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

by Trisha Ashley

  That stopped me in my tracks. She’d moved to Merchester by then and taken out a loan to buy into her friend’s family veterinary practice, not to mention a mortgage on a small terraced cottage. I couldn’t risk any action that might harm her.

  Mike had already made very sure he’d alienated me from any other friends I might have turned to, and the family were too far away to see what was happening. I had casual friendships with my gardening colleagues but, due to Mike, I no longer even went to the pub with them after work … and his habit of suddenly turning up at the garden where I was working didn’t endear me to my employers, either.

  He’d known Treena was the one person I could turn to and so once that was impossible, I felt trapped and hopeless.

  Now, of course, I find it hard to understand how I came to be so much under his thrall, but one thing followed another in a spiral of descent, until I began to feel I was losing both the fight and my mind, and there was no way out but one – until Fate and Treena intervened to set me free and I became the Runaway Bride.

  Now, five years later, here was Treena telling me that Mike had remarried and moved on.

  I realized I was still holding the phone in one hand and Treena’s voice could be heard faintly asking me if I was still there. I felt as if an hour had passed, but the same small white cloud above my head had hardly shifted and I knew it must have been barely minutes. I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, then put the phone to my ear again.

  ‘Yes, I’m still here, but I think I just had a near-death type experience, where the dodgier parts of your life rush past your eyes.’

  ‘No, that one must have been a new-life experience, because there’s no reason to put off coming back to the UK now, is there?’

  ‘I expect he lost interest in me long ago anyway and there was no reason why I shouldn’t have come back after the divorce was finalized,’ I said. ‘But now he’s remarried it somehow feels … safer.’

  A sudden wave of homesickness swept over me for the rolling farmlands, upland moors and little market towns of west Lancashire, where I had been brought up. I wanted to walk on the flat, pale golden sands at Merchester, with the wind blowing stinging sand against my bare legs and the taste of salt on my lips.

  ‘He’s got someone new to work on now he’s remarried,’ Treena said. ‘Sylvie, my receptionist friend, said his wife is a vet too, and she’s joined his practice so he’s going to be able to keep tabs on her all the time. She’s only a couple of years older than you were when you got married – he seems to like them much younger than he is.’

  I shivered, though that might have been the icy breeze winding around me.

  ‘So, when are you coming home, Marnie?’

  ‘As soon as I can find a job, though not with the Heritage Homes Trust, because after Mike managed to convince them I’d had a breakdown, alarm bells and whistles would go off if I sent in an application – or to the National Trust and English Heritage, because rumours do get around in the gardening world. I don’t think I could ask them for a reference, either,’ I added wryly.

  ‘Maybe not,’ she agreed. ‘But I expect some of the people you’ve been gardening for in France would be happy to write you references.’

  I’d spent the last five years moving around the surprisingly large circle of ex-pat château owners, working for little more than pocket money and board and lodging, returning to my family at the Château du Monde from time to time.

  Once I’d begun to feel safe, I’d found the life fun, but it meant I had little savings, and the small and decrepit old Citroën 2CV I’d arrived in was my only asset, unless you counted fluent, but Lancashire-inflected, French and a large collection of battered old books on gardening in that language, which I’d picked up along the way.

  ‘I seem to have lost my ambition to work my way up the gardening hierarchy of any big organization,’ I said, turning it over in my mind. ‘I think a job on a private estate with a cottage thrown in, something like that, would be perfect.’

  ‘You can stay with me while you look.’

  It was a kind offer, but her end-terrace cottage was so tiny and full of animals that staying there wasn’t going to be practical for more than a couple of days.

  ‘Thanks, Treena, that would be lovely, but I think it would be best if I could have something lined up before I got back,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my BSc Honours in horticulture, so that and a few references from people over here should do it.’

  ‘There are always copies of the Lady magazine in our waiting room at Happy Pets. They used to carry a lot of adverts for jobs like that with accommodation thrown in, so I’ll scour the recent issues,’ she offered.

  ‘As long as the work involves gardening, I’m not fussy,’ I assured her. ‘I can even do some handyman stuff, after helping renovate all these old French houses.’

  ‘Handywoman,’ she corrected. ‘But I know it’s the gardening you love best – never happier than when you’re grubbing about in compost and mulch.’

  I grinned. ‘There are a couple of job sites online I can look at, too, but I know I’m going to be back at the bottom of the ladder and starting again on a low wage.’

  Aunt Em had given me her old laptop the year before and, though temperamental to turn on, was OK once it got going, apart from an anxious whirring noise from time to time. It was nice to be connected to the internet again, even if I was avoiding social media like the plague.

  ‘Well, at least this time there won’t be any snakes to bar the way back up the ladder,’ Treena pointed out. ‘Right, I’d better go now – email you later if I spot anything that sounds good.’

