The Forbidden Orchid Read online

  Violetta’s brow furrowed. “Don’t even jest about that, Elodie. What a horrible thought.” She tapped her fingers against her sleeve.

  Violetta and I looked at the glasshouse again, searching for anything else that would lead to the flower’s whereabouts. “Here!” Violetta pointed. “What is this?”

  I looked closer and saw a faint handprint on one side of the case. My hand fit easily inside the print with room to spare. Whoever had made it had very large hands. I looked on the other side to see if there was a matching print. Maybe someone had thought to lift the entire case to steal it wholesale. There was something there, but it wasn’t a handprint. It was a long scratch, as though made by a tool or some such. “Do you see this?”

  “Could someone have tried to pry the glass out?” asked Violetta.

  “But why, when the door is inches away?”

  Violetta shook her head in frustration. “I suppose we will never know. There’s nothing for it. We’d better join them for tea or else the deacon will think we are conspiring against him.”

  My mind was whirling from the events of the morning, and I would have liked nothing better than a cup of tea, but I would rather gulp down a teacup full of arsenic than sit under the basilisk glare of Deacon Wainwright’s disapproval.

  SEVERAL DAYS PASSED AND THE MYSTERY OF THE MISSING ORCHID still had not been solved. The deacon had come for tea after church on my mother’s invitation, but Violetta and I did not want to see him and so we chose to avoid him by hiding in the conservatory, despite my mother’s protests.

  “We can’t stay in here forever,” Violetta said.

  “I can,” I replied.

  There was a sudden noise coming from a large potted fern in the corner, a little squeak, as though made by a wee mouse, and we both turned toward it. A scrap of blue pinafore trailing on the ground gave the mouse away: our nine-year-old sister, Calla. Small for her age and very shy, Calla was easily upset and hid often.

  Violetta and I exchanged a glance and went to her hiding place.

  “Come on out, dearest,” Violetta said, holding out her hand. Calla shook her head, her curls bouncing.

  I knelt next to the pot, my skirts blooming out over the floor. Calla sat with her back against the wall and her knees tucked up, the fern’s long fronds brushing her face. Her chin was trembling, and she clutched her alphabet picture book against her chest. “Please come out, sweeting. You look so lonely behind my plant all on your own, and I’m too big to squeeze in there with you,” I said.

  Calla looked between Violetta and me, remaining where she was. “Why are men in the house?”

  “Only one man, sweeting,” Violetta said, peering at her over my shoulder. “Deacon Wainwright. You’ve seen him here before. He brings his mamma with him. You’ve seen him at church, too. He’s the deacon. No need to be frightened.”

  “Not him.” Tears gathered in her eyes. “Not him. There are men. Big men walking all over, touching our things. I was on the front step, reading my book, and they came in through the gate and walked into the house without knocking, without waiting for Mary to answer the door. They trod on my book.” Her lip quivered, and she opened her little book—a large muddied mark of a hobnailed boot covered A for Apple.

  “Do you know where they went, dearest?” I asked, trying to keep the fear from my voice.

  She pointed at the ceiling. And then we heard it—the sound of hobnailed boots stomping over the floor boards, sifting through the raised voices of Deacon Wainwright and Mamma. “In the nursery.”

  SEVEN

  I stood and lifted Calla into my arms. She wrapped her arms around my neck and her legs around my waist, clinging on like a barnacle. “Sweeting, I want you to run next door to Mrs. Hardcastle’s house and ask her to send for the village constable. Do you think you can do that for me?” She nodded, her brown eyes wide. I set her on her feet and opened the back door of the conservatory. “Quick now, through the garden gate.” I watched her run across the garden, her sturdy boots swishing through the long grass, and her pinafore ribbons flying behind her. As she turned through the gate in the hedge and disappeared behind the privy, I heard Mrs. Hardcastle exclaim, her little rough-coated terrier, Albert, barking along with his alarmed mistress. My heart thrumming, I felt my pocket to make sure my billhook was there. I grabbed Violetta’s hand, and we ran for the back stairs.

