Outside there was an icy wind blowing that Seth, clad in what looked like the same multi-holed layers of old jumpers as before, didn’t seem to feel. He waited impatiently while I wrapped my scarf around my neck and fastened up my duffel coat, before shoving my hands in my pockets in lieu of gloves.
‘We’ll start at the front and work round,’ he said, as we stood in the entrance porch. ‘We have one seventeenth-century engraving of the front garden, when it was set out pretty much as you see it now, though we had to replant part of the maze that had been grassed over, and also restored some of the parterres. The hedging has changed. The maze was hornbeam originally, but now it’s yew, and most of the parterres and knots are edged in box—it’s longer-lived and easier to manage.’
I followed him down the steps, lingering to look through a clipped arch of variegated holly. ‘What’s through here? I looks a bit bare.’
‘It’s the new rose garden—still a work in progress. Do you want me to show you the way round the maze?’
‘No, I used to play in there all the time when I was a little girl and I remember the trick of it, which is probably the same even now it is much bigger. I’ll find my own way later.’
‘Right,’ he said shortly, giving me the impression that he wouldn’t care if I got lost in there and never found my way out, and off he strode. I trotted after him down gravelled paths between intricately shaped box-edged parterres, sometimes with trees clipped into cones, balls or pyramids at the corners or centres, until finally he halted at a wicket gate set in a long yew hedge that billowed like a satiated green python.
‘On open days, this is as far as the public can come. We put a “No Entry” sign on the gate, and ropes across the other paths. Through here is the wilderness and the fern grotto, which I expect you remember? This is a later part of the garden, of course, but Sir William liked it as it was.’
‘And the dogs’ graveyard is somewhere over here, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’ He opened the gate for me and then was off again.
We finally came out of the wilderness onto the rear drive behind the coach house, within smelling distance of the pigsty. I was glad to stop for a minute, and catch my breath.
‘Over there’s the tennis court,’ he said. ‘Another complete waste of time, in my opinion, taking the gardeners off their work to mow the grass and paint lines, especially since it’s only ever used when Jack brings his friends down for the weekends in summer.’
‘You don’t play tennis?’
‘No, I already get enough hot, sweaty exercise.’
My mind was suddenly and disconcertingly full of rather wild and earthy speculation, some of which must have shown on my face, because he explained, after a pause, ‘Gardening.’
‘Of course…’ I said, my cheeks burning. ‘I’ve never played tennis, but I do enjoy a game of croquet,’ I babbled, hastening to change the subject. ‘Lady Betty—my last employer—taught me. She swung a mean mallet when she’d had a gin or two.’
‘It would be a lot easier to maintain a croquet lawn than a tennis court,’ he hinted.
‘I expect it would—and look nicer too. We could have a neat, low trellis fence around it, instead of this tattered netting…and perhaps a little gazebo in the corner to keep the hoops and stuff in. And a rose growing up it…what kind of rose?’
‘A Falstaff—dark crimson, with a lovely scent.’
I had an enticing vision of cold drinks set out in the shade, the thunk of mallets on wooden balls and the smell of new-mown grass and roses—though goodness knew when I thought I’d have time for all that, with so much to be done!
Seth was looking at me with a glimmer of approval that would probably wither on the vine as soon as he’d heard what I had to say on Saturday. ‘Come along,’ he said, and led me into the walled garden that was Hebe’s domain, though there was no sign of her.
Again, I remembered it quite clearly from my childhood—full of roses and herbs, fruit bushes, hens, beehives and lean-to greenhouses. Aunt Hebe’s hard work out here made us pretty well self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables, eggs, honey and chickens. It was no longer a surprise that she hadn’t taken the housekeeping in hand, too!
‘I have the greenhouses abutting the other side of the wall,’ Seth said as we emerged, ‘and the nursery garden. There’s a big wooden building where we keep the tools and the gardeners brew tea and eat their lunch. There’s a phone extension there, so you can ring down from the estate office in the house if you want one of us for anything. Behind that is the old orchard. Most of the apple trees bear little fruit, but they are valuable for the mistletoe that grows on them. Do you know about that?’
