Like a Flower in Bloom (22 page)

He walked us off down toward the end of the room, although there seemed to be nothing there worth seeing. “I take such
pleasure in your interest, Miss Withersby. Most people would see my passion as a waste of time.”

“If that’s so, then I’ve wasted my entire life, haven’t I? In any case, I would love to draw your new orchid, if you would allow it.”

“Why should you bother about such things? I’ll have a sketch made for you, if you would accept the gift.”

“It would not be a bother.” I could not fault him for his generosity, but I must confess my fingers itched to take up a pen and a brush and try to match the flower’s subtle shadings, to try and capture the essence of a plant I’d never before drawn.

I turned and saw Mr. Trimble was looking at me as if . . . there must be something, then, that I’d failed to do. Or something I’d done for which I now must apologize. But I could not determine what grievous sin I’d committed. “Forgive me. Thank you.” I hoped that would cover my offense.

“It would give me pleasure to offer it to you. A woman like you shouldn’t have to draw it herself.”

Perhaps not. But what if she wanted to?

Eventually, Mr. Stansbury returned me to Mr. Trimble. After the industrialist had gone, Miss Templeton turned to him. “So what do you think of our Mr. Stansbury?”

“A self-made man, I believe.”

“You say it as if it were a slur!”

“Do I? Then I must amend my tone, for there are some in New Zealand who would call me the same.”

A smile animated Miss Templeton’s lips. “He seems to have developed a distinct fondness for our Miss Withersby.”

He slid a look in my direction. “I must agree with you.”

I wished they wouldn’t speak as if I were not present. “He is very kind. And quite forthright. More so than most, I would say.”

Miss Templeton arched a brow. “I should think he would
do quite nicely, Mr. Trimble, don’t you?” She winked at me behind her fan.

“Do for what?”

“Why, for a husband, of course.”

Mr. Trimble’s eyes were scanning the room. “He might do for some, I suppose, but I hardly think him the man for Miss Withersby.”

Miss Templeton snapped her fan shut. “Why ever not?”

“He might do, but would he do very well?
That
is the better question to ask.”

What gave him the right to concern himself in my affairs? Whatever Mr. Trimble might have thought of Mr. Stansbury, he could not deny the man was impassioned of flowers. If he mixed up his species from time to time or assigned plants to the wrong genus, could that not be forgiven for his ardor? And if the rector’s collections were somewhat haphazardly put together, might that not be forgotten for the absolute kindness with which he treated everyone? Even the objectionable Mrs. Bickwith?

Now that I considered it, I really was quite proud to call the men my friends. Or . . . perhaps not friends. Would that be too forward? Maybe they were just acquaintances. But then again, they were supposed by many to be courting me, so friendship could probably be assumed without objection. They were friends. And as such, they deserved my defense. “I would thank you to keep yourself out of it.”

“But is that not why I’m here? To help with your husband finding?”

He was involving himself much more in the process than my uncle had. On the whole, I much preferred the Admiral’s presence to his. My uncle didn’t seem to care who I spoke to so long as I was speaking to someone. And that was the goal, was
it not? To solicit the interest of someone? Why should I care who that man was? “I can hardly see why it matters to you whom I choose to spend my time with.”

“Because it pains me, Miss Withersby, to think that years from now, I might be imagining you as some man’s glorified assistant instead of knowing that you’re using that brilliant mind of yours for your own purposes.”

Miss Templeton looked as if she wanted to rap him on the head with her fan. “I suspect Miss Withersby would thrive wherever she might be. I think you do her an injustice, Mr. Trimble.”

“I think she does herself an injustice, Miss Templeton. She aims far too low.”

Miss Templeton’s eyes seemed to darken for a moment and then she put a smile on her face. “Come.” She linked an arm through both of ours, securing herself a place in the middle. “Let’s be friends, shall we? I’ve always loved intellectual stimulation, and I would hate for it to be spoiled by such a sour face as yours, Miss Withersby.”

She pulled us towards the punch bowl and then left us there as she tipped her head in greeting to someone and started back across the room.

I crossed my arms. I never knew what to do with them. Nor with my hands. There was nothing normal about holding them naturally when most often I was employing them for some purpose. Upon reflection, perhaps it wasn’t my arms that were the problem. Perhaps it was standing about doing nothing. There was no point to it. I glanced over at Mr. Trimble. “You made it seem, back there, as if you don’t approve of me.”

“I don’t.”

“It might interest you to know that I don’t approve of you.”

