Like a Flower in Bloom (8 page)

He was holding onto the strap of his vasculum, gripping it so tightly that his knuckles gleamed and his fingers trembled. “She never asked me for anything, but I told her I would make her proud, that I would become a proper clergyman. And I
have tried.” He held up his metal cylinder. “You can see that I have tried.”

“Indeed you have.”

“But I must tell you that it’s very tiring tramping about the countryside in search of flowers you’ve never seen before. I suppose I don’t have to tell you that. Your father has made a career of it. And, as you said, you’re a devotée of flowers yourself.”

“Indeed, I am.”

He sighed. “I am getting better at it. And I do have quite a collection at the rectory. Quite a large, fine, big collection.” He blinked his eyes open wide as if he’d just startled himself. “A collection you are coming to see tomorrow!”

I nodded. “Miss Templeton and I, both.”

“I must . . . I really should . . . I think it best if I go now.”

“Please don’t trouble yourself on our account, Mr. Hopkins-Whyte. I wouldn’t want you to set aside your sermon for—”

“Sermons come easy, Miss Withersby. It’s the flowers that have proved to be so confoundingly difficult. But I do try.”

“Flowers come easy to me. I suppose that’s why I like them so. They sprout and bloom and die, but they never prevaricate. A violet is always a violet. It’s very reassuring.”

“It’s the way I feel about God’s Word. It always remains the same. Little wonder, I suppose that His creations are constructed in a similar manner. I feel, like so many others, that I ought to be inspired to higher thoughts by botany, but I must confess I normally feel very . . . confused.” He looked sadly down at his vasculum and then glanced up at me. “I suppose I had better get back. To the children.” He nodded and then replaced his hat. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

When I returned, Father was closeted in his study and Mr. Trimble was sifting through a stack of journals.

“Enjoying your work?”

He had stood absentmindedly as I’d entered. Now he glanced up at me and then sat back down, continuing his work.

“I would offer to help you, but I can’t.” I sat in a chair and pulled off my boots.

“Your father has given me the task of compiling recent writings on the classification of orchids. Do you have any idea where the rest of the
Botanic Gazette
magazines would be?”

“No.”

“Because there’s a previous article referenced in this one”—he held up an issue—“that I cannot find.”

“By whom?”

He squinted as he consulted the issue. “Mr. Allen.”

“That sounds familiar, and he did publish a monograph on monopodial orchids last year, didn’t he?” Mr. Trimble began to reply, but I continued. “No. Forgive me. I believe it was the year before. But I wouldn’t wish to say that I was certain. It caused quite a stir, though you probably wouldn’t have heard of it, being halfway across the world as you were. Which leads me to wonder just how much you actually know about the current state of botany.”

He smiled, but I could tell there was no humor in it.

“May I ask, why didn’t you tell me your uncle was Admiral Williams?”

“Why would it have mattered?”

“He’s the finest seaman to ever sail in Her Majesty’s Navy! If he were related to me, I would make certain everyone knew it. To have such an honorable man share my family name . . . I tell you, Miss Withersby, it would be a vast improvement upon the family I was born into. I must confess that I don’t understand your lack of family pride.”

“My family—my father’s and my mother’s both—are botanists, Mr. Trimble. They always have been, back as long as anyone can remember. Can you imagine the scandal the Admiral caused by insisting upon going into sailing?”

“I would hardly call it
sailing
.”

“But surely you can see what a disappointment my uncle was.”

“I hardly call being the hero of the Opium War a disappointment.”

“In a family with such longstanding botanical roots, his insistence upon eccentricities—”

“Such as?”

“Such as . . . what?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. What were his supposed eccentricities?”

“
Supposed?
Are you mocking me?”

“I’m merely trying to understand you.”

I sighed. “He and my mother were raised in Essex. From what I have been told, he had a near constant need to be out upon the river.”

“That hardly qualifies him as an eccentric.”

“And he built himself a boat.”

“How very devilish of him.”

“Upon which he sailed far and wide.”

“As a proper sailor should.”

“And when he won a bursary at his entrance to university, he turned it down for a commission in the navy instead.”

“I see. For which provocation he was . . . ?”

“My grandfather didn’t speak to him for many years, and my grandmother never wrote to him, and he was off sailing about when my parents married.”

