The Hothouse

Eleanor Fane had been waiting three months for Lord Ashfield’s answer when it finally arrived: a brief note, in an expedient hand, saying that if she could identify what was killing his Himalayan primulas, she was welcome to examine the rest of the collection.

She presented herself at Ashfield Park the following Tuesday.

The hothouse was extraordinary. Lord Ashfield had spent five years in India and returned with two hundred and forty specimens, twelve of which were previously undescribed, and he had built the glass structure specifically for them—temperature-controlled, humidity-managed, arranged by altitude and climate of origin rather than alphabetical order, which was either very sophisticated or very eccentric. Eleanor, who was twenty-six years old and had recently become the only woman to have submitted a paper to the Linnaean Society’s Proceedings in the previous decade, thought it was both.

“The primulas,” she said, moving through the central aisle. “Do you know when the discolouration began?”

“February.” Lord Ashfield was at the far end of the house, watching her from a careful distance that she recognised as uncertainty about the correct etiquette for this situation. He was thirty-three and had the look of a man who had spent five years outdoors doing something physically demanding—he was not what she had expected when his solicitor had written to her in December. “I had them from Kathmandu in January. They seemed to establish. Then in February the lower leaves—”

“I see it.” She crouched by the nearest pot. “Overwatering during the propagation period. The root structure of this genus does not tolerate sustained moisture when it is replicating altitude conditions.” She looked up. “You have reproduced the humidity too accurately without adjusting the drainage.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I had three botanical consultants look at these. None of them identified that.”

“They were looking at the leaves. The answer is in the roots.” She stood. “I can show you the correct modification. In exchange, I want access to the full collection for my monograph.”

He looked at her with an expression she could not quite classify. “Agreed,” he said. “When can you begin?”

She had come prepared. “Now, if you’re available.”

She worked through the afternoon. He worked beside her—she had not expected him to work, had expected him to observe and ask questions at intervals, but he had good hands and learned the drainage technique quickly and followed her instructions without the particular resistance she usually encountered from men who had employed her but had not quite decided they would defer to her. It was, she noted privately, unusual.

By five o’clock the primulas were repotted, three other altitude-sensitive specimens corrected, and she had catalogued eleven of the twelve undescribed. The twelfth was behind a glass partition maintained at a separate temperature—night conditions.

“What is that?” she said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I found it in a valley in Uttarakhand. The local name translates approximately as ‘the flower that opens in the dark.’”

She went through the partition. The plant was night-blooming—obvious from the structure—with a flower form she had never seen described. She pulled her notebook. “I need better light for this one. And it’s late. May I return tomorrow?”

“You may return every day you need,” he said. “There is a great deal of the collection I don’t understand. I would find it—” He paused in the way he had been pausing all afternoon, a gap between what he was going to say and what he actually intended. “Useful. The company.”

She returned the next day, and the day after that.

By the fourth visit, the pattern had established itself: she worked; he worked beside her; they argued about classification in a way she found genuinely stimulating and he seemed to find the same; he produced tea at four o’clock and she stayed until the light failed. By the sixth visit, they had moved past formal address without discussing it. By the ninth, she had begun staying for dinner.

It was on the ninth evening, walking back through the hothouse in the last of the spring light, that she said: “You are not what I expected, Lord Ashfield.”

“James,” he said, which he had told her twice before. “What did you expect?”

“A collector. Someone who wanted the specimens for the status of possession.”

“I wanted them because I was there,” he said. “I was in the valley and I saw things that no one in England had seen and I wanted to bring them back and make certain they survived.” He paused. “I’m aware that isn’t entirely different from what collectors do.”

“It is entirely different,” she said. “The intent is the difference.” She stopped at the primulas, which were recovering well. “What you did was pay attention.”

He looked at her then in a way that was different from the cataloguing expression she had grown familiar with—more direct, less managed. “I’ve been paying attention,” he said, “to a great deal more than the collection.”

The hothouse was very quiet around them, full of the breathing of two hundred and forty organisms from the other side of the world.

“I know,” she said.

He kissed her—carefully at first, with the same deliberateness with which he had learned the drainage modification and engaged in the classification arguments, and then considerably less carefully. She kissed back with the full force of nine days of finding him exactly as interesting as she had refused to admit, and her hands went to his collar, and he walked her to the potting bench at the back of the hothouse and lifted her onto it and kissed her until they were both breathing in an entirely unacademic register.

He undressed her methodically—jacket, pins from her hair, the buttons of her dress—with the hands of someone who intended to do this thoroughly and was not in any hurry. He kissed her throat, her bare shoulder, the upper curve of her breast, and she pulled his coat off and kissed him back, and said, with the directness that had served her well in ten years of botanical argument, exactly what she wanted.

His expression at that was worth everything it had cost to say it.

He knelt before her with the same focused attention he gave her most challenging specimens—nothing cursory, nothing managed—and put his mouth on her directly, his tongue moving in slow deliberate strokes and then tighter, more precise, learning what she responded to and returning to it without deviation. She gripped the edge of the potting bench and let the sound of it go entirely—she was twenty-six years old and a serious natural philosopher and the only woman to have published in the Proceedings and none of that was relevant in the slightest to what his mouth was currently doing, which was dismantling rational thought with the same systematic quality he had applied to everything else. He brought two fingers inside her and worked them with his mouth at the same time, unhurried and exact, until she came in a long shaking wave that she expressed fully and without the faintest trace of academic restraint, his name said twice and then a third time on a wholly different register.

He stood, and she pulled at his cravat, and he helped her, and she reached for him and found him entirely ready, and said so in plain terms, which made him laugh—surprised and genuine, the laugh she had heard only twice before and found disproportionately worth earning each time. She pulled him forward, and he pressed into her slowly, watching her face as he did, and the fullness of it was as complete and overwhelming as she had recently stopped pretending she hadn’t considered, and she said so, and he made a sound at that which she filed immediately as significant data.

He moved, and she moved with him—careful at first, learning the fit of it, and then not careful. She wrapped her legs around him and he changed the angle and she said his name, which she hadn’t planned, and he kept that angle and moved into her at that depth and pace, unhurried and thorough, until she was gripping his shoulders and saying his name again and several other things she had not planned to say, and the second orgasm rose through her longer and broke harder—her whole body pulling taut against him, her hands finding purchase in his shirt—and she felt his rhythm stutter and fail at exactly the same moment: her name in his mouth twice, low and entirely unguarded, and then his weight against her as he shook through it, the hothouse fully quiet around them.

Afterward, the spring light had completely failed. She sat on the potting bench with his coat around her shoulders.

“The undescribed specimen,” she said. “I want the naming rights. That belongs to the first describer.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I’m going to name it after the valley. Not after you.”

“I wouldn’t have expected otherwise.” A pause. “Come back tomorrow.”

“I intended to,” she said.

Outside, Ashfield Park was settling into its evening. In the hothouse, the night-blooming specimen behind the glass partition had opened, finally, in the dark—its flower form unlike anything in any published catalogue, waiting to be properly described.