Page 117 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
I leafed through it and found a random selection of jottings in Mum’s familiar hand – she seemed to have used it as a kind of journal. She’d dated the entries, and I saw with a pang that they’d all been made during the last few months of her life, to write down whatever thoughts and memories came to her – and her hopes for my future and how proud she was of me …
I didn’t think she’d have been so proud of how I’d behaved recently – but Ididthink she would have understood. The diary was part of her legacy and I felt such love for her as I read her words from so long ago.
Time ticked on as I turned the pages, reading about her childhood memories, many of which she’d already shared with me, her happy days as a student nurse – and how guilty she’d felt that she hadn’t known my father was married until too late … He’d been an Italian doctor over on a six-month exchange and he’d gone back home, never knowing about me.
The entries were not set out like a journal, but jumped to and fro in time, making me smile, cry, or laugh by turns, but I really sat up and took notice when I came to a page where she’d described her last visit to Jericho’s End when, pregnant with me, she’d gone to tell her parents.
Em insisted on driving me to the farm when I finally summoned up the courage to break the news of my pregnancy to my family. She waited for me in her car in the farmyard and I was glad she was there, because the interview with my parents was more awful than I could describe. They still held to the old, strict religious tenets they were brought up to obey, and disowned me, saying I was no longer any daughter of theirs. I was never to return to the farm or contact them again. But worse was to come, for when my older brother, Saul, saw me out, he made such horrific threats about what he’d do to me if I ever set foot on the farm again that my blood ran cold – especially when he added that the same went for my child! I was sick with horror, because I was sure he meant it and I hope Marianne never goes back to Jericho’s End, even though I haven’t been able to resist telling her stories of my happier times there as a child, especially playing up by the Fairy Falls.
‘But you might have been a bit morespecificabout the danger, Mum!’ I said aloud, and Caspar opened one eye, looked at me and then shut it again. The bubbling snores resumed.
From that point, her writing was shakier and most of the entries shorter, until I came to a description of how, in her last year of school, she’d had a Saturday job helping in what was then called Verdi’s Ice-cream Parlour, though the last of the Verdis had married the artist living next door and was by then Gina Price-Jones. They had three daughters and the middle one, Elf, also worked in the café.
So far, this was very much what Elf had told me of the family history and I knew that the eldest of these daughters, Morwenna, had married Ned’s great-uncle Theo and gone to live at Old Grace Hall. It was the next part that really caught my attention.
One Saturday I was sent to the Hall with a message for Morwenna and found the housekeeper turning out a big glazed kitchen cupboard. The top shelf was full of musty old household account books dating back years, which were to be moved to one of the window seats in the library, which already held other family documents.
I wasn’t very interested in them, until one of the books, leather bound and thicker than the rest, slipped from the pile and fell open at my feet. Picking it up, I saw the name of Elizabeth Grace written on the flyleaf.
Well, though never mentioned in my family, I had heard of this disgraced ancestor of mine, who’d eventually married into the Grace family, so seeing the book was full of handwritten recipes, I asked if I might borrow it.
I had to keep it hidden from my family, of course, but I pored over it whenever I could. There were cookery recipes, but also remedies of all kinds. She’d seemed interested in the medicinal uses of herbs. There was, too, a list of the roses that had been planted in the small garden that separated the cottages and café from the grounds of the Hall, though it was now so overgrown on either side of the path through it that you could see nothing other than a thick tangle of briars. I was a romantic, imaginative girl then, though, and loved the old names of the roses.
I turned the page over eagerly, hoping she’d written the list down, but saw with a pang of disappointment that she hadn’t – though, of course, if she’d returned the book to the Hall, then maybe it was still there to be found.
That was the last thing Elizabeth Grace had written there and I was about to close the book, when I saw that a corner of the endpaper had come unstuck and there was the edge of a piece of paper covered in writing underneath it. I managed to ease it out without damaging the book further. The writing was faded and small, butit seemed to be part of a letter – and when I’d read it, I wished I’d left it there, because what it described was so horrible!
My eyes widened as I read on and I nearly dropped Mum’s journal. I wasn’t surprised when she finished by saying that she’d almost burned the page, but in the end replaced it in the book and stuck the endpaper down more securely, before returning it to the Hall.
Where, presumably, it still was …
I sat back, thinking that it had been a night of revelations, none of them good.
IfonlyI’d opened this box first and read Mum’s journal, it would have saved me the scene at the pig farm tonight and probably I’d have told Ned my secret ages ago.
And the journal also revealed something that, however awful, Ned ought to know. That hemustknow.
Suddenly it seemed urgent that I tell him right now: I couldn’t keepthisfrom him, too.
Without even stopping to put on a coat, I abandoned Caspar to his slumbers, rushed out of the flat and ran straight down the dark road, to hammer on Ned’s door.
It must have been after midnight by then, but the lights behind their heavy curtains still glowed and when he opened the door, Ned was still dressed in the clothes he’d worn earlier. His face took on a wary, shuttered and angry look when he saw it was me.
‘I wasn’t expectingvisitors,’ he said coolly and it was only then did I realize that Caspar must have hurtled like a comet through Lavender Cottage and out through the cat flap in the back door, to have arrived before me.
Ned’s face changed as he looked down at me and he said, in a gentler, concerned voice that brought tears to my eyes, ‘What is it, Marnie? What’s happened?’
‘I’ve found something you need to see,’ I said, thrusting the sparkly notebook at him and he stared down at it, and then at me, as if I’d run mad. Then he hesitated, before drawing me in and closing the doorbehind us. Caspar had already sneaked past and was making for the open library door.
‘I shouldn’t have left you like that, earlier,’ Ned muttered. ‘You’re still in a state of shock.’
I shivered and he drew me into the library, where he made me drink a glass of brandy, which I loathe, and when I’d insisted he read that last entry I’d found in Mum’s journal, he poured one for himself, too.
‘It looks from this like Lizzie had second thoughts about revealing the whole truth, after all, and hid a page away,’ he said.
‘I did think when I read through that copy you made for me, that the account jumped a bit abruptly from the end of one page to the top of the next,’ I said. ‘Do you think this book Mum found would have been put in the window seat in here with the others that were moved?’
‘I don’t know, but we’ll soon find out!’ Ned was already across the room and lifting the lid from one of the large window seats. He removed a bundle of old newspapers and then the first of a mouldering stack of old books.
