Her father, Roscoe Fitch, had been a kind, loving man who doted on Lavender, his only daughter. He’d been a professional gentleman in Belleville, always courteous and dressed in fine clothes, as he worked long hours in his busy apothecary shop. No one would have guessed the finances of this model citizen would be left in such a ruinous state after his fatal heart attack at age fifty-two, a little over a year earlier. But then, no one supposes they’ll one day saunter in sunshine and the very next collapse on the parlour floor. Lavender could only assume her father must have intended to set his affairs in order, but death summarily quashes our best-laid plans.
Roscoe Fitch had left huge debts, money owed to pharmaceutical suppliers. Lavender recalled him lamenting, over supper one night, about a large expenditure on equipment and chemical products slated to arrive by ship. The ship sank. The purchases had been prepaid. Her poor father seemed increasingly besieged by misfortunes of this nature. And there was his extravagant streak, costly regalia worn on shooting expeditions with his friend Dr. Minyard. Often enough, apothecaries and physicians coexisted uneasily, in a prickly tension, or full-out loggerheads; this wasn’t the case with Roscoe Fitch and Varn Minyard. They’d long been colleagues and fast friends. The doctor was a frequent dinner guest at the house on Pinnacle Street, where the two medical men enjoyed premium whiskey by the fire; and if they held contrary views on burning topics such as bad-air theory, germ theory, the regulation of poisons, the new epidermic syringe, and whether the latest “infallible corn remedy” or “tonic for a sluggish liver” really worked, they exchanged their opinions in a mode of genial sparring between gentlemen. Young Lavender would curl herself on the fainting sofa for a while, in their company, fascinated by the pipe smoke wisping laurels around their words, but would, soon enough, drift into sleep. As she grew, and along with it her stamina for staying awake later in the evening, she recalled, too, that their topics weren’t always medical. Her father had urged the doctor to invest in a rumoured gold mine in the country north of Belleville. It hadn’t quite happened yet, but it would be a good wagon to leap onto ahead of the pack; he himself had already invested. The doctor had simply laughed, saying, “Roscoe, my friend, you’re a quixotic dreamer.” But, as usual, no hard feelings lingered between the two friends.
In addition to a weakness for fine whiskey, stylish clothing, and imported pipe tobacco, Lavender’s father took frequent trips to America for pharmaceutical meetings—Philadelphia, Dayton, among other places. He often extended his time away because, in his absence, Lavender’s mother had looked after the apothecary shop. She had possessed considerable knowledge of medicinal plants, chemicals and compounding. Indeed, truth be told, some customers, especially those with ladies’ maladies—or anyone suffering intimate afflictions—felt less shameful confiding in Mrs. Fitch than in her husband. And as Amaryllis Fitch had also been known for her sweet harp playing, it was rather like one’s remedy being prescribed by an angel of song. Lavender’s mother had willingly helped out in the shop, but it was in her garden she longed to be, tending her flowers and medicinal plants, or practising her harp, or teaching music lessons to several girls in the village she had called her “harping little apprentices.”
The pith and core of it was, the Fitches had lived well. They’d ridden about in one of Belleville’s most lavish carriages. They’d had a cook, and dined sumptuously.
Then Roscoe Fitch died, and the books opened to sorrowful ruin. Some debts were settled from the sale of the apothecary shop, some from Lavender’s floral sales—that entire season—but a few remained. Lavender loved her father, but he’d squandered much, and had proven fickle as an abatina flower. But every coin has two sides: balancing her father’s frivolous indulgences were good, though again not inexpensive, actions. He’d sent Lavender to Cobourg Ladies’ Academy. He believed in girls’ education; he even speculated that one day there might be female doctors and druggists. In fact, he already knew of a lady doctor, Elizabeth Blackwell, and her study of typhoid fever. He’d heard of a woman apothecary too, in Niagara, he thought, perhaps not legally sanctioned, but no doubt competent. As his own dear Amaryllis had been. So, he knew his girl, Lavender, deserved to be educated. He’d hired a groundskeeper during her Academy years. Before that, he’d paid Mrs. Clement Rose to be Lavender’s tutor, and more generally a feminine presence in the household. And he’d taken in the orphan boy, Arlo Snook, in 1845, and paid a nursemaid to care for the infant. He hired Mrs. Rose once more, this time to tutor the boy in some rudiments of education. Mrs. Rose remarked more than once that while she didn’t object to being paid, “Mr. Fitch would save a great deal of money if he remarried.”
