Chapter 2

Saffron woke early Friday morning. She'd never made it into the bath the night before, having been too much of an exhausted mess after crying to Elizabeth, and so she took one first thing.

The bathroom, and indeed the whole flat, was not luxurious by any means. She and Elizabeth had secured it for an outrageous price, one that they could afford on Elizabeth's unimpressive receptionist salary. Little was new or in perfect working order, but they loved it all the same.

That thought recalled her current worries, and Saffron sank deeper into the hot water, allowing it to creep up the nape of her neck and wet her hair.

Money was a concern that had faded from her mind in the last year. She and Elizabeth had scrimped and saved to afford living in London on Elizabeth's salary while Saffron went to school, helped along by the money Saffron's mother had secretly passed along. Mr. Feyzi, the Everleigh family's solicitor, still mailed Saffron a modest check every month.

Growing up in her grandfather's household meant Saffron had never wanted for anything material, and though there had been a number of years without luxuries she'd once considered daily staples, Saffron had never truly known need. When she was hired by University College London as an assistant researcher, those cash-strapped years faded from her memory. Her recent promotion to full researcher had further bolstered their budget.

But after the conference last week, she was facing uncertainty from every angle, including the financial one.

The International Botanical Conference had been eye-opening. She'd expected the same sorts of discussions of scientific progress, methods, and adventures in discovering new species that she heard around the U. She'd prepared herself to face the same sorts of prejudices she experienced daily as the only female member of the biology department. She'd also anticipated coming away full of enthusiasm and ideas for her future research ventures.

What she had not expected was the proliferation of what was termed economic botany, the production of bigger, better, and more fruitful plants, nor that it would be the focus of the entire conference.

She hadn't thought herself so na?ve, so idealistic, that she would not accept a more pragmatic shift in the focus of her field. It made her feel foolish to be so crestfallen that her personal interests in poisons and the plants they came from seemed to be relegated to two industries: medicine and government research. The former she had already dabbled in and would not care to venture further into. The latter she was determined to avoid.

Dr. Aster hadn't been subtle about his intentions in sending her to the conference; he hoped it would change her mind about participating in government research. It hadn't been successful. But what would she do if no one else would pay her to research the things she cared about?

She sank deeper into the water, which was quickly growing tepid in the chilly bathroom. Her class was showing, as Elizabeth occasionally teased her. She wanted to follow her passions without consideration for whether or not it would put food on the table and clothing on her back. Her father, when he began his journey into academia, had certainly never had to worry about that. He'd had the means to study and publish whatever he liked because he always had his father's money and the promise of inheriting the Easting viscounty to fall back on.

The words of Dr. Ingham, her father's former colleague, floated back to her. She'd run into him at the conference, and he had asked questions that she didn't want to contemplate the answers to. She pushed his voice aside, unwilling to let those concerns cloud her already muddled mind.

Saffron had no secondary plan if being a research botanist didn't suit her, unless she agreed to what her grandparents had been pushing her to do for years: leave the university and academic life and return to the stifling arms of the upper classes, where she would marry and reproduce. Marriage and children were not the repugnant part of that equation. It was the expectation that becoming a wife and mother meant she could be nothing else.

The distant trill of the doorbell jolted her from her thoughts. Her luggage was being delivered from the train station, she recalled. She hauled herself from the bathwater.

Teeth chattering, with clinging strands of hair soaking the neck of her dressing gown, she hurried down the hall on cold, bare feet, calling, "I paid the fee at the station. You can leave it on the landing, and I'll collect it later."

She came to a breathless standstill when she flicked open the little cover on the peephole. "Alexander?"

He stood a few feet from the door, peering at her through the decorative metal grate. "Hello, Saffron."

"H-hello," she replied, automatically drawing the lapels of her damp dressing gown tighter around herself, though he could see only a few inches of her face. "What are you doing here? It's ten in the morning. On a Friday."

"It is." He seemed to rock back on his heels, stoic features giving nothing away. "I was hoping to speak with you, if convenient."

