Three Heaths

Wednesday, August 7, 1816

“You’ll want the closed carriage,” Oakes said. “It’s the first week of August. Half the regiment’s in town on half pay with nothing to do but walk down Oxford Street and look into curricles.”

“I know it.”

“You’ve not shown your face here since we sailed from Portsmouth in the year eight. Eight years, and it was a different face.”

“I know that as well. Is the pair put to?”

Oakes handed him his gloves. “They’re put to. I only thought I’d say it.”

“You have said it. Thank you.”

Gideon went down the steps of Brackenhope House into a grey, dry morning. The curricle was his father’s, dragged out of the mews and washed, and the pair were hired bays. Linnea was already beside it in her grey cloak, looking up at the horses with the wary respect she gave to anything larger than Damson.

He had made the offer at breakfast. She had mentioned Loddiges’ nursery twice on the road from Shropshire, the second time as a traveller might speak of Rome. He had thought about it all night, and about four words she had said in a hackney. He had not asked her what they meant. He had been afraid of pressing on the answer and finding it would not bear his weight.

“You will take me to Hackney yourself?” she had said, with her cup halfway to her mouth. “In an open carriage?”

“You will see nothing from a closed one.”

She had known perfectly well who else would see. She had not said so. She had only gone to fetch her notebook.

He handed her up and took the reins. The driver’s seat put her on his left.

“I must tell you a thing about this,” he said, as they turned into Park Street. “I can drive. I cannot judge distance as I did, and I see nothing on your side until it is level with the horses’ heads. In the country it does not signify. In Holborn it may.”

“What do you want of me?”

“Call what comes up on the left. A dray, a barrow, a fool on a horse.”

“I can do that.” She sat up straighter and pushed her spectacles firmly onto her nose. “Hackney coach, standing. Boy with a hoop. He has seen you, he is stopping.”

“You need not tell me who has seen me.”

“No. I beg your pardon. Cart.”

He drove the length of Oxford Street. It was all there as he had left it at six and twenty, the shops and the noise and the mud. People looked. A man on a grey cob stared and half raised his whip, and Gideon knew him for a captain of the Blues whom he had last met in a ballroom in Brussels. He touched his own hat and drove on. A barouche went by with two ladies in it, and one of them put up a glass.

He found that it could be borne. Linnea’s voice went on at his left shoulder the whole time, calm and exact. “Dray. Wide one. A woman with fish. Clear now.” He realised that he had more attention to spare for the stares than usual, because he was giving none to his blind side. He had handed it over to her entirely.

They went through the City and out by Shoreditch into market gardens and brick fields. At the turnpike she said, “That was a great many people.”

“It was.”

“The roof did not fall in.”

“You told me so once before. You are making a habit of being right about roofs.”

“Six,” said his wife, to the horses’ ears, and would not explain.
***
Messrs. Loddiges’ ground lay behind Mare Street. He had expected a large garden. He found a small town of glass.

There were hothouses in ranks, with gravel walks between them. The largest stood forty feet high at the ridge, with palms pressing their leaves against the roof like prisoners. Pipes ran along its foot, and steam leaked from the joints.

Linnea had stopped in the gateway. Her lips were parted, and she had forgotten him altogether. He was glad to see it.

A foreman came to them, wiping his hands on a blue apron. He was a broad, slow, weathered man of fifty, and he gave his name as Fenn. He looked at the curricle and the patch and decided on “sir”. Gideon let it stand. He had not come to be a duke here.

“The lady would like to see your Cape heaths, Mr. Fenn.”

“We’ve four hundred sorts, ma’am. Largest collection in Europe. You’ll be wanting something pretty for a window, I daresay. I can show you a ventricosa in full flower that any lady might keep.”

“I have six ventricosas, thank you,” Linnea said. “May I see how you pot them?”

Fenn blinked. He led them into a long, cool house where heaths stood in thousands on stone shelves, and Gideon watched his wife go to work.

She did not look at the flowers first. She picked up a pot and knocked on it. She turned it and looked at the hole in the bottom, and then she tipped the plant out into her gloved palm, root ball and all, as coolly as if it were her own.

“Ma’am,” said Fenn.

“I shall put it back. You have loam in this.”

“A quarter part. Good yellow loam off Epping. It gives them body.”

“It gives them a wet foot. Look at these roots, Mr. Fenn. They are brown at the tips, all round the outside, where the soil holds water against the pot. A heath has roots like hair, and it wants to be damp and never wet. I use two parts of black peat off the hill, rubbed through the hands and never sieved, to one of sharp sand. I put no loam in, and no dung. I crock the pot a full third of its depth.”

“A third? You’d have no room for soil.”

“I have room for air. How many do you lose in a winter?”