Her father did not remarry. He seemed content enough with his druggist vocation, travel and periodic deer-stalking expeditions. But after her mother’s death, Lavender noted a change. He grew quiet in a strange way she strove, at her tender age of ten, and then into her teen years, to understand. He remained loving, pleasant, courteous, but if she’d had to diagnose it, he lived in a kind of chronically subdued state, not unhappy—no, quite mellow—simply low in affect. Sometimes it was barely noticeable, but without his wife, his formerly animated spark had burnt out to a considerable extent.
The apothecary business’s assets should have left Lavender with ample resources to live quite comfortably. But all she had was the house, the garden, constant hunger and threadbare stockings. She’d sold the carriage, the horse. She let go the cook. Still, debts remained, which she tackled, stem by stem, selling her floral wares at the train station.
That summer, she’d more than once foraged among the medicinal plants in her garden, trying to recall which ones might lift her spirits, at least offer a temporary panacea, transport her away from her worries, divert her from hunger. She beheld her own sad, wan face in the gazing ball. The roof had torn open; after that, Lavender slept fitfully, on rain alert. When not occupied with garden work, she rifled through her mother’s old notebooks, reading up on the benefits and adverse effects of various plants and flowers: Lavandula, peony root, ginseng, lemon balm. Poppy oil. Camomile. Skullcap. She mixed tonics and teas from these elements. Great quantities of liquids taxed the bladder, she found; but the ultimate remedy, she already knew, was food.
Earlier that day, when the train delivered the Spirit Medium and the man with the marred face who’d bought all Lavender’s floral wares, his payment placed a bandage over her situation.
So now she wheeled her empty cart back to Pinnacle Street.
They’d exchanged only a few words, she and Robert Trout. For how many minutes? Two? Three? But the transaction opened a dream space, through which Lavender now moved. She felt no hunger; it was as if her body had embarked on a sojourn. Her flowers had stolen his breath away. The only thing pegging her to earth was, tethered to her sash, the coin purse’s genial heft and pendulum motion against her hip bone.
She’d not basked in a dream bubble for ages, but she recognized the feeling at once—a sensation like no other, when the veil of the everyday peeled away and something else opened up. A layer beyond. The feeling of her troubles retreating was as wondrous as a rose rising from snow. She’d felt the same way when she’d hear her mother plying the harp’s strings. And again when Quincey Luke took Lavender’s hand, steadying her, around the ice rink in Cobourg. (Before his betrayal of her.) Sometimes in her garden, a bubble of bliss descended too—until she recalled the harsh reaper of commerce, and the necessity of cutting down her flowers.
When the man with the ruined face approached Lavender’s floral cart earlier that day, the dream dome’s euphoria returned; the clock’s hands stalled.
The dome had lasted only a few moments.
But shreds of it lingered still.
Lavender had trodden those streets innumerable times, but now she beheld them anew—as if through Robert Trout’s eyes.
Light as ladybugs’ dreams, Lavender passed the vinegar factory, the sash and blind factory, the steam sawmill, the dirty forge, foundry, pump, and other great wooden shells with their grinders and gears and presses and jacks and wheels. Perhaps he—Robert—wouldn’t marvel at Belleville’s burgeoning industry; he’d alluded to extensive journeys and in all likelihood had toured widely with Allegra. Perhaps even sailed the sea. Lavender’s father had travelled, but besides him, the only person she knew who’d trotted the globe, and by herself no less, was Miss Zilla Cordell, headmistress at Cobourg Ladies’ Academy. The farthest Lavender had ever voyaged was Toronto; her father took her to the circus there once, S.B. Howes’ Star Troupe Menagerie. How Arlo Snook had pleaded to go along, but it was well the boy wasn’t taken, for ugly riots erupted on those streets; the clowns had proven very nasty indeed.
Lavender whisked towards Pinnacle Street, barely aware of the cart’s handles in her grasp. There was the dry cooper and there the wet cooper, where she’d bought the wooden bucket to catch the roof-leak drips in her house’s upstairs bedroom, the sorrowful chamber where her mother had breathed her last. Due to his foghorn-like, habitual snoring, her father kept a separate room for sleeping.
