The Kissing Garden

by Charlotte Bingham

  The next morning they took Peter to the woods which surrounded the lake and asked him to show them where he thought he had entered them the day before with the stranger. Peter stood chewing the inside of first one cheek then the other as he stood staring at the thick belt of trees.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve never been to this place.’

  ‘But you said you saw the lake, Peter,’ his father said, crouching down beside him. ‘Remember? You told us a man took you for a walk to the lake.’

  ‘This isn’t it,’ Peter insisted. ‘I’ve never been here, Daddy.’

  George glanced at Amelia. He stood up and, taking Peter’s hand, pushed the branches aside at the place where they had found the entrance the evening before. He led the way up the overgrown path until they came to the lake.

  ‘Here’s the lake, old chap,’ George said as they reached the end of the path. ‘There you are.’

  Peter stared at it silently, as if he had never seen it before. He shook his head and began to chew the insides of his cheeks once more.

  ‘Don’t do that, darling,’ Amelia chided him. ‘You know that’s an awful habit.’

  ‘I don’t like this place, Mummy. I’m frightened.’

  ‘This isn’t the lake the man brought you to?’

  In response to his father’s question the little boy shook his head again, gripping his hand ever more tightly.

  ‘Perhaps there wasn’t a man after all, darling,’ Amelia said, lifting the little boy up in her arms. ‘Perhaps you just imagined it?’

  Peter shook his head and turned away, embarrassed by so much attention to his chatter.

  ‘Can we go back now?’

  ‘He dreamed it maybe, rather than imagining it,’ Amelia said, after she and George had deposited their son back with Clara in the nursery. ‘You know what children’s imaginations are like. But I really don’t like the fact that he was frightened by it.’

  ‘It is an awfully dark and gloomy place, Amelia. Anyone would feel frightened.’

  ‘And it shouldn’t be. It should be somewhere lovely. I love a lake – so I’m going to get someone to come and look at it. Give me an opinion. It shouldn’t be a place where children get frightened. Just one other thing, George,’ Amelia added. ‘I don’t know whether you noticed, but there weren’t any footprints.’

  A man called Sam Wakes, a small and wiry man with a face like a water rat, came to plumb the depths of the waters. He was a friend of Jethro’s. A man guaranteed by the gardener to know all there was to know about water and the like, he arrived at The Priory with a cart carrying a small dinghy and pulled by a bonny cob which he rode rather than drove. With the help of the mighty Jethro he dragged the dinghy down the track and launched it on the lake, watched intently by George and Amelia.

  Jethro waded into the water at the very spot George had disappeared from Amelia’s view, but in spite of all warnings as to the depth he managed to push the boat out with Wakes in it at least four or five feet from the rushes without the water getting any higher than the top of his gumboots.

  ‘It must have been a hole,’ George observed, sitting down rather suddenly on a fallen tree trunk as he watched the proceedings. ‘I must have just been unlucky. That is the only explanation.’

  ‘Seems to be shallow round the sides here, Captain Dashwood!’ Jethro called out, making his way back through the parted bulrushes. ‘Muddy, though. Which might explain this ‘ere dark water like!’

  It did not take Samuel Wakes long to paddle out into the middle of the lake, where he stopped, shipped his oars and dropped a long plumb line over the side. Amelia wondered out loud what the exact length might be, and George, speculating as he watched Wakes unwind it, reckoned it to be at least twenty feet.

  ‘That would be deep?’

  ‘Deep enough.’

  ‘How will he know when it touches the bottom?’

  ‘The line will fold, just as it does when you fish.’

  They watched as Wakes pulled the line back up with a shake of his head, reeling it up before dropping another one over the side.

  ‘Can’t be,’ Jethro observed, pushing his cap to the back of his head and scratching his scalp. ‘Inland lakes like he be, from a spring like, they’d hardly be more’n twenty foot. Twenty foot’s plenty deep enough.’

