The Last Camellia: A Novel

A PLUME BOOK

THE LAST CAMELLIA

Jane Lee Photography

SARAH JIO
is the
New York Times
and USA
Today
bestselling author of
Blackberry Winter
,
The Bungalow
, and
The Violets of March
, a Library Journal Best Book of 2011. She is also a journalist who has written for such publications as
Glamour
;
Real Simple
;
Redbook
;
O, The Oprah Magazine
; and many others. She lives in Seattle with her husband, three young sons, and a golden retriever named Paisley.

A NOVEL

S
ARAH
J
IO

A PLUME BOOK

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

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First published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2013

Copyright © Sarah Jio, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Cover design: Jaya Miceli. Cover photographs: woman on path © Georgina White/Millennium Images, camellia © Getty Images.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Jio, Sarah.

The last camellia : a novel / Sarah Jio.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-61385-6

1. Women botanists—England—Fiction. 2. Flowers—Fiction. 3. Mystery fiction. I. Title

PS3610.16L37 2013

813'.6—dc23

2012049474

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

C
amellias are one of those flowers that don’t get a lot of fanfare. They’re not as beloved as roses. People don’t get nostalgic about them the way they do about tulips or lilies. They don’t have the fragrance of gardenias or the showiness of dahlias. They don’t hold up very well in bouquets and, when in bloom, it isn’t long before their petals brown and fall to the ground. And yet, I’ve always found camellias to be stunning in their quiet, understated way.

I don’t remember the first time I noticed a camellia. I remember them growing in my grandmother’s garden and blooming, one pink, one white, beside the entrance to my childhood home. Somehow, in my life, camellias were always
there
, gracefully swaying in the breeze.

They’re old-fashioned flowers (trees, really). In Seattle, where I live, many of the homes built at the turn of the last century feature old camellias presiding over the front yards. In fact, when my husband and I bought our first home in Seattle—a 1902 Victorian—it came with a camellia. I still remember its enormous trunk and how it stood tall, with branches that reached up to our second-story bedroom window.

While you’ll still find these gorgeous trees in modern-day gardens on occasion, camellias have stepped back to make room for more popular garden choices—rows of lavender, ornamental grasses, azaleas, and Japanese maples. Fashions change; garden preferences do too. And yet, I still have a soft spot for camellias.

When I set out to write this novel, I had an image in my mind of a single camellia tree with big saucer-size blossoms and shiny, emerald leaves. And then the rest of the scene came into view: row after row of camellias. An
orchard
.

I began to wonder if the camellia in this imaginary orchard could be a rare variety, perhaps even the last of its kind. And, as it turns out, a few very rare camellias do exist in real life—sequestered away in private gardens and public conservatories around the world, most notably in England.

When I close my eyes now, months after completing this novel, I can still see the gardens of Livingston Manor. I have to admit, it makes me a little sad to know that this place doesn’t really exist, because I’d love more than anything to visit. I’d sit in the orchard and gaze out beyond the stone angel to the carriage house and admire the camellias.

I hope this story brings you closer to your own beautiful, private garden, whether it’s right outside your door or tucked away in your heart.

SJ

—The meaning of the camellia flower, according to the Victorian language of flowers

Prologue

A cottage in the English countryside

April 18, 1803

T
he old woman’s hand trembled as she clutched her teacup. Out of breath, she hadn’t stopped to wash the dirt from under her nails. She hovered over the stove, waiting for the teakettle to whistle as she eyed the wound on her finger, still raw. She’d clumsily cut it on the edge of the garden shears, and it throbbed beneath the bloodstained bandage. She’d tend to it later. Now she needed to come to her senses.

She poured water in the little white ceramic pot with the hairline crack along the edge and waited for the tea leaves to steep.
Could it be?
She’d seen a bloom, as clear as day. White with pink tips. The Middlebury Pink, she was certain of it. Her husband, rest his soul, had tended to the camellia for twenty years—sang to it in the spring, even covered its dark emerald leaves with a quilt when the frost came. Special, he’d called it. The woman hadn’t understood all the fuss over a scrawny tree, especially when the fields needed plowing and there were potatoes to be harvested.