Robert Trout, the miracle of him, standing there by her floral cart, cheered Lavender so fully that even a humble object, a bucket, acquired new meaning. To fashion, from wood, a container that held water made the wet cooper rather like a magician. And why not? Theirs was an age in which the unimagined had been brought forth—one’s face captured in a daguerreotype, machines for sewing, a method by which the blind might read with their fingertips. Steam power propelled gifted luminaries into their midst, and in a manner akin to the telegraph, the dead could be communed with through mediums like Allegra Trout.
Past the barkers and ice dealers and ironmongers Lavender glided. Past the fish market with its unmistakable tang. Then she reached her father’s shop. Its new owner hadn’t replaced the sign; it still gleamed there, over the doorway, large gilded mortar and pestle, the words L. Roscoe Fitch, Apothecary. These words saddened Lavender; the dream bubble wobbled, then burst. A few doors down from her family’s erstwhile shop was a more sobering sign: Proctor & Co. Undertaking: Coffins, Shrouds, Caskets, Hearse, All Supplies for Interment. Mr. Proctor had been sending Lavender reminders of the outstanding balance owed after her father’s funeral. The notices had been civil enough initially, exuding that solicitous, hushed formality of the entombing profession, but their tone had lately grown brusque. The outer limits of sympathy had been reached, it seemed, breached.
Right then, Lavender made a decision. How uplifting it would be to no longer receive those notices! She left her empty cart in front of the undertaker’s establishment, entered it, opened her coin purse and laid out most of the money from Robert Trout’s floral purchase. She kept enough to buy a roast, some tea and a small portion for an unforeseen emergency. That smell, peculiar to funeral businesses, a cloying admixture of methanol and decayed apples, wafted from Mr. Proctor as he wrote Lavender a receipt—paid in full.
The lifting burden of debt was its own tonic. Lavender carried on to the butcher shop, where she purchased a roast; how happy the boy Arlo would be, enjoying this feast with her. She sped her pace. Thoughts of the new arrivals, Robert and Allegra Trout, returned too. What were they to each other? For the first time it struck Lavender they might be husband and wife. But would a husband praise another lady’s flowers so lavishly? Would that be wise? Might it not ignite flames of wifely rebuke? Allegra had been snappish with Robert after his floral purchase.
The Village Crier might know. Lavender neared where he stood, his clapper tongue clanging, heralding the Prince of Wales’s impending arrival. Oyez, oyez! The crier was a pill, but people listened. He blazoned on about that day’s arrivals too, the Trouts. Lavender considered asking the periwigged, garrulous sot for any intelligence he might dispense about the dazzling new arrivals. Siblings? Something else?
Curious as she was, the Crier had, in addition to breath of rancid garlic, an ogling manner she’d always disliked, a blight to anyone’s day. A regular rusty gut, the Village Crier.
Lavender realized there were other avenues for news. The artist, Dot Tickell, for instance; her painter’s eyes peeled back the world, everything was fodder, she made everyone’s business her own. Lavender’s old tutor, Mrs. Clement Rose, might have acquired some grist. And Arlo Snook, roaming the streets in search of employment, could have heard something.
Lavender resumed her project of viewing Belleville as Robert Trout might see it—admittedly a speculative act, but it brought pleasure. She took a very circuitous route, to extend that pleasure. A worldly gentleman such as Robert would surely appreciate the fine houses Lavender now passed: Mr. Flint’s villa and its watchtower; the Tuscan affair nearby, reputed to have a pond stocked with gold-and-silver fish; Mr. Noseworthy’s residence, with its oriel window and filigreed iron balconies. Other homes with their pillars, mansard roofs, wooden gazebos in gardens, vine-reddened pergolas. How could Robert not admire this? He was, clearly, an advocate of beauty—her flowers had stolen his breath away. His very breath.
A tall man in a dark coat dashed across the street. Robert Trout? No. A further surge of energy, as if the train had delivered casks of it, special, just for her, sent Lavender ranging through the village; even ascending the west hill didn’t cause fatigue—a sensation akin to ingesting some magic herb.
She rattled her cart past Mrs. Moodie’s stone cottage and contemplated what words that literary lady might now be scribbling within. The shades were drawn; perhaps mystics from the state of New York visited. Members of the Fox sisters’ circle. Or believers from Consecon, or Bloomfield. Were they in the parlour, holding hands in séance? Musing over a spirit board? Ears perked for table rapping? It was rumoured that the potash kettle once flew about of its own accord in that very house. Lavender pictured Mrs. Moodie’s bloomers sailing out over the Moira River, a white-ruffled muslin cloud caught in some ghostly updraught by the Spirits who needed their amusements too (one could only assume).