  ‘Yes, I’d better go, too,’ I said, as Jean, the elderly and irascible gardener, appeared from the greenhouse and began gesticulating at me in his own imperative manner. He had come with the château I was currently working at and had a bad temper and a face that looked the way Gérard Depardieu’s would if it had been briskly clapped between the two big wooden butter paddles that hung in what had once been the dairy.

  That was something I’d have quite liked to have done to him myself …

  2

  Back to the Future

  I leaned over the ferry rail and watched Calais dissolve into the grey early morning gloom, while the cold salt air scoured out my lungs in what I hoped was a healthy way. The last French seagull, hunched on a nearby hatch, ceased to eye me malevolently and, with a Gallic-sounding screech, took off for home.

  I wondered if seagulls had foreign accents. Though unless someone learned to speak Seagull, perhaps we’d never know.

  I groped in my pocket for my mobile, meaning to call Treena and tell her I was on the way, then remembered that my cheap pay-as-you-go phone had met a watery end in the lily pond at the Château du Monde and even sealing it in a bag of rice hadn’t revived it. I was the kiss of death to phones.

  Unsurprisingly, given the chill, I had the deck to myself, but soon I’d have to go in search of warmth and hot coffee. I spared a thought for my poor little Citroën down in the creaking, oily-smelling hold. She was even more battered than she’d been when we’d made the journey in the opposite direction five years previously, so even if she got loose and skated around the hold like a dodgem, you wouldn’t really notice any new bumps and scratches. I’d had a door panel and the bonnet replaced with parts from a scrapped white model, and perhaps when I could afford it I’d have the whole car resprayed in one colour. It might at least help to hold it together a little longer.

  As the Runaway Bride, I’d travelled out on Treena’s passport (just as well her photo had been taken when she was in her Goth phase, with dyed black hair and lots of heavy eye makeup), but I’d long since cancelled my own old passport which, for all I knew, was still locked away in Mike’s safe, and got a new one, so I was returning as Marianne Ellwood.

  Marnie: restored to myself again, and even if there were a few hidden scars, they were faded to the merest tracings of silver.

  Since Treena’s phone call,
I’d applied for any job that sounded even remotely suitable. But unfortunately, it appeared that most of the situations with accommodation thrown in wanted a married couple, usually a gardener/housekeeper combo. I’d only had one positive reply and that was to an ad that Treena had happened to spot in her local paper.

  Full-time gardener required to work at two adjoining country properties.

  Position includes small flat if required.

  There had been a box number, to which I’d replied, and was astonished to discover that, by one of those weird coincidences that life sometimes throws our way, the advertiser lived in Jericho’s End.

  The letter offering me the position was stowed in the small, worn patchwork leather rucksack slung over my shoulder. I could feel it glowing brightly in there, like a promise.

  The speed of the first response, and then the offer of the job following hard on the heels of my reply, made me suspect they’d had few, if any, applicants. The pay was low considering there were two gardens to look after, but then, the inclusion of the small flat clinched it for me.

  I’d had a tussle with my conscience before accepting it for, after all, Mum had made me promise never to go to Jericho’s End. Though, as Treena had pointed out when I discussed it with her, that was when she was very ill and probably confused. What danger could there possibly be in a small Lancashire village?

  Aunt Em had thought it was because Mum’s family had threatened to do horrible things to her if she ever showed her face in the village again, after she told them she was expecting me, but that was such an outdated attitude now and so long ago … I didn’t suppose I’d get a welcome from whatever members of the Vane family still remained there, but there surely couldn’t be any danger. In any case, I wasn’t Marianne Vane any longer, but Marnie Ellwood, and there was no reason why they should ever know who I was.

  I’d accepted the job offer and I was to start on Monday morning, or at least arrive then, which meant I could spend two nights with Treena and have a good catch-up first. Of course, I’d often seen her when she’d been over to visit the family, but the last – and only – time I’d stayed in her cottage in Great Mumming was when I was making my break for freedom.

  I’d been a nervous wreck, illogically convinced that Mike would suddenly appear, even though Treena kept reminding me that, with a burst appendix and septic shock, he’d have been incapable of even rising from his hospital bed in Amsterdam, where he’d just arrived for a conference. He’d been complaining about abdominal pain and thought he was getting an ulcer, which just goes to show how good veterinary surgeons are at diagnosing their own ills.

  I’d been afraid that he’d cancel the trip, because Treena and I had been counting on his absence for my Great Escape, so it was with huge relief that I saw his car emerge from the car park onto the road and vanish.

  He’d been due back on the Monday, so the news of the appendix bursting, which came just as I was about to depart the flat for ever, was an unexpected bonus, though it had taken Treena, later, to make me see it that way without feeling guilty.

  But I’d had my emotions twisted and pulled into such a complicated knot by then that it was to take five years of grubbing about in French soil to heal me.

  I pushed away the memory of that fleeing and haunted version of myself and thought about the future instead. I was going to live in Jericho’s End, the magical place of all Mum’s childhood stories, including my favourite ones about the fairies, or little angels, as she insisted they were, that she’d seen by the waterfall at the top of the valley.

