The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2) (4 page)

Primrose House

29 December

Dear Pru,

We’ve had the most amazing offer—Hugo Jenkins, a young reporter from the
Courier,
has asked if he could follow the garden restoration with a blog. Posts would appear every week online, all about Primrose House, Repton, and you. Isn’t this exciting?

Of course, it’s entirely up to you to say yes or no. I wanted you to make the decision, although I’m sure you are as thrilled as we are to be able to share this story with the world. Just give Hugo a ring when you’re ready.

Best,

Davina

P.S. I had a sudden thought last night—we could create a “ruin” in the oval bed with broken castle walls and maybe even a tiny moat. Wouldn’t that be charming?

Pru found the note on the kitchen table the next morning—Davina’s usual MO, dropping something in Pru’s lap and then leaving town; the Templetons had gone up to London for New Year’s. Pru thought it safe to dismiss any thought of a ruined castle. She said yes to the blog, even though the idea of being interviewed about a Humphry Repton landscape for which she was now responsible seemed audacious. But when she talked with Hugo, she found it easy to extol the virtues of a historic garden while also explaining that so much had happened in the ensuing two hundred years that it wouldn’t be possible to put it back exactly as it was.

The day after Bryan and Davina left, six large Maigold roses appeared at the house, lined up just where they should be planted, spaced out three on each side of the front door. They would require large planting holes—Robbie would be happy—and copious amounts of manure, which wouldn’t be delivered for a couple of weeks.

A note was pushed through the letter slot in the door, but not all the way, and so she took it out, telling herself that it could just as easily be for her as Davina and Bryan—after all, she lived there, too, albeit temporarily. Despite her reasoning, she felt a pang of guilt as she read the brief note from Jamie Tanner to the Templetons, which said he hoped that they would enjoy the roses he had found for them.
Not exactly subtle,
Pru thought. The pang of guilt dissolved. Well, let him try to butter them up—she was the one with the head-gardener post.

While her crew was off between the holidays, she continued to work. She spent most evenings going over pages of the Red Book and then searching for clues in the landscape. She poked around at the end of the drive, looking for remnants of the magnificent gateposts Repton had recommended. She dug around at the base of the house—he hadn’t cared for red brick and often recommended that stucco be applied. “I have shewn the effect of changing the house to a stone colour,” he had written. Perhaps the bricks of Primrose House had been covered with stucco once, but no sign remained now.

She began to come up with a few ideas of her own, too. The broad balustrade stone terrace that ran along the back of the house gave way to a steep lawn-covered slope, ending abruptly at the bottom as it ran into the overgrown yew walk. On the other side of the yew was a clearing beside the wood. Pru hoped the Templetons would eventually terrace the lawn, providing several levels for planting beds. Repton hadn’t specifically advised it, but did make mention that “…the stile and character of the house requires a certain space of dressed lawn or pleasure ground.” A stone staircase and stone-edged beds cut into the slope could give way to the more informal landscape below.

Dreams were fine, but more practical tasks made the restoration real. Pru planted the cyclamen and snowdrops that Simon gave her, and she bought ten flats of primroses and cowslips—grown from locally collected seed—and left the flats in the unheated greenhouse to grow on; they would be planted in another month. Primrose House would have primroses at last.

It was a Tuesday, the first day they were all back at work—one of Robbie’s days, and he was the only one with a smile on his face. A fine, cold drizzle fell. Pru handed out assignments and was met with rebellion.

“Liam, go with Ned, please, and finish clearing out the back two beds, then we’ll work our way forward and be ready for the manure when it arrives. And, Fergal, would you go up and help Robbie on the holes for the roses?”

“I’ll help Robbie,” Liam said. He stood a little apart from the rest of them, holding the handle of a shovel and resting his foot on its blade.

Liam seldom had the patience for Robbie, and Pru had soon learned to keep them from working on the same task. “Liam, I’d rather you go with Ned today…”

“I won’t,” he said, and she could see the red creeping up his face and the muscles on his neck stand out. “I’ll go with Robbie.”