As Lavender reached her home on Pinnacle Street, her mind dwelt on more tangible themes. She could almost smell the roast she’d cook, wreathed with savory, chopped onions. Surveying her house as if through Robert Trout’s eyes, she doubted its plain Loyalist style would impress him. Her mother, Lavender suspected, would have preferred one of the newer, turreted, gabled houses. But the family’s apothecary business was only getting established back then, and anything opulent was out of reach; Roscoe Fitch acquired his spendthrift tendencies later. On the sunnier side, there’d been a clerical error, on the county’s part, that allotted her father two sections of property instead of one, granting the Fitches a commodious double lot behind their house. Thus, thanks to a line of blurred ink or a moment’s distraction by some bespectacled clerk, Lavender’s livelihood, floriculture, came to exist.
In opposition to her home’s stark frontage was the garden out back; entering it was like stepping through a portal into another world, an oasis, dream-atrium, an expansive bower that never failed to draw Lavender with its mesmeric spell. The garden called to her now, and she took the most direct route, circumventing the front door and rattling her cart over the cobbled path that extended along the side of the house. She glanced at the Private Garden—Do Not Enter sign, its chipping paint. She unlatched the gate and rolled the cart to its place in the potting shed, where the hen’s creaky canticle greeted her and the rafters were festooned with bundles of drying herbs. On the wall peg hung Lavender’s sad old skates with their rusted blades, left over from the Cobourg heartbreak. To recover from it, she’d tried every herbal cure in her mother’s notebooks and gardening almanacs. She’d swallowed teas of mint and yarrow, taken purification with hyssop, poppy essence to help her sleep (though it only brought distressing dreams), a poultice of St. John’s wort. Lemon balm. An arsenal of remedies. After a couple of years, Lavender appeared restored, those closest to her declared, but there was scar tissue they couldn’t see, a blistered-over heart.
Robert Trout bore an outer scar. She wore hers within.
One mercy was that the heartbreak had happened near the end of her time in Cobourg. Before that, her studies absorbed her, especially floriculture and botany, into which she dove headfirst. Headmistress Cordell had noted her student’s botanical aptitude, and nurtured her passion, believing young ladies should resist the moulds society carved for them. The Academy’s library held valuable volumes on botany and medicinal plants, including Culpepper, Linnaeus, Nuttall, Mrs. Loudon, and a rare, precious facsimile of Parkinson’s Theatre of Plants, its pages brittle as dried hydrangea petals. There were dictionaries of floral meanings. Copies of the Gardener’s Magazine. And, from closer to home, works by Mr. Custead, Mrs. Traill, a memorable piece on Miss Crooks’s collections of plant specimens, and so many more that Lavender buried herself among the bookshelves and had to be coaxed away for socials and outdoor fitness activities. Her roommate, Ethelinda Quackenbush, joked about Lavender’s many hours spent in the library, how it was making her eyes go all rabbity, and she’d turn into a bookish wraith and forget how to be in human society if she insisted on spending her free hours with plants and books. She might well move her bed into the library. Lavender breezed the quipping away; she’d found her vocation and love, and that was all that mattered. Of course, she’d known it even before Cobourg. Her mother had built the garden on Pinnacle Street with her own hands, and taught her young daughter much about floriculture, especially plants with curative properties. Access to the Academy’s library only fuelled the flames of her botanical ardour.
When Lavender returned home after her studies, Mrs. Clement Rose, who often visited the house on Pinnacle Street, fretted over how much time Lavender spent in the garden, even in winter, mooning about out there, salvaging herbs under snow. She’d long since stopped tutoring Lavender, but, as a family friend, affectionate concern ruled the day. She introduced Lavender to single young men at dinners or church socials or picnics in the county. Lavender found these fellows dull as dried burdock. “Lavie,” Mrs. Rose had opined not long ago during a visit, “are you going to grub about in the garden all your life and grow into an old maid with your hands in the dirt?” Laughing, Lavender had replied that at least it was her dirt, and painful as she found turning the flower garden, once resplendent with harp music, into service, profit, it brought a measure of independence. None of this, of course, stopped Mrs. Rose from haranguing Lavender on the marriage topic. On another recent visit, the old tutor remarked, “Your orphan charge Arlo Snook is fifteen now. One day he will leave you and, having no husband, you’ll be alone.”
