Page 11 of The Language of Flowers

“Read me the other two again,” Beatrice says. “Slowly.”

I do, tracing each phrase with my finger as I go, and she listens with her eyes closed, which I have never seen herdo before — as though the words land differently when she cannot also be watching the page, as though closing her eyes lets her hear the shape of the thing rather than merely read it. When I finish, she opens her eyes and looks at me rather than at the letter, and there is something in her expression I have not cataloged before, somewhere between admiration and something warmer than admiration.

“You have read this letter as many times as I have,” she says. “More, I think. And I never once heard what you just heard.”

“You were reading it as a solicitor would read it. Looking for what could be proven, what could be used.” I fold my hands over the page. “I have spent seven years reading what people don’t quite manage to hide. It is a different kind of reading. I did not choose to become good at it.”

Something crosses her face, quick and gone before I can name it — something that might be regret, on my behalf, for the years that taught me this particular skill. She does not say anything about it, which I am grateful for. Some kindnesses are better left unspoken.

Beatrice sets down the letter and looks at me with an expression I have not seen on her before — not surprise exactly, but something adjacent to it, the particular look of someone recalculating a problem she believed she had already solved correctly. “Ashworth Grange keeps a still room,” she says. “Smaller than mine, but real. The clerk who spent two months there three years ago would have had occasion to be near it, if the housekeeper allowed him anywhere close to the domestic side of the house. A clerk conducting a quiet inventory of a family’s affairs might easily have found reason to speak with the housekeeper about supplies, accounts, the running of the place.”

“And valerian is common enough in any well-run household’s still room that no one would have thought twice about him hearing the name.”

“No.” Beatrice’s eyes have gone distant in the way they do when she is assembling something in her mind faster than she can say it aloud. “I know the housekeeper at Ashworth. I could write to her directly, ask whether she recalls a clerk from three years ago showing any particular interest in her stores.” She looks back at me. “His name was Fenwick. I am nearly certain of it now — I had it filed away as unimportant, a detail from a household matter I had no reason to think mattered to me. Josiah Fenwick. If I am right, we finally have something to give Vivienne besides a shape in the dark.”

I feel the particular satisfaction of a lock turning after a great deal of patient working at it, and beneath that satisfaction, something else — the awareness that I have just handed her the missing piece of a problem she has been carrying for weeks, and that doing so has mattered to me far beyond the simple pleasure of being useful.

She looks at me for a long moment, the letter forgotten between us. “I would not have found that,” she says. “The phrasing. I have read this letter a dozen times and never once noticed the pattern.”

“You were looking for what was wrong with it,” I say. “I was looking for what was consistent.”

Without quite deciding to, I reach across the table and set my hand over hers, where it still rests against the letter. She does not pull away. We are very close, closer than the width of the worktable should reasonably allow, and for a moment neither of us moves, and neither of us speaks, and the only sound in the room is the low settling of the fire beneath the last cooling bottle.

“I know where to start,” Beatrice says finally, and her voice is not entirely steady.

“I know,” I say. Neither of us is talking about the letter.

She is the one who looks away first, back down at the page, though I notice she does not move her hand. I let mine staywhere it is a moment longer than strict necessity requires, and then I draw it back, carefully, because some things are worth doing carefully even when every other part of me would rather not be careful at all.

We finish going over the letter’s remaining passages in something closer to silence than conversation, and when I finally go up to bed, long after the house has gone dark, I lie awake turning over not the clerk, not Ashworth Grange, not even the small triumph of having found the thread no one else had found.

I think about her hand, still beneath mine for the length of one long breath, and the particular unsteadiness in her voice when she said she knew where to start. I think, too, about the fact that I found the thread at all — that seven years of learning to read what people do not say directly, a skill I earned at considerable cost and never once thought to be grateful for, turned out to be the very thing that mattered tonight. No one has ever needed that particular skill of mine before. No one has ever thanked me for it, even silently, the way Beatrice’s stillness thanked me tonight.

I fall asleep still turning it over, and for the first time since I arrived at Wyndermere, I do not think once about what I am owed, or what I have lost, or what I am waiting to become. I think only about the warmth of her hand, and the sound of my own name in her mouth, and how very little, tonight, I want any of this to be simple.

Chapter 11

Clover

BEATRICE

Vivienne arrives on a Thursday, precisely when she said she would, in a plain traveling carriage that gives away nothing about the woman inside it, which is, I have come to understand, entirely the point.

I have known Vivienne Cavendish for the better part of ten years, and I have never once seen her disordered by travel — no crease in her gown that was not already there when she left London, no strand of silver hair out of place, no evidence whatsoever that she has spent six hours on roads that turned half the county’s carriages into mud-spattered wrecks this time of year. She descends, takes in the house with a single unhurried sweep of her eyes, and says, by way of greeting, “You’ve had good news. I can see it on the house before I’ve even gotten out of my traveling cloak.”

“We have a name,” I say. “Fenwick. Josiah Fenwick, a clerk who spent two months at Ashworth Grange three years ago.”

“Good,” Vivienne says, in precisely the tone Eliza used on her first night here, over an entirely different number, and I find the echo unsettling enough that I do not immediately follow her inside.

Eliza greets her in the entrance hall with a composure I recognize, by now, as the particular armor she wears for anyone she has not yet decided to trust completely — polite, correct,giving away nothing beyond what good manners require. Vivienne studies her for exactly as long as she studied the house, which is to say briefly and completely, and says only, “Lady Moreton. You look considerably less harried than you did in my sitting room three months ago.”

“I have had a great deal of help,” Eliza says, which is true, and which I notice her not looking at me while she says.

Vivienne’s eyes move to me anyway, and away again, and I understand, with the particular sinking clarity of a woman who has just watched a much cleverer person draw an entirely correct conclusion from a single sentence, that this visit is not going to be only about Fenwick.

We spend the better part of that first afternoon in my library, the letter and its various decoded fragments spread across the desk between us, while Vivienne listens to everything Eliza and I have assembled with the particular quality of attention that has made her, for thirty years, the most quietly formidable woman in three counties. She asks precise questions. She does not ask them kindly, exactly, but she does not need to; kindness has never been the currency Vivienne trades in, and I have long since stopped expecting it from her.

“The name changes things,” she says, when we have gone through it twice. “A shape in the dark is difficult to fight. A name is not. I know a clerk at the magistrates’ office in Maidstone who can be persuaded, discreetly, to produce correspondence that appears to place Fenwick in Surrey during the relevant period — travel documents, an innkeeper’s ledger, the sort of tedious paper trail that convinces a man like Pemberton because it is exactly the kind of evidence he expects to find. If Fenwick himself becomes a liability to Pemberton’s case rather than an asset, Pemberton will distance himself from him quickly. Solicitors of his sort do not stay loyal to a source once the source becomes an embarrassment.”