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Bertrand has successfully convinced her that, given the wedding is scheduled for next month, they can forego a significant engagement dinner. They have struck a compromise, however — the way they learned together on the island with nothing but bitter apples for company — and it has all shaken out into a tea party in the garden of her new home, accompanied by all of their closest acquaintances and all Snickets except the one she would like to see most (though, she admits privately with a hand over the almost imperceptible swell of her abdomen, perhaps now would not be the most appropriate time to see Lemony). It is a pleasant afternoon, in that part of the year Beatrice has always liked the most in the City when the cool breeze of spring begins to turn hot and the days begin to lengthen.
She has played hostess and Bertrand has cleared the plates. They sink with surprising ease and no prior conversation into these roles, and even that small thing reminds her of why this is the man she has chosen to marry. He is reliable and unflappable and steadying, the way he was as he steered their boat through the poor weather on the night of their return, and she has no doubt that he will make the most wonderful partner and father.
Besides that, of course she loves him. In quiet moments she admits to herself that she does even more than she did Lemony, though there were days where she never thought she would say that about anyone. This love has more dimensions. They can sit together and read, silent, just as well as they can argue a point, without ever being disrespectful, just as well as they can work together toward an agreed aim. He sees her, much more clearly and almost completely, and he doesn’t deny the parts of her which are not perfect.
Not everyone has been able to make it today, and some have sent their apologies in the form of gifts. Monty, for one, has written from Argentina and sent photographs of his latest discoveries which delighted and intrigued Bertrand. Others have brought along flowers and pretty greeting cards that she has decided she will display on the mantle. It is frighteningly domestic.
As the sun begins to set, Beatrice finds herself in the expansive kitchen fixing Kit a gimlet (and ardently wishing she could have one herself), with her betrothed chopping the limes. Well, chopping is not the word; in his quiet moments Bertrand has fashioned a device that cuts them neatly, in perfect decorative circles of precisely the correct thickness. While her own inherent contrariness whispers to her that this is a superfluous invention unless one does not own knives, she nevertheless appreciates the way his mind works.
Not for the first time, she wonders what kind of strange child they might be expecting as a combination of the two of them, different as they are. One with his logic, she hopes, his demeanour and his imagination. She is not sure what she has to offer, peppermint allergy aside. It will be a while yet before they will be able to ascertain if it can hold a tune, or if it can so reliably aim a dart.
Blissfully, the doorbell interrupts her before she can pursue her line of thinking. Bertrand stops what he is doing, but she has already finished stirring the drink.
“I’ll go,” she trills. As his hand gently brushes her back and he inclines his head for a kiss on the cheek, there is a vision in her mind, of them here in this very kitchen doing this very thing thirty years in the future, that she cannot decide if she welcomes or loathes. She is the safest she has ever been, and yet at least a tiny part of her is already rattling the bars of the imagined cage. Silly girl , her mother would have said. She wholeheartedly agrees, and on her way to answer the door makes a note to have a strong word with herself later on.
There is a thick card in a shade of cool ivory attached to the hostile bouquet. On one side, in a heavily embellished and easily recognisable script:
Congratulations, on a marginally better choice than your last.
Her stomach treacherously flips. Irritated as she is by the content of the message, Beatrice cannot help noticing that Esmé has sent it on the back of her own business card. It would be a frivolous detail, perhaps, to anyone without their training and experience, but Beatrice knows without a shadow of a doubt that if she wanted to send a message she would have no shortage of access to fine stationery. As with everything, Esmé has done this on purpose. It is a losing game to attempt to understand her true motivations — Beatrice thinks bitterly that she has tried hard enough over the years — but her address is printed on the back, underneath the raised gold foil of her name, and so her immediate aims are clear enough.
There will be endless twists and turns to the tale of how she has found out the date or the time of this event, and no explanation at all for why she has bothered to send a gift. The first thing Beatrice notices is that the flowers are striking, but she once spent an ultimately unsatisfying summer studying floriography as a teenager and so she can read their meaning. Petunias for resentment, cyclamens for separation, red dahlias for betrayal, a couple of anemones for death (Beatrice can only hope she intends this metaphorically), all such a striking contrast to the periwinkles and roses sent from genuine well-wishers.
