“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 denig
rating 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.”
“Here.” He took it from my hand, spread it out on the table, and added a flurry of strokes to my outlines, softening the edges of my sepals and rounding it about the petals. It seemed as if he were adding movement, if that were possible. “There. See?”
I did see. I saw that even a colonial sheep farmer was better at my job, and was a more talented illustrator than I. In five minutes’ work he could create a drawing, perhaps not more accurate, but more evocative than one that took me hours to complete. “You really are quite good at this.”
“As I said, it’s nothing. Just a parlor trick meant to amuse ladies.”
He had done that too. Even Miss Templeton, always so cheerful and winsome, had shone even brighter in his presence.
I wondered what it would be like to be Miss Templeton and have everyone leap to fulfill my demands. It would be quite nice, probably. There was something about her that made one hesitate to disappoint her. Could that sort of nature be cultivated? Could I, perhaps, turn myself into a Miss Templeton?
No.
That is, I could. Isn’t that what I had been trying to do? But I felt as if I were playing at something.
“Please don’t think this a slur on your friend’s good name, but the repartee we shared was a simple amusement.”
“An amusement?”
“Of the most effortless sort. I said what was expected, she said what was expected, and we carried on in good fashion. It was rather like being handed the script to a play I had already memorized. I had forgotten how easy it is to speak without having first to think.”
I looked directly into his blue eyes. “I find it troubling that you don’t always do so.”
“When I speak to you, it’s completely different. I have to think what I mean and mean what I say, and it’s both exhilarating and utterly exhausting.”
I glanced back down at the drawing. “If you don’t like it, then you don’t have to converse with me anymore.” I took the paper from him. “I’m sure I won’t mind.” It would be much less annoying on my part.
“But that’s just it. I think you enjoy this as much as I do, Miss Withersby.”
“Enjoy what?”
“Talking.”
I had to think on that a moment. Most of the relationships I had consisted, primarily, of me listening. I was always the writer, taking notes. With my father. With the rector. With Miss Templeton. Perhaps I didn’t write notes for her, but as I observed her, I registered my observations just the same. “I suppose I do enjoy it, Mr. Trimble. Upon reflection, I have just discovered that most of the time, I only listen.”
“That, my dear Miss Withersby, is a very great shame, for I have found that most of the time, quiet people have more to offer.”
“Do we?” At his words it felt as if something deep within my heart had taken wing.
“I believe so. I might go to Miss Templeton for amusement, but I would come to you for thoughtful commentary. And for observation.”
I found myself ridiculously pleased with the compliment.
He had been leaning toward me, but now he sat back with such abruptness that I might have said he scrambled to do so. “How is your campaign for marriage coming?” he asked. “Do you anticipate receiving any proposals?”
I blinked. “Proposals? I . . . don’t thi
nk so. . . .” Proposals? Proposals! “I mean, yes. Yes, I do think so. Soon.” And then Mr. Trimble could go away. That was the whole idea. To make him go away.
He smiled one of those bland, perfunctory smiles that I had come to realize meant nothing at all. “All men should be so lucky.”
“Why?”
He froze under my gaze as if trapped. “Why what?”
“Why should they be so lucky?”
He blinked. “It’s uh . . . It’s just a saying. Just . . . something one says.”
“You mean without thinking? But hadn’t you just got done saying that when you talk to me you do think about what you’re saying?”
He was looking at me with an odd sort of curve to his brow, as if I were a weed that had begun choking out his prized plants. “I really should get back to your father’s notes.”
“But I don’t understand. You—”
“Some things are not worth understanding, Miss Withersby.” He had taken on the manner of a lecturer once more. “In polite society when one is paid a compliment, one generally accepts it without peering beneath it.”
I followed him to his desk. “You mean you simply said something because . . . because why? I didn’t ask you for a compliment.”
“No.”
“I wasn’t expecting one.”
“I never thought you were.”
“So then why did you feel the need to give me one? And a compliment that was so obviously ill-thought at that? Why didn’t you say something you actually meant?”
“I did mean it.”
“But . . .” My head was starting to hurt. “But what did you mean by it?”
“I . . . I do not have the right to say.”
“But I thought . . . I mean I thought we . . .” I thought we knew each other better than that.
“If you would . . .” He gestured me over to the other side of the desk. “You’re blocking my light.”
Blocking his light? I might like to block his head instead. I decided I didn’t like polite society. There was something mercenary and decidedly lacking in it. I took his hand intending to move the pile of papers beneath it into the light. “I think you might find it easier if you—”
He snatched it from my grasp. “I think I might find it easier if you left.”
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