‘Yes, Mrs Lark told me about it.’
‘It grows wild in the woods too, mainly on the oaks, and the sale of it is increasingly lucrative, in season.’
He didn’t offer to show me, but instead walked around the solar tower to the terraces at the back of the house. ‘On visitors’ days those trellis dividers are pulled out to block off the top terrace to the left of the cross-passage door, so visitors can’t look in the windows of the family wing.’
He came to a halt and surveyed the three descending terraces proudly. ‘This is what I really wanted you to see—the restoration of the knot gardens to the original sixteenth-century design and planting, a very early scheme —though as I said, we are mainly using box edging, since it’s easier. We’re on to the lower one now, the last phase. We found all but that part of the plan, so your grandfather and I were trying to come up with a scheme that would be in keeping with the rest.’
I looked down at the terraces, with below them again the river, dammed off to make a small lake and cascade. On the far side, over a humped stone bridge, woodland covered the hillside. The roof of a half-hidden summerhouse could just be seen above the trees.
‘It’s so pretty!’
‘Well, it will be eventually. Jack wanted me just to rebuild the wall and turf the bottom terrace, and leave it at that, but Mr Hobbs said to carry on as before until you arrived and decided what you wanted to do.’
We went down to the second terrace, where he began to wax lyrical about the uniqueness of the restoration at Winter’s End and, as I listened to him, I began to appreciate truly that the completion of the gardens was something he wanted passionately, not only as a monument to both his father and my grandfather, but for his own satisfaction.
Strangely, he seemed unable to see that leaving the lovely old house at its heart to rot would leave a hole in the fabric of his beautiful landscape, but I suddenly found this blinkered viewpoint rather endearing. He’d entirely forgotten who he was with and was talking with a single-minded passion about what was evidently the love of his life. Strands of blue-black hair blew around his strong face and his eyes glowed an otherworldly green as he regarded his handiwork.
I shivered suddenly, but it wasn’t the cold.
‘The central knot of the middle terrace is in the shape of a rose, as you can see if you look down on it from the Long Room—a very unusual design,’ he enthused, ‘especially for the time.’ Then his eyes slowly refocused on my face and took on a warier but still hopeful expression. ‘You can see now how important it is to finish the scheme, can’t you, Sophy? We’re so close, and there will be absolutely nothing like it in the whole country!’
He didn’t wait for my answer, but took my elbow and steered me down another flight of stone steps to the lowest level, which was, quite frankly, a muddy mess.
‘So far we’ve started rebuilding the footings of the retaining wall—all the stones are numbered and charted as we remove them. And we’ve taken out the late Victorian lily pond, which had a ghastly fountain totally out of keeping with the rest of the garden.’
‘Oh? What have you done with it?’ I asked. ‘Even if you didn’t like it, it’s probably valuable.’
‘It’s in one of the stables. Some kind of water nymph, I think, with a big bird.’
‘Leda?’
‘Possibly, t
hough it looks more like a duck than a swan.’
I looked around the stretch of mangled turf, heaps of stones and muddy holes. ‘So, had you and Grandfather come to any decision about what to have here?’
His eyes lost that creature-from-another-planet glow and he grinned, making him look all at once younger and more approachable—and worryingly attractive too.
‘No, we couldn’t agree on it at all. Sir William wanted to repeat the design of the top terrace, but I thought it would be better to create a different sixteenth-century knot, this time using the sort of edging plants they would have used before box became so popular, like winter savory, hyssop, thyme and rosemary.’
The otherworldly glimmer again lit his eyes as he turned back to me. ‘It might be harder work to maintain, but it would be an interesting variation and could be infilled with plants available at the time too, perhaps repeated in borders at the back near the wall. But not at the front of the terrace, because the view over the lake and river below is enough.’
‘Yes, it’s lovely,’ I agreed, walking over to the low stone balustrade, the frozen grass crunching beneath my feet, and looking down at the waterfall below.