He didn’t seem very distraught by my pronouncement. “You’re hardly the first.”

“I don’t see how you can just go round disapproving of people you don’t even know.”

“But I
do
know you.”

“In just five short weeks, you’ve earned the right to meddle in my affairs? I find that rather presumptuous.”

“You forget . . . I’ve earned that right over three long years. So the question I must ask myself, and which you should ask yourself too is, why in God’s name would you wish to spend your life as some man’s transcriptionist or secretary when you’ve a mind of your own between those pretty ears of yours?”

Why did he take my search for a husband as a personal affront? “Because apparently all the research I’ve done, all those papers I’ve written hold no value. Why else would my father offer me up to the general population like some ceremonial lamb?”

“Perhaps because he feels it is his duty. Perhaps because he wishes to see you happy.
Are
you happy, Miss Withersby?”

Happy? How dare he ask me that! “Only a man who has forced himself into my family and then usurped my position would think to ask me that.”

“Because if you aren’t—”

“Make no mistake about it, Mr. Trimble. My first responsibility is to my father’s work.”

“And what of your own work?”

“
My
work? I’ve already told you. No one in a position to judge seems to think that my work matters.”

“I think it matters.”

“And who are you? Do you sit on the board of the BAAS? Are you in a position to decide which papers to publish?”

He said nothing.

“I thank you for your concern, but I’m very nearly beginning to think none of it matters.” The more I pretended an interest in marriage, the more trapped by my efforts I had become. I
wasn’t thinking of papers or books anymore. I was thinking of dinner parties and dances. “Perhaps a marriage to a regular, unphilosophical man is best. It’s worked for so many others. And as the Admiral says, it’s what I was made for.”

But if that was true, then why did the thought of that very thing make me want to cry?

O
ne would have thought I had earned a several day reprieve from social obligations, but Mr. Stansbury’s orchids awaited.

After that visit, however, I had one glorious day to lose myself in the doing of nothing in particular. After that I was subjected to a series of card parties and a round of calls—and then the morning of the rowing party dawned. At least it began early in the day. I was hoping that meant I would be able to spend a pleasant evening at home.

Down at the river’s edge, there were boats for rowing and pony carts for the children. Rugs had been laid out along the riverbank, and sofas and chairs had been arranged atop them. Mr. Trimble proved himself to be an able and attentive escort. Too attentive, perhaps.

“Is there something wrong, Mr. Trimble? You’ve been staring at me for nearly an hour.”

“I apologize. I was just trying to determine . . . There’s something . . . about the way you walk.”

“The way I
walk
?”

“Yes. It’s all wrong.”

“Pray tell, how else ought I to do it?”

“It’s not the action; it’s the motivation. You move as if you’re inclined to be going somewhere.”

“Generally speaking, I believe, that is the case. If I’m walking, I wish to get from where I am to where I am going.”

“Must you try so hard, though?”

“Must I try so . . . ? I don’t know any other way to do it. Do you mean that I should give up going to wherever it is that I’m going?”

“I’m simply suggesting that you might not want to be so pointed in wishing to be elsewhere.”

“You want me to slow my pace?”

“That might help the problem.”

“But then it would waste my time. And your own as well, since you insist upon going everywhere that I do.”

“It’s just that you have a way of making people think you’d rather be somewhere else.”

“We have, in fact, already established, that is the case.”

“But you ought to be making your companions think the only place you want to be is with them.”

“Why do people have to be so demanding? Is it not bad enough that I can’t say what I want to? Now I can’t even go where I wish to?”

“You can. It’s just that you ought not be so obvious about it. I don’t mean to offend you, Miss Withersby. I simply wanted to relay my observations so that you might be able to incorporate them into your efforts.” He caught me by the arm. “Look there, at Miss Templeton. Where do you think she’s going?”

I watched her for a moment as she walked with Mr. Stansbury. I was quite sure that they were headed for the river, but then she stopped to listen to him speak. After toying with her fan for a moment, she took his arm when he offered it and headed
out in the opposite direction. And even then I couldn’t say for sure where they were going. “I have no idea.”

“What do you think her reason is for walking about, then?”

“It looks as if she’s . . . I confess I don’t know.”

“It looks as if she’s simply enjoying conversing with her companion, doesn’t it? What is his name again?”

“Mr. Stansbury. The one you deem unworthy of me.” It did appear, however, that he had a point about Miss Templeton. “It does look that way, doesn’t it?” But as I watched . . . “Good gracious, now they’ve gone and changed directions again!”

