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

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘Did he?’ I said, pleased. ‘It’s the tip of the iceberg, but I’m dying to find out what roses are in there.’

  ‘I can see it’s your idea of fun,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘It is, but I did mean to start on your garden before I checked the River Walk today,’ I confessed. ‘Then I forgot the time. I’ll have a go first thing in the morning, instead.’

  ‘Oh, not to worry, I’m sure you’ll soon get it into shape and there isn’t any rush.’

  A giant marmalade-coloured shape suddenly shoved its way through the nearest clumps of lavender and came to twine itself sinuously around my legs.

  ‘Caspar!’ Elf cried. ‘Myfanwy said she’d let you out for the first time earlier, but she hadn’t seen you since. Where have you been?’

  Caspar told her, but unfortunately neither of us spoke Cat. Then he said something directly to Elf and headed for the back door.

  ‘I think he wants his dinner,’ I suggested.

  ‘I suspect you’re right – though he isn’t supposed to go into the café. Still, I don’t suppose it matters when we’re shut and at least he’s come back!’

  She followed him through the hall and into the scullery. Straight away I spotted a large white-painted cubbyhole for my post hanging on the wall, lettered over the top with ‘The Flat’.

  That had to be Jacob’s work, and upstairs I found he’d installed a giant cat flap into the door on the landing, too.

  I left the door unbolted but shut, and waited to see what Caspar would make of it if he came over again, which I already suspected was going to become a habit.

  A long hot shower relaxed my muscles and removed the bits of leaf and debris from my hair. Then, after dinner, I settled down with my coffee and Elf’s book to read the chapter on Lost Treasure.

  There often are legends about gold hoards being hidden near water – and of course, back in the mists of time, people did deposit valuable items as tribute in marshes and pools.

  Anything put in the cave by the Fairy Falls – more of a narrow fissure in the rock – would have had to be placed there during a severe drought, since it is usually at least partly covered by the cascade, as is the ledge leading to it. But of course, it is an apocryphal treasure.

  There is another hoard of treasure reputed to be hidden in the valley, too: Nathaniel Grace, the buccaneering ancestor of the present owner of Old Grace Hall, was known to have seized much gold and valuable jewels from Spanish ships, some of which, of course, he presented to Good Queen Bess, with whom he was a favourite. He certainly had enough left to purchase Old Grace Hall from his cousins when he retired from seafaring and married. He is, though, said to have concealed his greatest treasure somewhere on his property.

  The oldest part of the house has several times been searched, but to no avail, so I suspect that this treasure is just as much a tale as the other!

  I suspected she was right about both of them, but part of you always wants to believe in this kind of thing, like the Loch Ness Monster and Yetis!

  I heard a bumping noise and, putting the book aside, went out onto the landing, where Caspar was headbutting his new cat flap, before cautiously squeezing through. He had a lot of thick fur, so it can’t have been as difficult as he made it look.

  He went to bed first, highly miffed because I refused to share my cup of cocoa and two Jaffa Cakes with him, but I soon joined him, pushing him over to one side to make room, and then quickly fell asleep to the sound of his bubbling snores.

  13

  Follow the Yellow Brick Road

  I woke very early, to find a very hairy face pressed in between my chin and neck. When I moved, Caspar rolled onto his back and stretched luxuriously, then lay there like a giant stuffed toy, big feet in the air.

  The sky was still a magical dusky, duck-egg blue and I could see the bright pinprick of a star. I love stars; they always make me feel hopeful. I’d hung the crystal one I’d bought in the village in my bedroom window, though I expected that, apart from my day off, I’d rarely be in the flat to see the sun cast prisms from it across the white duvet and walls.

  I went through the living room to the front windows, where dawn was a thin hammered silver line behind the hills on the other side of the valley, above Risings.

  I heard Caspar land on the floorboards with a heavy thud and then he padded past me and I followed him into the hall in time to see him cautiously headbutt the cat flap, before squeezing through it, in that oddly ectoplasmic way cats have, as if they could just simply materialize somewhere else if they really put their minds to it.

