The Garden Plot Read online

  “I’ll leave the garden in your hands, then,” Mr. Wilson said, departing.

  Pru made her way to the back and began again with the ivy. It wasn’t long before Malcolm’s head popped up over the wall.

  “Morning, Pru, time for coffee?” he asked.

  “I’d better not, Malcolm. This has all got to be cleaned out today.”

  Malcolm didn’t move, but watched her cut, cut, cut, and then pull out and wind up long pieces of ivy. “Pru, do you know the rose called Highway 290?” he asked. “I read about it online when I looked up your rose rustlers.”

  “I do,” Pru replied, as a strand of the vine whipped her in the face. “It’s found all across Texas, at least from the central area south. It’s named for the road that runs east-west from Austin to Houston. Little, double pink flowers. It’s called Highway 290 Pink Buttons.” Pru gave an extra hard yank to one thick stem and almost toppled backward.

  “You’re doing an admirable job there, Pru,” Malcolm said. “The place has been overgrown for ages. I don’t suppose you’ve found anything interesting as you clean up.”

  Pru assumed he meant some choice plant under the ivy canopy. “I don’t think anything could survive under all this.”

  “Well, you never know what’s hiding in someone’s back garden, do you?” he asked.

  You’d know, thought Pru, because you’re always watching.

  “I’ll just leave you to it then, shall I, Pru? Cheers, bye!”

  By the time Sammy arrived and they’d consumed Mrs. Wilson’s plate of sandwiches, Pru had cut most of the vines off at ground level, but she’d found a curious thing; it looked as if the shed might have been in use after all. The rest of the mountain of ivy had been a tangled thicket, but against the shed—although it looked impenetrable—the vines had been stretched over the door loosely. Step back and it appeared as if nothing had been bothered for ages, but it took little effort to sweep the growth away from the entrance. Did Mr. Wilson have a special getaway in the shed—far from little Toffee Woof-Woof’s intrusions? Well, now he will find the access even easier, Pru thought.

  With Sammy off to the green waste collection site, his truck piled high with ivy and well secured with his own style of crisscrossed bungee cords, Pru stayed past the five o’clock bell. She stripped off her gloves and ended the day by snapping more pictures of the now-cleaned-up back garden, including the shed with its peeling green paint.

  Mr. Wilson had told her not to bother about the shed—just as well as they hadn’t the time—but no harm in peeking inside. She picked her way carefully across what had been the ivy forest and now resembled the site of some terrible catastrophe. Stumps of ivy, as thick as her wrist, stuck up just above ground level. In many places the vine had risen and fallen as it grew, like a sea serpent gliding through the ocean. Each time a stem fell to earth, it had rooted, forming secure loops just waiting to catch a foot unawares. Pru had cut off most of those, but not all; she hoped the lunch ladies wouldn’t venture this far out.

  The metal latch on the unlocked shed door worked easily and the hinges were quiet. She pulled open the door.

  Inside, the shed did indeed look disused, not Mr. Wilson’s hideaway at all. A dampish smell pervaded; the floor was packed dirt. All the tools—three rusted spades, one long-handled and two short, a rake, a circle hoe, and fork—still hung neatly from wooden pegs on the wall; some equally rusted hand tools lay in a line on the bench. Under the bench sat four large, rusted tins.

  Two high windows, coated in grime, offered little light. When her eyes adjusted, Pru could see that the dirt floor showed scratchings of some kind—she thought of Toffee’s growl that first day and stood quite still as she glanced around to see if any rodents were looking back at her. Pru didn’t mind a little mouse or two, but drew the line at rats. Nothing moved, so she took a few more steps toward the back wall, where it looked as if a bag of leaves had been left. She looked round.

  If they let her, it could be cleaned up and used as is, she thought, or it could be taken down and the whole back corner turned into a separate seating area, enclosed with a short clipped hedge. It would be apart, yet still within the garden. Pru wondered if there was a foundation below the dirt and took down one of the spades to test a tiny area that no one would notice.

