The Lady's Slipper (2 page)

When she heard the cry she threw back the sheets and was out of bed before she knew it, despite the chill. Instinctively, she picked up a small earthenware cup, half filled it with water from the jug on the stand and crossed the creaking boards of the landing in her bare feet.

The morning light slid over the whitewash in pale strands. She rubbed the grit of sleep from her eyes and pushed open the door into Flora’s room. Her knees buckled anew at the sight of the bare room and the empty pallet.

It was the cockerel, and not crying after all, that had woken her. She slumped against the doorframe; the little cup dripping from her fingers. She took in the mattress, thin and grey without its covering of white linen and blankets, and tears swam into her eyes. Moths had already started to eat away the cushion on the chair where she had kept her nightly vigil. How many nights had she spent, sleepless beside Flora’s waxen face, watching and praying? She turned away, ignoring the dark stone of grief that weighed in her stomach, shut the door again on all the memories. She took a deep breath; she must pull herself together. Life goes on.

Alert now, she cast her mind back to the night before, and the orchid. Had she really stolen it? The remembrance of it seemed strange, like a dream. Everything was unreal since Flora died–dark and watery, as if she were drifting aboard a rudderless ship.

She made her toilet quickly, glad of the icy water in the bowl. She rubbed her face hard with the muslin cloth and a tingle of warmth crept back into her cheeks. She picked up the looking glass and saw a woman, white as alabaster, stare back at her through troubled pale blue eyes. Seeing herself, she blushed. She had stolen the orchid.

For the first time since Flora’s death she felt a rush of excitement, an appetite for the day. Her breath clouded the surface of the mirror, so she hurried to layer heavy underskirts under her gown, smoothing down the dark taffeta folds and pressing the black lace-trimmed collar against her shoulders. Downstairs, she added a shawl and hastily tucked her unruly copper hair under a white coif. She stepped into her black bootees, not bothering to fasten them, and opened the door into the garden.

The tongues of her boots flapped as she hastened to the summerhouse along the grass so as not to waken Thomas with the noise of her wooden soles on the path. Under the apple trees windfalls had already made green trails in the white of the dew. The dogwood stems–red stripes against the scullery wall–naturally caught her attention, and the whirl of a snail-shell caught in the leaves of the periwinkle. Her passing eye took each small detail and stored it as a future vignette to be captured in paint.

The sun had just risen, but the air was damp as a wet stocking. These days she did not sleep well and her restless wanderings in the night often led her out to the stone summerhouse, her private place where she could breathe easily, a place she found comfort in the familiar, solace in her paints and pigments. Her portraits of Flora were there; she had hung them along the walls, like a living presence. The octagonal shape of the building meant that, whichever way she turned, Flora’s face smiled down on her.

She lifted the lady’s slipper onto the table and stared at its strange, almost unearthly appearance. It was essential to catch the moment before the flower faded. She could not quite believe she had done it. She, Alice Ibbetson, was a thief. There were thieves in the stocks on the green–people who were rough and dirty, covered in slops. Like everyone else she ignored them, but felt a sting of guilt as she went about her business.

Of course, this was a little different; she was not really a thief but a rescuer preserving nature’s wonders. She was perspiring slightly and wiped her fingers down her skirt. Nobody had seen a lady’s slipper flower for more than twenty years. If her skill was enough, in future times little girls like Flora would be able to pick them and put them in water with the buttercups.

She must find a better hiding place, for word would soon be out that it was gone. People called her eccentric because of her passion for plants, but she was not the only person who would be interested in the orchid. The botanists would want it–the new breed of men, men like Geoffrey, who traded in foreign and unusual specimens. It always surprised her how news of a rarity could travel, as if somehow it was carried like a scent on the air. Plantsmen have a sixth sense; like homing pigeons they know by instinct when something calls them home, and this orchid would certainly draw them.

She positioned the plant on the table, where the pearly light from the long casement windows lit up the flower petals and showed off their delicate transparency. The need in her to fix its beauty on paper was urgent. Her fingers itched to take up the brush. She would just make a quick sketch. It was barely dawn–Wheeler would not be awake yet, and although he might guess who had taken it, she doubted if he would have the effrontery to come to the house.