  By the time we reached the top of the landing, the men had progressed to my parents’ room. We heard them talking.

  “There’s a good dressing table. Mark that down as worth a guinea,” one man said.

  The other scoffed. “More like half a crown.”

  “We ain’t here to rob them blind, Mr. Jones. Have a care. A guinea is what I say, and a guinea is what it’ll be. Moving on to items on the dressing table. An ivory comb, a silver brush . . .”

  I flicked open the billhook, and we entered the room. As little Calla said, the men were huge. There were two of them, burly men dressed in long blue smocks. The one speaking, the larger of the men, held Mamma’s porcelain swan-shaped hairpin holder, which Papa had brought her back from China several years ago. The dainty object in his workmanlike hands looked absurd, but he held the object with deference, as though he were used to dealing with such things and knew that it needed to be handled with care.

  They looked up briefly when we entered the room and then returned to their assessment. They were not startled or fearful. They looked like they knew they belonged there.

  “May I ask who you are?” I said, holding out the little knife. “And why you are in my mother’s bedroom?”

  Violetta strode into the room and snatched the hairpin holder from the man’s hands. Several pins fell from the swan’s back and clattered to the floor. “Are you the thieves who stole my sister’s orchid?” she said.

  The smaller man laughed. “We ain’t thieves. And don’t know nothing about no orchid.” He saw me holding out the knife, and his lip curled. “Bill’ook. Two shillings.”

  The larger man scowled at him. “Hush it, you.” The smaller man shrugged and then opened Mamma’s wardrobe and began rifling through her gowns.

  “Don’t touch those!” Violetta barked. She set the pin holder down and squeezed in front of the man. She slammed the door, leaning against it, her arms spread out. “How dare you!”

  “Leave off for a moment, Dawson,” the bigger man said, and then he turned to me. “We’re here on official business for Mr. Erasmus Pringle, miss. I believe you know him to be your father’s employer.”

  “What would Mr. Pringle want with my mother’s hairpins and her gowns?” Violetta asked, her eyes snapping with fury.

  “We’re assessing the value of the contents of the house to be sold to recoup a debt,” the man replied.

  “A debt?” I said, lowering the knife. “What do you mean?”

  The smaller man sat down on the end of Mamma’s bed, bouncing a little, as if to assess the comfort of the mattress and thus its price. “He means your dear old papa never fulfilled his contract, and he owes Mr. Pringle a whole lot of coin, treacle.”

  “Your father has been warned this would happen. Mr. Pringle has written to him, and he’s not replied,” the larger man said. “It’s within his rights to demand recompense, as your father is personally liable for his business debts, which means his possessions can be sold. We’re assessing the value of the house to determine whether that will settle the debt.”

  I swallowed. “Just the contents of the house? That will discharge the debt?” Saying good-bye to our furniture and belongings would be hard to bear, but we’d still have a roof over our heads.

  The man shook his head, suddenly looking very sorry for us. “No, miss. The contents of the house and the house itself.”

  “But where will we live if the house is sold?” Violetta asked.

  “I suppose you’ll have to go on the parish.” The smal
ler man stood up from the bed and returned to the wardrobe. Violetta’s mouth dropped open. “Now, we got work to do.” He took her by the elbows and danced her to one side, Violetta too stunned to resist him. He opened the door and began to shuffle through the contents once more.

  “On the parish?” she finally squeaked out. “Do you mean the workhouse?”

  The smaller man tapped the side of his nose with one short finger. “You’re a clever one,” he said.

  “Look, miss,” the bigger man said to me. “This is only an assessment. If your father fulfills the obligation, then Mr. Pringle is willing to let the matter settle.” He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheaf of papers and handed them to me.

  I opened them and read Mr. Pringle’s demands: Either my father return to China to collect three hundred Queen’s Fancy orchids and burn the forest behind him or he was to repay Mr. Pringle for the prior failed voyage to China, plus recompense for the three hundred Queen’s Fancy orchids. The sum was an astronomical amount that my father could never hope to pay in a lifetime, nor could our house or its contents ever fulfill it. At the bottom of the page was written: For any amount unfulfilled, the aggrieved party will exercise his rights to have Reginald Buchanan seized by the authorities and placed in debtors’ prison until the debt is satisfied.

