“He loves me,” I whispered to nothing and to no one, counting the petals. “He loves me not.”
When I’d been a girl of seven and he a boy of nine, he’d once accompanied us to our relatives’ country estate. One morning after Mother and Father had gotten in a terrible row, I’d found a small bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace on my dresser. I’d never had the courage to ask Montgomery if he’d left them. When Mother found the flowers, she tossed them out the window.
Weeds, she had said.
Montgomery gave me flowers on the island years later, when we were no longer children, and he’d outgrown his shyness. He’d won my affection, but his betrayal had left my heart dashed against the rocks, broken and bleeding.
“He loves me, he loves me not,” I whispered. “He’ll forget me, he’ll forget me not. He’ll find me, he’ll find me not. . . .”
I sighed, letting the sounds of my whispers float up to the rose-colored wallpaper. I rolled over, burying my face in my pillow.
You must stop with such childish games, I told myself, as the place beneath my left rib began to ache.
THE NEXT MORNING THE professor took me to the weekly flower show at the Royal Botanical Gardens, held in the palatial glass-and-steel greenhouse known as the Palm House, where I found myself only surrounded by more flowers, ranunculus and orchids and spiderlike lilies, and where the only things more ostentatious than the flowers were the dozens of fine ladies sweating in their winter coats. A year ago I’d never thought I would find myself wearing elegant clothes once more, amid ladies whose perfume rivaled the flowers, who tittered about my past behind my back but wouldn’t dare say anything to my face.
It was shocking how much one’s fate could twist in a single year.
The professor, who I was quite certain wished to be anywhere but in a sweaty greenhouse surrounded by ladies, wandered off to inspect the mechanical system that opened the upper windows, leaving me alone to the sly looks and catty whispers of the other ladies.
. . . used to work as a maid . . .
. . . father dead, you know, mother turned to pleasing men for money . . .
. . . pretty enough, but something off about her . . .
Through a forest of towering lilies, a woman in the next aisle caught my eye. For a moment she’d looked like my mother, though Mother’s hair had been darker, and she’d been thinner in the face. It was more the way this woman hung on the arm of a much older white-haired man, dressed finely with a silver-handled cane, who bore no wedding ring—her lover, not her husband.
The couple paused, and the woman stopped to admire the lilies between us. I was about to leave when I overheard her say, “Buy me one, won’t you, Sir Danvers?”
Sir Danvers. I gave him another look, discreetly, studying the expensive cane, the bones of his face. Yes, it was he. Sir Danvers Carew, Member of Parliament, a popular lord and landowner—and one of the men who used to keep my mother as his mistress. He’d seemed kind, like his reputation, until he turned to drink. He had once knocked Mother around the living room, then struck my leg with that same cane when I’d tried to stop him. I hadn’t thought of him in years, and yet now my shin ached with phantom pain from that day.
I turned away sharply, though there was no danger of him recognizing me. Back then I’d been the skinny young child of a mistress he hadn’t kept but a few weeks, and now I was just one of the many elegant young ladies come to admire hothouse flowers in winter.
“May I show you these lilies, miss?” a vendor across the aisle said. I turned my head, still a bit dazed. “They’re a new hybrid I developed myself,” she continued. “I cross-pollinated them with Bourgogne lilies from France.”
Eager to be away from Sir Danvers, I stepped forward and pretended to admire the flowers. The blooms were beautiful, but the hybridization had made the stems too thick. They would have done better crossed with Camden lilies to keep the stems strong but delicate. I didn’t dare start talking aloud about splicing and hybridization, though—I’d have sounded too much like Father.
I swallowed. “They’re beautiful.”
“There you are!” called a voice at my side. Lucy came tripping along the steam grates in a tight green velvet suit, fanning her face. “I’ve been up and down every hall looking for you. Oh, this blasted heat.” With her free hand she dabbed at the sweat on her forehead. Beneath our feet, the boilers churned out another blast of steam that rose like a Turkish sauna. I inhaled deeply, letting it seep into my pores. I felt healthier here, in the tropical warmth, where the symptoms of my illness never seemed quite as bad.
Lucy glanced rather disdainfully at a bucket of mangled daisies with broken stems. “Good lord. It looks as though someone pruned those flowers with a butter knife.”