Page 75

“Or ye can decide the folk who taught ye shame don’t get the last word. Ye can be here, in the light, when that young man rolls back. And ye can let him look. Truly look. For the first time.”

Her breath caught.

Let him look.

The thought was terrifying. It was impossible. It was also the only thing she had ever wanted.

“I do not know if I can,” she whispered.

“That’s the way of courage, miss.” Elias took up the shears and turned back to the hedge, as if he had said no more than the weather. The blades clicked once on a wet stem. “Ye never know till ye try. And trying is a thing ye can do with the face ye’ve got. I’ve seen it in the beds. A plant don’t bloom for wishing. It blooms for being put in the light.”

And Isolde stood in the yard with the wind in her hair and the gray sky pressing. The hedge Elias had been cutting smelled green and wet. Far off the sea kept its work. She put her marked cheek to the air on purpose, a small, shaking dare, and wondered if she had it in her to leave the shade.

Once. For good. When the coach came back, if it came back, she would have to decide with her feet, not only with a wish. The thought scared her. It also, for the first time since the garden, felt like a door she might one day open.

CHAPTER 17

“Hope, however, strengthened her fortitude; and those affections of the heart, which had hitherto yielded her the most simple consolations, in all her distresses, now conspired to revive her spirits.”

Ann Radcliffe

* * *

February 25, 1822

Six days.

Six days of ruts and sour inns had left him worn. Every inquiry had come to nothing, and every name he chased had led him nowhere. Through all of it, he had held a small heat in his chest and cupped it from every gust of doubt.

Now the road was turning toward Grimsfell at last.

Home. The word startled him as it rose. When had that odd pile on a Cornish cliff begun to wear that name? When had the singing wind, the inner ways, the iron screens, stopped being curiosities and started being known? A week ago he would have laughed. A week ago home had been Florence, Paolo’s shop, Marco’s laugh. A week had rewritten the map.

He knew. The house had become home the hour Isolde had become the center of him.

The coach lurched. He barely felt it. All of him was on the wooden box in his lap, held as a man holds a thing that cannot be replaced. Straw packed fine inside kept the bloom cushioned. He had kept the box against his coat the whole road back from Sir Horace Pembury’s, giving it what warmth a body could give against a February that wanted the bloom dead.

Truro had given him nothing.

Two full days in that busy town had put mud on his boots and left him a room over an inn that smelled of boiled mutton. He had tried every society that would open a door. He had spoken to collectors and to gardeners and to men who talked of bulbs as other men talked of horses. One had a ledger of names and ran a finger down it and shook his head before the finger stopped. Angelo had named what he wanted. He had been met with a shake of the head and a sorry. He had walked back to the inn each dusk with the box empty and the hope thinner.

“Too soon in the year,” one man said. “A month yet, at least. You would need a house-grown piece, and those are hard to come by.”

“Try the private places,” said another. “Some of the rich keep bloom through winter. They will not sell. Those pots are a fortune.”

So he had gone farther south, following half a name and a pointing finger, until the gates of Sir Horace Pembury rose up. The house looked tired. Around it, glass stood like a small city, and those were the finest houses Angelo had ever walked through.

Sir Horace was an oddity of the first water. His hair was white and he was past seventy. He wore a coat that had seen better dinners and a pair of spectacles on a ribbon. He had poured a fortune into rare stock and did not seem to mind that the house itself peeled. His glass held the world. Orchids from southern forests grew there, some of them ugly on purpose. Lotus from Egyptian water sat in a tank that steamed. And tulips out of Constantinople had been bred and crossed for the strangest coats nature would give. A boy in clogs went about watering and did not look at guests. Sir Horace looked at guests as if they were another sort of beetle.

The talk had been sharp.

They sat in a room that smelled of wet earth and old port. The old man would not part with a tulip. It was the pride of the collection, years in the making, and coin would not cover the loss, he said. He named sums that would have bought a shop in Florence and then said even those sums were an insult.

Angelo had not put coin on the table first. He had put Isolde. He heard his own voice go rough and did not stop it. If a man would not sell for gold, he might sell for a story that was true.

He did not give her name. He did not name the house. He gave the heart of her. He spoke of a woman marked from birth, and of a world that had taught her the mark was a fault. He told of years spent in shade, sure no one could look at her face and not step back. He spoke of a woman who was, to Angelo’s eye, the finest thing he had ever seen, and who could not take the words when he said so.

Sir Horace had been quiet a long while. His watery eyes rested on Angelo’s face and went through him. Then, slowly, a smile came.