The fragile truce forged in the humid confines of the glasshouse had altered the very atmosphere of Blackwood.
The air between Beatrice and Alistair, once sharp with the chill of academic rivalry, now held a strange, lingering warmth, like the afterglow of a lightning strike.
It was a change Beatrice found both unsettling and surprisingly welcome.
Their work on the orchid, their orchid, had taken on a new rhythm—a quiet, focused harmony that hummed beneath their continued debates on Linnaean classification versus more modern systems.
Beatrice was packing her satchel to depart one evening, the sky outside bleeding from bruised purple into an inky black, when a flicker of movement near the service entrance caught her eye.
It was nearly nine o’clock, an hour when the estate was typically sinking into a deep, rural slumber.
A heavy cart, its wheels muffled by the damp earth, was being guided toward the potting sheds by two burly men. It was the figure directing them, however, that drew Beatrice’s full attention.
Mr. Finch, his usual cloud of mild anxiety now a raging tempest, was practically vibrating with nervous energy. He held a lantern aloft, but its light seemed only to illuminate the frantic darting of his eyes and the tremor in his hands.
“Quietly, quietly!” he hissed, his voice a harsh whisper that carried on the still night air. “His Lordship is in his study. Be quick about it.”
Beatrice flattened herself against the cool glass of the conservatory, her curiosity piqued.
Botanical shipments were not unheard of, but they almost always arrived in the bright light of day, announced with paperwork and official fanfare.
This felt clandestine.
Secretive.
She watched as the men unloaded several large, flat crates stamped with Portuguese markings.
Mr. Finch fussed over them, gesturing for them to be placed behind a stack of terracotta pots, well out of the direct line of sight from the main house.
The contents were supposedly exotic ferns, or so she gleaned from a muttered phrase, but the urgency seemed disproportionate to the cargo.
Ferns, however rare, did not warrant this level of subterfuge.
“That’s the lot,” one of the men grunted, wiping a grimy hand across his brow. “Payment?”
Mr. Finch fumbled inside his coat, his movements jerky and graceless.
He passed a small pouch to the man, who tested its weight before nodding curtly. “Until the next time, then.”
“There will not be a next time,” Finch snapped, his voice cracking with a strain that sounded like fear. “This is finished.”
The deliveryman merely grunted a noncommittal reply and, with his companion, led the cart away into the darkness, leaving Mr. Finch alone with his illicitly acquired ferns.
The head gardener stood for a long moment, his shoulders slumped, the lantern light casting his shadow long and distorted against the wall. He looked like a man trapped, a specimen pinned to a board.
Beatrice slipped away before he could spot her, her mind whirring. Her scientific training had honed her powers of observation, teaching her to notice anomalies, to question deviations from the norm.
And this—this was a significant deviation.
She thought of Alistair’s bitter words about betrayal, spoken during the storm. She thought of his fierce, almost paranoid, protection of his estate.
Would he know about this? Or was his trusted head gardener operating in the shadows he so carefully guarded?
The question troubled her all the way home, and it was the first thing on her mind when she returned the following morning.
Under the pretense of searching for a variety of moss for a new illustration, she made her way to the area where the cart had been unloaded.
The ground was soft from a recent shower, marked with the deep ruts of the heavy wheels.
As she knelt, feigning interest in a patch of liverwort, her fingers brushed against something cold and hard half-buried in the mud.
She worked it free. It was a coin, heavy and tarnished.
But as she rubbed the dirt from its face, her breath caught. This was no English shilling or sovereign.
The script was foreign, the profile of the monarch unfamiliar.
She recognized the coat of arms from her father’s old atlas: Spanish. A Spanish real.
What was a Spanish coin doing dropped in the dirt of an English estate, exchanged in the dead of night?
Tucking the coin securely into her pocket, Beatrice felt a new kind of chill, one that had nothing to do with the morning air.
The mystery was deepening, presenting itself like a complex botanical puzzle, but with stakes that felt infinitely higher than academic prestige.