“And what’s so terrible about that? We’ve done the same, you and I, haven’t we just now?”

To my great astonishment, we had.

Mr. Trimble burst into laughter. “There’s no good in glaring at me like that. It’s hardly my fault you’ve been talked into not paying attention.”

“Is that what you mean? That I ought not pay attention to where I’m going? For I assure you that on lanes like ours and roads like Cheshire’s, I’m liable to end up wrenching my ankle if I don’t watch where I’m going.”

“Perhaps you could think of it as going for a ramble. You’re out for a walk, not certain of what you’ll find or where your observations will take you. You’re simply . . . enjoying yourself.”

“Enjoying myself?”

“Enjoying yourself. In the same way that I am enjoying being with you.”

“You . . . you are?”

The corner of his mouth twitched. “Strange as it might seem, I am.”

Mrs. Bickwith came toward us on the path. She stopped and simpered at Mr. Trimble. “I can’t say that I remember a more delightful autumn.”

I could. “I can. There was October two years past.”

“But it was so dreadfully wet!”

“Admirably so, I thought. It kept the flowers in bloom and then the fruits came in quite full.”

“I hardly think that compensated for the difficulties it caused in getting about.”

“If you wear sturdy boots and tie your skirts up a bit, they don’t get quite so damp and it keeps the mud from clinging to the hems.”

Mrs. Bickwith’s mouth fell open and stayed that way for several seconds before she shut it up with a harrumph and then took herself off.

I felt Mr. Trimble’s arm shake and looked up to find him trying not to laugh.

“I suppose I’ve said something I shouldn’t have again.”

“Most women, most people, don’t talk about rain and mud with quite the same fervor that you do.”

“I wasn’t talking about mud or rain. I made quite deliberate references to clothing, just as you said I should. Didn’t you hear them?”

He laughed outright. “Is that what you were doing?”

“I don’t see why you should laugh. Miss Templeton is always talking about dresses or hats or . . . other things.”

He steered me about in the opposite direction. “Why don’t we walk over this way for a while?”

Miss Templeton and Mr. Stansbury soon joined us. She and I sat on a bench while the men stood beside us.

Mr. Trimble pulled a small sketchbook and pen from his pocket and began to draw. I peered up at it, but he pulled it away, toward his chest. “Tsk, tsk. Not until I am finished.”

He worked at it for a few moments longer, pen dashing across the page, and then tore it from the binding and presented it to Miss Templeton with a flourish.

“Oh!” She put a hand to her mouth as she gasped with pleasure. “But it’s charming! And so clever. How cunning you are, Mr. Trimble. What skill!”

Mr. Stansbury didn’t look nearly as impressed as she was.

“Do look, Miss Withersby!” She handed it to me. Mr. Trimble had depicted her as a laughing nasturtium. Though it was not colored, I could immediately picture her, cheerfully golden. It was altogether fanciful and quite charming, actually. Her cries drew a crowd of ladies, who soon clamored for Mr. Trimble’s attentions.

He did Mrs. Shandlin as a foxglove, the bloom cleverly turned into a bonnet; one of the party from London, he turned into a dahlia with a multitude of flounces to her skirt; and Mrs. Bickwith, he drew as an overdone carnation, though she seemed to like it well enough.

Miss Templeton clapped her hands in delight. “Now do Miss Withersby.”

“No.” Although I was quite fascinated with his matching of flowers to personalities, I couldn’t think what he must make of me. And in a strange fit of sentiment, I didn’t wish to know.

She laid her fan across my lips to keep me from speaking as she appealed to him. “Yes. Do, Mr. Trimble. You must! It’s only polite. You’ve already done everyone else, so now you must do her as well.”

He scrutinized my face, as if considering what flower best represented me.

I decided to be firm. “Please, no. I’ve spent my life in flowers—I hardly need to be depicted as one.”

He ran a hand over his book. “All the more reason to sketch you.” He drew a pen from his pocket and put the nib to the page, but I put a hand over his to stop him. “How do you—? What sort of pen is that?”

He held it up. “This? It’s a rather amazing mechanism. Doesn’t need an inkwell. It has a cartridge just here.” He tapped a finger to the shaft.

“A cartridge? Inside?” I’d never heard of such a thing. “Where did you get it?” If I didn’t have to take an inkwell about with me to draw, I could draw just about anywhere.

“I had it sent from New York City.”

“New York. As in . . . America?”

He nodded, having already begun his drawing.

