The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2)
Read The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2) Online
Authors: Marty Wingate
The Red Book of Primrose House
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An Alibi eBook Original
Copyright © 2014 by Martha Wingate
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
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eBook ISBN 9780804177719
Cover design: Scott Biel
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He returned after everyone had left and stood just inside the gate of the walled garden, surveying the scene. They’d made real progress, but now…
What a mess,
he thought.
I can’t believe it came to this
. Now it was left to him to sort it all out.
He had intended to take care of it; he had promised he would. But the time for negotiating had passed—he must take action. Checking his watch, he thought he might as well get to work. Clear this up before he began to clear up the other problems. He looked at the mountain of branches, strewn about in such disarray.
He reached down and gathered up an armful of greenery. No sense in letting it lie—it would only make more work for them later. God knows they had far too much to do as it was. He walked to the back gate; it wasn’t a heavy bundle, although he had to take care not to step in one of the holes made by the boy. He let go the branches and they fell to the ground, making a soft
flump
. He went back for another load while his mind went over what he would say to each of them. His only concern was to make sure she would be all right—it made all other priorities take second place.
“Have you done it?”
He had just let go of the second armload of greens and hadn’t seen the speaker approach. “You can’t expect it to happen so fast,” he said.
“You said you would take care of it. It’s gone too far now, and I won’t give up.”
“I said that I would take care of her,” he replied, growing short with this same argument.
“You made promises—we agreed, but you’ve done nothing.”
“I will do what needs to be done, and what I do, I do for her—not for you or for a building or for anyone or anything else,” he said, pulling his arm away from the hand that tried to stay him.
“It’s cost me too much. How could you let it go this far? How could you let this happen?”
The rising frenzy would not sway him. “How could
I
let it happen? You’re here only because of what you’ve done. Too full of yourself by half—you knew better than to start up, I warned you. I’m looking out for her.” He started back to the gate.
“Do you think I’ll let you off that easy?”
He turned to reply, but it was too late. The hatchet sank straight into his chest, and the impact sent him falling, falling backward until he landed on the soft bed of yew branches.
Primrose House
15 December
Dear Pru,
We love what you’ve done with the boxwood path out from the kitchen door to the yew walk—how clever to think of making the overgrown hedge into its own arbor walk—so much better than those laburnum walks. We wondered if it would be possible to plant daffodils at the base of the box—seeing as how you’ve already removed all the lower branches. What a glorious sight that would be!
Is it too late to do that now? You know we are more than happy to cover any extra costs for working on weekends. You are a jewel of a head gardener, and we remain thrilled with all your ideas and hard work—American Pru Parke and the famous Humphry Repton, what a pair!
Here’s to a fine Christmas for all of us—and just think, soon you’ll be moving in to your cottage. It’s almost ready!
Best,
Davina and Bryan
Oh, yes—we’ve decided to open the garden here at Primrose House on 30 July. I’m sure you’ll have everything ready. It will be a glorious summer party!
“I’d say that’ll do for today, will it, Pru?”
“Yes, Ned, that’ll do for today.”
Ned adjusted his cap and knocked a clod of dirt from his Wellies as he gathered up the short spade and garden fork. Ned kept himself as befitted a widower in his seventies—that is to say, his work clothes were always in good order, but Pru thought he might cut his own hair, as it usually stuck out from under his flat cap in uneven bits, like gray moss hanging off a tree branch.
Half past three on a mid-December afternoon. Pru glanced at the darkening sky and climbed out of the mud where she had landed after yanking on an ash sapling growing in a sheltered corner of the walled garden. She sighed and reached up to unclip her hair, comb it through, and reclip. One strand escaped again without delay. Her hair had always had a mind of its own, even now as a little more gray had slipped into the brown. In her earlyish fifties, she was still able to carry out most of the physical work of gardening, although more and more she appreciated an extra pair of hands.
More than a month had passed since she began at Primrose House, an eighteenth-century manor farm near the village of Bells Yew Green and just a few miles from the spa town of Royal Tunbridge Wells. Much of that time had been spent getting to know the land, her new employers—Davina and Bryan Templeton—her crew, and the historic plan laid out in 1806 by the famous landscape gardener Humphry Repton.
