The Garden of Forgotten Wishes: The heartwarming and uplifting new rom-com from the Sunday Times bestseller

by Trisha Ashley

  Trisha Ashley

  * * *

  THE GARDEN OF FORGOTTEN WISHES

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  1. French Leave

  2. Back to the Future

  3. Unlocked

  4. Going to Jericho

  5. Men Are from Mars

  6. Thorny Paths

  7. Flights of Fancy

  8. Poison

  9. Hot Beds

  10. Cat Flap

  11. Wheels within Wheels

  12. Bed of Thorns

  13. Follow the Yellow Brick Road

  14. Pure Folly

  15. Back to Black

  16. Heartfelt

  17. Well Trained

  18. Slightly Gnawed

  19. Full House

  20. By the Book

  21. Flower Power

  22. Signs

  23. Celestial

  24. Fêted

  25. Relatively Speaking

  26. Mr Mole

  27. Rabbiting

  28. Angels and Demons

  29. Well Rotted

  30. Box of Delights

  31. The Handmaid’s Tale

  32. Flight

  33. Unforgotten

  34. Folly

  35. Misery

  36. Hidden Messages

  37. Blast from the Past

  38. Something in the Air

  Epilogue

  Recipes

  About the Author

  Trisha Ashley’s Sunday Times bestselling novels have twice been shortlisted for the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, and Every Woman for Herself was nominated by readers as one of the top three romantic novels of the last fifty years.

  Trisha lives in North Wales. For more information about her please visit www.trishaashley.com, her Facebook page www.facebook.com/TrishaAshleyBooks or follow her on Twitter @trishaashley.

  Also by Trisha Ashley

  Sowing Secrets

  A Winter’s Tale

  Wedding Tiers

  Chocolate Wishes

  Twelve Days of Christmas

  The Magic of Christmas

  Chocolate Shoes and Wedding Blues

  Good Husband Material

  Wish Upon a Star

  Finding Mr Rochester (ebook short story)

  Every Woman for Herself

  Creature Comforts

  A Christmas Cracker

  A Leap of Faith (previously published as The Urge to Jump)

  The Little Teashop of Lost and Found

  A Good Heart is Hard to Find (previously published as Singled Out)

  The House of Hopes and Dreams

  Written from the Heart (previously published as Happy Endings)

  The Christmas Invitation

  For more information on Trisha Ashley and her books, please see

  www.trishaashley.com

  or visit her Facebook page (www.facebook.com/TrishaAshleyBooks)

  or follow her on Twitter @trishaashley.

  For Mum, who so loved my books

  Mary Turner Long

  5/7/25 to 7/1/2020

  Acknowledgements

  I could not have written this book without the research carried out by my son, Robin Ashley. His wonderful plan and planting lists for the walled Apothecary Garden enabled me to walk around it in my head, step by step with my heroine, Marnie.

  Prologue

  Passing Places

  1993

  ‘Tell me about when you were a little girl at Jericho’s End,’ I said. It wasn’t that I needed to hear her stories again, for they were engraved on my memory for ever, it was just that her thin, silvery thread of a voice was all that seemed to keep her connected to life – and to me.

  After the last round of chemotherapy, her curling, red-gold hair had returned in the form of an ashy down, and her hand in mine, once so strong and capable, seemed to have turned into a bird’s claw, dry as a bundle of fine twigs and cool to the touch. Painkillers had smoothed out the lines in her hollowed face and clouded her blue-grey eyes with vagueness.

  ‘It’s me, Marnie. Can you hear me, Mum? Auntie Em’s dropped me off after school, but she’s going to come in and see you later, when she picks me up.’

  ‘Marianne, not Marnie,’ Mum corrected, with an echo of the old touch of reproof.

  The hospice was so quiet that you could hear the bees buzzing among the lavender bushes in the garden, and only the purposeful footsteps of the nurses going briskly and competently about their work broke the drowsy spell.

