“Are you living here through the construction?” Emma raised her voice to ask as she peered around the entryway draped in drop cloths. A ladder stood next to a grand staircase bracketed by a hand-carved banister, and the scent of fresh paint hung in the air, although the walls looked as though they had only just been stripped of wallpaper.
“We are,” a man’s voice came from over Emma’s shoulder. “I’m Andrew. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
Emma shook Andrew’s hand, letting her eyes slide between the husband and wife. He towered over sprightly Sydney, his Clark Kent glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose and his short brown hair combed neatly to the side. He wrapped his arm around his wife’s waist as though it was the most natural thing in the world, looking down at her with a healthy mixture of amusement and adoration.
Even standing amid the dust of a half-finished house, the Wilcoxes exuded polish, education, class. They were a golden couple, which—experience had taught her—made them all the more likely to be huge pains. However, they were paying customers who wanted a restoration project, not a brand-new garden, and they hadn’t even flinched when Emma had given them a quote.
“Andrew let me convince him that we should be on-site through the restoration work.” Sydney bit her full lower lip. “It’s been a bigger project than even we expected.”
Andrew shook his head. “Six months they said.”
“How long has it been going on now?” Emma asked.
“Eighteen months, and we’ve only done up one wing of the house. There’s so much still left,” said Sydney. “Darling, I was just going to take Emma for a tour of the garden.”
“I don’t want to bother you,” Emma said quickly. “I’ve been working off Charlie’s specs. I’m sure I can find my own way.”
“I insist,” said Sydney. “I’d love to hear your first impressions, and I have a few ideas.”
Ideas. All her clients had ideas, but so few of them were good. Like the man outside of Glasgow who insisted he wanted a tropical garden in the middle of Scotland despite her warnings that it would require intensive work to maintain. He’d called her six months after Turning Back Thyme had packed up and moved on to another job, complaining that every single one of his banana plants had died over the winter and wanting them replaced for free. She’d politely referred him to her contract, which stated she was not responsible for neglect on the part of the owner.
At least Highbury House would be different in that regard—a respite from all of the contemporary design projects she took on to keep the business afloat. A historic garden of some importance that had lain virtually abandoned for years, the Wilcoxes wanted to see it bloom again just as it had when it had been created in 1907.
Although they took up time and research well beyond her modern projects, Emma loved nothing more than sinking her spade into a restoration. She’d done battle against poured-concrete patios and cursed stretches of lawn previous owners had laid down because it was “easier” than doing any real gardening. In one particularly egregious instance, she’d ripped out a half acre of artificial lawn installed in the 1970s and re-created the eighteenth-century French knot garden through which ladies in powdered wigs had once strolled. She could make long-forgotten gardens bloom out of pastures and paddocks. She could rewind the clock. Make things right again.
Still, she couldn’t live on challenge alone, and since Sydney would be paying her bills for nearly a year, she would humor Sydney’s ideas. Within reason.
“I’d be glad of the company,” she said, putting as much enthusiasm as she could into her voice.
“Are you coming, darling?” Sydney asked Andrew.
“I would, but Greg said something about floor joists earlier,” he said.
“What about them?” Sydney asked.
Andrew gave a half laugh and pushed his glasses up. “Apparently we don’t have any in the music room. They’ve rotted straight through.”
Emma’s brows rose as Sydney’s mouth formed an O.
Andrew waved a goodbye, darted around the ladder, and disappeared through one of the doors off the entryway.
“I’m afraid that’s been happening a lot recently.” Sydney pointed to a pair of French doors that had been stripped of their paint and looked like they were waiting for a good sanding. “The easiest access to the garden is just through here.”
Emma followed her employer out onto a wide veranda. Some of the huge slabs of slate were cracked underfoot and weeds pushed up through the gaps, but there was no denying the view’s beauty. A long lawn rolled down a gentle hill to trees lining a calm lake. She squinted, conjuring up the old photograph she’d found in the Warwick Archives showing the garden during a party in the 1920s. There had once been a short set of stairs down to a reflecting pool surrounded by two quarter circles of box as well as a long border that ran the eastern length of the property. Now there was nothing but a stretch of uninterrupted lawn that held none of the charm that surely would have imbued Venetia Smith’s original design.