She remembered the first time she had been introduced to him, at Lady Swainson’s house. She had been curious to meet him then, for she had heard about these odd followers of George Fox, men who quaked in their boots at the word of the Lord. She had been ready to scoff at him, but found him so unlike what she was expecting that she was quite unable to do so. She had imagined a small tremulous mouse of a man, not such a tall, energetic, capable-looking person.

Alice repositioned the plant to face her. Just one turn of the sandglass, that should be enough time to capture the rhythmic line of the petals. She drew quickly, then began to grind the pigments in a stone bowl, adding water drop by drop from a small flagon. A dribble of gum was added next, imported at great expense from India. The scrape of the grindstone and the motion of stirring the paint was soothing. It was a ritual she had always enjoyed; the sound of the spatula turning in the bowl took her back to her child hood. She saw again her father’s lace-cuffed hand weigh down on hers as he showed her how to press the gum into the soot.

She traced the forms and spaces of the stems and leaves, sketching the outline in fine sepia brushstrokes. Soon she became engrossed in a world where the only sounds were of sable on paper, the tinkle of rinsing the brushes, and the rising and falling rhythm of her breath. The flower took life on the paper, blooming out of the ivory spaces, waxing slowly into existence. But the light shifted imperceptibly, and she failed to notice that the sand had long since trickled away in the glass.

She did not hear the knocking for a few moments. A rapping on the front door. When sound suddenly cut through her reverie, her brush jumped and skidded across the page. Alarmed, she placed the board silently on the table and tilted her head round the corner of the door. From this position she could not see who was there; the caller was obscured by a topiary box tree. The person stepped back to look at the upstairs windows, and with a jolt Alice recognized the solid dark figure. It was Wheeler. She shrank back inside the summerhouse.

He was at her door already. She cursed her own stupidity. The hour must have grown later than she thought. She regarded the painting with panic-stricken eyes. Hastily she moved the paint water onto the side table. She concealed the watercolour behind a stack of boards against the wall and piled a good few more unfinished paintings in front of it. Her head tilted to one side and straining to hear, she pulled out a picture of a dog-tooth fern, and gently placed it on the stand on the table.

She heard Ella answer the door and some muffled discourse. The click of the door being shut. He must have gone inside. She scoured the room for somewhere to hide the orchid, dithering with the pot in her hands. Her eyes darted round the whitewashed shuttered walls, the wooden panelling, the tall domed casement windows. There was nowhere safe to hide it.

Thinking quickly, she peered through the window to check no one was looking, then crept round the back of the summerhouse, pressed flat to the wall, out of sight of the house. Cradling the pot under her shawl, she ran to the rhubarb patch. This new, odd-looking plant with its ruby-red stalks was being grown in darkness under wooden buckets. She thrust the flower into the muddy hollow under the nearest plant and lowered the bucket back over it. Back round the side wall and inside to the table, where she quickly positioned a fern.

Just in time, for Wheeler and her husband were already walking up the path.

‘Oh, there you are,’ Thomas said. ‘I told Mr Wheeler you would be out here. I know you hate visitors, dear, but he was most insistent to see you.’

‘Good morrow, Mr Wheeler. It is a lovely morning.’ She stood up, aware that she was still breathless. Her voice sounded high-pitched and distant.

Wheeler nodded to her by way of courtesy, but then waited silently, filling the doorway, making no attempt to remove his brown felt hat.

‘Is there something amiss?’ She smiled at him, although her hands were wiping mud surreptitiously off her fingers and onto her painting rag.

‘I think thou knowst what brings me here.’ He looked penetratingly at her shifting hands.

‘And what might that be?’

‘The lady’s slipper orchid has been stolen in the night.’

‘Stolen?’ Thomas looked at him questioningly.

‘Someone has dug it out and removed it. It is a rarity. I have come to ask Mistress Ibbetson if she knows anything about it.’

‘Are you accusing my wife?’

Wheeler’s eyes dropped. ‘She is a flower artist–she may know of someone who would want it so badly they would come in the night to steal it.’ He looked directly at her.

