"Will you take breakfast with me?" she asked, and hated how small her voice sounded.
"I have breakfasted. I have letters to answer." He inclined his head, stiffly. "Good morning, madam."
And he was gone, up the stairs, and she stood alone in the great cold hall with her book and her mud and the words she had not said.
She went to her sitting room and shut the door. She sat at the little writing desk and opened the book to the last page, where she had pasted, in neat rows, six months of notes. At the top, in her own handwriting, was a line she had written on the second day of January:
For L. — the orchid house, restored as it was. His birthday: the twenty-first of June.
It had begun by accident, and by grief. In the dead of winter, three months after she was married, she had found her husband alone in his mother's old sitting room late one night, with a brandy he was not drinking, staring at a faded watercolour of the glasshouse. She had stood in the doorway, uncertain. He had not seen her. And he had said, softly, to the picture, in a voice she had never heard from him: "It was the only place I was ever happy."
He had said nothing more. When he noticed her, he had straightened and put on his stone face, and she had gone away. But she had remembered.
It had taken her a month to learn that the glasshouse had fallen into disrepair after the Dowager's death, kept alive by one stubborn gardener but starved of funds by an estate steward who thought orchids a waste of coal. It had taken her another to work up the courage to walk down there and introduce herself. And it had taken Samuel Hale about a quarter of an hour to understand what she wanted.
"You mean to restore it for his lordship," he had said slowly. "As a gift."
"If it can be done. I have a little money of my own. My mother's pearls, which I do not need." She had flushed. "He will not like it if he knows beforehand. He does not like to be given things. I thought that if it were finished, if it were simply there…"
"Then he would not have to say anything," Samuel had said gently. "And neither would you."
She had looked at him with wide, wet eyes. "Yes. Exactly that."
He had been quiet for a moment. Then he had said, "There is one plant in that house, my lady, that his lordship's mother would have given anything to see in flower. If you can wait until the twenty-first of June, I think it may do it."
She had counted the days ever since.
The mud on her hem was from the lower garden, where she and Samuel had spent the last four mornings re-laying the paths in the old pattern from the Dowager's plan, and the notes in the book were the temperatures and tallies and cost of every new pane of glass that had gone in since February. In eleven days, the whole thing would be finished. In eleven days, she would take her husband by the hand and lead him down the path and open the door.
And he would see.
She laid her pen down. She looked at the stiff upright figure of her own reflection in the window glass and thought, unhappily: If only he would look at me even once as though I were not a stranger.
Chapter Five: The Note
Samuel's letter came on the Thursday, and that was the unlucky part.