The Heiress Effect (20 page)

“That was foul.” Geraldine folded her arms.
“Extremely foul. I don’t care what nonsense you spout. That was
outside the bounds of fair play. And given what Hapford told me of
his conduct…” She made a disgusted sound. “No, Miss Fairfield. I
should have spoken before now. You oughtn’t be alone with him.”

Jane didn’t know what to say. She’d expected
the worst for so long that she didn’t know what to do when it
didn’t come. Her throat was closing up. She hadn’t
expected…this.

Genevieve touched Jane’s elbow. “Maybe you
don’t understand this, either.” Her hands were gentle. “But no
matter what—no matter how we’ve treated you in the past—we aren’t
going to let anything happen to you. I promise.”

Jane let out a slow, shaky breath, then
another. Then another one. She looked from side to side. The
sisters were half a foot shorter than she was, but they seemed to
loom over her. She wasn’t sure which of them saw the suggestion of
tears in her eyes first, which of them moved closer, putting her
arms around her.

“There, there,” Geraldine said. “There,
there. It’s all right. It will be all right.”

She hadn’t known how much fear she had—how
alone she’d felt—until they spoke. And now that they had—now that
they’d broken through that barrier—there was no stopping the flood
of emotions. Jane let out a gasp, and then another one. She had
thought herself entirely alone, a wizened, puny, ugly thing of
spikes deserted in a sea of sand. But when she staggered, Genevieve
caught her.

“There, there,” Geraldine was saying. “There,
there.”

“I’ve felt worse and worse with every passing
month,” Genevieve said. “Dirty. No better than Bradenton. We’ve
been awful, truly awful.”

“It was just so fortuitous,” Geraldine
continued for her sister. “You were the perfect excuse to drive
Genevieve’s suitors away.”

Jane couldn’t help herself. She’d been angry,
frightened, and then taken utterly by surprise. At that, she began
to laugh.

“I don’t think she understands,” she heard
Geraldine say.

Jane straightened. She took a deep breath and
looked around her, at a world that she no longer quite understood.
Then she exhaled slowly.

“Geraldine,” she heard herself say,
“Genevieve, I have a confession to make. I haven’t been very kind
to you, either. Not from the first few weeks.”

They stopped, their matching china-blue eyes
widening.

“I…” She took a deep breath. “I’m this awful
on purpose. I owe you both an apology.”

“Oh, no,” Geraldine breathed, stepping
forward, a smile spreading across her face.

“Indeed.” Genevieve laughed. “Skip the
apology. I’d rather have an explanation. This has to be good.”

The women walked for hours, talking, scarcely
looking at the plants around them.

“You see,” Genevieve said solemnly as they
finally came to the end of their time together, “I don’t wish to
marry. Every time I think of a man pawing over me, I just start to
panic.”

Geraldine patted her sister’s arm. “Mama says
she’ll grow out of it. But Geraldine and I do everything together.
We had our first menses on the same day. It’s foolish to imagine
that this will change when we’ve always differed on this score. So
I am supporting her out of sisterly solidarity until she’s of
age.”

“It’s such a shame.” Genevieve sighed. “I’d
make such a marvelous wife, if I could marry the equivalent of her
Hapford. I’d so love to spend my husband’s money on charitable
works. Instead, I shall be forced to
economize.
So she’s
going to have all the babies. And I shall spoil them and be the
exciting, wicked aunt. I shall give them sweets until they’re all
riled up, and then hand them back to the nurse and be on my
way.”

“You were such a godsend,” Geraldine said.
“We’ve always done everything right until now. Genevieve was so
afraid that she’d be lambasted into accepting some reasonably
ordinary gentleman, and being miserable all her life. And then we
met you. All we had to say was, ‘Oh, no, we couldn’t possibly
attend without our bosom friend Miss Fairfield,’ and suddenly our
invitations dwindled. It was so fortuitous.”

It had been fortuitous for them all. Now that
they’d spoken about it, it had planted the roots of something warm
and real in the remains of their previous cold, twisted
friendship.

“Tonight, then?” Geraldine asked, almost two
hours later as the ladies came back up to the entrance of the
gardens.

Mrs. Blickstall was waiting for Jane, seated
at a bench near the entrance. She glanced up, but if she found
anything odd about the fact that the ladies were walking arm in arm
and smiling at one another with genuine pleasure, she didn’t say
it.

Genevieve kissed Jane’s cheek, and then
Geraldine leaned in and did the same.

“Things will be better now,” Geraldine
whispered. “For all of us. You’ll see.” They waved goodbye.

Mrs. Blickstall stood to go.

But somehow, leaving seemed wrong. Jane
wasn’t sure why until she remembered what she’d left in the
greenhouse. She’d pretended at the time that she hadn’t seen what
had happened, but some part of her still saw that shattered plant
out of the corner of her eye.

“I need a little longer,” she said.

One lovely thing about bribing her chaperone
was that Jane always got her way. Mrs. Blickstall shrugged and
subsided into her seat. Jane walked back into the gardens, down the
path alongside the brook, back toward the greenhouses.

She was a blight. A poison. A pestilence. She
was the enemy of all proper conversation. Grown men would rather be
mauled to death by lions than converse with her.

