The Midsummer Garden

by Kirsty Manning

  A couple of lids had become dislodged from Andreas’s terracotta pots during the journey from Châlus. ‘By God’s blood,’ he cursed; he should have taken the time to seal them with wax. He was lucky nothing had spilled from the lips of the pots. Andreas walked around the side of the cart and drew a deep breath of the sweet perfumes before replacing the lids. Inside half the pots was his particular blend of rosewater laced with nutmeg, cinnamon and myrrh. The other pots held sugar and salt. The rosewater—used as a handwash at feasts—was his secret recipe and in demand with all the local châteaux. His grandfather told him once that a long-dead pater had brought the recipe back from the east after the Crusades. De Vitriaco family lore whispered it was straight from the hand of Ibn Sīnā. Ridiculous story, of course. It was straight from the family business in Genoa. Still, it didn’t hurt his trade.

  Andreas grinned as the young kitchenhand Jacobus bounded out of the kitchen door towards him.

  ‘Bonjour, Monsieur de Vitriaco,’ said Jacobus, nodding. ‘You’re a bit late. The spice pots need to go straight into the kitchen, but we’d like the pots for the laver to go up the stairs to the grand banquet hall. Abbot Roald has instructed me to help you carry them. We’d better be quick. He has his jousting poles out today! The fat bastard has already smacked me twice over the back of the head. He’s in a filthy mood. As he conked me with his closed fist he said: The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother. Whatever that means.’ The lad shrugged. ‘Don’t live with my maman and I work like a horse. No shame there, sir.’ The lad’s face was filthy—streaked with ash and sweat—but defiant as he eyeballed Andreas.

  ‘Ah, Jacobus—the good book of Proverbs shredded again. Abbot Roald is always in a filthy mood. Why celebrate a wedding and enjoy a banquet when you can make life a misery for everyone? Just because the righteous chaplain has chosen a life without a woman doesn’t mean the rest of us should suffer. God won’t keep you warm at night.’ He chuckled. ‘And waking to matins must be miserable. Make sure you find a better way to greet the sun as soon as you are older.’ He ruffled the child’s hair fondly. ‘Let’s get a move on, lad.’

  Andreas and the runt of a boy busied themselves unloading the cart before loading it with empty vessels for return. By the time they were done the pale linen shirt was stuck to Andreas’s back.

  ‘I have to go, monsieur,’ said Jacobus. ‘I’m the lucky bastard that gets to stand in the fournier for the day. Hildegard needs me to help turn the bread sauce and aioli.’ He shook his dirty blond head in defeat and Andreas felt sorry for the boy. Jacobus had a rotten sweaty day ahead, standing in the fireplace fanning coals. He felt a little guilty for hoping the child would avoid hanging his head over the sauce pots. In the extreme kitchen heat, Andreas was worried the boy’s lice might jump right in.

  Before Jacobus turned to run off, he leaned in and whispered to Andreas: ‘Artemisia just snuck out via the side gate to get some herbs for her entremet. Out under the quince near the pond. Abbot Roald will gut her if he finds her missing from the kitchen for too long. He’s in a flap even though Artemisia and Hildegard have been up till late last night turning the sauces and baking the desserts. Please tell her to hurry.’ Jacobus turned and dashed through the gargantuan stone archway and disappeared into the kitchen. Andreas was left with the sounds of crocks and pots banging inside and idle horses and mules switching their tails beside him.

  He slipped around the curve of the turret and stood on a cart offloaded with oak barrels sitting by the high stone wall. The stamp showed the barrels were from Rivesaltes. Excellent. He preferred a sweet muscat-style wine to begin a banquet rather than the harsher, drier grenache that ripped your head off and often left you legless for the remaining courses. Andreas was pleased Lord Boschaud had ignored his miserly controller of the treasury—Abbot Roald—and unloosed the château’s purse strings a little more than usual. It was going to be magnificent.

  His eyes roved the length of the stone wall. On the far side he could make out a dark shadow creeping into the walled garden through a side gate and passing via the lavender beds. As the sunlight lifted and she stepped from the shadows of the wall, he could see the faded rose of her rumpled linen tunic. It looked fair against her dark skin and long thick plait. Artemisia was hunched, struggling to carry the large conical wicker basket on her back. He wanted to run over and offer to carry it, but he knew Artemisia would shoo him away like a pesky child. Worse, she’d probably curse him.

  Instead, Andreas watched her walk the linden allée and make her way into the heart of the prayer garden. Designed for the monks who lived in the monastery on the far side of the walled garden, the cloister was protected on four sides by shorn hornbeam hedges and divided into four quarts of vines for verjuice and wine, with a large round reflection pond at the centre.

  Artemisia paused, tilted her shoulders and let the basket drop to the ground. She then sat on the woven willow bench with her back nestled into the quince arbour. Watching Artemisia dip her head in worship, Andreas hoped her prayers echoed his. He glanced at the sun and started to count the hours until the banquet would be over and they no longer had to keep their secret.

