Chapter 29
29
Gardening staff, Olivia learned through talking to Mr Rowe, worked long hours. And junior gardeners, in particular, had duties that extended well into the night. In order for Lady Fairchild to enjoy fresh peaches and pineapples, someone had to keep the hothouse stoves burning around the clock, which explained why Seth was often late to the tower. The poor man retired after a ten- or twelve-hour day, before rising with the sun and heading out at the crack of dawn to start his duties again. It was merely a place to lay his weary head and act as protector to stop thieves from stealing Sir Hugo’s prize orchids.
That evening, sitting with her back to the wall and a book resting on her knees, she heard faint noises through the bricks. It was eight o’clock and Seth was only now returning from a day’s work in the Merriford gardens. There was a big sigh and the squeak of bedsprings as someone considerably larger than herself lumped down on a bed in the adjoining room – a bed that was not there.
‘You sound tired,’ she said, confident it was Seth who had joined her. ‘Did someone keep you up all night?’
‘Hello, there.’ He sounded weary but faintly amused. ‘Someone did indeed, and the things we talked about have been on my mind all day. I’ve been so distracted, I watered five seed trays before I realised I hadn’t planted any seeds in them.’
She smiled at the image.
‘I cycled into Merriford Lode today and asked a former neighbour of yours if she was still in touch with you or your mother, but she wasn’t.’
‘I’d forgotten that you said I work elsewhere. Still don’t understand why I’d do that.’ She could almost imagine him shaking his head. ‘Guess this is one of those ripples we talked about.’
She couldn’t bring herself to tell him that she had, to all intents and purposes, got him fired back then. This job was his life, and all he’d wanted to do after being discharged from the army was return to Merriford.
The talk of ripples led them to discuss which of his fellow servants were present for both of them and it was surprising that, apart from a housemaid who had left to get married in Seth’s world, and that Seth was absent in hers, the members of staff were almost identical. She knew Sir Hugo was short of gardeners, as there simply weren’t the men available that there were before the war. Many big houses were struggling, and even women were turning their noses up at working in service. Why be at the beck and call of some demanding master all hours of the day, when you could walk out the factory doors at the end of your shift and not have to worry about anything until you turned up for work the next morning?
‘How did you persuade Sir Hugo to let you return to the tower after the war?’ she asked.
‘They initially offered me a bed in the bothy, but people have generally been accommodating of us returning servicemen. There have to be some advantages to nearly getting my guts spread across the fields of Flanders. And I’ve long had a strange affinity with this place. Made a friend here several years ago – a spirited little girl who told me she was the ghost of a fancy princess. Someone I’ve since learned lost both her parents at sea, was living in a dreamworld, but still managed to have a sunnier outlook than me.’
‘You weren’t exactly a ray of sunshine,’ she agreed.
She wondered if he might justify his previous dour self with talk of his sweetheart running off or the death of his father but he said nothing, so she didn’t mention her investigations into Annie Taylor.
‘And for that, I apologise, especially as I seem to recall that one of our earliest encounters involved me using some pretty choice language.’ She thought back with amusement to the evening when she’d heard him swear through the wall. ‘Master Howard had put a hoppin’ toad in my bed. I’d asked him quite sharply not to trample over the flower beds and was sure he’d say something to his father and get me into trouble, but he never did. Instead, he sought revenge in his own way.’
Hearing Howard’s name brought her up short and she struggled to respond for a few moments. He’d always had a grudging respect for those who stood up to him and called him out on his silly behaviour, and she was the prime example. But she couldn’t talk about the man she’d loved to Seth; she couldn’t talk about him to anyone. Just thinking of his face made her insides collapse, so she moved the conversation on.
‘Equally, I must apologise for my childish nonsense back then. A princess indeed…’
‘Not at all – it’s because of that nonsense I owe you a debt I can’t never repay. I think you may’ve saved my life… certainly my sanity.’
She shuffled closer to the wall. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Even though I wasn’t in a good way back then, the girl through the wall was always so positive and forward-looking and I often thought back to our conversations during the war. Even on that first journey to the front, as I trudged through a landscape of lush, green fields, confetti-covered cherry trees, smelt the scent of damp soil, I remembered how you always focused on the positives. So many of the men thought we were headed on some great adventure but I was under no such illusion. And, so many times, as dusk fell like a soft blanket on the jagged world below, I thought of you, always telling me that after every raincloud, the sun was sure to follow. And so I held on tight to the beauty of that afternoon and thought about it often.’
