But after the conference last week, she was facing uncertainty from every angle, including the financial one.
The International Botanical Conference had been eye-opening. She’d expected the same sorts of discussions of scientific progress, methods, and adventures in discovering new species that she heard around the U. She’d prepared herself to face the same sorts of prejudices she experienced daily as the only female member of the biology department. She’d also anticipated coming away full of enthusiasm and ideas for her future research ventures.
What she had not expected was the proliferation of what was termed economic botany, the production of bigger, better, and more fruitful plants, nor that it would be the focus of the entire conference.
She hadn’t thought herself so naïve, so idealistic, that she would not accept a more pragmatic shift in the focus of her field. It made her feel foolish to be so crestfallen that her personal interests in poisons and the plants they came from seemed to be relegated to two industries: medicine and government research. The former she had already dabbled in and would not care to venture further into. The latter she was determined to avoid.
Dr. Aster hadn’t been subtle about his intentions in sending her to the conference; he hoped it would change her mind about participating in government research. It hadn’t been successful. But what would she do if no one else would pay her to research the things she cared about?
She sank deeper into the water, which was quickly growing tepid in the chilly bathroom. Her class was showing, as Elizabeth occasionally teased her. She wanted to follow her passions without consideration for whether or not it would put food on the table and clothing on her back. Her father, when he began his journey into academia, had certainly never had to worry about that. He’d had the means to study and publish whatever he liked because he always had his father’s money and the promise of inheriting the Easting viscounty to fall back on.
The words of Dr. Ingham, her father’s former colleague, floated back to her. She’d run into him at the conference, and he had asked questions that she didn’t want to contemplate the answers to. Shepushed his voice aside, unwilling to let those concerns cloud her already muddled mind.
Saffron had no secondary plan if being a research botanist didn’t suit her, unless she agreed to what her grandparents had been pushing her to do for years: leave the university and academic life and return to the stifling arms of the upper classes, where she would marry and reproduce. Marriage and children were not the repugnant part of that equation. It was the expectation that becoming a wife and mother meant she could be nothing else.
The distant trill of the doorbell jolted her from her thoughts. Her luggage was being delivered from the train station, she recalled. She hauled herself from the bathwater.
Teeth chattering, with clinging strands of hair soaking the neck of her dressing gown, she hurried down the hall on cold, bare feet, calling, “I paid the fee at the station. You can leave it on the landing, and I’ll collect it later.”
She came to a breathless standstill when she flicked open the little cover on the peephole. “Alexander?”
He stood a few feet from the door, peering at her through the decorative metal grate. “Hello, Saffron.”
“H-hello,” she replied, automatically drawing the lapels of her damp dressing gown tighter around herself, though he could see only a few inches of her face. “What are you doing here? It’s ten in the morning. On a Friday.”
“It is.” He seemed to rock back on his heels, stoic features giving nothing away. “I was hoping to speak with you, if convenient.”
“I, er—” She wet her lips. “I’ve just come from the bath, but—”
“Not convenient, then,” he said. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”
Her mouth fell open, and she quickly snapped it shut, forgetting again that he couldn’t see her gaping like a fish. They’d had this conversation before, just a few weeks ago. He’d asked her to dinner but had relented when she’d made it clear that she did not envision a romantic future for the pair of them, not when he’d been adamant about her not continuing to help police investigations. He even went so far as to threaten to report her to Dr. Aster.
That didn’t stop her heart from speeding up at the sight of him at her door.
“I just want to talk,” Alexander added.
Saffron noted the softness of his voice, and between that and the darkness gathered beneath his eyes and the faint tension around his mouth, she found herself agreeing. “Of course.”
He gave her the time and place and was down the stairs before she even had time to identify the feeling welling in her chest. After weeks of her vision for the future shifting and dissolving like a sand dune with no white-floweredOenothera deltoidesto anchor it, she felt hope once again.
The bell rang twice more that day, once just a few minutes after Alexander had left, announcing the actual arrival of her luggage, and once more midafternoon. The first made Saffron’s heart leap with uneasy anticipation, imagining it was Alexander, impatient to reveal whatever was on his mind. When the bell rang at three, she’d squashed her anticipation and simply opened the door.
She was immediately confronted by a bouquet of flowers.
A confusing mixture of panic and appreciation flooded her at the sight of the blooms. A brief scan of the colorful arrangement assured her that none of them was poisonous, or at least not in the way the last bouquet she’d been presented with, and the casual manner of the delivery boy who offered them to her with a cheeky grin confirmed that this was the nice sort of flower delivery and not the deadly kind.
She locked the door firmly behind her regardless and took the flowers to the parlor.
With the radiator blasting and a fire laid in the fireplace for the evening, Saffron was enjoying a cozy afternoon. Her favorite plants grew in cheerful pots on the windowsill. Books and magazines sat in curated piles on the coffee table, and a blanket awaited her on the couch. She took a vase from the shelf and set it on the coffee table with the bouquet inside. Dark ivy twined through the bunches of purple verbena and lush, tall stocks of pink hollyhock. Nestled along the bottom were cuttings from a balsam tree, fragrant and sharp.
She puzzled over the flowers only until she recalled the card the delivery boy had sneaked into her hand. A familiar tight, neat script read:
Welcome back from your academic adventure! In case you’ve been missing the real fun, I’ve created a little puzzle for you. Drop by sometime, if you can bear to.
Yours,
Lee
