The next morning Marin spent several hours working on a possible website design for Fowler and Son; when Rebecca had asked her what she was doing at breakfast, and she’d told her, her sister’s eyebrows had risen and she’d given a smirking kind of smile. Marin had rolled her eyes.
“Don’t start, Rebecca. It was bad enough that you disappeared last night after inviting Joss in for a drink – it looked rather obvious, you know.”
“All the better,” Rebecca replied blithely. “Both of you need a good push for anything to happen.”
“Maybe I don’t want a good push.”
“You don’t want to be alone, do you?”
Marin frowned. “I’ve been alone for most of my life. It’s not that bad.” She’d found a small happiness in managing for herself, and surely being alone was better than being with someone and being unhappy, being hurt. Having someone you love cut you out of his life, just as her father had.
“Maybe I don’t want you to be alone,” Rebecca said and Marin looked up from her laptop.
“What do you mean?”
Rebecca shrugged, her gaze sliding away from Marin’s. “I feel guilty for taking you away from everything,” she said after a moment. “Your whole life. If you were with someone…”
Marin closed her laptop. “Rebecca,” she said, “I told you before. I chose this. You. And the truth is, you didn’t take me away from very much.”
“Didn’t you like your life in Boston?”
“It was all right.” Marin rose from the table and dumped their cereal bowls in the sink. “My job was being outsourced eventually and I’d only made a few friends. I worked long hours.” She was giving Rebecca the excuse she’d given Joss last night, but she didn’t feel like clarifying it the way she had with Joss. She didn’t want Rebecca’s pity.
“Even so, it was your life,” Rebecca persisted, “and it’s not any more.”
“True. But I don’t mind that. I’m happy here.” As she said the words she knew she meant them. “You don’t need to feel guilty, Rebecca.”
“Maybe I can’t help it,” Rebecca said quietly, and Marin had the unsettling sense that her sister was talking about something else entirely.
“What do you…” she began, but Rebecca cut her off.
“I’d better get going. I don’t want to miss the bus.”
Marin nodded, her unfinished question sinking into the silence, and she didn’t say anything else as Rebecca reached for her bag and coat and then walked out of the room; a few seconds later Marin heard the front door slam.
She finished doing the breakfast dishes, her mind skirting around what Rebecca had said and, more importantly, what she’d meant. What did she feel guilty about? If not Marin having to give up her life, then something else, something with her parents? There was still so much they hadn’t talked about, and even though Marin was trying to take steps towards bridging that chasm of silence, it was hard. Maybe she needed to take a flying leap instead, but how? It was utterly unlike her to do so.
She spent the rest of the morning working on Joss’s website, glad for the distraction from her own circling thoughts. After a quick lunch of soup and a sandwich she headed outside; the sky was a fragile blue and the wind was kicking up, but she’d got used to it now, and with her scarf wrapped around her neck and her hat pulled down over her ears, she felt well equipped for the relentless Cumbrian wind.
She spent an hour clearing more of the garden; Joss had left his strimmer with her for a few days and she was still thrilled by the easy way it cut through the brambles. Another couple of hours, she reckoned, and the entire garden would be clear, albeit covered in a few inches of stubbly roots.
She was just slicing through a particularly thick branch when the strimmer made an alarming, high-pitched noise. Marin quickly cut the motor. Pushing past the bramble, she saw that she’d started cutting into something significantly harder than a thorny branch: a slab of sandstone.
She cleared away the cut brambles and brushed off the dirt from the slab; with a shivery ripple of shock she realized it was an old headstone. But surely someone wasn’t buried here? Instinctively she looked down at her feet, almost as if she expected to see a skeletal hand poking through the dirt. She really was becoming fanciful.
“What have you found?”
She turned to see Joss coming through the garden door, a camera slung round his neck. Marin nodded to the headstone.
“A grave,” she said. “I think.”
He came to stand next to her and then crouched down to examine the headstone. “I can’t read the name,” he said, “but the date looks like 17-something.”
“Do you think someone is actually buried here?”
He shook his head. “Doubt it. The church has permission to move old headstones after a certain number of years, in order to make way for new ones.”
“So you mean people are buried on top of people?”
He nodded towards the headstone. “Two hundred years on and there’s not going to be much left.”
“Of course.” But it still gave her an unsettling feeling to think about it.
Joss straightened and brushed the dirt from the knees of his jeans. “So, how about we take some photos?”
“All right.”
“You’ve done a good job,” he continued, “clearing this lot.”
“It feels rather therapeutic, actually, to cut through it all.” She nodded towards the growing pile of bramble she’d stacked haphazardly in the far corner of the garden. “I’m not sure what to do with that, though. If it were November, we could have a roaring bonfire for Guy Fawkes.”
