The Heart of the Garden

by Victoria Connelly

  ‘But she obviously liked them,’ Anne Marie said.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘She hired you to keep them looking perfect.’

  ‘But that doesn’t mean she liked them. She might just have respected what her family had created.’

  Anne Marie thought about this for a moment. It was an interesting point of view and she couldn’t help thinking of her own situation at Garrard House. Nothing there was her choice, was it? She simply endured it to keep the peace. From the dull white dinner service to the magnolia walls, none of it was of her choosing.

  ‘I think a lot of people live with the decisions of others,’ she said at last.

  ‘I wish I’d had the chance to talk to her,’ Cape said. ‘All I know is that she walked in the maze, but that doesn’t really tell us anything, does it?’

  ‘Maybe we’ll find out more once we’re allowed in the house,’ Anne Marie said, and the two of them glanced up at the Gothic exterior.

  ‘I wonder what secrets it holds,’ Cape said.

  ‘I can’t wait to see it,’ Anne Marie confessed.

  ‘Did you get the email from Mr Mander? The first meeting is set for Monday evening.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The great handover begins,’ he said. ‘After that, it sounds like it’s up to us to organise things.’ He took a deep breath. ‘But let’s not worry about that yet. I was going to show you around.’

  He led the way through a long avenue of topiary hedges which seemed to reach to the very sky in happy spirals and joyful twists.

  ‘You take care of this all on your own?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘It’s quite a job.’

  ‘I wouldn’t give it up for the world,’ he told her. ‘I love it here.’

  They walked around in silence, their feet crunching over the frosty lawn. The air was cold and still and their breath misted the space around them.

  ‘Did you want to go inside the maze?’ he asked her as they reached one of the entrances.

  Anne Marie had only ever seen photographs of the maze on the internet and had always been curious about it but, now that she was standing at its entrance, she wasn’t at all sure.

  ‘Well, maybe just a little way.’

  Cape gave a laugh. ‘You can’t just go a little way into a maze!’ he declared.

  ‘Oh.’

  Cape cocked his head to one side. ‘We don’t have to go in at all if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No, I want to.’

  ‘Are you sure? Because you don’t look sure.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Let’s do it,’ she said with determination, taking the first step and entering the maze. ‘You do know your way?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ he said.

  ‘Good. Did you want to lead?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ he told her. ‘You should experience it yourself. False turns, doubling back and everything.’

  Anne Marie nodded. She could do this, she told herself and, although she felt horribly self-conscious with Cape so close behind watching every wrong move that she made, she also found that she soon fell into a strange rhythm. Her feet seemed to be taking on a life of their own.

  Left feels good here. But right here. No, I’ve been here before. This isn’t the way. I think I’ve seen that bend already so that means take a left now.

  And on it went until she found the centre where a beautiful wrought-iron bench greeted her and she took a well-deserved sit down.

  ‘Well done!’ Cape said, clapping a hand on her shoulder.

  She looked up at the sudden familiarity of the moment and he withdrew his hand quickly, taking a step away from her.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked.

  ‘It was the strangest sensation,’ she told him. ‘I had no thoughts in my head other than where I was going. It was wonderfully freeing.’

  He nodded as if in recognition. ‘Mazes and labyrinths were often used for meditation and spiritual journeys.’

  ‘Really? I didn’t know that.’

  ‘But I think they’re just for pleasure these days.’

  ‘You said mazes and labyrinths,’ she said. ‘Aren’t they the same thing?’

  ‘No, they’re not. A maze can have many entrances and exits and multiple dead-ends, but a labyrinth has a single direct route.’

  ‘This is most definitely a maze,’ she said, ‘and I think I found all of the dead ends!’

  He smiled. ‘You did.’

  ‘Can we get out of here now?’

  He nodded. ‘Want me to lead the way?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  She followed him and he made it look so very easy, turning left and right in exactly the correct places. She was quite sure that she would never have been able to do it in under an hour.

