by Laura Briggs
For the champagne luncheon, I couldn't avoid flowers, even if I wanted to do it. I had planned simple and elegant centerpieces featuring hothouse lilies. I had been at a loss when choosing local flowers, so I decided to stick with what I knew. I needed more time and research to choose native blossoms on my own, ones that would complement the lightly-Cornish theme Petal wanted.
Dinah had assigned Gemma and Pippa to round up and polish four elegant crystal vases for the table, but I was arranging the flowers myself. This was a task — sometimes monotonous — that Design a Dream's senior planners had delegated to me many times, whenever clients wanted simple and inexpensive arrangements. Since Petal didn't want to be bothered with choosing florists or flowers, it was up to me to decide.
"There's no local florist who would make you a centerpiece as nice as we can arrange from the hothouse flowers," said Lord William. "Marian Jones in the village makes a fine one, but she'd be busy already with local weddings for such short notice."
"Are you sure?" I said. "I don't want to offend the likes of your celebrity guests on my first try." I was half-hoping Lord William would mention another local florist, someone who could send four vases of red roses, even.
"Our flowers are among the finest in this part of Cornwall," he said. "What could they possibly object to?" His smile was equally as disarming as Lady Amanda's, with an absolute lack of pomp and circumstance in his general appearance, one of work-worn denim and a frayed sweater. There were wood chips clinging to his sleeve — I imagined him cutting up broken trees for firewood somewhere on the estate, as Geoff Weatherby had described.
"Nothing at all," I said, shaking my head. I admitted defeat at this point, and asked Pippa to let the gardening staff know that I wanted as many white lilies as the hothouse had available.
"Don't you want to see them yourself?" asked Pippa. "Take a geek at the place and pick them out for your own?"
"She means 'look it over,'" supplied Gemma, who was polishing one of the vases. "But she'll be glad to do it for you if Ross is there."
Pippa didn’t argue with her, glancing back at me. "Well, don't you?" she asked me, trying to banish the traces of a saucy grin which Gemma's words had inspired.
"No need," I answered. "Just white lilies."
I knew that the gardeners would know who wanted them and why, so there was no need to explain. Thankfully, whoever the gardener was who had ordered me off the heath the other day, I hadn't introduced myself as part of the staff. He would imagine me safely gone as a rude tourist.
When the lilies arrived the day before their scheduled arrangement, something else arrived with them, in a white florist's box unlike the lilies' basket. Pippa read the note taped to the top, then handed it to me.
"For you," she announced. "Looks like you've got an admirer already."
"Who?" I asked, with total shock. I opened the box and found a sheet of pale green tissue paper folded around blossoms — roses in a shade of deep, violet-pink.
"Oh, they're gorgeous," said Gemma. "Who're they from?"
I pulled out a card tucked near the blossoms. I apologize for being rude to you. You were correct before — no visitor to Cornwall deserves a welcome less than warm. With my sincere wishes for your success here, Matthew Rose.
I read the words aloud despite the faint blush on my cheeks for the episode in my memory. A little gasp of shock came from Gemma. "Ross sent you flowers?"
"Heavens, did he really?" Even Dinah was listening now, even though she was busy poring over a recipe for petits fours, a row of spices lined up before her like soldiers.
"What — here four days and you've hooked him already?" said Pippa, with amazement. "Ross never pays any attention to anyone — how on earth did you manage it?"
"Hold on," I said. "Who is 'Ross'? The card says it's from someone named Matthew Rose."
Gemma's jaw dropped. "What, you don't see the resemblance?" she asked. "Everybody sees it when they look at him."
"Sees what?"
"You know, the television programme. Poldark? Ross, the main character?"
"I've never seen it," I answered.
"Never? Not even once?"
"I don't watch PBS?" I said, meekly. Both of the girls exchanged glances once more — this time, of pity for my ignorance.
"Does he really look like this — Ross guy, I take it?"
"Dead ringer," said Pippa. "Why do you think all the women about go a bit soft in the knees whenever he comes by?"
He was handsome. No denying that. And in a way that Donald Price-Parker was not, which was precisely the reason I had found myself staring at him a few days ago in the railway station.
"Why was he apologizing to you?" Gemma asked.
"Oh, that." My blush was back, for reasons besides Matthew Rose — or the mysterious Ross's — good looks. "I, um, sort of ... stepped on his plants the other day."
From her place by the stove, Dinah let out a peal of laughter. "Dear me, I would have loved to have seen that," she said.
"Why?" I asked. "He was completely rude about it. And it wasn't intentional, what I did. Obviously."
"Ross is that way. Part of his charming manners." Pippa flashed me a grin.
"He's not rude," retorted Gemma. "He's nice. Funny and smart, if you know him well enough, I've heard. Trouble is, he's hard to get to know. He's a slave to the dirt, he likes to say, and that's no lie. Hardly ever goes out from that cottage he rents, except to the village to buy groceries."
"Leave him alone," scolded Dinah. "He's a grown man. He knows well enough what he's doing. At least he's not acting silly with his head in the clouds, or mooning about over some personal troubles the way so many others do." A look in her eyes made me curious to know exactly what she meant by this, but I hated to ask.
The grounds were proof of Matthew Rose's devotion to his work, anyway. I had seen both perfection and wild beauty in the tumbling foxglove and periwinkle, and carefully-tended roses, and marveled at whoever produced it. "Looks like his hermitage has paid off for Cliffs House," I remarked.