“You could still burn it. The earth is damp enough, so it won’t spread.” He took the camera from around his neck and started snapping photos. “How are you doing with the website?”
“Good. I’ll show you what I’ve worked up after you’ve taken the photos, if you like.”
“All right.”
Marin watched as Joss took photos of every part of the garden: the sweep of cleared earth, the dilapidated shed, the headstone, the pile of sandstone blocks, the damson trees and the redcurrant bushes.
She followed him around, seeing the garden not just as a testament to a forgotten history, but as a blank canvas. How on earth was she going to fill the space? Now that it was mostly clear, she was realizing just how big it was, probably at least a quarter of an acre. And she wasn’t even a gardener.
“You could grow vegetables,” Joss said, and Marin turned to him, startled.
“How did you know what I was thinking?”
“Your eyes went wide and you were looking around the garden with something like panic.” He smiled, his eyes creasing, before he held the camera up to his face. “Smile.”
“What? No!” Marin threw her hands up, pushing back her wind-blown hair and shaking her head even as he snapped the photo. “That’s going to be a dreadful picture.”
Joss glanced at the camera’s screen, a faint smile on his lips. “Come see.”
Marin joined him, and peered at the digital image. In the picture he’d taken she was squinting and only just starting to smile, her hands holding her hair back. Looking at it, she had a strange, tumbling sense of déjà vu; she was in almost the exact same pose as the picture that had been taken when she was fourteen, with her father. Just as disconcerting was the realization that she was also in the same position as the girl in the photograph in the village hall, with the garden door framing the photograph. There was no gardener in the photo, of course, leaning on his spade, but Marin realized she could see Joss’s shadow behind her, the camera raised to his face. Suddenly she shivered.
“Cold?” he asked and she shook her head.
“No… it just reminds me of the photo in the village hall.”
“Of course.” He glanced at the image again, nodding. “But no butterfly.”
“Right. A bit too cold this time of year for those.” She shivered again, this time from the cutting wind. “Shall we go inside? I could use a cup of tea and I’ll show you the website design I was working on.”
A few minutes later they were comfortably installed in the kitchen with cups of tea as Marin showed Joss what she’d done with his website.
“I like it,” he said. “It’s basic but it gets the job done.”
“If you want bells and whistles, I’m happy to oblige.”
“No thanks. I’m not a bells-and-whistles sort of man.” He nodded towards his camera, which he’d left on the table. “What about the photos I just took?”
“We can upload them to the blog page. I linked it to your website but also gave it its own domain – thelostgarden.com.” He raised his eyebrows at this and she continued, “lostgarden.co.uk is a walled garden up in Scotland. Penicuik, it’s called.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”
“I had a look at the website last night. It was a massive estate with an equally massive garden. Greenhouses for every kind of fruit – plum, cherry, apricot.”
“And what happened to make it lost?” Joss asked with a little smile.
“Time and money. It was ruinously expensive to maintain, and it became overgrown sometime in the last fifty years. Even by the time of our garden it was struggling.”
“Which makes you wonder how our garden really fared back then.”
“I was thinking about that. The vicar, this Andrew Sanderson, must have had some private income. He built Bower House, after all.”
“That’s true.”
“I suppose he could have spared the money for a garden and gardener.”
“The man in the photograph.”
“Don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do.” He fell silent, as did Marin; she wondered if he, like her, was thinking about the expression on the man’s face. Marin wondered if he’d been in love with the Sanderson daughter, if that’s who the girl in the photograph really was. Or was she being fanciful again, wanting there to be more of a story, even a romance, where there was none?
She placed her hands on the keyboard, splaying her fingers out as she formulated her thoughts. “Do you think,” she asked slowly, “that there really is a story behind all this? I mean…” She glanced down at her hands. “Perhaps it’s just an old garden they used for vegetables. Maybe when the Sandersons left and Bower House was let, the tenants didn’t need so much garden, and so it became overgrown.” She glanced up at him. “Maybe that’s all there is to it.”
“Maybe,” he agreed. “There might not be a story to the garden, but there’s one to that photograph.” He held her gaze for a moment and Marin felt her heart give a strange little thump.
“You mean… the girl and the gardener.”
“Don’t you think?” he answered, parroting her question back to her.
“Do you think…” She swallowed, wondering why this suddenly felt so personal. “Do you think he was in love with her?”
“It certainly looks like that in the photograph.”
“But she doesn’t even seem aware of him, only of the camera.”
“And the butterfly.”
“So do you think she loved him? Do you think she even knew how he felt?”
“I don’t know. But maybe we can find out.”
