The Skeleton Garden Read online

  Evelyn Peachey stood across an expanse of kitchen with her back to the door. She nodded to the pot on the stove and said, “Ms. Parke. I’ve just poured up the tea. Mr. Pearse went straight up the stairs when he arrived, and I haven’t seen him since.”

  When Harry and Vernona Wilson gave Pru and Christopher the gift of Greenoak—at least for a year, while the Wilsons were away on an archaeological dig—Mrs. Wilson had also given them the gift of Evelyn’s skills as housekeeper and cook. “She’s a treasure,” Mrs. Wilson had said about Evelyn. “She’s frightfully shy, however, and it makes her seem a bit…standoffish. But don’t worry, the moment will come when you’ll be fast friends.”

  Months later Pru continued to wait for that magic moment. She approached the teapot on the table. “Thanks. I’m sure he’ll be down directly. I saw Peachey”—Pru saw Evelyn’s shoulders tighten—“Albert,” she said, backpedaling. “I saw Albert out by his van. He’s welcome to come into the kitchen and wait for you here.”

  Evelyn finished parceling out potatoes into ten square plastic containers and snapped on the lids. “Albert knows his place, Ms. Parke, and his place is by the van. Until it’s time.”

  Christopher pushed open the door from the hall—he’d already changed his uniform for khaki trousers and a mossy-colored sweater. Evelyn stood at the sink, scouring out pots and pans.

  Pru gave Christopher a quick kiss. “How was your day?” she asked.

  He nodded. “And yours?”

  She shrugged. “Evelyn,” Pru said as she lifted the teapot, ready to pour, “will you have a cup of tea with us? You and Albert?”

  “No, Ms. Parke, but thank you,” the back of Evelyn said. “Albert and I have our duty. Mr. Pearse, could I slice you some cake?”

  “Thanks, Evelyn,” he said, “but the tea will be fine.”

  Christopher cut his eyes at Pru. She nodded and cleared her throat. “Evelyn, Christopher and I would really prefer that you call us by our Christian names. I know I’ve asked before, but truly, there’s no need for formality while we’re living here.” She smiled encouragingly at Evelyn’s back.

  Evelyn hung the last pot over the Aga range and picked up her apron to dry her hands. “Mrs. Wilson never complained about how I addressed her. Nor Mr. Wilson.” She stood clasping her hands in front of her, with a stony expression, and looking down her beaky nose at Pru—easy to do, as Evelyn stood at about six feet.

  Of course Mrs. Wilson never complained—but she had asked, just as Pru was asking. “Try if you must,” she had said to Pru, “but I doubt if you get any further than I did. She does seem to relish the below-stairs mentality.”

  “I’m sure that was fine for Mrs. Wilson”—drat, caught out, Pru thought as she saw Evelyn raise an eyebrow—“I mean, Vernona, but it would make us feel more comfortable. You wouldn’t mind too much, would you?”

  Evelyn’s brick-wall demeanor stumped Pru, who had always found it easy to get along with people. She counted Ivy Fox, who had been the cook at Primrose House where Pru worked for a year, as a good friend, and thought that she and Evelyn would slip into the same comfortable relationship. She tried to be friendly and helpful around the house—offering to slice the bread or make the tea—but was continually met with stony refusals. It hurt Pru’s feelings, which, in turn, made her feel childish, as if she were a petulant ten-year-old and Evelyn wouldn’t let her on the slide at recess.

  “Evelyn, my dear, your chariot awaits.” Saved by Peachey sticking his head in the kitchen doorway—his Evelyn alarm must’ve gone off.

  The stonework of Evelyn’s face broke to pieces as she turned toward her husband; deep dimples appeared, and her cheeks took on a rosy glow. “Now, Albert, go on with you. Would you hang my pinny up for me?” she asked, taking off her apron and handing it to him. “The meals are all ready.” She waved at the boxes. He joined her at the counter, and they began packing up. Evelyn and Peachey stood eye to eye, but that’s where the similarity ended. If Peachey were a string bean, then Evelyn was a head of broccoli with broad shoulders that narrowed to a sturdy stalk.

