A Walk in the Garden
Edenhurst was a fairly spacious estate in its own right. As Elizabeth had guided him the last time, Mikhail thought that wandering the grounds together would give him a good long while walking at her side. Yet when he suggested a stroll, Anastasia hesitated to agree, quite contrary to his expectations.
In the end, he had no choice but to bring up his own wound.
“In truth, I rested a full week so the injury could heal. Igor tells me that walking about would do me good now. Still, walking alone is rather dull, so if it would not trouble you, Miss Anastasia, would you care to join me?”
Anastasia pondered for a long while before nodding with visible difficulty.
Truthfully, just as he had not spoken of it to anyone else, Mikhail had never intended to mention the wound to Anastasia either. He knew she would never scatter his private affairs about the way the other Lauderdales did, yet he felt no need to recount what had been done to him. Would it not make him seem terribly weak? And besides…
She would surely be frightened.
If she learned he was the sort of man used to being attacked like that on the road, she might grow afraid of him somehow. So he had meant to keep silent—only to find himself using the injury after all, simply to get what he wanted.
Mikhail ordered the meal cleared and called for Natasha to prepare them to go out. Natasha hurried to the room and returned with a suitable hat for Anastasia. She settled it carefully so that the fresh braid she had woven that morning would not come undone.
When they came down to the first floor and made to leave through the central entrance that opened onto the garden, Anastasia stopped short and spoke with a frightened look.
“I mustn’t use this door. Please go ahead. I’ll follow right after.”
Wondering what she meant, he looked and saw she was turning toward the servants’ door at the far end of the corridor. Mikhail found it absurd; he told her it was perfectly fine and firmly steered her toward the main doors. She did not come willingly. So he decided a small deception was in order.
He glanced at his side. After a week spent lying still, the wound had closed cleanly. There was no pain left. But…
Mikhail deliberately laid his hand over the place, feigning that it still hurt terribly. Anastasia hurried closer at once, startled.
“Does it hurt very much? Shall I fetch Sir Igor?”
“There’s no need. But… if you would not mind, might I ask you to support me just while we go down the stairs?”
At that she glanced about, then nodded her acceptance. Forcing the pretense of pain, Mikhail thought,
How easy she is to fool.
As they descended, he casually offered her his hand. Anastasia’s face grew even more tense than when she had first agreed to the walk; with a hand that shook violently she took hold of his. She trembled so hard that his own hand shook with it.
Then, with every single step he took, she gripped him tightly, her expression solemn as though the fate of the world hung on it—as if she were truly supporting him.
Mikhail did not bother to point out that what she was doing helped not at all. He had never expected real assistance from her in the first place. He simply chose to find meaning in the fact that Anastasia was the one holding on to him, and holding on for so long.
Once the few stairs were behind them she snatched her hand free at once. The hand that fled as if escaping left him oddly bereft, yet he said nothing. Even this much must have cost her considerable courage.
Walking through the garden, Mikhail halted and looked back at Anastasia following a few paces behind. Two weeks had passed since his arrival. Of those, one entire week he had personally seen to her meals and cared for her. Perhaps because of that, she had grown startlingly healthier in the interval.
Her once-dry hair now gleamed even without rose oil; the patchy, uneven color of her skin had swiftly returned to its proper tone. Her sunken cheeks had filled, and her arms and legs—once little more than skin stretched over bone—had regained a healthy shape.
A body long starved could never become fully robust like anyone else’s, yet in these two weeks Anastasia was becoming a person. Watching her, Mikhail felt something of a gardener’s quiet pleasure.
A fragile sprout struggling in dry earth. Water and nourishment given until color returned to the leaves, the stem grew strong, and at last a flower opened.
At first he had thought of her as nothing more than a small amusement to while away the tedium of Edenhurst. She was proving far more delightful than he had expected. So he began to consider what else he might add to this private entertainment.
First he would have to summon the capital dressmaker’s madame again. For fabric they could use the finest goods from Ils and Flanders that arrived in the port of Sokolov. Since she still wore a hat without fail, several new ones ought to be made as well. And…
His gaze dropped to the feet just visible beneath her skirt. Anastasia wore neat, comfortable-looking leather shoes. They were not the pair he had first given her.
