Midsummer Day

Monday, June 24, 1816

“There are five,” Linnea said. “The front door, the back door, the study, the cellar, and this little one, which opens the vestry press where the registers are kept. The cellar key sticks unless you lift the door a little as you turn it.”

Mr. Aldridge took the ring from her and weighed it in his brown hand. Behind him on the rectory path a carter and a boy were arguing a bookcase through the gate.

“I feel like a bailiff,” he said. “I had hoped to feel like a rector.”

“You will by Sunday. Mrs. Tranter has agreed to stay, and she will tell you everything that I have forgotten, and a good deal that I never knew. The study chimney smokes in an east wind. The pump wants priming after a frost. I do not think you need trouble about frost before August, but in this year I would not swear to it.”

He laughed. He was a quick man and he did not waste her time with condolences. He only asked whether she would like to go round to the back alone, and when she said yes, he went to help with the bookcase.

She went round by the brick path.

The foundation was still there. Tudge had taken everything above the ground, and he had left the floor, thirty-six feet of red brick laid in a herringbone, with the low footing wall round it and the square pit of the stoke hole at one end. Four weeks of rain had washed it clean. Groundsel had already come up in the joints.

Linnea stepped over the footing and stood in the middle.

There was a worn place in the brick by her right foot, where the legs of her stool had stood for fifteen years. The staging had left two long pale stripes down either side. In the far corner there was a round mark as wide as a cartwheel, darker than the rest, where a tub had sat since March of the year nine.

She had thought she would cry here, and had brought a second handkerchief for it. She found instead that she was looking at how small it was. It was only a floor. Everything that had made it more than a floor was a mile away, in the warm.

Out on the lawn there was a yellow square in the grass where the rain gauge had been. Crispin had carried the funnel up to the castle in both arms, like a christening cup.

“You did it, Papa,” she said, not very loud. “It is all alive. I thought you would like to know.”

She gave it a minute. Then she stepped back over the footing.

Mr. Aldridge was waiting at the corner of the house, pretending to examine a gutter.

“What ought I to do with it, Duchess? It seems a pity to dig up good brick.”

“Stand a frame on it. Brick holds the day’s warmth and gives it back at night. My father raised his seedlings on the floor for that reason. In a better summer you might have melons.”

“Then in a better summer you shall have the first one.” He bowed. “I shall take care of the house. I know whose it was.”

She walked home by the lane. She noticed that she had called it home in her own head, and she let the word stand to see how it wore.
***
The door into the walled garden was in the west wall, under a pear tree. She saw the smoke before she opened it. A thin grey line was going straight up from behind the wall into a sky the colour of slate.

She opened the door, and stopped.

It stood against the south wall as if it had grown there. Tudge had given the bars a coat of white lead, and he had bedded every pane in new putty. Three hundred heaths stood on the staging inside, tier above tier. The sun had not shown itself since Friday, but the glass took what light there was and held it.

She had watched it go up bar by bar for three weeks. She had not seen it finished, because on Saturday there had still been a ladder against the ridge.

“Six hundred and twelve,” said Crispin, arriving at her elbow with his ledger. “I ticked each number as it went back. Six hundred and eleven old and one new. Mr. Tudge let me call them.”

“That one’s mine,” Pip said. She pointed without coming any nearer. “Bay F, row four. It’s a different colour.”

It was. The old crown glass had the faintest green in it, like water in a deep basin. Number three hundred and seven was as clear as air.

“It is the cleanest pane in the house,” Linnea said. “I shall always know where to look when I want to see what the weather is really doing.”

Pip scowled at it. It was the scowl that meant she was pleased and did not intend to be caught.

The Duke was at the stoke hole.

He was down on one knee on the new brick with his coat off, looking in at the furnace door, and Oakes stood over him with a shovel. He got up when he saw her. There was coal dust on his right hand and a smear of it along his jaw, on the scarred side, where he must have rubbed his face.

“Duchess. We lit it at nine. Tudge says the flue draws.”

“What are you burning?”

“Clee Hill coal. Preece swears by it. It comes off the hill ten miles from here, and he says it burns hotter than anything the Ludlow merchant sells and leaves half the clinker.” He nodded toward a lean-to against the wall, with a new door. “There are six tons in the shed. The waggon goes up again in September.”

Linnea looked at the shed.

She had counted lumps for four months. She had counted them into the scuttle and onto the fire, and in the last weeks at the rectory she had counted them in her sleep. She did not know how many lumps there were in six tons.

“That is a great deal of coal,” she said. Her voice did not come out quite as she meant it to.

“It is a great deal of glass.” He wiped his hand on a rag that Oakes held out, carefully, finger by finger. Then he took his coat from the barrow handle, and from the inside pocket he drew a folded parchment tied with pink tape. “This came from Quince by Saturday’s mail. I waited for the last pane. I thought the two should go together.”

He held it out. He did not make a speech.

“Read it before you take it. I should, if I were you.”

She untied the tape. It was one skin of parchment, engrossed in a clerk’s black hand, with two red seals at the foot. She read it standing on the path, all of it, while the children watched and Preece came up from the far border and stood turning his hat.

