Page 9 of The Language of Flowers

“I know a man at the Inns of Court,” she says. “He owes the society a favor he has never had occasion to repay. I’ll write to him tonight.”

And she does — not tomorrow, not after supper is properly finished, but immediately, calling for paper while the last course is still on the table, writing with the same focused, economical hand she uses to label her jars, finishing an entire page of dense, precise argument before the footman has cleared the plates. I watch her do this and think, with a clarity that startles me slightly:she makes things happen.

I have known a great many men who believed themselves to make things happen. My husband among them — a man who could fill a room with the appearance of consequence, who understood exactly how to be seen arranging a solution, and who very rarely, in seven years, actually arranged one. He would have made a considerable performance of writing this letter — the summoning of the good pen, the announcement that he was not to be disturbed, the later, careful mention over cards of the trouble he had gone to on someone’s behalf. Beatrice does not perform the arranging. She simply arranges, in the time it takes most people to decide whether the matter is worth their trouble, and moves on to the next thing before anyone has finished admiring the first. I do not think it has once occurred to her that the letter might be admired at all. It is simply a thing that needed doing, and so she has done it.

I go back upstairs after supper and do not, for once, sit uselessly with my own worry. I take out a fresh sheet of paper instead and begin an illustration of the heartsease growing wild along the south window ledge — small, unassuming flowers, purple and yellow and white all at once, that I have walked past every day without truly seeing until three weeks of lessons taught me to look properly at things I had always simply glanced at before. No one has asked me to draw this. I am doing itbecause I want to, which is, I am beginning to understand, a category of action I have had very little practice with.

I work for an hour, perhaps longer, correcting the same small fault three times before I understand what my eye keeps catching on — the way the yellow at the center bleeds too abruptly into the purple, when in the actual flower the color shifts by degrees, one shade earning the next. I fix it. It is a small thing, the sort of correction no one but myself will likely ever notice, and I find I do not mind that in the slightest. It was never for anyone else to notice.

When I finally look up, the candle has burned low and the house has gone entirely quiet around me, and I realize, with something between surprise and quiet satisfaction, that in all that time I have not thought once about London, or Pemberton, or the letter from my solicitor, or anything at all beyond the particular yellow at the center of a small flower I am only now, at four-and-twenty, learning to truly see.

Chapter 9

Sage

BEATRICE

Two months into her stay, I open the still room to her on a Tuesday, and I tell myself this is simply a matter of necessity.

The crisis tincture is running low — three drops under the tongue, the kind of preparation that must always be in ready supply, because the women who need it rarely have the luxury of waiting a week while I brew a fresh batch — and the work is more than I can comfortably manage alone this week, with the spring cuttings also demanding attention and a letter from Vivienne promising a visit within the fortnight that will require the house to be in a state I have not yet achieved. I need another pair of hands. Eliza has been asking, in the careful way she asks for things, whether there is anything useful she might do besides sit in the greenhouse in the evenings. This is, I tell myself, simply an efficient solution to two separate problems.

I do not examine this reasoning any further than that. I have found, over the past several weeks, that certain reasoning is better left unexamined.

The still room is smaller than the greenhouse, and warmer, and considerably more private — I have shown it, in ten years, to perhaps a dozen people outside my own household, and every one of those visits was strictly professional, a matter of the society’s business rather than anything resembling company. Eliza stands in the doorway for a moment when I bring her in,taking in the shelves of dried herbs, the mortar and pestle worn smooth with use, the small locked cabinet in the corner that she has clearly noticed before, from the corridor, and never asked about.

“This is where the real work happens,” I tell her, which is truer than I mean it to sound.

The room smells different from the greenhouse — sharper, drier, the green growing scent of living things replaced by something closer to a chemist’s shop, resin and crushed root and the particular bitterness of valerian that never quite leaves a person’s hands once they have worked with it for long enough. I have grown used to it. I forget, until I watch Eliza’s face when she first breathes it in, that it is not a smell most people find pleasant.

“You don’t mind it,” I say, watching her.

“I don’t mind anything that means something,” she says, which is not quite an answer to what I asked, and which I find myself thinking about for longer than the remark seems to warrant.

She is, as I expected her to be, a quick study. I walk her through the crisis tincture first — valerian, skullcap, a careful proportion of passionflower, reduced slowly over a low flame until it reaches the particular clouded amber that tells me it is ready. I explain what each component does and why the proportions matter, and she listens with the same total attention she has given everything since she arrived, asking questions only when a question will actually move her understanding forward, never simply to fill a silence.

“And this one,” I say, moving to a second preparation already begun, “is the fever tincture. It mimics the symptoms closely enough that a doctor examining the patient will find exactly what he expects to find — the heat, the particular pallor, a pulse that runs faster than it ought to. It buys a woman time.A doctor’s certificate saying she cannot travel, cannot receive visitors, cannot be closely examined by anyone sent to establish that she is fit to sign away her own inheritance. It has moved more women out of dangerous households than any other single preparation I make.”

“And the calming compound,” Eliza says. “The one you mentioned, that night in the library.”

“Steadies the hands,” I say. “Enough that a woman can sign a document under enormous pressure without her signature betraying how afraid she is. I have watched a solicitor’s clerk study a signature for evidence of duress. A steady hand tells him nothing is wrong, whatever is actually happening in the room.”

“Who is it for?” Eliza asks. “This batch.”

I do not usually answer that question. I answer it now. “A Mrs. Radley, in Hampshire. Her husband’s brother has spent four months persuading a physician that she is not competent to manage the annuity her father left her, and he has very nearly succeeded. She sits down with a solicitor on the twenty-second. She has asked for enough that her hands will not shake in front of him and nothing further — she was quite specific about the nothing further.”

“Will she know it came from you?”

“She will be told a preparation arrived. That is the whole of the arrangement.” I set the bottle down. “It is the part of the work I have never found a way to explain to anyone who has not needed it.”

Eliza is quiet for a moment. “She asked for the smallest possible thing,” she says.

“They almost always do.”

I show her the dosing, the small graduated glass I use to measure it precisely enough that the effect is reliable without being so strong as to cloud a woman’s judgment when she most needs it clear. Too little, and the hands still shake. Too much,and the mind goes soft along with them, and a soft mind can be talked into signing something it should not. The measure has to be exact. I have spent years arriving at it, adjusting by the smallest fractions, testing on myself more than once in the early days before I trusted it enough to send it out into the world in someone else’s hands.

“You tested it on yourself,” Eliza says. It is not quite a question.

“Someone had to,” I say. “I was not going to ask it of anyone whose hands I had not already trusted my own life to.”