‘Your words are surprisingly poetic for a—’ She stopped herself. How patronising of her to assume that because he was a servant, he couldn’t articulate his feelings.
He chuckled. ‘What? An uneducated gardener?’
Thank goodness he couldn’t see the glow of her cheeks.
‘No, I?—’
‘I read a lot of poetry during my time in the army, mainly because I’d come by a copy of The Oxford Book of Verse and kept it with me always. Mum occasionally sent out horticultural journals, but there weren’t a lot of call for my gardening expertise in the waterlogged trenches and barren wasteland of no man’s land.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘I’m not saying I always understood what I was reading, but I was keen to learn. Better men than me fell into the mud and I realised I’d wasted my youth being angry with the world. I could have met a nice girl before the war but I’d shut myself off to the possibility. Bit of a slap in the face to realise there was every chance I would die a wretched death, far away from home, missed only by my mother. So, I determined that if I returned, I’d try to make something of m’self and not end up miserable and alone. And I’m fairly certain that the ladies are more amenable to young men who have a smile on their face and know a bit of fancy poetry.’
She didn’t want to think about the young women working at the manor or living in Merriford Lode who might currently have their eye on the handsome returning undergardener, and instead questioned why she had failed to pull herself around after losing Howard. It was clear that Seth had suffered as much as her in his lifetime – if not more. He’d witnessed the deaths of men first hand. His pain must be so much greater. Why had her childhood optimism been able to pull Seth from his self-pity but deserted her?
‘I thought about all them plans you had,’ he continued. ‘How if you hadn’t been so foolish as to launch yourself from the tower that you’d have been off around the world and trying new things. How you believed nothing should stop people from fulfilling their dreams. Began making notes in my pocketbook and allowing myself to make plans of my own. Why shouldn’t I become a head gardener of a place such as Merriford? There are no limits – the sky goes on forever, right?’
Now she felt really embarrassed for her ‘do as I say, not as I do’ attitude. How arrogant of her to spend her childhood dispensing such bossy advice to him and then fail to take any of it on board herself.
‘So, Princess Cordelia, what have you done with yourself? Did you write those books? Have you still great plans to travel and go on wild adventures? Will you learn to fly an aeroplane? Or study at a university?’
There was a pause. All those dreams had died with Howard. Her plans for family, fortune and fame.
‘The war put everything on hold?—’
She heard his derisive snort through the bricks.
‘Don’t use the war as an excuse to close your world down; use it as a reason to live your life to the fullest. Nothing should stop you putting pen to paper or escaping in your head. You taught me that.’
But she had no reason to throw herself into her books any more. At twenty-one, she would reach her majority and planned to return to the Davenport family home in Suffolk to lead a quiet life. Travelling no longer appealed because so many of the people she’d cared about had left for foreign shores and never come back. Benji would eventually marry and she would still be a spinster. Not even being related to the Fairchilds, she would have no place living at the manor. She didn’t need to work, and she certainly didn’t need to marry. Thanks to the efforts of the suffragettes and Lloyd George, at thirty, she would even have the vote. Olivia could live as an independent woman and please herself without having her heart broken again. But if she couldn’t have her happy ending, why should she write them for others?
Of course, she didn’t say any of this. Howard’s death, and her love for him, was something intensely personal to her, much as Seth had avoided giving her any details about Miss Taylor.
‘It’s not that easy.’
‘Course not, but in’t that the whole point? Imagine if you were a honeybee and destined to die within a month. Such a tiny, hard-working little insect, flitting from flower to beautiful flower, part of a community, experiencing the colours and scents of Mother Nature at her best, but only living a handful of days. Yet, the giant oak stands in the landscape for a hundred years and never moves from the spot it first fell to the ground as an acorn. Why live all that time if you only ever see the same view and have no one to share it with? Personally, I’d rather be a honeybee.’
And as she contemplated Windy Acres, as charming as it was, being her only view for the next fifty years, she wondered if she shouldn’t like to be a honeybee, after all.