Fenn rubbed his chin. “One in ten, of the tender sorts. More in a damp year. This year—” He stopped.

“This year you are losing them now, in August, and you are blaming the weather. I lost four in three hundred between January and June, with a stove I could barely feed. What water do you give them?”

“The pump.”

“Out of London clay, with lime in it? Mr. Fenn, you have an acre of glass roof. Put a gutter on it and a tank at the end. Give them rain, and ring the pot before you water at all.”

“Ring it?”

She took a pencil from her pocket and struck two pots, one after the other. Gideon heard the note and the dull knock, and remembered a wet glasshouse in May.

“That one is singing. That one has its mouth full, and you watered it this morning all the same, because it was Wednesday.”

The foreman looked at the pots for some time. Then he felt in his apron and brought out a greasy memorandum book and a stub of lead.

“Two of peat to one of sand,” he said. “Unsieved. Would you say that again about the crocks, ma’am? Mr. George Loddiges will want it exact.”

She said it again. Fenn wrote. Gideon stood by a pillar with his hat in his hand and felt the pride of an officer whose subaltern has just carried a position alone. It was warmer than that, and he did not look at it closely.

He was still watching her when something stopped beside his knee.

It was a boy of five or six in a nankeen suit, who had got loose from a nursemaid at the far door. He had planted himself on the gravel with his hands behind him. He was looking up at the scar with his mouth open.

Gideon had spent a year keeping out of the way of that look. He had it now from two feet away, in a house of glass.

“Does it hurt?” the boy asked.

“Master Henry!” The nursemaid came hurrying. “Oh, sir, I’m sure I beg your pardon, he doesn’t know any better—”

“It is a fair question,” Gideon said. He looked down at the child. “No. It did when it was done. Now it only pulls a little in cold weather.”

“Who did it?”

“A Frenchman on a horse. He was doing his duty, and I was doing mine.”

“Did you win?”

“We did.”

The boy considered the patch. “Can you see through that?”

“No. There is nothing under it to see with.”

“Oh,” said Master Henry, quite satisfied. He allowed himself to be towed away, and he looked back over his shoulder the whole length of the house.

Gideon let his breath go. He had answered three questions and still had all his skin on. It was absurd to feel that he had been under fire.

A hand came through his left arm.

She had left Fenn in the middle of a sentence. She said nothing about the boy. She settled her gloved fingers in the bend of his elbow, on the blind side, and turned him toward the shelves.

“Come and look at these with me. Mr. Fenn says they have things from the last Cape ships that I have only read about.”

She did not let go. She kept his arm down the whole of that house and into the next. She kept it while she bent to read labels, and she kept it when she wanted both hands and had to manage with one. Two ladies passed them in the walk and looked at his face. He felt her hand tighten a little, and she went on talking about sand.

There were three plants she could not leave. He marked them, because she went back to each. One was an Erica jasminiflora with long white tubes like wax tapers. One was a low thing called banksii, green and yellow. The third was a small plant with flowers of a red so deep that it was nearly black, and its label said only Erica sp. nova, Cape, 1815.

She read the prices and put each of them back on the shelf with great care.

“Fifteen shillings, and that little one a guinea and a half,” she said. “For a pot I could hold in one hand. I shall come again when the book is finished.”

At the gate she remembered a question about steam pipes, and went back to Fenn. Gideon found a boy with a barrow.

When she came out, the three pots were in a hamper on the floor of the curricle, packed in moss.

She stood and looked at them. Her colour came up.

“Gideon. I have four hundred a year.”

“You have. I have a quarrel with this purchase already. The moment these cross your threshold they are ‘hereafter growing therein’, and Preece will have me at the assizes if I touch one.” He handed her up. “I wanted to give you something that was written in no document. I have very few chances.”

She sat with her boots either side of the hamper and one hand on its lid, all the way back to Shoreditch. She did not speak until they reached the paving.

“Seven,” she said then, rather unsteadily. “Waggon on the left.”
***
Brackenhope House had been shut since his father’s time. A caretaker and his wife kept four rooms aired, and the rest stood under dust sheets. The library was one of the four, though half its shelves were sheeted and the chandelier hung in a holland bag like a great wasps’ nest.

It was past eleven. He had Bellamy’s note of yesterday’s hearing in front of him and had read the same page three times. They were to start for Oxford at seven.

The door opened without a knock.

She was in her wrapper, with her plait over her shoulder and a candle in her hand. She shut the door behind her and set the candle on the corner of his table.

“I looked for a light under the door,” she said. “I am learning your habits.”

He had got up. He was in his shirtsleeves again, with no neckcloth, and this time he did not reach for his coat. “Can you not sleep?”

“I have not tried.”

She came round the table. She took off her spectacles, folded them and put them in her pocket. He understood what that meant a second before she put her hand on his chest.