  I felt fine this morning; I mean, I’d been doing hard physical work for years, so it wasn’t exactly a novelty. But I was full of energy and anticipation for the job ahead – to reveal the secrets of the rose garden! And who doesn’t love a secret – or almost secret – garden?

  I warmed up a pain au chocolat from the freezer – old habits die hard – and had two cups of coffee. Then I was good to go, intending to make a start on Elf and Myfy’s garden.

  All was silent from the direction of the café when I went down and let myself out into a diamond-encrusted world of webs and shadows, where the birds had struck up an enthusiastic dawn chorus.

  I found all the tools in a small shed by the greenhouse and filled a wooden trug with everything I thought I’d need. They had a few of those big, woven green garden bags, too.

  I began to tidy the overgrown shapes of the lavender bushes into neat mounds, like little islands, working my way along the meandering crazy-paving path. There were three woody rosemary bushes that would have to come out, but since they’d take a lot of digging and hacking to get the roots up, I left them for later.

  There was the over-rampant Rambling Rector, too. He ought to be firmly dealt with, but I’d borrow the long leather gauntlets from next door before I tackled that.

  After an hour or so, the sun was fully up and I cleaned and put away the tools in the shed, then went through to the Grace Garden, where no one was to be seen, if you didn’t count the peacocks, though the lights in the office were already on, so Ned must have been in there, working.

  In my rucksack I now had keys to the Potting Shed and Grace Garden, as well as the big ring of keys for Lavender Cottage and the River Walk, so I jangled like a gaoler when I walked.

  I’d left the heavy gauntlets and other tools from yesterday together and someone had replenished the big stack of empty garden bags. I helped myself to some plastic plant markers from a box on the end of one of the workbenches, then dumped everything into the small green wheelbarrow I’d used yesterday, which I’d already started to think of as my own, as you do.

  I was more organized this morning and had a small notebook and pen in my dungaree pocket, so I could jot down any details I noticed about the roses as I went. I’d even remembered to put my new phone in a zipped pocket in my gilet, so it wouldn’t fall out into the nearest bucket of water or the pond and die a watery death, like most of my previous ones.

  I assumed Ned had already fed the fish, since they weren’t hanging about in a crowd at the surface, looking like hungry teenagers, but were just a glimmer in the depths. He must have made as early a start as I had.

  I started by collecting the two or three old metal plant markers I’d noticed in the beds next to the bit of path I’d cleared and replacing them with plastic ones. The roses all seemed to be old, unfamiliar varieties so far, so it was just as well they had the tags, because it’s often nigh on impossible to guess what a rose is until it flowers, and even then it can be hard.

  Then I took up where I’d left off yesterday. I’d uncovered the path for quite a long way, but since I was heading along one side of the wider end of the wedge, I probably had at least as far to go again.

  In my head I was now Dora the Explorer, hacking my way through to goodness knows what, turning a dank, overgrown tunnel back into a light-pervaded pathway.

  I had to be careful, because some of the thorns on the branches were huge and vicious, t
hough most were small and less likely to pierce through my clothing.

  After a while I found I was singing ‘Follow the Yellow Brick Road’ as I worked, though now the parts I’d revealed yesterday were cleaned off a bit, the path wasn’t so much yellow as a beautiful patchwork in shades of old rose pink and orange.

  I’d filled four large bags and was going for the fifth, when that familiar deep voice suddenly broke into my song.

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of coffee, Dorothy, but no oil for the Tin Man.’

  I turned and there was Ned, holding one of those bamboo travel beakers with a lid.

  I straightened, tossed a long and viciously barbed stem into the bag and said, gratefully, ‘Oh, thanks, I could really do with that! I must remember to start bringing a flask with me as well as my water bottle.’

  ‘It’s nearly eleven and I saw you heading here hours ago, so I thought you’d lost track of time again.’

  ‘I had, but that’s very easy to do. I’m determined to get all the way to the back wall today, and then I assume the path just goes up the other side to the pond again.’

