The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,67

group of people came in. I recognized the owner of the gift shop and Ned said one of the others was from Brow Farm on the hill behind Risings.

Then Ned looked at his watch and said the quiz would start any minute.

‘And here’s Cress,’ said Elf, as a tall, lanky girl in waxed jacket, riding breeches and paddock boots came in and stood looking vaguely round. She had the face of a not unattractive, but slightly worried, bloodhound, and her mouse-brown hair was in a long plait that hung over one shoulder like an unravelling bell rope.

Gerald stood up, waved and beckoned, and her expression brightened as she waved back. She got herself a drink and then made her way over and took the last seat, on the end of the bench next to me and directly opposite Ned. In fact, her surprisingly lovely big grey eyes were fixed on him with a sort of doglike devotion.

‘Hi, Cress,’ he said, casually. ‘This is Marnie Ellwood, the new gardener I’m sharing with Elf and Myfy. Marnie, meet Cressida Lordly-Grace from Risings, allegedly our remote relative by the backstairs.’

Cress looked faintly surprised and he added, ‘We’ve just been talking about the ancient family scandal. Elf’s put it in her book.’

‘Oh, right,’ Cress said vaguely. ‘I knew the family had a big bust-up over it with the Grace cousins at the Hall in the early nineteenth century.’

‘Yes, that’s why the two families ignored each other until recently,’ Myfy said.

‘But it’s so silly to carry on with that sort of thing,’ said Cress. ‘We’re all friends now.’

‘Audrey, Cress’s mother, doesn’t exactly mix with the rest of us peasants,’ Ned said, when she’d gone to the bar to get crisps, which seemed to be all the dinner she intended eating.

‘No, Audrey’s always been snobby,’ Myfy agreed, then explained to me, ‘Her late father-in-law left the property to Cress, but Audrey carries on as if she owns it.’

‘The old man left the lodge to Steve just to spite her,’ Elf said. ‘The only reason he let her carry on living there after his son died was because he loved Cress.’

‘There wasn’t much money, though, so that’s why they’re having to run Risings as a B&B,’ Ned explained.

‘Or Cress is. Audrey still has her pretensions,’ Elf said. ‘Cress and some daily help run the B&B, but her main passion is horses and she does some teaching at a riding school over near Great Mumming, when she can get away.’

‘She keeps two horses at Brow Farm, too,’ Jacob said. ‘I like the piebald with the wall eye best.’

‘Only because he looks so odd,’ Myfy said. ‘He has a pink floppy lower lip, too, and grins a lot.’

‘Can horses grin?’ asked Gerald.

‘Rags does,’ she said.

‘Cress would get on well with my sister, Treena,’ I said. ‘Her horse is at livery near Great Mumming and she spends all the time she can spare with her.’

‘They might already have met, because it could be the same stables.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, as Cress returned with four packets of crisps and a bag of peanuts. Her horses would probably be able to use her as a salt lick by the end of the evening.

‘Gerald teaches music at Gobelins, a small private school,’ Elf said.

‘I’m sort of semi-retired, so a few hours here and there suit me very well,’ he told me.

Charlie and a young girl so like him she must be his sister, Daisy, brought round pads of paper and pens for each table and there was a bit of moving chairs about and regrouping in the room, which was now crowded. Through a gap at the far end of the bar I could glimpse the new lounge and the restaurant, and that looked busy, too. For a pub up a dead-end lane off a minor road, it was surprising how popular the place was!

But on this side, everyone seemed to be local and when we’d sorted ourselves out a bit, the quiz began.

The questions were read out by an elderly man, who I was told was Frank Toller, Charlie’s grandfather, and were very wide-ranging.

I’d only done gardening quizzes before, and that was when I was a student, but we seemed to have a wide range of general knowledge on our table, apart from TV soaps. Between them, Gerald and Jacob answered the music questions, from pop and rock to classical, and Ned proved to be hot on history and general knowledge. My input was confined to nature and an obscure question on Agatha