She moved towards the windows, feeling sweat gathering on her palms. The room had grown warm. It was oppressive with the three of them so closely confined, as if the walls were boxing them in.

‘No one of my acquaintance would do such a thing,’ she said, ‘although, of course, reports of the orchid’s discovery will have spread abroad by now. This is dreadful news. Are you saying the plant is gone completely, not just the flower?’ She felt obliged to carry on with the charade.

‘I left my guard of it for only a half-hour. In that time the whole plant was taken.’ He was still staring at her. She wondered if there was mud on her sleeves.

‘Surely, anyone could have taken it,’ Thomas said. ‘Were there any footprints?’

‘No footprints. No iron marks or patten marks at all.’ Wheeler fumbled in his bag. ‘But whoever it was, they left these.’

Alice’s stomach clenched and her collar seemed too tight. He held out the few coins, displaying them on the flat of his palm. His hand was broad and strong, the colour of a brown hen’s egg. The coins appeared tiny in his grasp.

‘How strange,’ Alice murmured.

Thomas took the coins from Wheeler and counted them. Alice wished she had not been so reckless. She flushed and moved away. Picking up a jar of ground pigment, she began to empty it into a dish; her hands were unsteady and she scattered green powder upon the table.

‘If I hear anything I will let you know,’ she said. It was a kind of dismissal. She was feeling stifled under her thick petticoats. She willed Wheeler to leave.

‘Yes, I’m sure my wife will keep you informed. I’m surprised anyone would bother. After all, it’s only a plant.’

Alice bristled. How typical of Thomas. Why could he never understand her passion for flowers, or her need to express them in paint?

Wheeler ignored her hint that he should leave. His eyes raked the summerhouse, taking in the pile of paintings, the table with pestle and mortar, the rows of jars with their vivid array of minerals and powders. He approached the boards where she had hidden the painting of the orchid and picked up the first one. Alice held her breath.

‘I like this,’ he said. It was a study of flowering honeysuckle, shown just as the flowers were turning to berries.

‘Yes,’ she said, coolly, ‘the honeysuckle is over now. That one will be wrapped and sent to the Low Countries. It is a commission for a friend.’

Wheeler examined it for a few more moments before returning it to the front of the stack. Alice maintained her distance as he walked over to the work on the table. The fern was many shades of green, from the palest moss to deepest sage. He studied it closely, looking at it from several angles.

‘But this is deftly handled,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘The way thou hast caught the light in the layers of leaves.’

Alice had always found his old-fashioned Quaker speech strange, and although she had heard rumours that he had been educated, Alice was surprised he should have any appreciation of the arts.

He added, ‘People have told me of thy talent, but I did not expect such fine work.’

She felt exposed, as if he had caught her undressed. She did not want him to admire her work. She did not want anything to do with him. She could not make him understand the flower’s importance. He would have left the orchid to be eaten by deer, or die unnoticed in the winter frosts. She did not want any more of his conversation, she just wanted him to go.

‘My wife has achieved a measure of success of late with her paintings,’ Thomas said. ‘She never stops painting–she paints morning, noon and night.’

Alice was embarrassed. When Thomas talked of her this way it made her feel like a prize exhibit at a fair.

She followed Wheeler’s attention as he looked from the plant to the painting. The painting did not match the position of the plant and she hoped he had not noticed. Evidently not, for he turned away and moved towards the door. He gestured to the paintings of Flora. ‘Is this your daughter?’

‘No,’ Thomas said, not waiting for Alice to reply. ‘It is Alice’s sister. She died less than twelvemonth past.’

‘I had heard it. On the day I moved into my house, I passed the cortege going to the church.’ He turned to Alice and removed his hat. ‘I am right sorry for thy loss.’

‘My wife took it hard,’ Thomas said. ‘We have no children, and Alice misses her sorely.’

Alice remained silent. She had marvelled at Thomas’s noisy outbursts of tears, and then how easily he had found it to put his grieving aside. Alice still had found no way to express her grief and it disquieted her that Thomas trespassed upon it. She felt Thomas’s presence in the summerhouse to be a kind of intrusion into her private world, the world where Flora’s laughing eyes were still indelibly preserved, for Flora had been the last of her family.