‘Planting anything there would simply be gilding the lily,’ he said, following me, ‘and— Don’t lean on it!’ he yelled suddenly. Flinging his arms around me, he hauled me backwards with a jerk that made my teeth rattle and I found myself, feet dangling above the ground, crushed against a broad expanse of unravelling Aran jumper.
‘I—I think mending that might be a priority?’ I said weakly, clutching at him as the stone I had been leaning on wobbled a bit and then settled back into place.
‘Yes, straight after we’ve rebuilt the retaining wall,’ he agreed, setting me back on my feet and releasing me, then added grimly, ‘providing you don’t let your aunt take my gardeners away to clean out hens and dig vegetable beds whenever she pleases.’
‘I don’t think an hour or two here and there is going to make that much of a difference,’ I said, still slightly shakily. Then I gazed up at the shabby house with its dull, dirty windows and it seemed to be looking back at me with the hopeful expectancy of an overgrown puppy. ‘The tourists come to see the terraces on open days, don’t they?’
‘Yes, though obviously they are not allowed down to this level yet. We rope it off. When they’ve seen the Great Hall and minstrels’ gallery, they come out through the cross-passage door onto the top terrace and down to the second. Then they usually go back up to the tearoom.’
‘Mmm. It all seems pretty amateur at the moment, but higher visitor numbers would increase the Winter’s End revenue, especially if we charged a lot more for entrance.’
‘You sound as if you’ve done this before?’ he asked curiously. ‘I thought you were just some kind of New-Age traveller.’
‘I haven’t lived on the road for years,’ I said patiently. ‘My mother and I settled in a commune and ever since I left school I’ve worked in stately homes, doing everything from cleaning the floors to running guided tours. So I know that to entice more visitors, we need to enhance the attractions, and one obvious thing we could do is promote the possible Shakespeare connection more vigorously, both in the house and out. After all, that would fit in with the date of the knot gardens, wouldn’t it?’
He nodded, looking cautious. ‘I’ve read the theories that he spent the Lost Years in Lancashire—but he would have been just a teenager for most of them.’
‘Well, we don’t have to prove he was here, just suggest it. I saw a garden once that was entirely planted with things Shakespeare had mentioned in his plays,’ I mused. ‘Is there any reason why we couldn’t do that on the lower terrace?’
‘There are Shakespeare gardens,’ Seth conceded, obviously turning the idea over in his head. ‘It probably wouldn’t be much different to my original suggestion of keeping the planting on this level purely late sixteenth century.’
‘No, as long as the shrubs and plants were mentioned in one of the plays, you could have what you liked.’
‘Easy then,’ he said drily.
‘Well, Hebe did tell me you did your degree dissertation on garden history, so it shouldn’t be too hard. You probably know it all already.’
‘I’ll think about it,’ he said, but the embers of that glow were sparking up again in his eyes.
‘Is Jack interested in the garden?’ I asked suddenly.
‘Not particularly. Jack’s only interested in Jack and money.’
‘That’s a bit harsh. Don’t you get on?’
He shrugged. ‘We don’t have a lot in common these days, and I’m not too keen on some of his business methods either, but we used to get on OK in the holidays when he was home from his posh school—I went to the local grammar. But we didn’t see much of each other once we left university, until I came back after my father died, to finish what he started. Jack was against the whole restoration scheme and he wanted me to stop once Sir William died, even though we are so close to finishing.’
‘Well, you can hardly blame him, when it has been draining the estate for years,’ I said, and, seeing his face set into obstinate thundercloud mode added quickly, ‘Mr Yatton told me about your working arrangement with my grandfather.’
‘It suits me at the moment. I can still run my own business, while keeping an eye on Winter’s End.’
‘You design knot gardens, don’t you?’
‘Yes—“Greenwood’s Knots. Topiary, Parterres and Knot Gardens a Speciality”.’
‘That doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? You could have called yourself something more exciting, like “Get Knotted”,’ I suggested.
