She had meant to tell him that morning. She had risen at six, planning to catch him at breakfast, but he had been gone from the house, and by the time he returned the guests were arriving. Now she looked up at his profile, so stern and so carefully blank, and thought: Soon. After the Duke has seen it. After the guests have gone. I will take him there myself.
"Shall we?" said the Earl, and offered her his arm toward the glasshouse.
There was a general movement of the company. They went down the gravel path in a bright, chattering stream, past the beds of roses and the lavender borders that Cecilia herself had weeded in April, and gathered in a murmuring semicircle before the open doors. The glasshouse gleamed in the sun like a jewel. The Duke, who had returned to the front, held up his hand for silence.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, in his gravelly voice, "I have been collecting flowers for fifty years, and I have seen the finest in England, in France, in the Indies. I tell you plainly that I have never seen a thing like what is in that house. Lord Wyncombe, I congratulate you. And I congratulate your gardener, who is the best in the kingdom, and whom I intend to steal if I can."
There was laughter and applause. Samuel, standing by the door with his hat in his hands, went crimson to the ears.
And Lucian Hartley, who had listened to every word with a face of stone, said in a clear, cold, carrying voice, "Hale. Bring it out."
The laughter faltered.
"My lord?"
"The orchid. Bring it out where we may all see it."
Samuel hesitated. "It is very delicate, my lord. It has not been moved in six years. The change of air—"
"Bring it out."
A small, uneasy silence had settled over the lawn. The Duke frowned. Somebody coughed. Cecilia, at her husband's side, turned and looked up at him with the first stirring of real fear.
"Lucian," she murmured, "what are you doing?"
He did not look at her.
Samuel went into the glasshouse. When he came out, he was carrying the clay pot in both hands with the care of a man carrying a newborn child, and the white flower bobbed gently on its stem in the sunlight, as luminous as a small moon. A sigh went through the crowd. Even the string quartet had stopped playing.
"There it is," said the Earl, softly, from where he stood. "My mother's orchid. My mother's glasshouse. Quite a treasure, is it not, Hale? Quite a thing to have kept all these years?"
"Yes, my lord."
"And do you love it?"