WILDFLOWER WEDDING

The first hot cup of tea of his life was handed to him by an old woman in a black shawl, on the bank of a creek, five minutes before he was married.

He had not been expecting it. He was standing under the big willow at the bend of Marrow Creek in his one good suit, with his hands clasped before him and his heart going like a frightened bird, looking down the long green slope of the meadow toward the village, where a procession of people was beginning to wind its way between the hawthorns. It was the middle of June. The air was thick and sweet with clover and warm hay, and the sky overhead was the soft deep blue of evening coming on, and the whole valley hummed with bees. He had been standing there for a quarter of an hour. He had straightened his collar four times. And at some point Granny Odell had come up beside him with her stick, and without a word had pressed into his hands a thick white mug that was almost too hot to hold.

"I want you to drink it," she said.

"Madam, I do not think that I am able to swallow anything."

"You will drink it, Your Grace, because you are shaking so badly that you will frighten the child, and because I will not have a man stand up before the whole of the Hollows with a face the color of a candle." She folded her arms. "It is only tea. It has honey in it. Drink it while it's hot, before it goes cold on you."

He looked down at the mug.

The steam curled up from it in a small gold thread, catching the light. It smelled of black tea and honey and something green and faintly bitter, a leaf from the garden. He thought of the cups on his study desk, one every morning at five, poured and tended and left to go cold, while he stood at the window and counted the hours until the day was done. He thought of his mother's cup, abandoned on a table in the garden at the age of seven, in the hour when he had learned that nothing in a house is ever really finished. He had not drunk a hot cup of tea in eight years. He had never intended to. It had seemed to him a kind of disloyalty.

She would have told me to drink it, he thought. She would have told me to stop being such a fool.

He lifted the mug and drank.

It scalded his tongue. It was too hot, and too sweet, and he gasped and nearly dropped it, and the tears sprang into his eyes. But it was tea, hot, real, living tea, and it went down his throat like a warm hand and spread outward through the whole of his chest, and he stood there under the willow with his eyes streaming and the mug clutched in both fists and began to laugh.

"That is the most wonderful thing that I have ever tasted," said Soren.

"It's only tea," said Granny gruffly. But she turned away to blow her nose.

…

They had asked for a small wedding, and the Hollows had taken it as a personal insult.

Three hundred people came. They came on foot from the village and the Calder seams and the farms along the river, in their Sunday clothes and their working clothes and everything in between, and they brought with them every wildflower within ten miles. It was the oddest thing. Nobody had told them to do it. But the children had gone out into the meadows that morning with baskets, and by noon the creek bank had been transformed into a hanging garden of daisies and buttercups and meadowsweet, foxglove and rosemary and bright blue cornflower, strung in garlands from the willow branches and heaped in drifts on the grass. It was every plant on the list of the contaminated, the great black list of 1796 that had cost the Hollows a hundred years of gardens. Someone had woven them into arches. Someone had tied them in bunches to the benches. A little girl in a clean apron stood at the head of the path, gravely dispensing a daisy to every guest.

"They are saying that it is a statement," said Finch, at his elbow, in a stage whisper.

"It is a statement," said Soren. "It is a very good one."

"I believe it is also a bit of a rebuke to the Botanical Society."

"I certainly hope so."

Finch beamed at him, resplendent in his plum waistcoat, brushed, with a daisy in his lapel the size of a saucer, and a fiddle case under his arm. Soren had not known that he played. It appeared that there was a great deal he had not known about the Archivist. There was a whole band of them, in fact, gathered under the next willow: a long-jawed man with a bass, two boys with fiddles, a stout woman at a concertina, a collier with a tin whistle, all tuning in a ragged, cheerful cacophony. The Hollows band had been playing at weddings for two hundred years. It had never before been permitted to do so within sight of a Wardens' post.

"They have been practicing for a month," said Dorian, coming up on his other side in his gray dress tunic, tall and lean and grinning. "I have heard 'The Miller's Daughter' eleven times this week. If I have to hear it a twelfth, I shall defect."

"You have been practicing too, I think."

"I can neither confirm nor deny it." Dorian clapped him on the shoulder, and his hand was heavy. "You look terrified."