  ‘Mum?’ I tried again. ‘Remember when you were a little girl and lived at Jericho’s End, and what you and your friends saw when you were playing among the stones by the Fairy Falls? Tell me that story,’ I pleaded.

  ‘Jericho’s End …?’ A light seemed to glimmer in her eyes for a moment and the fleeting ghost of a smile touched her lips.

  ‘Ice-cream … and angels,’ she sighed ecstatically on an exhaled breath, as if she’d had a glimpse through the doors of Heaven, and spotted the Angel Gabriel driving the celestial version of a Mr Whippy van – and then, in an instant, she was gone.

  Even at twelve, you know when the butterfly has flown and the chrysalis is an empty husk, but I sat there holding her hand and wondering if the journey from birth to death wasn’t a straight line at all, but a circle, until Aunt Em came to fetch me.

  1

  French Leave

  Early 2017

  When my mobile rang, I was digging up early potatoes in the walled garden of a vast and castellated French château, though not the one belonging to my adoptive family, the Ellwoods, which was an altogether more modest affair about forty miles away, in the Dordogne. I fished the phone out of my pocket with an earthy hand.

  ‘Marnie? Good news!’ announced Treena Ellwood, who filled the dual role of my almost-twin sister and best friend, sounding as if she was standing next to me, rather than back in the UK. ‘I just heard on the grapevine that Mike got married again early last year. I thought there must have been a good reason why he suddenly agreed to the divorce.’

  ‘He’s … remarried?’ I repeated, slowly. I spared a fleeting thought for his newest victim, but my overwhelming feeling was that one final shackle holding me to the past had finally fallen away. I found I was staring at the ice-blue sky, wondering if I still remembered how to fly.

  And as I stood there, phone in hand, the memory of my brief marriage escaped the dark corner of my mind in which I’d hidden it and slithered out to taunt me for the reckless, loving fool I’d been.

  It had been a whirlwind romance and I’d blithely followed a trail of rosy delusions right up to the altar within two months of meeting Mike Draycot. I’d assured everyone that despite the short time we’d known each other and the age difference – he was ten years older – we were true soulmates … though, later, I found it hard to think of anything we shared.

  But then, I wasn’t the malleable, emotionally damaged person he thought I was; he just caught me at a low ebb. I was strong, prone to be acerbic and fiercely independent, and yet Mum’s death when I was twelve had left me with a deep feeling of insecurity. My adoptive family’s recent decision to sell up their home and garden centre business in the UK, and to relocate to an old château in France, had stirred up that feeling all over again. Somehow it felt like a second betrayal.

  Mike had seemed so understanding and sympathetic. I’d told him more about how I felt t
han I’d ever revealed to anyone, even Treena, and since his first wife had died tragically young, we seemed to have a bond of loss in common.

  He was charming, very clever and emotionally manipulative in ways I’d never even thought of. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

  Mike was a wiry man with the deceptively skinny physique of the runner, and had attractively spiky silver and black hair, bright dark eyes and an engaging smile.

  He owned the veterinary practice in Merchester where Treena was providing a year’s maternity cover for one of the staff, which is how I came to meet him. Treena, however, was the only member of the family who didn’t think Mike was the perfect man for me, right from the start.

  ‘He’s a good vet, but the animals don’t like him,’ she’d warned me, before the wedding. ‘And he’s the only vet I know who doesn’t have pets of his own.’

  She herself had two dogs and three cats, and for the last year I’d shared a small rented cottage with her and her menagerie on the edge of Merchester, where the Ellwoods ran their garden centre. Just before I met Mike, my adoptive family had fallen in love with the rundown Château du Monde in France, which came with extensive grounds and outbuildings, a lake and campsite. With hard work, it would provide a home and a living. Unlike her married older brother and her sister, Treena herself had decided to stay put in the UK and I’d been in two minds whether to go or stay. There were gardens to restore at the château and the Ellwoods hoped eventually to set up a garden centre there, too. But moving to France had never been my dream. In any case, I was successfully working my way up the gardening hierarchy of the Heritage Homes Trust, and had just been offered a promotion at a property in the North-East.