Later that week, her mother dispatched her to the village on an errand to collect a parcel of French lace that had finally arrived.
The village pub, The Blackwood Arms, was bustling with its usual midday crowd of farmhands and local merchants.
As Beatrice waited for the publican to fetch her package, a low, tense conversation from a shadowed alcove snagged her attention.
She recognized Mr. Finch’s reedy voice immediately, tight with desperation. “I tell you, it is too risky now. He watches everything.”
The responding voice was a low, gravelly rumble that smelled of brine and cheap tobacco.
“Risk is the cost of doin’ business. Davies ain’t a patient man. He wants his merchandise, and he wants it moved through a quiet port. Blackwood is quiet.”
Beatrice turned her head slightly, just enough to catch a glimpse.
Finch was huddled across a sticky table from a man whose weathered face and rough-spun clothes marked him as a sailor. His hands, resting on the table, were scarred and calloused, a stark contrast to Finch’s soil-stained but gentle fingers.
“The Earl suspects nothing, I swear it,” Finch pleaded. “But he is… unpredictable. Since the lady botanist arrived, he spends more time in the glasshouses than ever. There is no opportunity.”
“You’ll make an opportunity,” the sailor snarled, leaning forward. His voice dropped lower, but the menace was unmistakable.
“Or I’ll be forced to remind your wife about that little debt her brother ran up in Lisbon. A shame if she were to learn you’ve been paying it off this way.”
Mr. Finch seemed to shrink into himself, all the fight draining out of him. “The next shipment of orchids from the Americas is due in a fortnight,” he whispered, defeated.
“It will be a large delivery. There will be… confusion.”
“See that there is.” The sailor pushed himself back from the table, downed the last of his ale, and stalked out of the pub, leaving the scent of the sea and intimidation in his wake.
Beatrice’s heart was hammering against her ribs. She snatched her parcel from the publican, murmuring a hasty thanks, and hurried out into the street, her mind racing to connect the pieces.
The late-night delivery. The foreign coin.
The hushed, threatening conversation. Lord Davies’s name.
It was no longer a suspicion; it was a theory, terrifying in its clarity.
Finch was using the cover of the Earl’s botanical shipments to help smuggle contraband—French silks, Spanish brandy, she could only guess—for a ring of criminals connected to Alistair’s political rival.
The knowledge sat like a lead weight in her stomach. A fortnight ago, she might have relished the discovery of a scandal that could topple the arrogant Earl of Blackwood.
She might have seen it as a form of justice. But now… now all she felt was a cold dread.
She pictured Alistair’s face when he spoke of betrayal, the deep-seated pain in his eyes.
This was not some abstract failing of estate management; this was a viper coiled in his own garden, tended by the man he trusted most.
Her first instinct, her logical, scientific instinct, was to present her evidence to the authority in charge. To lay out the observations, the data points, and the conclusion for Alistair to evaluate.
But how could she?
Their truce was a fragile, unacknowledged thing, built of shared vulnerability in a rainstorm. It was not built for the weight of an accusation like this.
To approach him would be to accuse his loyal, lifelong servant of treason against him. He would see it as an attack, another attempt by the trespassing female botanist to gain an advantage.
His walls, so recently breached, would be rebuilt thicker and higher than before. He would never believe her.
He would shut her out, and the fragile connection that had begun to blossom between them would wither and die.
Walking back towards the Blackwood estate, the weight of the Spanish coin in her pocket felt immense. She was an outsider, a rival he was forced to tolerate.
She had no standing, no right to interfere.
Yet, to stay silent felt like a betrayal of her own. A betrayal of the man who, despite his arrogance, had shown her a glimpse of the wounded heart he kept so carefully guarded.
She had stumbled upon a dangerous secret, and she was utterly alone with it.
The only person she could possibly confide in was the Earl of Blackwood himself—a man who was, in his own way, as complex and indecipherable as the orchid they had discovered together.
And she had no idea how to even begin.