It rained on the morning of Lady Pemwick's conservatory tour the way London rain always did in late July. Not dramatically, not honestly, but with a quiet persistence that made you feel the sky had simply given up pretending otherwise. Eleanor came anyway. She came because Lady Pemwick had a Stanhopea orchid in the east wing of her conservatory that had not bloomed in 11 years and was, according to Mr. Fitch, showing signs of finally opening. She came because plants did not care about rain and neither did she and because staying home would have felt uncomfortably like hiding.
She did not come because she had thought twice about whether he might also be invited. She had not thought that. She was specific about this. The conservatory was warm and close. The glass walls silvered with rain on the outside. The inside thick with green and the particular sweetness of things growing in enclosed spaces. Six or seven guests moved between the rows of specimen tables. Eleanor found the Stanhopea immediately. South corner against the brick wall. Its buds pale and swollen and absolutely on the edge of something.
She stood before it for a long time. She was making a note about the bract formation when she heard the door. She did not turn around. She knew without turning the way you know a storm is coming before the first sound of it. Something in the air changes. The quality of the silence shifts. She knew it was him. He appeared at the edge of her vision. Stopped beside her. Looked at the orchid. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"The lateral sepals are asymmetric," he said finally. "They're supposed to be," she said. "It's characteristic of the genus." "I know," he said. "I wasn't criticizing. I was noticing." Eleanor looked at him sideways. He was watching the orchid with genuine attention, not the polite performance of interest that most people offered plants before moving on to things they found more important. He was actually looking. It did something to her argument.
"You know Stanhopea," she said. Not a question exactly. "My wife kept an orchid house," he said. Simple. Offered without performance. Eleanor was quiet. Outside the rain pressed its palms against the glass. Inside the air was warm and still and suddenly more delicate than it had been a moment ago. She had heard about the wife. Everyone had. Lady Vane, dead four years. A fever that took her in autumn. No children. The Duke had closed the London house for a year afterward and returned to society only because the rumor went the alternative was worse.
She had thought when she heard it, the way you think about strangers' griefs, with sympathy that does not quite reach the bone. She was thinking about it differently now. "I'm sorry," she said. He meant it plainly, without decoration. "Thank you," he said equally plain. They stood together in front of the orchid. The rain intensified briefly overhead. A small drumming rush against the glass, and then gentle again.
"She would have liked your paper," he said quietly. "The Drosera one. She read the Linnaean correspondence every quarter." Eleanor did not know what to do with that. She turned it over silently, like something found on a path that you're not yet sure is precious or just a stone. "Did she garden?" Eleanor asked. "No. She just loved that things grew." Pause. "She said it was proof of something. She never told me what exactly."
Eleanor looked at the orchid. 11 years of silence. Then this, these pale swollen buds, this quiet insistence on becoming. "I think I know what she meant," she said. He looked at her then. Not the evaluating look he'd offered at Lord Pemwick's party, not the careful considering look from the lecture. Something different. Something that had less guard in it. She felt it on her skin the way you feel sunlight through a window. Indirect. Warm. Present.
She looked back at the orchid. It was Rosie who broke it. Not metaphorically. Literally. Rosie, who had been brought along because Mrs. Partridge had a cold and Eleanor had run out of alternatives. Rosie, who had been given strict and detailed instructions to remain with Lady Pemwick's niece in the rose room. Rosie appeared at the conservatory door at precisely the wrong moment with mud on her pinafore and a look of urgent confession on her face.
"Ellie," she said. "I need to tell you something." Eleanor turned. "Rosie, we discussed" "I wrote him a letter," Rosie said. Silence. "I wrote him a letter," Rosie repeated in the manner of someone who has decided that saying a true thing twice makes it more manageable. "And I signed your name to it." The conservatory became very quiet. Even the rain seemed to pause.
Eleanor stared at her sister. "You signed my" She stopped. "What did the letter say?" Rosie's chin came up. The gesture was so like Eleanor's own that it was almost painful. "I said that you thought about him when you pressed flowers and that you argued with him because arguing was the only way you knew to talk to someone you found interesting and that you were lonely and too proud to say so and that I thought you would both be less sad together than you were apart."
The silence after this was a different kind. Eleanor could not speak. Not because the words were untrue, that was, she was aware, the precise problem, but because they had been said in a conservatory in front of the very person they concerned by a six-year-old in a muddy pinafore with the devastating accuracy of someone who loved you without any interest in your defenses.
She turned to look at him. He was looking at Rosie with an expression she had never seen on him before. Not the considering look, not the almost smile, something open like a room with both windows wide. "When did you send it?" he said to Rosie gently. "Tuesday," Rosie said, "after the gardens." He was quiet for a moment. "I received a letter Tuesday," he said slowly, "that I assumed was misdirected. The handwriting was" he glanced at Eleanor "small."
"She is six," Eleanor said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "I wrote very neatly," Rosie said with dignity. Eleanor pressed her fingers to her forehead. The heat had arrived at her face in full and she had lost any ability to dismiss it. She wanted to say something sharp and conclusive, something that contained the situation and her and the six weeks of careful distance she had been constructing between herself and whatever this was. Instead what came out was, "Rosie, go back to the rose room."