“You don’t have to ask me twice,” said Charlie.
“Let me just get this hydrangea into the ground,” Emma said.
“I’ll help you,” said Henry.
Sydney and Charlie exchanged looks but left without a word, followed by Andrew.
“Well,” said Emma.
“Back to work,” he said.
Emma moved toward her spade but snuck a look at her phone again.
“What do you keep checking?” Henry asked.
She turned her phone around to show him the photo of the Bible page.
He stepped close to lean in, resting his hand on the small of her back. “What am I looking at?”
She read out, “Helen Marie Goddard marries Arthur Melcourt in 1893.”
“I’m still not seeing it,” he said.
“The family tree shows that Helen’s brother is Matthew Spencer Goddard. There’s a gap in the correspondence between Venetia Smith and her brother, Adam, who handled all of the operations of her business, during the autumn of 1907. Then Venetia reappears seemingly out of nowhere in America in 1908, married to a man named Spencer Smith. The same middle name as Matthew Spencer Goddard, Helen Melcourt’s brother.”
“You think Spencer Smith is really Matthew Goddard?” he asked.
“Think about it. Venetia was a single woman working for his sister’s family. She leaves the country without any explanation and never comes back. I think she was running because she and Matthew fell in love.”
“But why not just marry?” he asked.
“It must have been more complicated than that. I think she and Matthew had an affair and her reputation was on the line.”
“And so Matthew marries her and takes on a different name so no one could trace the affair back to her work at Highbury House,” he said.
“And look at this,” she said, excited as she flicked through the pictures on her phone to the image of Professor Waylan’s letter she’d texted to Charlie. “A professor who helps me sometimes found this letter from Spencer Smith to Venetia in 1912. ‘Sometimes when you are away I think back to the celestial connection that forever binds me to you. The joy that slipped through our fingers led us to where we are now. I hope you do not hate me for having no regrets, because now I have you.’ Someone wrote on the final garden plans ‘Celeste’s garden’ under the name for this space. What if the celestial connection is this garden?”
A little smile tipped his mouth. “I love how excited you are by this.”
She grinned. “I like the idea that maybe I know a secret about Venetia Smith that no one else in the world knows. Except you.”
Henry picked up his spade and began pushing dirt to level off the bottom of the hole they’d pulled the box out of. “You know,” he said as he worked, “I never did get an answer to my question.”
She crossed her arms as she watched him. “What was that?”
“When are we getting drinks?”
“Are you asking me out to be neighborly or because you want to ask me out?”
He huffed a laugh. “If you have to ask, I’m not doing a very good job of sending signals.”
Emma crossed the short patch of ground between them, and kissed him. She could feel his surprise as his lips opened, but then he cradled the back of her neck, deepening the kiss. She traced her hands up his arms, gripping his hair and pulling him closer to her, finally letting herself do what she’d wanted to since he’d taken her groceries from her at the pub and pulled her into his world.
When finally she pulled away, he kept her anchored to him, his hands on her hips.
“Let’s skip drinks and go straight to dinner,” he breathed.
She laughed, wrapping her arms around his waist. “I thought you’d never ask.”
? DIANA ?
DECEMBER 1944
Diana watched Bobby pick up the red toy lorry with its chipped paint and place it in the tin box. It had been three weeks since Bobby’s aunt had left Highbury House carrying a battered suitcase and her handbag. While quiet, Bobby was a sweet little boy. With time, he would once again grow into the vibrant child who’d played with her son.
Sometimes Diana fretted that she had used her money and her position to force Miss Adderton’s hand, just as she’d forced Cynthia out. But then why did Miss Adderton shake her hand before walking down Highbury’s drive? And why had the only letter that had arrived from London been addressed to her, not to Bobby? Miss Adderton wrote that she had enrolled in a secretarial college full of other women deemed unable to serve for whatever reason. She’d taken on hours with a volunteer ambulance unit in Willesden, where she’d found a flat. She was already making friends.