Tilly breathed in the orangey perfume of Lady Roxton’s philadelphus and enjoyed a rare moment of nothingness. Except that James’s gardening notebook lay temptingly close on the bench next to her, his Montblanc rollerball marking his last entry. One peek wouldn’t hurt, would it? She would never commit the sin of privacy invasion, but scribblings about plants could hardly reveal intimacies. Beside, James didn’t have the brain circuitry for mixed content. On the other hand, he might go nuclear if she messed with his possessions. Everything in James’s world had its place.
A tractor rumbled in the distance and Tilly swallowed. Her throat was sore from hours of prattling. Lecturing, while James hung back and scribbled in his little book. Black, of course, since everything about James was black today, from his earrings to his mood. He had expressed no interest in the Woburn jaunt and had ignored her probes about his day alone. Not that she needed to ask how he’d spent his time, since mounds of rosemary now circled evenly spaced rows of thyme, sage and rue. Clearly, he’d fobbed her off with that crap about personal matters. Tilly gnawed on a hangnail. Frustrated didn’t begin to explain how she felt. But then again, all things James had become wrapped in barbed wire since his bombshell about David. Maybe gardening was all they had left to share.
James had certainly been an eager pupil that morning, sparking with energy. “Elaborate,” he kept saying, his fingers jiggling as if he were speed learning. When she explained that gardening was plagued by the unexpected but offered so many comeback lines that defeat was never an option, he wrote it down and underlined it twice. The trick, she told him, was to adapt to every curveball that nature threw at you. If a plant had outgrown its space, you cut it back. If a plant wasn’t thriving, you moved it.
Tilly glanced at the notebook again. How long had James been gone? Five minutes? She had explained elevenses—English snack—during their first day in the walled garden, and every morning, when the clock on the stable block chimed eleven, James disappeared and returned with treats. She never put in a request; she didn’t need to. He kept a Tupperware of her favorite chocolate in the Hall fridge. Tilly’s stash, Rowena called it. What would James bring her this morning? Easy-peasy, a Cadbury flake. Perfect for a sunny, sixty-degree day. He had studied her well. By the time he flew home, James would have learned more about her than about gardening. And what would she have learned about him?
She set the pen aside and pried open the nappa-covered notebook. For a moment Tilly stared at James’s writing without seeing words. Then she stroked the small, compact letters, so different from her large, loopy style. He took notes in complete sentences, each line of text a grammatically correct, self-contained thought with no abbreviations. She flipped through, stopping when she reached an angry doodle that spread like a bloodstain over an entire page. Every line was sharpened to a point, the pen strokes carved with such force that they had broken through the paper in several places. James hadn’t drawn a single curve.
“Find anything interesting?” he said.
Tilly shrieked and dropped the notebook. How could she not have heard him approach?
He positioned one of the two mugs he was carrying on the armrest next to Tilly and then fished out a Cadbury flake from his jean pocket.
Tilly thanked him and tried not to think about the reason for the flake’s slight warmth.
She retrieved the notebook from the ground, dusted it off on her T-shirt and flicked through to find the right page to mark with his pen. “Why’re you taking notes today?” she said.
He pushed up his sunglasses, scraping his hair back to expose his high, pale forehead. At some point in his life he must have worn his hair short. Is this how he would have looked? His thick, dark eyebrows were now his most prominent feature, and his cheekbones were more pronounced. Only the eyes remained the same.
“I don’t want to forget anything you’ve taught me—” he watched her “—after I leave on Friday.”
“What!” She shot forward and spat out a mouthful of coffee. “But I thought you were staying until I have my results?”
“I am.” He sat next to her. “Which is why I booked a Friday flight.”
“But what if it’s malignant?”
“Then a stranger won’t be much help.”
“Crap.” She thumped her cup down on the ground, spilling coffee over her Wellington boot. “This is crap, and you know it. Been there, done that, had the conversation. You’re not a stranger. And if this is some lame excuse to get me to confess….”
