The Peonies

They lived beneath the house. Beneath the many parlors and dining rooms and delicious bedrooms filled with velvet and lace, they lived in a place they liked to call “the cave,” because it was so very cramped and dark. Mrs. Hawkins, the housekeeper, got irritable when they wasted things such as water and candle wax, and so they were constantly walking around the few rooms of the cave without candles, chuckling as they stumbled upon the withered floorboards. Although they weren’t family, they often looked it because they spent so much time together in the cave and upstairs in the house, serving the wealthy Maitland family, and their skin had become quite pale because of it. Their cheeks and hands were so white, they looked like cream. The only one with any color to his face was Michael, the gardener, whose nose was sprinkled with freckles. Jane never noticed him much until the day she found the peony.

---

It was a Monday so, naturally, she was exhausted for absolutely no reason at all. She stumbled downstairs to the cave that night, pulling pins out of her hair, and giggled lazily when she ran into Peter, one of the servant boys.

“Excuse me, Jane.”

“Sorry, Peter.”

“Couldn’t you see my hair?” he chuckled, for his hair was as bright as a carrot and rather easy to spot even in the darkness.

Jane smiled. “I wasn’t looking up.”

After almost colliding with Louisa and Meg, the cook’s daughters, she managed to find her own bedroom. It was nothing to marvel over. Just a small room with a small bed and table and a little trunk, where she kept her things. She didn’t have many things. But she didn’t need many things either, she supposed. She’d lived long enough without them already.

Once her hair was unpinned, falling past her shoulders in wrinkled waves the color of coffee, and her little maid’s apron had been untied and thrown in the corner, she sat on the bed and lit a candle. And it was then that she saw it. There, upon her white pillow, was a red peony. The petals were a deep, lovely crimson and the center was mustard-yellow. When she lifted it from the pillow, she was surprised it hadn’t stained the pillowcase, for its colors looked absurdly strong in the dreariness of the cave.

Holding it up to the candlelight, she bit her lip. It was awfully pretty. And awfully alone. Although she searched upon the pillow, beneath the pillow, beneath the covers and bed, there was no note left alongside the peony. She hadn’t the slightest idea who might have left it. But she couldn’t deny how happy it made her.

That night, she lied awake in bed for hours, too restless for sleep. The peony was lying beside her cheek on the pillow. She wanted to keep it close, so that the shadows couldn’t rise up from the darkness and steal it away from her. She knew it was silly to think such a thing, but she was tired and everything seemed ethereal to her in that odd sort of half-sleep. While she protected her flower, she began to think of the other occupants of the house, wondering who might have left the flower for her. In the end, she could only think of one plausible person. Michael, the gardener. It would have been very easy for him to snip off the flower, for one thing, and his room rested just beside hers as well, making it easy for him to slip inside and leave the flower without being noticed.

Now, as she began to think of it, she turned toward the wall that they shared. She thought she could hear him breathing in his sleep and the sound, suddenly amplified, sounded thick in the night, as though he were resting in the room with her. Suddenly embarrassed, she clutched the peony to her chest.

---

Michael wasn’t unhandsome. He was quite tall and lithe after working so long in the Maitland’s great gardens. There was a healthy warmth in the glow of his skin and in the summertime, the sun liked to kiss bits of his brown hair, making them light and gingery. Whenever Jane had to go to the rose garden, her mistress’s favorite place on the estate, she would pass Michael and give him a polite smile. He’d have his sleeves rolled up and his hands dirtied with soil and he’d tip his hat at her and perhaps say good morning. But she’d never thought that he might fancy her. And she’d never thought that she could care for him either. It was the peony that did it.

The next day, she found another flower on her pillow. And the day after that, another. With every new peony, Jane thought more and more of Michael. She was achingly aware of everything he did- when he turned his head to her, when he brushed past her in the cave, when he tended to the peonies in the garden. Everything that might have been an accident before was now intentional and romantic and wonderful. When he picked up her glove for her, she blushed and stammered. If she heard footsteps in the night, she knew that he was pacing his room and thinking of her. When he gave her his biscuit at breakfast, saying he wasn’t very hungry, she swallowed the dry crumbs happily, as though they were bits of a moist, chocolate cake baked by her kind gardener. By the end of the month, she had a bouquet of peonies and she was hopelessly in love with Michael.

He would have been a fool not to notice it. And as Jane’s heart began to thud within her chest, Michael’s did too. When her blood sang in her ears, Michael’s sang to match it. Soon they were both quite smitten and all because of the peonies, which Jane now kept hidden in her trunk, lined up in neat little rows.

If she was ever unhappy, all she had to do was unlock the trunk and look down at all her pretty red peonies. They were like jewels, like rubies, in her tiny gray room. They were the blood that now pulsed through her veins, making her think of Michael at every moment. She would have gone mad if they’d been taken from her. She always made sure the lock of her trunk was fastened and secure before she left her bedroom. It hurt her just to leave them. The only way she could bring herself to leave her room was to remind herself of the faltering chance she might have to see Michael that day. Without that, she might have stayed amongst her peonies forever.

But as the days continued to pass, Jane began to grow restless. Certainly they wouldn’t go on forever, she thought, with only blushes and smiles and secret peonies. Certainly Michael had begun to grow rather restless as well.