"I, er—" She wet her lips. "I've just come from the bath, but—"

"Not convenient, then," he said. "Will you have dinner with me tonight?"

Her mouth fell open, and she quickly snapped it shut, forgetting again that he couldn't see her gaping like a fish. They'd had this conversation before, just a few weeks ago. He'd asked her to dinner but had relented when she'd made it clear that she did not envision a romantic future for the pair of them, not when he'd been adamant about her not continuing to help police investigations. He even went so far as to threaten to report her to Dr. Aster.

That didn't stop her heart from speeding up at the sight of him at her door.

"I just want to talk," Alexander added.

Saffron noted the softness of his voice, and between that and the darkness gathered beneath his eyes and the faint tension around his mouth, she found herself agreeing. "Of course."

He gave her the time and place and was down the stairs before she even had time to identify the feeling welling in her chest. After weeks of her vision for the future shifting and dissolving like a sand dune with no white-flowered Oenothera deltoides to anchor it, she felt hope once again.

The bell rang twice more that day, once just a few minutes after Alexander had left, announcing the actual arrival of her luggage, and once more midafternoon. The first made Saffron's heart leap with uneasy anticipation, imagining it was Alexander, impatient to reveal whatever was on his mind. When the bell rang at three, she'd squashed her anticipation and simply opened the door.

She was immediately confronted by a bouquet of flowers.

A confusing mixture of panic and appreciation flooded her at the sight of the blooms. A brief scan of the colorful arrangement assured her that none of them was poisonous, or at least not in the way the last bouquet she'd been presented with, and the casual manner of the delivery boy who offered them to her with a cheeky grin confirmed that this was the nice sort of flower delivery and not the deadly kind.

She locked the door firmly behind her regardless and took the flowers to the parlor.

With the radiator blasting and a fire laid in the fireplace for the evening, Saffron was enjoying a cozy afternoon. Her favorite plants grew in cheerful pots on the windowsill. Books and magazines sat in curated piles on the coffee table, and a blanket awaited her on the couch. She took a vase from the shelf and set it on the coffee table with the bouquet inside. Dark ivy twined through the bunches of purple verbena and lush, tall stocks of pink hollyhock. Nestled along the bottom were cuttings from a balsam tree, fragrant and sharp.

She puzzled over the flowers only until she recalled the card the delivery boy had sneaked into her hand. A familiar tight, neat script read:

Welcome back from your academic adventure! In case you've been missing the real fun, I've created a little puzzle for you. Drop by sometime, if you can bear to.

Yours,

Lee

Included was an elegant card providing Lee's full name and an address on Harley Street.

Saffron set the card and the note on the table with the flowers with a sigh. First Alexander, and now Lee. What was the world coming to?

Still, she was unable to resist the riddle Lee had created for her, so she went to the bookshelf for the well-worn floriography dictionary she'd refused to return to the university's library. It was a memento of her most recent adventure, one that was still useful, apparently. She quickly decoded the flowers.

Ivy: friendship

Verbena: regret

Hollyhock: ambition of a scholar

Her fingers smoothed over the pointed tips of balsam, puzzling over its inclusion, until she realized that Lee had likely meant balsam, Impatiens balsamina, rather than balsam fir, Abies balsamea. The mistake made her laugh despite herself. She understood his meaning, however—"impatience."

Saffron was not impatient at all to see Lee. With far too many problems nipping at her heels, she would be avoiding her former study partner for as long as her conscience would allow.

It wasn't long after the flowers arrived that the front door was unlocked, opened, then violently slammed shut. Saffron called out to Elizabeth, who didn't answer.

Warily, Saffron peered around the corner, only to be nearly bowled over by Elizabeth storming into her bedroom. She didn't close her door, so Saffron followed.

"Whatever is the matter?" Saffron asked her when she found her flatmate throwing her shoes into her wardrobe.

"I cannot believe him," Elizabeth snarled, starting on the buttons to her suit jacket. Her red varnished nails flashed with each button before she tore the jacket from her shoulders. "The sheer nerve!"