"I am, and I have been terrified since breakfast."

"It's a good sign." The lopsided smile softened. "I would be worried if you weren't."

…

She came down the meadow at sunset.

He saw her first as a flicker among the hawthorns, a pale figure in the gold light, walking slowly between the lines of villagers with her brother on one side and her small green-eyed sister-to-be on the other. The crowd drew back to let her pass. A murmur ran through it. Then he lost the power of speech.

She wore no crown. She had left the circlet of iron and roots at home, on the table in the cottage, and in its place she wore a wreath of wildflowers, simple and a little crooked, plaited that morning by Lila out of daisies and clover and the pale blue flax that grew along the creek. Her dress was cream-colored, of plain village linen, hemmed with a narrow band of green, with the sleeves pushed up to the elbow and her feet bare in the grass. Her hair was down. It fell in a long dark wave over her shoulders. She carried nothing in her hands but a single stem of calendula, bright orange, the first flower she had ever grown at Vandermere. And the scar on her neck, the delicate green-gold tracery of the root, shone clear in the evening light, and she held her head high and did not cover it.

I wish my mother could see her, he thought.

It was an odd, unexpected, piercing thought, and it did not hurt as he had feared. It was like a note of music heard across a field.

Lila ran ahead, scattering handfuls of petals. Jonah walked proudly at Tamsin's side, straight as a sapling, in a borrowed coat that was too short at the wrist. And behind them, at the end of the procession, a little apart, in a plain brown cotton gown with a gray shawl about her shoulders and a straw bonnet that hid most of her face, came a tall slender woman who walked as if she was not sure whether she was permitted.

…

He saw her at once, and so did Tamsin.

She stopped in the middle of the path. The procession stopped with her, and a faint rustle went through the crowd as heads turned. Soren felt a cold chill run down the back of his neck. The woman in the straw bonnet had halted ten paces behind, and stood now with her hands clasped before her and her eyes on the ground. She raised her head. Beneath the brim her face was pale and thin, with new lines at the corners of the mouth, and her eyes were brown.

They were a plain, warm, honest, ordinary brown. He had never seen anything so beautiful.

"Delphine," said Soren.

He had not known that she was to be released. The Convention's court had sat for eight weeks, in public, in the Great Hall, and had found her guilty on three counts of conspiracy, and had sentenced her, after long argument, to seven years of supervised service in the work of dismantling the Wards. She was to scrub, and carry, and haul, and sign her name to every order. She had begun in the first week of May. He had visited her once, on the site at Ash Row, and had found her in a canvas apron and gloves among a crew of former inmates, hauling wire from a fence, with a smear of soot on her cheek. She had not looked up. He had not intended to speak. But he had stood there for a minute, watching her work, and she had lifted a crate of rusted staples to a wagon with a face of such grim concentration that it had seemed, for the first time since he had known her, that she was not performing.

"I have a day's leave," said Delphine. Her voice was low and quite steady. "The warden was very kind. I did not wish to intrude. If I am unwelcome, I shall go back to the station at once and think no more about it." She swallowed hard. "I only wished to see it. I wished to see it done."

The meadow was silent. Three hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on her, and a number of them were hard.

Tamsin turned around.

She stood in the path with the sun on her face and the wreath crooked on her dark hair, and looked at the woman in the brown dress, and Soren saw her consider. It did not take long. A small line appeared between her eyes, and cleared. She looked at Delphine for a long moment, with those clear gray-blue eyes that had never in all the time he had known her allowed a falsehood to pass, and then she gave a single slow nod.

"You may stand at the back," said Tamsin. "There is a place by the willow."

Delphine bowed her head. For a moment her shoulders trembled. Then she moved aside without a word, off the path, and took her stand at the back of the crowd in the shade of the bushes, and the villagers closed over the gap.

…

They were married in the shallows.

That was Granny's idea, and nobody dared to contradict her. The old woman stood in the creek in her black shawl, up to the ankles in the clear running water, with her stick planted in the gravel, and said that the marriage of one of the green blood had always been made in the water, and that she would be damned if she would see it done otherwise on the account of a few Gilded manners. Soren took off his shoes. Tamsin stood in the current beside him, barefoot, with the calendula in her hand and the cold bright water running over her feet, and Granny took their joined hands in her gnarled brown ones.