He pulled his sunglasses off his head and shook his hair free. “Confess to what?” He sounded so indifferent she expected him to yawn.
Tilly gave a snort and stared at the puddle of coffee glistening on her boot. She wasn’t claiming feelings she didn’t own, or suspected she didn’t own. “The garden—” She pointed at the rose bed with its pruned canes, excavated edge and compost-rich soil. “We’re not done with the garden.”
“I think we are, Tilly.”
“But the tree house.”
“I’ll finish on Thursday, while we wait for the surgeon’s call.”
“Why, James? Why are you leaving?” She swallowed the word me, worried it would sound petulant.
“I butted into your world, forced you to take me on.” James gave a rueful smile. “We both know it’s time I reconnected with my own life. I need to check on the house, and then I’ll drive to Chicago to visit friends, leave the Alfa there and fly to Seattle for an extended trip.” He raised his mug, with both hands, to his lips. “I haven’t seen Daniel in twelve months.”
“Who’s Daniel?”
“My son. He lives in Seattle.”
The breeze brought the faint, but discernible, scent of wild honeysuckle from The Chase, and the echo of a pheasant’s cough. Tilly could almost hear the morning ticking away as she sat in Rowena’s walled garden exchanging words with a stranger.
She prodded a stray rose petal with her foot. “If you’re leaving at the end of the week, it’s time I showed you how to plant.”
* * *
“Promise one last time that I can’t catch cancer from the soil.” His words spilled out as he crouched on the thyme-covered walk.
“I’ve promised five times already,” Tilly said. “That’s enough.”
But she hadn’t made it to six. “Please?”
“No. That’s your OCD asking, not you.”
A mob of starlings flew over the walled garden cackling and James imagined shooting them. He hadn’t fired his dad’s rifle in three decades, but today he felt primal, like a Neanderthal hunter waiting to kill. And it disgusted him. Vile images hijacked his mind. He saw himself with his fingers clasped around a bird’s neck, wringing the life out of it, which was bogus. He knew in his soul he could never kill a bird. He’d felt bad enough about flattening that moth in his bedroom the other night, and moths creeped him out.
James took off his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. A headache was drilling through his skull. His bangs, now long enough to tuck behind his ears, flopped forward. Pinpricks of anger jabbed at him. Why did he ever think he had the patience to grow his hair? He wanted to jerk it out by the roots.
“Come on, James. What are the chances of catching cancer from soil?”
He looked up. “Less than zero?”
“Exactly.” Tilly smiled, but he couldn’t imagine why. Quite possibly she was relieved this would be their last gardening lesson. “Ready to try again?” she asked.
No. He didn’t want to disappoint her, but his focus was broken. He needed to distance himself—from this garden, from Tilly. In his mind he had left already.
“No. I’m done,” he said, and used his wrist to force the web of hair from his face. He eyed the discarded gardening gloves, ripped off and abandoned after his abortive attempt to dig up a daylily. An excellent plant, Tilly had told him, for a first lesson on subdividing. Even Isaac couldn’t kill a daylily. No, but James could.
“Listen,” she said. “Hear that song? Tsee-tsee-tsu-hu-hu-hu. It’s a blue tit.”
And doubt about leaving returned. But doubt was part of his DNA, and he had to find the strength to ignore it. That had been his goal before he’d met Tilly, before he had allowed jealousy and desire to distract him.
The agony of leaving her had begun, but heartbreak, like anxiety, faded. And even if he couldn’t tackle the ultimate exposure, did it matter? Thanks to Tilly, he had made incredible progress. He would never forget the hope that she had given him by caring, by reminding him to laugh. But the fantasy was over. He knew it; so did she.
“I’m going to miss sharing my private hell.” James stared at a topiary of ivy that had long since broken free of its shape.
“Me, too,” Tilly sighed. “Me, too.”