  I smiled, thinking that it was probably the effect of flickering sunlight through leaves that had caused an imaginative child to conjure up something so fantastical, but I would search out the spot when I had time and think of her there.

  The cold wind ruffled my short, dark curls – long gone was the Pre-Raphaelite mass of wavy black hair that Mike had so admired, for the moment the real Marnie had emerged from wherever she’d been hiding I’d ruthlessly purged myself of anything that reminded me of him.

  One of the ways Mike had tried to exert control over me was by giving me clothes – short-skirted little suits, slinky dresses and ridiculous shoes with pointy toes and stiletto heels. Apart from not having pointy feet, there was no way I was tottering about on spikes, and I’d thrown them out of the window. For a moment it had seemed likely that he would throw me out after them. I did wear the loathsome clothes at home, though – Mike’s home, never mine.

  I’d left every single thing he’d ever bought me behind and now my wardrobe was almost entirely utilitarian: dungarees and jeans, T-shirts and jumpers, anoraks and lace-up leather work boots.

  I love dungarees, but ones made especially for me by Aunt Em, with a wide bib front and lots of pockets, because I’ve never found a pair of dungarees in a shop yet where the sides of the bib didn’t hit the middle of my boobs dead centre, which is neither comfortable, nor a good look if you actually have a bosom. It’s the same with most aprons, come to think of it, because they usually have ridiculous little bib tops too … and don’t get me started on women’s shirts with breast pockets. I mean, show me any woman who puts stuff in a breast pocket? Clothes designers should take a sanity check before they’re allowed near a sheet of pattern paper.

  There had been no chance of my acquiring even the slightest touch of French chic during the last few years. I was a lost cause.

  The ferry gave a sudden lurch, dragging back my thoughts to the present. It was plunging up and down in a way that I found exhilarating, but I was feeling chilly and searched out a sheltered spot behind a lifeboat, where I took out Ms E. Price-Jones’s last missive to read again, even though I knew it pretty well by heart.

  My sister and I are so glad you have accepted the position! The pay is not munificent, I have to admit, but the accommodation, a small self-contained flat, is of course included. The flat is situated at one end of Lavender Cottage, over the café-gallery, and comprises a bedroom, sitting room/kitchenette and the usual offices.

  Your working hours will be divided between our small garden (largely given over to varieties of lavender, as you may have guessed!) and that of my nephew’s house next door, Old Grace Hall, the two being conveniently linked by an old, but sadly neglected, rose garden.

  The Grace Garden behind the Hall was originally set out in the seventeenth century as a walled apothecary garden and is currently being restored. I am sure you will find it most interesting.

  There certainly sounded plenty to keep me occupied there, even without the vague mention later in the letter of ‘occasional other duties as required …’

  I hadn’t heard of the Grace Garden, but found the whole idea of a walled apothecary garden enchanting. I’d once visited and been fascinated by the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. And I also loved roses, so the challenge of a neglected old rose garden made me itch to come to the rescue, secateurs in hand.

  It all sounded like my idea of heaven …

  I suddenly realized that either the wind had shifted, or the boat had changed direction, for a gust tried to tear the letter from my hands and I hastily stuffed it back into my rucksack and headed inside to thaw out over hot coffee and croissants.

  My drive north from Dover seemed endless, though I didn’t remember it taking so long when I was fleeing in the other direction.

  I stopped often for coffee to keep me awake, and coffee had certainly improved in my absence, even in motorway service stations.

  By the time I could finally abandon the M6 and head for the increasingly small roads that would take me to Great Mumming, I was very tired and having constantly to remind myself to drive on the left.

  I felt an unwelcome pull of tension when I saw a sign for Merchester, and I wished Mike wasn’t still so close, even if he had totally lost interest in me. I tried to banish a sudden mental image of him sitting like a squat spider in the middle of his dark web, waiting for me to twitch the edges.

  He wouldn’t even know I was in the area unl
ess I bumped into him and I vowed to avoid Merchester like the plague.

  It was All Fools’ Day, but I’d been there and done that, and I’d never be anyone’s fool again.

  I got to Treena’s tiny end-terrace cottage on the very edge of the small town and, dazed by exhaustion but happy to be there, was borne indoors on a wave of warmth and dogs, fed supper and then fell into bed and instant oblivion.

  3

  Unlocked

  I woke very early, with the panicked feeling that I didn’t know where I was – but then, I’d often had that during the last few years, due to moving around so much.

  Then I registered the familiar shape of Mum’s small, scroll-backed antique chair, upholstered in rubbed gold velvet, and it came back to me: I was in Treena’s spare room, into which had been wedged a narrow bed, a tiny chest of drawers with a mirror on top and a stack of boxes and bundles under a bright throw, which contained all the things Treena had been storing for me all this time.