All that glasshouse or conservatory lately removed from the Rectory of Brackenhope, together with the stove, flues, staging and utensils thereof, and the whole collection of plants now or hereafter growing therein. It was vested in Nathaniel Quince of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, gentleman, and Owen Preece of Brackenhope, land steward, upon trust. For the sole and separate use of Linnea, Duchess of Brackenhope, free from the debts, control or engagements of her present or any future husband.

“‘Any future husband,’” she read aloud.

“Quince is thorough,” said the Duke. “He has buried me in the fourth line and married you again in the fifth.”

That made three. She kept her face straight for the sake of the tally.

“It says ‘now or hereafter growing.’ So if I raise a seedling next year, it is mine as well.”

“Every one. If I walk in and pick a flower, Preece is bound in law to prosecute me.”

“I never was a trustee of anything before, Your Grace,” Preece said to her, anxiously. “I hope I’ll not be called on to do more than admire it.”

“You will be called on to find me peat, Mr. Preece, and I shall be very exacting about it.”

She folded the parchment along its creases. Her fingers were not perfectly steady, and she saw the Duke see it. He looked away at once, toward the glass, and gave her time.

She had not owned a thing in her life but her paint box and her mother’s pearls. The rectory had been the Church’s, and the plants had been her father’s. Now nobody could sell them or take them from her. A man she had known for seven weeks had seen to that, and he had made sure he could not take them from her either.

“Thank you,” she said. “It is exactly what you promised. I find I did not quite believe in it until I had the seals in my hand.”

“That is why I told you to read it.”

“There is one thing still outside.”

The tub stood on its low cart by the orangery door, with its tall leaves swaying. He had his coat off again before she had finished speaking. He took a pole end himself, with Pugh and Hotchkiss and Oakes and a garden boy, and Linnea walked backward before them through the glasshouse door with her hand up to keep the blades from the lintel.

“To the end. Further. There, over the place where the flue comes in.”

They set it down. She crouched and laid her palm on the brick beside it. The floor was warm.

She parted the leaves and looked down into the heart of the plant, as she had looked every morning since January. There was a new leaf coming, rolled tight as a green cigar. There was nothing else.

She put her thumb on the brass plate, on the worn place over 1809, where another thumb had rubbed it every March.

“Well,” she told it, “you have six tons of coal and a duke to carry you. I do not know what more you can want.”

“It wants to be asked civilly,” the Duke said behind her. “I should, after seven years.”

She let that make four.
***
They dined at two. By three she was at her bench.

Tudge had set it at the cool eastern end, under the gable light, with a blind of thin calico stretched overhead to take the glare out of what sun there might be. She had her board and her water jars and her shells of colour. She had a heath in a five-inch pot, an Erica retorta just come into flower, with its sticky pink flasks in a ring at the top of each stem and every small leaf curled back and tipped with a bristle.

It was to be plate sixty-five.

She took a sheet from the portfolio and held it up flat against the gable glass. She looked through it, turned it over and looked again. She laid it aside, took another and did the same.

“Why do you do that, Aunt Linnea?”

Crispin had come in very quietly and shut the door behind him without being told. He stood a yard from the bench with his hands behind his back.

“What do I do?”

“You hold every sheet to the window before you draw on it. You did it in the orangery as well. I counted. You have never once not done it.”

“Come here and see.”

He came. She held the sheet against the glass at the height of his eyes.

The light came through it evenly, a soft grey-white. There were letters in one corner, paler than the rest, as though somebody had written on the paper with water.

“J,” Crispin read slowly. “W, H, A, T, M, A, N. And a number underneath. One, eight, one, four.” He looked up. “It isn’t ink.”

“It is not on the paper at all. It is in it. A sheet like this is made in a mould, a frame of fine wires. The maker sews his name into the mould in wire, and the year. The pulp lies a little thinner over the letters, so the light comes through there.” She turned the sheet. “That is called the watermark. Mr. Whatman’s mill is in Kent, and my father bought these in the year fourteen.”

“But why do you look?”

“For two reasons. The first is that paper has a right side and a wrong side, and they take colour differently. When the name reads the right way round, I have the right side toward me. The second is flaws. If there is a thin place or a speck in the sheet, I shall see it against the light, and I had rather find it now than after three days’ work.”

He took the sheet from her in flat hands, as he had seen her take panes, and held it up himself.

“So it is like the label on the tub,” he said. “Only you cannot unscrew it.”

“That is just what it is like. Every sheet tells you who made it and when, if you ask it. Most people never ask.”

“Does all paper have one?”

“All good English paper. The maker and the year.”

“My ledger?”

“I should think so. Try a leaf.”

He was gone before she had finished the sentence. She heard his boots on the gravel, going faster than Crispin generally went anywhere. She thought that every sheet of paper in the schoolroom would be held to a window before supper, and that Mercy Onions would have something to say about it.

She pinned the sheet to her board and began.
***
She had the whole spray in pencil, and one floret off the plant and lying on a slip of glass, when the door opened again.

