Page 36 of A Recipe for Love
‘Yeah. Grew up having one bottom bunk with someone above me and someone right next to me, and now all of this. Until I met Alexander, I thought New York was everything.’
‘And now?’
Darcy leaned against the fence alongside the paddock. ‘I think Veronica thinks I’ll go back there. I don’t know. I can’t think beyond right now.’
‘You don’t have to. And you can stay here as long as you want.’
‘Is that what Veronica says?’
Bella sighed. ‘Well, it’s not up to her, is it? Adam will say the same. This is your home. You do not need to go anywhere.’
‘You’re kind, but there’s a way these things work. The dowager moves into the dower house. The laird and lady live here. What should happen is that I should go to the dower house, but then where does Veronica go? You’re not supposed to have two dowagers, are you? My Alexander died too young.’ Her previously matter of fact tone cracked. ‘I’m not ready.’
Bella bent her head towards Darcy.
‘And I don’t want to leave my girl. Liberty.’
Of course. The horse.
‘Or Larry. Who’d be fool enough to look after him if I wasn’t here?’
‘Then stay.’ Of course Darcy should stay. Bella turned and looked back at the castle. She could now see a staircase down the outside to a lower level that seemed to have grilles across the entrance. ‘Is that a dungeon?’
Darcy followed her gaze. ‘Oh, don’t be silly. That was the kennels for a long time.’
‘How many dogs did you have?’
‘Well before my time there was a hunt. Adam hated it though. Don’t think Alexander was really that keen himself.’ She paused. ‘So after the hunting dogs had gone it was just Wren and whichever pups we kept.’ She looked for a second as if the tears were going to come again. ‘Only Dipper left now. We lost Wren last year. That broke Alexander’s heart.’ Almost on cue Dipper came darting across the courtyard.
Darcy bent down to pet her. ‘You’re the last girl standing now, aren’t you?’
Darcy was sweet when she wasn’t screaming at her mother-in-law. Bella wanted to comfort her. There was only one way of giving comfort that Bella really understood. ‘Let me make you some lunch.’
‘That’s very kind.’ Darcy smiled. ‘Oh, you didn’t really think that was a dungeon, did you?’
‘No.’
‘Right, because the dungeon’s over under the scullery.’
Of course it was.
Adam wished Bella had joined him on his walk. Her presence was a balm but also a distraction from the nagging voice that had lived in his brain for as long as he could remember but was now moving from a whisper to a shout. It was the voice that told him that whatever breeding, and the rules of inheritance, and the imperious insistence of his grandmother, said, he was not cut out for this.
He couldn’t even keep the peace within his own family. What chance did he have managing a sprawling estate? Going through the accounts was like trying to learn to read Greek with his eyes closed. And the in-tray in the office of letters and bills and goodness knows what else made him thank the heavens for his business partner back in Edinburgh a thousand times over. Ravi was an organisational genius. And Adam was a good horticulturalist and a decent designer. They both knew they needed the other. Here he was expected to be able to do it all, and that was before he’d even got started on the layers of responsibility and public duty that seemed to come with ‘being the laird’. The family, the estate, the village – they were all spokes on the wheel. Adam was the hub. If he failed, nothing else held together.
From what he remembered of his grandfather, and, to a lesser extent, his father, being the laird involved a lot of wearing tweed and shooting game, neither of which really appealed to a man who’d scandalised his grandparents quite enough by briefly going vegetarian as a teenager.
He walked around the outside wall of the house and up towards the fields, but rather than continuing up the hill, he followed the line of the castle wall. This was a walk he’d done a thousand times with his father. The path split as the wall turned a corner. To the left, taking you further around to the far side of the house, there was another wall, with a small wooden door cut into it. To the right, the path went up hill along the coastline to the north, and then followed the clifftop around to the large headland that enclosed the sea loch and protected the house and the village from the elements.
He turned to the left, following the wall down to the old wooden door – the gateway to the castle’s walled kitchen garden. The garden had been established in the 1800s by the son of the seventh baron, desperate to prove that modern gardens and imported tropical plants weren’t the exclusive preserve of those fancy English lords and ladies. The pineapples hadn’t lasted long, but the garden had thrived.
Adam stopped with his hand on the round metal handle. This garden had been his father’s pride and joy. It was where Adam had first put his hands into the soil. It was where he’d learned about the rhythms of the seasons and the thousand and one ways in which a novice gardener could conspire to kill the things they planted, and the thousand and one ways nature had of surviving despite his interventions.
This garden was also where Adam and his father had spent most of their days in those strange disjointed weeks and months after his mother had gone. They hadn’t talked. Adam’s father had never been a great talker, but they’d worked side by side, planting, weeding, thinning out, tying up, and eventually harvesting. The cycle of the year from spring into summer and then autumn had carried them through the confusion and the emptiness that his mother’s departure had left in her wake.
His hand rested on the worn wood of the doorway, warm under his touch, compared to the cool stone of the wall. When Adam thought of his father this was where he pictured him, peering at a seed tray with one pair of glasses on his nose and another resting on the top of his head, or kneeling next to a bed pulling out interlopers and chatting absent-mindedly to his seedlings as he did so.
If Adam never opened this door then he could keep that picture alive. His dad could be always here, pottering in his garden, just about to take a break and pop inside for a cup of tea. Adam removed his fingers from the handle and turned back towards the house.
