The Skeleton Garden Read online

  “Were you?” she asked. “How did that work out?” Pru looked down at a lone carrot in the serving dish. So much for leftovers.

  “Well, it was all right at breakfast,” Orlando replied, “but Bess cooked roast pork and stuffing for Sunday lunch. It wasn’t her fault—she didn’t know.”

  “Is Bess still working for the council in Plymouth?” Christopher asked as they cleared dishes.

  “No, sir, she isn’t,” Orlando mumbled, dropping the pie plate into the deep sink where it crashed into the dinner plates.

  “Easy, son,” Christopher said, eyeing the boy closely. “Is everything all right with Bess?”

  Orlando’s eyes flashed to his uncle and then to the floor. “Yes, sir, she’s all right.” He nudged the dishes around in the sink. “Nothing’s broken. Did you say you’ve another Star Trek film?”

  Pru wondered just how much Vulcan mind-melding she could take in a week. As the movie began, she fell asleep at warp speed, her head resting on Christopher’s shoulder. They both woke to the credits running and no Orlando.

  “He must’ve gone to bed,” Pru said.

  “Where’s your laptop?” Christopher asked.

  “No, he wouldn’t. He knows he isn’t allowed access to a computer. Why would he do that?”

  Christopher shrugged. “He’s sixteen, that’s why.”

  “Well, good night,” Orlando said, appearing in the doorway. “Oh, Uncle Christopher, have you emailed my mum—you know, just to say all is well?”

  “Why don’t you give her a ring?”

  “Yes,” Orlando said. “Of course. May I borrow your mobile?”

  “You can use the phone in the hall.”

  Orlando leaned out and looked at the landline, wasting away on the hall table. “Right, well, awfully late now. Tomorrow.”

  —

  By Thursday, Pru had to drag herself out of bed. Orlando continued to receive work assignments, and Pru continued to do them over again while neglecting her own. They made little progress in the garden, and Pru saw Simon’s frustration level rise through every curt word and gripped spade handle.

  Today, Orlando had the simplest of tasks. She spread canvas over the path, and told him to transfer a pile of manure from one side of the path to the other and spread it over the bed of tulips that he—that is, Pru—had planted. What could go wrong here?

  Just before lunch, she stood on the opposite side of the wall from Orlando and felt fine, dry flakes falling, as if someone were sifting sugar onto her head. She held out her hand and saw brown bits land on her palm—it was raining manure. She looked out the gate—Orlando stood on the path, the canvas drop sheet in a heap to one side. Holding the long handle at its very end, he plunged the spade into the pile, staggered as he lifted it high into the air, and flung the material over his shoulder. Large chunks of the manure fell onto the path and broke while the lightest, driest parts drifted off on the breeze.

  “Orlando!”

  He dropped the spade; it bounced onto the gravel and spilled the rest of its load. “Yes?” He wiped his hands on his sweater, his chin in the air.

  Hot tears sprang to her eyes, and she willed them not to fall. “The canvas…”

  “I tripped on it.”

  “Look at the path.”

  “I’m doing what I was told—taking orders, just like Mum said.”

  “This isn’t meant to be punishment,” Pru said, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

  “Yes, it is,” he answered hotly.

  Her shoulders sagged as the fight went out of her. “Yes, I suppose it is. But we do need help in the garden.”

  “I’m not very good at it,” he said in a small voice, his toe prodding a clod of manure.

  “Come on, boy,” Simon said. He had come up behind Pru and had a grim look on his face. Pru opened her mouth to make excuses, but Simon continued. “Let’s go.”

  “Simon, really, it’s all right,” Pru said in a rush.

  “Go where?” Orlando asked, not moving.

  “We’ll take the afternoon and go into Romsey—find you some decent work togs.” He gave Pru a wink. “Give your aunt a break.”

  “Is that all right, Aunt Pru?” Orlando asked, his eyes alight with hope.

  “Well,” Pru said, “I’m sure Evelyn’s getting tired of doing your washing every day.” With a flood of relief, she smiled at Simon. “Thanks.”

