The Flourishing of Floralie Laurel

by Fiadhnait Moser

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  251 Park Avenue South, New York, NY 10010

  Illustrations copyright © 2018 by Bonnier Publishing USA

  Illustrations by Vivien Mildenberger

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Yellow Jacket is a trademark of Bonnier Publishing USA, and associated colophon is a trademark of Bonnier Publishing USA.

  First Edition

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017038871

  yellowjacketbooks.com

  bonnierpublishingusa.com

  For Janet Karman and Janet Armentano

  CONTENTS

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  8

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  June 30, 1927

  If you were to walk through Whitterly End, somewhere along the Here and There Bridge, you would find a little twig of a girl with flowers tucked in her hair and love letters inked on her hands. Her name was Floralie Alice Laurel, and the flowers were for sale, but the letters, well, no one asked about those. Floralie supposed nobody noticed them—or if they did, they were too polite to ask. Except, apparently, for that boy.

  He stood just in front of Floralie, a scraggly thing he was, with untidy walnut hair and chapped lips, even though it was summer. If he were a pet cat, Floralie might have named him “Scruffy” or “Smudge.” He stared at Floralie for a good long minute before Floralie finally said, “Er—G’morning.”

  The boy simply stared.

  Floralie fiddled with the two-inches-too-small sleeve of her school uniform—former uniform, to be precise. “Would you like to buy one?” she said, offering her basket of roses and tulips for the boy to peruse.

  He stared some more.

  Floralie bit the inside of her lip, and then the boy did something quite strange. He slipped his hand into his pocket and pulled from it a fountain pen and a tattered leather notebook. He flipped open the book and scrawled something on the page. How much?

  Floralie eyed him quizzically, then took the pen and leaned over his notebook. For a tulip or a rose?

  The boy took the pen. For a poem.

  Floralie laughed and quickly covered her mouth to hide the gap in her teeth. We don’t sell those.

  The boy took back the pen. It’s okay, he wrote, you don’t have to write. I can hear fine.

  “Oh,” said Floralie. “I thought—” She averted her eyes. “I thought you were deaf.”

  The boy shrugged. No. I can hear okay. I just don’t like to talk.

  Floralie opened her mouth to speak, but instead took back the pen. I don’t mind paper, though, she wrote. I don’t really like to talk either. In the corner, she sketched a sprout of mugwort—dimpled blossoms and sun-stretching leaves—short, like baby arms. There was just something about mugwort flowers that felt happy.

  As the boy read, a crooked smile broke his chapped lips. They bled a little, but he didn’t seem to mind. He took the pen again and then began to write something a bit longer. When he finished, he turned it over to Floralie. I saw your hands and there are poems on them. I like poetry, and I’d like one of yours, please. I’ll give you whatever I’ve got in my pocket.

  Floralie gazed down to the love letters on her hands. They were written in black ink across her palms and had become a bit smudged in the late-afternoon heat. They were not the romantic sort of love letters, though. These were for the sort of person you love so much that it hurts to say the word “love.” Indeed, Floralie’s words wandered and rambled, but nowhere on her hands would one find the word “love.” Instead, words like “missing you” and “needing you” and “leaving you” and “forgetting you” snaked up and down the lines of her palms.

  It didn’t matter, though, because that person would never see Floralie’s words, even if they were written on paper instead of skin, and even if Floralie knew the address, and even if Floralie were back safe and sound at her old home in France. Because some words are too precious to give away, even if they’re meant for someone else. And sometimes, words hurt so much that you’ve got to keep them somewhere outside of your head, or they might gobble you up from the inside out. That was what Mama used to say, before she disappeared.

  Floralie tilted her hand so the boy could not read the letters, then took the pen. Sorry, they’re not poems. They’re letters, and I don’t sell those, only the flowers. I’m sorry.

  The boy took the book and scanned her words. He glanced up and twitched his mouth with disappointment, then took off into the crowd.

