Chapter One: The Glasshouse at Wyncombe
The glasshouse at Wyncombe Park had been built in the year of Trafalgar, and for fourteen years it had been the warmest place in all of Hampshire.
Samuel Hale knew this the way a sailor knows the sea. He knew it by the weight of the air when he pushed open the iron-framed door at half past five each morning, by the smell of wet bark and moss, and by the tick of the cooling pipes as the boiler boy, half asleep, fed the furnace in the sunken yard behind. He knew which panes sweated first when the sun came over the beech wood, and which corner stayed damp however many times he opened the vents.
In the far corner, on a shelf of slatted teak that he had built himself, sat a clay pot no larger than a man's two fists. In the pot, tied with soft twine to a cork-bark raft, was a single plant with three grey-green leaves and a spike of buds so tightly furled they might have been carved from candle wax.
"Not yet," Samuel told it, as he did every morning. "But soon."
He misted the roots with a brass syringe. He checked the thermometer, which read seventy-four degrees, exactly as he wanted it. He wrote the figure in the ledger that hung from a nail beside the shelf, in a small, upright hand that his father had taught him, and then he stood for a moment with his arms folded, simply looking.
He was thirty-one years old, broad through the shoulder, with the forearms of a man who had spent his life lifting clay pots and the quiet eyes of a man who had spent it waiting for things to grow. His coat was brown fustian, patched at the elbow. His boots were good, because he took care of his boots, as he took care of everything.
The plant was the last of his father's.
Thomas Hale had been a plant collector, one of those half-mad, half-saintly men who went out into the forests of Brazil with a mule, a sack of moss, and a letter of credit from a society in London, and came back, if they came back at all, with a few crates of living treasure. Thomas had come back four times. The fifth time, he had come back in a ship's hold in a barrel of rum, which was how they sent the dead home in those days. Of the thirty orchids he had shipped on his last voyage, twenty-nine had died in the damp of the Atlantic crossing.
One had lived.
Samuel had been twenty-five. He had carried the crate to the only person in England who he thought might understand what was in it: the old Dowager Countess of Wyncombe, Lady Honoria Hartley, who had the finest hothouse south of the Thames and the stubbornest heart in the county. She had looked at the grey-green plant for a long, silent minute, and then she had said, "Young man, can you keep it alive?"
"I can try, my lady."
"That is not what I asked."
"Yes," Samuel had said. "I can."
She had bought the plant for a sum that paid off his father's debts and buried him properly, and she had hired Samuel the same afternoon as under-gardener, and by the end of the year as head. She had died three winters ago, in her bed, with the glasshouse key in her hand. She had left him a letter, which he kept in his Bible, and which said only: Keep it alive, Hale. I should like to see it bloom from wherever I am.
Six years he had kept it alive. Six years of nights spent sleeping on a cot beside the stove, of hand-warming the pipes in frost, of killing a thousand aphids one by one with a camel-hair brush. And now, in the second week of June in the year 1819, the buds were swelling.
"Soon," he said again, softly, and turned to the door, because he had heard the footsteps on the gravel.
They were light and quick, a woman's steps, and he knew them, as he knew the sound of the boiler and the click of the vents. He had heard them every morning for the past four months.