  Too many days go by without seeing you, and I don’t like leaving our letters in the hollow of a tree, so look now, I’ve come up with a plan. Do you know Kitty, Len Wheeler’s daughter? She is always tending those ducks near the lane. She’s a sweet little girl, and I’ve asked her if she’d like to be our secret post box. She’ll be good and keep our letters in her pinny until they are collected. What do you think?

  —Letter from Home Farm, Ratley

  Chapter 7

  Pru walked to the Robber Blackbird for the afternoon, past Kitty Bassett’s enormous duck pen and stone cottage with its apple-green door, and almost as far as Stan Snuggs’s farm before taking the footpath that cut across the field. She wanted to have a chat with Dick Whycher, barman. Dick had offered the pub for the dance after the Christmas fête at the church hall next door, and it was Pru’s assignment to begin discussing the particulars.

  She shed her waterproof jacket in the doorway—the rain had held off on her walk over—and took a deep breath of air scented with ale, spirits, and wood smoke, blinking to adjust to the dim light.

  “All right there, sunshine?” An old woman with curly hair the cheerful color of a tangerine stood at the far end of the empty bar.

  “Hello, Mrs. Whycher. Is Dick around?”

  “He’s below changing out the lines. I’ve just slipped over to keep an eye on things for him.” Dick’s mother ran the shop next door. “You go on down, he won’t mind.” She nodded to the far corner beyond the bar where a trapdoor stood wide open.

  “Thanks.” Pru took the steep wooden steps to the cellar and found Dick hooking up fresh casks to the beer pulls above.

  “Pru,” he said, looking over his shoulder, “howerya?”

  “Good, Dick, thanks. And you?”

  “Yeah,” he replied.

  She’d never seen “below” at the Blackbird and took a moment to look round. Oak posts held up massive beams and underfoot was a smooth stone floor in great need of sweeping. Casks were stacked under the stairs, and shelves of extra glasses lined the walls. Dangling bare bulbs provided plenty of light. “This is quite a place.”

  “This is nothing,” Dick said, nodding to an oak-beamed doorway. “See that old horsehair sofa? Take a look round there.”

  Pru walked through to another room, also lit. Wooden chairs were stacked up in a corner next to a sofa that looked as if it had been upholstered in dust, its stuffing bursting from the armrests and seat. On the wall—she walked over to take a closer look—a calendar turned to August 1944, its color illustration of scarlet geraniums still surprisingly vibrant. A shelf held a kettle, teapot, and a half dozen chipped mugs along with stubs of candles and a box of matches. Another opening led off at an angle.

  “Dick, what is all this?” Pru asked, coming back to find the barman.

  “They used the place as an air-raid shelter during the war,” he said. “Tried to bring some comforts of home, I suppose. Stan Snuggs remembers coming down here, and Kitty Bassett, too, even though she was just a young thing. Jimmy would’ve remembered.”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Jimmy Chatters, Martin’s dad. Well, stepdad. Jimmy was a policeman, too—like father, like son.”

  Pru’s thoughts settled for a moment on Detective Sergeant Martin Chatters, Christopher’s younger superior at the Romsey station, but her mind was pulled away and soon she was caught up in a scene from more than half a century ago. She stood still and breathed in the smell of earth and pictured her teenage mother going down into such a cellar where she had lived near Ibsley. It came to Pru that she hadn’t asked enough questions about her
mother’s life during the war. “Does your mother remember this?”

  “Ma moved us down here in the late ’60s,” Dick said. “Sadie Farrow, Ev’s mother, worked at the bar then. She was here during the war, too, but she’d have sheltered out at Home Farm.”

  Polly had filled Pru in on the general history of the area. Home Farm, once the largest farm in the area, had been broken apart after the war. Stan’s family bought their land, and Kitty’s retained their small piece, where she continued the family tradition of raising runner ducks. Stan, well into his eighties now, had help with the cows, although he still kept a hand in the day-to-day work on the farm, and most often could be found in the barn or out in the field.

  Pru’s thoughts returned to the room with the calendar. “Are there more rooms? Did they dig it all out for the shelter?”

