Two Bottles of Rose Water

I was nineteen the summer the roses bloomed twice at Ridgefield, and I learned that even sweetness could be measured out like grain. My brother Whit had come home from his posting in the mountains of the Karakoram with two cut-glass bottles of rose water, sealed with wax and wrapped in raw silk. One bottle was for hair, he said, and one was for the face. Both went to my sister Caroline's rooms before I even knew they had arrived. That was the way of things at Ridgefield. Caroline was twenty-two, the eldest, and she was the one our father called his investment. I was the second daughter, the one the staff called Miss Evelyn when they remembered, and the one the household budgets accounted for under "and Miss Evelyn, incidentals." I did not hate my sister. That is important. I hated the way the house arranged itself around her, the way light fell on her chair at breakfast and shadow fell on mine, but I did not hate her. She was kind to me in the absent way of someone who has never had to think about whether kindness would be returned. The trouble started with the envelopes. By late August, three families had written to my father about me. Two of them sent cards in the same week. The first was heavy paper, cream-colored, with a crest stamped in charcoal ink and a neat black border. The second was lighter, folded twice, with a small drawing of a pear branch in the corner and a wax seal the color of rust. Both sat on the silver tray in the front hall, addressed to Mr. Charles Ashby, Ridgefield House, regarding his daughter. I found them before my father did. I am not proud of that. But I was nineteen, and I had spent my whole life reading the small print of my own diminishing, and so I read the envelopes. The charcoal one was from the Devereux family. Their son was at Harvard, and there was a photograph of a stable with six horses, and a note about a summer cottage in Maine. The rust one was from the Hollis family, whose son Thomas had been my playmate since I was six, when his mother brought him to Ridgefield for the autumn harvest and he fell out of the pear tree by the pond. I remember because I climbed up after him and got sap in my hair, and Caroline said I smelled like a Christmas candle for two days. What I remember most is what happened next. My father came into the hall, picked up both cards, and carried them into Caroline's sitting room without opening either. I stood in the doorway with my hands at my sides and watched him spread them on her writing desk like a hand of cards. "What do you think?" he asked her. Caroline looked up from her book. She had the rose water on her dressing table, the first bottle, the one for hair, and the room smelled faintly of it. "The Devereux boy has better prospects," she said. "But Thomas Hollis has the old orchard, and land endures." "Exactly my thinking," my father said. And that was that. Two envelopes, one decision, and neither of them mine. I went out to the pear tree by the pond and sat under it until the light went orange. I did not cry, because I had learned a long time ago that crying at Ridgefield only earned you a lecture about composure and a request to practice your piano. But I felt something harden in my chest. Not anger. Not yet. Something like a seed. That evening, I went to Caroline's room while she was at dinner and I opened the second bottle. The one for the face. I touched one finger to the wax, lifted the stopper, and tipped the glass against my fingertip. One drop. That was all. One drop on the pad of my finger, and I pressed it to my cheek. It smelled like a garden I would never own. I was still standing there when the door opened. My sister's maid, Mrs. Fenn, stopped in the doorway with a tray of clean linen. "Miss Evelyn," she said, and her voice was not unkind, but it was final. "What are you doing in here?" My father was not angry. That was the worst part. He was disappointed in the way of a man who had expected better, and he did not raise his voice at all. "Caroline has those bottles because Caroline is married in spirit," he said. "You are not. And until you are, you do not take from her rooms." "I took one drop." "You took what was not yours," he said. "Do you know what the rose water costs, Evelyn? A year of the orchard's profit. Two bottles, one for hair and one for face, and both of them are the property of your sister, because she is the one who will marry into a family that will return that investment tenfold. You are not stupid. You know how this works." I did know. I had known since I was twelve, when I stopped being the second daughter and became the spare, the one kept in reserve in case Caroline's prospects fell through. "I want to see the Hollis card," I said. "Caroline has it." "Thomas Hollis came here for me," I said. "He has come here every autumn since I was six. He is not a stranger." My father looked at me for a moment. Then he turned back to his ledger. "Thomas Hollis is a pleasant boy, and he will make a pleasant husband for whoever he marries. But the orchard is encumbered, and the family is old and poor, and I am not going to hand my daughter to a man who cannot keep her in rose water." I stood very still. "You can have soap," he said, not looking up. "There is plenty of soap."