Page 18 of The Language of Flowers

“I did not ask her to choose between you and the work, Lady Moreton, whatever the tone of the conversation may have suggested to anyone listening in the corridor. I asked her to be honest with herself about what she is carrying. Those are not the same question, though I understand why they might sound alike through a closed door.”

I do not ask how she knows I was in the corridor. I suspect Portia simply knows a great many things without being told them, the way Beatrice does, the way Vivienne does — the particular occupational habit of women who have spent decades reading what a room does not say aloud.

“Thank you,” I say, “for telling me that plainly.”

“I am two-and-fifty,” Portia says, cutting a final stem and adding it to my basket instead of her own. “I have very little patience left for telling anyone anything otherwise.”

Beatrice has been different for a fortnight now — since before Portia’s letter arrived, if I am honest with the accounting, though Portia’s visit has sharpened whatever this is into somethingI can no longer politely decline to notice. Not cold. Beatrice has never once been cold to me, not in three months, not even in our very first conversation in the greenhouse when she plainly wished I would simply disappear back to London. This is something else, something I recognize with an unpleasant, specific familiarity from seven years of marriage — a person becomingmanaged, deliberate, every gesture and word passed through some internal accounting before it is permitted to reach me. I know this particular quality of attention. I spent seven years living inside a house where every conversation with my husband had already been decided before he opened his mouth, where warmth, when it came at all, arrived pre-measured, like a dose calculated not to do harm.

I did not expect to recognize that same careful measuring in Beatrice. I do not know, yet, what it means that I do.

I go to the illustration table when I can no longer simply sit with the not-knowing, though I do not draw anything. I take out the forget-me-not instead — unfinished still, the small blue flowers only half rendered, the leaves barely begun — and I look at it for a long time without lifting my pencil, remembering the particular quality of the morning I began it, the lightness I felt watching Beatrice cross the garden and thinking, with a certainty I had not permitted myself in seven years,I want to stay.

I still want to stay. That has not changed, whatever conversation is happening downstairs, whatever word Portia used and Beatrice allowed. I simply no longer know, with the same clean certainty I felt four days ago, whether wanting it is going to be enough.

I have been composed at harder things than this. I was composed at seven-and-ten, standing in a church accepting vows I had not chosen. I was composed at four-and-twenty, watching my husband’s solicitor explain, with visiblediscomfort, precisely how contested my own inheritance was likely to remain. I know how to hold my face very still while something underneath it comes slowly, quietly apart.

I will be composed at this, too, whateverthisturns out to be. I set the illustration down, unfinished, and I do not cry, and I tell myself that not crying is its own kind of victory, though I lie awake a long while afterward listening for footsteps in the corridor that do not come.

Chapter 17

Lavender

BEATRICE

I have rehearsed this conversation for two days, in the careful, exhaustive way I rehearse everything that frightens me, and I still do not know, standing outside the blue room’s door with my hand raised to knock, whether I have found the right words or simply the words I can manage to say without my voice breaking in the middle of them.

I knock. Eliza’s voice, from within, tells me to come in, and I do, and she looks up from the illustration table with an expression that is already, I notice, bracing itself for something — she has grown too good at reading me these past weeks for me to arrive at her door unannounced and expect her not to understand, before I have said a single word, that this is not a social call.

“We cannot afford distraction.” I have decided, in my two days of rehearsal, that beginning plainly is kinder than circling the point the way I circle everything else. “Not now. Not with Pemberton’s second thread active, not with Portia’s questions still unanswered, not with the whole of the society’s safety resting, in some part, on my judgment remaining exactly what it has always been. The society’s work is too important.”

Eliza sets down her pen very carefully, the way a person sets down something she does not trust her hand to hold steady much longer. “I am aware of the stakes, Beatrice.”

“I know you are.” This is true, and saying it does not make the next part easier. “I am not explaining this well. What I mean is that we are both adults. We understand the difference between what is real and what is simply circumstance — two people thrown together by a letter and a threat, feeling things that are, under the particular pressure of the moment, entirely understandable, and entirely separate from what either of us can actually afford to build on while that pressure remains.”

I cannot look her in the eyes while I say this. I look instead at the illustration table, at the corner of a drawing I recognize as the forget-me-not, still unfinished, and I fix my eyes on the small blue flowers rather than on whatever my own words are doing to the woman sitting in front of them, because I have already decided, in my two days of rehearsal, that I am not going to be able to manage this at all if I have to watch it land.

“Circumstance,” Eliza repeats. Her voice is very even. It is the particular evenness I have come to recognize, over three months, as the sound a person makes when they have decided, deliberately, not to let a room see what is actually happening underneath the words.

“Circumstance,” I say again, because I have run out of other words and do not trust myself to reach for new ones. “I think it would be wise for us to set it aside. Until this is resolved. Until I can trust my own judgment again without wondering whether I am protecting the society or simply protecting what I want to be true.”

The room is very quiet. I am aware of the particular quality of that quiet the way I am aware of everything in this house now, too finely, too completely, and I find myself wishing, absurdly, that I had never learned to notice a silence this closely.

“All right,” Eliza says.

That is all. Two words, offered without argument, without a single question, and I feel them land somewhere considerablylower than I expected two such small words to reach. I had rehearsed, in my two days of preparation, a dozen different versions of what she might say in response — anger, I had prepared for; grief, I had prepared for, though badly; a request for explanation I was not certain I could survive giving. I had not prepared for this — for her simply agreeing, cleanly, without a single crack showing in the agreement, because I understand, watching her pick her pen back up and return her attention to the page, that she has had a great deal of practice accepting exactly this kind of sentence from exactly this kind of room, and that she is very, very good at it.

I understand, too, distantly, that this is precisely the composure I have spent three months coming to love in her, and that I have just asked her to turn it against me, and that she has done so instantly, without hesitation, because it is the only tool she has ever been permitted to keep.

I make myself look at her once, before I lose whatever courage brought me to this door at all. Her face has not changed in any way a stranger would notice — the same careful stillness, the same composed set of her mouth — but I have spent three months learning the particular grammar of her face the way I once learned the grammar of a difficult plant, and I see it: the smallest tightening at the corner of her eyes, gone almost before I register it, the exact place where seven years of practice have taught her to absorb a blow without letting it show anywhere the room might notice. I have seen that tightening described to me once, secondhand, by a woman who escaped a house very like the one Eliza escaped. I did not expect to be the one who put it there.

“Thank you for understanding,” I say, which is not what I mean, though I could not in this moment, name what I actually mean if my life depended on it.

She does not answer. She is drawing again — the forget-me-not, the small blue petals, her hand as steady as it has ever been, and I understand that she is not going to finish this conversation for me, that she has decided, in the space of those two words, precisely how much of herself she is willing to spend on it, and that the amount is considerably less than I deserve.

I let myself out. I close the door with the particular careful quiet of someone who does not trust the latch to behave itself if handled at ordinary speed, and I stand in the corridor for a long moment afterward, the wordcircumstancestill sitting in my mouth like something I swallowed too quickly and cannot quite settle.

I do not know how I said it. I mean that literally — I do not know, standing here now, precisely which words I actually used and which I only rehearsed and never spoke, the whole conversation already collapsing into something I cannot entirely reconstruct, the way a person cannot entirely reconstruct the moment just before an accident, only the plain unbearable fact of the aftermath.