“Out getting your bearings, are you?” Mrs. Mins said, plucking away at invisible weeds. “The early bird gets the worm.”
Mrs. Mins liked talking in well-worn aphorisms. I would learn that they were her way of protecting herself from thinking too deeply about anything, and one of the ways she had survived at Barnsley all these years.
That first time, I took her comments literally. It was early, and for all I knew, worms were something they served in the restaurant at Barnsley. Worms seemed the only likely thing she might be harvesting from that particular patch of barren dirt. “Are they for the restaurant?”
Mrs. Mins stopped her digging and leaned on the hoe. She looked at me carefully. “Have you not noticed?”
There was plenty I had noticed in my twelve or so hours at Barnsley. A creepy housekeeper. An absent mother. Overlooked children. A distinct lack of guests. Arctic draughts. None of these seemed appropriate to mention. “Noticed what?”
“The hotel is closed. So is the restaurant. It’s been that way since the accident.”
“But the website doesn’t say anything about that,” I stammered, shocked. It was true. I had spent a lot of time on that website: The image gallery. The suggestions for things to do in the local area. The history of the buildings. None of it had suggested that the hotel was actually closed down.
“It does if you try to make a booking. Max didn’t want it to be too obvious. In fact, he never really made a decision. Just stopped answering the phones and bolted the main gates.”
I thought of my mouse hovering over the “Book Now!” tab, and my decision to turn up unannounced. “Are you going to reopen?” I asked, still piecing things together in my mind.
“Well, he let me take that booking for the wedding, that’s a start. But there’s a lot of work to be done anyway.” With a gloved hand she indicated the garden, the house beyond. That morning she was dressed in jeans and a navy fisherman’s sweater, the type my father would wear when visiting friends’ farms, but she still wore the golden hoops. In her work clothes, she looked even more at home than she had the night before, and once again more put together than I would ever be.
“How long has it been closed?” I asked, wondering how far to pursue my curiosity.
She didn’t seem to mind. “It’s almost a month now. I’ve had to turn away everyone who had booked for Christmas and New Year. All those bookings. Poof!”
“They’ll come back.”
“I’m not so sure. This place is starting to get a reputation.”
“Sounds to me like it’s had one for a while.”
A small sound escaped from Mrs. Mins’s throat. She looked down and kicked at a root in the ground. Conversation over, it seemed.
Growing up with Fleur had left me attuned to garden design, and someone with a trained eye had set this one out. In some ways, it was a nostalgic rendition of an Edwardian kitchen garden, with beds edged in basket fences and herbs surrounding every patch, but it had a more modern symmetry about it. It reminded me of gardens Fleur had taken me to at home. Stonefields. The kitchen garden at Heide. It was bare now, but I imagined what it must be like in full flush. “You should see this garden in summer,” Mrs. Mins said, as if reading my mind. “That whole bed along the wall is mint. Five or six different types. Did you know you could grow chocolate mint? If you could smell it . . . Over there—lettuces. At least four kinds. It’s all herbs beyond the lettuce, every type you can imagine. I expect you’re not too interested in that kind of thing, though.”
“Oh, yes, I am,” I said, before thinking better of it. I had been about to tell her my background. Herbology. Naturopathy. Wellness. Dietitian. “My stepmother is a gardener. Landscape architect, really.”
Mrs. Mins looked at me properly, her eyes darting to my hands, looking for the signs that might give me away as a serious gardener. Finding none, she seemed to roll her eyes for an invisible observer. “What are you doing working in child care, then?” She looked suspicious.
“The children are still asleep,” I said. Dodging the question.
She shook her head slightly, like she was trying to dislodge something from her ear. “Everyone sleeps late around here,” she said, “except for me.” Was it a threat? It felt like one, but despite my age, I have always been an early riser, and I didn’t feel I needed to change. Mrs. Mins didn’t have a monopoly on the early hours.
It seemed to me strange that Max should sleep late. My own father was always first up: making the coffee, reading the newspaper, watching the television news. I looked around again for signs of life. There was a hedge at the end of the kitchen garden, and beyond that green border was the car park, empty now except for a small vehicle, more like a golf buggy than a van. “Oh,” I said. “Do you run the hotel for Mr. Summer?” What did she do all day, I wondered, while it was closed? Who was she?