The Red Book—the name Repton gave to the leather-bound books he created for potential clients—had been discovered just as the Templetons hired Pru as head gardener. The Earl of Lamerton had come across it in a box in one of the many unused rooms of the castle—Primrose House had been a manor on the estate. Davina had presented the book to Pru in the kitchen—not the most formal of occasions, but Pru had felt the weight of the centuries on her when she held the thin book.
She had set it down on the farm table and run her hand lightly over the cover. It was not as large as a coffee-table book, more the size of an old-fashioned accountant’s ledger. The red Moroccan leather had faded little, and the ornamental gold-stamped border still looked fresh. Opening the book to the title page, she had seen Repton’s self-portrait—a small drawing of him surveying a landscape, and “Primrose House in Sussex, A Seat of William Michael Hamilton, Earl of Lamerton” in Repton’s careful, scrolled handwriting. A page of introduction was followed by a page titled: “Situation of the House.” Pru had trembled with excitement.
The entire book was in Repton’s hand and interspersed with his watercolors. It was a treatise on his landscape ideals. “To remedy the great defect of Primrose House…” he began. Despite what had gone on in the ensuing two hundred years, it felt as if the great landscape gardener himself were telling her to carry on.
Dozens of his Red Books were still in existence, some held by the original properties and others in libraries or museums, but most of the landscapes retained only impressions of Repton’s designs, and some had never even been built. The mere possession of a Red Book was noteworthy in the world of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century gardens and architecture; the hope that remnants of his designs might still exist at Primrose House and would be re-created made the news: a small article had appeared in the
Tunbridge Wells Courier
.
Now Pru had both a derelict garden to clear, design, and plant as well as a historic landscape to rediscover and restore—by summer, if you please. She saw the calendar in her mind at all times. The number of days until the garden needed to be “finished” for the open day Davina had planned without Pru’s consent decreased rapidly—while the amount of work that still needed to be carried out seemed to increase each day. It didn’t help that light was in such short supply as midwinter approached.
And yet, it was her dream job—head gardener of a historic English garden.
Be careful what you ask for,
she thought, trying to quell the rising panic that set in each late afternoon. An open garden day may be a wonderful summer party to the Templetons, but it would be a day fraught with anxiety for Pru—every gardener in England peering at her plantings and wondering where the tea and cakes were.
She breathed deeply, reminding herself how lucky she was. She’d moved from Dallas and spent a year in London trying to find work. As the year drew to an end—with no permanent job in sight—she was hired to build a garden in Chelsea. The garden never got made, owing to Pru’s discovery of a body in the shed and her subsequent entanglement in a murder inquiry, but the silver lining to that cloud was meeting Detective Chief Inspector Christopher Pearse, who had conducted the investigation.
She could still see him as she had that first time at the scene of the murder—tall with short, dark hair flecked with gray and cutting a fine figure in his dark blue suit. He exuded an inner strength, and although he had seemed stern, Pru learned he was quick to smile and that his penetrating brown eyes could easily melt her on the spot.
He had asked her to stay in the country just as she was so reluctantly about to leave for her old job at the Dallas Arboretum—and only moments after she’d at last had a job offer from the Templetons. The stars had indeed aligned for her, although the decision to stay was both exhilarating and frightening, because she knew it was more than just a physical home that was at stake, but a home for her heart, too. Now here she was, just an hour away from London and Christopher. But for the moment, she measured the distance in weeks, not minutes. Weeks since they’d seen each other, weeks until they would again. She brushed a few clumps of leaf litter off her trousers, smearing mud in the process. The Templetons were gone, and she looked forward to a quiet evening alone in the kitchen of Primrose House, after which she could crawl into bed and wait for Christopher’s nightly phone call.
“And tomorrow we’ll plant those daffs Mrs. Templeton asked for?” Ned asked.
“Tomorrow,” she said, coming back to the moment. Bulb-planting season long over, Pru had needed to buy several dozen pots of forced bulbs to plant below the box. And they had to be the small native
Narcissus,
not one of those garish jumbo selections. That was Ned’s idea; he seemed to know as much about old plants as he did the old happenings around Bells Yew Green.
“I can dig the holes, Pru, can’t I? You promised I could dig the holes.” Robbie, at that very moment digging a hole in the middle of one of the square beds, stopped for a moment and waited for her answer, holding on to the spade handle with both hands. He was tall, wiry, with arms and legs sticking just a bit too far out of his trouser legs and the sleeves of his red fleece jacket, and almost constantly in motion. Although in his early twenties, his mind worked at about the level of a ten-year-old’s, but he was a pleasant—if occasionally exhausting—companion for them.