  Chapter 3

  Tasmania, April 2014

  Jack watched Pip standing with her honours student, Taj, bent over and knee-deep in the stretch of tidal mudflats at Stinkpot Bay. He was helping Pip’s brother-in-law Will drag the silver dinghy through the blend of fine sand and mud so they could head out fishing for flathead. The hull carved a ribbon behind them as they pulled the boat through the silt to water deep enough to launch.

  As Jack tugged the boat into the shallows alongside Will, icy water bit at his ankles and confirmed winter was on its way. To take his mind off the chill, he gazed across at the white caps and beyond to the shallow sweep of mudflats lining North West Bay.

  Usually this stretch of foreshore was more sheltered than the main stretch of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, where the wind gathered pace and whistled and stung like a whip. The tide was heading out and a nor’westerly was picking up, so they’d better get a move on as the days were shortening. Beyond the wide bay, Mount Wellington loomed like a giant elephant with its head in the clouds. It was a rare day lately when you could see the whole mountain and today it had darkened from pale purple to an angry grey. A storm was gathering.

  As they navigated the boat through the rocky outcrops, Jack looked back over his shoulder and admired the lines of Pip’s tanned legs, her strong thighs as she bent down looking for clams in the sandy slurry. She was wearing faded denim cutoffs and one of his dark green work shirts paired with an old grey polar fleece to brace against the wind whipping across the top of the water. Despite the old clothes and diminishing light, Pip was luminous.

  Taj was watching Pip demonstrate how to place the corer into the sediment. From this distance it looked like a leftover bit of grey plastic irrigation piping but it had an intricate pull and had to be placed at a precise depth. Laughter carried across the water surface as Taj attempted to fill a mesh bag and missed. When the last bag was filled and dropped into a twenty-litre plastic drum, Pip gave Taj a thumbs up and then stood and watched her walk to shore. Once ashore, Taj waved goodbye to Pip before getting into her car with the drum and driving off.

  When Pip caught sight of Jack, she grinned and gave him an enthusiastic wave using both arms.

  ‘Hold the boat for a minute,’ said Jack as he jumped overboard, dashed across the flats to Pip and planted a sandy kiss on her lips.

  Pip’s nose was icy, as usual. She had no circulation at the tip. Jack reached out and gave it a rub before he snatched his navy woollen fishing beanie off his head and gently tugged it onto hers. Jack tucked in the strands of auburn hair whipping against her face. Pip lifted her green eyes to meet his and thanked him with a happy peck on the lips. The splash of freckles across her forehead, nose and cheeks grew every summer. Each year she joked this would be the one where they merged. He placed both thumb
s on the bridge of her nose and ran them across the constellation of freckles on her cheeks, then under her eyes, where dark rings and uncertainty had crept in. He wished he could wipe them away with a swish of his finger. Instead, Jack breathed in Pip’s scent of mud, eucalyptus and sea salt, placed both hands on her sturdy shoulders and gave her an affectionate squeeze.

  ‘You’re frozen. You should go up to the house with Megs. Have a hot bath.’

  ‘I’m fine. I forgot how it takes a while to get the knack of the corer. Taj nailed it though. She’s even taken some samples back to analyse for me, which is nice.’

  ‘Well, you have been out here helping her for two hours on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ Pip wrinkled her nose in confusion.

  ‘I’m just saying, you’ve also been really nice to her. Especially when you could have stayed in bed this morning with me!’

  Pip tipped her head back and the sun lit up the freckles across her nose. ‘Sure.’ Her voice had developed a slight edge. ‘Well, the samples needed to be done this week. Sorry it didn’t fit your schedule.’ She gave him a tight smile. ‘I’m going to get some clams for dinner. See you back at the house.’ She picked up her red bucket and walked away from him—strong shoulders slumped—across the mudflats.

  She looked tired, Jack thought. She needed a break. That was why he’d booked their working holiday—he’d assumed she would be thrilled. It would do her the world of good. And you couldn’t get more romantic than Italy. He was really looking forward to exploring the region around Lucca with Pip, but she always sighed, changed the topic and left the room when he brought it up. He was trying to make this buyout possible—secure their future. Why wasn’t she more excited?

  It was Jack’s dream to buy Ashfield House and the vineyard with Pip. He’d promised to wait until they were married, Pip had finished her thesis and found work. But this surprise offer from the neighbours meant they had to make the call to buy out his parents now. His hardworking mother, Sarah, had wrung her hands as she told them the news. She’d asked Jack and Pip to ‘just think about it’. With the money from the property’s sale, the Rodgers could perhaps help Jack and Pip make a start somewhere else.

  Max—tall and broad—took up most of the cottage living room as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. ‘Son …’ He shook his balding head and narrowed his eyes with concern. ‘I know you and Pip want to buy us out. And we were prepared to wait.’ He sighed. ‘But this offer—Nicko’s had a look at it …’

  ‘Fantastic,’ said Jack. ‘And what does my expert big brother think, perched in his fancy office on the other side of the world? I’d love to know.’

