The Garden Plot Read online

  The Garden Plot 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 by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI and colophon are trademarks of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7770-2

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  www.readalibi.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  He couldn’t stay away. The thought of what lay beneath the earthen floor had consumed him for months. He’d let it slip only once, and at first he thought it wouldn’t be noticed, but no luck. He’d been asked and asked until he shared details. Details led to plans, and plans led to grandiose dreams of fame and fortune; these had temporarily taken over his more sensible side. Now he had acquired a “partner”—an unwanted partner, one he wished with all his heart he could shed.

  He stepped past the pots of faded pelargoniums—They certainly do need a gardener, he thought, but why now?—and down the stairs, then let himself in quietly and pulled the door to, not wanting to risk another sound that might set the dog off. First morning light wasn’t what it used to be—the autumn sun rose later and later, and on this day, fog dimmed the light even more. He dared not switch on a light, and so he moved carefully through the basement.

  Up and out into the back garden, he stopped for a moment to make sure no one watched. Moving along the wall, he walked to the shed. He had been surprised to see the ivy cleared away. It made his task easier, but it made it easier for others, too, and that worried him. The fewer people who knew the real secret, the better. He’d already made one enormous mistake; he didn’t want to make any more.

  He wanted only to look again, perhaps dig a bit, just to feel as if he were doing something. If he could find one of the markers, he could use it as evidence that he was no amateur, but a professional who could find and recover new—old—pieces of history. He took off his coat, then reached over and pulled one of the spades off the wall. He uncovered the mosaic again and then dug deeper. Water seeped into the hole, and he smiled to himself. Yes, he thought, you stay safe down there.

  He plunged the spade in one more time and heard a metallic sound. Reaching down into the muck, his hand grasped the small treasure he sought.

  “Digging? Have you reconsidered?”

  He turned abruptly, not realizing he’d been followed. A wisp of fog trailed behind the speaker, like a ghostly companion.

  “No, not really digging,” he said, clutching the treasure in his hand while he leaned the spade up against the wall. “I told you, we can’t disturb the place. This is too important.”

  “Important? To whom? Will you really let this slip away while the others take the glory—and the money—away from you? From us?”

  It was the same argument. But only a trace of temptation remained; he brushed it aside for good, he was finished with those thoughts. He turned to get his coat and had just put it on when the spade came down on his skull.

  Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens

  2 Tumbly Hill Road

  nr Quedgeley, Cheltenham

  Gloucestershire

  GL2 5DH

  25 September

  72 Grovehill Square

  Chelsea

  London SW3

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  Further to our conversation on 30 August, I write to regretfully inform you that you have not been selected for the post of head gardener for Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens. Thank you for sharing with us your knowledge of the Arts & Crafts movement and William Morris’s influence on garden design in the Cotswold landscape.

  We appreciate your interest in this post, and wish you well in your future endeavours.

  Yours sincerely,

  Lionel F. Arbuthnott, director

  Damson Hill Manor Farm House Gardens Charitable Trust

  LFA/sar

  Chapter 1

  The rain leaked down the outside of the window, caught on the sash, and dripped onto the sill, each drop counting down the days remaining before the end of Pru Parke’s life. Through the rivulets, she could see the London street outside and, across the road, the line of plane trees inside the wrought-iron railing that surrounded the private square. Inside the railing, a mixed border, flowering shrubs, and climbing roses surrounded a three-tiered fountain that splashed merrily.

  “What a pretty garden,” an American tourist had said to Pru one day last summer when they both stood looking through the rails.

  “It was designed in 1845 by Rowland Mason Ordish,” Pru said, “the engineer who designed the Albert Bridge and the dome of the St. Pancras rail station. The fountain was added at a later date. There’s a giant sequoia, more than one hundred and fifty years old, in the far corner.”

  “Oh, you’re American,” the visitor replied. “How did you learn so much about the place?”

  Bits of garden history stuck to Pru like cat hair on wool—a master’s degree in garden history and lifelong love of learning made sure of that.

  “I grew up in the States, but I live here now.” As much as Pru loved saying it aloud, she knew it couldn’t really be true until she found a permanent job, a job as head gardener at a small historic garden. Give her a couple of acres and a place to live; she didn’t need the grounds of Windsor Castle.

  She had continued to look into the square after the tourist departed, taking along directions from Pru to the Sloane Square Underground station. The plants, the fountains, the roses all called out for Pru to enter the square and enjoy, but only residents of the houses around the square held keys. Real residents, not her, not an American subletting in such a tony neighborhood as Chelsea while she searched for acceptance and a job that would keep her in the only place that ever felt like home.

