The Garden Plot (13 page)

Just after she and Sammy were finished with their work, she phoned Pearse.

“Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Pearse, please leave a message,” said the recording. She believed this information needed to be delivered live, not on tape, so she didn’t leave any message and decided she’d phone again later. She considered looking into it herself in the meantime—maybe she could clarify a few things they’d said and so the evidence would be more helpful to the police.

Her initial scare faded over the next couple of days in the rush to stuff four days of work into two, and although she kept meaning to phone Pearse again, she didn’t get round to it. Her mind shifted its focus to her interview at Primrose House on Thursday and spending the weekend in the Cotswolds with Jo and family, pushing aside the murder and its investigation.

On Thursday, Pru took the train from Charing Cross station to Frant, the small rail station nearest Primrose House. It took only the short train journey for her to begin thinking about life in Bells Yew Green. With the town of Tunbridge Wells only four miles away, loads of services and shops would be near at hand, and the area was chock-full of fine gardens to visit for inspiration.

Pru rang for a cab from the station and took down the driver’s phone number so she could ring him for the return trip. She had barely settled back into the seat when they arrived.

Good clay soils led to an abundance of brickworks in Kent and Sussex, and so brick buildings were a common sight in towns and villages—along with those made from local ironstone. Brick-built Primrose House sat slightly back from the road with an oval gravel drive leading to it and back to the road again.

Although good-sized, it was certainly not enormous; it was the smallest of the manor farms on what had been a grand estate. The castle—owned by the Earl of Lamerton—came with a Grade-II listing, noting its historical status, but none of the manor farms had a listing and had been sold off individually over the past hundred years. They had been built in the late eighteenth century. It was reputed—or rumored, Pru couldn’t remember which—that the landscape around the estate, including Primrose House, had been designed, or perhaps influenced, by Humphry Repton, renowned landscape gardener, in the early nineteenth century. That’s all she had learned from the slip of a leaflet included in the letter from the Templetons.

Pru glanced around the landscape. Away to the back, a tall row of yews ran parallel to the house. At the end of the row to the right, and behind what could only be the walled garden, she could see the looming figure of a mature cedar of Lebanon—at least two hundred years old, she thought—characteristically flat-topped with horizontal branches stretched out like a hen covering her chicks. Nothing grew up against the house—that wasn’t unusual, although it may have been that vines or roses had been cut down.

Two columnar yews flanked the front door—she peeked inside the wall of foliage to see if they were sheared or one of the narrow-growing selections. Sheared, she thought, and by the looks of things, the only bit of gardening that had been done in a
while.

She arranged herself before knocking—she could see no bell. The knocker, an enormous brass piece fashioned in the shape of a badger’s head, made a marvelously deep sound on the wood and echoed inside. She heard footsteps, and the door opened.

A short woman with bobbed white hair answered, offered her hand, and said, “Hello, Pru, I’m Davina Templeton. Please come in.”

They shook hands and Davina led her down the hall. “We’re in the kitchen, I hope that’s all right with you.” Pru nodded her approval and glanced around as they went. It looked as if Primrose House had been “sympathetically restored,” as the saying goes. The exterior remained late eighteenth century, and the furnishings were traditional but with quirky twists throughout. She saw an enormous modern painting with splotches of bright color above a fireplace with a leather Chesterfield sofa in front of it, and on a nearby wall, a large gilded mirror with fat cherubs decorating the top. Flanking the mirror were two avant-garde wooden chairs, the kind you weren’t sure if you should sit in. In the corner of the room, Pru thought she saw a tall cactus in a pot.

Davina and Bryan, gracious and just as eclectic as their décor, were a delight, and Pru felt a great burden lifted from her just talking with them; for a time she was able to forget her money problems, her life decisions, and anything associated with murder.

