The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf

Praise for the Bestselling Historical Novels of Stephanie Barron

A FLAW IN THE BLOOD

“Barron—the author of nine Jane Austen mysteries—makes this career detour a THOROUGHLY ENJOYABLE one, complete with fully fleshed-out characters, seamless prose, a snappy blend of fact and fiction—and a truly stunning conclusion.”

—
Richmond Times-Dispatch

“BARRON IS A MASTER AT CRAFTING ENGLISH PERIOD PIECES.… A beautifully written novel, filled with twists and turns, many of which seem like dead ends until the oh-my-God ending, which leaves the reader wondering,
could this be true?”

—
The Denver Post

“Be assured that no palace is a safeguard against crime, as Barron demonstrates.… Well-paced… In Barron’s expert hands, the plot moves quickly and believably. And as in THE BEST HISTORICAL FICTION, the reader learns about politics, medicine and custom along the way.”

—Cleveland
Plain Dealer

“Barron has taken what should have been a straight-up historical mystery and set it on its ear with the precision of an acrobat. Laden with palace intrigue, petty jealousies, medical mysteries and espionage, this is a GRIPPING novel.”

—
Romantic Times

“ENGAGING… The history of the royal line is diverting, and the royal gossip is even more so.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“With all the earmarks of a gothic romance—unrequited love, a murderous stormy night, guilty secrets, hopes dashed, revenge plotted—this FAST-PACED mystery is a winner for fans of Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney, as well as the more contemporary Carlos Ruiz Zafon.”

—
Booklist

“A
REMARKABLE GEM of historical suspense.”

—
Library Journal

AND THE JANE AUSTEN MYSTERY SERIES

“SATISFYING right to the last revelation… Like Regency great Georgette Heyer, the author excels at both period detail and modern verve. Aping Austen’s cool, precise and very famous voice is a hard trick to pull off, but Barron manages it with aplomb.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Considered by some as the best of the ‘neo-Austens,’ Barron gets high marks for authenticity and wit.”

—
Booklist

“FIRST-RATE historical mystery. Barron writes a lively adventure that puts warm flesh on historical bones. The nice thing is she does so in a literary style that would not put Jane Austen’s nose out of joint.”

—
The New York Times Book Review

“There’s plenty to enjoy in the crime-solving side of Jane.… [She] is as worthy a detective as Columbo.”

—
USA Today

“Barron does a WONDERFUL job of evoking the great British estates and the woes of spinsters living in that era… often echoing the rhythms of the Austen novels with uncanny ease.”

—
Entertainment Weekly

“Cleverly blends scholarship with mystery and wit, weaving Jane Austen’s correspondence and works of literature into a tale of death and deceit.”

—
Rocky Mountain News

“A LIVELY plot accented with fascinating history… Barron’s voice grows better and better.”

—
Booknews from The Poisoned Pen

“Historical fiction at its best.”

—
Library Journal

Also by Stephanie Barron

A FLAW IN THE BLOOD

The Jane Austen Mysteries

JANE AND THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT
SCARGRAVE MANOR

JANE AND THE MAN OF THE CLOTH

JANE AND THE WANDERING EYE

JANE AND THE GENIUS OF THE PLACE

JANE AND THE STILLROOM MAID

JANE AND THE PRISONER OF WOOL HOUSE

JANE AND THE GHOSTS OF NETLEY

JANE AND HIS LORDSHIP’S LEGACY

JANE AND THE BARQUE OF FRAILTY

For Leslie, with love

28 March 1941
PROLOGUE

IT WAS CHILLIER THAN SHE EXPECTED THAT MORNING, and a stiff wind shuddered through the apple blossoms—penetrating even to the desk in the Lodge at Rodmell, where she preferred to write. The wind formed a background to her stuttering thoughts, not unlike the sound of airplane engines cutting out overhead—there had been so many engines in recent months that she’d stood beneath them as they passed, her bony fists clamped to her jutting hips, staring upwards from the back garden. So many planes. So many bombs, that one had actually fallen near the house when she wasn’t looking. The river dykes were smashed and the water crept over the flat Sussex meadows as steadily as infantry.

She had hoarded poison against the coming Germans and made death pacts—she would not be taken alive. But by winter the planes had dwindled, predatory birds bound for harsher climes. Leonard hid the poison very secretly while she was in London one day.

And so she was forced to make other plans.

She wrapped the wings of the ancient cardigan closer about her wasted frame and began to write.

I feel certain that I am going mad again; I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times.…

He never used the word
mad
, Leonard. He was infinitely careful in his choice of words, as befit a good editor.
Your health
, he would say;
your nerves. You must think about a rest. Now that the book is finished
.

