Page 3 of The Language of Flowers

She tells me, then, where I am going: an estate in Kent, remote, well defended, kept by a woman Vivienne trusts absolutely with the most difficult matters the society faces. I ask, because I find I want to know and because asking feels, oddly, like the first genuinely selfish thing I have done in years, why that house and not some other, closer, less inconvenient refuge.

“Because the letter names it,” Vivienne says. “Pemberton knows Wyndermere’s address, Lady Moreton. He does not yet know how much, or how little, that fact will cost him. You are the only person who can tell Beatrice what he knows, becauseyou are the one holding the evidence of it. I am not sending you to Kent to hide you. I am sending you because you are, at this moment, the only person alive who can tell her what she is facing.”

I think, on the road that afternoon — my trunk strapped behind, the letter once more in my reticule, the spires of London giving way by slow degrees to hedgerows and the flat gold light of a county I have never visited — that I ought to be afraid. There are men watching a house I have just left. There is a solicitor building a case that could, apparently, end a decade of some other woman’s careful work. There is a stranger in Kent I am being sent to, sight unseen, carrying evidence I do not fully understand toward a danger I understand even less.

But what I feel, watching the hedgerows go by, is not entirely fear. It is something closer to the sensation of a held breath, finally, cautiously, beginning to let itself out — the strange, unfamiliar lightness of being on a road I did not choose for reasons that, for the first time in seven years, have nothing to do with what anyone requires of me, and everything to do with what I am apparently capable of, if someone simply hands me the chance to find out.

I do not know yet whether I am escaping something or beginning something. I find, somewhere past Sevenoaks, that I have stopped trying to decide, and am simply watching the country go by instead.

Chapter 3

Wisteria

BEATRICE

The Digitalis purpurea has outgrown its pot again, which is exactly what I have been waiting three years for it to do.

I have my hands in the soil, easing the root ball free without tearing it, when I hear the gravel outside the greenhouse door shift under a footstep that is not the gardener’s and not the housekeeper’s either — lighter, quicker, unfamiliar with the path. I do not look up right away. The plant is at the point in its repotting where a moment’s inattention can undo a season’s patience, and I have learned, over ten years, that very little in life cannot wait the ninety seconds it takes to finish a task properly.

Vivienne’s rider was meant to arrive first. A note, delivered by hand, giving me a day, perhaps two, to prepare a room and arrange my face into whatever expression the situation required. That is how it is meant to go.

“My lady.” Mrs. Prentice is in the doorway, and her voice has the particular flatness she uses when she is choosing her words with more care than usual. “There is a Lady Moreton in the entrance hall. With a trunk.”

I set the specimen down, carefully, because even now I will not rush a plant, and look at her properly. “A trunk.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“And no rider came ahead of her.”

“No, my lady.”

I wipe my hands on my apron, which does very little beyond redistributing the soil more evenly across the fabric, and I do not stop to consider my appearance any further than that, because there is a woman in my entrance hall who was not meant to arrive for another day at least, and whatever she has brought with her, it will not improve by my keeping her waiting while I change my dress.

She is standing beneath the Rosa centifolia print when I come in — the framed illustration my grandmother-in-law commissioned decades ago and that I have never had the heart to move, though it is not, in truth, a very good rendering. Lady Moreton is not looking at it the way most guests look at it, which is to say briefly, politely, and then away. She is looking at it the way one looks at something one is trying to understand. Her head is tilted very slightly. Her gloved hand has come up as though to trace the line of a petal and then stopped short of the glass, as though she has only just remembered that touching another woman’s belongings is not generally done.

I take her in before she takes me in — the advantage, I suppose, of being the one who enters a room rather than the one already standing in it. She is younger than I expected, though I am not certain what I expected, having been given nothing but a date and a name. Her traveling dress is very fine and entirely wrong for the roads of Kent in early spring, the hem already dark with mud at the edge, and she wears black, properly, correctly, the black of a widow only four days made. She is, I note with something that is not quite irritation and not quite anything else I have a name for, extremely beautiful in the unbothered way of a woman who has never had cause to think about it.

She turns before I have decided what to say, and there is nothing in her face of the alarm or apology I would expect from a guest arrived a full day early and unannounced. “I am sorry tocome without proper notice,” she says. “I understand a rider was meant to precede me. I believe I outran him.”

“You did,” I say. “I am Lady Wyndermere.”

“Eliza Moreton.” A small inclination of her head — not quite a curtsy, not quite its absence either. Her eyes go, briefly, to my hands, to the soil still visible under my nails despite the apron, and I watch her decide not to remark on it, which I find, oddly, more interesting than if she had.

I have been cultivating this particular Digitalis for three years, watching it survive two winters it had no business surviving, and I have learned more from its stubbornness than from most people I have known. It flowers late, and reluctantly, and only for those patient enough to wait it out. I think, briefly and uncharitably, that I have no idea yet which kind of guest is standing in my entrance hall — the kind that flowers, or the kind that simply takes root where it is not wanted and cannot be removed without damaging everything around it.

I do not take her to the drawing room. I am aware, as I make the decision, that it is not what is done — that a countess receiving a guest, even an early and unexpected one, ought to offer tea in a room arranged for the purpose, ought to ring for the housekeeper and allow twenty minutes of careful nothing before any real conversation begins. I have never had much patience for what is done when what is needed is available instead, and what I need, standing in my own entrance hall with a stranger who has arrived carrying whatever crisis brought Vivienne’s urgency, is somewhere I can think. I lead her back through the house instead, past the library, to the greenhouse, where the Digitalis is still waiting, root-bound and patient, for me to finish what I started.

She follows without a word of protest, which I note and set aside to consider later. Most guests, led away from the drawing room and toward a workroom still smelling of turned earth,would say something — a polite question about the destination, a small laugh to cover the strangeness of it. She says nothing at all. She simply follows, taking in the house as we pass through it: the portraits she does not linger over, the worn patch in the library carpet she does notice, the door to the still room, closed, that she looks at for exactly one second longer than the others. I add this to what I am gathering about her, the way I add a new specimen to a catalog before I know yet what use it will be.

The moment we come through the greenhouse door, she stops. “It smells extraordinary in here.”

I have owned this greenhouse for ten years. I have shown it to duchesses and vicars’ wives and, on one memorable occasion, a bishop who spent the entire visit looking faintly alarmed by the humidity. Not one of them has ever said that. Most people find it overwhelming — the wet green weight of it, the mingled sharpness of a hundred different plants none of them can name. I find I do not have a ready response, and so I say nothing, and go back to the potting bench, and finish settling the Digitalis into its new pot while she stands a few feet away, looking at everything with the same unhurried attention she gave the rose print.

She does not sit, though there is a stool near the specimen tables she is welcome to. She stands instead, hands folded, in the particular posture of a woman who has learned to make herself small in other people’s rooms without ever quite disappearing from them. It is not shyness. I recognize it, distantly, as something closer to strategy, and I file that away too.

“You have the letter,” I say, when the plant is settled and I can no longer justify delaying the conversation with soil.

She produces it from her reticule without hesitation — no fumbling, no performance of reluctance, simply the letter, held out. I take it with hands that are, I realize a beat too late, still faintly marked with earth, and I read it there, standing at myown workbench, twice through, because the first reading tells me it is serious and the second tells me precisely how serious.