  “Wait—” Floralie cried, and she chased after him, forgetting all the ladylike manners she had been taught at Mrs. Coffrey’s School for Young Girls. She barreled through the crowds of shoppers and vendors, children and mothers. “Hey—come back!”

  His disheveled hair bobbed just beyond a tall man in a tweed suit. Floralie stumbled past the man, flowers flying out of her basket. Finally, she caught the boy’s shoulder. He turned, wide-eyed, as the crowd swirled around them like daisies caught in a dust storm.

  Immediately, the boy knelt down on patchworked knees and began to gather the fallen tulips. Floralie bent down as well, and what she noticed about the flowers were their colors. Shadowed in the boy’s hands, perhaps the tulips would seem pretty as babies’ smiles or flamingo wings. But Floralie knew better. Colors were a mysterious business, and Floralie just so happened to know all their keen tricks. She was, after all, a painter—which was more to say she was a seer—because, really, all painting was, was learning how to see properly.

  The tulips’ highlights, colors like ballet slippers, Floralie would paint with a pleasant mixture of titanium white and alizarin red. Their shadows, though, she would paint a muddy swamp of a color—alizarin mixed with viridian green and a hint of cadmium orange. But the shadows, however ugly, were what gave the flowers life. Floralie’s mother used to say the same about people. Broken pasts and shattered presents, uncertain futures without half a chance of happiness, those stories were what made people human. Mama knew that stories made people dance. That dance made people feel, and feeling made people fear, and fear was ugly. She knew fear was ugly. But fear, like shadows, looked up to beautiful, wonderful things. That was one of the things Floralie missed most about Mama.

  As the boy handed Floralie the tulips, his cheeks blushed the same colors as the petals. Floralie took the flowers, but as the two stood, she also took the boy’s book and pen, and wrote:

  I’m Floralie.

  Most people were too polite to laugh when they learned her name—but Floralie could always tell when they wanted to. Laughs hid in the nooks and
crannies of noses and cheeks, turning ears the color of holly berries. They could not hide from Floralie.

  But this boy hadn’t a drop of manners in his body. He didn’t even try to hold back his laughter; he simply cracked another off-kilter smile and laughed. But it was not an ordinary sort of laugh. It was a quiet laugh, a whispery laugh, a laugh sprung from joy instead of cruelty. Floralie couldn’t help herself from joining in.

  The boy’s eyes wrinkled with his smile, and Floralie noticed they were the same honey color as the ramshackle cottages that lined the streets of Lower Whitterly End. And when his laughter settled, he stared for a moment as if memorizing Floralie. Then, he gave her a nod and disappeared into the bustle.

  Floralie stood there for a while, wishing the boy had told her his name. Perhaps he would be back around. Or perhaps not. He was a slippery sort of boy, the kind Mrs. Coffrey would have called a “street rat.” But Floralie thought he looked more like a mouse, which, of course, Mrs. Coffrey would have thought an odd thing to say, but it was true. The boy really did look like a mouse—not in a bad way, just in a mouse-ish sort of way. It was then that Floralie realized she, too, was like a mouse. She was like the boy, and though she knew hardly anything about him, she was sure of this: They both knew how to disappear.

  A haze of perfume hung like storm clouds over a field of lavender and cornflowers, pretty blues and periwinkle pinpricks. The perfume shop was one they visited only on special occasions. The occasion on this day happened to be the most beautiful sunrise Mama and Floralie had seen in a long while. Mama and Floralie wove through the rows of glass bottles filled with magic liquid. They glittered under crystal chandeliers, the light following Mama like a spotlight down a stage. She glowed like a lightning bug, daisy-blond hair swept over her shoulder and pale skin stretched smooth over pink-blushed cheekbones.

  Floralie stopped at a clear bottle labeled LA DANSE DE MINUIT. Mama kneeled down to Floralie’s level and whispered, “These are fairy potions, my wildflower. Bottled unicorn tears, mermaid scales, and phoenix breath.”