“Liam…” Fergal began.

“I won’t do it,”
Liam shouted.

Ned stood silent, looking back out at the road, as if observing something of great interest. “I’ll help the boy,” he said quietly. “We’ll get started on those holes, will we, Robbie?”

Robbie could pick up a tense tone in the air as well as anyone, and she could see the confusion on his face.

“Liam and I’ll clear out the beds, Pru,” Fergal said. “We’ll do the back four, not just two.” Each bed was a large thirty-two-squa
re-foot space chock-full of perennial and woody weeds; to dig out and carry off all the material down to their designated brush pile would take the entire day, as short as daylight was.

Pru felt a mutiny on her hands, and, unprepared for it, decided to go with the flow. “Yes, sure, Fergal, thanks.” She took a deep breath. “Well, then, are we all sorted now? Everyone happy?” She looked directly at Liam, who looked away.

They got through the day, although the best thing that could be said about it was that it stopped raining. Ned and Robbie returned for lunch, which they usually took together, sitting along the warmest wall in the garden, but Liam said he had an errand and returned only when it was time to get back to work.

Tension remained high in the following days, with glaring looks from Liam and sullen silence from Ned. All Pru could do was to make sure they were nowhere near each other. She gave Liam jobs to do on his own, which he did well and with no objection. She noticed that Fergal kept an eye on him, and once she saw the two of them deep in conversation, Liam’s face contorted with anger, while Fergal patted the air with his open hands, as if to calm his brother down. She tried to ask Liam what was wrong, but he stomped away, and, as usual, left Fergal to make excuses for him.

“Sorry, Pru, he has a lot on his mind right now.” The brothers’ lives appeared fairly simple to Pru. Their parents had retired from local jobs and moved back to County Mayo in Ireland, but as Liam and Fergal had spent their entire lives in England, they decided to stay. They had bought a decrepit cottage that they lived in and worked to restore the days they weren’t at Primrose House. They hoped to sell the cottage, buy another, and do the same. They were handy lads and didn’t seem attached to anything in particular. Liam’s exploits with the ladies were common knowledge—mostly because Liam himself talked about them—but Fergal had a steady girlfriend who worked in the freight transit authority office in Tunbridge Wells.

Fergal’s excuse did little to explain the problem, but as long as they made progress, and she could keep Ned and Liam apart, perhaps she could ignore it. She did, after all, have other things on her mind, at once more pleasant and more stimulating. Christopher rang when he arrived back from Dubai. They spoke about his flight, Graham’s job, and the
Courier
’s blog, but the volume of their unspoken conversation drowned it all out: “When will I see you?”

On Wednesday morning, she gave herself extra time to check the
Courier
’s website, as the first blog post was scheduled to appear. When she called up the page, the headline screamed at her: “American Takes the Reins at Historic Garden: ‘It isn’t all Humphry Repton, you know.’ ”

Pru jumped back as if she’d been bitten.
Oh my God,
she thought, how crass, how presumptuous, how arrogant…had she said that? She thought back to her conversation with Hugo. Those were her words—she had tried to explain that many others had a hand in the gardens in the ensuing two hundred years.

Half afraid to look, she turned her face away from the screen while she scrolled down and saw that there were already forty-two comments, many of them along the lines of “Leave it to some know-it-all Yank to take over one of our gardens.”

She wouldn’t read any more now. She couldn’t let it get to her; there was too much work to do. Jo rang to provide a few encouraging words. Pru had told both Jo and Christopher about the blog, so she wasn’t surprised when Christopher was next to ring.

“I think you shouldn’t let it worry you,” he said.

She took a deep breath. “Yes. But I will have a word with Hugo. If he wants this to continue, then he needs to be fair.”

That’s all she asked, for him to be fair. She rang him as she walked out to the walled garden—better to get this out of the way and get to work. Hugo had an entirely different take. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it, Pru? You’re getting the attention now—it’s started a real conversation online. Did you see that someone from the National Trust posted a comment?”

This news did not make her feel better. “What did it say? That I should mind my own business and go back to Texas?”