  “It’s a rabbit warren down here,” Dick replied, following her and crossing to a darkened doorway on the far side. “There are a couple more rooms, maybe even another that’s been blocked off. But it’s been here longer than the war—Ma looked into it and says that there was a grand manor on the spot a few centuries ago, and these were the cellars. Family left, and the house crumbled or was knocked down. The pub and shop were built from the stone about 1850.”

  Oh well, then, Pru thought, just a young building in British history. She peered into the darker room beyond. “What else is back there?”

  “More of the same. I never have got all the way through it,” he said as they climbed up the wooden steps.

  Back in the bar, Pru looked around at the space, including the larger room up the three broad steps. “About the dance after the fête—will you have enough room here?”

  “We never have more than thirty or so for the dance; we’ve plenty of space, and we can push those tables back for more. It’ll do.”

  In the pub, Kitty Bassett sat at a table by the window, a half pint of porter in front of her. Kitty always looked as if she’d stepped out of a late nineteenth-century painting. She wore small, round, wire-rimmed glasses and had gray hair slicked back into a bun at her neck and adorned with a black ribbon. She wore a long, gathered gray skirt with a man’s shirt tucked in over her round figure, and sturdy black shoes. Pru could see that near the open front door, Sonia, Kitty’s companion duck, stood at attention.

  “Ah, Pru,” Kitty said with a wide smile, “is your special constable with you by any chance?”

  “No, he isn’t, sorry,” Pru said. She would bet that Christopher wasn’t sorry.

  “It’s just that I wanted to talk with him about putting up a new fence for the ducks.” Kitty treated Christopher as not only a police officer, but also a general dogsbody, assuming he could repair the roof as well as chase down a thief.

  “Will you have something, Pru?” Dick asked, taking up the bar again.

  “No, thanks, I’ll need to get back.”

  “Something pressing, is it?” Kitty asked.

  Pru thought about what she had to get back to, and all she could picture was Evelyn in the kitchen.

  “Oh, go on, then,” she said. “I’ll have a half of your best bitter.” She collected her glass and sat down with Kitty. “Dick says that you and Stan took to the cellars here during air raids. And Martin’s dad, too.”

  “We were up and down those stairs many a night—my mum and me, of course, and my dad, too, with some help,” Kitty said, nodding her head. “My dad was injured early in the war, you see, and came home disabled. He was part owner here at the Blackbird—the Duke of Wellington as it was then. I haven’t seen the cellars since the war—none of us has, probably. Except Jimmy. Do you remember, Ursula? Do you remember how Jimmy used to be in and out of the place toward the end?”

  “I do indeed,” Mrs. Whycher replied, “and Martin soon after, looking for him.” She idly wiped the bar with the apron she’d taken off. “Poor sausage.”

  “Martin?” Pru asked.

  “No, Jimmy,” Kitty said. “Well, the two of them, really.” She stared off in the distance. “Jimmy. He was a saint, he was. I remember my mother used to say that.”

  “You’d’ve heard another story about Jimmy from your dad, Kitty,” Mrs. Whycher said.

  Kitty looked into her glass and didn’t speak for a moment. “My dad,” she said to Pru, “had his own troubles. But now, Jimmy couldn’t fight at all—something to do with his eyes.”

  Pru knew next to nothing about Martin’s home life. “Did Jimmy die suddenly?”

  “Not sudden enough, I’d say,” Mrs. Whycher said, followed by a chastising “Ma” from Dick.

  “Well, Dicky, the way his mind just drifted off, it was a pain to see.”

  “He died just six months after Maude,” Kitty said. “And there was Martin all alone. Of course, this was only ten or fifteen years ago, and he was well grown by then, but still, after the way his life had started, you’d hope he’d have his mum and Jimmy around longer.”

  There was a moment of respectful silence for the dearly departed. Pru took a drink of her beer and looked over the rim of the glass, hoping someone would pick up the story so that she wouldn’t have to ask.

  “Martin was seven or eight years old when his mum married Jimmy,” Kitty continued. “She worked the docks in Southampton.”

  “She worked on the docks? I didn’t realize women…” Pru heard Mrs. Whycher cough, and Kitty cut in with a chuckle.

  “No, child, not on the docks. Maude was a working girl.”