Saffron withheld a sigh. Colin Smith had no doubt done something romantically stupid. "Whatever it is—"

"And after so long!" Elizabeth's volume was steadily rising, along with the pinkness in her cheeks. "Years, he's waited!"

As Elizabeth and Colin couldn't have been stepping out for more than two weeks, Saffron asked, "Who, Eliza?"

Elizabeth's rambling became ranting as she shed her skirt and blouse. She only paused to detach her stockings from her garters and carefully roll them down, avoiding snagging them. When she was barefoot and in her camiknicks, she finally rounded on Saffron and exclaimed, "And he's coming here! He's just going to waltz in here like it hasn't been five bloody years since I've had more than a telegram from him wishing me happy birthday weeks late."

Saffron set her hands on her friend's shoulders, which were significantly higher than her own. "Who are you talking about?"

Elizabeth inhaled, and with the disgust she would display for a moldy potato at the back of the larder, she enunciated, "Nick."

Saffron blinked. "Your brother?"

"Yes." Elizabeth brushed Saffron's hands away and bustled over to her dressing table, where she removed her earrings and rings.

"He's coming to London to see you?"

"That is what his note said," Elizabeth replied before half disappearing into her wardrobe. She came out with a man's union suit, which she pulled on. The long-sleeved undergarment could mean only one thing.

"And he's coming here, to the flat?" Saffron guessed.

Elizabeth did up the buttons and pulled a pair of denim overalls from the wardrobe, slipping them on over the cotton of the union suit. Saffron opened a dressing table drawer and extracted a plain scarf to hand to her friend. She knew better than to try to talk her out of what she would do next.

Elizabeth wrapped her perfectly set sandy waves with the faded pink fabric. "He said he'd be here in four hours. Four. Hours."

An unexpected visitor would likely put off any homemaker, but an unexpected visitor of this caliber meant that the cleanliness-obsessed Elizabeth was moments away from panic. All Saffron could do was stay out of her way and hope that she didn't wear through their floors with frantic scouring.

By seven in the evening, Saffron was more than happy to get out of the flat. It was spotless and redolent of bleach, dinner, and stress. She'd dressed alone for her dinner with Alexander, though she would have preferred preparing with Elizabeth to keep from thinking in circles about how things would go between them. She'd imagined everything from grand romantic gestures to a formal letter of termination, presented by Alexander on behalf of Dr. Aster. She'd known she was being ridiculous, but she couldn't help it. If the continued ranting floating down the hall was any indication, Elizabeth was equally on edge. She'd disappeared into her own bedroom to prepare to receive her brother.

The moment Saffron stepped into the street, where she was greeted by dreary dampness, she began rethinking her acceptance of Alexander's invitation altogether. She could have pressed Elizabeth harder about staying home, though her friend had seemed utterly resolute she'd greet her brother alone.

Though Saffron had grown up with the three Hale children, who'd lived on the property adjacent to the estate where she'd been raised, Nick was eight years older and had never had much time for Elizabeth and, by extension, Saffron. He'd tolerated the girls scampering after him during school holidays, but he'd joined the army right after school, and Saffron hadn't seen him since. She'd heard from Elizabeth and Mrs. Hale about his meteoric rise through the ranks but knew little about his service during the war, other than he'd received a medal of some kind. He hadn't returned to Bedford for the funeral services for the middle Hale child, Wesley, after he fell at Flanders.

Saffron guessed that was perhaps the crux of Elizabeth's problem with Nick—that he hadn't been present to grieve for their lost brother. Saffron, who'd been as much in love with Wesley as her fifteen-year-old heart had been capable of being, couldn't hold that against Nick. Even if he was as high ranking as she recalled, few men had been given leave to mourn their family members.

These thoughts took Saffron from her flat to Kings Road. When she reached the corner before the restaurant where Alexander had told her to meet him, she slowed her steps. Anxiety crept up her neck like the cold autumn chill.

At the very least, she and Alexander could talk about the Amazonian expedition as they dined. That was a safe topic of conversation, hopefully, one that would last them through the meal. She wanted them to be friends. That was the only hope she allowed to take root as she opened the fogged glass door of the restaurant.