Chapter Two
TWO
THE LANE SUCKS at my boots, as if the manor grounds don’t want me to leave.
Strange when it’s been so dry of late. But then the track is on a sunken level, and – now that there’s light to see by – its steep banks are revealed to me, covered in nettles and grass.
The trees are just tripping into their first autumn colours: soon there’ll be leaves on the ground in great drifts to clear up. That irresistible crackle underfoot.
Movement up ahead of me. Pace slowing, I turn my head to look up at the path.
It’s becoming steep now, the banks and boughs overhead crowding in so that it’s more like a tunnel, leading up to a circle of golden morning light at the summit.
And there, in the centre of the circle …
I relax. It’s just the Allens’ dog again.
‘Hello there, Mutton,’ I call out.
His legs and underbelly are matted with sludge, as if he’s been wading through deep muddy water. Must have been in the lake.
‘You coming with me?’ I ask him, and he seems to understand, as he plods over to my side. In spite of his mighty smell and his rude way of introducing himself the other day, I have to admit he’s got a certain charisma.
Mutton and I walk as far as the red post box up on the main road. I’m sending two letters, reporting back on my time at Harfold so far – one each to Mam and Dad. Separate addresses. Tom offered to post them for me, but I’d rather do it myself.
He’s been telling me a little about the area: Salisbury Plain.
It’s an ancient chalk plateau – you can see as much in the soil, the pale tracks over the fields.
I’ll have a devil of a time keeping the gardens fertilized and watered.
Apparently the War Office owns a fair deal of the land round here – they used it to prepare troops for the Front during the Great War.
While I can’t say I’d heard of Salisbury before, I have heard of Stonehenge, which is a near neighbour to Harfold.
I’ll have to make sure to take a trip to see it.
Send Mam and Dad a couple of postcards next: look where your daughter is now.
Letters deposited, it’s well past time to tackle the yews, which are supposed to be my focus of the morning.
I survey the hedges as I come back toward the house.
There are twelve in total, bordering the driveway in symmetrical pairs.
The first five sets are small – around four feet high each – and were once geometric shapes, from what I can make out. Easy to put right.
‘Get away then, Muttsy,’ I tell the dog.
‘You can’t be running around under foot, now.
’ At my shooing motions, he slinks off, ears down and stubby tail no longer wagging.
Glances back at me with mournful eyes, slivers of white like crescent moons showing at the edges.
‘Sorry, boy, but the last thing I need is you knocking me from a ladder.’
Starting with the smaller hedges, I set at the task with my shears, snipping back the new growth to resurrect neat spheres, cuboids, pyramids.
The work lulls me into a trance: the shush of falling, feathery cuttings; the overwhelming green in every direction.
I love this. Up and close to nature, shaping it with my hands. It makes me feel peaceful. Powerful.
I first discovered this rush as a child, helping Dad sow cabbage seeds in our little garden in Butetown.
Then the war came and, with Dad gone away, it was suddenly my job to keep it all alive.
I found I had a knack for it. Dreamed of a vast garden of my own.
Maybe even studying at a horticultural college, sitting my RHS General Exam.
But in the meantime, I still needed serious employment, so I started work in a laundry as a receiver, then progressed on to sorter, and finally the coveted rank of hand ironer.
It was boring, repetitive labour, cooped up indoors with powder constantly clogging my airways when I wanted nothing more than to be out in the sunshine.
I knew that I lacked something essential in common with the other girls, though I couldn’t put my finger on what it was back then.
And that was my life up until March 1917, when I saw the posters for the Land Army round town.
That illustration of a young woman wearing overalls.
Like a boy, but not. I’d stared at it so long that Mam had asked me what was wrong.
But I still couldn’t name it – I only knew there was a sudden knot in my stomach, a feeling that the picture had been somehow pinned up just for me.
The opposite of how I felt around those other laundry girls.
The next day, I’d gone straight down the employment exchange and asked to be put in the agriculture section.
They were looking for women over twenty and I’d just turned seventeen, but I’d fibbed about my age to get in, just as all those bright-eyed boys at school had done three years earlier.