  ‘That was fun,’ she said. ‘I can say that now that I’m out of there.’

  ‘I remember the first time I went in. It took me forty minutes to find my way to the centre and then out again.’

  ‘Do you ever get lost when you’re trimming the hedges?’

  ‘No. It’s kind of like a second home to me now.’

  ‘It’s very special,’ she said. ‘But what are we going to do with it?’

  ‘I think it’s the rest of the garden we need to worry about first,’ he said. ‘Did you want to take a look?’

  Anne Marie knew where they were going. Leaving the maze and the topiary garden, they rounded the house and walked towards the walled garden. The neat lawn was soon replaced by long grasses and clumps of nettles which rampaged along the brick wall that was happily crumbling into old age.

  Reaching a wooden door that had long fallen off its hinges, they stood looking on in speechless wonder as a pair of rabbits scuttled into a thicket of brambles. There were thistles the size of full-grown men, there was broken glass everywhere and frost-cracked pots lay scattered around in terracotta graveyards. But Anne Marie’s eyes also saw the enormous potential of a space that could bring people together and that they could use, though one question was foremost in her mind.

  ‘Where on earth do we start?’ she asked.

  ‘We start with the people,’ Cape said. ‘We find out what everybody’s skills are and assign jobs to them.’

  ‘You make it sound so easy.’

  ‘I don’t think it will be if that’s any consolation.’

  ‘It isn’t really,’ she said, smiling up at him, but then she sighed. ‘I don’t know why I’ve been chosen for this. I don’t think I have any skills. I’m an editor. What can I possibly bring to this project?’

  ‘You said you loved the garden.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Having a passion for something is half the battle, I find. It’s a pretty good driving force to getting a job done.’

  ‘Well, I would love to see all this restored.’

  ‘There you go then. You’re halfway there already!’

  They laughed together.

  ‘You know, I’ve been dying to get to work on this place,’ Cape confessed to her. ‘I was only ever contracted to take care of the maze and the hedges. I wasn’t allowed to even come into this part of the garden.’

  ‘Why do you think that was?’ Anne Marie asked.

  ‘Well, at first I thought it was a money issue, but it seems clear that there was always plenty of that.’

  ‘Maybe Miss Morton didn’t want to waste any money on a part of the garden she didn’t use,’ Anne Marie suggested as the two of them walked along an overgrown path strewn with broken snail shells.

  ‘I once sneaked in here,’ Cape said. ‘I was curious to see if there were any old tools that could be rescued.’

  ‘And were there?’

  ‘There were a couple of nice pieces actually, but Mrs Beatty took them away. She occasionally pokes around the garden to see what I’m up to. I’m not sure what she did with the tools. Probably locked them away in a dark shed to rot.’

  �
��Maybe we could look for them now that the garden is going to be restored.’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that.’

  They soon reached the other side of the walled garden and turned around to look at the waste ground before them.

  ‘There’s a lot to do here, isn’t there?’ Anne Marie said.

  ‘And it isn’t just the walled garden either. There are footpaths around it and statues everywhere which have been left to deteriorate. There are all sorts of areas between here and the topiary garden that need attention and we’re starting at the ugliest time of year,’ Cape pointed out, ‘although, if we work hard, this part could be a really productive place come summer.’

  Anne Marie looked at the space with fresh eyes, trying to imagine it on a perfect summer’s day with raised beds full of beautiful produce, immaculate pathways linking the spaces between and a fully restored greenhouse full of ripening tomatoes and luscious vines. Perhaps all that wouldn’t be achievable by the summer, but it was fun to dream and it was important to have a vision.

  As they were walking back to the topiary garden they heard the sound of tyres on the gravel driveway and looked round to see a car leaving.

  ‘That’s Mrs Beatty,’ Cape said. ‘Looks like she’s off early today. Mind you, she gets here at the crack of dawn.’ His expression changed.

  ‘What is it?’ Anne Marie asked him.

