Two O'Clock in the Orchid House

The orchid house at the Ashby-Vane cottage was, Theodore Brandt had long ago decided, the only honest room on the entire estate. Everything else lied. The ballroom lied about how many people the family had to love them. The library lied about how many of its books had been opened. The forty bedrooms lied, every June, about being a summer cottage, because no one had ever built a cottage with forty bedrooms and a staff of thirty and a private dock, and the family knew it, and the word *cottage* was simply one more of the small expensive lies that Newport told itself between the months of June and September. But the orchid house did not lie. The orchid house was glass and iron and damp warm air, and it contained two hundred orchids that did not care in the slightest who owned them, and they bloomed or they did not bloom according to laws that no fortune in America could amend. Theodore came here at night, when his work was done, because it was the one place on the estate where being looked at was not the point of anything. He was not supposed to be here. He understood that perfectly. He was a footman — second footman, in fact, which was a rank precise enough to be insulting — and the orchid house was the private province of the family, and a footman discovered among the family's orchids at two in the morning would not be a footman by breakfast. Theodore knew the risk. He had simply decided, somewhere in his fourth Newport summer, that a man who took no risks at all was only a different kind of furniture, and he had grown tired of being furniture. So he came, most nights, and he stood among the orchids in his shirtsleeves, and he breathed air that smelled of green growing things instead of beeswax and other people's cigars, and he let himself, for half an hour, not be anybody's second footman. What he had not allowed for — what no amount of careful night-walking had prepared him for — was that the orchid house might also be the only honest room for somebody else. He heard the door at the far end before he saw her. The particular soft catch of the iron latch, eased rather than turned, the latch-work of a person who also did not wish to be heard. Theodore went very still among the white moth-orchids, his heart performing the swift cold arithmetic of the discovered: a maid, perhaps, in which case there might be an understanding between them; a gardener, in which case there would certainly not be; or — Or Miss Eleanor Ashby-Vane, in a pale wrapper with her hair down her back, carrying a small lamp, who came three steps into the glasshouse and saw him, and stopped. For a long moment neither of them moved, and the orchids did not lie, and the warm damp air held the two of them exactly where they were. Theodore knew her, of course. Everyone in the house knew Miss Eleanor — knew the shape of her summer, which was the shape of every unmarried daughter's summer in Newport: the mornings of being dressed, the afternoons of being driven, the evenings of being introduced, the whole long bright season of being shown, like a painting the family was hoping to sell well. He had handed her into carriages. He had stood behind her chair at dinner forty times and she had never once, that he had noticed, looked at the man behind the chair, because you did not look at the furniture. She was looking at him now. "You are the second footman," she said. Her voice was low, careful, pitched for a room where neither of them belonged. "Brandt. I do know your name. I want you to know that I know it, because I think — I think you have spent four summers assuming that I don't." It was so exactly, so precisely the thought he had been thinking about her thirty seconds before that Theodore forgot, briefly, every rule that should have governed the next thing he said. "I came here," he said, "because it is the one room in this house that doesn't want anything from me. I thought I was the only person who knew that about it." Eleanor Ashby-Vane stood among the orchids in the lamplight, a young woman who was driven and dressed and displayed all day long, and something in her face — some held thing — eased very slightly, the way the iron latch had eased. "No," she said. "You are not the only one. I have been coming here at two in the morning for three summers, Mr. Brandt, and I have never told a living soul, because it is the only half-hour of my year in which nobody is deciding what I am worth." She set the small lamp down on the staging bench, between a flowering orchid and a pot of one that had not yet decided to flower, and the gesture had the quality of a flag being, very cautiously, set down rather than raised. "It seems we have been keeping the same secret. On opposite sides of the same glass." Outside, the great lying house slept off its dinner. Inside the orchid house the air was warm and green and told the truth, and Theodore Brandt, second footman, looked at Eleanor Ashby-Vane across two hundred flowers that did not care who owned them, and understood that the most dangerous summer of his life had just, very quietly, at two o'clock in the morning, begun.