A Winter’s Tale (19 page)

‘Yes…this meeting, Sophy,’ Aunt Hebe said doubtfully, ‘shouldn’t you wait until Jack arrives and get his approval, before you make any changes?’

‘There’s no time to waste and I’ve already had the benefit of the solicitor’s advice and then Mr Yatton’s—
and
Lucy’s.’

‘Lucy?’ Seth questioned.

‘My daughter,’ I said shortly, because I was getting tired of having to explain who she was, though that certainly wouldn’t be a problem once she got here and made her presence felt. ‘She’s in Japan, but Mr Yatton has been emailing her. She has much more of a head for figures than I have and she’s amazingly practical. I’m hoping she’ll come home soon.’

‘Sir William told me about her, after he’d been up to see
you,’ Mrs Lark chipped in unexpectedly. ‘He said she’d turned out just the way he’d hoped Jack would and it was wasted on a girl. But then, he was a bit of a mis…what’s the word?’

‘Misogynist?’ I suggested, though what she had just told me had made me think more kindly of Grandfather.

‘That’s the one.’

‘You mean, you knew my brother had found Sophy and you never mentioned it to me?’ demanded Aunt Hebe, gazing at her with acute disapproval.

‘Sir William told me in confidence, Miss Hebe. Some of us don’t go blabbing about things we shouldn’t to them as shouldn’t know!’

Aunt Hebe coloured slightly.

‘It sounds to me as if Winter’s End is going to suffer from an overdose of managing women,’ Seth said gloomily, so maybe
he
was another misogynist.

Draining the contents of a giant blue and white striped china mug, Seth rose to his feet—and I had forgotten quite how tall he was until he was towering over me. ‘If you want to see the gardens in the daylight, we’d better get going right now.’

‘OK, I’ll get a coat,’ I said, quelling an irrational urge to challenge everything he said, just for the hell of it. Apart from trying to throw me off the premises when I first arrived, aiding and abetting Grandfather to spend money he couldn’t afford on the garden and knowing more about Alys Blezzard’s book than he should, nothing was actually
his
fault, was it?

‘Do you want to come, Charlie?’ I asked. ‘Walkies?’ But he was now lying on the braided mat in front of the Aga and didn’t stir apart from thumping his tail a couple of times, so I left him there.

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, though 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.’