Page 12 of The Language of Flowers

“You can arrange that.”

“I can arrange most things, given a fortnight and a competent forger.” She says this without any particular satisfaction, the way another woman might mention having arranged flowers for a dinner party. “I’ll need everything the two of you have compiled. Every date, every phrase, every inconsistency.”

I give her all of it. She reads with the same total absorption Eliza brings to everything, though where Eliza’s attention has a warmth to it, something that makes you want to have earned it, Vivienne’s is simply thorough, a mind moving through material the way water moves through a millrace — efficiently, without sentiment, toward a specific and necessary end.

Eliza joins us partway through the second hour, having been sent for at Vivienne’s request rather than mine, and answers Vivienne’s questions about the letter’s construction with the same precision she brought to identifying the pattern in the first place — the repeated phrase, the single correctly rendered botanical name buried among a dozen incorrect ones, the logic that led from a clerk’s careless habit to an actual name. Vivienne listens without interrupting, and when Eliza finishes, she says only, “That is very good work,” in a tone I have heard her use perhaps three times in ten years for anyone who was not already a full member of the society. Eliza does not know what to do with the compliment, and covers the not-knowing by looking down at the letter again, and I find myself wanting, absurdly, to tell her that the not-knowing is its own kind of answer to whatever question Vivienne is quietly asking underneath the compliment.

Vivienne takes her time in the greenhouse. She moves along the specimen tables with the same unhurried thoroughness she brought to the letter, pausing over the valerian, running a finger along a row of labeled cuttings, asking a question here and there about propagation that I answer readily enough, grateful for the ordinary shelter of talking about plants rather than anythingelse. She stops longest at the lavender bed near the south wall, where the summer’s first flush has just begun to come in, and stands there long enough that I begin to wonder whether she means to say something about it. She does not, not yet. She simply looks, the way she looks at everything, as though committing it to some private ledger she keeps and rarely shows anyone the contents of.

It is late in the second afternoon, after the immediate business has been settled and Vivienne has gone to see the greenhouse — she asks to see it specifically, which she has never done before in ten years of visits — that she turns to me, apropos of nothing I have said, and asks: “Is she society material?”

I have my answer ready, because I have known this question was coming since the moment Vivienne’s carriage turned up the drive. “She is perceptive,” I say. “Discreet. She found the pattern in the letter that neither of us had managed in weeks of looking. She has not put a foot wrong since she arrived.”

“That is not what I asked.”

I say nothing. Vivienne does not repeat herself; she has never needed to. She simply waits, in the particular patient way she waits for solicitors and magistrates and, apparently, for me, until the silence itself becomes the answer she was actually after.

Something moves across her face — brief, almost imperceptible, gone before I can properly name it, though if I had to guess, I would call it satisfaction, which is somehow worse than any question she might have asked aloud. She does not press further. She simply says, “I see,” in a tone that makes very clear she does, and turns back to the lavender bed as though the matter has been fully and finally settled, which I suppose, for her purposes, it has.

I find this deeply irritating. I find it more irritating still that I cannot, in good conscience, tell her she is wrong.

Vivienne stays two nights, which is, for her, an extraordinary indulgence — I do not think she has stayed anywhere two full nights in the ten years I have known her, always somewhere else to be, some other crisis requiring her particular brand of quiet, ruthless competence. She departs on the third morning with the same unhurried economy with which she arrived, the forged correspondence already commissioned, the plan set in motion, Fenwick’s name now a live thread in hands considerably more skilled than mine at pulling it.

“You’ve done good work here,” she says, at the carriage door, and for a moment I think she means the letter, the decoding, the name we have finally produced after weeks of patient effort.

“Beatrice,” she adds, before I can answer, “whatever this is that you have not yet worked out how to say aloud — say it before you have to explain it to me a second time. I am not a patient woman, and I have very little practice pretending otherwise.”

She is in the carriage and gone before I can decide what to say to that, which is, I suspect, precisely how she intended it.