If he could only see it now. In bloom.
What if someone from the village finds it?
No, she couldn’t let that happen. It was her responsibility to make sure of that.

Years ago, her husband spent sixpence on the tree, which was then just a sprout peeking out of a ceramic pot. The traveling salesman told him it had been propagated from a shoot at the base of the Middlebury Pink, the most beautiful camellia in all of England, and perhaps even the world. The only known cultivar, which produced the largest, most stunning blooms—white with pink tips—presided over the Queen’s rose garden inside the gates of the palace. Of course, the woman hadn’t believed the tale, not then, and she had scolded her husband for his foolishness in spending such a high price on what might be a weed, but in her heart, she did love to see him happy. And when he looked at the tree, he was happy. “I suppose it’s better than squandering money on drink,” she had said. “Besides, if it blooms, maybe we can sell the buds at the market.”

But the tree didn’t bloom. Not the first year or the second, or the third or fourth. And by the tenth year, the old woman had given up hope entirely. She grew bitter when her husband whispered to the tree in the mornings. He said he had read about the technique in a garden manual, but when she found him spritzing the tree with a mixture of water and her best vegetable soap, she didn’t care that he said it would ward off pests; her patience had worn thin. Sometimes she wished for a bolt of lightning to strike the tree, split it in two, so her husband could stop fawning over it the way he did. She thought, more than once, about taking an ax to its slim trunk and letting the blade slice through the green wood. It would feel good to take out her anger on the tree. But she refrained. And after the man died, the tree remained in the garden. Years passed, and the grass grew high around its trunk. The ivy wrapped its tendrils around the branches. The old woman paid no attention to the camellia until that morning, when a fleck of pink caught her eye. The single saucer-size blossom was more magnificent than she could ever have imagined. More beautiful than any rose she’d ever seen, it swayed in the morning breeze with such an air of royalty, the old woman had felt the urge to curtsey in its presence.

She took another sip of tea. The timing was uncanny. Just days ago, a royal decree had been issued notifying the kingdom that a rare camellia in the Queen’s garden had been decimated in a windstorm. Greatly saddened, the Queen had learned that a former palace gardener had propagated a seedling from the tree and sold it to a farmer in the countryside. She had ordered her footmen to search the country for her beloved tree’s descendant and to arrest the person who had harbored it all those years.

The woman stared ahead. She turned to the window when she heard horses’ hooves in the distance. Moments later, a knock sounded at the door, sending ripples through her tea. She smoothed the wisps of gray hair that had fallen loose from her bun, took a deep breath, and opened the door.

“Good day,” said a smartly dressed man. His tone was polite but urgent. “Upon orders from Her Majesty, we are searching the country for a certain valuable variety of camellia.” The woman eyed the man’s clothing—plain, common. He was an impostor; even she could tell. Her husband had warned her of the lot—flower thieves. Of course, it all fit. If they could get to the camellia before the Queen’s footmen, they could command a fortune for it. The man held a page in his hand, rolled up into a tight scroll. Unfurling it with great care, he pointed to the blossom painted on the page, white with pink tips.

The woman’s heart beat so loudly, she could hear nothing else.

“Do you know of its whereabouts?” the man asked. Without waiting for her reply, he turned to search the garden for himself.

The man walked along the garden path, past the rows of vegetables and herbs, trampling the carrot greens that had just pushed through the recently thawed soil. He stood looking ahead where the tulips had reared their heads through the black earth. He knelt down to pluck a bud, still green and immature, examining it carefully. “If you see the tree,” he said, twirling the tulip in his hand, before tossing it behind him, “send word to me in town. The name’s Harrington.”

The old woman nodded compliantly. The man gestured toward the north. Just over the hill was Livingston Manor. The lady of the house had been kind to them, offering to let them stay in the old cottage by the carriage house so long as they tended the kitchen garden. “Better not mention my visit to anyone at the manor,” the man said.

“Yes, sir,” the woman said hastily. She stood still, watching as he returned to his horse. When she could no longer hear the
click-clack
on the road, she followed the garden path past the pear tree near the fence until she came to the camellia bearing its one, glorious bloom.

No, she thought to herself, touching the delicate blossom. The Queen could search every garden in the land, and the flower thieves could examine every petal, but she would make sure they never found this one.