Over coffee at the large farm table, Pru told them her background and they expressed understanding at her decisions. They in turn told her about how they’d moved from Manchester to live in Sussex and had spent five years restoring Primrose House. It sounded as if they threw themselves wholeheartedly into the project, living only for its completion. Pru thought that if the kitchen—which included a new British-racing-green Aga cooker, farm sink, tile backing everywhere, and one of those water spouts right over the stove for tall pots—was any indication of the care they took, the rest of the house must be amazing.

“We care too much about our English heritage to completely wipe away the past,” Bryan said. “But we know it’s possible to respect the past and celebrate the present, too.” Although Bryan worked in international investments, he had gotten a second in history at Cambridge.

Pru talked about the vernacular landscape as it tied into architecture and how the genius of English garden design lay in its ability to absorb international influences and reflect them in its own style. She included a bit on Humphry Repton’s contribution to English garden history and how she much preferred his ideas of more formality near the house that slowly changed to a more naturalistic landscape over those of Capability Brown’s projects that moved heaven and earth to make the landscape look as if nothing
had happened. She hoped it sounded good. They asked questions about her style of working; she answered everything, touching only lightly on her diminishing window of opportunity to find a job.

Pru felt good about how it was all going, and when Bryan said, “You and Davina have a look around the garden, and I’ll get busy on lunch. You’ll stay, won’t you, Pru?” she had a fleeting urge to ask if they would adopt her.

They walked out the front door, and Pru asked about the badger knocker. “It’s our nod to the country,” Davina said, “and made by a local artist. You know, I think we have a badger sett near the woods, but we haven’t really investigated yet.”

Primrose House, as it turned out, had no primroses. “At least we’ve never seen any,” Davina said. “We don’t know where the name came from—were there primroses in the past, or was it just wishful thinking on someone’s part? Still, it’s such a charming name, we’d never want to change it.” Pru thought of Grenadine Hall, where she would spend the weekend. It had been known as Cromley Manor until the 1840s, when the owner, in a fit of Victorian fancy, renamed it in honor of the popular pomegranate-based syrup.

Pru gave Davina a short treatise on primroses and cowslips, and how perhaps the beech wood had grown to cast more shade than they liked. She thought it perfectly reasonable to establish a patch in a sunnier spot, perhaps just beyond the wall of yew.

The drive had been regraveled after the house restoration, but the oval bed in front, which had been the staging area during the work, held nothing but tufts of grass and weeds. “We removed all the creepers and climbing roses from the walls, too, I’m afraid,” she said. “So much work needed to be done on the house, we really couldn’t go any other way.”

Behind the house, a path that led out from the terrace to the yew walk once had been lined with boxwood, but left to its own devices, it had grown into a boxwood allée—as the plants had achieved small-tree status, their upper canopies leaned gracefully into one another.

“I believe we’d have a view of the Weald if the yew wasn’t there,” Davina said, referring to the rolling, wooded hills and sandstone outcroppings, a classic feature of the natural landscape in the Southeast.

Pru suggested reducing the yew severely to keep its fine architectural lines. “It’s very forgiving, as long as it gets good drainage.”

They walked across the gravel yard to the walled garden. Davina opened the wooden door for Pru and gestured widely, the countless layers of thin fabric that flowed from her arm following the movement like a wake.

Within the walls, devastation. “I should’ve prepared you,” Davina said. “We just turned a blind eye, because we were spending all our efforts on the house, and now look what’s happened.”

The garden,
thought Pru,
always the last thing on the list.
Weeds, weedy shrubs, weedy trees, and perhaps just the remnants of a path or two, impassable with so much overgrowth. In the center, where once there might have been a large square bed anchored at the corners by topiary yew, the yews had grown together to form one enormous green-black block.

To Pru, it was a dream come true.

They walked out of the walled garden, and Davina pointed to a small building set off on its own at the end of a short drive from the road. “There is the head gardener’s accommodation—it used to be a cow shed. Now, we won’t go over just at the moment, because the conversion hasn’t quite started, but I did want you to see how close to the garden and to our house it is. It isn’t large, but it will be cozy.”