She’d hated everyone for the jests they’d
made at her expense.

So when had she started believing them? That
she was a plague, that nobody could truly like her? That every word
out of her mouth was a burden for others?

She came to the greenhouses and headed back
to the desert room. She opened the door, hoping her memory
exaggerated the damage. But no. That poor little plant was still in
pieces. Bradenton had hit it so hard that it had split all the way
to the root.

But it wasn’t a blight or a pestilence. It
was just a plant, and it didn’t deserve to die.

Jane didn’t know how to go forward, how to
remake the person she had become. She was never going to be like
Geraldine or Genevieve with smooth manners and perfect skin. She
would always talk too much, say the wrong things, wear the wrong
clothing. But maybe…

Maybe things really could change. A
little.

And she knew the first thing she needed to
do.

Jane had to rap on three doors before one opened
at her knock.

Beyond the doorframe, Jane saw a glassed-in
room and tiny plastic pots of little seedlings. A woman in a dark
dress, covered by a navy smock, her hands in dirt-stained garden
gloves, stood at the door. Her eyebrows were raised as she
contemplated Jane. She took in Jane’s gown—bright orange-and-cream,
with fussy cherubs on her skirts—and those eyebrows went up even
farther.

“Well?” the other woman asked. “What is
it?”

“I’m so sorry to bother you,” Jane said. “But
I was walking in the greenhouses and…there is this cactus.
Something happened to it.”

The woman did not look impressed. “It is a
cactus,” she said. “They usually look like they’re dying. That’s
normal.” She started to close the door.

“No, wait,” Jane said. “It’s been broken to
bits. It looks like a boy hit it.”

The woman looked up and sighed. “Oh, very
well. Maybe I should have a look.” She turned away, rummaging among
items on a metal shelf until she found a small pot, a set of
shears, and another pair of gloves. “Let’s go see this cactus.”

Jane trotted down the hall. She’d expected to
find an old, hoary gardener, or a young man with calloused hands
and a broad accent. But this woman, by her cultured tones and the
stiff, starched fabric under her gardening smock, seemed to be a
well-bred lady.

“I’m surprised,” Jane said. “I hadn’t thought
that the Botanic Gardens would hire a lady.”

“Hire?” The woman huffed. “Don’t be
ridiculous. I volunteer.”

The other woman hadn’t spoken a sentence
longer than a handful of words and did not give the air of being
particularly talkative. “Of course,” Jane said. “I’m sorry.” She
wasn’t sure what she was apologizing for. “It’s in here.”

“I know,” the woman replied. “There’s only
one greenhouse for the desert succulents.” So saying, she swept
into the room. With her smock, she reminded Jane of a nurse—aproned
and gloved and ready to fix any ills. Her eyes lit on the plant
that Bradenton had destroyed. The center had been smashed to bits,
and the little spiky green tentacles lay about it, hewn off.

The lady stopped. “Oh,” she crooned, in a far
different voice than the steel-laden one she’d used to converse
with Jane. “You poor, poor baby.”

She gathered up the clay pot almost tenderly
and gently poked through bits of broken cactus.

“Can you save it?” Jane asked.

“It’s a cactus,” the other woman replied
absently. “They grow in deserts. They’ve evolved to withstand sun
and slicing sandstorms.” She sounded proud. “You can kill a cactus,
but it takes a sustained effort—consistent overwatering and the
like. This piece of vandalism?” She shrugged. “This is just an act
of propagation.”

So saying, she scooped up a little sand into
the smaller pot she’d brought with her. She trimmed the damaged
cactus, removing the broken tentacles, piling them on the ground as
she worked.

“There,” she finally said. “Now we get to the
fun bit.” She picked up the green tentacles and poked them back
into the soil. “First there was one cactus, now there are seven,
eight…” She took the last piece and stuck it into the pot that
she’d filled. “Nine.”

“What? That’s it? No water, no special
potions?”

“It’ll take a few months for them to take
root,” the woman replied. “Water them only when the sand is dry.
But yes, as I said. The cactus is a hard plant to kill.” She handed
the pot to Jane. “Here. For you.”

“Oh my goodness,” Jane said in surprise. “Can
you do that? Just
give
me a cactus like that?” She frowned
and looked at the woman. “Wait. You’re only a volunteer. You
can’t.”

“If you walk out the doors with it, you’ll
own it nonetheless,” the woman replied. “I had not thought that the
intrepid Miss Jane Fairfield would balk at a little thing like
ownership.”

“How did you know my name?”

“I’m Violet Waterfield. The Countess of
Cambury.” She looked expectant.

Jane blinked at her. “Pleased to meet you, my
lady.”

She seemed nonplussed. “You don’t know who I
am? Oliver always does forget the honorary members.” She held up
her left hand in her glove. “Brothers Sinister? Oliver, Sebastian,
Robert?”

“Oliver. Do you mean—”

“Of course I mean Oliver Marshall,” the woman
said.

“How did you know—”

The countess smiled mysteriously. “I know
everything. That’s my duty in our little group.”

“I see,” Jane said puzzled. “What a lovely
vocation.”

“Vocation?” Another huff. “Of course not.”
There was a particularly self-satisfied smile on her face as she
spoke. “I volunteer.”