Like a Flower in Bloom

by Siri Mitchell

  The rector! I don’t know how I had managed to forget him.

  We arranged ourselves in the Admiral’s carriage and set off in the direction of the rectory. Miss Templeton rhapsodized about the glasshouse all the way.

  “I adored his ferns! And his orchids! And his palms!”

  “One might venture to say that you adored him.”

  “Miss Withersby! How you shock me. I hardly know the man.”

  The Admiral was watching us through a narrow-eyed gaze.

  She saw him watching too. “I think the more accurate statement might be that he seemed to adore you.”

  “Do you think so? I hadn’t really noticed.” Though I was hopeful. I did want to see whether his orchids turned out to be incorrectly labeled.

  “If you didn’t notice, it’s because you were so intent on criticizing him and his orchids.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing him. I was criticizing his correspondent.”

  “You’ll never find a husband if you go about disparaging people’s collections.”

  “I wasn’t disparaging anything. It was a very nice specimen. In any case, if I were him, I’d want to identify it correctly. Wouldn’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I would want; it matters what he wants. Although I have to admit that it seemed he was quite taken with your knowledge of plants.”

  “I don’t suppose the rector has a glasshouse, so I daresay I shall be saved from making any more mistakes.”

  9

  He may not have had a glasshouse, but he did have children. There were a bunch of them running wild through the yard as we alighted from the carriage. One of them ran into me and almost knocked me to the ground.

  The Admiral reached for the boy’s collar but missed. “In my day boys knew how to behave!”

  I could sympathize with their plight, but I couldn’t approve of their antics. In my experience, being bereft of a parent meant more work and less leisure. I wondered that they had time for such aimless pursuits.

  “Good gracious but those children need a mother!” Miss Templeton took up my arm and hauled me toward the front door.

  The rector answered the door, a baby cradled in his arm. “Yes?” He seemed not to be expecting us.

  Miss Templeton smiled at him. “We’ve come.”

  He stood there blinking at us. “May I assist you in some way?”

  “You asked us to view your collections.”

  “My . . . collections!” A pallor swept his face, then was immediately replaced by a flush. “I don’t know that . . . they’re not quite . . .” He pulled the door open wider, stood aside, and flapped his arm toward the interior. “Please. Come in.”

  We entered, Miss Templeton clutching my arm as we did so.

  The Admiral gestured to the yard. “I’ll stay out here.”

  The rector was continuing to speak. “I had remembered about your visit earlier in the day and I put Peter and Elizabeth to work sorting through things. But then the baby needed to be put down and then he needed to be got back up and the children insisted they were hungry and the nurse had gone out and I had an inspiration for a series of sermons and started reading the Bible and I just . . .” He paused to survey a parlor that was in such disorder that it was difficult to know where to walk. “I could make some tea.”

  “Oh no. No, thank you.” Miss Templeton answered on my behalf as well. “Perhaps Miss Withersby could take up where the children left off.”

  He looked at me with surprise. “You’re hungry? I think they were having some bread and cheese.” He picked up a plate holding a half-eaten meal and offered it to me.

  Miss Templeton intercepted it. “That’s so very kind of you.” She put it back down. “But I’m sure the children will still be hungry once they’ve realized they haven’t yet eaten. I had thought instead that Miss Withersby could help you with your collections. I’m sure she’s very interested to see them.” She took the baby from him and made her way to a sofa, where she sat and dandled him on her knee.

  His ears turned red at the tips. “Of course. So sorry. I just . . . I’m not quite certain where to begin.” He put a hand to a tottering pile that sat atop a desk. “I have these.” He then bent to lift a coal hod and dumped a pile of dried plants onto the floor along with a stream of sooty ashes. “And then there are more in there.” He gestured toward a bookshelf, but I didn’t see any.

  “There?”

  He nodded quite vociferously.

  “Where there?”

  He pulled a book from the shelf. “Between the leaves.”

  “You mean to say that all of these books have specimens inside them?”

  “Most of them. Not all of them. At least, I don’t think . . .” He took another book and opened it, spilling a treasure of dried plants from its pages. “Perhaps, yes.”

  I felt my brow lift in amazement. “But you can’t dry specimens in books. You need a press.”

  “I just thought that since most of them are so thick and heavy . . . to spare the expense of a flower press . . . ”

  “You’ll ruin the books as well as the plants.” I took up a particularly thick book and opened it. “You see?” The pages were marked and wrinkled where they had absorbed the plant’s moisture, and the plant itself was discolored.

  “I hadn’t realized.”

  “Moisture mildews the book and the paper eats at the plant.”

  “Good gracious!” He began pulling books from the shelves, holding them by the spine and shaking them. Flattened specimens drifted to the ground like falling snow.

  “Wait!” I closed a hand about a book. “You’ll lose all your field notes if you keep on like that.”

  “I’ve got them all in a notebook that I keep in my desk.”

  “But if the specimens are here and your notebook is there . . . how do you know which belongs to which?” I stooped to the floor and grabbed up a specimen. “This, for instance. How would you know on which ramble you found it and on which date and where it was growing?”