“And I suppose when he was knighted by Queen Victoria for the valiant service he had offered his country, then . . . ?”

“Then we couldn’t hide our relation to him any longer.”

He burst out laughing.

“I fail to see any humor in the situation.” I reached over and tapped on the lid of a Wardian case, and a droplet of condensation fell onto an orchid’s leaf.

“Perhaps you ought to consider past events from his point of view. It’s not a pleasant thing to be the bane of someone’s existence. I can tell you, from experience.”

“I wish someone would consider things from my point of view. I am being forced to abandon my life’s work. Does no one understand that? If my father and the Admiral have their way, my generation of Williamses will contribute nothing to the record of botany.”

I had been speaking rather more loudly than I meant to and revealing more about my sentiments than I had wanted to.
Confound it!
I took a deep breath. “I never said the Admiral was a bane.”

Mr. Trimble opened his mouth to speak and then closed it up. A look of indecision crossed his face. “Didn’t you?”

“He has done much for my father since my mother died, and I won’t have him disparaged.”

“I never meant to.”

The Admiral
had
done quite a bit for us. Until that moment, I hadn’t quite realized how very much he’d done. He’d gotten my father out of bed, and he’d moved us to Overwich. He’d been . . . he’d been our saving grace. Which made me feel rather mean and very small about my opinions of him. “He simply doesn’t fit. He failed to meet the family’s expectations.”

“Don’t we all? From time to time?”

“Perhaps you have, but I haven’t. I never have. I have done precisely as was expected.”

“But why must expectations always become obligations?
Imagine if he had done as your family expected. Then who would have won Hong Kong for the queen? It’s a well-established fact that he was the naval genius of his generation.”

Could it be that I had been looking at the Admiral all wrong?

Mr. Trimble cleared his throat and continued, “I should confess that I have no great love for my family. And I’ve been wondering what my obligation is to them when I can’t abide by their strictures. So I find your opinion of the Admiral quite illuminating. And rather alarming, if I may be frank. He’s the hero of the realm, and yet you seem to hardly tolerate him.”

“You sound as if you don’t quite fit with your family either.”

“No, I do not. So I must ask myself, if I prefer the woodlands to the meadows, if I prefer sunlight to shade, if my habit inclines to the upright instead of climbing, then why must I live my life twisting and coiling about a tree’s trunk? Why can I not just live as a tree?”

“It’s impossible to change one’s genus, Mr. Trimble. Is that what you’re trying to do? You might as well try to hide your roots and declare yourself to be an owl.” I tucked my feet up on the chair, beneath me. “Your family are not inclined to sheep, then?”

“No.”

“Are they inclined toward botany?”

“No. They are more inclined to excess and dissolution than pursuits such as this.” He shuffled through the pages of one of the journals for a while before he gave up with a sigh. “Do you think it possible to change what one is, Miss Withersby? Fundamentally? At the core?”

“Are you asking again whether a vine could ever become a tree?”

“I suppose that I am.” He looked at me, a crease lining his brow.

“It would seem to be impossible, would it not? Even those plants some believe to be new species are often simply varieties of the old and are prone to reversion.”

“Yes . . . I suppose, in my darkest thoughts, I have often feared the same.”

M
r. Trimble’s strange words stayed with me throughout the afternoon, and I pondered his question. Was it possible to change one’s habit? To modify one’s very nature? God created each corn daisy, each stem of hawkweed, each flower, for His purposes to serve at His good pleasure. Did that mean each creation of His was lovely?

It did not.

There were flowers that gave off the most putrid of smells and twining leaves that could cause a most maddening itch. It did not mean, however, that those creations were any less.

They had to have been made by God. Everything was. And what was the alternative, in any case? To not believe in God? To believe in . . . in simple chance? Or magic? The idea seemed preposterous.

I had to believe that even the meanest of creations served God’s purposes. And yet anyone could see there was a great difference between a thorn and a flower and no hope at all of one becoming the other.

If Mr. Trimble’s family was dissolute, as he had said, did it not stand to reason, that he would eventually become the same?

It was a confounding sort of puzzle.

I supposed I must remember that people could make choices that plants could not. Or . . . perhaps Mr. Trimble was the true representation of his family and the others the aberrations. I rather liked the idea that
they
were the exception rather than him, for—in spite of his taking up my position and his annoying tendency to lecture—the author of all those letters, the possessor of all those hopes and dreams of which he’d written, couldn’t be all bad.

