Chapter 12 Foxgloves

Delphine

The first foxglove of the year had flowered three weeks early under glass, and by Tuesday its lowest bells were already going brown at the lip.

Delphine Calloway pinched them off one by one in gray kid gloves, and the dead bells dropped into the trug at her feet with a small dry tick. Outside, March was raw and colorless. In here it was seventy-two degrees, the glass fogged white.

On the potting bench a little radio murmured. One of the local morning programs, the woman who did Bramport society between the traffic and the weather.

"…and the talk of the Heights this week, if you can believe it, is Sunday lunch at Whitlock Hall. My sources tell me that Beatrix Whitlock, who as we all know does exactly as she pleases, brought a guest.

"And not just any guest. The former Mrs. Rhys Calloway, now a heart surgeon at St. Ansel, apparently. And the old lady sat her, I'm told, in the chair. You know the one. Her late daughter's chair. Empty thirty years. Well. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions—"

Delphine reached over without looking and switched it off.

She moved on to the next plant. Digitalis purpurea. She'd grown them for twenty years, from seed she'd brought with her when she married. In their first year they were nothing, a flat gray-green rosette, a weed to anyone who didn't know. In their second spring they sent up this. All that patience. All that height.

She pinched off another dead bell.

"Mrs. Calloway?"

Ursula Blythe stood in the greenhouse doorway, letting the cold in. She was in her navy cardigan with the notebook in its pocket, and she had the slightly hunched look of a woman who'd been up half the night.

"Close the door, Ursula. You'll chill them."

Ursula came in and closed it. She stood just inside, on the brick path, with her hands folded.

"How is he?"

"Not good, ma'am. He's been agitated since the hospital. Since Monday. He grips the bedrail with his good hand and pulls himself up, and he won't lie back. He makes those sounds at the window. Over and over."

Ursula's mouth tightened. "Last night the night girl said something about the doctor. Only that, ma'am. The doctor will be pleased. About his blood pressure. And he started to cry. Just lay there and cried, with his eyes open. She didn't know where to put herself."

Delphine examined a leaf for aphids. There were none.

"And there's this." Ursula took a folded sheet from her pocket. "The new surgeon's note came through to Dr. Stroud. He had his office forward it to me. She's written that his valve isn't critical at all. And at the bottom she's recommended an urgent medication review." She held it out. "Dr. Stroud's furious. He says she's overstepping."

Delphine didn't take the paper. She looked at it in Ursula's hand for a moment, then went back to her plant.

"Dr. Stroud has known Edmund for five years," she said. "This woman has known him for twenty minutes."

"Yes, ma'am."

"And she has a history with this family, as I'm sure you know. I'd hate to think of her using her position to upset him. To unsettle him. When he's been so peaceful." She pinched a bell. Tick. "He's an old man, Ursula. He's had a terrible stroke. He's frightened and confused, and seeing her has made it worse. What he needs now is rest. Calm. That's the kindest thing."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then give him what he needs to rest." She turned to Ursula with the warm face she kept for tradesmen at Christmas. "Whatever Dr. Stroud allows. A little more if he frets."

Ursula looked at her for a long moment. Then she put the folded note back in her pocket, beside the notebook.

"Yes, Mrs. Calloway."

"Thank you, Ursula. You're a treasure. I don't know what we'd do without you."

When the door had closed again, Delphine stood for a while with her hands resting on the edge of the bench.

---

The door opened again almost at once. Her son put his head around it, all hair and elbows, a guitar case slung over one shoulder and a set of car keys hooked on his finger.

"Mom. I'm taking the Jeep into town. Is that okay? Dad's got the other one and he's," Gideon made a vague drinking gesture, "lunching."

"Close the door, sweetheart. The plants."

He came in and shut it and stood dripping on the path. Twenty-two, and still standing the way he had at fourteen, apologizing to the room for taking up space. He'd left Brown last spring without telling anyone and come home with a guitar and a beard she'd made him shave off. She'd forgiven him in a day. She forgave Gideon everything. That was what he was for.

"Did you hear the radio?" he said. "About Rhys's ex? She's back. She's a heart surgeon now. Apparently old Beatrix Whitlock adopted her or something." He grinned. "Rhys must be losing his mind."

"Rhys is fine."

"I liked her, you know. Margot. She was nice to me. She used to—" He stopped. Something passed over his face and was gone, so quickly she almost missed it. He looked at the trug of dead bells by her feet instead. "Anyway. Can I take the Jeep?"

"Take it. Be back for dinner, and don't park it on the grass again."

He went. She watched him through the fogged glass, a blurred dark shape crossing the lawn toward the garage, the guitar case bumping against his back.

Calloway Meridian had been built by Edmund and run by Rhys. One day, she thought, if things were managed properly, there would be room in it for her son. Things only needed to be managed.

