“Very well.” He wrinkled his brow, thinking. “I got a telegram from Mark saying he needed me to send you flowers. That telegram must’ve been damn expensive, because I think they were in Bermuda. I don’t even know if they have telegraphs in Bermuda, but I also can’t imagine him successfully bribing the ship’s communications officer. Anyway. He said to send you a dozen striped tulips with a note. But striped tulips mean ‘you have beautiful eyes,’ and I didn't think that fit, so I swapped them out for purple hyacinths. Because they represent sorrow.”
Ellen’s mouth fell open in surprise. She’d never once considered the language of flowers.
“Then he gave me the note to add.” Luke grimaced. “It was short. I wasn’t impressed, but I wasn’t going to change that part without his permission, and they were already leaving Bermuda.”
Striped tulips are my favorite flower.
“When he came to Cottesloe on leave a few months later, he mentioned he didn’t know what to say to you. One of his fellow officers suggested the phrase, ‘my condolences.’” Luke snorted. “Thankfully Mark had the good sense to go with something a little longer than that.”
“Four words longer,” Ellen murmured.
“I know he wanted to visit you,” Luke added.
Ellen threw him a skeptical look.
“I mean, he felt like he ought to check on you,” he amended. “But by then it had been seven months since your baby had passed away, and he was fairly certain you didn’t want to see him.”
Correct on that score.Ellen shook her head. “I didn’t know this. I didn’t know any of this.”
“Mark is a private person. It doesn’t surprise me he didn’t share this. He probably knows what he did was insufficient, and he’s embarrassed by it.” Luke eased back in his chair.
Ellen put a hand to her face. “I need a moment to refresh myself.”
“Are you well?” Luke peered at her, concern etched across his features.
“Yes,” Ellen told him distractedly, and rose to find the water closet. After she splashed water across her face and took five deep breaths, she raised her chin and went back to their box.
The show had already started when Ellen slipped in, thankfully, so she quietly took her seat and stared at the glittering figures on the stage for the next hour and a half, not a single complete thought in her head. When the show ended, Mark and Ellen hung around to thank Luke for his box and suggest he come by for a visit.
The opera had been timed to end so the cream of Society could reach their next destination, usually a ball, just in time for the clock to strike midnight. For Mark and Ellen, they rode home in a full cab in conflicted silence.
What he did was bad. And insufficient,Ellen mused as she watched him reread the program in snatches as they went past gaslights.Hedidtry. He wasn’t as cold and uncaring as I thought.
She fidgeted, trying to get comfortable with her bustle. She so rarely wore one in a cab, due to her work. Quietly, before she lost her courage, Ellen told him, “I would’ve been pleased with striped tulips.”
Mark’s gaze flew to hers. “What?”
“And while your six words were, well, pathetic, and I deserved at least a six-page letter, it was much better than ‘my condolences.’”
Mark scowled. “Luke’s been talking.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Ellen scooted down her seat to be directly across him, her twisted bustle causing her skirt to rise a few inches from her ankles. Their knees bumped together.
“I still ruined it. And even if I’d sent you that six-page letter and all the tulips in London, it still wouldn’t have been enough. I should’ve been there.”
“You wouldn’t have been able to get leave. And you were in Bermuda. And you didn’t find out until weeks after it happened.”She had a sudden picture of Mark, age twenty, reeling from bad news and with no idea how to handle it. No idea how to comfort a wife from halfway around the world.
He shrugged. “I shouldn’t have joined the Navy. This whole problem wouldn’t have happened if I’d not made a rash choice.”
Ellen smiled, the hard, bitter shards in her heart melting away. “On that we agree, at least. For the record, I could live without the color purple.”
“For your birthday I will find you tulips,” he promised.
Warmth blossomed in her chest. Ellen stretched out in the carriage for hire, her slippered foot accidentally resting on his. She jerked away, surprised and uncertain, and the slipper fell off somewhere in the darkness.
Mark glanced at her in surprise, heat flaring in his eyes.
“My…my slipper.” Ellen licked her lips nervously, and his gaze focused on them. She flushed. “Pardon me.”