But for how long could one hope to defy one’s own nature? What if
I
was ignoring God’s divine plan? What if my true calling, my one purpose, was, in fact, to marry and bear offspring? What if my botanical investigations were simply self-serving?

I had never before pursued such lines of reasoning, and the whole idea and the unsatisfactory nature of my conclusions unsettled me. Would it not be wonderful if mankind were more like plants? If their habit was plain and they always did those things for which they were intended?

At ten o’clock the next day, the Admiral sent his carriage round for me, and then I went to fetch Miss Templeton at Dodsley Manor. With many columns and pilasters, arches and parapets decorating its substantial façade, it was equally as decorative as she.

After the footman helped her up, she settled into her seat, shook out the sides of her blue many-caped mantle, and then clasped her gloved hands in seeming glee. “I have never ridden in a Berlin carriage before. Can you believe it? But it’s so spacious, so stately; I wonder why it was ever scorned for the Clarence?”

Indeed it seemed as if she did wonder, for she was looking around the interior as if in amazement. But then she turned her
cornflower-blue gaze on me. “In any case, I was ever so excited to read the Admiral’s request. I hadn’t planned on visiting the dressmaker for another month—at least! So what is it you need, Miss Withersby? And how am I to be put to use?”

“I need everything.”

“
Every
thing?”

“Everything. Apparently I’m not suitable.”

“How shockingly delightful! We must make sure my father never finds out. He was so certain, considering how old you are, that you would be an appropriate companion. It’s the only way I could get him to let me go round without an escort—to promise that you would provide the escort for me!”

“You must remember that I’m only doing this to make my father get rid of Mr. Trimble and take me back. With any luck, it should only take a couple more days. You can understand, then, my reluctance to visit the dressmaker.”

“You must never be reluctant to visit a dressmaker.”

“I fear it will be a waste of her time and my uncle’s money.”

“But that’s no reason not to take your wardrobe seriously.”

“What I really need is a new shooting jacket.”

“A new
shooting
jacket! You say the most extraordinary things. I am going to like being your friend very much.”

“Well, you see, the pockets of my current jacket have the worst holes in them, and just last week, I lost a perfectly good specimen because it dropped right through the seam.”

“Then we’ll add a new shooting jacket to the list.”

“I really don’t know what’s required. Although . . .” I reached down into my reticule for the list. “Mr. Trimble wrote down a few things.”

“Mr. Trimble . . . your father’s new assistant? As if
he
could know anything at all about the matter!” She sniffed and reached a hand toward me. “The list, if you please.”

I gave it to her.

She tore it in two and let it flutter to the floor. “
That’s
what I think of Mr. Trimble and his lists! If you have any doubts or questions, just ask me. I will not allow you to go astray. You can depend upon it.”

The dressmaker gestured me over to a velvet-draped corner and said something about cutting my gowns to my stays and for that reason she had better see them, hadn’t she? So she undid my dress, helped me off with it, and turned me round.

“I can’t possibly cut a gown to those!”

I looked down at them and didn’t see anything very objectionable.

“Those stays aren’t even fit to you!”

The dressmaker I’d seen for my London clothes hadn’t objected. “They were fit to my mother, but since she hasn’t any use for them anymore, I didn’t see why—”

“You’re going to have to get new stays before I can do anything with you.” She helped me back on with my dress and then put us both back out onto the street.

I turned to Miss Templeton, who was blinking from our abrupt departure. “I don’t suppose there’s a staymaker in Overwich?”

She nodded and started off. We took care to avoid the channels of foul-smelling brine that ran in rivulets through the streets. I wished I could have avoided the clouds of soot as well, but they seemed to sink toward the ground, filtering the sun’s rays and leaving sooty smudges on the buildings. The town ought to have displayed itself in the sunny golden tones of its sandstone, but thanks to the saltworks, it looked as if it had been doused with dirty dishwater. I always felt as if I ought to bathe whenever I returned from town. Only one of many reasons I avoided Overwich.