  Evelyn and Albert left in his van to deliver dinners to the elderly, those still living on their own, before returning to their own modest home off the Winchester Road on the far side of Romsey. Pru had driven by it once—a small row house with a pebbledash-and-brick front that had the added allure of being at the end of the row with its own garage.

  Cooking and keeping house for the Greenoak household of two could never fill Evelyn’s workdays, and so the Wilsons allowed her this community service five days a week. Not only did the Wilsons allow it, Pru suspected they also footed the bill—that kind of generosity was typical of them, low-key and unobtrusive. Just as they had been when they handed Pru and Christopher the keys to Greenoak. “We’ll need someone to look after the place. You’ll be doing us a favor,” Mr. Wilson had said. “And there’s the garden,” Mrs. Wilson had added. “Think of the fun you and Simon will have on the renovation.”

  When I signed up to be a Land Girl, I told them I knew all about gardening. I’d have said anything to get away, but in truth, I didn’t know potatoes came out of the ground or that apples tasted so good off the tree. Now I can tell you how many days it’ll take before the beans germinate and I can nudge a chicken off her nest to collect eggs without a care.

  —Letter from Home Farm, Ratley

  Chapter 2

  “The weekend!” Pru squeaked with delight. The house, under the watchful eye of Evelyn throughout the workweek, belonged to them until Monday morning. “And whatever she’s left for us”—Pru nodded toward the Aga range—“smells wonderful.”

  “Is Evelyn’s cooking worth us walking on pins and needles around her?” Christopher asked.

  “Yes, it is,” Pru replied. Each weekday a delicious dinner awaited them in the oven—stews, pies, roasted chicken. Pru, sure of herself in so many parts of life, had little experience and no confidence when it came to cooking, and so she was easily intimidated by Evelyn’s efficiency.

  Now they sat at one end of the large farm table and drank their tea. “How was your day, really?” Pru asked, popping open the cake tin and cutting off a slice of lemon drizzle to share with him.

  “This morning, it was traffic safety with the five-year-olds at the parish school. We practiced walking across the Winchester Road—a perilous journey, I can tell you. And a couple of ramblers got caught out in Stan Snuggs’s field with his bull about to charge, or so they thought. They rang 999, but it was an hour before I heard and went out to rescue them.” She saw that ghost of a smile. “The bull was fast asleep by the time I arrived.”

  “Special Constable Pearse to the rescue,” she said. “Still—not exactly what you’re accustomed to, is it?”

  He took her hand and gave it a squeeze. “No complaints here.”

  They held hands and Pru felt the peace of the house pull up around her like a soft blanket. The kitchen, as big as Pru’s whole cottage in Sussex, retained a cozy atmosphere with the Aga set back into the former inglenook fireplace and the table—antique Norway pine, Mrs. Wilson said, and comfortably well-worn—occupied a fair piece of real estate. Each weekday, Evelyn set the formal dining table for Pru and Christopher, and after she had left for the day, they reset their places there in the kitchen or took their meals and sat in front of the fire in the library.

  “And you?” he asked.

  “We’ve taken care of a bay tree that was in a bad way,” she said. “Just a brief shouting match.” She frowned. It’s likely that she didn’t know how brothers and sisters were supposed to act. Her friend Lydia in Dallas certainly argued with her own brother a fair bit. “Did you and Claire argue a lot?”

  “We had our disagreements,” Christopher said, “but silence is more my sister’s solution.”

  “Polly’s back from Bristol. I told Simon we’d meet them at the Blackbird.” She stood up, swigging down the last of her tea and taking out her hair clip. “I’ll wash off the dust.”

  — />
  The Robber Blackbird, their local pub, sat on a quiet corner a mile or two west of Romsey town in what once had been the bustling village of Ratley. Attached to the Blackbird was a shop with a post office counter. The latter had been threatened with closure until the community rallied to save it; now locals ran the postal window on a volunteer basis, everyone taking a turn. Across the bridge and along the river sat a few stone houses. Out the door of the pub and down the road to the right stood a small auto repair shop—more of a kiosk than an entire building, as the business was mostly a mobile service. The owner—that would be Albert Peachey—offered his expertise wherever necessary. Need an oil change? No need to cancel that meeting or drop the car off somewhere, Peachey will come to you.

