Page 20 of Ravishing Among the Roses
Gabby swallowed, glad he’d said nothing, and he glanced around them to assert that they were alone before quickly placing his head on Edmund’s chest for a quick moment. “I hope you get the outcome you want.”
“Thank you.” Edmund stroked his hand over Gabby’s skull, threading his fingers through his hair, and then bent to kiss Gabby on the forehead. Gabby’s heart melted. And thenEdmund stood up tall, put his hands on his hips, and surveyed the garden.
“How much damage did he do?”
Edmund tilted his head. “None.”
“Excuse me?” Gabby could see that the rose bush, the one Edmund had stared at with such adoration last time they’d been in this garden, was barely there, just a stump with a few branches sticking out of the ground. If it had looked dead when Gabby first saw it, now the thing looked hopelessly dead.
“Tom and John are well trained. They’ve pruned it in the correct manner, just as we discussed last week—” Edmund walked over to the stump and peered closely at it. “Yes, they’ve done an excellent job and given a little bit of care, the Himalayan Musk Rose will thrive in the spring.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Roses need to be pruned in the middle of winter. We usually do it after Christmas, so this is maybe a few weeks too early. A good prune shapes the plants growth for next season, it allows light to come into the core of the plant and prevents disease. You can see that Tom and John have removed all the spindly branches first, and then they’ve removed all the old dead growth. They’ve made each cut at the correct angle to encourage new growth to spread in the direction we want and to stop rain gathering on the cuts.”
“But it looks so small?”
“Yes. Normally I would only prune by about a third or at most half, and this is...” Edmund swallowed.
Gabby wanted to hug him. “It’s nearly all gone.”
“Approximately ninety percent, I’d say. Rather severe, but the plant itself will recover. Tomorrow I will spray with lime sulphur to prevent scale, and then we add compost around the base and wait until spring.”
“And your brother?”
Edmund flushed. “I’ve done it again, haven’t I?”
“Done what?”
“Cared more about my roses than about people.”
Gabby barked out a laugh. “His Grace can afford the best doctors. They are probably letting his blood right now and restoring his humours. I wouldn’t worry about him, and I like listening to you.”
“Oh.”
“Are you certain that the rose hasn’t been harmed?”
Edmund sank down, squatting on his heels, as he examined the plant. “No, the plant is fine. The gardeners have done a good job. The best they could in the circumstances, and now all we can do is wait until spring. I will get them to clean up all the branches and burn them.”
“You’ll burn them. Why?”
“The same disease that might have hurt my brother also hurts the rest of the garden. You can’t put rose clippings into the compost, it upsets the balances. I don’t know why roses do this, but the cut branches and stems need to be burned to keep the remaining plants healthy.”
Gabby smiled. “Are you telling me that to create the beauty of the rose flower, you need to almost destroy the plant to allow room for that beauty to thrive. That the plant itself is host to nasty diseases that could destroy everything around it.”
“Yes.”
He couldn’t help himself and laughed slowly. “It sounds like your brother. His presence slowly destroys everything around him unless you let him bloom the most.”
Edmund stood, shaking his head. “Don’t be silly. He doesn’t have the beauty of the rose. His charm is superficial. If anything, he’s like the endless winter of 1816, suffocating everything with darkness and rain. I nearly lost all my roses that year to rot.”
Gabby couldn’t do the maths, but surely, “Weren’t you just a child then?”
“I was fourteen, just starting out. I’d spent most of my childhood following the gardeners around every day and I was curious and had my own greenhouse and it was the first season that I’d transferred some of my first hybrids into the main gardens. It was a disaster. All the crops failed.”
“And your brother is like the endless winter?”
Edmund sighed heavily. “It’s hard to remember what I thought about him before I really saw him. He’s so charming when you agree with him and he’s my big brother. I looked up to him and admired him, and it wasn’t until recently that I started to see how destructive he is. And then when you see it, you can’t not see it. Do you understand? His presence becomes like the dark winter, suffocating growth, unescapable, always there, always demanding attention and adoration without doing anything to earn it.”