“I came to see the flues,” said the Duke.

“They are under the floor, Duke.”

“So Tudge tells me.”

He did look at them. He walked the length of the house and put his hand flat on the brick at four places, and he crouched at the far end to feel where the heat ran out. He made a great business of it for perhaps two minutes. Then he came back down the path between the staging and stopped at her shoulder.

“What are you doing to it?”

“Taking it to pieces. Each plate has the flower opened at the foot, to show what is inside. I have a difficulty, as it happens. The arm of my lens stand was bent in the move and has gone to Ludlow to be straightened. I want both hands for the needles, and I have been holding the glass in my teeth.”

“Give it to me.”

It was a brass-rimmed lens the size of a crown piece, on a short handle. He took it. She showed him the distance, three inches above the slip, and he brought it there and stopped.

It did not waver. She had felt how steady that hand was once before, at a chancel step. She saw it now through the lens, as a clear round window that stayed where it was put.

“A little toward me. There.”

She took a needle in each hand. Under the glass the floret was as large as a thimble, pink and sticky and faintly ribbed. She set one point at the mouth of it and drew the other down the side, and the flask opened along its length like a pea pod.

“Now look. Do not move the lens, bring your head down.”

He bent. His shoulder came against hers, and stayed. His right hand, holding the lens, was a finger’s width above her left wrist, and she could feel the warmth of it on her skin without his touching her at all.

“There are threads,” he said. “With brown heads. Six. No, eight.”

“Eight stamens. The brown heads are the anthers, which hold the dust. Look at the base of one. Do you see two little tails hanging down, like the ends of a ribbon?”

“I see them.”

“Those are the awns. Some heaths have them and some have none. Some have a crest like a cock’s comb. There are some hundreds of Cape heaths, Duke, and a good half of them have pink flowers shaped like a bottle. The colour will not tell you which one you have, and the leaf will not. The anthers will. Botanists sort them by it.”

“Like the facings on a regiment.”

She turned her head. His face was a hand’s breadth away, and it was the left side of it, the black silk and the long pale line. She could see where the scar pulled a little at the corner of his mouth when he spoke.

“What are facings?”

“The collar and cuffs. Every regiment of the line wears a red coat. At two hundred yards you tell them apart by the colour of the cuff. Buff, blue, yellow, green.” He was still looking through the glass. “You are telling me that a heath wears its cuffs on the inside.”

“I shall put that in the letterpress,” Linnea said, “and Dr. Yarrow will have a seizure.”

That was five, though it was her own joke and perhaps ought not to count.

She went on. She lifted the stamens away one by one and laid them in a row. She found the seed vessel at the bottom, round and green and no bigger than a pin’s head, with the style standing up out of it. She named each part, and he repeated the names, got one wrong and corrected himself. When she wanted the lens nearer, she said so, and it came nearer. Twice the back of his fingers brushed her wrist. Neither of them mentioned it. She found that she was breathing rather carefully, and that the floret was taking a great deal longer to dissect than it ever had before.

The stable clock struck. She counted five.

“I have kept you an hour,” she said.

“I have been kept in worse places.” He straightened and gave her back the lens. His face had its usual stiffness on again, but he did not go. He looked along the bench at the pencil drawing, and then through the glass at the grey garden.

“The one in my study has a flower cut open at the foot, like this. I had not known what I was looking at. I look at it most nights, when the accounts will not come right.” He paused. “I took down all sixty-four and went through them, the night Quince first came. I chose that one because whoever drew it had plainly liked the plant. I thought that a man who could be so patient with a flower was worth having on the wall.”

Linnea put the lens down on the bench.

He had asked her for plain dealing among her own flower pots, and she had asked it back of him in his library. He had turned his face to the window because she named a thing he did not care to hear. And there was something about that picture which she had not told him. She had told nobody at all. It would take one sentence.

It was not only hers to say. There was a name on that plate, and the man it belonged to was under a yew tree and could not be asked.

“Duke,” she said.

“Yes?”

He had turned to her fully and was waiting. He would have heard it, whatever it was. She knew that, and it made it harder.

“The heaths hate damp,” Linnea said. “More than cold. You must tell Tudge that the top lights are to stand open an inch all day, even in rain, or I shall have mould on every pot by July.”

It was true, and it was not what she had opened her mouth to say. She thought that he knew it. His eye rested on her a moment longer.

“An inch,” he said. “I will tell him.”

He went up the path. At the door he stopped, with his hand on the latch and his back very straight. He spoke to the door frame.

“I should like to ask you something. You need not answer if it is outside the terms. You have had a month of this house. You have had my table and my silences, and a child who cuts your brushes. I heard of that from Oakes, not from you.” He cleared his throat. “Are you content with your bargain?”

She looked at the back of his neck, which had gone red, as it had over the stovepipe.

She had six hundred and twelve panes over her head and a warm floor under her feet, and a deed with two red seals in her apron pocket. Her wrist was still warm where his knuckles had been.

“So far, Duke,” she said.
***