  Floralie dabbed a bit of the perfume onto her finger and sniffed the soft, flowery scent, a scent so strong and sweet it seemed to take her by the hand into a fairyland far, far away.

  “It smells pretty,” Floralie said. She looked into Mama’s garden-green eyes. “It smells like you.” And though Floralie didn’t say it, she believed her mother must be brewed of all the magic around her. Her mother must be part fairy, part enchantress, part angel. Floralie could hardly imagine anyone on the earth meeting Mama and not falling in love with her. She was perfect.

  Mama tucked an angelica flower on the shelf behind the Danse de Minuit perfume and said, “That one’s for inspiration.”

  Hot summer fog rolled down hills and through alleyways, into Floralie’s shoes, between her aching toes. There were no happy couples strolling about tonight for Floralie to sell flowers to, nor were there street performers to sing merry tunes and draw crowds. So Floralie, basket of coins jingling slightly less noisily than usual, ambled down the cobblestones toward her brother’s shop. But as she walked, she thought about the gray surrounding her, and how it wasn’t really gray at all, because if Floralie were to paint the fog, she would paint it cobalt blue and ultramarine violet and viridian green and even a fleck of yellow ochre here and there.

  The roads were thin and twisty, quiet but for the shopkeepers flipping their door signs from OPEN to CLOSED. Floralie had become accustomed to counting lampposts to guide her home when it was rainy or foggy, which happened to be most of the time in Whitterly End. Back when Floralie lived in France, she would count fireflies on her way home, watch them glint along walls of ivy and peek out from behind rosebuds. She hardly ever had to walk in the rain then. Everything was different then.

  Just past Floralie’s twenty-second lamppost, nestled between the cobbler and the Whitterly Library, was the flower shop. The top half of the Dutch door was swung open, and a figure, somehow caught between boy and man, was silhouetted in the frame. Slender built and long legged, he leaned over the front desk, elbow on the desk, head in his palm. As a car rattled by, headlights blazing through the mist, a fleck of light winked across his thin-rimmed glasses, lighting his furrowed brow.

  Nerves zipped through Floralie’s arms and legs as she neared the door. Nevertheless, when she came upon it, she creaked open the lower half and slunk inside. The shop was a small speck of a thing with pots toppling over pots and flowers tucked into nooks and crannies. It smelled of perfume and ballet, of things lost but never found.

  The ceiling drooped low in places, and though Floralie could stand beneath it without problem, her twenty-year-old brother, Tom, had to hunch. He reminded Floralie of a camel, the way his shoulders crouched, and Floralie could almost see him promenading through the desert. He was a lonely creature. He stood there now, the figure at the desk, hunched over his papers beneath a bluebell-shaped table lamp.

  As a breeze blew in, a small slip of paper fluttered to Tom’s fancy leather shoes, the kind of shoes with pointed tips and soft-as-snow footsteps that he could hardly afford. Sometimes, Floralie thought he wore them only to pretend he was a university student instead of a shopkeeper. To pretend he had chosen university instead of Floralie, to pretend that the money he had been saving since he was five years old had gone to his own studies rather than Floralie’s upbringing. To pretend that Floralie hadn’t gotten expelled from Mrs. Coffrey’s finishing school but months ago, and to pretend that all was well and shiny, sleek and smooth. He shook the paper off without a care, taking no notice of Floralie’s presence.

  He was making a sound. What was it? It was a jagged, whimpering sort of noise one might expect from a puppy or a baby. Was Tom crying? Floralie treaded in slowly, then quietly, gently, she breathed, “Tom?”

  Tom’s head snapped up as if struck by lightning. He cleared his throat, spared a quick glance in Floralie’s direction, and spoke in what Floralie gathered to be an attempt of a dignified tone, “Floralie. Lovely to see you—er—just drop the basket by the daffodils, will you? Best be off to bed now.”

  “Tom . . . ,” said Floralie again. “What’s on the desk?” Her voice was low, and her words barely sounded like a question.