  … Thirty-six days, thirty-five, thirty-four … Pru felt time slipping away and taking with it her dream of escaping her former life in Dallas to live in England. Not that she had a life to go back to. She knew that sounded overly dramatic and carried overtones of self-pity—perhaps not the most attractive qualities in a woman in her early fifties—but Pru felt it true to her very bones. She hadn’t begun a new chapter of her life by moving to England, but rather an entirely new book—one that she’d prepared her whole life to write. Not only had she given up the physical pieces of her life in Texas—sold her little adobe-style house, quit her steady job at the Dallas Arboretum—she had also relinquished all ties; she had untied herself in order to follow a path that felt new and old at the same time. England was her home. The boldness of her move had energized her and scared her half to death.

  She glanced around the sublet surroundings that she got for a song, at least until the owners returned from a year in Italy—comfy chintz sofa, overstuffed chair and ottoman, tea tables, requisite Constable print on the wall
by the door to the hall, piles of magazines—her own more recent issues of British garden mags next to a stack of two-year-old Country Life issues left by the owners. They had left the bookshelves on either side of the fireplace full, but locked up the rest of their possessions in the basement. Pru carried out no gardening here; the small space behind the house had been completely paved over.

  “You’ve got the place to yourself,” Jo, the property manager who had become her good friend, had said. “And you won’t have to worry about stumbling into a vase or ancient Greek urn.” Pru got the idea that antiques filled the basement.

  When she first arrived, she had toyed with the idea of becoming The American Gardener in Chelsea. Maybe she could acquire enough rich clients and become so well known that she’d be asked to design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, win a gold, and be interviewed by that cute Chris Beardshaw from BBC One or possibly Alan Titchmarsh, a famous garden personality who, just a few years ago, had been named Sexiest Man in Britain. Only in Britain would a gardener be at the top of that list.

  In reality, this temporary lodging plus filling her days with garden work at many different London houses kept her going, but it could not be a permanent replacement for an actual job and home. And she desperately wanted something permanent; she wanted to fit into this new life she had chosen. Middle-aged American woman with no head-gardener experience seeks complete life change in the form of a position in a highly competitive field in a foreign country. What was she thinking?

  Three piano chords in G major came from her phone. She pushed her hair out of her face, reached for it, and wondered where her hair clip had got to.

  “Is this Pru Parke? Mrs. Vernona Wilson speaking,” said a rushed voice. “Victoria Pegg-Wells gave me your name, she said you’re a wonderful gardener, and I do so need someone to tidy up the bottom of the garden. It’s frightfully overgrown, and there’s a shed down there I would be afraid to even put my nose in—if I could get close enough. Can you come and sort it out for me?”

  Oh fine, Pru thought. I’ve gone from gardener to rubbish removal.

  “I could stop by tomorrow to take a look,” Pru replied. “May I email you a brief form to fill out? It’ll help me get familiar with your garden before I even see it. You can jot down exactly what you’d like done.”

  “Oh, no, dear, tomorrow is too late a start. You’d better stop by this afternoon. You can take a look at what you’re up against, and after you’ve sorted this out, I’ve a whole list of other jobs for you,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I’m sure your form wouldn’t have room for everything. It wasn’t terribly tidy when we moved in here last year, and I have had so much to deal with in the house … well, I’m afraid I turned a blind eye to the garden. We had such a large place before and to fit the furniture and all our photos and art into such a small town house …”

  Pru stopped listening to Mrs. Wilson’s description of her change of life when she heard the post drop through the slot in the door. Hoping that one of her clients had paid a bill, she headed into the front hall, offering sympathetic “mmm’s” occasionally as Mrs. Wilson explained that the only reason she’d decided it was time to attend to the garden was that she was afraid her little dog, Toffee Woof-Woof, would get lost in the chaos and what would her luncheon guests think at the sight of it.

  Pru scanned the few letters that had landed on the front mat, among them was a note from her best friend in Dallas, Lydia Morales. She glanced to the end and saw that Lydia had added: “Marcus says hello.” Marcus—Lydia’s brother and Pru’s old … what, flame?—could say all the hellos he wanted, but he shouldn’t expect one back. A photo slipped out of the envelope, a snapshot of Lydia and her husband, Ray’s three girls, Yolanda, Dora, and Lupe, in their school uniforms. On the back Lydia had written: “They’ll never be this clean again.”

  When Pru had announced her move to England, Lydia had protested, “But the girls will miss you.”

  Pru had responded, “You’ll bring them over to visit.”

  That had prompted Lydia to say, with a sly grin, “Yes, you can take them up in that Ferris wheel on the Thames.”

  Lydia knew that Pru had a fear of heights. Just the thought of the London Eye—and dangling more than four hundred feet in the air in a see-through capsule—sent Pru’s head reeling.

  “We’ll take them through the maze at Hampton Court Palace,” she had replied. A gardener needs solid ground.

  Pru saw one more piece of mail … a payment? With her phone tucked between her ear and shoulder and Mrs. Wilson expounding on Toffee Woof-Woof’s penchant for weedy thickets, Pru ripped open the envelope with an SW3 post code and found one piece of folded stationery:

  Dear Pru, I’m sorry to tell you that I won’t be needing your gardening services any longer. You’ve done such a wonderful job and I thank you so very much for all your weeding and planting and your suggestion to remove the cordyline that my late husband planted in the front garden, but as it turns out, my nephew has just finished his A levels and has some time on his hands, and so he’s to become my new gardener.

