The Countess Conspiracy (24 page)

“Oh. Just a few crosses with some flowers,” he said with a wave of his hand. “It never really went anywhere. It’s…rather embarrassing. Maybe someday, I’ll figure it out. This way… It’s better for us all.”

She was still holding his hand. “Maybe,” she said softly. “But I’m curious.”

“What, you want the scientific talk?” He smiled. “Come, Violet. I know better than to woo you with confusing data sets.”

“Clearly, you don’t know me as well as you think. Confusing data sets are my specialty.” She inhaled. And it would be easier to try and accept what he’d told her if it were a data set: something laid out like a problem to be solved.

“It’s nothing like your work—not nearly as good—but…” He shook his head. He seemed
nervous,
of all things. After all they’d done together, all they’d said to one another.

“Oh, come on, Sebastian,” she said. “You can just give a little interim report at one of the weekly seminars. Everyone would love it. And I know you said you wouldn’t present my work anymore, but this is yours.”

He didn’t say anything.

“It’s been a week since I took a trip back to Cambridge,” she continued. “The gardeners make sure my plants don’t die, but I’m still responsible for all the crosses. Don’t you think you could…?”

She wanted him to make this clear. She wanted this to be a puzzle of the intellect, one she could think all the way through, rather than one of the heart.

“Oh, very well,” he said. “But… Violet, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

She looked up at him. “Is it very, very explicit then?”

He shook his head. “No.” He gave her a sad smile. “The only one who might find it objectionable at all would be you.”

Chapter Fourteen

“D
O YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON?
”

Violet shifted in her chair at the front of the room, sliding an inch closer to her friend.

Jane Marshall was dressed almost demurely—for her—in a dark blue gown, one that had only a mild excess of ruffles. Two seats down from her sat Jane’s sister-in-law, Frederica Marshall. Miss Marshall—known to the family as Free—had begged to come, to see a real Cambridge lecture. It was hardly that, Violet thought, but still, the young woman looked about the room in avid interest. She seemed to drink in every ordinary detail: the wood panels on the walls, the chairs, worn and scratched from years of use, all lined up to face the front.

“Oliver tells me,” Jane continued in a whisper, “that Sebastian has been rather odd about this lecture. Nervous and secretive. As you and he are friends of such long standing, I thought…” She spread gloved hands. Her gloves, at least, were outrageous—spangled with little glass beads that had been sewn on the soft leather in the shape of peacock feathers.

“He’s told me very little,” Violet said. “It’s just an interim discussion of research he has not yet finished.”

Jane looked about expressively. “An interim discussion?” she asked in amusement. “Any other interim discussion would bring an audience of what, nine or ten?”

There were almost ten times that many onlookers here.

“Well,” Violet said. “It
is
Sebastian.”

Three seats behind them sat that annoying couple that had disturbed his last talk. Violet wrinkled her nose and wished that they, at least, had stayed away.

“And he’s told you not a thing?” Jane frowned. “How strange. He came to Oliver three days ago and asked him to come. He acted as if it were important. But it’s a little-advertised event, and when Oliver asked, he said he was presenting work that had little scientific value. Neither of us can make any sense of it.”

“Well,” Violet asked in her most reasonable tone of voice, “why would he talk to me about his lectures?”

“True,” Jane said after a pause. “True. Still, I can’t help but wonder if he’s planning to spring some horrid surprise.”

Violet wondered the same thing. He’d been so nervous telling her about it. A secret project, one he’d hidden from her for years? One that would have revealed his feelings? It made no sense. None at all.

Three seats down from her, the woman with the high-pitched voice squirmed. “This will be awful,” she predicted. “Won’t it, William?”

Violet refused to let that woman set the mood for the day. She looked straight ahead. Luckily, his response was too low to carry to her.

“How can I bear it?” the woman was saying. “We must put an end to this all.”

Violet sniffed and turned to Jane. But there was no time for further conversation. The door to the side of the room opened; Oliver and Robert trooped out and came to sit by them, Oliver to Jane’s right, and Robert on Violet’s left.

“Did you learn anything?” she heard Jane whisper.

“Not a thing, except I’ve never seen him like this,” her husband whispered back.

That door opened once more and the whispers died down. Sebastian and a white-haired man came forward. Sebastian didn’t look nervous, but then, he never did in company. He seemed perfectly at ease, smiling as if the crowd were a group of dear friends.

“Welcome, welcome,” the older man who’d accompanied Sebastian said. “Welcome to our weekly little—ha!—botanical seminar.”

The nine people in the audience who normally attended the less popular version of this talk chuckled.

“Today, we’re honored to have Mr. Sebastian Malheur presenting an interim version of his latest work. He was quite modest in his description. But I’m sure none of you wish to hear me speak, and so I give you Mr. Malheur.”

Polite applause sounded, and Sebastian came forward.

Sebastian never looked at Violet when he lectured; he’d told her once that if he did, he feared she’d make him laugh in the middle of his sentence. But this time was different. Usually she knew every word that would come out of his mouth.

This time, for the first time in a hundred lectures, she had no idea what he was going to say. He looked up, looked around the room. His eyes came to rest on hers.

Her breathing stopped. God, he was looking at her like that in front of everyone.

