She lowered her hands and looked at him, and there was something wonderful in her face, a kind of bruised and trembling hope.
"Do you think so?"
"I think that tomorrow you will take him by the hand and show him what you have done. And I think he will not be able to say anything at all. And I think that will be quite enough."
She was still smiling when, at a quarter to three, with no more sound than a sigh, the sheath on the spike of the orchid split open and a single flower unfolded into the lantern light.
It was white. It was the white of moonlight on water, with a lip of palest silver and a throat that glowed faintly gold at the centre, and it hung from the stem like a small slow breath. The scent that came off it was not sweet but strange and cool, like rain on stone, like something remembered from a very long time ago.
Neither of them moved.
"Oh," Cecilia whispered.
Samuel Hale said nothing at all. He was looking at the flower, and tears were running down his face, unashamed, and he made no move to wipe them. Somewhere in the darkness of the wet leaves he heard his father's voice, and the voice of a dry old woman saying I should like to see it bloom, and he said softly, to nobody and to everybody, "There. There it is. It is done."
And neither of them saw, beyond the glass, a pale figure in a dark coat standing very still among the dripping laurels, who had come out into the night to look for proof, and found it.
Lucian Hartley saw his wife in the lantern light with her hair unbound and her face radiant. He saw the gardener weeping beside her. He saw them share something so private and so luminous that he knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never be part of it.
He did not cry out. He did not move. He simply stood in the wet dark as a man might stand who has been struck and has not yet fallen.
It was the only place I was ever happy, he thought, from a great way off. And now it is theirs.
Chapter Eight: The Garden Party
The twenty-first of June dawned bright and cloudless, and by noon the lawns of Wyncombe Park were a scene from a painting.
Forty guests in summer silks and bright waistcoats strolled across the grass. A string quartet played on the terrace. Footmen carried trays of iced lemonade and cold ham and strawberries. The Duke of Marlowe, a small, fierce, bewhiskered figure in a battered hat, had arrived at ten and had been shown directly to the glasshouse, where he had stood for twenty silent minutes in front of the orchid before turning to the head gardener, seizing both his hands, and saying roughly, "Young man, you are a wizard."
Samuel Hale, who had not slept in two days, had thanked him, and had gone out into the sunshine feeling that everything in the world was exactly as it should be.
At two o'clock the Earl of Wyncombe came down the terrace steps with his wife on his arm.
He looked magnificent. He always did. Tall, dark, immaculate in a coat of midnight blue, he bowed to the Duke, he smiled at the guests, he said all the proper things. And Cecilia, walking beside him in a gown of pale yellow muslin, her heart singing and her hands cold with nerves, had no idea at all that his arm under her fingers was as rigid as iron.