  Plunging it into the dirt floor took less effort than she thought: the soil was loose. When she stepped down on the spade a second time, she heard a plunk. She dug away at the spot and saw something whitish below. Widening the hole, she saw bits of white, then bits of black and some bits of red.

  It was a design. It was like a mosaic. There’s a tile floor under the garden shed, Pru thought; that’s sort of a fancy piece to cover up. Why put a sunken tile floor out in the farthest part of the garden? She continued to dig and widen the hole to get a better idea of what lay beneath and then sat back on her heels to take it in. It looked like the rounded hind end and part of the tail of … a horse. The hind end of a horse, designed in a fancy, curlicue style. What fun, she thought. I wonder if Mrs. Wilson knows this is back here.

  The light was just beginning to fade, and Pru couldn’t see well enough to dig any longer. She heard Mrs. Wilson call, “Pru, Pru dear—cup of tea?” Pru walked out of the shed and approached the back door, but when Mrs. Wilson saw the state of her, she offered to bring the tea out to the little table on the terrace.

  Mrs. Wilson poured and Pru took a piece of shortbread off the tray. Toffee Woof-Woof sat expectantly at her feet.

  “He does love just a tiny treat, dear,” Mrs. Wilson said, nodding toward Pru’s shortbread.

  “Oh, of course.” She broke off a small piece. “Here you go, Toffee.” The dog took the shortbread out of Pru’s fingers carefully before crunching it down.

  “Mrs. Wilson, I’m sorry I couldn’t get more finished before your luncheon,” Pru said, looking past the pots of pelargoniums. The cleared ground resembled a moonscape, full of craters and pits.

  “Just getting that mess out helped a great deal, Pru. No one will look beyond these lovely flowers. Harry will be very pleased.”

  How lovely that Mr. Wilson wanted his wife to be happy, and she wanted to please him. Pru held her teacup up to her face and let the steam rise as she basked in the glory of the day’s work, the fine weather, and the companionable ambience of taking tea with someone. She had made only one strong connection since moving to London—Jo, who could spare only random bits of time for her. Transience filled the rest of her life; Mrs. Wilson made her feel at home.

  “Mrs. Wilson, did you know you have a tile mosaic under the dirt floor of the garden shed?” Pru asked as they sat with the tea steaming into the air.

  “A what, dear?” Mrs. Wilson stirred her tea.

  “It looks like part of a picture of a horse, done in mosaic.”

  “A horse? In the shed? Are you sure it isn’t an old calendar illustration or something? Who knows what was kept back there.”

  “Come see,” said Pru. “Do you have a flashlight—a torch, I mean?”

  Mrs. Wilson fetched a large torch and out they went to the shed; Pru cautioned her about the uneven ground. Under the broad bright beam the back end of the horse showed up even better. Mrs. Wilson stared at it without speaking, squinting her eyes just a bit.

  “Well, Pru, I believe you’re right—it does look like part of a horse. What a funny place to put a garden decoration, way out here and inside the work shed. You know,” she said thoughtfully, “this looks quite old. I believe we should show this to Harry. I never worked in the garden at our house in Hampshire, although we did have a lovely gardener, Simon Parke, and he … oh, Pru dear, that’s your surname, isn’t it? Is he a relative? Well, I don’t know what Harry will say when he sees this.” She looked back at the mosaic. “You know, it looks just like some of the photos he brings back from the country when he goes off with his group. It looks like something Roman.”

  Pru had lost track of Mrs. Wilson again, getting caught on her former gardener’s name—
Pru’s name, too. Then the last part filtered through. “Roman? You mean, ancient Romans from two thousand years ago?”

  “Yes, yes, that might be it,” Mrs. Wilson said. “We might have Roman ruins right under our very feet.”

  “Just think, Jo”—they sat across the table at Pru’s house, an almost-empty bottle of wine between them and dinner plates pushed aside—“there could be an entire Roman villa beneath our feet there. Maybe it extends into other gardens, too. And the remnants of the Roman garden could be there …”

  Jo interrupted Pru’s dreaming. “Pru, you don’t think that two-thousand-year-old plants would just be petrified under all that soil, waiting for you to find them?”

