Page 104 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘Come on in and have a look – just don’t touch anything,’ he invited me. ‘It’s not at its best at this time of year, but wait until the angel’s trumpet’s in flower, and the aconite and the foxgloves – I’ve got more of those coming, in pink, red and purple.’
‘I’m sure it will be lovely,’ I agreed, cautiously peering at the quite pretty ferny leaves of the rosary pea, which had red berries … all the better to kill you with.
It was enclosed in the Victorian ironwork aviary, and the mandrake was in a smaller one, though I couldn’t imaginethatescaping and wreaking havoc.
When he’d finished, he locked the gate carefully behind us. ‘I’ll start giving tours of the Poison Garden in summer, just to small groups of adults and maybe only at weekends,’ he said. ‘I can’t really ask Roddy to do them, but if it’s just one group a day, it won’t take too much time up.’
‘They’ll be really popular,’ I said. ‘You might have to have a pre-booking form on the website. You should add a sign-up page for the Friends of the Grace Garden now, anyway, and perhaps another for volunteers.’
‘You talk to Roddy about it,’ he suggested. ‘You’re the one with all the ideas!’
‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘When are the rest of the wetland plants you ordered arriving?’
‘Early next week, I think,’ he said, pushing the hair back from his face. ‘You might ask him to chase that up too, while you’re at it.’
‘Your hair wants pruning,’ I told him.
‘Stick to the gardening, Ellwood, you’re not coming near me with the secateurs,’ he said and, picking up the barrow handles, he headed for the gate to the vegetable garden where the bonfire patch lay.
Perhaps it was because it was the last weekend of the Easter holiday that the garden was almost as busy as the last one, but I was conscious of theebb and flow of the visitors as I dug my way down a long narrow plot with Ned working from the other side, to meet, as we so often did with garden tasks, in the middle.
I didn’t return after checking the River Walk, but instead went back to the flat to wash and change, ready to go over to Ned’s later and get stuck into actuallyreadingsome of the papers we’d rough-sorted.
First, though, I whipped up a big risotto, which I ladled into a lidded container, wrapped in newspaper and put inside a freezer carry bag before setting off.
It had worried me that Caspar hadn’t yet put in an appearance at the flat, but I found him sitting waiting on Ned’s doorstep, like some misshapen heraldic beast.
‘What kept you?’ he said – or Iassumethat’s what he said.
We ate first, while the risotto was hot, finishing off with some of Elf’s ice-cream from Ned’s freezer and coffee, before going through to the library and setting to work.
First, we put all the bundles of letters to one side, for later examination, except for one that had been labelled ‘Tradescant’, presumably by Ned’s uncle Theo, and which we thought might contain some interesting insights into the early days of the garden. Of course, there’d probably be loads of interesting things in the other letters too, but it would take ages to read them.
That still left several other heaps on the table. Ned suggested we divide them between us, then put anything irrelevant to the garden back in the boxes as we went.
‘I’ll start with the oldest-looking pile and put my rejects in the trunk, and you put yours in the box. How about that?’
‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ I agreed, and we settled down to it, finding a few gems of information, but occasionally side-tracked by something irrelevant but interesting, like the contents of an ancient will.
Wills, marriage lines, inventories, lists, stray letters – the task seemed endless … as did Caspar’s bubbling snores from his favourite armchair.
Ned had just come back with mugs of coffee to keep us awake, when I discovered a long brown envelope that looked quite new and hadsomehow found itself sandwiched between a bill for the refitting of a merchant ship and ‘A Sovereign remedy for girth galls and Spavins’, which didn’t sound like a lot of fun.
‘Listen to this, Ned,’ I said as he put the coffee cups down. ‘It looks like your uncle Theo’s writing again and it says, “An account written by Elizabeth Grace, née Vane, to be given to her son, Thomas Grace, explaining the circumstances surrounding his birth.”’
I passed it across. ‘That’s definitely Theo’s writing,’ he said, opening the end of the envelope to reveal another, older one, inside. ‘I hope this isn’t going to be like pass-the-parcel, with ever-smaller and older envelopes.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ I said. ‘And that must be the Elizabeth Vane in Elf’s book, who ran off with a Lordly-Grace and then ended up married to your ancestor, mustn’t it?’
The dreaded Vane connection had reared its ugly head again.
‘I expect so. I can only think she must have had a charm about her that all the VanesI’veever met have entirely lacked.’
I said nothing and he began to read what it said on the inner envelope.
I found this letter among the papers in my mother’s desk after her death. I saw fit to keep it for posterity, who I hope will not judge her conduct harshly. My mother was the sweetest and kindest of women and her sins were only those of youth and folly.
Thomas Grace