Beatrice would like to be cross, or at least perturbed, but some part of her appreciates the quality of the insult. It is strangely flattering to picture Esmé, who hates to read and has no patience for flowers in any case, doggedly learning an entire summer of information on Veracious Floral Dialogue simply to catch her attention.
On instinct, as Bertrand comes to stand beside her, she pockets the card. He examines the arrangement and chuckles.
“Have you upset someone?” he asks with a bemused little chuckle. Bertrand doesn’t seem to have ever taken the same coding class, but it comes as no surprise to her that he has somehow learned the language anyway. His face becomes serious as he fingers an anemone, in deepest burgundy, staring into its small black heart. “Who are they from?”
Beatrice hasn’t had enough time to think, and later she will wonder what motivates her into doing this. There is something akin to shame coiling inside her and she feels the little card inside her pocket like a heavy lead weight.
“It doesn’t say.”
Beatrice reminds herself that this is a bad idea before she has even put on her jacket. She says the same again when she toes on her shoes, when she tells her fiancé that she is going for a walk, and again in the backseat of the taxi. Who even is this woman anymore, the one who has sent a veiled threat in the form of flowers? It has been a year since they have seen one another, longer since they have really seen one another, and the stories about Esmé’s behaviour do not fill her with confidence. But there is a stray childish hope within her that she cannot expel. With Olaf gone (to where, nobody in Beatrice’s circle seems to know or much care) is there a chance she will be different? And, more worryingly - what difference would it make if she were?
She mulls this all throughout the journey, and on her way up the steps, but doesn’t arrive at an answer. She has to stand and wait after she knocks for what feels like an interminably long time, which she is sure is part of the game, and when Esmé answers, she has the nerve to attempt a look of surprise .
One thing Beatrice had not considered in the taxi ride was the greeting. Esmé is easier to consider when she can be evaluated properly and objectively from a safe distance. Nothing is ever as simple in practice as it is in theory.
“Beatrice Baudelaire,” comes the strange, formal greeting, said somehow with warmth, disgust and trepidation all at once. Then she settles into it, leaning against the doorframe with a sneaky curl to her mouth. “That is, if you are keeping your own name? Did you like the flowers?”
Beatrice feels so different and so much older now than she did when they last spoke alone that she is a little taken aback, firstly that Esmé looks the same as ever and that she is already needling and playing the way she always used to.
“Yes. Very clever,” Beatrice sighs, to placate her. “Will you invite me in?”
With a little shrug and that same irritating smile, Esmé shifts marginally to one side to allow her to come in — only far enough that Beatrice still feels the need to squeeze past her — and staring at her all the while as though she is a cat who has trapped a mouse. Truth be told though, however many stories her associates tell, Beatrice is not afraid of Esmé and cannot ever picture feeling that way, no matter how monstrously she acts. She transparently enjoys this persona she wears sometimes, unsettling and mysterious, but Beatrice still remembers parts of her that do not support this image.
“You’ve a lot of nerve, coming here. What would your friends say?”
“ You’re the one who summoned me .” This comes out defensively, as she is guided through the expansive hallway and into a kitchen. The first thing Beatrice thinks on entering is how different it is from Bertrand’s — all style and no substance — and then feels an odd twist of guilt for comparing them in the first place.
“Oh, is that the case?” With a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head, she turns her back and leaves Beatrice leaning against the countertop. “You were hardly dragged at gunpoint.”
Esmé is dressed as if she is in one of the expensive City bars she apparently frequents, rather than at home alone on a Sunday evening. Perhaps she has only just come home, but something in the totally unruffled gloss of her hair that looks freshly put together suggests otherwise. In any case, the flow of the satiny dress is interrupted by a belt which Beatrice herself would argue does not actually complement it, though she knows that the combination must be the very height of chic, and it is only as she focuses on the belt that a spark of indignance fires to life inside her and she lets out a disbelieving sigh.
“That’s mine ,” she points out, gesturing vaguely with a breathy laugh.
“From years ago, darling, and it was rather unfashionable then. You were always leaving things with me.” Clinking glasses together as she selects the two she wants for whatever she is making, she turns back to give a little sly smile. “I simply spared you the indignity of being so unfashionable again by never returning it.”
“Of course,” Beatrice murmurs sardonically. “Much like my mother’s bracelet, I suppose.”
Esmé levels her with one of her looks; halfway amused, halfway murderous. “Now, now. Neither of us are any stranger to a little theft.”