  “Oh.” Comprehension dawned in his eyes. “I . . . don’t.” He took the specimen from me and looked at it as if hoping it might tell him. “So you mean to say all that time and all those walks are for . . .” He looked up at me. “Were they for nothing?”

  Most probably yes. But somehow when I opened my mouth to respond, I just couldn’t find it within myself to tell him. “Why don’t we see what you have first, and then I’ll better know how to advise you.”

  He shook the rest of the specimens from the books and then brought over the pile from the desk. As he pushed them toward my feet, I was left with more specimens than I knew what to do with. It was one thing to be at home in a mess of my own making and another thing entirely to try to navigate someone else’s.

  He brought over a footstool and bade me sit.

  As I gazed at the specimens, my hopes sank in just the same manner they did when father and I had opened Mr. Trimble’s latest crate.

  As I sifted through the plants, I separated them out and placed them into a pile. “These speedwell specimens all seem to be of the flowering stage. Did you not pick buds?”

  He gasped. “Buds? No. It seemed too cruel to pick them and keep the plants from flowering.”

  “Why don’t we make a list of what you need and a list of what you can offer, and we can write the Botanical Society of London to see if an exchange might be made.”

  “I didn’t know there was such a thing as an exchange.”

  “It’s quite extensive, with a great many correspondents. I’d be happy to write the letter for you.”

  “Would you . . . You would?”

  “Correspondence is one of my specialties.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s one of my great deficiencies.” He grabbed up a pen and inkwell.

  “Perhaps you can do the writing.” I decided to start with the speedwell, since he’d collected so much of it. “So you need specimens in bud, in fruit, and with seedpods.” I glanced at the pressed specimens in my lap. �
�Do you not pick your flowers by the roots?”

  “Lavinia always says . . . That is . . . she used to say . . . She’s my wife you see. Or she was. But she says it made an awful mess when I brought the roots home with the flowers.”

  “If you wash the dirt off before you bring them inside, it keeps everything tidy.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You really should include roots in the future.”

  “I shall make a note of it.”

  After finishing with the speedwell, I took up several specimens that appeared to be of the same plant. “And these? Are they lady’s-mantle?”

  “Lady’s-mantle? I had looked for them but thought I’d never found one. Are those . . . are those really them?”

  “I should think so.” I looked at them more closely. “If we boil them up, I would be able to tell.”

  “Boil them?”

  “In order to revive them. Plump them up a bit.”

  Miss Templeton had been entertaining the baby, but she now rose from the sofa and held it out toward the rector. “I don’t know that we have time for boiling at the moment, but I’m sure we could return, Mr. Hopkins-Whyte.”

  “We haven’t any more time?”

  “I’m afraid not.” She said it with a smile, but it didn’t truly look as if she were happy.

  From outside there came a great bellow.

  “Is that the Admiral?” I lifted the specimens from my lap and stood, trying to get a look out the window.

  The rector strained to see as well. “Are the children—?”

  Miss Templeton offered a hand to assist me in the negotiation of the great piles of specimens that lay around me. “I believe the poor Admiral is quite beside himself. Next time perhaps he’ll be content to come inside.”

  We opened the door to find the Admiral sitting inside his carriage and the children pelting it with pebbles. Miss Templeton stood beside me, eyes wide, hands clasped to her bosom. “Whatever are they doing?”

  The rector had come out behind us and shouted at his children. “Look here! Where is Miss Lytton?”

  One of the brood, a tall girl, turned to address him. “She’s cooking supper. She sent us outside to play.”

  “Yes, well, it’s not polite to throw things at people.”

  She was joined by one of the boys. “But he said he was an Admiral. We were just shooting cannonballs at him.”

  The rector stepped around us to gather the children up, taking the younger ones by the hand and then dropping them almost immediately in order to open the carriage door for us.

  He called through the window to the Admiral. “I am so sorry!”

  The Admiral mumbled something as the rector helped us into the carriage.

  As we pulled away, Miss Templeton leaned out the window. “Good-bye! We’ll see you soon.”

  The Admiral was scowling. “I didn’t get treated so rudely by the Chinese. I’ve never seen a more insufferable group of children. And their father a rector!”

  Miss Templeton sighed. “The poor darlings. And without a mother. I suppose that’s why he’s so interested in your niece. I shouldn’t be surprised if he proposes marriage before a fortnight is over.”

  I shuddered to think of owning children like those.

  She continued with a bright smile. “I daresay it would be such a blessing to have a ready-made family. Don’t you think so, Miss Withersby?”

  “A blessing!”

  She frowned. “What girl wouldn’t want a family like his?”

  Me. I wouldn’t.

  She cocked her head as she looked at the Admiral. “I can’t help but wonder if Mr. Withersby counted on his daughter being snatched up so quickly.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Miss Withersby’s attracted the attentions of two of the most eligible bachelors in the county! Don’t you worry, Admiral Williams. We’ll have her married off in no time.” She winked at me when the Admiral wasn’t looking.

  We returned Miss Templeton to Dodsley Manor. She did not make us come in, for which mercy I was heartily thankful. When I returned home and walked into the parlor, Father and Mr. Trimble were conversing about the classification of some flower or other.