His brow knitted, so he looked quite Neanderthal. ‘No, I couldn’t. No one would have taken me seriously.’
I don’t think anyone had ever teased him before, but if he was going to be so serious then he had better get used to it, because I was finding the temptation to wind him up irresistible.
He looked at me for a minute in a slightly baffled way, then said challengingly, ‘So, are you going to let me finish what my father and Sir William started?’
‘Oh, yes. I think my grandfather would come back and haunt me if didn’t! But you may as well resign yourself to it taking longer than you anticipated, because getting the house and its finances back in good order again has to be the priority now.’
‘No, it’s the gardens that attract the visitors, so they need to be completed first,’ he insisted stubbornly.
I glared at him. ‘Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve been saying? The house is equally important—or will be when it is restored. And I intend to see that it is.’ I turned and started up the steps, while he followed behind me in brooding silence.
‘That box hedge looks pretty ratty,’ I said critically as we reached the top again, just to wind him up.
‘It’s foxes,’ he said shortly.
‘Foxes?’
‘A fox, anyway. It seemed to like the scent. Sir William saw it from the windows rubbing itself against the hedges until they wore away. But it’s not a problem any longer.’
I turned and stared at him. ‘You killed it?’
‘No, we found it dead on the tennis court. Natural causes, nothing to do with us—unless it overdosed on box, of course.’ Before I could decide if that was a joke, he added abruptly, ‘I’ve got things to do.’ And off he strode as though he was wearing seven-league boots.
I stared after him, thinking some extremely random thoughts about the way that his silky black hair was just a bit too long at the back and how the width of his shoulders made him seem incredibly slim-hipped…And I was pretty sure the bottom layer of his holey, ratty jumpers was a pink T-shirt with some kind of slogan on it.
Then I came to with a start and went in through the unlocked cross-passage door.
Security seemed just a little lax at Winter’s End.
Chapter Thirteen: Grave Affairs
Joan says that in her last hours my mother foretold that I woul
d remain a Blezzard and my child after mee; but my children’s children would be Wynters. I do not see how this can be, but it is true that I continue to think myself Alys Blezzard and not Alys Wynter.
From the journal of Alys Blezzard, 1581
There was something I couldn’t put off any longer, even though, with the light fading and the temperature dropping, it wasn’t the best time for what I had in mind.
I collected Charlie from the kitchen as company, first inserting him into his garish tartan coat, then drove off in the VW down the back drive, which would lead me, I knew, into the village by the churchyard. I parked in the lane and went in through the unlocked mossy lych-gate, though I felt doubtful about taking Charlie into a churchyard. But there was no one about, so I decided to risk it.
‘Don’t do anything you shouldn’t,’ I warned him, and he wagged his tail amiably.
The family plot was easy to find—or perhaps that should be plots, since centuries of Winters had filled the original enclosure with weathered stone figures of knights reclining comfortably on top of their tombs amid plainer, lichen-encrusted stones, and spawned whole new enclaves around it. Space had been made for William in one of these, his name and dates added to the splendid, polished slate obelisk at the back. It was topped with the same family emblem that I’d already noticed on the arch over the drive, which really couldn’t be a whippet with a black pudding in its mouth…could it?
My mother’s grave was nearby—a simple rectangle edged with clipped rosemary for remembrance, with a small marble angel at its head that reminded me very much of my mother: it was standing on tiptoe in a whirl of curls and draperies, seemingly about to take wing, while casually dropping a half-furled inscribed scroll.
‘Well, Mum,’ I said, ‘here we are, back at Winter’s End.’ The angel regarded me with blank eyes and a slightly spaced-out smile. Either the sculptor knew my mother or had been shown photographs. ‘Did you believe all those stories you told me when we ran away?’
She’d certainly been the Scheherazade of the family, though of course no one had been trying to kill her, apart from Fate. And diamonds had literally been a girl’s best friend, since she must have been selling them one by one to be permanently stoned for so many years.
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