  ‘I think so,’ Ned agreed.

  I took the lid off the cup and a lovely aroma met my nostrils.

  ‘I think that Java stuff woke me up this morning,’ Ned said. ‘I had a really good idea for the design for an awkward-shaped garden first thing, soon after I’d had some.’

  ‘I thought you must be working on a design when I saw the lights were on in the office.’

  ‘I was, but since then I’ve been digging out the pond area in the Grace Garden a bit more. Gert’s been helping me. James is sanding and painting plant tags, so I’ll take these new ones you’ve found back with me.’

  He rubbed the dirt off one and said, ‘“Double White”? That could be almost anything.’

  ‘The ones I’ve found so far sound like the old names, but we’ll see what they’re like when they flower.’

  ‘I’ve ordered that extra sign, explaining what we’re doing in here, though it’ll probably arrive after the others do. But I’ve got plenty of those moveable rope-and-post barriers to put across the paths we don’t want the visitors to go down. In here, we’ll confine them round the fish pond for the present. They can watch you vanishing into the brambles from there.’

  ‘I don’t mind an audience. One or two of the châteaux where I worked had gardens open to the public, as is the one at my family’s house. It’s called the Château du Monde because it has one of those gardens with the beds laid out to represent various parts of the world.’

  ‘I’d like to see that.’

  ‘It had got a bit overgrown, and there were some inappropriate additions, but Aunt Em’s got it looking wonderful now.’

  Ned collected up the old metal markers and I followed him with my coffee back to the marble seat by the pond, which had now acquired a cat.

  ‘Hello, Caspar,’ I said.

  ‘Pfut!’ he replied, pulling a face at me that I couldn’t interpret, before going back to staring down at the moving shapes beneath the water.

  ‘I hope he doesn’t try to catch the fish,’ I said worriedly.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to be thinking that way, just mesmerized by the movement. We’ll have to see. If he does start trying to catch them I’ll have to put something over the pond, which would be a pity.’

  I drained the last of the coffee and handed it back with thanks.

  ‘Gertie says she’s got a sandwich for your lunch, and to go over when you want it.’

  ‘She’s very kind, but I don’t want her to feel she has to feed me lunch every day,’ I said. ‘I was going to go back to the flat for something.’

  ‘Gert feeds us all: you’ll just have to accept it, or you’ll hurt her feelings. I have a greaseproof paper bag sitting on my desk as we speak and there’s a plastic box with a buttered cherry scone and a slab of lardy cake, too.’

  ‘Just as well we’re burning off so many calories, if lardy cake is on the menu every day,’ I said.

  ‘You sometimes get a bit of carrot cake, or fruitcake, but that one’s a staple, because it’s her husband, Steve’s, favourite.’

  ‘Do they live nearby?’

  ‘Just up the road in the lodge at the gates of Risings. Steve was left it by Edwin Lordly-Grace, the father-in-law of Audrey, probably to spite her, because they never got on,’ Ned said. ‘Steve used to be their gardener, but he retired as soon as he got the lodge and Wayne is doing it now – or pretending to do it, unless Audrey’s gimlet eye is actually upon him.’

  It was a great pity, I thought, that the first of my Vane relatives I’d come across should be the shifty and work-shy Wayne.

  ‘Steve’s taken on a couple of small part-time jobs. He opens the gate to the ruins every day and looks after the public toilet block in the car park there, too.’

  ‘I think I saw him the day I arrived, when I stopped for a few minutes in the car park. Treena told me there’s going to be an archaeological dig there after Easter, run by one of her friends.’

  ‘I heard about that. Jericho’s End is such a small place, anything is big news! The site has never been dug before, but I can’t imagine it being very interesting, because the monastery was abandoned only a couple of years after it was founded. Elf says the river flooded the water meadows right up to it for two years running and so the monks moved on and joined a more established priory somewhere else. I don’t know how she knows that, though – perhaps they took their records with them?’