  EIGHT

  Deacon Wainwright was still in the house drinking tea when Calla came back, clutching our neighbor’s hand. I told Mamma about the men in the house, and then Mrs. Hardcastle informed our astonished mother that the constable refused to come because they were within their right to assess the house.

  “What do you mean?” she said. “What are you saying?” Overwrought and frightened, Mamma stood up and fainted, striking her head on the tea table and necessitating a call from Dr. Thumpston, who dosed her with Chlorodyne and stitched the cut on her forehead.

  There was only one solution left to us, whether Violetta liked it or not: we had to travel to Kew and appeal to my father.

  “I will go and speak with your father at Kew,” Deacon Wainwright said after the doctor had left. Our neighbor and Mary had taken the children upstairs and fed them bread and jam. Violetta, the deacon, and I sat in the sitting room surrounded by empty teacups and a plate full of crumbs.

  “I do appreciate that, Deacon Wainwright,” I said quietly, knowing that Papa would not take kindly to him. “But I don’t think such a visit will be fruitful.”

  “What do you suggest, then?” he said, reaching absently for the cake plate, and then, finding only crumbs, drawing his hand back and pretending to search for his handkerchief inside his pocket instead.

  “Mamma is not well enough to travel, so I suggest Violetta and I go.” I would have to find someone to travel with us. Perhaps my neighbor’s husband would agree to go.

  “All we’ll find is Papa going on about his business, uncaring,” Violetta said, her voice made faint by despair. “He won’t do anything. He won’t.” Violetta sat close to the fire, staring into it, her shawl tight around her. “Our house will be taken. All our lovely things and our books. We’ll be forced to live in the workhouse and made to dress in hessian sacks and pick oakum, even the little children.”

  I made no move to comfort her and tell her she was imagining the worst, because for once Violetta wasn’t being dramatic or relating some plot from one of her gothic novels. The workhouse was a very real possibility for all of us. Our parish’s imposing workhouse lay at the edge of the village, more like a prison than a place of respite, its high stone walls hiding the inmates from view. Workhouses were meant to shame the poor rather than help them, and shame them they did. Very few people who entered the workhouse ever left it, and those who did were unable to remove its stigma. We would never see the young children again, as little ones were separated from the able-bodied. Dahlia would stay with Mamma until she turned two, but if Mamma slipped back into Dr. Thumpston’s cure, she would be sent to an asylum, to lie possibly chained to her bed.

  But I did correct her on one thing. “Papa is not uncaring, Violetta. He loves us and won’t see us fall like this.”

  Violetta didn’t even try to disabuse me. She kept gazing into the fire as though the answer were marked there on the flames.

  The deacon sat forward and took the summons from my hands and read it. “Hmmm,” he said. “It seems this Mr. Pringle will pay for your father’s return to China, but the cost will be added to the amount owed if he fails in his mission. He has your father tightly bound, make no mistake.” He handed me back the contract. “You cannot presume to travel to Kew unchaperoned,” Deacon Wainwright went on, his voice gentle and calming, as a man of the cloth should be, showing me that perhaps the deacon wasn’t as unsuited to his chosen profession as I thought he was. “I will go with you.”

  “Thank you,” I said. And I meant it. We did need Deacon Wainwright to accompany us. We so rarely left Kent, and I was a little terrified of traveling on the train and finding our way to Kew. I was mentally and physically exhausted, and I wasn’t sure I could deal with this new situation without assistance. “I would appreciate that very much.”

  “Elodie . . . I . . . Miss Buchanan,” Deacon Wainwright said. “I hope you will forgive me for acting the cad. You were quite right when you said I was not acting as a man of the cloth. I’ve been told from time to time that I’m too ardent, and that I let my emotions get the better of me. I fear you paid the price.” He held his hand to his heart. “If any of my doings caused you distress, I humbly apologize.” He reached out and laid his hand over mine. “You look quite unhappy. I hope that I can help take some of the burden off.”