  Falling for Mike scuppered both those options, though he seemed to understand my ambition to become a head gardener one day, as well as sharing most of my aims in life … and really, I can’t imagine how I got that impression, because it wasn’t long before I realized that he was intent on making me over in an entirely different pattern of his own design.

  But of course, the benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing. And at first he was very subtle in his technique: one small thing after the other, each designed to isolate me from family and friends, undermine my self-confidence and independence and lead me further and further under his control.

  It didn’t help that in public he showed a different face, so that for a long time he fooled everyone (though never Treena) into thinking he was the perfect husband and I the ungrateful and difficult wife.

  The very first pinprick to start deflating the rosy bubble of romantic delusion had come right after my small wedding, which was a close ‘family and friends’ affair. Aunt Em (I continued to call them Aunt Em and Uncle Richard, even after they adopted me, as they were friends as close as any family) had made my beautiful white silk dress herself, a floaty boho affair, and instead of a veil I just wore my long, black wavy hair loose, with a circlet of flowers on my head.

  I’d noticed Mike hadn’t smiled at me when I came down the aisle, or said anything other than to make the responses during the ceremony, so when we went to sign the register I asked him if he liked my dress … to which he’d replied coldly that he would have preferred something more sophisticated that made me look less like a child bride.

  In that instant, with that casually cruel remark, I saw a stranger in his eyes and my world rocked. Then just as suddenly, he was giving me the old charming smile and turning away to speak to someone else, leaving me wondering if he could have meant it as a joke. If so, then it wasn’t kind. I mean, given his wiry, skinny physique, his sharp-shouldered suit made him look a bit as if he was dangling from a wire coat hanger, but I wouldn’t have dreamed of hurting his feelings by saying so.

  At the reception in a small hotel, he was so very much the happy bridegroom, saying how delighted he was with his beautiful bride and introducing me to his elderly, but strangely cowed parents, who had travelled up from Hastings for the occasion. He left me alone with them only for a moment, during which time they wished me happiness, though not as if they were optimistic about that outcome, and said they were sorry they would have to leave early to catch their train home.

  I had a sudden unexpected urge to ask them about Mike’s first wife and especially what she’d died of, but before the question could leave my lips, Mike hurried back and bundled them off into a taxi.

  Treena cornered me a little later and asked me what was the matter. ‘And you can’t fool me, I know something’s up.’

  ‘Oh … it’s nothing really. I just took something Mike said in church the wrong way, but I’m sure he meant it as a joke.’

  She insisted I told her what he said and then frowned over it. ‘That was a stupid and cruel thing to say. Why on earth should you dress as if you were the same age as him?’

  ‘Well, I did think the child bride bit was silly, considering I’m a lot nearer to thirty than twenty. That’s why I thought he must have been joking.’

  ‘Huh!’ she said disbelievingly. ‘I just heard him telling Mum that he hoped you’d be starting a family very soon and giving up your job. Mum was surprised.’

  ‘So am I!’ I stared at her. ‘He knows I want to wait a couple more years before I take maternity leave. I’ve already given up the chance of promotion with that job near Hexham, but there should be an opening where I am in the next year or two, if I hang on in there.’

  ‘I suspect he might not have quite grasped that,’ Treena said drily.

  I looked at her uncertainly and then said after a minute, ‘I wish the family wasn’t moving abroad. Thank goodness you’re still going to be around!’

  ‘Yes, I’m definitely accepting that partnership in the Great Mumming veterinary practice, so even after I move, I’ll only be about twenty miles away,’ she agreed.

  ‘Will you have to move? It would be nice having you in Merchester.’

  ‘I know, but I’d find the commute a bit of a pain down all those small country roads and, anyway, I’d like to settle there, near Happy Pets. I’ll move Zeph to a livery stables nearby, too.’

  Zephyr was a dappled silver and lilac-grey mare that reminded me of an old-fashioned rocking horse and Treena adored her.