I go back to the greenhouse that evening later than usual, once the house has settled and Eliza has retired to the blue room with the excuse of a headache that I do not entirely believe. The decoy letter went out weeks ago, and it has bought us the time it was meant to buy — Pemberton’s men, by the last report through the society’s channels, are still occupied with a Surrey property that has never held a single one of our secrets. Now, with Fenwick’s name and Vivienne’s forgers at work, that borrowed time is very likely to become something closer to permanent. The threat has not vanished. But for the first time since a trunk arrived unannounced in my entrance hall, I can imagine, without much effort, a version of the coming weeks in which it no longer occupies every corner of my attention.

I stand for a long while among the specimen tables, in the particular blue-gray light that settles over the greenhouse afterthe sun has gone but before I have troubled to light a lamp, and I try to identify the thing Vivienne so plainly saw and I have apparently been failing to name for weeks.

The greenhouse has been my most private place for ten years. Tonight it feels, as it has felt for some time now without my quite admitting it, larger than it used to be — not because anything in it has changed, but because I have stopped experiencing its size as a boundary. I built this room, brick and pane, as a place that needed nothing beyond what I put into it myself. I do not know, standing here now with Vivienne’s parting words still unresolved in my ears, what it means that the room no longer feels complete unless a particular set of footsteps is likely to cross its threshold before the night is through.

I think of Vivienne’s question in the lavender bed, and her parting words at the carriage door, and I think, too, of Portia, who has not visited in some months but who will, when she does, ask a version of the same question with considerably less patience than Vivienne extended me. I have spent ten years being the person other women bring their crises to, the one who listens and assesses and offers a plan without ever once needing to be asked twice what she actually wants for herself. It has not occurred to me, until this week, how rarely anyone has thought to ask me that question directly, and how little practice I have answering it even inside my own head.

I do not have a word for it. I suspect, uncomfortably, that I have had the word for some time, and have simply declined, out of long habit, to use it.

A light comes on in an upstairs window — the blue room, I know without needing to look twice, because I have learned the shape of that particular light against the dark the way I have learned a great many small facts about this house that I never troubled to learn before. I watch it for longer than I would care to admit to anyone, Vivienne least of all, and then I bank thelast of the greenhouse fires and go up myself, no longer entirely certain which of us, tonight, is waiting on the other.

Chapter 12

Myrtle

ELIZA

Vivienne Cavendish, in person, over the course of two days, is nothing like the woman I met in a London sitting room three months ago, frightened and half-composed and desperate for any instruction that would tell me what to do next. That woman I remember mostly through the fog of my own panic — a severe voice, a set of instructions, the particular relief of being told plainly what was expected of me. This woman studies me the way she studies everything, with an attention so complete it feels almost physical, and then, apparently satisfied by whatever she has concluded, more or less leaves me alone to prove her right.

I like her enormously. I had not expected to.

She asks me, on the first afternoon, to walk her through the letter’s construction, and I do, and when I finish she says, “That is very good work,” in a voice that carries no more warmth than her ordinary speaking voice and somehow lands harder for it. I do not know what to say back. I have spent seven years being told I performed adequately, correctly, appropriately — never once that the thing itself was good, on its own merits, regardless of who had produced it. I look down at the letter rather than answer, because I do not entirely trust my own face at that moment, and I am aware, without looking up, that Beatrice is watching me not-answer with an expression I cannot read and very much want to.

The plan comes together with an efficiency that would have seemed impossible to me three months ago — a magistrate’s clerk in Maidstone, forged correspondence, a false trail solid enough that Pemberton will have no reason to look past it. Vivienne discusses the details with Beatrice in the particular shorthand of two women who have solved a great many problems together over a great many years, and I sit at the edge of it, useful where I can be, quiet where I cannot, and understand, watching them, that I am seeing the actual machinery of the thing I have been living inside for three months. It is less mysterious than I imagined, and somehow more impressive for that. Nothing about it is magic. It is simply two women who refuse to accept that a problem cannot be solved, applying themselves to it until it yields.

Vivienne leaves on the third morning. Before she goes, she takes my hand — an oddly formal gesture, for a woman who has spent two days treating me with the brisk efficiency she extends to competent staff — and says, “You’ve done more for this society in three months than some members manage in three years. I hope you know that.”

I do not know that. I am not certain, standing in the entrance hall watching her carriage pull away, that I know very much of anything about myself with real confidence yet. But I know that I want to keep finding out, and that wanting it here, in this house, feels entirely different from wanting anything ever felt in the seven years before it.