She was aware of the path beneath her feet and the cool air against her face and the distance between them, smaller now than it had ever been, measured not just in space, but in everything that had been said and not said across three months of gardens and lectures and rain-blurred conservatory glass. "I argued with you," she said. "The very first proper conversation we had." "You argued with me about my critique of your paper," he said. "And you were right. The sample population was appropriate. I revised my position." "You never told me that." "I'm telling you now." He almost smiled. Almost. "That is a very long time to sit on a concession."
"I was working up to it," he said. And then the almost smile she had cataloged across 12 weeks of careful observation, it arrived fully for the first time. Not the ghost of it. The real thing. It changed his face entirely, opened it, made him look younger and less careful and startlingly, unexpectedly warm. It was deeply unfair, Eleanor thought, that he had been keeping that.
He took a breath. "I wrote your name in my notebook," she said. The directness of it surprised even her. But she was tired of being careful, tired of the long cautious approach, tired of saying things that meant less than she intended. "In the margin. After Lady Morfield's dinner. I told myself it was nothing. I didn't cross it out."
He was very still. "Eleanor," he said. Her given name in his voice. No title. No careful distance. She felt it from her throat to her hands. He crossed the space between them, not quickly, not dramatically, but with the same unhurried certainty with which he did everything, and stopped close enough that she had to look up to meet his eyes. Close enough that she could see the slight unevenness of his breathing and knew it matched her own.
His hand came up, slowly, giving her every opportunity to step back, and his fingers found the line of her jaw, light as a question. Her heart was doing something completely ungovernable. The cool morning air and the warmth of his hand and the pale autumn light all arrived at once and she could not have composed a sentence in any language botanical or otherwise. "I have been," he said quietly, "trying very hard not to do this." "I know," she said. "I am not entirely certain I should." "I know that, too." She held his gaze. "Do it anyway."
He looked at her for one long moment, at her upturned face and her honest eyes and the mess of her that was sharp and warm and stubborn and present in a way that had been pulling at something inside him since a garden party and a small girl in a muddy pinafore and he lowered his head. And Eleanor Calloway, botanist, sharp-tongued sister, daughter of a woman she was slowly forgetting the sound of, stopped thinking in words entirely.
It was soft. Careful. A question answered rather than a demand made. His mouth against hers in the cool morning air of Kew Gardens with the fountain still running and the pale light still steady and the world entirely indifferent to the fact that something inside her had just put down a weight she had been carrying so long she had forgotten it was there.
When they separated, just slightly, just enough, neither of them spoke immediately. She pressed her forehead briefly to his shoulder. His hand moved to her hair. The morning continued around them. The fountain ran. The trees stood in their late green. "Rosie," she said finally against the wool of his coat, "is going to be completely insufferable." She felt the sound move through his chest before she heard it. A laugh, low and real, the laugh of a man rediscovering that the sound was still available to him. "She deserves to be," he said. Eleanor laughed, too. Quietly. Into the space between them that was no longer a distance.
Three weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, a small figure in a yellow dress sat in the front parlor of the Calloway house on Marsh Street and received a visitor. The Duke of Ashworth sat across from Rosie Calloway in the chair that was slightly too large for him, holding a cup of tea he had been given with great ceremony, and asked her, formally with complete seriousness, for her blessing.
Rosie considered him. She studied his face, his hands, the way he held the cup carefully as though things given to him mattered. "Will you make her less lonely?" she asked. "I will try every day," he said. "For the rest of my life." Rosie nodded once. The nod of a general accepting a satisfactory report. "You may have her," she said. And then, because she was six, and because some things must be stated plainly, "But if you make her cry, I will put beetles in your hat."
He looked at her with those steady gray eyes. "That is entirely fair," he said. Rosie picked up her biscuit. "I know," she said.
They married in October. Not in a cathedral this time. Eleanor had been specific about this, but in the small chapel at Alton Green where the ceiling was low and the windows were plain glass and the light came through honestly without trying to be anything more than light. Rosie stood at the front in a new yellow dress with white flowers in her hair that Eleanor had pressed and dried herself. Bellis perennis, common daisies, which Rosie had chosen because she said they looked cheerful and Eleanor had not argued because she was right.
The Duke stood at the altar and watched his bride walk toward him and did not attempt to arrange his expression into anything other than what it was. Eleanor walked without trembling. She carried no roses. She had brought instead a single stem of Stanhopea from the conservatory at Aldrin, pale and extraordinary and blooming finally in her hands. When she reached him, she looked up and found his face open and unhurried and warm in the way she had cataloged across months of careful not looking and had finally allowed herself to keep.
She had been given nothing. She had chosen everything. That, she thought, feeling the cool chapel air and his steady presence and Rosie's small hand briefly squeezing hers before releasing it, was the only kind of love worth arriving at. The kind you walk toward yourself with your eyes open and your hands full of things that had finally learned to bloom.