  “I think you’ll find Linnaeus’s system works quite as well as any other,” my father was saying.

  “But what about the benefits of a natural system?”

  “What benefits?”

  “I simply think that reducing the entirety of a plant to its sexual system is an unjust simplification of a wondrously complex creation, and de Jussieu’s system—”

  “De Jussieu? Bah, he’s a Frenchman!”

  I collapsed into a chair and levered off my shoes.

  My father looked surprised to see me. “Back already?”

  “I’ve been gone all morning. And the afternoon as well.”

  “I hadn’t realized.”

  “It looks as if I’m to be proposed to soon.”

  “What’s that?” My father had come round the table to stand in front of me.

  “It looks as if I’m to be proposed to soon.”

  “Why that’s . . . that’s . . .”

  Mr. Trimble joined him, staring down at me, hands at hips. “You’ll never be proposed to if you insist upon traipsing about in gowns like that.”

  I glanced down at it. “What’s wrong with it? Neither Mr. Stansbury nor the rector voiced any objections.” With primroses embroidered upon the material and green trim circling the hem, it had been a favorite of mine for years.

  “It’s meant for a summer season.”

  “I like primroses at any time of the year.” However, it was, perhaps, a bit light in weight for just sitting about in. The parlor really was quite drafty. I went into the hall, took up the Admiral’s old shooting jacket and buttoned myself into it, turning up the cuffs. That was better. I turned around, only to find that Mr. Trimble had followed me.

  He stood staring at me, his expression indecipherable. I moved to pass him, but finally he spoke. “Did you give the dressmaker the list I made for you?”

  “Miss Templeton said you couldn’t possibly know what you were talking about, and she tore up your list.”

  “She what?”

  “Tore it up.” I pantomimed her doing it. “In two.” And then I returned to the parlor.

  “I don’t think I like your Miss Templeton.” He spoke from the doorway.

  Settling myself in the chair, I sighed with satisfaction. “The feeling is decidedly mutual.”

  He strode into the parlor. “But I’ve never met the girl.”

  “And she’s never met you, and you both assure me that it makes no difference.”

  “Whatever you do, don’t go out until the dressmaker sends your new gowns.” He gave me a long look and then took a seat behind my old desk.

  “But we’ve agreed to go visit the rector again, and the dressmaker made no promises of a speedy delivery.” I looked past Mr. Trimble to my father, who had not spoken for quite some time. “The rector has requested my help with his collections. I don’t see why I should be kept shut away here when there are plenty of men in society who seem interested to marry me even if I am not properly adorned. Isn’t that the point of all of this? To find a husband?”

  Mr. Trimble scowled at me.

  I scowled back.

  My father gave me a teary glance.

  I had to steel myself against a tug of emotions. He was doing entirely too much work. But he had made his choice; he had cast me aside. The sooner he realized the error of his ways, the better it would go for both of us. I must remain firm.

  My father picked up a pen and returned to the table where they had been conversing when I’d returned home. “Come back here, young man, and leave Charlotte alone. She’s only doing what she’s been asked.”

  Perhaps I was, but Mr. Trimble’s comments worried at me. I composed a letter to Miss Templeton asking for her advice. If it really was such a grave offense to wear a summer dress in the autumn or to go
about with a smear of ink on my bodice, then perhaps it would be wise to refrain from visiting the rector until I received my new gowns. Besides, after the dinner party the previous week and the afternoon’s calls, it seemed reasonable to me that I might have earned a bit of a break from society.

  Miss Templeton’s reply came the next afternoon. It was accompanied by a package done up in string.

  My dear Miss Withersby,

  Please don’t mistake my reply for an endorsement of Mr. Trimble’s point of view. You know that I can’t approve of him. However, I do think there is some merit in your going about in gowns appropriate to the season. In that spirit, please accept the loan of this gown, and don’t worry too terribly much about its return, since I wore it last year. You’re a bit taller, perhaps, than I, but if you can manage to wear it with slippers instead of dancing boots, it shouldn’t matter.

  Yrs etc.

  Postscript: I shall send a note to the rector to tell him to expect us next Monday at two.

  Post-postscript: Please wear this gown on that occasion. As well as to our next dinner party.

  Post-post-postscript: Mr. Trimble will probably try to convince you that you cannot possibly wear the same gown twice in a row.

  Post-post-post-postscript: Don’t believe him.

  Post-post-post-post-postscript: I really, truly detest that man!

  Post-post-post-post-post-postscript: Don’t worry. Before long Mr. Trimble will be but a distant, and very bad, memory. Rather like a nightmare.

  I turned the paper over, but there were no more postscripts. Untying the string on the package, I undid the paper to find a dress in a lovely, almost larkspur shade of blue.

  Holding it up by the shoulders, I tried to view it in my mirror, but my room, being on the north side of the house, was gloomy so late in the afternoon.

  I tiptoed across the hall to Mr. Trimble’s room and opened the door.

  There was hardly anything out of place, the bed being made in an uncomfortable-looking perfect sort of way and his clothes tidily hung on pegs. The mirror was fixed to the wall above the dresser. I moved his pitcher and basin from the dresser to the floor so that I could see myself and then held the dress up to my chin.