  By now Wakes was bent over the side of the dinghy, as if trying to look down into the murky depths. A moment later he began to reel his longer line back up before slipping the oars back in the rowlocks to paddle vigorously, it seemed, away from the centre of the lake to the perimeter. As he did so he stopped several times to test various depths until, apparently having had enough, he rowed to the far end where he stopped in what looked like the shallows to take samples from the bottom with a small pan attached to a long pole. He did this in various other places on the perimeter before rowing back to where he had started, Jethro wading in once more to take the painter and secure the boat to a branch.

  ‘I’m not quite finished yet,’ Wakes announced, speaking slowly. ‘But I thought you might like to know what I found so far. First things first. ‘Tis very deep. Out in the middle there, I ain’t done a lake as deep as he. Must be fifty foot or more. I dropped my first line as you saw, my twenty foot one, and he just swung there. So I put in my other line, and he’s near fifty foot. Didn’t touch nothing, he didn’t. So lord knows how much deeper he goes. Your guess be good as mine. But I’ll tell you, Captain Dashwood sir, he be plenty deep enough.’

  ‘It’s not man-made then, that’s for certain,’ George said. ‘Not that I thought it was, but there’s nothing to say it hasn’t been altered since it was first sprung.’

  ‘No-one’s been near him for years, Mr Dashwood. I never seen such black water. ‘Tis freezing too. Middle of summer though we are, he’s as cold as can be. Course he might be too, being that deep. Even so, that be cold water right enough.’

  ‘And not very clear either?’ Amelia wondered, half to herself.

  ‘No, ma’am. Should be. Should be clear as day, for ‘tis not mud on the bottom, not round the sides. ‘Tis stone, and pebble, though could well be muck and mud when he gets deeper. Even so, you’d not think he’d be that murky.’

  ‘Can’t be spring fed then?’ George asked. ‘If it was spring fed it would be running clear, wouldn’t you say? Even if there was a lot of silt below.’

  ‘With respect, Mr Dashwood sir, he’d have to be spring fed. Or fed be an underground stream or river maybe. If there weren’t no source for ‘im, he’d have dried up long ago.’

  ‘So what accounts for the murkiness?’

  Wakes shook his head and rubbed his stubbled chin.

  ‘That I can’t say, sir. I never seen a lake like him. There’s another thing too, though. You see there be no current, be there? None at all. Lake’s as calm as a mill pond. Yet when you rows away from the centre, ‘tis like there’s all manner of a stream running against you. Whichever way you rows, you feel like you’re being held back, as if ‘twere some sort of great magnet.’

  On their way back to the house George reasoned that there might well be sub-currents running in a lake as deep as that. Amelia argued that if there were such things then surely some sort of movement would be clearly visible either on or under the surface of the water, but George stuck to his argument, saying that water was a very deceptive surface. Amelia agreed, adding furthermore that until their children had learned to swim properly then all access to the lake should be fenced off. After which George promised that he would put the matter in hand with Jethro at once.

  But the truth was that neither of them were made any easier in their minds by their resolutions or their promises, and they were certainly not reassured after they heard what Samuel Wakes had to tell them when he returned from the lake to load up his boat.

  Fifteen

  ‘I’d gone back for a moment only, see?’ he said, standing with his elbows leant on the side of his cart. ‘For I’d dropped some’at, my pocket knife which I had
since I were a boy. When I got back to the turn in the path, just before where you was both sat, there were this noise. I looked up to the sky thinking it must be a storm, for it were like all the trees were blowin’ in the wind like. But the sky were as blue as he is now, with never a cloud in sight. Yet the trees all around the lake, mind, they was bent and whipped like by a gale. And the water. The water was rushing, do you see – rushing not across as if blown be the wind but round and round in these huge big circles. Just like it were being churned. I never seen the like of it in all my born, never nothing near the like, not on a lake. It was as if it were the sea. I tell you – my jaw it dropped down to my knees I was that astonished. Even more so a moment later, for no sooner had this great wind whipped up the waters than it stopped. Just as sudden as it started. And as I stood there it all was as if nothing had happened at all. Nothing. The water was as smooth as glass again, and the trees – not a leaf was moving. ‘Twas that quick it were like a dream. ‘Twas as if I’d closed my eyes and dreamed it. Except I didn’t. But I tell you what it was like, shall I? It were like the whole place had suddenly lost its temper. That’s what it were like. Just as if the whole place had suddenly lost its temper.’

