The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,140

The question of whether he knew where I was or not seemed to have faded into insignificance next to my preoccupation with how Ned would react to my revelation … if I ever actually managed to pluck up the courage and tell him.

‘Mike, your controlling ex-husband, remember?’ prompted Treena.

‘He doesn’t matter any more, because Ned knows all about him,’ I said simply. ‘Perhaps he did find out from Melinda, but isn’t interested?’

‘Perhaps, but if he knows, then I wouldn’t put it past him to try to jerk your strings a bit, just for the fun of it.’

I hoped she was wrong: he’d be one more blast from the past I could do without right then.

When I’d got home and put my shopping away, I changed and went to join Ned at the bottom of the garden, where our veg-plot-style beds were coming along nicely, even if the surrounding ground did look a bit of a muddy mess at the moment. Once we’d finished digging out, enriching and planting up the long beds and replaced the walkways and borders with new turf, it would all look entirely different.

The garden had opened by then, but was not yet very busy, so we spent a peaceful hour with just the two of us, working together … and it would have been the perfect moment for my confession, except that every time I looked up, the words forming on my lips, he’d catch my eye and smile at me, amber eyes warm and happy, and I simply couldn’t bring myself to do it.

To add to the problem, after my talk with Treena I was seeing him with new eyes – and she’d been quite right, because my feelings had been changing towards him and unacknowledged hopes were now struggling to the surface. Perhaps how he felt about me was starting to change, too?

How could I speak the words that might put an end to all that?

He looked up at me again and grinned. ‘Stop daydreaming and put your back into it, Ellwood,’ he said.

That evening, over a Sunday dinner of roast chicken with all the trimmings, Ned told the family about the Lizzie letter and gave Elf her copy.

‘I’ve sent one over for Cress, too, since it’s about her branch of the family as much as mine,’ he told them.

Elf pored over it, exclaiming and wishing it had come to light before she’d written the book. ‘Though the bare outline is correct, of course. But it would have been nice to have the human element, to have fleshed out the character’s motivation.’

‘The poor girl sounded very nice, for a Vane,’ said Myfy, who’d been taking the pages from Elf as she’d read them. ‘Witty and clever, too.’

‘Yes, but they can’t all have been horrible. There are always some nice people, even in the most disagreeable families,’ Elf said. ‘Only think of that lovely Martha Vane, who was our Saturday girl in the café years ago, just as Daisy is now. Such a clever, sweet-natured girl – everyone liked her.’

I inadvertently swallowed my last bite of treacle pudding the wrong way and Ned patted me on the back rather too heavily with one large hand, then poured me some water.

‘You know, I’d forgotten about her,’ Myfy was saying, when I resurfaced. ‘But she was a little younger than me, so I’d have been off to art college by then, I expect.’

‘Before your time, Ned,’ Elf told him. ‘She was a beautiful girl too – tall and Titian-haired.’

That was Mum – and she’d worked in the café! Not only that, but she, a Vane, had been universally liked.

‘What happened to her?’ asked Myfy, ladling custard onto Jacob’s second helping of treacle tart.

‘She went off to train as a nurse, against her father’s wishes, but her teachers encouraged her. Then I think there was some family breach later, because she stopped coming back to visit after a while. And I think …’ she furrowed her brow in concentration, ‘… someone told me she died quite young. Tragic, if so.’

I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to, but my mind was working furiously. No wonder Mum’s last words had been ‘ice-cream and angels’, because they’d probably been her two most favourite things about the valley.

There were two more plant deliveries next morning and, since Ned had gone over to Formby to see the site for a garden design commission, Gertie, James and I had moved all the pots to the bottom of the garden. Or rather, since his