“Certainly not.” Hugo sounded as if he were pumping her up for the big game. “It said they look forward to seeing how you will restore the garden. Davina tells me there will be an open garden day in July. Has she mentioned that?”

“I’m not sure that would be entirely appropriate this year.” Could she not quell this preposterous idea? “You won’t encourage it, will you, Hugo?”

“You’re too hard on yourself, but don’t worry—I won’t encourage her. Next week will be about the tools you found in the shed. Old tools are fascinating.”

“I like that idea,” Pru said, thinking how that would move her out of the spotlight. “You should talk to Ned Bobbins about the old tools—he’s the one that discovered them and I’m sure he’d like to tell you the story.”

Hugo muttered something that sounded to Pru like “I’ll just bet he would.”

“Sorry?” she asked.

“Didn’t the brothers get them back into working order for you?” Hugo asked.

“Yes, Liam and Fergal—talk to them if you like.” She imagined Liam would love to have his name in the news.

As soon as she pushed in the heavy wooden gate, she could see the greenhouse door standing open, and the flats of primroses and cowslips upturned and scattered. She ran to the mess and saw tender young plants lying broken in heaps of potting soil. She stared in disbelief and then looked round as if she could catch the culprit in flight.
Rabbits?
she asked herself. No, rabbits would only nibble off all the green.

She phoned Davina to let her know—the Templetons loved daily updates—and Davina went on the offensive.

“I’m ringing the police right now, and I’ll have someone out to see what’s happened.”

Pru dropped the empty flat in her hand—she’d already started to pick up the mess. “Do you think that’s necessary? I wouldn’t want to waste their time.”

“It’s probably some local vandals, trying to cause trouble—some people just don’t like to see success—and we must take a stand to let them know they can’t get away with it,” Davina said.

Detective Sergeant David Hobbes, a congenial young man with hair that might’ve been strawberry blond if it had a chance to grow, arrived while they were busy with garden tasks. It was a brief interview. He, too, thought it might be vandals, but said he would get back to the Templetons with anything he found.

Pru filled her weekend with odd jobs around the garden, hoping that an accumulation of tiny steps might result in a sense of accomplishment. Anything to ease the nagging anxiety about opening the garden to the public in only six months’ time—the thought that lurked just under her consciousness. Sunday afternoon, she stood on the sloped lawn, studying the house and sketching out a possible plan for terraced beds and wisteria running along the balustrade. The fragrant purple flowers would scent the air in May—just not this May, she thought. A garden takes time, she kept saying to Davina and Bryan. She repeated it so often she was afraid she’d start grabbing strangers on the streets of Tunbridge Wells and telling them, too.

While she sketched, she heard a vehicle pull up on the drive, and soon after, Jamie Tanner came round the corner of the house, his eyes scanning the landscape. Pru called and waved to him, and he came down the slope.

“Thanks for delivering the roses,” she said. “They’re perfect for the front of the house.”

“I’m happy to help.” He looked over her shoulder at the rough drawing, more penciled impressionism than a realistic rendering. “Grapes?”

Pru laughed. “That’s why I could never be an artist,” she said. “It’s wisteria.”

Jamie’s small smile turned to a tiny frown, and he sighed. “Look,” he said, “Ned told me about what happened with your primroses. Do you know who did it?”

Pru shook her head. “I thought it might be rabbits to begin with, but Davina called out the police. It doesn’t seem like a big deal to most people, but they were important to the garden.”

Jamie nodded. “I know what you mean—it’s just the garden, a few plants, they say. But not to us.” He shrugged. “I hope you don’t think I’m interfering, but I wasn’t sure if you knew enough people in the area yet, so I asked around and found some replacements.”

“You found more primroses?”

“And cowslips—just a couple flats of each, but maybe that will help replace what was lost. I know a fellow who works with native plants, restoring meadows and the like. He’s happy to let you have them”—he laughed—“for a price, of course. It’s just that I went ahead and brought them over, if that’s all right.”

“Yes, that’s great.”