  ‘Oh, well, archaeologists seem happy with very little, don’t they?’ I said.

  ‘Steve looks after the Village Hut, too, and he’s a leading light in the Christmas panto every year,’ Ned said. ‘That’s organized by the Friends of Jericho’s End, and I bet they try to rope you into it.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. I’ve only been here five minutes,’ I said. ‘Did you mention Steve might be helping with the tickets when you open?’

  ‘I hope so. He’s coming over to talk about it later. He’s older than Gert and doesn’t want to work in the garden, but he’d be happy to help out with the tickets and the shop, if he can fit it round his other jobs. James will need a break, and though Gertie could fill in, I need all the gardening help I can get.’

  ‘It sounds like a good idea to me,’ I said, getting up and dislodging Caspar, who had somehow managed to drape himself across my legs without my noticing it. I was now covered in marmalade cat hair.

  ‘I’ll carry on for a bit before I have lunch,’ I said. ‘I think there might be a marble statue, or something like that, at the far end of the path. I can just make out something white between the branches.’

  ‘Let’s have a look,’ he said, and when he had, agreed. ‘I think you’re right! Go carefully, won’t you. I’d better get back to what I was doing. I left Gert to it.’

  He dragged off the full garden bags with him and I got on with my pruning, though he must have brought the empty ones back, because when I finally stopped, due to the howling wolves of hunger prowling round my stomach, they were heaped on the path behind me.

  For such a big man, he moved very quietly.

  Some time had passed and as I headed for my sandwich in the Potting Shed, I spotted Ned going into his office with James and another elderly man, whom I thought I recognized from the day I arrived and now knew to be Steve.

  I found a note on the table in the shed that said, ‘Ham and mustard sandwiches in fridge and buttered scones: help yourself, we’ve had ours. Gert.’

  I did, after scrubbing my hands in the chipped sink in the staff toilet, a grandiose name for an ancient Victorian loo that lurked behind a blue-painted door on the other side of the yard. The identical one next to it was for visitors, so I hoped there were some urgent plans being put into place for upgrading those facilities!

  I fed the inner woman, who was very grateful for it, then rushed back to work, because that glimpsed glimmer of white at the end of the rose garden was tantalizing me. Unfortunately, I still h
adn’t got near enough to make out what it was before I had to put away my tools and dash off to do the River Walk again.

  It was already after four when I set out and I was still hot, dirty and sweaty, so hoped I wouldn’t meet any visitors on the way. But, of course, as Sod’s Law has it, I did meet several of them making their way back to the entrance.

  They greeted me warily, probably because with my grubby and dishevelled appearance and the bag and stick, they thought I was a tramp.

  There was no one near the waterfall. I left the bag and stick behind a boulder near the viewing place, while I climbed up to the top, without seeing anyone … or anything. When I descended, though, and approached the mouth of the falls again, I did catch a momentary flicker of movement and felt some kind of presence … but the mind plays strange tricks.

  I didn’t linger, but collected my stick and bag and headed straight back. I was ready for a hot shower and a substantial dinner.

  Treena would want an update later too, and I should let the family know how I was getting on. I had so much to tell them about the garden!

  Treena was much more likely to be interested in the cat.

  14

  Pure Folly

  A loud flapping noise woke me early on the Friday morning bringing vague thoughts that some large bird had got into the flat, but then I relaxed as I realized it was only Caspar, making a speedy exit through the cat flap.

  Last night he’d appeared earlier than before, right after I – and presumably he – had dined, in my case off macaroni cheese followed by a yoghurt.

  Although I’d unpacked and arranged my entire Agatha Christie collection and other cosy crime favourites on the vacant shelves along one wall, besides having bought the latest Clara Mayhem Doome novel in Great Mumming, I’d instead found myself taking another lucky dip into Elf’s book.

  Her style might be a bit soporific, but some of the chapters sounded fascinating. I was sure the rise of a ‘strange religious sect’ in Chapter One would be about the Strange Brethren. Mum’s parents must have been part of the last generation to belong to it …