  Tom sighed. “Nothing you need to worry about. Now off to bed.” He wouldn’t even look at her.

  “They’re debts, aren’t they? We’re running out of money.”

  “Floralie, please, this is no matter for children—”

  “I’m nearly twelve—”

  “Precisely.”

  Floralie inched closer to Tom and reached a gentle hand up to his shoulder. “You don’t have to protect me so much—I can handle things, Tom; you don’t have to keep it all inside—”

  “ENOUGH.” Tom banged his fists on the desk and lowered his head as Floralie leaped back. “Go to bed, Flory. Please. I love you.”

  Floralie felt a jab in the pit of her stomach; her throat tightened and tears welled behind her eyes. “I know you do.”

  Tom pursed his lips, then muttered, “Grandmama’s coming tomorrow.”

  “What?” breathed Floralie. “Why—what for?”

  “She telephoned today saying she wishes to ‘inspect’ you.”

  “Oh,” said Floralie. “Inspect.” The word tasted like prunes.

  “You must behave yourself tomorrow. That means no daydreaming, no skipping or hopping about, no paint on your dress, and no writing on your hands.” He sighed, and then added, “You know what this means, don’t you, Flory? You do know?”

  Floralie tipped on her heels, feeling dizzy all of a sudden. She knew exactly what it meant. If Grandmama didn’t like what she saw, she would stop funding Tom and Floralie, and Floralie had a sneaking feeling she wasn’t going to like what she saw. Guilt swelled in Floralie’s stomach as she swallowed the visions of her expulsion letter she had received that sunny May morning. How it turned her world gray. “Y-you’re right. I think I should be getting to bed.” She dropped the basket full of c
oins on the counter, then turned for the door and hurried down the street.

  They sat in silence on the train ride back to Whitterly End. Tom clasped his fingers together so hard his knuckles turned white, and Floralie watched him bite away his tears in the reflection of the train’s window. She had said she was sorry. Tom was not angry. But sadness was an affliction Tom knew only too well.

  Floralie leaned back in her seat, next to Tom. “You’ve really messed this up,” said Tom, but he wrapped his arms around Floralie anyway, lying her head in his lap and stroking her curls. “We’ll be just fine, you and me,” he whispered. “We’ll be okay.”

  When Floralie arrived at the ramshackle cottage at the very end of Whitterly End, just down the block from the flower shop, she scurried up the rickety stairs and into her little bedroom with slanted walls and a sagging cot. Tom and Floralie had moved into this cottage after Mama was sent away and after Papa died in France, so it could be just the two of them, with Tom looking after Floralie. Tom had dreamed of going to university, but instead had decided to care for Floralie so she wouldn’t have to live with Grandmama at her orphanage—the Adelaide Laurel Orphanage for Unfortunate Children. Grandmama collected children the way some people collect buttons. She used to tell Floralie that she lost her son, Floralie’s papa, after he went and married Mama. She said Mama stole him from her. But Floralie was little then. She hadn’t understood the way some wounds heal quick and some wounds leave scars.

  When Floralie and Tom first moved in, Floralie’s room had been bare. But she painted flowers upon flowers all over her wallpaper, and her room quickly turned into a beautiful enchanted forest. After moving from France to England, this wonderland was the closest thing Floralie had to home.

  The room was small to begin with, with nothing but a brass-rimmed cot and a raggedy pink blanket, a wardrobe, and a wooden desk piled high with books Grandmama had given Floralie. All the books were about table manners and needlepoint and other things that didn’t interest Floralie very much. However, they did come in handy when she was painting. This was because her paints and brushes were kept high up in a secret compartment of her wardrobe, and whenever she needed them, Floralie would pile up the books on her desk chair and climb up to reach the compartment (which would explain the muddy footprint on A Tidy House Is a Happy House by Mildred Grenshaw). Yes, the room was quite plain indeed, and now so were the walls. It was unnerving.