“Yes, Robbie, sorry, I wasn’t paying attention.”
Robbie grinned and said, “Pay attention, Pru, pay attention.”
She laughed. “Yes, pay attention, Pru.” She had already used that phrase with him often enough—“Pay attention, Robbie, watch out for the seedlings” or “Pay attention, Robbie, leave the ax where it is, please”—that he had latched on to it and loved repeating it to her. “Of course you can dig the holes.” She turned back to Ned. “We’ll hold the bulbs until Friday, all right, Ned?”
“You’ve a kind heart toward the lad, but it mightn’t do the garden much good,” Ned said as he pulled on his coat and readied to leave.
“He really is a help,” she said. “He digs and…arranges the pots in the shed, and brings tea down for us.” Robbie had gone back to digging. “I don’t mind, really.”
It was the only thing that kept his attention, digging holes—the only thing she allowed, that is. Early on, she’d discovered Robbie fancied himself Robin Hood—or occasionally one of his Merry Men—and apparently, he thought the hatchet made a good stand-in for a broadsword. She had laid down the rule swiftly on that: Robbie was not to touch any of the tools unless Pru said it was all right and she stood there with him. Robbie understood rules, and he knew how to follow them.
So, digging it was. When he dug, he didn’t ask Pru the same question three times in five minutes, nor did he make a constant circuit around the walled garden, ricocheting off the same spots each time: “What tree was that? Was it an oak?” “That wall’s in need of a repair.” “What will you make of the yew? Will you make a teapot out of it?”
“Shall I walk him up to the big house for you?” Ned asked.
“Yes, thanks, Ned, that’ll give me a chance to clear up.”
“All right, Robbie Hood, we’re off,” Ned called to him. Robbie leaned his spade against the garden wall and took up an imaginary sword, sticking it into its pretend scabbard. Ivy encouraged her son’s fascination with Robin Hood; she thought a good English folktale so much safer than those modern, violent television shows.
“I’m off to the pub, Pru,” Robbie said. “To have a pint with my mates.”
On Tuesdays, Robbie’s mother, Ivy, allowed him some male-bonding time at the Two Bells, where he could drink one pint before she collected him to go home. “They all know him there,” Ivy said, “and Ted behind the bar keeps an eye on him. It’s good for him, and I don’t mind, really.” Pru thought the tight smile Ivy gave when she said that told otherwise.
Out of the corner of her eye, Pru saw the other two members of her workforce amble through the open gate—Liam and Fergal Duffy.
“How’re the tools?” she asked.
“Were we being punished, Pru, was that it?” Liam asked. “Only I can’t imagine a more boring punishment than cleaning garden tools all day long.”
Fergal, ever the calm older brother, even though he was just twenty-nine years of age to Liam’s twenty-six, said, “All finished. I’ve repaired the rack for now, and we hung the tools back up. The rack needs rebuilding, but I’m afraid nailing new wood into that old wall would knock the whole shed down.”
For every smart-aleck answer from Liam came a reasonable reply from Fergal, but Pru took Liam in stride, especially as the brothers were the brawn of her outfit. There was no mistaking they were brothers or their Irish heritage—both with dark red hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and quick smiles. They’d got off easy today: she’d had them sanding, sharpening, and oiling a collection of fine old, but badly rusted, tools. Ned had come across them in the old potting shed, which sat under an enormous cedar of Lebanon behind the walled garden. At least the Duffys had been out of the cold.
“We didn’t get to it today, so tomorrow, we’ll be removing all the buddleias—I’ve counted fourteen of them in here, although there are probably seedlings, too,” she said.
“We’re taking out the buddleias?” Liam asked. “And what are we doing that for?”
She’d have more patience with his question if he hadn’t asked it the day before, too. “Because they don’t belong here, Liam, that’s why.”
“I never heard anyone complain about butterfly bushes before—they grow along the railway with those pretty flowers all summer long and no trouble at all. I don’t see why they have to go,” he said.
“They grow like a weed in this country, taking over natural areas, and we won’t be a party to it. They’re coming out.”
“I’ve always liked a buddleia in the garden.”
“They’re coming out, Liam.”
“I don’t know what the butterflies will do now,” he muttered.
“Out
.
”
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Tomorrow.”