She let out a disbelieving laugh. “How could we possibly find that out, Joss?”
“The historical society, remember? They might be able to trace the photograph. Or we could go into Whitehaven. The library has archives on local history. There might be something there.”
“It would be like searching for a needle in a haystack.”
“Probably. But perhaps we’ll find something in the garden.”
“Buried treasure?”
“Of a sort.”
She let out another laugh and shook her head. “You know, I never used to be fanciful. I’ve always been tediously practical and unimaginative.”
“Says who?”
“Says me. I studied business at university and have worked in IT.”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not imaginative.”
“I don’t know.” She lapsed into silence, sorting through the memories and thoughts that were all tangled up in her mind. “My father was the creative one in the family,” she said at last, and Joss waited for her to say something more. “He was a university lecturer in art history,” she finally said. “And he played piano. My mother was an artist, a potter.”
“So you must have inherited some of those artistic genes.”
“You’d think so, but…” She trailed off. “I don’t know. I never felt as if I did. But maybe…” She hesitated, and Joss raised an eyebrow in silent prompting. “Maybe that part of me closed off when my mother died. Maybe that’s when I became… the way I am.” And she knew she wasn’t just talking about being creative or imaginative. She’d become closed off emotionally. Numb inside. And it was coming to Goswell, and working in the garden, that was bringing her back to life.
“Grief changes you,” Joss said after a moment. “No doubt about that.”
“Have you lost someone?” Marin asked. She’d sensed it before, when he’d spoken to her about grief. He’d spoken with the understanding of someone who had lived it, felt it.
Now he hesitated, and she saw a conflict in his eyes, and something else. Something darker. “My father,” he finally said, and she had the feeling that he’d been going to say something else, but had changed his mind. “He died six years ago.”
“I’m sorry.” She thought of Fowler and Son on the van. She should have asked before, should have realized his father was gone. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and then asked, “Were you very close?”
“Not as close as we should have been. He wanted me to join him in the family business, but I didn’t want to.”
“But you have joined—”
“After he died. I only started it up again three years ago, but people have been good about putting business my way.”
“What did you do before then?”
He hesitated, and again she had the sense that he was going to say something, something important, but then he simply shrugged and said, “This and that. I tried university and ended up dropping out. I did shift work at a factory and then some construction for a while. I never seemed to find something I could stick to.” He gave her a small smile, even though she still saw a bleakness in his eyes. “I was a bit of a yob, to tell you the truth. Messing about and not getting serious about anything.”
“And your father’s death changed that?”
Another hesitation. “Yes. I decided I wanted to keep the business going, that it would be wrong to just let it go. So that’s what I did.”
“And do you like it?” Marin asked. “Are you… are you happy?”
“As happy as I can be.”
And what on earth did that mean? She wasn’t able to ask, however, for he leapt into the moment’s silence with a question of his own.
“Are you happy, Marin? Here?”
“Yes, I am,” she said after a moment. “I know things aren’t perfect with Rebecca, but I’m hoping in time they might become better, at least. And I like having a house I can think of as a home instead of a soulless flat. I’m even learning to cook.”
“And to garden.”
She laughed and nodded. “Yes.” She glanced at the clock above the Rayburn, reluctant to end their conversation but knowing Rebecca would be home any minute and Joss would have to get on to his next job. “I should start tea. Rebecca’s always starving when she comes home.”
“Tea, is it? You really are becoming northern.”
“I suppose I am.” She hesitated, then blurted, “You could stay, if you like. For tea.” She held her breath, waiting for Joss’s response. She’d meant to make it a casual, offhand invitation, but there was both eagerness and uncertainty in her voice, and she had a feeling Joss had heard it as well.
“That’s very kind,” he said as he stood up. “But I should really get on. I have a few things to get on with before dark.”
“Of course.” Marin smiled stiffly, the rejection of her invitation stinging far more than it should. “Thanks for all of your help.”
He nodded towards her open laptop. “And thanks for your help. I like the website.”
“If you email me the specifics of the content you want on it, I’ll set it up.”
“Great.”
They both stood there, stiff and smiling, until, with a nod of farewell, Joss left. Marin let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was still holding.
She really shouldn’t feel so let down. She’d invited him to a kitchen supper with her and Rebecca, not on some romantic date. She hadn’t meant it to be a date or even sound like one, and yet…
She still felt stung.
Sighing, impatient with herself, she reached for her waterproof jacket and stuffed her feet back into her wellingtons. Forget dinner; she could clear a bit more bramble before Rebecca came home.
She was hard at it twenty minutes later when Rebecca found her in the garden. “Hey,” she called over the sound of the strimmer, and Marin cut its motor.
