After dinner I climbed the stairs, jumping again as the cuckoo clock sprung to life in the hallway. I considered ripping the loud-mouthed wooden bird out of its machinery, but the professor adored the old thing and patted the bird lovingly each night before bed. It was silly for him to be so sentimental over an old heirloom, but we all have our weaknesses.
I went to my room, where I locked the door and took out the silver fork I’d stolen from the dinner table, admiring the sharp tines. The professor had set up accounts at the finer stores in town for me to purchase what I required, but what I needed was paper money for my secret attic’s rent, for the equipment and ingredients for my serums, few of which came cheaply. Grafting roses only paid so much. I stared at the fork, regretting the need to steal from the man who’d given me a life again. But as I looked out the window at the dark sky and saw the snow falling in gentle flakes into the garden outside, flashing when hit by the lights of a passing carriage, I told myself I was desperate.
And desperation could lead a person to things one might never do otherwise.
THREE
THAT NIGHT, LIKE MOST nights, I lay in my big empty bed, staring at the ceiling, and trying desperately not to think about Montgomery.
It never worked.
When I had moved into the professor’s home, he had wallpapered my bedroom ceiling in a dusky pale rose print. As I lay in bed my eyes found hidden shapes among the soft buds, tracing patterns, remembering the boy who would never give me flowers again.
“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.