New York? That sounded . . . Well . . . frankly, it sounded odd for a sheep farmer to have contacts in New York City. It sounded altogether like the sort of thing Mr. Stansbury might say. Or Miss Templeton. I considered how that might fit with what I knew of his family and could come up with no explanation.

He spent several minutes swiping his hand this way and that over the page. And then he raised his head to look at me.

“You don’t have to continue this foolishness.”

“Foolishness? Are you denigrating my talents, Miss Withersby?”

I felt my face flush. “No. I only meant that—”

“Don’t worry yourself. I know what you meant.”

He was quite adamant about my not seeing the drawing until he was finished, but Miss Templeton stood beside him, sighing now and then at what she was seeing. He made one last grand sweep of his pen and then passed it to me.

He had sketched Miss Templeton with the sort of wholesome exuberance she exuded like a perfume. Mrs. Shandlin, he had sketched as a foxglove, just as tall and slender as she. Me, however, he had drawn as a common bluebell. The petals formed an unfashionably narrow skirt, and one of its pointed bracts he had made into a bonnet. Plain, though somehow elegant. Sturdy, yet delicate. It was altogether unlike me. And yet, it somehow made me wish to be one.

Miss Templeton snatched it from my hand. “Oh, you’ve gone and drawn her exactly, Mr. Trimble.” She gave him a knowing look. “But our Miss Withersby is quite tenacious, and bluebells wilt at the slightest provocation.” She spoke the words as if chiding him.

“Only when they are wrenched from their home. If left to their own, they’re quite the hardiest wildflower in the land.”

“Yes, but if we are not to collect them, then how are we meant to admire them?” She left him with a puzzled frown as she took Mr. Stansbury and went to show my sketch to the gathered women.

I had to give credit where credit was due. “You have a rare talent.”

“For parlor tricks, perhaps.”

We had been abandoned by the others.

He studied my face for a moment and then glanced down at his empty sketchbook. “You don’t approve of my choice?”

“May I remind you of the bluebell, Mr. Trimble? It’s a very common flower. One might even say it’s the commonest.”

“I have never thought so. Indeed, most consider it the kingdom’s favorite flower. And what would our lives be—how would we ever make it through a barren winter—without the hope of our bluebell woods come spring?”

“But bluebells droop under the weight of their own blossoms, of their own expectations. They’re much too fragile for the realities of life.”

“Bend, Miss Withersby. Bluebells don’t droop, they bend. They offer their strength to the needs of the moment.”

I wished it were so. “They’re destined to live their lives in the shadows of others, sinking their roots into the litter of plants long dead. If they spread at all, they do it under cover of those flowers that have gone before them.”

“That’s a sad indictment.”

“It’s a sad state of existence. And . . . don’t think me dismissive of your talents, but I don’t . . . I don’t want to be a bluebell.” He thought I was a bluebell? Truly? I blinked at the tears that had formed in my eyes.

“How can you be other than you are? And why would you wish to be? Surely you know that bluebells don’t have to grow only in the woodlands. They can grow almost anywhere. And some say they do much better in sunlight than in the shade.” He took ahold of my chin with a gentle hand and wiped away a tear with his thumb.

“I suppose you mean to say that . . . although bluebells might not like to be picked, they don’t mind being . . . transplanted?”

“I mean to say that there’s no end to what you might accomplish, Miss Withersby, if you would stop trying to be a nasturtium.”

I knew I shouldn’t have started talking to him again! “I can be anything I want.”

“Can you?”

The next afternoon, after church, I tried out Mr. Trimble’s method of turning people into flowers. If I could draw flowers, didn’t it follow that I could draw flowers as people in the same way that Mr. Trimble had? I looked at my drawing of Lady Harriwick, who I was trying to make into a pansy.

I sighed.

Mr. Trimble pulled up a chair and came to sit beside me. He took hold of my paper and turned it round. “You mustn’t keep such tight control of your pen. It’s all in the recording of an impression. It doesn’t have to so rigorously adhere to the actual lines of the flower.” He took a clean sheet and sketched out a quick cartoon.

“How do you do that?”

He tilted his head as he looked at what he’d just drawn. “I don’t know exactly.”

“The proportions are all wrong but . . .”

“But you recognize it as a pansy, don’t you?”

“Yes.” As incredible as it seemed, I did.

“And you know it’s Lady Harriwick.”

“Yes.” The resemblance was unmistakable. I took hold of my own drawing and began to crumple it.

He laid his hand across mine.

I protested. “It’s no use. I can’t do it like you can.”