  “The outlines of the garden could be there, indications in the soil, the difference in paths and planting areas, seeds, you never know. There’s that Georgian garden in Bath that they’ve been able to re-create because when they dug down, they could see how the chalk from the walkway outlined the garden.”

  “That’s just two hundred years ago.”

  “And,” Pru continued, “the garden at Fishbourne was uncovered and re-created after almost two thousand years—that’s real Roman. We know what plants they grew. We know they had ornamental gardens. I wonder if the Wilsons would like a Roman garden,” she mused more to herself than Jo. “It would suit Mr. Wilson’s hobby, and he could have all his digger friends over for meetings or whatever they do.”

  “Maybe Fishbourne should hire you as its head gardener.”

  “Maybe I should re-create my own Fishbourne.” Pru thought she might be underestimating her chances at the Wilsons’. What if the mosaic were part of a larger floor, and the floor led to finding a villa buried since A.D. 400 and that villa—perhaps covering the entire Chartsworth Square area—could be reestablished and she would be the lead designer on planting the first new, very old, Roman garden in London. Talk about a permanent position.

  Pru thought fondly of Mrs. Wilson all the next day—the day of her special luncheon, which turned out to be a group of women she’d been in school with at Newnham College, Cambridge—and, although Pru had come closer to her senses, realizing the whole Roman garden thing might be a bit of a stretch, she kept hold to part of the dream, to make a garden for the Wilsons, just as soon as Mr. Wilson dug up the Roman tiles.

  Work from the Wilsons could more than replace Sarah Richards and so prolong the time when a decision would be forced on her—stay or leave. And any day she should hear from Halstead House in Long Melford.

  It didn’t even matter that she would spend the day grooming the beds at Mrs. Barrie’s and weeding the Connors’ tiny front garden, because tomorrow, Friday, she’d be back at the Wilsons’. She’d downloaded photos onto her laptop and sat staring at them with her cup of coffee in hand, beginning with shots of the first day when the ivy still held control. She could see Malcolm, of course, in a couple of the photos, one standing in his own back garden next to a short ladder leaned up against the side of his house, and another that caught him standing at his back door, hands on his hips, looking down his own basement steps. He looked as if he were talking with someone.

  Then the ivy disappeared; the removal really did make the garden look bigger. With the ivy out of the way, it was easier to envision the potential of the space available. Water. A rill. A brick rill running down the middle from the house to the bottom of the garden, where it would spill into a pool of marsh marigolds accentuating the narrow depth of the space. Pru realized she borrowed that directly from the Sir Edwin Lutyens and Gertrude Jeykll garden at Hestercombe in Somerset. Hestercombe. Hestercombe had no openings for a gardener at present.

  Halstead House

  12 The Vicarage

  Long Melford, Sudbury

  Suffolk

  CO10 9JL

  27 September

  72 Grovehill Square

  Chelsea

  London SW3

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  On behalf of the garden committee, let me thank you for your application of 5 September for the position of head gardener of Halstead House and sharing with us your ideas for incorporating both Saxon and Viking elements to echo Suffolk’s ancient history. I write to regretfully inform you that you have not been selected for the post, but I am confident that you will find a position suitable to your qualifications and ideas.

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

  Yours sincerely,

  Marietta Woods-Russell, chair

  Halstead House

  MWR/lmw

  Chapter 2

  Lydia’s email from Texas arrived hot on the heels of the rejection letter from Halstead House, the most incredibly bad timing. Pru’s old job at the arboretum was opening up—vacated after only a year by someone from San Francisco who couldn’t take the Dallas weather—and Marcus said they could hold it open for her, but not for long. Wasn’t it time for her to come back? Lydia asked. Pru deleted the email and a second later guilt washed over her. Lydia was a dear friend and only trying to help. She didn’t understand that Pru saw the offer of comfortable employment back in the States as quicksand: put one toe in and she’d never get out again.

  Thoughts of the Wilsons’ new back garden design—rill, perhaps borders running along the walls, and a seating area where the shed now stood—carried her through to Friday morning, banishing all thoughts of failure from her mind, at least for a while. She wondered how it would compare with their Hampshire garden.