  Pru and Christopher often walked to and from the Blackbird that way. From Greenoak, they took the lane past Kitty Bassett’s cottage and almost to Stan Snuggs’s farmhouse. There, a stile led across a field and opened out onto the road; they walked up past Peachey’s repair to the Blackbird. If they drove, the short journey took them in the other direction, down their lane and up and round on the road, past St. Mary’s Church to the pub.

  The pub sign, which creaked as it swayed in a breeze, showed the eponymous blackbird wearing a Zorro-style bandit’s mask—black-on-black, yet still discernible. Slung over his shoulder and held firm by the fingerlike feathers of his wing, a bag of booty. Dick, behind the bar, told Pru that the pub had been called the Duke of Wellington until the war—the Second World War, not the one Wellington fought against the French. Someone had changed it as a joke, but hardly anyone now remembered what the joke had been, although Stan Snuggs, who had grown up nearby, said wasn’t it all water under the bridge, anyway.

  Pru and her sister-in-law, Polly, stood outside the pub chatting. Where Pru and Simon were still finding their way over treacherous ground, Pru and Polly had settled into a comfortable relationship that grew as the weeks went on. Polly, a few years older than Pru, wore her faded blond hair shoulder length and held back with an Alice band—a headband to Pru—her face was set off by red-framed glasses. As an accountant, Polly was full of logic and numbers and calculations, but she also freely spoke of spirits and life energy. The afternoon that Birdie had died, Polly had known without being told, even though she had been in town with a client. She had gone round to collect Simon, and together they went to find Birdie, who had died peacefully in bed.

  “Bristol is too big,” Polly said in response to Pru’s polite query. “I’m happy to be back. How has it been?”

  Pru shrugged. “We got through the week unscathed,” she said.

  “Listen,” Polly said, but got no further, as the pub door opened and they scooted out of the way of two men emerging. “Sorry, lads.”

  “You’re all right there, Polly,” one of the men said. “So, here you are. No wonder your menfolk are in there looking forlorn, standing at the bar on their own.”

  Polly smiled. “We’ll rescue them in good time, Martin.”

  Detective Sergeant Martin Chatters was still fresh-faced although into his late forties, with curly black hair unmarked by gray. He had been a one-man show assigned out of the Romsey station to the rural district around Ratley, until he fought for a second officer and won the day. Approval came through for a “special constable,” a post that was more glorified traffic warden than police officer, Pru thought. When Christopher had told a London colleague of his plans to leave the Met and get on at a station somewhere in Hampshire, his colleague had jokingly told him of the opening—and laughed even louder when Christopher took it.

  “It’s a large step down for you, though, isn’t it?” Pru had asked.

  “I believe I’ll quite fancy walking the lanes of Hampshire instead of the pavement of London—at least for a while.” He did like most aspects of his new job. Pru thought he especially enjoyed being a mentor to Martin, an amiable man who made no pretense of hiding his great admiration for Christopher. And so, Special Constable Pearse was born.

  “Well, I must be off, ladies,” Martin said, his face reddening. “I’ve a dinner date this evening.”

  “Good on you, Martin,” Polly said. Martin blushed deeper and mumbled a goodbye.

  Inside, the Blackbird was heaving. The women spotted their spouses at the bar, but as they attempted to make the journey there, they were snagged by conversations. Pru and Christopher had wasted no time in putting down roots upon their arrival at Greenoak. It helped that Simon and Polly asked them along to any local gathering, from district council meetings to a community harvest dinner held in one of the fields at Home Farm. They had become part of the landscape in short order.

  “Simon tells me the garden is coming along, Pru,” an older man said, his two hands wrapped around three pints of ale. “We’ll be reading all about you soon—casting an international light on our little bit of England, are you?”

  Pru smiled at the jest—she and Simon often got comments about being English-American gardeners. “You’ll have a good, long wait before we let anyone write it up, John. There’s work to be done.”

  Polly nudged Pru toward the bar, whispering, “Look, I’m sorry I haven’t had the chance to say anything…”

  “Is it about the Christmas fête?” Pru had offered to staff the tea table at the annual event held on a Saturday in early December at the church hall. The place would be abuzz with food and craft stalls, a jumble sale, the baking competition would be held, plus entertainment at the end of the day. “Isn’t there an organizing meeting tomorrow?”