  It took a moment, but Pru’s face heated up the instant she realized. “Oh. I see.”

  “Jimmy had taken a post in Southampton,” Kitty continued, “thinking he’d be more likely to become a detective inspector with experience in a big city. He’d been there several years, and then he met Maude when she was rounded up with the rest of the girls one night. He fell in love with her on the spot, he wasn’t ashamed of saying.”

  “Maudie was a good woman,” Mrs. Whycher said. “She’d just fallen on hard times.”

  “Jimmy to the rescue,” Kitty said. “Married her and brought them both back here. He saved her and her little Martin, truly he did.”

  “Did everyone know about her?” Pru asked.

  “It was common knowledge, but didn’t come up in conversation often.”

  Mrs. Whycher picked up the story. “When Maude fell ill, Jimmy held himself together, but after she died, it’s as if he gave up. His mind, you see”—she tapped her temple—“he became confused.”

  “Started coming in here,” Dick said, “wanting to go below. I let him—no harm in that. I’d go down after a while or Martin would come for him, and Jimmy would be moving chairs around or looking behind the extra glasses.”

  “He said he needed to find something,” Mrs. Whycher broke in, “but he couldn’t say what it was.”

  “Or he’d be sitting on one of the chairs as if he was waiting for the all clear to sound,” Dick finished. “Then he up and died, too.”

  The silence of decades fell over the group until a shaft of late afternoon sun cut through the window, throwing a wide band of yellow light across the table and onto the floor.

  Kitty finished her porter and rose. “Well now, that’s us away. Jemima will be looking for her tea.”

  “Kitty has her granddaughter, Jemima, with her, don’t you?” Mrs. Whycher asked.

  “She’s all at sea at the moment,” Kitty said, nodding. “Taking her gap year in the country—she wasn’t too keen on university. I told her dad, you let her come here to me, she can tend my ducks for a while. Nothing better to give you a sense of purpose than a flock of runners.”

  “Our nephew is staying with us at the moment,” Pru said. “He’s helping Simon and me in the garden.” What a lie, she thought. Helpful was the last thing he’d been. “Certainly livens things up, having a teenager around.”

  “Jemima keeps herself to herself, up in her room,” Kitty said. “If I didn’t tell her it was time to round up the flock, she’d leave them to roam all the way to Dunbridge.”
r />   —

  Pru pulled up her hood and kept her head down crossing the field—the better to keep the rain out of her face. She arrived home as Evelyn and Peachey finished packing up the van with meals for the pensioners.

  “No sign of your boy, now,” Peachey said with a smile, “but Christopher arrived. The kettle’s just boiled.”

  “We don’t want to be late for the pensioners, Albert,” Evelyn said from the passenger seat.

  “Right-o, my love. We’ll be seeing you, Pru.”

  Christopher, quick-change artist that he’d become, stood in the kitchen wearing an old sweater and well-worn trousers. “The garden looked deserted when I arrived,” he said, meeting her in the mudroom.

  Pru hung her dripping waterproof coat on a peg. “Simon volunteered to take Orlando shopping for work clothes, and I went off to the Blackbird on Christmas fête business,” she explained. She took out her hair clip and combed it through.

  Christopher took the clip from her and slid his hand around her waist, his fingers slipping inside her waistband. He began softly kneading that low spot on her back. “You mean we’re alone in the house?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Now that you mention it, I suppose we are.”

  His gaze penetrated her very being. “Upstairs.”

  She caught her breath. “I’ll be right there,” she said. “I’ll just get out of my muddy shoes.”

  He patted her bottom. “I’ll get you out of more than that,” he said and left.

  Damn shoelaces, she thought as she picked at a stubborn, wet knot that was covered in mud. She really should dispense with shoelaces and wear something that could be pulled off instantly. And why had she tied them so tightly? She got them off just as she heard tires on the gravel. Muddy shoe in hand, she cast a longing glance toward the stairs as Simon and Orlando came in.

  “Hello, you two,” she said, smiling. “How was the shopping?”

  “These ought to hold Evelyn off for a day or two,” Simon said, holding up an assortment of bags from charity shops. “He can muck about all he wants now.”