  ‘If you’re going to move, then I ought to clear my stuff out,’ I said. Not only were a lot of my belongings still at the cottage, but some of the things that had been Mum’s were stored there. There wasn’t room in Mike’s small and minimalist flat in a former mill building, though we planned to buy a house together.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to put a lot of things into storage until we move to somewhere bigger.’

  ‘There’s no rush. I can just take it with me when I move, so you can sort it out later, if you like,’ she said. ‘By the way, you do realize Great Mumming isn’t far from that village where your mum came from – Jericho’s End?’

  I looked at her in surprise. I was so used to thinking of Jericho’s End as some fabled, forbidden Shangri-La, that I’d almost forgotten it was a real place.

  ‘I suppose it is,’ I agreed.

  ‘When I’ve moved, we could go and have a look at it,’ she suggested. ‘Aren’t you curious?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said honestly. ‘I loved hearing Mum’s stories about it when I was little – it seemed such a magical, wonderful place – but then, she made me promise never to go there. She said … it would be dangerous.’

  Treena’s blue eyes widened. ‘You never told me that! What kind of dangerous?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it was something to do with her family. Remember I told you her parents belonged to some small, strict, religious sect I’d never heard of, who sounded as if they came straight out of the Dark Ages by way of Cold Comfort Farm? They disowned her after she got pregnant with me, so perhaps she just meant they’d make me unwelcome, or put a curse on me, or something.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Treena.

  I recalled the urgency with which Mum had made me promise not to visit Jericho’s En
d, which seemed a bit over the top … but then, so had her upbringing. ‘I’d hate to bump into any of my Vane relatives,’ I said.

  ‘It wouldn’t matter if you did, because you’re an Ellwood now, and anyway, you don’t look anything like your mother so they won’t guess if they’re not told,’ Treena pointed out.

  This was true, since I was medium-sized and had the black wavy hair and pale olive complexion of my Italian father, while Mum had been a tall, Titian-haired beauty. We did share a heart-shaped face with a broad brow from which sprang two wings of curling hair, and eyes of an unusual light grey-blue ringed with black, but that was it.

  ‘Well, I expect I’ll have to go there with work at some point. I’ll tell you what it’s like, and then if there aren’t any Vanes running around with axes, we could go and visit it,’ she suggested.

  The promise Mum had extracted from me did seem a bit silly now and these future plans comforted me. I told myself that I had lots to look forward to. I had good friends, loved my job and, if the family were moving abroad, at least that gave us somewhere nice to go for holidays. And Mike had his own work, as well as a passion for early morning running that took him for miles and seemed to be almost an addiction.

  There were bound to be minor misunderstandings at the start of our married life, when Mike and I had known one another for so short a time, but since we loved each other, I was quite convinced any little difficulties would soon be ironed out.

  Only I didn’t realize that it was me who was supposed to be ironed out, and then refolded into a state of submission, fear and obedience … I wasn’t going down without a fight, however.

  Sarcasm had always been my weapon of choice. The first time Mike gave me a list of things he wanted me to do while he was at work one Saturday, I looked at him in astonishment and said, in a robotic voice, ‘This android is not programmed to take your orders.’

  He didn’t find that funny, and was grouchy for the rest of the weekend. Then he apologized but I knew he was still punishing me when I began to be excluded from social arrangements or he totally overrode household decisions we’d already agreed upon. I began to see a pattern, and again, he wasn’t amused when eventually I said that if he’d wanted a Stepford Wife he should have married one. I really wanted our life together to be everything it had once promised to be but I knew I had to choose between saving the so-called marriage or saving myself in the end. Before he destroyed my love for him, I wasted too much time trying to make things right between us, but when I finally took my courage in my hands and told him I thought we’d been mistaken in each other and should separate, he flew into one of his terrifying cold rages, which by then had much the same effect on me that the Dementors had on the characters in the Harry Potter novels, and threatened that if I ran off to Treena for help, he’d blacken her professional reputation.