  “The fête?” Polly echoed. “No, it isn’t that…”

  But Polly’s reply got lost amid the hellos all round as Simon handed his wife her gin and tonic and Christopher held out Pru’s pint. Drinks in hand, Pru headed for the community table that ran along the window, but Simon nodded to the three steps that led up to a larger space with booths.

  When they settled, Simon held up his pint. “Cheers.” After a drink, he said, “Christopher tells me the ducks got loose again this week. You’d think Kitty’d have a better fence up, for all they’re worth.” He looked at Pru with a sly smile. “It’s that Sonia that orchestrates the breakouts.”

  Pru snorted into her pint. Polly and Christopher rolled their eyes. Kitty Bassett might be a thorn in Christopher’s side, but she was a charming piece of local flavor to Pru. A week into his new job, Christopher told Pru that Kitty kept Indian runner ducks, a breed that walked upright instead of waddling—dress them in black dinner jackets and they could pass for a group of penguins, he’d said. Kitty’s prize-winning flock lived in a luxurious pen in front of her cottage, replete with pond and wooden structure that Christopher referred to as the “palace”—it was large enough for a person to walk upright inside. One of the ducks, Sonia, was Kitty’s constant companion, following her about like a dog. When the ducks went on unauthorized walkabouts, Kitty invariably rang Christopher for assistance.

  Simon cleared his throat. “I heard from Vernona this week…”

  “Oh,” Pru cut in, digging in her bag for her phone, “so did I. She sent me a new photo.” She tapped and scrolled and held up the screen. The photo showed Harry and Vernona sitting at an outdoor café drinking wine. Their terrier, Toffee Woof-Woof, lay stretched out under the table.

  “Archaeology, is it?” Christopher asked. “Where are the pith helmets?”

  “Toffee would look especially fetching in a pith helmet,” Pru said, grinning at the photo. “And shouldn’t they be covered in dust?” She studied the scene. “They do look as if they’re enjoying themselves, though.”

  “Vernona doesn’t seem like the digging type to me,” Christopher said, smiling and slipping his arm around Pru.

  “True,” Pru replied. “Mrs. Wilson says it’s harvest time for the olives in Tuscany—she’s learning how to use a small press someone has set up in a garage. It’s very much a Women’s Institute sort of thing to do.” Pru looked over to the quiet side of the table. Polly pushed her glasses up with the back of her hand and sh
ot a glance at Simon.

  “Did Vernona say anything about the garden?” Simon asked.

  Pru shook her head. “No. But you’ve told her how we’re doing? That it’s slow-going, but we’re making progress.”

  “Yes.” Simon drummed his fingers on the table.

  “We’ll send her a snapshot of the repotted bay tree.”

  “Well.” Simon dug a thumbnail into a worn groove on the table. “Here it is. Before they left, Vernona and I were talking about the landscaping, and I told her hadn’t the garden got a bit stale.”

  Pru didn’t agree. “The garden is lovely—we’re just sprucing it up a bit.”

  Simon continued as if on a single track to the station. “She put an idea into my head. She thought that the garden at Greenoak—and its gardeners—might make a good story. An article, that is. In a magazine.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if we’re suited to that,” Pru said. “Magazine articles are so big and colorful—I doubt if we’re what they’re looking for. Maybe a little article in The Advertiser—in two or three years, when the renovations have had time to…take.” Since the open garden day she’d orchestrated at Primrose House, Pru had wanted to avoid any publicity.

  “Sister and brother, American and English, working together. It’s a great…hook…the editor said.”

  “The editor?” Pru asked.

  “Vernona gave me the name of the editor at The English Garden. She wants to come round for a visit.”

  No one moved. No one breathed.

  “Along with her photographer,” Simon added.

  Pru swallowed her first response—“Are you out of your mind?”—and instead, said, “But the garden will never be ready. They wouldn’t want us when we’re in the middle of a renovation.”

  “I would never have thought Greenoak good enough to be in a magazine, if you hadn’t been here.” Simon shifted his glass about on the table. “I couldn’t do it on my own, but it’s different the two of us together—and you know what it’s like to get a garden ready for a big event.”