"I haven't any book," she said. "I never learned the Gilded words. I am only going to ask you what I would ask any two folk in this valley, and you can answer it as you like." Her voice shook, and steadied. "Will you keep faith with one another? Will you tell each other the truth, even when it costs you? Will you remember, when one of you falls, that the other is there to catch?"

"I will keep faith, and I will tell the truth," said Soren.

"I will," said Tamsin, "and I will footnote it."

A great gust of laughter went up from the bank. Granny sniffed and wiped her cheek with the back of her free hand, and made no attempt to hide that she was doing it.

"Then there's nothing more to say. Give her the ring, boy, and kiss her before I start to howl."

He gave her the ring. He had forgotten that he had it, in his pocket, and his hand was trembling so badly that it took him three tries to get the little silver band onto her finger. She laughed at him. She held his hand steady with her other one. And when it was done, and the plain uneven circle of dull silver, which had once been the signet of the Aldridge line, gleamed on her hand in the last of the sun, she took from her own pocket a ring of her own: a thin braided twist of green root, supple and living, with a tiny white flower at the knot. She slid it onto his finger. It was cool, and slightly damp, and it smelled of the creek.

"It will grow," she said. "I have been told it is rather unmanageable. You may have to prune it."

"I will prune it every spring," said Soren, "for the rest of my life."

He kissed her.

…

It was a cacophony of joy.

The meadow erupted. The band struck up, a skirling, stamping, rollicking reel, and three hundred people who had never in their lives been permitted to dance in a field began to whirl. Children raced between the legs of the grown-ups. A collier swept up a washerwoman and spun her until her cap flew off. The long wooden tables were uncovered, and there was food, enormous heaps of it, roast chicken and ham and pies and new potatoes and fresh bread and strawberries in cream. Lila danced with Jonah, and then with a Bayou boy, and then with Mrs. Ketteridge, who had the energy of a girl of twenty. Dorian took the stout concertina player round the meadow twice, to a thunder of cheering. Granny sat in a kitchen chair at the head of the table with her stick across her lap and a cup of elderberry wine in her hand, and wept without any pretense whatever, and told everyone who came near that she had known it all along.

He danced with his wife at dusk.

They did it on the grass by the creek, alone, a little apart from the others, in the blue light under the willow. The band had slowed. The boys with the fiddles struck up a tune that he did not know, a lilting, aching waltz, and the stout woman took up the thread on the concertina, and the whistle floated over it like a bird. It was not a ballroom piece. It was not played in strict time, nor with any particular polish. It sounded like a thing played by people who loved it.

He took her in his arms.

It was nothing like the other time, in the Winter Garden at midnight, with the silent glass and the moon. It was warm, and noisy, and the grass was damp under their feet, and she smelled of crushed daisies and creek water and honey. She laid her cheek against his shoulder. He felt the thin ring of root on his finger brush her hair.

"I once said something to you," he murmured, "in a garden. I think you will remember it."

"I remember every word."

"I said that I would rather lose an empire than live one day without you."

"And I said that the world had a way of listening," said Tamsin. She tilted her head back, and the light caught in her eyes, and she was smiling the small crooked wicked smile he had learned to love. "I have been meaning to tell you for some time, Soren, that I think it did."

"Did what exactly?"

"It listened to you." Her smile widened. "It is a good thing that you lost one, then."

He laughed, and pulled her closer, and they went on turning in the blue dusk to the music of the fiddles, under the first stars, while the whole valley sang.

…

Later, when the fires had burned down and the last of the dancers had gone staggering home, they lay on their backs in the long grass by the creek.

The night was soft and warm. The moon had not risen. The sky above them was a great black bowl of stars, so many and so bright that he could have read by them, and the creek ran beside his ear with its low continual chuckle. Her head was on his arm. Her wreath of daisies lay crushed on the grass beside her, and her hand was tucked in his. He felt, for the first time in his life, entirely and completely still.

"Finch gave me something this morning," he said.