  All the best,

  Sarah Richards

  P.S. I’ll send your cheque very soon.

  “It’s dead,” shouted Pru to the piece of paper. “The cordyline is dead, and no amount of waiting for it to resprout will bring it back.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, Mrs. Wilson, I’m very sorry, I was just trying to … I saw a … right, this afternoon. We won’t worry about the form right now.”

  With a woof in the background, Mrs. Wilson gave Pru her particulars, which Pru, still standing at the front door, scribbled on the back of Sarah Richards’s envelope. A second after the call ended, a knock at the door startled her.

  “Pru?” Jo called out. “Are you on the phone or are you talking to yourself?”

  “A bit of both,” Pru said, opening the door. “I’ve lost Sarah Richards.” She waved the note in the air.

  Jo shook her umbrella and closed it before stepping in. “That one with the dead cordyline who wanted you to string the tea lights for her summer barbecue? With the nephew who weeded out the delphinium you set out?”

  “I did string the lights, and she still hasn’t paid her bill.”

  “She isn’t worth it. You’ll get someone better to replace her.” Jo was Pru’s biggest cheerleader. “What about Damson Hill?”

  “No,” was all Pru could bring herself to say.

  “Bateman’s is looking for an intern. Think of it—Rudyard Kipling’s house and National Trust to boot.”

  “I can’t be an intern, Jo, you know that. They don’t make any money. How would I live? If only I was fourteen, I could become a bothy boy.”

  “If you were a boy. If there were bothies. If it were still the nineteenth century.”

  Pru told Jo about Mrs. Wilson, whose garden—and dog—she would be meeting soon. “Once I clean up the shed, I might be able to design a proper town garden for her—you never know. It sounds like nothing has been done for ages. Tea?”

  “God, yes. Cordelia had to shift her piano lessons to my flat this week while the pavement is repaired outside theirs, and my head is pounding from the scales.”

  Jo’s daughter taught piano at home—or out of her mother’s home when necessary—while Cordelia’s longtime partner, Lucy, an architect, worked with a firm in London’s Docklands, once an abandoned industrial area along the Thames, but now teeming with expensive flats and high-end offices. Jo’s tiny flat suited her perfectly—she was, as Pru’s dad would’ve said, no bigger than a minute—but there was nowhere to escape the piano lessons. Pru thought Cordelia must have gotten her height from her father, Alan, who lived in Edinburgh.

  Pru couldn’t imagine how she would have survived these months without Jo’s friendship, which had developed over her first few weeks in London. Jo the property manager acted as Pru’s main contact for the sublet. The people who held the lease on the house, the Clarkes,—were away; he was a history professor on
sabbatical, Jo said. Jo’s name had been passed to Pru through the usual means—a friend at the Dallas Arboretum knew someone who had spent a year in London, and that person asked a friend in the city who knew about Jo from her own rental.

  “Here’s my number,” Jo said on the first day, when they met at 72 Grovehill Square. “You ring anytime you need something.”

  Pru had plunged into her voluntary internship at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley almost immediately after she arrived, and so, although she needed a great deal of help figuring out a new city in a new country, she had no time to ask for it. Early each morning for a month, she had made her way to Waterloo station—picking up a coffee and a roll on the way—to get a train to Woking. One of the gardeners at Wisley had kindly offered to collect her from the small station and drop her off again at the end of the day; otherwise she’d have been on her own for the four-mile walk—pleasant enough in summer, but not ideal in late autumn—or she would have been out the cost of a cab twice a day.

  Arriving home each evening exhausted from a day working in the chill and rain, Pru ate sandwiches she bought at the rail station for dinner. After three days and nights of that and one splurge at the Cat and Cask, her local pub, she phoned Jo.

  “I know this sounds like a silly question, but I’ve had no time to explore,” Pru explained. “Where’s the nearest shop? I’m not looking for anything fancy.” Living in Chelsea meant that the surrounding shopping areas were filled with lovely, expensive food, clothes, coffee—all out of Pru’s price range as she had yet to make any money at all. The frenetic shopping energy of King’s Road, which cut across Chelsea and Kensington, made her nervous and was too far a walk for a quick shopping trip.

  “Not to worry,” Jo said, taking things in hand. “Tomorrow I’ll take you around and we’ll find everything you need.” She was better than her word, showing Pru not just where to shop—the nearest Waitrose was two streets away, although Pru was on more of a Tesco budget—but also introducing her at Gasparetti’s, the Italian restaurant nearby. Pru fell in love with Gasparetti’s on her first visit and stopped by often, although her dinners consisted mostly of Riccardo’s minestrone with an occasional small plate of pasta.