“…Sir Mikhail?”
When he stopped so abruptly and stared downward, she stopped too and followed his line of sight. Realizing his eyes rested on her feet, she hastily covered them with her hem.
“Why aren’t you wearing them?”
“Pardon?”
“The shoes I first gifted you—the ones with the daisy ornaments.”
Anastasia lowered her eyes and said nothing. How could she wear those? She had already told him: they were like a sacred relic to her. Though she now possessed many new pairs thanks to him, the first ones he had given were different from all the rest. Even if she were barefoot again, she would never put those on.
Would he think it strange?
After she was given a new room in the annex and Natasha began to look after her, Anastasia had received truly excessive things—furniture and bedding, of course, clothes too numerous to count, even objects whose purpose she could not guess. Worried whether someone who was Lauderdale in name only had any right to so much, she had touched nothing beyond what she had once worn or used. Then Natasha had said,
“Miss, everything here was sent for you.”
“But I don’t need nearly so many…”
“There’s no need to fret. Miss Elizabeth and Miss Catherine have received many times more.”
In truth it had been a kindly lie meant only to ease Anastasia’s burden, though she had no way of knowing. After hearing Natasha she finally began to use the things that had come for her. Shoes were among them, of course. Looking at the new pairs she had felt glad: she could keep that first pair neatly without ever wearing it.
If she had been unable to obtain other shoes she would have hated appearing barefoot before Mikhail, and so she had once fretted that she might have no choice but to put them on.
“Anastasia?”
At his call, which pressed for an answer, she spoke of something else entirely.
“Is that flower called a daisy?”
“Pardon?”
“The flower on the ornament of the shoes… I never knew its name. It wasn’t a flower that grew in the village where I lived as a child…”
Mikhail was silent a moment. Daisies were flowers commonly planted in the gardens of noble houses. Naturally Edenhurst’s own gardens were full of them in every color and variety. And yet she did not know the name?
He had known the people of Edenhurst had neglected her while raising her, but to think they had left her so thoroughly untaught that she lacked even such simple knowledge. Anyone would have answered if asked. There had simply been no one to ask.
Unaware of his thoughts, Anastasia softly repeated the name he had given her. It was a flower she had often seen. The shapes and colors varied a little, yet it was one of the earliest to bloom in the garden. She had been all the happier that the ornament on the shoes she received had been shaped like that very flower.
So it’s a daisy.
At last she knew its name.
There were so many flowers whose names she longed to know. But who would ever tell her such things? From the forest-keeper she had met only once—the one person who had treated her without any particular feeling—she had been too absorbed in the explanation of the chapel to think of asking about flowers. Muttering the new name as though determined never to forget it, Anastasia turned to Mikhail again.
“I’m sorry, but do you happen to know the name of this flower as well?”
“It’s a lilium.”
“And this one?”
“Dahlia.”
“Then this?”
“Poppy.”
The more readily he answered, the brighter the light of wonder grew on Anastasia’s face. Mikhail was nonplussed. None of the flowers she was asking about were particularly rare. Yet she wore the expression of someone who had just met the wisest person in the world simply because he knew a few names.
During a meal, when he had casually mentioned the scale of the Sokolov mansion, she had concentrated on slicing her steak with neat precision; yet a handful of common Novgord garden flowers produced this reaction.
He truly could not tell what part of it she found so astonishing.
She kept asking names and he kept answering. Then Anastasia drifted a little off the path, pointed to a flower among the shrubs that the gardeners had not yet pulled—a weed’s flower—and asked,
“What is the name of this one?”
“That is…”
Where she pointed bloomed a blue-violet flower that, even with the kindest eye, looked like a close cousin of weeds. A plant that seemed to have barely survived by hiding among the shrubs from the gardeners’ notice.
The trouble was that Mikhail did not know its name. That was only natural. How many people in the world properly knew the names of the weeds that littered the roadsides? More than anything, the flower was not one that made money. Therefore it had never been anything that would interest him.
Anastasia’s eyes were full of expectation, as if of course he would answer this time as well. Her gaze more hopeful than when she had asked about the garden flowers made cold sweat prickle along his back.