He had been holding it against his chest all evening, under the coat. He drew it out now, a single folded sheet of heavy cream paper, soft with age at the creases, and she turned her head. It was from the leather folder, the one that Finch had carried to the roof of the tannery. The Archivist had pressed it into his hand at dawn, in the cottage doorway, with his round face working. Your mother wrote it, he had said. She gave it to me the week before she died. I was to give it to you on your wedding day. He had added, in a faltering voice, that he had hoped to do it eight years ago.

"Will you read it?" said Tamsin.

"I have, twice. I should like to read it to you."

She put her head on his shoulder. He held the paper up to the starlight, where the faded ink was just legible, and in a low even voice he read.

My dearest Soren,

If you are reading this, then you are grown, and you are happy, and you have found someone who tells you the truth. I do not know her name. I hope that she makes you laugh. I hope that she is cleverer than you are, because you will need it.

I am writing this with a bad pen at a bad table in a bad light, and I am very afraid, and I have never in my life been so certain of anything. I want you to know that I am not sorry. I have been a wife and a mother and an Empress, and none of it was a mistake. I was born in a village by a creek that no map shows, and I came to Highmark with a letter and a needle, and I met a man who bought a ribbon. If I had it to do again, I should do every bit of it.

I have hidden a great deal from you, my darling. I did it because I was frightened, and because I wished you to have a childhood. I am sorry for that. But I want you to hear this from me, whatever else they tell you. The green is not a sickness. It never was. It is the most beautiful thing that I have ever known, and it lives in your sister, and in me, and in a great many people whom you have not yet met, and one day you will have to decide what to do about it. I do not know what you will choose. I think you will choose well.

Be gentle when you can, be brave when you must, and listen to the water.

The roots will hold you.

Your loving mother, Adeline.

…

He did not weep.

He had thought that he would. He lay very still, in the dark, with the letter laid against his chest and the stars blurring a little overhead, and what he felt was neither grief nor joy, but something larger than either, a vast quiet widening, like the opening of a door onto a field. He heard Tamsin draw a long unsteady breath beside him. Her fingers tightened on his.

"She would have liked you," he said.

"She would have told me that I was too thin."

"She would have said it in the first minute. And then she would have fed you."

They laughed together, softly, in the dark. After a while the laughter died, and she lay with her face turned up to the sky, and he knew from the pattern of her breathing that she was thinking, as she always was.

"I have been making a list," she said.

"Of course you have."

"There are a great many doors that were closed. I should like to open some of them. The first one, I think, is a school." She turned toward him on the grass. Her eyes were two bright points in the starlight. "A real school. Not a charity school, nor a ward school, nor a place where one is taught to know one's station. One school for everyone, Gilded and Rootkin, from the Hollows and the Prairie and the Bayou, where the children sit down together and learn to read, and do sums, and ask questions, and look things up. Where nobody is ever told to keep their eyes on the floor. I want to put it in the Hall, in the east wing, where the infirmary was, with the long windows."

"And what will it be called?"

"Adeline Marsh," said Tamsin. "The Adeline Marsh Academy. I think that she would hate it, a little, because she hated a fuss. But I would like her name to be on something that is not a tomb."

He could not answer for a moment. He reached out and drew her against him, and she settled with her head in the hollow of his shoulder, and the starlight lay silver on the grass.

"I used to think that a crown was heavy," said Soren at last. His voice was rough. "I carried one in my head for twenty-eight years, and I thought that the weight of it was the weight of being who I was. I thought that the loneliness was part of the price." He turned his face into her hair. "It was not the crown. It was the absence of you that was heavy. I did not know that, until it was gone."

She did not say anything. She only held on.

The creek went on talking in the dark, its small bright voice moving among the stones. It was a sound he had heard all his life, in the garden at Vandermere, in the river under the bridge. He had never really listened to it before. It was very clear, and very sweet, and it was saying the same thing over and over, quietly, in a voice like water, like a lullaby sung by someone who loved him.

The night over the Hollows was quiet. From the cottages along the lane, from the open windows and the sleeping porches, not a sound rose but the soft drowsy breathing of the village and the whisper of leaves. For the first time in three hundred years, in the whole valley of the Calder, nobody was coughing.