Miss Templeton’s disposition, however, did not suffer from the setting. She seemed to know everyone and stopped often to talk. In between her conversations, we visited the staymaker and the glover. It seemed everything required a visit to everywhere. She also extracted a promise from me that we would visit the milliner once we’d ordered my gowns so that we could purchase some hats to match. After two hours had passed, I found myself quite exhausted by the ordeal. I threw myself upon her mercy, hoping to be allowed to go home for a rest before our afternoon visits, but Miss Templeton forbade it. She would not even parole me to a pub.

“We can’t possibly take refreshment while there are still gowns to be ordered. If they aren’t started soonest, you’ll have nothing to wear!”

Back we went to the dressmaker. The woman undressed me once more and sniffed at my new stays when she saw them. “I don’t know if I could call those an improvement.”

“I’ve others on order.”

“At least I’ve something to work with now.” She took my measure and then set about compiling my order. “It’s late in the season, but I assure you we can still provide for your needs. What is it that you desire?”

“I need a dress to make me look like a moonflower.” Remembering the dresses, like Miss Templeton’s, that had been covered in blooms and twisting vines, I thought it best to be specific. “It probably ought to be embroidered with them as well.”

“You want to look like a moonflower . . . ?”

“Exactly, except that the dress should have lots more petals.”

“Petals?”

Miss Templeton was beset by a spasm of coughing. I pounded her on the back until she recovered.

She waved my hand away and then took in a great breath
of air. “Miss Withersby means the gown ought to have a great many flounces.”

“But no sepals.” At least not like the kind that my blue dress had.

The dressmaker was peering at me from beneath a furrowed brow. “No . . . ? Have you lately come from the Continent? I haven’t heard these terms you’re using . . .”

“I just don’t like sepals. At least, not on a dress.”

“Sepals? I still don’t quite understand your meaning.”

“Have you got a piece of paper and a pen? I can show you what I mean.”

I made short work of sketching the sort of gowns the women at the dinner party had been wearing.

“Oh! Yes. Of course I can make you a gown in the style of Louis XV, Miss Withersby.”

“But remember, no sepals.”

She made an appeal to Miss Templeton. “Whatever can she mean?”

I took up the pen to sketch in what I didn’t want. “You see most flowers have sepals. Right here, where they join the stem. But I don’t want any.”

“Oh! You mean a redingote. Of course you wouldn’t want that for an evening gown.” She took up the sketch. “Just leave this all to me. I’ll see you’re well taken care of.”

“Mr. Trimble had said that ordering just one dress wouldn’t do. I’m supposed to be like a day lily.”

“A day lily!” The dressmaker muttered the words to herself.

“A different bloom each day.”

“I don’t quite—”

“What Miss Withersby means is that she’ll need five evening gowns, five day gowns, three visiting dresses, a mantle, a cloak, and . . . and a promenade dress.”

The woman wrote up the order, shaking her head all the while. “And I suppose you’ll want all of these tomorrow.”

“I would be much obliged.”

Miss Templeton laid a hand on my arm. “By the end of the week she’ll need two of the evening gowns, and really, she ought to have one of the visiting dresses tomorrow.”

The woman’s brow rose. “We will proceed as quickly as we can, but even I cannot perform miracles.”

I couldn’t let my most urgent request go unmet, however. “I hate to add one more thing to the list, but I’ll also need a new shooting jacket.”

Miss Templeton grasped my arm. “Oh! And do order a new skirt as well to go with it!”

“I don’t think I really need—”

She smiled. “We’ll just add it to the list.”

After leaving the dressmaker, we went to Woodside to get the Admiral and then presented ourselves to Mr. Stansbury at Overwich Hall.

Miss Templeton looked round the front hall with great excitement. She took hold of my arm and stepped close. “I’ve never been here before!”

“Neither have I.”

“It’s just like a setting for an opera.” Her eyes were full of wonder.

I’d never been to an opera before, but if the setting consisted of vivid reds and gleaming wood, colonnaded balconies and ivory-colored plasterwork, then she was right.

“Would you like to see my glasshouse?”

The Admiral grunted while Miss Templeton clapped her hands. “Oh, yes!”

Mr. Stansbury showed us the way with a sweep of his arm.

We walked through a series of twisting hallways and then the house seemed to leave off and give way to a green-tinted, light-filled paradise of soaring heights, copious plants, and . . . were those
parrots
?