“This,” Sebastian said, “is a subject matter near and dear to my heart. One that I have studied for years in hopes that I might determine its secrets.” He hadn’t looked away. Her palms grew cold.

“I wanted to understand everything,” Sebastian said. “But some things are not comprehensible, at least not to me. So this is a talk that touches on failure as well.” Now he did look away from her. “It’s a talk of hubris, too. A talk about how one man thought he could take on something that he knew was larger than him.”

He paused, as if for effect, and then looked back at her. His eyes bored into hers.

“This,” he said calmly, “is a talk about Violet.”

Her insides froze. She could scarcely sit straight. Her head was whirling. He’d…he’d said
her name
in front of everyone. He was going to tell them—everyone would know—

Oh, God, her mother was going to kill her. Lily would never speak to her again. Everyone would know. This was a disaster. This was…

But nobody in the room had turned to her.

“Genus
viola,”
Sebastian said.

Violet unclenched her hands and smoothed her skirts. This was a case of mishearing. He hadn’t said that it was a talk about
Violet.
He’d said it was a talk about violets.

She took a deep breath and tried to relax.

Sebastian turned to the draped easel at the front of the room and whipped away the cloth that covered it.

“Here’s a typical specimen.” He folded the fabric as he talked. “The flower that adds color to gardens all around England. This”—he indicated the first card on the easel, a colored drawing—“is
viola tricolor violacea,
the violet of our country gardens, recognizable by its large, three-colored petals and the palmate stipules of its leaves.”

She could scarcely think for the relief flooding her. She was going to kill him, frightening her like that. Making her think that he was talking about her in front of everyone, when he was merely addressing the subject of flowers.

“Many,” Sebastian said, “think the violet a common flower. That is a mistake, one made only by those who have never subjected it to close study. In reality, the violet is one of the most surprising of blooms. It can be found in woodlands and hedgerows, in alpine desolation and in cultivated gardens. It ranges in color from the flashy gold of
viola tricolor lutea
to the brilliant white of
viola alpestris.
Some species of genus
viola
bloom with flowers the size of my fist; others have tiny blooms, scarcely detectable.”

Sebastian smiled, and Violet felt herself smiling back at him.

“People think
viola
so common,” he said, “that they judge it unworthy of study. Nowadays, when you see a patch of violets, you look past them, wanting to see flashier flowers. But—as I shall demonstrate—the violet is beyond compare.”

And that was when Violet understood. He
wasn’t
talking about flowers, even if everyone else in the room thought he was. He was talking about her.

He started by describing the crosses he’d performed between the various subspecies of
viola tricolor
. But she couldn’t ignore his language. He always had a flair for presentation, eschewing big words and dry sentences in favor of a more colorful, conversational style. This time, his words felt like a caress, not a conversation.

Instead of talking about
viola tricolor alba,
he called it “beautiful violet.”
Viola alpestris
became “resilient violet”;
viola odorata
was “sweet violet.” He was announcing, over and over, to everyone here, how he felt about her.

She’d been avoiding thinking about his feelings in the weeks since he’d confessed them, transforming them into tepid, safe emotions. She hadn’t allowed herself to think it was love. It couldn’t be love. People didn’t love her, not once they knew her.

But he was detailing research—years of research spent faithfully recording every aspect of genus
viola—
done simply so that he could stand in front of a crowd and talk about violets. Lovely violets. Resilient violets. Clever violets.

She was such a fool. He’d told her that this would reveal his feelings. This wasn’t a lecture; it was a…a… She didn’t know what it was. The closest word that came to mind was
seduction.

Every compliment slid around her like an embrace, one she dared not accept. She sat erect in her chair, afraid to move an inch. Afraid to draw attention to herself—afraid that if she so much as breathed too heavily, the crowd would see her laid out on Sebastian’s easels, all her secrets exposed.

But none of them knew. To them, she was a nonentity. If they knew she existed, they thought of her as the Countess of Cambury.

Jane’s hand slid into Violet’s. “Breathe,” Jane whispered. “You have to breathe, Violet.”

Or…maybe, some people would notice.

Sebastian continued on, talking about the crosses he’d performed between species. How
alpestris
and
tricolor violacea
crossed beautifully, but
alpestris
and
calcarata
refused to cross at all. He went through experiment after experiment: failed crosses, crosses with poor germination, crosses that resulted in stunted plants with flower buds that refused to open.

He ended with a chart of his attempted crosses, a spider’s web of confusing marks that he presented with self-effacing humor.

“I’m sure there is an animating principle,” he said, “one that would explain why some species cross and others do not. But what that principle is, I don’t know. One gets the sense that if only one little fact, one overlooked piece would come to light, we could understand it all.”

I have no solution,
Violet thought.
Just blades.

“But until then,” Sebastian continued, “I’ll keep looking. Because I would rather fail at violets than succeed at anything else.”

The applause was light, the questions good-humored. God. She didn’t know what he wanted of her. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do. How was she to look at him?

Three seats down from Violet, the woman of the high-pitched voice folded her arms. “There was nothing objectionable in that,” she complained. “Nothing suggestive at all.”

It just went to show. Some people never understood anything they heard.