  ‘We’ve betrayed the place,’ Amelia said after Wakes had left. ‘We allowed a stranger in to examine something which obviously the lake did not want to be examined.’

  ‘Amelia,’ George groaned. ‘You are surely not suggesting that something inanimate like a hole in the ground filled with water can have feelings? Feelings which can be upset?’

  ‘A lake isn’t inanimate, George. You know that. Lakes are full of life, of the past, of mystery. We often talk of hills being moody and the sea being angry, after all.’

  ‘In a poetic sense. Not an actual one.’

  ‘But we don’t know, George. How can we? How can we know what lies within mountains, under the sea, or hidden by the dark waters of an ancient lake?’

  ‘So what do we do, Amelia? Don’t you find all this a little – worrying?’

  ‘No, not really. Do you?’

  ‘I must say, I do find it unsettling,’

  ‘You don’t want to move, do you?’

  ‘From here? Certainly not. Do you?’

  ‘Of course not, George. Don’t be silly. I love this place. Don’t you?’

  And of course George did, but before admitting as much he had to hear it from Amelia herself, because if she had nursed the slightest doubt about living at The Priory, such was his love for her and for his family he would have upped and left it that day. As long as Amelia was still happy he had no reason to want to move, since personally he was happier and better than he had ever been, a state he ascribed to both the love of his wife and the perhaps magical properties of their ancient home.

  Besides, like Amelia, and even before she had expressed her own thoughts on the matter, he had considered the so-called storm on the lake to be a direct reaction to Samuel Wakes’s examination, even though he realized that such an opinion was totally without logic.

  But then, as both Amelia and he were now agreed, logic was not something which could be applied to their own experience of the place. In their opinion The Priory and its enchanted grounds now stood well outside the pale of logical explanation.

  So they stayed put, and, thanks to Amelia’s vision and artistry allied to George’s dedication and patience, they continued to transform what had been little more than ruins into a beautiful house, and one which was not only architecturally perfect but also a warm, light and welcoming home.

  Certainly it seemed to be a happy place, a place made for a young family to grow, where children felt safe and loved to play. It was as if the good people who had once lived there in prayer and contemplation had bequeathed a legacy of love, as if their spirits were watchdogs of the family’s future, and that as long as the Dashwoods remained there in the house they would be safeguarded by them. This was what Amelia felt and George did too. They both had a sense of belonging to The Priory, a feeling strengthened, not weakened, by its inexplicable manifestations.

  Yet, for the time being anyway, and without regret, they set aside any further work on the lake, fencing off the entrance with barbed wire and a sign warning strictly against any trespassing. It was almost as if they had both acknowledged, in their own very different ways, that the lake was a mystery, and not one either of them wished to unravel.

  With George spending most of the day locked in his study writing, Amelia continued her work in the gardens, which thanks to the hard and creative work put in by Jethro and Robbie were admired by all who visited. Amelia and her little team had been very careful to ensure that rather than creating a new landscape they should endeavour to make the surrounds of The Priory look as though they had, quite simply, been restored, rather than suffered radical alterations.

  For example, the courtyard at the rear of the house still had the feel of the cloister that had once formed one side of it, a covered and pillared walkway off which led what had once been cells for the monks but were now guest bedrooms; the end of the square was contained by the little chapel, now charmingly restored.

  In the middle of the courtyard Amelia had fashioned a knot garden which she had inter-planted with fragrant old-fashioned roses, so that on a summer’s evening the air was full of their subtle scents.