As quickly as that, the colour comes back into the picture of why she shouldn’t be here at all. It feels strange to loiter at the edge of the kitchen, oddly comfortable, and feel as though they are merely bickering good-naturedly over Lemony’s casting choices again as they did years ago. Lemony . So much has transpired and the theft is not at the top of Beatrice’s list of changes in their relationship that should make her feel more on-edge here, even if it is at the top of Esmé’s.
She is preparing something complicated to drink. Beatrice knows that Esmé does not actually care much for the taste of alcoholic drinks, but her own preference is secondary to the trends, and so she is sloshing amber liquid into crystal glasses and adding various garnishes from nearby. Beatrice won’t drink whatever it is, but it informs her that, while Esmé has somehow gotten wind of her engagement, the news of the baby has so far escaped her.
She takes the glass to avert suspicion. “Why did you ask me here?”
At this, Esmé laughs outright. “I didn’t; you have arrived unannounced!”
Beatrice scoffs. She supposes that they are both right, but won’t agree to that aloud. She doesn’t like to play along with Esmé’s power games, and they both know that she wouldn’t be here had she not been sent a blatant provocation, despite the wavering doubt of that little voice in her mind that asks whether the card was really only a vehicle for the message. There is always the temptation to write off whatever Esmé has done as an accident, and Beatrice thinks that’s probably what keeps her in business: the benefit of the doubt that people seem to extend to her and the enormous grey area of plausible deniability. “The card ,” she cannot help but say, petulantly, even though she knows it will make no difference.
“Oh, I hadn’t considered that you’d pay so much mind to it.” Esmé lies well enough when she wants to, but for this she isn’t even bothering to disguise her smirk. “Shall we sit?”
She follows, clutching her undrinkable drink, and settles into a chair that Esmé indicates for her as though they are initiating peace talks in a long drawn-out war over their whiskeys. For a long moment, they sit there together in the pointed silence of a ceasefire. Beatrice feels quite strongly that she has been lured here — encouraged, at least! — for some purpose that her former friend does not want to share, but she is also beginning to come around to the idea that Esmé feels the same way, from the way she sits strangely quiet and waits.
“But really,” Beatrice says, even though she suspects the response will not be worth it. “Why?”
“I only wanted to see if you’d come.” This feels uncomfortably honest even to Beatrice, and it is said without the usual hauteur. It grates on Beatrice’s nerves regardless — a little game, to see if her power still holds, and she has decidedly lost it. But then, she supposes she knew that in the taxi.
“A test, then.” Beatrice clarifies in an unimpressed monotone, and the blonde promptly nods. She ought to be ashamed of that, but of course Esmé never has had the good manners to be ashamed of anything.
“And so I have. So what?”
“Well, why have you?”
Beatrice is perfectly able to deflect, but Esmé has managed to rather strike to the heart of the question that has been formulating, only ever pieces rather than whole (it is too much to look at all at once). While she feels her decisions have already been made for the most part, through her actions — there is a wedding planned! — it remains one she has not quite resolved in her own mind. She thinks about poison darts and coded letters and great escapes, and then of the neutral yellows Bertrand wants to use in the nursery, of the promises they have made that they will make sure their children are safer than they ever were. The latter is what she has strived for; so, why does it scare her?
Esmé won’t be able to opine on this, even if given the opportunity, but she sits here in her diamonds and silk seemingly without a care in the world, as if all of her decisions have already been made and she is comfortable in them. If Beatrice can forget the heinous ways she has behaved in the past for just a moment, it is as if she is looking at the embodiment of the part of herself she is leaving behind.
Besides even that, she cannot help remembering that, not even so long ago, they had laughed, they had battled, schemed, danced...and more, too. It feels like a thousand years ago in some ways, but only a week in others.
Before she can consider whether (or why) she might want to put any of this into words, the first thing that comes absurdly to mind is that she wants to put down her drink first. “Coasters?”
“You are ridiculous.” Esmé says, with a shake of her head, but then reluctantly she nods toward the cabinet close to Beatrice’s side. “In the drawer.”
After a bit of rifling through trinkets, Beatrice manages to find something that might be coasters, though they are metal for some reason. In the moments of pause, she sees Esmé shifting forward slightly in her seat in her peripheral vision, lips parted as though she wants to say something but cannot quite work out how.