  I looked down at his hand over mine, the skin almost translucent, his signet ring on his third finger a somber black. I slid my hand out from under his. “Thank you,” I said.

  Lying in bed next to Violetta that night, I knew she was as awake as I. Terrified by the way she’d looked earlier that evening, I felt my closest ally and confidant slipping away from me. If I lost my sister, I would run mad, truly.

  “Please, Violetta,” I said. “We have to remain hopeful that Papa will help us.”

  She remained quiet for so long I thought she’d fallen asleep. “What if he has another family?” she finally said. “What if that is the reason he’s turned away from us?”

  Violetta had expressed the thought I hadn’t dared to speak myself. There had been whispers to this end in the village. I’d heard one of the Jenkins sisters speaking of it outside of church only last Sunday. She’d stopped gossiping directly she saw me, but I’d heard her.

  My imagination painted a picture of Papa turning down a lane and into a thatched cottage, children tumbling out of the open door and into his arms, followed by a smiling woman, her face filled with love, not knowing that his heart had once lain elsewhere.

  And why not have a new family? Why couldn’t this be the case? As Violetta had pointed out so many times, we didn’t really know our father well. The man in my mind was perhaps a figment of my imagination. Perhaps the attributes I had given him were ones I’d hoped he possessed. Mamma said he had poor judgment, and she knew him better than any of us. They quarreled so much when he was at home, maybe . . . just maybe Violetta was right.

  It wasn’t an uncommon thing, to be sure. Divorce was difficult to obtain, so many men simply severed emotional ties with their first family and began a second one anew, usually in another city or town under an assumed name.

  Adventurers had recently lit the imagination of the public, and even women were turning up at lectures by such notable men as Dr. David Livingston and John Hanning Speke to hear of their travels. Perhaps Papa had such a following as well. Maybe he wasn’t melancholic; maybe he’d fallen in love with an admirer.

  I shuffled my legs under the blankets, suddenly feeling restless. I heard Violetta hiccup, and then a little sob broke forth. I turned toward her, and we clung to each other, crying together as quietly
as we could, keeping our grief to ourselves, because we both knew if everyone in the house heard us, we’d all be lost.

  Deacon Wainwright dealt with everything, and I was indeed grateful. There were many details to traveling that I found confounding, from purchasing the tickets, to stepping on the correct train, to looking for the proper station to disembark. This terrified me the most, as I might have ridden the train to its terminus, possibly to the end of Britain, for all I knew. The deacon seemed full of self-confidence doing these things, as though they were second nature to him. I wish I possessed such ease and worldliness. I studied him carefully at every little task to learn for myself how to do it. I watched as he handed our tickets to the conductor without fumbling, how he opened the door of the train when it came to a full stop and escorted us over the little gap on the platform. When we left the station at Richmond, I noted how he hailed a hansom cab by stepping into the street and holding up an arm. At Kew, he located Sir William Jackson Hooker as though he knew exactly where to find him.

  Papa’s little thatched-roofed house sat on the outskirts of the garden, at the end of the arboretum. It was beautiful, filled with trees I’d never seen before, and it made me sad that the memory of my first visit to the garden would be marred by angst and trepidation. Violetta clung to my hand as we approached the cottage, both of us terrified of what we’d find. But there were no children playing outside, no woman who had replaced Mamma in our father’s affection. Violetta loosened her grip on my hand, and I heard her breathe out in relief.

  The windows were shut, and the curtains drawn over. It looked as though no one was home. And indeed, no one answered when Sir William knocked, and so, after a few moments, he opened the door and we went in.

  The cottage was tiny, with only one room, which was divided in half by a large bookshelf crammed with bottles, plants, and various tools of the botanist’s trade. The rest of the room was sparsely furnished. Two chairs sat near a small hearth: an upholstered armchair with the stuffing poking out of various holes, and a ladder-back chair with a frayed cushion that looked as though mice had been nibbling at it. A steep staircase at the back of the room led to another floor or maybe an attic.