  Thinking of the Wilsons’ Hampshire garden reminded her of the name of their gardener: Simon Parke. Here was someone with Pru’s mother’s surname, now her own. Her mother, Jenny Parke, although an only child, must have had a few distant cousins somewhere that she’d never researched. She made one trip with her parents to England; only eight years old at the time, she couldn’t recall if the people they’d stayed with had been family or old friends. Here’s another reason to stay in England—follow the trail of bread crumbs leading to what might be her only family. Just don’t send me back, Pru pleaded silently.

  Fog filled the Friday morning London landscape. Not an impenetrable Dickensian fog, but certainly thick enough to disguise buildings and people, creating small moments of astonishment every time a figure emerged from the mist.

  By the time Pru left home, the fog had begun to lift, and when she arrived at the Wilsons’, only stray scraps lingered with the sun piercing through. Pru—ready to take measurements, do some rough sketches, and talk with Mrs. Wilson, who’d promised to give her the time—knew she wouldn’t be able to create the same garden the Wilsons had in Hampshire, but she could leave her own mark.

  Pru decided to take a few shots of the front of the town house, too. She could suggest to Mrs. Wilson that she replace those tired pelargoniums and add window and railing planters she could change out seasonally. It would create a more welcoming scene at the front door. She walked across the street away from the house and turned back to get a wider view, inadvertently snapping shots of a few passersby, too.

  Pru walked down the steps and let herself in through the basement. Typical of London town houses, a wrought-iron railing ran along the front with a gate that opened onto steps leading down from the sidewalk, instead of up to the front door. The belowground access had been used for tradesmen, those in service, or coal deliveries.

  She walked past Mr. Wilson’s desk in the dim morning light, out the back door, and up onto the flagstone terrace, plopping her sketchbook and bag on the table. She dug around inside for her clip, secured her hair, and surveyed the landscape. Her line of sight led directly over the back wall to Malcolm’s house, where a slight movement of the upstairs curtains caught her eye. The best entertainment is what’s going on at the neighbors’; that’s universal. Standing on the terrace gave her the overall vantage point she needed, so she snapped a few more photos with her phone and then, checking them on the phone’s screen, saw what she had not noticed before: the door of the shed stood partially open.

>   Hadn’t she latched it when she left on Wednesday evening? Surely a tour of the old shed hadn’t been part of the luncheon activities yesterday. If she had left it unlatched, she supposed an animal could easily get in, pushing open the door for better access. What if it was a badger—or were there even badgers in London? Pru knew they were a protected species in Britain, and she seemed to remember they were large and could be fierce, but she didn’t think any lived in Chelsea. In Dallas, she would’ve suspected an armadillo or a possum.

  She walked down to the shed, but her steps slowed the closer she got. A few feet from the door she stopped and listened. Morning sounds drifted in from the roads nearby on the early-autumn air: traffic, the occasional car horn, a dog barking a few houses away. Quiet all round her, and no movements from the shed, but Pru still felt nervous. She stepped up to the door, took hold of the latch, and pulled the door open farther. As it lightly scraped on the ground, something scurried toward her and she let out a shout before she saw the mouse, just as startled as she, hightail it out and into a pocket of grass near the wall.

  Hand to her chest to help calm herself, Pru laughed. Good gardener, she thought, frightened by a little mouse. “Any more of you in there?” she asked as she stepped in. The light poured in from the door behind her, casting the rest of the interior in deeper shadow. She heard no more scurrying. Silly Pru.

  Her eyes adjusted to the light and she could see more clearly, although the corners of the shed remained dim. The long-handled spade lay on the ground. Did Mrs. Wilson let the ladies in here after a couple of gin and tonics? Pru wondered, picking it up and hanging it back on its wooden pegs. She pulled out her phone to take a few interior shots, but then stuck it back in her pocket; it still seemed too dark to get a good shot of the far corners. It looked as if someone had done more digging around the mosaic; she walked farther back into the shed to look. She turned toward the door when she heard a loud male voice outside, getting rapidly nearer. “Who’s that? Who is in there?”