3. The Kitchen Garden
Chapter three
The Kitchen Garden
Henry
He had no business returning to Hampstead.
The solicitor would need four days, possibly five, to prepare the documents.
Mr Brigg had told him as much that morning, standing in the study at Iredell House with his case under his arm.
There was nothing for Henry to do in the interval.
Nothing that required his presence at Thornwick House.
Nothing that could not have been accomplished, if it needed accomplishing at all, by letter.
He went anyway.
He left the carriage at the foot of the lane and walked. The afternoon was grey and cold and damp in the way that February is damp when the rain has stopped but the sky has not committed to stopping. The hedgerow was as overgrown as before. The brass plate still green. He did not go up the drive.
He followed the line of the hedge along the eastern boundary, where it thinned enough in places to see through.
The ground was soft underfoot and his boots sank into it.
He kept close to the hedge and told himself that a man had every right to inspect a property he was about to take responsibility for.
The kitchen garden was at the back of the house, behind a low wall of brick that had lost several courses at its far end.
It was larger than he had expected. Someone had been working it with more care than the rest of the property suggested.
The beds were dug and weeded with a care that the rest of the property had been denied for years.
A row of bean poles stood ready, their twine still tight.
The tools leaning against the wall were old: a trowel with its handle bound in twine where the wood had split, a watering can with a patch soldered over a hole, a hoe worn thin at the blade from sharpening.
Along the south facing wall, where the brick held what warmth the winter sun offered, herbs grew in close rows.
Some had been cut back to the root. Some were still green.
She was kneeling in the near bed with her back to him.
The dress was darker than the one she had worn for their meeting, with the sleeves pushed above her elbows.
Her hair had been pinned loosely and much of it had come down.
A wooden trug sat beside her with cuttings in it: stems, roots, a quantity of something leafy and dark. Her hands were in the soil.
One of the younger sisters was beside her.
The golden-haired one, Poppy, sat on an upturned bucket with her knees drawn up and her arms around them, talking.
He could not hear the words, only the rhythm of a young voice that had not yet learned when to stop.
Miss Linton listened or appeared to. Her hands did not stop moving in the earth.
At the far end of the garden, near where the wall had crumbled, the baroness stood among a patch of something tall and gone to seed.
She wore no hat. Her grey hair was loose.
She held a stem between her fingers and examined it with the grave attention of a woman who found in plants what other women found in drawing rooms. She was speaking to no one. Or perhaps to the plant.
Miss Linton sat back on her heels and said something to Poppy.
Poppy leaned over and brushed something from her older sister’s shoulder without pausing in whatever she was saying.
The gesture was small, thoughtless, the kind of touch that came from years of sitting beside a person.
Neither sister noticed of course. Henry had not intended to move from the hedge.
The gap in the brickwork at the garden’s far corner was visible from where he stood, and the wall itself was low enough that a man could rest his arms upon it.
He was there before he had made the decision, close enough now to see the soil beneath her fingernails and the mend in the elbow of her sleeve.
Close enough to see her hold a cutting up to the grey light and turn it slowly, examining the roots, her lips pressed together in concentration.
She set it down and chose another, then wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist and left a streak of dark earth across her brow that she did not notice or did not care about.
He watched her hands. In the drawing room she had kept them folded and still, the gesture of a woman who had been taught to sit in parlours. Here they were quick, sure, filthy, and entirely her own.
A door opened at the back of the house. The man called Kit came out carrying a pail in each hand.
He set them by the wall and stood with his arms crossed, surveying the garden as if he considered everything in it his responsibility.
His gaze moved to the low wall where Henry stood.
Henry stepped back. He did not know how long he had been standing there.
Longer than any sensible man would stand watching a woman who did not know she was being watched.
He waited with his shoulder against the wet hedge and the damp of it soaking through his coat. After a moment he looked again. Kit had gone to the far bed. The baroness was showing him something on a stem. Poppy was still talking. Miss Linton was still kneeling.
There was nothing more to see. A kitchen garden, a working household, a woman on her knees in the dirt. Nothing that altered the terms of their agreement or that a solicitor’s document would not render beside the point within the week.
He walked back down the lane toward the carriage. The ground was softer now and his boots left deep prints in the mud. He did not look back at the house.
The coachman straightened when he saw him coming.
“Home, Your Grace?”
Henry climbed in and sat with his hat on his knee. The carriage moved off.
He thought of the younger sister’s hand on Violet’s shoulder, how neither of them had flinched or remarked upon it. He could not remember the last time anyone had touched him without first asking permission or bracing for the consequences.
He thought of her hands in the soil. The cutting held up to the grey light, the roots exposed, turned slowly in her fingers. She had been deciding what would take in new ground and what would not.
The thought sat with him, uninvited, for the rest of the drive home.