She kissed him.

It was no more skilled than the first, but it was surer. She knew now where their noses went. Her mouth was warm, and she had her other hand on his bare throat, in the opening of his shirt, where his pulse was. He felt her fingers find it and stay there.

His arms had gone round her before he could give them any order. There was nothing under the wrapper but a nightgown and herself. He felt the long line of her back under his palms, and the dip of her waist, and her breasts against him through two thin layers of cambric. She was tall enough that he hardly had to bend. She made a small sound into his mouth, and it went through him like brandy.

She drew back an inch. Her eyes were very wide and dark without the glass, and she was breathing fast.

“Mrs. Jessop has put me in the room next to yours,” she said. “There is a door, and the key is on my side. I suppose you asked for that.”

“I did.”

“I have not turned it.” She swallowed. “You may come through it tonight, Gideon. If you like.”

It was said plainly, in her own way. Her voice shook on the last three words and she let it shake.

He wanted it more than he had wanted anything since he could remember wanting. He had wanted it on the leads, and in the glasshouse with a lens in his hand, and all day with her arm through his. His hands were on her now, and they knew what they held.

He took them away. He put them on her shoulders, and then he let go of her altogether and stepped back until the table edge was against his thigh.

“No,” he said.

She stood quite still.

“Hear the whole of it. You heard the whole of my terms once, and they were worse than this.” His voice was rough, and he did not try to smooth it. “Yesterday you told a Master you married me for a glasshouse and three children. While that is the true answer I will not take you to bed. When the court is done and you owe me nothing, ask me again, or do not.”

The colour went out of her face and then came back much darker. He saw her hand go to the edge of her wrapper and pull it close at the neck.

“I see,” she said. “I am to be refused upon my own evidence.”

“Linnea.”

“I told you in the hackney that it was true in May. I thought that you had understood me. Did you suppose that I came down a strange staircase in the dark to settle an account?” Her chin had come up. It was very like Philippa’s. “You think I would pay you in that coin.”

“I think you are the most honest person I have ever known, and that you pay every debt you believe you owe. I have watched you do it.” He kept his eye on hers. “In a fortnight an old man in a rusty gown decides whether those children stay. Until he does, you are bound to me by a bargain, and you cannot get out of it without costing them their home. You have my deed in your pocket and my coal in your shed, and today I gave you three plants and drove through London for you. You are grateful. I saw it in the curricle.”

“Of course I am grateful! I am not only that.”

“I believe you. But while you owe me anything, I could never be sure of it, and I do not think you could be sure either. I did not flatter you in May, and I will not flatter myself now.” He stopped, and made himself go on. “I bought a duchess. I will not have it said that I bought the rest, even if I am the only one who says it, at three in the morning. When you come to me, I want you free to stay away. Then I shall know why you came.”

The candle burned between them. Somewhere in the house a clock struck the half hour.

She was angry. He could see it in the set of her mouth, and he knew he had earned it. He had turned away a woman who had never offered herself to any man before. If she never offered again, the loss was his, and he would have to bear it.

Then her eyes changed. She went on looking at him, in the way she looked at a stem before she drew it, and the anger gave way to something more thoughtful.

“You are holding on to that table,” she said slowly, “as if it were the only thing keeping you upright.”

“It very nearly is.”

“So it is not that you do not want it.”

“God in heaven, Linnea, no,” he said. “It is not that.”

She let out a long breath. She took her spectacles from her pocket and put them on, and looked at him properly, the open shirt and the patch and his knuckles white on the mahogany.

“It is the most insulting thing anybody has ever said to me,” she said. “It is also the most honourable, I think. I shall need an hour or two to find out which I mind more.” She picked up her candle. Her hand was not steady. “You are leaving the door open for me to walk away.”

“Yes.”

“Did it occur to you that I might be vexed at having it held so very wide?”

“It occurred to me. I could see no other way to do it.”

“No. You would not.” At the library door she turned. She was still flushed to the hair, but there was a little of her own dryness in her voice again. “Very well. When the court is done, I shall ask you again. You had better be at home, Duke.”

“I shall be at home.”

“And I am not going to lock that door. I will not begin locking it now because you have behaved well.”

She went. He heard her bare feet on the stair.

He stayed where he was for a long time. Then he took his hand off the table and found the print of its edge across his palm.

He went up at midnight. His room was cold and smelled of camphor. The door to hers was in the wall beside the wardrobe, with no key on his side, and there was a line of candlelight under it.

He did not go near it. He lay down on the bed in his shirt and breeches, with his arm behind his head, and looked at the dark.

A board creaked beyond the wall. She was walking. She took six steps and paused, and came back. He wondered whether she had learned that from him.

The candlelight under the door did not go out. He lay and watched it, and she walked, and neither of them slept.
***