The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,131

there.

When the two men had finished, I had a closer look at the swirls of seaweed and barnacle-like applied decoration that Ned had mentioned, which was strangely beautiful …

‘You’d fit easily inside one of those, Ellwood,’ Ned threatened me. ‘Bear that in mind before you give me any more of your sarky comments.’

Then he introduced me to Lex, who was grinning. He was as dark as Ned was fair, with an aggressively Roman nose. In fact, he was very much like Clara Mayhem Doome; you could see the family resemblance.

Ned began telling him what we’d been working on recently in the garden and our future plans and something – possibly Ned’s frequent repetition of the words ‘we’ and ‘Marnie thinks’ – seemed to have caused Lex to jump to the wrong conclusion about our relationship. He said he was glad Ned had found someone on his wavelength at last and we must all meet up at the Pike with Two Heads for dinner, when his wife got back from painting a portrait commission.

‘Great,’ said Ned, who didn’t seem to have noticed Lex’s mistake at all.

Roddy arrived early and Ned took him into the office, then later I saw him taking the second tour group round the garden, while Ned thankfully escaped to the half-dug long plots to join me.

‘Roddy’s amazing – he seemed to grasp what was needed almost straight away. He’s going to have a chat later with James about what’s selling best in the shop and what else we could stock.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘I was just thinking I could do with some of the volunteers from the dig to start rolling all this rough turf back from round the beds, but you’ll do instead.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I seem to be under the deluded impression that I’m the boss round here.’

‘Planks.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘We need planks between the long beds, until we put down the new turf.’

‘I know – I’ve got a stack of them in the stables. Two minds with but a single thought!’

And he picked up his spade and began to dig.

Caspar and I headed for the Hall again that evening. Ned had insisted he’d provide dinner – and this time actually cook something.

I hadn’t got my hopes up too high, which was just as well, because he’d dashed up to Toller’s and bought a huge pizza and a sherry trifle sealed in a plastic bowl.

Both were quite nice, though, even if the trifle was covered in slightly synthetic-tasting cream and the glacé cherries on top had never seen a stalk.

I ate too much pizza and was feeling distinct twinges of indigestion as we settled down in the library to sift the accumulated paper trail of centuries.

There were rolls of parchment and crackling sheets of thick, ancient yellowed paper, bundles of letters tied up with string or ribbon, miscellaneous official-looking deeds and documents, invoices and lists …

But we’d sworn not to start reading anything tonight, just rough-sort it all onto the floor and table, and we mostly managed to stick to that.

When we finally stopped, dusty, grubby and tired, Ned reminded me that it was the quiz the next night.

‘It’ll probably do us good to have a break from all this dust, and we can have another go on Saturday night if you haven’t had enough of it?’

‘Of course I haven’t. I can hardly wait,’ I said truthfully. ‘It’s been very tantalizing not reading what we’re finding – when there’s bound to be loads of stuff about the garden.’ Then I added, more firmly, ‘But next time, I’ll bring dinner with me!’

On Friday I discovered that Ned had had the bright idea of carrying a box of the photographs we’d found and the family albums down to the office, so that if Roddy had any time to spare in the afternoon he could attempt to identify the subjects of some of them and pencil the information on the back.

I thought he’d probably prefer to get on with the book he was writing, if he had some spare time, but when I asked him later, when he’d finished taking the visitors round for the second tour, he said he was finding it very enjoyable.

‘I like a challenge,’ he said, and then, as if this had reminded him, remarked that Cress’s mother had invited him to tea after the garden closed, or maybe he was tea, because now I came to think about Audrey Lordly-Grace, with her plump body and spindly arms and legs, she was a bit spidery