Of Ghosts and Gardens (Sweet Treat Novellas #14)
Chapter One
To be Welsh was to believe in the wondrous, and Enid Pryce was inarguably Welsh.
Her family, like so many others, included a great many Englishmen and Scotsmen and even the occasional Irishman if one looked hard enough.
And her family, like so many others, chose not to look overly hard.
After all, they need only point to their garden, haunted by a famous, long-dead Welshman, to prove how very strong a claim they had to their nationality.
“You must not take what is not yours.” That was all he ever said to anyone, and only ever in response to someone attempting to make off with a bit of the garden.
She wasn’t firmly decided on whether or not Dafydd Gam’s place in history ought to be viewed as that of a traitor or a hero, a topic of some debate amongst those for whom the contradictory conduct of a man during the course of two wars fought four hundred years earlier was still incredibly relevant— which, if she was being honest, likely included most of Wales— but she knew one thing about him for certain: he was a very particular gardener.
Now a grown young lady of nineteen, Enid had been dragged quite against her will to Bath, along with a great many other young ladies whose families hadn’t the means to grant them a proper London Season, to mingle with an endless supply of penniless soldiers, younger sons, and widowers looking for someone to raise their horde of unruly children.
Hardly a recipe for matrimonial success and happiness.
After a tiring summer— they’d extended their stay beyond the usual time frame in the hope of catching the trickle out of London— Enid returned home a happy failure and, upon arriving, went directly to the garden, intent on immersing herself in the scent of late summer roses.
She also secretly hoped Dafydd Gam would make an appearance.
His presence would be a much-needed bit of evidence that she was home again.
“Dafydd,” she called out as she walked the familiar paths. “I’ve come to pilfer your garden. You’d best come scold me for it.”
Not even the wind picked up in response. Dafydd Gam had always been too stubborn for something as simple as answering a summons.
I’ll have to steal something. She wasn’t sure what was most likely to bring down spectral wrath upon her head.
Roses usually worked, but the bower looked so nice, and she’d not seen a decent rosebush in all the months she’d been in Bath.
It would be a shame to desecrate these. Autumn had not yet rendered the leaves gold.
Plucking leaves outside of autumn really didn’t make a great deal of sense.
Spring wildflowers would have been a nice option.
Had it been spring. And had wildflowers been permitted to grow there.
One year, an extremely late frost had killed all of the wildflowers in the garden, which everyone of sense had agreed was a message from Dafydd Gam that he found wildflowers objectionable.
Perhaps if she plucked a few stems of rosemary. . . No. That wouldn’t work. The ghost didn’t generally object to the picking of herbs, owing, no doubt, to herbs being quite useful and, therefore, the picking of them not being particularly wasteful.
Another circuit of the frustratingly ghost-free garden produced no grand schemes.
She might have picked any number of things, but Dafydd Gam had grown very stubborn.
He no longer appeared every time she made off with something.
Summoning him often felt like a puzzle she was required to solve.
But after months of Society and balls and uncomfortably fashionable gowns, followed by dire predictions of her miserable future as a speedily aging spinster, Enid was too weary for riddles.
“I don’t know what to steal,” she announced in ringing tones. “I am perfectly willing to make off with any number of things; you simply have to tell me which.”
The voice that answered, though decidedly male, was not Dafydd Gam’s. “I am not intimately acquainted with the laws governing Brecknockshire, but I am relatively certain thievery is as much a crime here as it is in the rest of the kingdom.”
Enid turned toward the unfamiliar voice.
His perfectly pleasant tone and timbre hadn’t prepared her for the picture he presented.
He was not the sort to send entire ballrooms full of women swooning en masse, perhaps, but he suited Enid’s tastes quite perfectly.
Dark hair to contrast her golden locks, eyes of a very light blue, tall, and of an active build.
His smile hitched up a touch higher on one side than the other, something that sent her heart into a rather absurd rhythm.
And this handsome stranger thought she was a thief who talked to herself in gardens. It was, technically, the truth, but still a terribly unpromising way to make a gentleman’s acquaintance.
“One must not take what is not one’s own,” she paraphrased Dafydd Gam’s signature declaration. “But as this is my garden, stealing from it wouldn’t truly be stealing.”
His brow pulled low in thought. “Why would you be stealing from a garden?”
“To summon the ghost who lives here.”
With that, his eyes opened wide, and his smile blossomed fully. “It appears I am in the right place, then.”
“You have been searching for a ghost in a garden?”
“I have been searching for the particular ghost in this particular garden.” He spoke with utter sincerity. “I should very much like to make his acquaintance.”
“You believe he’s real, then?” She’d mentioned her family specter to a few people she’d met during her time in Bath and was always met with doubt, both about the ghost and about her mental state.
“I have no reason not to believe it,” the stranger replied.
“In that case, sir, welcome to Wales.”