“Hey.” She swiped a few strands of her hair from her eyes. “How was school?”
“Fine.” Rebecca stepped into the garden. “You’ve done a lot since I was last in here.”
Marin hefted the strimmer. “This thing works wonders.”
“What’s that?” Rebecca asked and nodded towards the headstone that was leaning against a broken bit of wall.
“It’s an old headstone,” Marin said. “But don’t worry, no one’s buried here.”
“A headstone,” Rebecca repeated, and a strange look came over her face, as if a shadow had passed over it. She crossed the garden to stand in front of the headstone and stared down at the faded inscription. “But it belongs to someone,” she said. “Why has it been moved?”
Marin explained what Joss had told her; as she spoke, Rebecca frowned, shaking her head as if to deny the truth of it.
“So headstones can just be… moved? After a certain amount of time?”
“If the churchyard is crowded, I suppose. But not until a long time afterwards.”
“But that’s still awful,” Rebecca protested, and Marin could see that this wasn’t just about an old headstone. “Her descendants, whoever they are, can’t find her grave. Can’t mourn her.”
“But the headstones aren’t removed for a long time, Rebecca,” Marin said, trying to keep her voice gentle. “A hundred years at least, I should think. People might want to visit the grave of an ancestor, but they wouldn’t necessarily mourn her.”
“Still, I think it’s terrible. How can people just be forgotten?”
“I’m sure there are church records to say who was buried where and when. No one’s truly forgotten.”
“Aren’t they?” Rebecca asked, and she sounded so bleak and despairing that Marin couldn’t think what to say. In any case, she wasn’t given the chance because Rebecca turned and walked out of the garden. With a sigh Marin followed her. She needed to get the tea on, just as she’d told Joss.
Rebecca was quiet during dinner, a chicken and mushroom pie that Marin was quite proud of, and she retreated to her bedroom afterwards with a mumbling about homework. Marin spent the evening in the sitting room on her laptop, working on Joss’s website as well as her own, advertising IT services. She’d already had a request for a quote to create a website for an interior designer, and she made some preliminary notes on that before finally closing her laptop and heading to bed.
She paused by Rebecca’s door on the way to her bedroom; the light was off even though it wasn’t quite ten o’clock and she couldn’t hear a sound, so she moved past to her own room.
The wind started again in the middle of the night. Marin woke up around two o’clock in the morning, startled into wakefulness first by the howling of the wind, and then by the distant sound of a door banging. She reached for her dressing gown and slippers and crept through the house, looking for the culprit; after some investigation she realized it was the garden door. She’d forgotten to shut it yesterday afternoon. It was dreadful out, with slanting rain and howling wind, but Marin knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep for the banging. She grabbed her coat and a torch and headed outside, ducking her head against the rain as the torch’s beam cut a thin swathe of light through the relentless blackness.
The wind whipped her hood back and sent her hair flying around her face. Within moments, it was plastered to her head by the rain. Even through the sound of the wind she could hear the mournful bleating of sheep in the pasture by the vicarage, and she pitied the poor animals stuck out in such a gale.
She made her way through the darkness and fastened the garden door; the latch moved easily now since she’d oiled it. She glanced at the garden and saw how eerie it looked in the darkness. By the light of her torch she could just make out the boxy shape of the little building in the centre. It looked even more desolate and forgotten in the dark.
When she came into the kitchen Rebecca was standing there, shivering in the cold despite the rolling warmth of the Rayburn.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, hugging her arms around herself. “Where were you?”
“The door in the garden was banging. I shut it.” Marin shed her wet coat and reached for the kettle. “Cup of tea?” she asked and Rebecca nodded, her teeth chattering.
Marin reached for the fleece she’d draped over the back of her chair after dinner and tossed it to Rebecca. “Here. It’s freezing out. The wind cuts right through the house, I think.”
Rebecca poked her arms through the fleece, clutching it around her.
“Are you OK?” Marin asked quietly, and Rebecca jerked in response, her expression wary.
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
Marin considered her response carefully, wanting so much to handle this right but afraid she simply didn’t possess the emotional resources or wisdom. “Because,” she finally said as she put several teabags into the pot, “you seemed upset earlier about the headstones. And we haven’t really talked about things – not properly. I know what it’s like to lose your mum, Rebecca. It’s like… like losing your arm, or your right hand. Someone so incredibly important to you, you don’t feel quite whole any more. So if you wanted to talk about it… well, I’m here.”
Rebecca didn’t answer for a long moment, and Marin braced herself for one of her sullen silences. “Well…” Rebecca began, and drew a shuddering breath. Marin turned to look at her and, shocked, she watched as Rebecca’s face crumpled and then she burst into tears.