As she reaches to place the strange squares on the table and place her glass atop one, she is startled by the hand that comes to rest on her wrist.
“Bea.” This is said in a rushing exhale, as though she needs to get it out before it expires on her tongue. “I — didn’t mean to spoil it, today.” She sounds unusually tongue-tied, Beatrice notices vaguely, over the jump of her own pulse, and she is speaking more softly than normal. “Do you suppose it’s so wrong if I only wanted to see you?”
Beatrice doesn’t know how to respond to that. She is suddenly aware that she has started to hold her breath, and that she has gone very still as though she is holding a butterfly that she is frightened to crush. She cannot look up to see the look on her face, but she can picture it clearly enough.
“ Bea ,” she says again, and Beatrice detects the movement in the corners of her vision as she shifts closer and dips her head to try to catch her eye.
It is only when her fingertips brush the tendon on the underside of her wrist that she shakes awake in a flurry, drawing her hand back and reaching over to close the drawer she has left open, as if any of those things will be enough to distract her. This is only a game too, probably, and it is why she should never have come, and Bertrand , and most of all she shouldn’t feel that tingle on her skin as if she has been somehow pleasantly branded by those gentle fingers.
As her head is turned in her panic, she catches sight of something that serves to only compound her crisis. She plucks the matchbook from the drawer with just the very tips of her fingers, as if she is frightened that it will sully her too. She knows already that Esmé has played some part in so many terrible things by now that she doubts she can even list them, but it is never pleasant to have the abstract brought into reality so suddenly.
“I suppose you left this for me to find?” Beatrice shakes her head and purses her lips while pain clenches in her chest — why should she still feel it? She should be long past disappointment, and yet somehow every time she discovers that her once-friend has done something terrible she feels the same awful dread.
“What?” Esmé asks, a little startled and with her brow furrowed. “A brown —”
Before she can even finish, Beatrice has violently thrown it at her.
“Beatrice, you are acting hysterical!” This accusation, hurled at a pitch that could itself be labelled hysterical, is followed by a quick swipe to snatch the matchbook from her and wave it wildly at the long column atop the cabinet. “For the candle , you stupid woman.”
There is it again, that familiar plausible deniability. “Nothing you do is ever truly by accident.”
Sighing, Esmé blinks heavily as though she is already tired of this particular dance. “You think so much of me, in a way, Bea.” With a faint and fleeting expression that could either qualify as a smile or a grimace, she tosses the book of matches aside. “You come here to see me — unnecessarily, even if it is easier for you to say otherwise! — and you say I have forced you, and you imply that I’m this and that, and yet here you still are.”
Whether she believes her or not is irrelevant; that she can conceive of this as flattering at all is what Beatrice hears. “True, though, isn’t it?”
Esmé has the nerve to look as though this conversation is beneath her, as if Beatrice is judging her for eating too many macaroons rather than for committing heinous crimes. “If I tell you no you will assume I am a liar, and if I tell you yes you will assume I am corrupt — as you would put it — so whichever you prefer, as it will make no difference to the outcome on my part.”
This is as good as confirmation as a firm answer would have been, but at least five times as infuriating. It is no surprise, but it leaves a bitter taste regardless, and something like a lump in her throat. Smoothly and decisively, she rises to her feet with a hardness in her jaw. “I shouldn’t have come.”
Infuriated too, by the looks of it, Esmé crosses her legs in a huff. “Oh, so you’ve lost interest in discussing the flowers?” she pries, with a bite of anger behind the words. “Which did you like the best, so I can remember for the big day?”
With a bark of a laugh, Beatrice pauses halfway to the door. “You can never help yourself, can you?” She hasn’t felt this way in months, fury pricking under her skin and it is terrible , but it is somehow enlivening too. “Can never just leave well enough alone. All I had wanted today was a peaceful little gathering, with my associates and my fiancé, a moment not to think about the state of this City and the people like you who inhabit it — and you’re jealous , that’s what it is. It always has been!”
“Of you?” This is said so incredulously that it almost sounds like the yelp of a frightened dog. “I am truly not. And besides; peaceful, darling, fiancé? Who are you — do you know?” Even in her fury, Beatrice falters a little upon realising that perhaps Esmé has intuited more than she considered possible, and in that moment she is on her feet too, crossing to stand close to her. “Is this really all you want?”