  Beyond the chapel to the west lay the herbaceous garden, walled on the north side in old stone reclaimed from around the site by Mr Stanley, and carefully rebuilt where an original wall had once stood. A large flower bed flourished on the warm sunny south side, stocked with pink and maroon day lilies, blue globe thistles, pink mallows, campanulas and white verbascums, while at the back of the bed, and trained along the wall, grew two productive peach trees whose summer fruit Amelia loved to make a point of picking in the early morning sunshine when the flesh of the peaches was warm and the skin of such a sensuous velvet that just to hold them made Amelia, as she said, ‘believe in heaven here on earth’.

  A smaller bed laid opposite was planted mainly with blue and lavender delphiniums and pale pink and occasionally lemon yellow roses, fringed with pansies and pink diascias, set against an old box hedge which had appeared to be dying when they first moved in but now flourished, shooting each May a mass of tender green shoots which Amelia carefully cut and pruned each year in order that the bushes should fill out below rather than climb skywards unchecked.

  Hedging was just about the only planting that Amelia permitted to grow in any kind of solitary fashion. It was a sore point with Jethro and indeed Robbie that Mrs Dashwood would not leave anything to hisself. Not nohow! ‘Tis always got to have something jumbled up and round it, so ‘tis.

  ‘Back along this would never be allowed,’ Jethro would grumble as Amelia, determined on untidiness at all costs, encouraged every kind of flower to thread its way through every kind of tree.

  ‘Roses through apple trees, clematis through pears, you’ll be growin’ them through the Captain soon. Back along this’d never be!’

  Jethro would shake his head in dismay, and Amelia would laugh, but carry on just as determinedly as before. She knew how she wanted the garden, full of colour, and a kind of gaiety that more strictly formed gardens would eschew.

  In fact now the grounds were fashioned more or less exactly as she had described them to Jethro when he had first come to work there, not only the river bank cleared but the river itself, which at this point of its course had long become clogged up and apathetic.

  They had managed to divert it to refill and reconstitute the old carp ponds, which they had found to be almost entirely choked with weed and silt, linking the two pools to each other with an arched Chinese-style bridge overgrown with guelder roses and fringed with gunneras and slender blue and yellow irises.

  The effect early on a summer morning when the mist still lay over the waters was one of dreaminess and tranquillity, a mood carried on into the long walk which they fashioned through the area she had designated as the Wild Garden: an acre turned o
ver to swathes of long grasses, wild flowers, buddleia and trees carefully selected for the differing colour of their foliage, weeping pears for spring, tall slender willows for summer, and acers for when the days grew shorter.

  The walk led to Amelia’s formal water garden, which was contained by an ancient yew hedge she and Jethro had discovered growing underneath a blanket of bramble and briar roses. They had cleared the hedge then square-clipped the yew into a geometric border within which they had sowed a lawn and constructed a round pond twenty feet in diameter edged with cut flags and sparingly planted with white, crimson and pink water lilies and perimeter clutches of white and blue water irises. Amelia had been adamant they should not over-plant the pool, for its uncluttered position was perfect to mirror the sky in all its changing moods.

  ‘We must take our visitors out another way, Jethro,’ Amelia had instructed when they were laying out the design. ‘The whole idea is for the gardens to flow, to grow out of one another if you like, so that wherever you walk you are drawn into the next landscape.’ The only place to which the visitor was not guided was the hidden garden, privately dubbed by George and Amelia, ever since their initial discovery of it, the Kissing Garden. They kept this part of the grounds for themselves.

  ‘I think we should respect the garden’s privacy, George. And since I don’t intend to plant anything here there’s going to be nothing to see anyway. All I shall do in here is keep the grass cut, and trim the hedges myself.’

  ‘I agree. I wouldn’t be happy with other people walking through it. It asks to be kept private, and so it shall be.’