The Language of Roses by Heather Rose Jones

Author:Heather Rose Jones [Jones, Heather Rose]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Queen of Swords Press
Published: 2022-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

How many days had I been cataloguing? I counted time only by the number of true books I found. I wanted to keep the ledger of household receipts in my chamber to read in odd moments, but when I applied to Grace for permission—permission seemed advisable—I was told, “Leave all as you found it.”

“Shouldn’t I sort out the true books from the false?” I’d asked.

“No, leave all as you found it.”

But one day I found a book that tempted me to disobedience. It was small—no more than the size of my hand—and bound in bright green leather the color of a new-furled leaf. Small enough that perhaps I had simply overlooked it before. There it stood, on the shelf I had been cataloging the day before. An armorial cinquefoil was tooled into the cover between scrolling vines. On the title page, in flowing manuscript, the words: The Language of Roses. Each page held a flower: sometimes a single bloom, sometimes a cluster, sometimes simple, sometimes with a profusion of petals. Each was hand-tinted in a wild riot of colors—all the colors one might expect in a rose garden and more besides. Below each painting was a brief inscription. “The sign of truest love” under a flower so dark and red it might have been heart’s blood. “A token of returned affection is requested” with the image of a cluster of bright yellow flowers with golden centers. Between two pages I found a pressed flower, so faded its colors couldn’t be discerned, but the painting it marked was of a pure white flower brushed at the heart with hyacinth blue and the inscription read, “I would share a path with you throughout the wide world.”

One bloom to each page, each different, and then midway through the volume they turned to nothing but printed outlines of uncolored flowers with space below to write. Not a manual then, but a journal? I knew about the flower game that was played in the courts and salons of Paris. We knew it in a simpler form at home, where flowers rarely told of any sentiment not already known. But this was different.

I thought of the undying rose that lay beneath my pillow and how the colors seemed to shift. Seemed? No, I knew for certain that they changed, although my mind had always slid sideways from that fact before. My father had said he picked a red, red rose, but the one I selected from his gifts laid out on the table had been pink. At the time, I thought it poetic exaggeration. Father had always been free with truth for the sake of a good story. But the morning I set out from home, I was certain it had been red at the heart. I’d seen the rose in my dreams so often that I’d convinced myself the shifting colors were half-remembered visions. And there was enchantment enough in the flower’s stoic persistence that a change of color had seemed of little moment.

Red, Father had said.

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