Pru tried to discern the condition of the building. Was it missing a door? There were openings in the wall, but could they be considered windows? The original advert for the post had described it as a “charming estate cottage.”

“And just beyond—you can’t see from here—there are a few partial walls left from another outbuilding. I suppose we should remove them,” Davina said.

Pru told her about the ruins of a fifteenth-century tithe barn at Sudeley Castle near Cheltenham that had been planted up with roses and climbers and what a romantic setting it was. Davina loved the idea.

“There would be additional help, of course,” Davina said. “We have old Ned a couple of days a week and the two lads that live just down the road. Special jobs, especially as the garden gets going, need extra hands, we know. I’ve never thought a head gardener should bother with machines and mowing; a head gardener should be for design, inspiration, planting, tending.”

Pru felt herself balanced on the thin tightrope between hope and despair. They returned to the kitchen to a lunch of ribollita—a hearty Tuscan soup. The Templetons had brought back the recipe from a small Italian hill town they visited often.
A perfect lunch,
thought Pru.

After coffee, Pru rang the cabdriver and thanked Davina and Bryan profusely. Davina walked her to the door.

“We’re very happy to meet you, Pru.” She paused. “We’ll let you know our choice just as soon as possible. I know you’ll understand that we’ve talked with a few others about the post.”

“Of course you have—that’s the best way.”
No,
thought Pru,
I didn’t want to hear that.
“Now, you go on, I’ll just wait for the cab here. Thanks again.”

Davina closed the door, and Pru stroked the badger knocker’s snout for luck. Her spirits soared.

“Interviewing for the gardener post, are you?” said a crusty voice behind her. She turned to find someone who matched his voice perfectly, from Wellies to cap.

“Yes, hello, I’m Pru. Are you Ned?” Pru remembered Davina mentioning “old Ned.”

“I’m Ned, yes.” He looked kindly at her. “I hope they didn’t get your hopes up.”

“No, I understand they haven’t made a decision yet,” Pru said.

“They made a decision all right. Rang up the fellow this morning and offered him the post. Too bad they didn’t tell you about that.”

Pru looked back at the closed door as if the badger knocker could verify this outrageous statement. “Someone else has taken the job?” she asked Ned, her voice suddenly high and reedy. “They’ve already filled the post?” She clamped her jaw tight in an effort to keep the tears away.

Ned looked left and right, and then at his Wellies. “Well now,” he said, “I don’t know that for sure. It’s just something I might’ve heard.”

“Why would they bring me down here if the job was filled? Who would do that—get someone’s hopes up?” She hammered Ned with questions that should’ve been directed at the Templetons. She had a fleeting thought to knock on the door and ask them, but the thought flew out of her mind as quickly as it had flown in—she was not one for confrontation.

The cab turned into the drive, and the sound of the tires on the gravel caught their attention. Ned put his palm up as if to calm her. “I may have spoken out of turn,” he said. “Don’t pay me any mind. You have a safe journey. It was good to meet you.”

Pru watched Ned wander off around the corner of the building. Her feet felt like lead as she dragged herself to the cab. She remembered nothing of the journey back to London.

Boxgrove Manor

Cannards Grave Road

Hornblotton Green

Somerset BA4 6SB

4 October

72 Grovehill Square

Chelsea

London SW3

After the interview at Primrose House that had begun with promise and ended with heartbreak, and the rejection from Boxgrove Manor, Pru thought perhaps she wouldn’t check her email. Lydia seemed able to sense when she was at her weakest, and she didn’t think she could take another plea to return to Texas. But she did look and found two messages from Lydia and one from Marcus. Would she come “home”? Marcus wrote that he couldn’t put off the board much longer. His email had an even tone to it, and she was relieved that he kept his request on a strictly business level. Everyone remembered her and wanted her back, he wrote—her old crew, especially.