---

She didn't often think about the file.

She'd found it five years ago, almost to the day, in the bottom drawer of Edmund's desk in the study, while he was at the cardiologist and the house was quiet. She hadn't been looking for it. She'd been looking for a letter about the will, and the file had been underneath, in a plain manila folder with a single word written on the tab in his old-fashioned hand.

She'd read it standing up, by the window, in the March light. Then she'd read it again sitting down.

She remembered the photographs in it. One of them most of all. An old print of a young woman on a window seat in a blue dress, and clipped beside it, a newer snapshot of a girl in hospital scrubs, and the two faces side by side.

That girl's face should have stayed in Switzerland. It had been safe in Switzerland. Everyone had been safe.

And now there were children.

Delphine set down the secateurs. She found that her hand wouldn't keep still, and she pressed it flat on the bench until it did.

Twins. Four and a half. Born in the autumn. She'd done the sum on the terrace with Rhys watching her, and she'd gotten the answer he'd gotten, and for one moment she'd felt the ground go out from under her.

Something older tried to come up behind the sum, from a drawer she had kept shut for a long time. She felt it press. She did not open it.

She picked up the secateurs again and cut the whole foxglove spike off at the base, clean, in one stroke. It fell across the bench, a yard of purple, still beautiful. She looked at it, and then she laid it in the trug with the dead bells, and the drawer stayed shut.

---

She thought about Rhys instead.

He'd filed. That was good. That was better than good. A court, lawyers, Benedict Carrow in his dry gray way putting everything into numbered paragraphs. It would be cold and slow and public, and it would set him squarely against her, and that was exactly where Delphine wanted him.

But he'd looked at the children.

She'd seen his face on the terrace when he said it. The girl has my eyes. She'd known him since he was twelve. She'd watched him grow up in this house, motherless and furious and far too proud, and she knew how he looked at things he'd decided were his.

He'd looked at the harbor like that, at eighteen, the summer Edmund first put him to work on the quay. He'd looked at his grandfather's company like that. He did not look at many things that way, and he did not let them go.

He'd looked at Margot like that, once. Only for a few weeks, in their last winter. Delphine had noticed. She noticed everything.

He needed reminding. He needed his old story back, the one he'd told himself for sixteen years: the girl on the ice who'd held his hand, and the wife who'd poisoned his grandfather. Good and bad. Simple. He'd always been happiest when things were simple.

She took off one glove and then the other and laid them on the bench, side by side, fingers together. Then she took her phone out of her coat pocket.

Vivienne's life was all over the internet, as it always had been. Delphine scrolled. The prestige drama Vivienne had been filming in Vancouver had been cancelled after one season. There'd been a piece in one of the trade papers last month, kind in the way an obituary is kind. Her agent was quoted as saying they were "regrouping" and "weighing exciting options."

There was a photograph of Vivienne coming out of a juice bar in Los Angeles in enormous sunglasses, looking thinner than she ought to.

Delphine looked at the photograph. She'd held Vivienne at her christening. She'd paid for her first headshots. She'd taught her, at fifteen, how to cry on cue, sitting at the kitchen table at Larkmoor with an onion.

It was nine in the morning in Bramport. Six in Los Angeles. Vivienne would be asleep.

Delphine pressed the number anyway.

It rang five times. Then a rustle, and a thick, cross, frightened voice, the voice of someone woken by a phone in the dark who knows that nobody calls at that hour with good news.

"Hello? Who is this?"

"It's me, my dear."

A pause. The rustle of sheets. Then, wide awake, in a different voice entirely: "Delphine? Darling, is it Edmund? Is something wrong?"

"Edmund is resting." Delphine turned toward the fogged glass. Beyond it, faintly, she could see the gray shape of the house, and the window of the care suite, and a light on in it. "I'm calling about Rhys."

"Rhys?" Vivienne's voice sharpened, as it always did at his name. "What about him?"

"She's back, Vivienne. Margot. She's back in Bramport. With children."

Silence on the line. Delphine let it run. She'd always known how long to let a silence run.

"Children," Vivienne said at last.

"His, apparently. He's filed with the court. He's angry. But he's also confused. And he's alone, my dear. He's been alone for five years, and you've been in California." She picked up one of the gray gloves and smoothed it over her knuckles. "He's forgotten things. Important things. Who stood by him. Who was there on that road, in the ice, when he was nineteen."

On the other end, Vivienne breathed.

"I can't just get on a plane," she said. "I have meetings. My agent—"

"You have a juice bar, darling. I've seen the pictures."

A small sound, hurt and then not. Delphine waited. She heard a lamp click on three thousand miles away, and the creak of someone sitting up properly in bed.

Delphine looked down at the cut foxglove lying in the trug, a yard of purple bells, and smiled.

"Come home, Vivienne," she said softly into the phone. "Rhys needs reminding who he loves."