seven years, one finds it a bit hard to stop.
At least, I did. It had been so long I could scarcely recognize the sensations, and part of me observed the shattered breathing, the hot liquid trails, the seizing feeling in the middle of my chest, to be catalogued later.
For now, though, I could only give in to it.
I cried for everything in the last few years.
For Pike, and everything with him. For my mother.
Even, with surprising vehemence, because my aunt had not invited my twelve-year-old self to London, and why that was something I had held on to all this time, I’ve no idea.
Why did my father not give me my legacy?
I suppose he simply never found the note, or, if he did, never bothered to translate it.
His Latin, as I have mentioned, is execrable.
I am attempting not to hate him for it. Two legacies, one a book for young ladies, one a scholarly volume for learned men—his mistake was natural enough.
But now I knew. Harry, you never intended me to take Quindley’s as my guide.
You never intended me to read it at all.
At the thought a sob tore from me so violent that I almost bent double.
Suddenly I saw what Quindley’s really was: a stuffy, hateful tome written by someone who knew as much about young ladies as I know about kangaroos.
I had always known, I realized. For years, I had fought that knowledge, for your sake.
How could I ever think that necessary? How could I ever fail to remember you as you were—someone who liked me?
Oh, Harry, thank you. The thought of all those wasted years, making that hateful book my bible, trying to be what I thought you wanted for me—I am crying again as I think of them.
But the mistake is now corrected, and I really believe it happened at the right time.
I shall never read the horrid thing again.
Mamma heard my noise and came in, alarmed. “Mary! What on earth is the matter! Are you ill?”
I was sobbing so hard I could barely speak, like a child. It was mortifying. “I-I-I didn’t g-go to London!”
“When?”
“When I wa-was twelve!”
“Oh,” she said, still looking mystified.
“And I-I-I hate Quindley’s !”
She patted me nervously. “Believe me, so do we all.”
“And Papa is gone—and Longbourn is lost—and I-I-I don’t mind.” And I cried so hard I could no longer speak at all.
She put her arms around me. “There, there, love. It will be all right. I knew all those books would fracture your wits one day. Come.”
So unused to seeing me in tears was she that she bade me lie down as though I had a fever. Now I am writing this in my bed, like a lady of leisure.
I do not know what is to become of me now. But I will go to my fate with good grace.
Nettles can grow anywhere, can’t they?
And, dear Harry, there is another Campanula trachelium I must take your advice about. I do not know if she will listen. I do not know if I deserve to be listened to.
Wish me luck, anyhow, whether I deserve it or not.