“ All ,” Beatrice repeats, as if it is a slur, and shakes her head. How is it possible that she understands and yet so completely doesn’t? “You have no concept of the things you look down on. You don’t understand me.”
Truth has lost its meaning in this discussion, by now — and, in Beatrice’s estimation, Esmé is the one who saw to that — so there is no need to consider whether she believes this statement entirely factual.
“I understand quite well how quickly you have flitted on from Snicket. The weeping didn’t last long.”
Something in her chest clenches coldly. That she can say the name at all is one thing, but that she snarls it like this is another. “ Don’t speak of him to me,” she warns, disappointed when her voice slightly shakes with the emotion behind the words.
“Oh, Beatrice!” Esmé cries, with undisguised mirth. “Not the crocodile tears again! You ought to post a note of thanks to Olaf, perhaps, now you have found better! Is that the line you have been towing?”
Beatrice won’t let herself cry from the frustration of it, or give her the slap she unquestionably deserves. She is making no point whatsoever, only finding new things to argue over and new ways to be obscene and cause her hurt — why is she here, again? She turns to leave then, fist clenched tight at her side and nails digging half-moons into her palm, but Esmé apparently isn’t finished.
“My point is ,” she says, in a little less of an elevated accent; the way she always does when she is trying to say something articulately rather than simply whatever nonsense enters her mind. Her hand is around her elbow, and she is uncomfortably close, but she looks down so beseechingly as if she wishes she could just make herself understood. “You shouldn’t pretend to be someone else, least of all for Bertrand — or Snicket.”
So taken aback by this, Beatrice finds herself incapable of words. When she does find them again, after a gasp of disbelief, they spring from her softly, before she has had time to coat them in venom. “What would you know about it?”
Esmé is serious now. It is obvious from her eyes. “You’ve constructed this silly life for yourself,” she says, soft too. “But it simply doesn’t suit you.”
“Better than this does, for you,” Beatrice says, with a knowing and spiteful look. “It seems you’ve nothing better to do these days than research my plans and my whereabouts and think of spiteful little messages to send to me to see if I will pay attention to you. Can’t you get it anywhere else?”
“Don’t be crass , wife-to-be,” she snarls. “You’ll be lonely soon enough.”
“Lonely!” Beatrice breathes, in a furious expulsion of breath.
“Very likely,” Esmé agrees. “Because it isn’t who you are.”
Beatrice thinks now of her earlier reflections — and of this horrible but infatuating fury, of the havoc she might wreak if she were to allow this to be the whole of who she is. She thinks about how foolish she has been to think that she might find something through this conversation that is more worthwhile than she has already a few neighbourhoods over. The alternative seems only to be this endless, exhausting loop of rage and distrust. If she mourns this later, it will only be because it could have been different, not because it was ever viable in the real world.
“Or, if it is,” Esmé continues, quietly now, eyes glittering as though she thinks she is reaching such a key moment in their dialogue. “Then why are you here?
Beatrice can finally answer the question now, to herself. To leave this behind.
“You finally raise an excellent point.” she says simply, with an air of finality this time, and she notes with a modicum of satisfaction that her certainty throws off her sparring partner. Shucking her arm free, she heads for the door and secretly delights — one final time — in the clack of heels behind her.
She turns back, just for a second, to say goodbye or to communicate it with her eyes, and knows the moment she does that she will regret it for years. Esmé’s hand tangles in the lapel of her jacket and pulls taut.
“ Bea ,” she has dropped the nasty tone entirely and this sounds almost something like a plea, with her lips parted and brow furrowed, but Beatrice has already heard enough.
She thinks too highly of herself to follow her out into the street, but she calls her name twice into the dark. Beatrice tells herself she won’t wonder about that later.
When she returns home, she pretends it never happened. She discards the jacket, stuffing it hurriedly into the laundry the moment she is up the stairs as if it has been stained by the pressure of her fingers prying at the fabric, asking for something neither of them have ever really been able to voice.
She will dispose of the flowers tomorrow, if Bertrand hasn’t done so already, and it is of some comfort to her that even if she doesn’t, they will wilt. Some things, she reflects, are created temporary, but others are stronger and stay the course. There is that saying about the brightest flames.
In a strange way, she has helped herself. She knows now that she has made the decision with head and heart, and on purpose.