Summer 1911
London
“A rose by any other name,” someone quoted, and Alice Eastwood was hard-pressed not to roll her eyes. When it came to Shakespearean quotes about flowers, hang Romeo and Juliet. She preferred Julius Caesar: “Nature must obey necessity.”
Because Mother Nature was a carnivore: she ate what she wanted when hunger made it necessary. Alice had known that in her bones since that day five years ago, when the earth shrugged its shoulders and a city cracked in half.
“You’ve been on quite a pilgrimage of Europe’s gardens and conservatories, Miss Eastwood! Will you return to San Francisco soon?” The question came from the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew as he trailed Alice toward the Palm House with its great glassed layers like a crystal wedding cake. “I understand you’ve been invited to resume your old position at the California Academy of Sciences—curator of botany?”
“Not yet.” But she knew it was coming, the invitation to help rebuild the lost herbarium. Whether she could bear to accept or not, she hadn’t yet decided, so Alice sped her footsteps to outpace both the question and her companion. She still had the vigor for the work, no question—perhaps she was fifty-two, but she certainly hadn’t calcified with her advancing years: whether heading up a California mountain to investigate a poppy field, hauling herself into a pack mule’s saddle for an expedition in the Rockies, or striding along raked gravel paths of formal gardens, Alice Eastwood was always first on the scene.
No, it wasn’t the vigor she lacked—it was the heart. Set foot on that treacherous San Francisco earth again, after what had happened there?
The director hurried after her, a little out of breath. “The Academy’s herbarium was destroyed during the ’06 earthquake, I believe? Such a loss to science.”
“Yes,” Alice said briefly, eyeing the Palm House as though it were a thorny sample she had to yank out of the ground without her field gloves. She had a little bit of a Thing about conservatories (she wasn’t going to call it a fear) ever since that particular day in ’06, but you couldn’t be a botanist and have a Thing about conservatories, so she squashed it down firmly and strode inside. Ah—the smell of vegetation, warm air, fern fronds. Life. The sun twinkled through the glass panes overhead, paths wound under shading palms, and she thought she could smell the elusive scent of orchids. “You have a sample of Encephalartos altensteinii I was interested in seeing . . .”
“Yes, this way. Someday I’m hoping to lay hands on an Epiphyllum oxypetalum, but—”
“A Queen of the Night?” Alice didn’t often veer away from proper scientific names—it felt mildly rude, like addressing a woman by her nickname when you hadn’t yet been formally introduced—but Epiphyllum oxypetalum was special.
“Yes!” The director of the Royal Botanic Gardens brightened, tugging on his whiskers. “I’ve never been lucky enough to lay eyes on one, much less in bloom. Difficult when it only flowers for one night, eh?”
“I’ve seen one bloom.” Alice could see it now: a white, exotic blossom opening slowly in a dark room, almost seeming to cast its own light, emitting a heady and indescribable fragrance. She remembered her fingers trembling as she touched one exquisite petal, remembered the look on the faces of the women around her. Four women who could not have been more different, united in vast, wondrous awe around the miracle of that flower. Miracle had not seemed too momentous a word, after what they had endured.
“Where did you see . . .”
“Oh, a long time ago.” Alice fiddled with the Zeiss lens hanging around her neck on the same chain as her spectacles, bringing it up to her eye to examine a spot on a palm leaf. “Let’s see that Encephalartos altensteinii.”
Later, having said her goodbyes, after being introduced to a dozen botanists and trading addresses for correspondence (“I know of your interest in the Genista genus, Miss Eastwood, and would be happy to send you some samples!”), Alice wandered the lawns outside the Palm House, clapping a hand to her flower-laden hat to keep it from blowing away in the summer breeze. The hat had come from Paris, made by a master embroideress at the Callot Soeurs atelier: the only remotely fashionable touch on a woman who would always rather carry a plant press than a velvet handbag. Her stride along the path was still brisk, but she hadn’t outpaced the question after all: Will you go back to San Francisco?
Alice found a bench nearby and sat, picking up a discarded newspaper and fanning herself. Later she thought how random that was: she never read the society pages; and she shouldn’t have seen that article at all. But the abandoned paper had been folded back on one of those gushy social columns, the sort that breathlessly reported which ball Lady So-and-So had attended in a gown of pale green liberty satin and an eight-strand pearl collar, or which earl’s daughter had married in a cloud of mousseline and Valenciennes lace . . . Only it wasn’t a description of a gown or a ball that caught Alice’s eye on this bright summer morning.
—phoenixes carved in rare blue-and-white jade—
—fifty-seven sapphires and four thousand pearls—
—butterflies fashioned out of kingfisher feathers—
—carved ivory Queen of the Night flowers—
And she found herself reading, fingers clenched so tight the newsprint crumpled in her grip. Reading it once, twice, her hands shaking. Putting it down at last, staring blindly over the children bowling their hoops and the strolling women in their white summer muslins. Instead of banks of blowsy roses she saw a wall of flame, and instead of twittering birds she heard the crystalline shatter of glass.
She rose, not bothering to formulate a polite apology as she approached the first top-hatted gentleman hurrying past her bench. “Excuse me, sir, I don’t know London at all well. Where would I go to send a telegram overseas?” The man stared at her uneasily before rattling off some directions, and Alice didn’t blame him. She was drenched in icy sweat, white-faced and trembling—Alice Eastwood, who had not trembled as she climbed a railing six stories high over a shattered atrium in the old California Academy, who had laughed when she was nearly swept over a waterfall to her death at Cataract Gulch but struggled out of the river with a handful of wet plant samples instead.
Alice Eastwood, afraid?
Very, she thought as she hurried out of Kew Gardens, already parsing her words for that telegram. Three telegrams, actually. One to New York, one to Buenos Aires, one to Paris . . . but all beginning with the same four words.
The Phoenix Crown
Found