And he had. It was true. One day near the start of autumn, he slipped a note in her apron pocket after breakfast.

Dear Jane, it read, Would you like to go on a walk with me this afternoon? The Maitlands will be away paying visits to their friends and so we will have a few hours to ourselves, I think. I should like it very much if you would come walk in the gardens with me. They’re very pretty in fall, just before everything starts to die away. I think you would like it.

-Michael

As soon as her mistress had walked out the front door, Jane rushed downstairs. She exchanged her smudged apron for a clean one, tidied her hair, and nervously slipped one of the peonies into her pocket. It felt like a weight pulling at her apron strings, so clearly could she feel it. She stumbled back upstairs and tried to look calm and composed as she met Michael in the garden.

He was waiting for her beside the dogwood tree, holding up his hand with a palm full of sunflower seeds, chuckling as a robin flew down to his wrist for a little snack. Jane bit her lip as she watched him. He looked like some sort of god with the sun falling down upon his cheek, his soft whistle tempting and soothing the birds, his calmness, his gentle nature. She went to him, saying, “Good afternoon, Michael,” very softly, so that she wouldn’t startle him.

He looked to her and smiled and said her name, “Jane,” in such a way that it didn’t sound simple or plain, as she’d always thought of it. It fell from his mouth like honey, so warm and so beautiful, that she felt lovely as she stood there with the peony in her pocket.

“Should we go then?” he said.

And she nodded, breathless, and said, “Yes, let’s,” even though the words sounded ridiculous to her as soon as she said them. So very tidy and pretentious.

“The roses are gorgeous this time of year, aren’t they?” Michael said, holding her hand in his elbow as they walked along the little pathway, between trellises that weeped with hundreds of flush rose petals. “But of course you know that. Miss Maitland loves to come see them- doesn’t she?- and she makes you come along.”

“She doesn’t make me. I have to, as her maid. It isn’t her choice.”

“Yes, I know. Of course. That’s what I meant.”

“I know.”

Michael scratched the back of his head. His hair was in need of a trim, he thought. He looked around at the gardens. The flowers bored him, for he saw them so often. But knowing how much most girls like sentimental things like pretty flowers and lush gardens, he said, “But of course many flowers are pretty in autumn . . . Aren’t they, Jane?”

“Yes, they are.”

“Is autumn your favorite season?”

“No, I like winter best.”

“When there are no flowers left at all.”

Jane blushed. “I suppose.”

They’d reached the patch of peonies by this point: an overstretched circle of scarlet that swam around a little willow tree with arms that shifted and stretched in the breeze. Its fingertips just dusted the red petals.

Jane began to feel a little feverish as she looked at the patch of them. And she felt the fever pulsing out from one specific point on her thigh, beneath her apron, where she’d tucked in her own peony flower. The flower that Michael had given her. Slowly, nervously, with cheeks that were burnt as red as the flower, she pulled the peony from her pocket and held it up for Michael to see. It looked sad in the sunlight, she thought. She’d kept it hidden inside her trunk, in her room, in the cave, for so long that when she finally brought it out into the light, its color grew muted and its petals looked droopy and weak. She frowned at it for a moment but then, with a spurt of hope, she looked up at Michael again.

He stared blankly at the peony.

“Well that’s a pretty flower,” he said finally, smiling.

Jane felt her cheeks grow pale again. “Yes, it is.”

They began walking back toward the center of the garden, where they’d first begun the walk, as Jane slipped the peony back into her pocket. Their conversation was awkward but they both pretended not to notice it. Jane because of the peony. Michael because he didn’t like to talk much anyway.

“What do you like to do during the winter then, that makes it so wonderful? Do you like to go sledding?” he asked.

“No, I’d get my skirts all wet.”

“Do you like to go skating on the pond?”

“I’m always afraid I’ll fall in. I haven’t gone since I was a girl.”

“Do you make snowmen?”

“Sometimes. But they fall apart so easily. The snow’s rarely the right consistency to make a good, stable snowman.”

“That’s true.”

“I like to drink warm coffee by the fire though, with Mrs. Hawkins and Meg and Louisa. And I like to sit by the window in the library and look out at all the snow.”

“But you don’t like to go out and play in it?”

“No, not really.”

Michael stopped for a moment to look at the shrubs beneath the parlor window, and Jane had to stop too because her hand was still curled into his elbow. When he kneeled down and pressed his hand to the soil, measuring its richness or its health or some other strange detail only gardeners must know about, Jane’s hand was left hanging and alone. She brought it back down against her side awkwardly and waited for Michael. He stood and she trembled, wondering if he would take her hand again. He did, but this time in his own hand. And he squeezed it. And he stepped forward. And now Jane was trembling worse than ever. Somewhere, she heard footsteps but they were so jumbled that she began to doubt that they were footsteps at all. Perhaps it was only her heart, that was now jerking within her breast, beating against her ribs so hard that she was sure Michael could hear it.

“Jane?” he said.

“Yes?”

And then his lips caught hers. And for a moment, she was still.

But when she opened her eyes, she did not look at Michael. She looked past him, toward the door, where she saw Peter walking into the house. He hadn’t seen them. Jane didn’t say a word. Because as she stood there with Michael’s arms around her, she saw Peter walking toward the door of the cave and beneath his old tweed cap, resting upon his carrot-red hair, she could just see the bright petals of a peony flower.