As unthinkable as the prospect of Arlo not living under Lavender’s (leaking) roof was, she wouldn’t be totally alone; she’d have the garden. But it was wasted breath explaining that to someone as pragmatic as Mrs. Rose. Luckily, tea and almond cake, when Lavender’s pantry held it—Arlo was a dab hand at baking it—proved effective diversion tactics. In truth, any sort of sweet would work.
Lavender closed the potting shed’s door. She was too hungry, too bemused by the day’s events at the train station, to fret anew about the money that her father rasped, with his dying breath, her mother had left her—nest egg, tucked away somewhere, meant for you. Lightning had racked the sky as she grasped his hand, and as he’d whispered one last thing about the money’s location, thunderous booms outside obscured his words. Then Roscoe Fitch was gone.
She’d searched. And searched some more. Over the past year, Lavender inspected the potting shed, the garden’s glass house, the attic, every crack in the floorboards, the inside of every Mason jar and crock in the pantry, to no avail. She’d even, with the greatest care, examined the stand of her mother’s harp, which still stood in the parlour, to see if some small, hidden drawer existed there; none did. All the fine-toothed combs in the county couldn’t locate her mother’s gift. How far a nest egg—of virtually any size—would go to alleviate the ongoing spectre of destitution. If vagrancy befell her, then Mrs. Rose would say, beyond a doubt, “Did I not warn you that you’d better find a husband?”
Fretting was of little use in any case, Lavender knew. Instead, she vowed to intensify her search for the nest egg. She’d be as audacious as ivy, persistent as spurge. The financial gift her mother had left her would secure the future. Her mother wanted her to have it. “Ah, girlie, you’ll be provided for,” Amaryllis Fitch had once said, plucking a pear from the garden tree she’d planted in 1832, to mark Lavender’s birth. Her mother spoke those words when Lavender was very young, about five, and her child’s mind didn’t fixate on them.
A sudden rain, from nowhere, slashed its watery veils across the garden.
Lavender hurried, clutching the roast, wrapped in brown butcher paper, into the house. She hoped Arlo Snook had returned from his employment search; she had so much to tell him, about that day’s train station market, the disfigured, yet magnificent, gentleman whose extravagant gesture bore all her flowers away in his arms. A yarrow sachet in his pocket.
Arlo Snook wasn’t home.
As suddenly as it began, the flash rainstorm ended.
The house was quiet except for the drips of rainwater into the leak bucket upstairs.
Plink plink
Plonk
Plink plink
Plop!
She must remind Arlo, when he returned, to empty the bucket. It filled Lavender with sorrow to enter that room where her mother had breathed her last, and the boy, thankfully, dealt with the leak-catching chore to spare her.
As brief as the spontaneous downpour had been, it cooled the house. Lavender mustered a fire in the kitchen, for the roast. And another fire in the parlour, where she hoped that evening, after their feast, Arlo might be prevailed upon to play his concertina. And she’d ask the boy if he’d heard any reports of the newly arrived Trouts, and what they might be to each other. And if he’d heard of a Mr. Whitman—clergyman, perhaps?—for Robert’s words at the floral cart stayed with Lavender: “And tomorrow, with even the slightest sliver of serendipity, you shall hear Mr. Whitman’s divine words.”
While Lavender wasn’t keen on listening to a sermon (if this Whitman was, in fact, clergy), she longed to study the book of Robert’s face further, a book pulled, half burnt, from a fire. So much was written there, from the depths of suffering, Lavender didn’t doubt, to ecstasy’s heights, and the deep, innate sensibility required to worship—his word—at her floral cart, to see it for what it was, a little cathedral on wheels. She’d never met anyone who grasped flowers’ import and beauty—profound, fleeting—to that extent; it was like meeting a kindred soul. Kindred, yet at the same time he seemed to her like someone who’d tumbled, in his best clothes, from some faraway constellation. She’d never met anyone like him.
Tomorrow you shall hear. Tomorrow. Where? What time? His proposal was short on details.
Soon the parlour fire ticked brightly. The kitchen warmed. She was ravenous. The onion awaited chopping, but before Lavender went to work on it, she glanced at her reflection in the mirror. Her blouse was buttoned crooked—and her muddied skirt! Shame coursed through her. The Trouts were impeccably dressed, while she, that day, hadn’t met even the most basic sartorial standards.