Maybe this was the sort of fantasy they were writing about in those gothic novels. A mysterious, brooding, dark-eyed gardener in the wilds of Cornwall, tending beauty while living in a tumbledown, ivy-covered cottage —
"I guess I owe Mr. Rose an apology, too," I said. "Maybe I missed the sign he mentioned. And it was my fault his plant got a little crushed. I just thought he could have been nicer about it."
"Sent you flowers, didn't he?" said Dinah. She gave me a look that made me feel self-conscious again — this time for the impossibility of myself paired with this mystery man of a gardener whom half the village was tracing.
I shrugged it off. "I didn't say he doesn't have good apology skills," I answered. My fingers stroked the soft petals of the roses. I hoped he hadn't taken them from one of the estate's rose plants, since I was pretty sure that would get him into trouble.
I put the lilies into a cool, dark closet so they could 'rest' for the hours before they were arranged. I put the roses in a vase on my desk. From my window, I could see Ross — or Matthew Rose — trimming the hedges in the garden. A blue shirt untucked beneath his wool pullover, a pair of faded jeans with hand shears tucked in his back pocket. It was sunny today, so he wasn't carrying the wool cap I had noticed the other day, when it had been slightly rainy in the morning.
A moment later, I crossed the lawn to where Matthew was working. For a moment, he pretended not to see me approaching — I could see it from the way his eyes twitched in my direction, then focused harder than ever on the hedge. But I stood there until he finally looked at me.
"Thanks," I said. "For the flowers."
He gazed at me for a long moment, studying me intently. His eyes were as dark as coffee — almost black, but with little glints of something lighter in them. My knees threatened to tremble ever so slightly, but I resisted by locking them firmly upright. It was silly of me to have that reaction to a stranger.
"You're welcome," he answered. He went back t
o trimming the hedge.
There was a touch of Cornish in his accent, I could hear that much, only it had softened over the years, and mixed with something else. A little of London, or maybe a little of something closer to home for me. Was it an American accent? New York, maybe?
I tilted my head. "Where are you from?" I asked.
"Here," he answered, snipping away more green branches.
"Yeah, but ... somewhere else, too. Are you from America?"
"Briefly," he answered. "I spent some time there, once."
I hesitated. "Is that why you sent me the roses?" I asked. "Because I'm a fish out of water? A foreigner from familiar shores?"
"No. I sent them to you because I felt you had a point," he said. "If you had been a visitor to Cliffs House, I would have given you a poor impression of its hospitality. If you had been a visitor," he clarified. "And not, let's say, the newest member of the staff. Who should have been able to read the sign by the path, for instance."
"In English or in Cornish?" I asked. This time, I wasn't irritated, but smiling. I wasn't flustered anymore, but bold enough to joke with him a little.
"Both," he answered. For a moment, I thought he wasn't going to smile. At last, however, that serious countenance broke a little with the faintest proof of a smile. "Regardless, I learned my lesson, thanks to you. I'll be nothing but politeness itself to the next rude tourist who wanders off the beaten path."
Victory. I tucked my hands in the pockets of my pea coat. "Well, as the newest member of your staff, I concede your point about the native flowers," I said. "And I hope your heath plant recovers."
"As someone wise pointed out — it is a resilient plant," he said. "Even if it is a protected one. It should be fine, given a day or two." He smiled, this time for real. It was worth the wait for that smile, I decided.
"So why are you cultivating it along the pathway?" I asked. "Doesn't it grow there naturally?"
"Not really. We're trying to introduce it to more regions in Cornwall by propagation, part of a botanical program at work locally. There was an errant cigarette fire along that part of the pathway not long ago and it cost me the first part of my work," he said. “I'm trying to hurry along the recovery process with a few transplants."
"Oh." Now I felt worse about stepping on his plants. "Um, sorry, then."
"Where are you from in America?" he asked. This complete change of subject bumped me from my thoughts back to the present.
"Seattle, Washington," I said. "Before that, Idaho. A very sleepy spot in it called Molehill." My hometown's name tended to garner snickers from anybody who heard it. It hosted a yearly festival that involved whacking moles in carnival games and a puppet that looked like a groundhog popping out of a paper-mache volcano painted green.
Matthew didn't crack a smile, oddly enough. He looked thoughtful. "Did you know there's a village close by called Mousehole?" he asked.
"Mousehole?" I echoed.
"Exactly so." He turned back to his hedge, although he glanced over his shoulder at me. "If you feel homesick, you can visit its road sign." He winked at me. No smile this time, but there was something almost flirtatious about that brief movement of his eyelid, and the expression in his dark eyes.
I felt a little shiver pass through me. "I'll keep that in mind," I said, as I turned back to the house. I couldn't help glancing over my shoulder one more time before I went inside. That glimpse of his good humor, the smile that brought warmth into those dark eyes. That must be the charming side that Gemma had mentioned, and I could see what she was talking about.
"Julianne," I said. "Morgen. That's my name, in case you didn't know it." Lame, since obviously someone on staff had told him about me and described me well enough that he knew I was the woman from the path.
"I know," he answered.
He was completely absorbed by his hedge trimming once again. Since he didn't look at me as he spoke, I went inside and went back to my own work.
***
