“No.”
Lucy blinked.
Catherine let herself grin, drawing the moment out. “I think it will eclipse theirs entirely.”
Lucy’s delighted laugh gave Catherine so much pleasure she had to excuse herself from the room on the pretext of a missing skein of silk. It took fifteen minutes for her heart to stop racing, and a full half hour before she trusted her hands to be steady again. By then Lucy was intently focused on translating the next passage of Oléron, and Catherine, relieved, resumed her proper orbit.
The safety of routine was interrupted again the next day by an invitation from Aunt Kelmarsh:
Damn this absurdly chill spring, but the garden’s lovely anyway. This English moss is so stubbornly green, even beneath the snow. Come and have tea, the pair of you.
Catherine traced amused fingers over the purple-and-green thistle that spread its prickly self out beneath the older woman’s signature. Aunt Kelmarsh’s letters always had blossoms pasted into them, incredibly life-like recreations made from scraps of cut and colored paper. She’d been taught to cut silhouettes as a child in the early years of the last century, but the older she got, the more she enjoyed composing the portraits of plants rather than people. Once, while on an extended trip to the Continent, she’d sent young Catherine a letter that was nothing but a series of blossoms, painstakingly glued down to the paper in a regular grid so the letter could be folded small enough to post. Catherine had taken several days to decrypt the whole, bedeviling her mother’s pet botanist and several of the Ruche Abbey gardeners in the process.
It had seemed like a game at the time. It seemed less so after her marriage, with George laying first claim to all arriving correspondence—ostensibly since much of it was vital to his scientific pursuits—so that every letter Catherine received had been opened and scrutinized long before it reached her.
Soon she didn’t trust him not to read her outgoing letters as well—so she would compose long descriptions of the weather wherever they were, and border them with sketches of worm-eaten rose leaves bristling with thorns, or quiet, tense bundles of forget-me-nots. Aunt Kelmarsh would respond with equally polite replies about the state of English roads, but her bright additions of lilies and willows and myrtle would offer palpable solace in answer to Catherine’s wordless plea. Catherine still had them all, upstairs, tied up safely with ribbons.
After her husband’s death, Catherine had written Aunt Kelmarsh two lines:
George dead. Write as you please.
Aunt Kelmarsh had replied with a single word on the first page, underlined three times and sent halfway round the world:
Good.
The second page of the letter had been absolutely covered with detailed, precise, and glorious recreated apple blossoms, which Catherine had no trouble interpreting:Better things ahead.
All of which was to say: Aunt Kelmarsh’s letters were never trifles. She meant something by this invitation.
Catherine sent a note back to accept—with an unseasonable mistletoe sprig doodled in the corner—and the next morning she and Lucy set out.
The wind coming off the river was sharp and cold on the westbound road. It warmed only slightly when the carriage turned off the main thoroughfare and into the dell cottage Aunt Kelmarsh had inherited from her late husband. The house sat with its back against a row of stony hillocks, draped in green boughs and protected from the worst of the weather.
The older woman waved to them from the door, swathed in a gown of deep emerald wool. Cranberries in red and thorns in ochre silk twined around the gown’s collar, cuffs, and hem. “I’m afraid nothing is blooming yet,” Aunt Kelmarsh said, once they’d all clasped hands and kissed cheeks. “I’m starting to worry it’ll never warm.” She turned to Lucy with a welcoming smile. “But first let me tell you, Miss Muchelney, I regret not storming out with you after dinner the other night. Roger Hawley has always been a tedious rule-follower, and none of us are the better for it. I can’t get you membership the way Sir Eldon’s doing for that Wilby pup. I can, however, let you know that you aren’t alone.” As Lucy blinked at this frank declaration, the old woman jammed her hands into the muff at her waist. “Let me show you the garden, and then we’ll have a spot of something warming in front of a good fire.”
Catherine hadn’t seen the cottage garden in ten years—an eternity, in gardening time. She’d been expecting something orderly, charming rows and tiers of plants the way they’d been at Ruche Abbey. But those grounds had been expansive, even without counting the glasshouses and the aviary. This tiny place was knobbly and closed-in. Anyone in search of a vista would have thrown hands up in frank despair.
Aunt Kelmarsh had seen the place for what it was, not what it could be improved into. She’d seen the gray stone and the shaded spaces, the water and the woods and the quietness. Instead of a long line to the horizon, she’d made a path to wind between stacks of flat stone, lush with moss and overhung by the trailing arms of willows. Every turn brought some new discovery: a branching arbor overhung with vines waiting for summer, a pond frost-fed by a stream, a gathering of slender gray birches that leaned genteelly together like elven maidens at a faerie court. Catherine saw foliage of a few of the plants that the late Mr. Kelmarsh had been such a student of: peas and roses and flowering raspberry. The farther they walked, the thicker the frost became, icing everything over, until they turned the final corner.
Catherine stopped dead.
“Here it is,” Aunt Kelmarsh said, her tone rich with satisfaction. “My shell grotto.”
Round arches of irregular stone blocks enclosed a small space, just large enough for two people to stand out of the weather. Onto these walls a careful hand had placed thousands of seashells, small and large, their colors painfully vivid against the gray of the sky and the white of the spring frost. Lucy gasped and moved forward wonderingly, her hand tracing the dizzying patterns. Here a column of overlapped mussel shells rose tall and straight as the spine of some ancient dragon; there tiny snail shells were arranged in a spiral like the eye of a storm. Some arrangements looked as pristine as a church spire, others were wild, gorgeous encrustations like the palace of some decadent undersea queen.
Catherine looked at Aunt Kelmarsh and only then noticed the worried crinkle between her brows. “It’s not as large as the one we had at the abbey,” the older woman said apologetically.
“I heard the new owners knocked it down,” Catherine replied against the ache in her throat.
Aunt Kelmarsh’s lips thinned. “I heard that, too.”
“Are these...” Catherine stopped, breathed hard, and tried again. “Are these all from Mother’s collection?”
“As many as I could save. A lot of the rare, fancy ones went to other naturalists in the auction—but I bought as many as I could. Even the boxes and boxes she hadn’t gotten around to cataloging yet. I put them in my attic for years, but when I married Mr. Kelmarsh and began work on the garden, I realized what I’d been saving them for.” She blinked hard to clear the mist from her eyes. “I consider it a memorial to her.”
“It’s beautiful,” Catherine said, moving forward. Close up, she recognized several species, though when she’d seen them last they’d been displayed in rows under glass, each one carefully labeled. This was not that sort of arrangement. That had been science; this was closer to art.
But as her eye followed the lines, variations of shape and style and color shifting like gradients, one species shaded almost imperceptibly into another, Catherine realized there was a science here as well. “Mother would love it,” she said softly, and was rewarded when Aunt Kelmarsh set her mouth and coughed as if to pretend it was not tears tickling the back of her throat.
