“No. I don’t,” she said.
“You know, I find that some people who don’t need to talk just need a friend.”
A friend. How long had it been since she’d had one of those? She’d never been the most popular girl. She was far too focused on playing her harp and a touch too shy for even the singers and other musicians she accompanied. But all of that had changed when she’d become engaged to Murray. He was like a whirlwind, sweeping into a room and collecting people up in his wake. The early years of her marriage had been awash in parties, and his friends’ wives had become her friends. But how long had it been since she’d seen Gladys or Jessica or Charlotte?
When she didn’t respond, the chaplain leaned back, folding his hands in front of him. “I will admit that I could use some company myself. The most disturbing thing about landing yourself in a convalescent hospital is realizing that you’re now surrounded by all manner of sick men.”
“I would have thought that being an army chaplain would have prepared you for that,” she said.
“Oh, it does. But every once in a while, it is good to spend some time in the land of the living, too.”
She gave him a hard look, but then shrugged. If the man wanted to sit out in a half-wild garden and watch her prune a plant, that was his prerogative.
She gestured at the clematis. “I’m going to continue my work here.”
“Please do. I wouldn’t dream of disturbing you,” he said, tilting his head back to soak in the weak sunlight.
With a shake of her head, Diana set about mastering the clematis once again, but as she did, she found that a little bit of the fury that had driven her out into the garden had passed.
? EMMA ?
MARCH 2021
This one, too!” Emma shouted down to Charlie. She was perched on a ladder, looking at the structure of a tree in what Sydney called “the ramble.” It had been a long time since anyone had given the trees any love, and a few of them needed to come down, either because they were rotting or to open pockets of air and light to the forest floor.
“Got it,” Charlie yelled back.
“How many is that?” she asked as she descended.
Charlie tallied up the morning’s notes. “Seven if we include that elm near the cottage.”
“I hope the Wilcoxes need firewood,” she said.
Rustling in the yew branches behind them had them both turning just as Bonnie and Clyde raced up.
Charlie immediately dropped to his knees and rubbed Bonnie’s ears. “Hello, gorgeous girl,” he cooed, his Scottish accent wrapping around each “r.”
“When are you going to get a dog?” she asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
“I move around too much for a dog. At least you have the narrow boat.”
Charlie grunted as Sydney burst through the clearing.
“Oh, good, you’re both here. I was going through some things and, well, I think I found something exciting!” Sydney said in a rush.
“What is it?” Emma asked.
Sydney just grinned and retreated.
It could be anything, Emma reminded herself as she and Charlie followed Sydney back through the garden, into the house, and over drop cloth–covered stairs to the finished wing of the house. She always asked owners to dig through any papers that came with a house, but finding something new and significant was rare.
“I was excited after talking to you, and poor Andrew and I have been spending every night up in the attic going through boxes. Granddad might have been a pack rat, but at least he was somewhat organized. The boxes are all marked ‘House & Garden,’？” Sydney chattered as she opened the door into a study with a large mahogany desk in the center and bookshelves lining two sides. Several containers sat in the middle of the room, their tops open.
“I was disappointed at first. It seemed to be a lot of receipts for roof repair and a new Aga in the seventies, but then I came across this.” Sydney pointed to a cardboard tube and an ancient-looking file folder. “Do you want to do the honors?”
Emma picked up the tube, uncapped the top, and slid out a sheaf of rolled-up papers. Sydney and Charlie cleared the desk, and she laid them out.
“These look like the house’s blueprints,” she said.
“They aren’t originals. I think they’re from the late 1930s, just before the war. You can see where an architect moved a wall on this floor to create a larger bathroom,” said Sydney, pointing to the blue ink.
Emma flipped through the pages. There was the entire house in view, then each floor, including the cellar, where the kitchen, pantry, and an old-fashioned stillroom had been. But when she flipped to the next page, her breath caught in her throat. On the large yellowing sheet of paper was a pencil sketch of the garden with “Highbury House” written across the top.