The book was called
Between the Acts
and she thought it was probably her worst, but then she always thought that when she had finished something—drained of the dream phrases that had gripped her for months, she was light-headed and exhausted and immeasurably depressed, as women are who have given birth. In the weeks after writing
The End
she would refuse to eat. Loiter in doorways. Crave kind words, like a whipped dog.

I begin to hear voices. I can’t concentrate
.

Leonard was at his most brisk during such periods. He would leave his work in the garden or the typeface he laboriously set on the hand printing press and shepherd her towards a chair, offer the bulk of her knitting, employ the hands that no longer held a pen. He would urge endless glasses of milk down her throat and forbid visitors. Keep her from travelling to London—although it was the bombs that had taken London from her now, the house in Tavistock Square cratered to its foundations. Leonard wanted the best for her; Leonard manufactured peace.

You have given me the greatest possible happiness.…I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.…

Squandering their rationed petrol, he had driven her across the countryside to Brighton yesterday, so that Octavia might look at her.

The horror of unbuttoning her blouse before the woman doctor; the ugliness of her rib cage; the sag of nearly sixty years. She had answered Octavia’s piercing questions in monosyllables.
Yes. No. I’m not sure
. And then she choked out what was most important:
Don’t force me to take a rest cure
.

Now she signed her farewell and put down her pen. She did not look back as she left the Lodge in the garden.

LATER, IN HER FUR COAT AND GALOSHES, HER WALKING stick in one hand, she traversed the drowned meadows to the river.

A bird was perched on a fence-post, not ten feet away, trilling despite the bombs:
Life! Life! Life!

Even as a child, she had dreamed ecstatically of drowning. Water had an inexorable pull: at the sight of it, she was dizzy with longing and vertigo. To stand on the bank of the River Ouse was to grip the edge of a volcano: she could hardly keep from hurling herself in. The current was nothing, close to the edge; a few days before, when she had ventured out, the ripples quickened at her knees, then sucked at her thighs, a lover dragging her to a sticky bed. Then she’d surrendered to it, sinking down until an unexpected claustrophobia overwhelmed her—the water slamming on her head like a cupboard door. She fought her way out, arms flailing and feet stumbling, her skirts dragging her back.

She told Leonard she’d slipped into a dyke. A bit of weed twined around one leg.

If she were to try again, she thought, it would be important to find some stones.

She picked up a few beauties as she trolled along the riverbank. A chunk of granite; a sharp slate knife. The bird sang past her as the water eddied in the stiff breeze.

Life! Life! Life!

In Latin, the word would be
vita
.

Sissinghurst

A tired swimmer in the waves of time
I throw my hands up: let the surface close:
Sink down through centuries to another clime,
And buried find the castle and the rose.
Buried in time and sleep,
So drowsy, overgrown,
That here the moss is green upon the stone,
And lichen stains the keep.
I’ve sunk into an image, water-drowned,
Where stirs no wind and penetrates no sound,
Illusive, fragile to a touch, remote,
Foundered within the well of years as deep
As in the waters of a stagnant moat.
Yet in and out of these decaying halls
I move, and not a ripple, not a quiver,
Shakes the reflection though the waters shiver—

—VITA SACKVILLE-WEST, 1930

October 2008
Kent, England

JO BELLAMY EASED HER RENTAL CAR CAUTIOUSLY into the Slip Road roundabout, every fiber of her body braced for the shuddering crash that must surely come, and when it didn’t—when the circular bit of carriageway remained miraculously free of maddened English drivers on this late October morning—she darted a glance in the wrong direction, cursed softly, then searched over her left shoulder for the first available exit from this particular rung of hell. She was looking for something called the A262, which ought to lead straight to the castle, but after an hour and a half of descending from London’s Victoria Embankment through the Blackwall Tunnel, not to mention Margate and Maidstone, her patience was frayed and her calf muscles cramped. She was a brown-haired, crinkle-eyed American woman, thirty-four years of age, and this was her first visit to England—which sufficed to say that she had
never driven on the left side of the road before. She had
particularly
never driven a stick-shift transmission on the left, and both her feet and her hands were disobeying her rational mind’s orders. She had stalled twice, clipped the left side of the car with an errant curb (or kerb, as they insisted on spelling it here), and was desperate for a stiff drink, although it was only eleven o’clock in the morning. If she did not find the castle soon, she intended to drive the darling little Mini straight into one of the massive oaks that lined the carriageway, and walk to Sissinghurst.