And suddenly I was the one in overalls, working with a gang to plough, pick stones, cut hay.
That’s how I’d first met Gladys and then Lou, both of them assigned to the same farm as me.
Gladys, with her sculpted curls and a full face of make-up that they were forever making her wash off.
Completely unsuited to the job. Still, she always had a cigarette to share, a cheerful tune to sing.
It turned out she didn’t live far from us in Tiger Bay – her father was a Jamaican docker.
By contrast, Lou was a proper workhorse, capable of hefting twice what the rest of us could manage; she’d grown up on a farm in the Valleys.
She wore her hair shorter than I’d ever seen on a woman before, and had a way of swaggering about that I immediately envied.
The three of us were fast friends within weeks.
I hadn’t realized till then how alone I’d been.
The sun hovers high overhead like a bird of prey. Even with my shirtsleeves pushed back, it’s too bloody hot. Sweat’s running into my eyes as I work, and I have to keep reminding myself not to wipe it away with my bare fingers, covered in sap as they are. The yew is an extremely poisonous plant.
Dad didn’t spend the war fighting overseas.
A life-long pacifist and professed socialist, he was against the conflict from the start.
So he joined the No-Conscription Fellowship.
Was denied exemption. Refused his orders anyway.
Ended up – as did most so-called ‘Absolutists’ – in prison.
He never talked afterward about what happened to him in there, but he came out with a permanent squint as a souvenir.
They released him at the end of the summer in 1919, and after a while he found a position as a gardener out toward Penarth.
Talked his new employers into taking on Mam as a cook as well.
The Land Army had been disbanded, so I was on to odd-jobbing myself, not able to face another stint in the laundry, and I often went along to lend Dad a hand.
Sometimes, if his eyes were playing up, I’d take over for him as I used to do at home, and eventually I was offered a formal role as undergardener.
The family – the Reeses – were fond of me.
I think it amused them to see a girl grubbing around in the dirt; Mr Reese would stand at the window and watch me from time to time, shaking his head as if it was the funniest sight.
That sort of thing did get on my nerves, but a job was a job, and they even entrusted me with spare keys to the store-shed after a time.
This fact hadn’t worked out in my favour, in the end.
At seven feet, the pair of hedges closest to Harfold Manor are taller than the rest, and I’ll have to use the steps to get their tops.
It’s anyone’s guess what shape these ones used to be.
I take them in from a distance, visualizing my different options.
Remember Tom’s invitation to be as artistic as I like.
For whatever reason, this thought leads me back to all the rabbit decorations I’ve spotted about the place. Rabbits … Yes, why not?
I turn my shears on them, hacking out two conical bodies, two pointed noses, four tall, upward-reaching ears. I’ve done them to face each other across the driveway, like they’re in silent conversation. What delicious carrots we’ve had lately.
As I gather up the discarded cuttings, I think I see a quick movement out of the corner of my eye, from the direction of the big house. The upper floor. A curtain falling back into place. I pause for a moment, not sure if I’m being watched. Then, thinking why not, give a wave.
By the evening, I’ve moved on to netting weeds out of the ornamental pond in the water garden. Mutton’s back once more, frolicking in and out of the central fountain, casting rainbows of droplets every time he shakes his head.
Behind me, the manor house. I’m acutely aware of every window. Just stop thinking about it, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter if my mysterious new employer is looking; there’s nothing for her to see.
But with a void of information, I can’t help but speculate. Just who is Lady Lascy? Some kind of recluse, evidently. My imagination cobbles together a timid, mousy little woman – the kind of person who reads from a prayer book every night and is prone to nervous faints.
A crunch of footsteps on the paved terrace.
Moments later, a man appears around the corner.
He has a round face with puffy eyes, over-magnified by a pair of thick-lensed spectacles.
Floppy, hennaed hair. A pair of binoculars hanging about his neck.
In his mid-thirties, if I had to guess. He’s wearing a linen suit in a slightly pinkish hue. Mam would probably call him vulgar.