It only took the slightest prodding to get her talking. “And everything else,” she said, with the martyred sigh of the chronically overworked. “I wasn’t meant to be taking over the children as well. That wasn’t what I signed up for.”
“And what did you sign up for?” I asked, leaning back to pick the heads of parsley so far gone to seed they came to my waist.
“I used to work on Capri—in Italy?”
I nodded as if I knew it.
“Max and Daphne came out to see me—they had heard about what I had done out there. I was working for a small hotel, a tiny little village on the side of the cliff that had been converted into a luxury resort. It had become very famous, and not just because of the setting. The luxury hotel industry is much smaller than you would think.”
I had never really thought about it at all, but I nodded again anyway.
“We had an amazing chef—not a celebrity like Daphne, but he could cook very, very well. All the best staff used to come to work for me, and we had amazing reviews. People came for honeymoons, celebrations, but mostly it was people in the know, the sort of people who come every year, stay for a month, and don’t even ask the price.”
“It sounds amazing. How did Mr. Summer convince you to come here?”
“He offered me a lot of money, much more than I was making there. The owners didn’t pay us much, but life was good. We had accommodation, and there were tiny restaurants in the back streets just for the people working in the hotels. But it wasn’t the money.”
It seemed she might talk forever, but she surprised me by turning around suddenly and walking off, leaving me in the middle of the stone path, forcing me to call out after her. “What was it?” I said. “How did he get you to come?”
She stopped, stood still for a moment. From behind, she looked much younger, and I thought again how Max must be tempted by her. She looked up at the windows, and I could see that they were the windows along the children’s corridor. Surely they must be close to waking. Mrs. Mins must have had the same thought, because it was only once she was satisfied there was no one there listening that she turned around again. “How did Mr. Summer get you to come?” she said, quietly.
Immediately, there was a sensation of blood rushing into my face. “The children . . . he needed someone for the children,” I finally stammered in response. I had no real reason for my sudden appearance; I didn’t even know if the job had been advertised. For all I knew, there had been a letter up a chimney, Mary Poppins style.
“The children,” Mrs. Mins said thoughtfully. “That’s certainly not how he got me here.”
“Do you have children, Mrs. Mins?”
“Me? No. It’s too late for that.” It was an answer to another question, perhaps the one I should have asked. We stood awkwardly for a moment.
“And Mrs. Summer? Will she be having more children?” I was clutching at straws, but it was the only way I could think to bring her into the conversation. I was the nanny, after all.
“Daphne?” Mrs. Mins looked stricken. “Why? What did Max say?”
“Oh, nothing. I just thought maybe that’s why she needs a nanny.”
Mrs. Mins’s eyes went to the upstairs windows. When she spoke, it was slow, as if she was assessing each word as she said it. “Daphne needs a nanny because she has been in bed since the accident. The doctors say she needs to rest. When she is better, she will be busy with the restaurant again.”
“What accident?” I blurted out. Unlike Mrs. Mins, I didn’t take my time.
“It’s not my place to talk about the accident.” Nor yours, she said with her eyes.
“I’ll leave you to it,” I said, when it became clear she would not be elaborating.
“Maybe you can help me out here when the weather improves. It’s too much work for Mr. Mins and me, and we could use another set of hands. I could see if Max could pay you a little extra for it.”
After the way she had been looking at Max the night before, I had been surprised to hear her talking about a Mr. Mins. Here was my chance to ask. “Does your husband work here as well?”
“You’ll meet my brother soon enough.” I nodded, confused and still unsure why she was calling her brother Mr. Mins. “Only if you know what you’re doing, of course. I wouldn’t want you out there if you weren’t entirely certain about things.”
It was a long time since I’d felt entirely certain about anything, and I couldn’t imagine feeling certain about anything again anytime soon. Everything here seemed so ambiguous.
There was so much to learn.
There was one question I was desperate to ask, though, and Mrs. Mins’s invitation to help her in the garden gave me the encouragement I needed to ask it.
“What happened to Agatha?” I said, so quickly the words ran together. I assumed it had something to do with the accident.
Mrs. Mins took a moment to process what I had asked. I suspected she knew I would ask sooner or later, and the timing of the question was the only part she found at all surprising. I expected she thought it would take me longer to work up the courage. “Curiosity killed the cat,” she said, and left me waiting so long in silence that finally I had no choice but to walk away and find the children.