  ‘Mrs Beatty’s gone.’

  ‘Yes,’ Anne Marie said, frowning.

  ‘We could go in.’

  ‘Inside the house?’

  ‘Why not? We could take a look around.’

  ‘Are we allowed to do that?’

  ‘Well, it’s kind of been left to us, hasn’t it?’

  ‘But shouldn’t we wait for everyone else to join us next week?’

  ‘You want to wait?’ he asked her, a tiny grin hovering at the side of his mouth.

  A little bubble of excitement rose in Anne Marie. ‘Not really,’ she confessed. ‘But how exactly are we going to get inside?’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I have a way. Come on.’

  Anne Marie wasn’t quite sure what he was up to, but she found herself following him, curious as to where he was going.

  They soon reached a great wooden door at the side of the house.

  ‘As the gardener here, I was given access to the cloakroom and kitchen on the ground floor so I could take a break when needed,’ Cape said, producing a key from his trouser pocket and opening the door.

  Anne Marie followed him inside and saw a stark kitchen with old-fashioned cupboards, a butler’s sink and a small wooden table with a couple of chairs in the centre of the room. It was pretty basic, but everything looked clean and tidy.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’ he asked as she looked around.

  ‘Oh, no thank you.’

  ‘We’ll continue then?’ He left the room, entering a hallway with a quarry-tiled floor and passing a small cloakroom before starting up the stairs.

  They were doing it. They were really venturing inside, Anne Marie thought, feeling a surge of excitement as well as a good dose of nerves. She’d so often wondered what the house looked like and couldn’t quite believe she was going to find out right now.

  ‘Are you sure we should be doing this?’ she asked.

  ‘You don’t want to?’ Cape asked, stopping on a landing and looking back at her.

  ‘Oh, I want to do it, but . . . never mind – let’s do it.’

  He grinned and tried the door that led off the landing.

  ‘Locked,’ he said. ‘I tried this one once before and couldn’t get in this way.’

  ‘Why were you trying to get in?’

  ‘It was after I found a scarf in the maze and wanted to return it to Miss Morton in person. I found another door up the next flight. That one was open. Come on.’

  He continued up the stairs and stopped at a second door.

  ‘Mrs Beatty might have locked this one since my little visit,’ he said, resting his hand on the doorknob for a moment.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Anne Marie pressed. ‘I want to see what’s on the other side!’

  He smiled at her enthusiasm and turned the handle.

  ‘It’s not locked,’ he said, pushing the door open and then walking out onto the landing.

  For a few moments, they walked around the house in awed silence. Anne Marie had never seen anything like it. She didn’t know where to look first: there was so much to take in, from the ornate ceilings to the art on the walls and the rich carpets beneath her feet. Her eyes darted around, finding it impossible to settle on any one thing.

  At first, they peeped cautiously into the rooms they passed. Many were filled with white dust sheets so they couldn’t see their contents.

  ‘There’s only Mrs Beatty to take care of everything,’ Cape explained.

  ‘Do you know anything about her?’

  ‘She’s a widow. That’s all I know. She probably bossed her husband into an early grave.’

  ‘Oh, look,’ Anne Marie cried as she caught sight of the paintings on the landing. ‘These are exquisite. Look at the colours. I’ve never seen anything like this in my life. At least not outside a museum. They’re all Pre-Raphaelites.’

  Cape frowned. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know much about them.’

  ‘It’s a movement of painting from the mid-nineteenth century. I think this one’s Rossetti.’

  ‘Was he famous?’

  ‘Pretty famous.’

  ‘I don’t know a lot about painting.’

  ‘Neither do I, but I became quite interested in the Pre-Raphaelites when I was doing my degree,’ she told him. ‘We spent a term learning about them – Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter, and the Pre-Raphaelites were drawn to poems by writers like Tennyson and Keats. So many of their paintings depicted women like the Lady of Shalott and Mariana, and Ophelia from Hamlet. Women who were trapped in a man’s world – often physically trapped in a single room like the Lady of Shalott was.’

  ‘Like this lady,’ Cape said and the two of them studied a painting of a woman wearing a midnight-blue dress. She had a melancholic look on her face as she stared out of a mullioned window. ‘It could be Miss Morton.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Well, I never saw her, but I always imagined her trapped in this old place because I never saw her outside it.’

  ‘Or inside it,’ Anne Marie said. ‘Maybe she didn’t exist at all!’

  ‘Now, there’s a thought. Maybe Mrs Beatty made her up.’

  ‘Except, I thought I saw her once – just briefly – at a window when I was leaving the garden.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I’m not sure, though. It could have been anyone, I suppose.’

  ‘In all the years I’ve worked here, I’ve never caught more than a glimpse of her. The only people I’ve seen coming and going have been Mrs Beatty, the window cleaner and the man who comes to sweep the chimneys once a year.’

  Anne Marie looked up at the painting again. ‘It can’t be Miss Morton,’ she said. ‘Look at the dress. It’s Victorian.’

  ‘She’s got long red hair like you,’ Cape pointed out.

  ‘It could be Elizabeth Siddal. She had red hair and was painted lots of times by Rossetti and Millais. Although I’m not sure,’ Anne Marie added. ‘There’s something not quite . . .’ She paused. ‘I’m not sure about it. It looks Pre-Raphaelite. The colours are so rich and vibrant, like jewels, but something’s not quite right about it.’

  ‘Do you think it’s valuable?’

  ‘Well, if this is a real Rossetti, then yes. Enormously so. His paintings can sell for millions of pounds.’

  Cape made a funny choking sound. ‘Millions?’

  ‘Rossetti’s very popular. But these aren’t to be sold, remember?’

  ‘You think I’d try to sell them?’ he asked her and she turned to look at him.

  ‘No, of course not,’ she told him. ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ There was humour in her tone, but she
was watching him carefully for his response.

  ‘I could buy my dream garden with the proceeds of one of these,’ he replied, ‘so perhaps you’d better keep an eye on it.’ He gave her a wink and she smiled.

  They spent a little while longer looking around the rooms, barely daring to breathe as they entered them and making sure they didn’t knock into anything.

  They were at the front of the house and were just admiring the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling when they heard the sound of a car on the gravel driveway. Cape rushed over to the window.

  ‘It’s Mrs Beatty!’ he cried.

  ‘I thought she’d gone home!’ Anne Marie said.

  ‘We have to get out of here. Quick!’ He grabbed her arm and the two of them flew along the landing towards the door that led to the servants’ stairs.

  ‘Leave it as you found it,’ Anne Marie said and then cursed herself for sounding so bossy.

  ‘The door wasn’t locked,’ Cape reminded her.

  ‘Will she be mad if she sees us in here?’

  ‘She won’t see us. She never comes round to this part of the house.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Cape said as they reached the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Oh my goodness! I haven’t moved so fast in years! I’m actually out of breath.’

  ‘Sorry about that!’ Cape said.

  ‘You weren’t to know she’d come back.’

  They looked at each other, huge smiles on their faces at their shared adventure.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea now?’ Cape asked.

  ‘You know, I might just be ready for one.’

  They were making their way into the kitchen when the door from the garden opened and Mrs Beatty entered.

  ‘Ah, there you are,’ she said, eyeing Cape suspiciously.

  ‘Mrs Beatty – what a surprise,’ Cape said. ‘Are you well? I was just going to make Anne Marie a cup of tea. She’s part of the—’

  ‘Yes, I know who she is,’ Mrs Beatty interrupted.

  ‘It’s good to meet you,’ Anne Marie said, stepping forward and extending her right hand which Mrs Beatty shook perfunctorily. Her expression was stern and Anne Marie felt the full weight of her disapproval.

  ‘The meeting of the group is on Monday evening,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we know,’ Cape said. ‘Anne Marie’s just been looking around the garden today.’