  It turned out the vineyard consortium planned to convert Ashfield House into a luxury boutique hotel with a marble-lined bistro and wine-tasting room. Pip and Jack just didn’t have the kind of capital to rival such an offer—how could they compete?

  So Jack needed to act quickly to make changes. Find some finance. That meant a trip to Tuscany to study how they harvested and crushed the grapes, how long they left the purple skins in the tanks to give the deep crimson hues in the glass, how different yeasts could bring out certain flavours. When they took over Ashfield House, he hoped his blend of innovation and old-school Tuscan winemaking techniques would make it sing in the bottle. Better wine. More profit.

  How else was he going to sort the finance without his brother’s sticky fingers all over it?

  ‘You jump in first, mate, while I hold it.’ Will was standing still with the boat propped against his thigh as Jack pulled himself into the silver dinghy. Jack waited until Will settled into the bow before he took off, skimming the boat over the chop. He glanced back at Pip, who was crouching down studying the murky pockmarked sand, poking it with a piece of gnarly driftwood. It made a change from the usual corer she lugged around. Her work and study schedule was as inflexible as the tides, but since she had finished writing up the first part of her thesis she had grown restless. He often heard her pacing the short length of the cottage hallway in the middle of the night when she assumed he was asleep. Or she would roll away from him in bed, pretending to be asleep, when her sharp shallow breathing told him otherwise. She could do with a holiday, that was for sure. He couldn’t put his finger on why she looked surprised—and a little cross, to be honest—when he told her about the Italy trip.

  Jack grinned at Will, who was sorting out the rods and checking the tackle. ‘Better wait until we nudge around the corner, Will. Don’t want to put a hook through one of those fancy hands of yours, do we?’ He revved the engine some more to prove the point.

  ‘Nothing fancy about my hands, Jack. Honest day’s work!’

  ‘Ha! Work? Built that sandpit yet? Chloé’s going to have her licence at this rate. Didn’t Megs want the garden finished before she was born?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’ Will laughed. ‘No rush.’

  ‘Yeah, right. Hands like white cushions. Never seen dirt in their life.’

  ‘I’ll take that as a compliment and I’ll clean the squid. Okay?’

  ‘Aye, aye, Doctor! Hope you do a better job on your patients—’

  His sentence was whipped away by a gust of wind. Jack took another deep breath, braced himself against the stiff breeze and made a beeline for the open water. He’d never heard Pip groan about sunburn, sleet or icy winds—she never even slept in. Not once. He needed to harden up. Jack had lost count of the mornings Pip sprang out of bed before dawn to beat the tide along this stretch. She dressed for the weather—a seven-millimetre wetsuit, hood and booties in winter and a full skinsuit in summer so her fair skin didn’t burn in the harsh Tasmanian sun.

  He’d loved it during Pip’s fieldwork when she turned up at the cottage well after dusk with a bucket of clams or pipis for dinner—or, if he was lucky, some of the small local oysters or blue mussels. Occasionally she’d dive for abalone at her ‘secret site’ on a rocky outcrop in the bay, but mostly she didn’t like to disturb them. Said the poachers would be all over it if she gave the position away. She’d bash the abalone meat with his hammer and slice it so thin you could see your hand through it before giving it a quick sizzle on his camping hotplate and finishing it with a squeeze of lemon. Magic. She did the same with the oversized scallops when they were in season after Easter—minus the bashing.

  They’d down a couple of beers or ciders with a feed, sitting on the wooden deck overlooking the vineyard. Pip would talk at bullet speed, reflecting on her samples, speculating on outcomes. Ask his opinion. She’d throw her head back and laugh deep from her belly as they’d shoot the breeze and he’d try to pronounce the names of different intertidal animals. Polychaete worms. Anapella cycladea.

  These last few months in the chemistry lab had seemed to sap all her energy though. Just last night she snapped at him for offering feedback on the organic carbon results. He grilled a steak while she was hunched over the kitchen table analysing data, ignoring him. When he’d first built the table Pip had laughed and said it was way, way too big for the tiny cottage kitchen. Now it was her favourite spot to work—she’d staked her claim with a waterglass of rosemary picked from his mum’s vegetable garden.

  Since she’d gone from fieldwork to lab work, and—he grimaced—especially since she’d agreed to the wedding date, there’d been no more lazy nights. She was determined to wrap up her thesis before the wedding—despite these problems with the data and the extra workload it had created. Why not just submit the thesis after the wedding?

  He took a breath. It was her degree. They’d get married in the end. Right? And look, it was nearly winter—maybe he was just taking it all too personally? As soon as the sun came back, so would the weekends hiking the ridge to Wineglass Bay, pitching the tent and cheeky midnight skinny-dips.

  He looked back over to where Pip stood, framed by the light hitting the cliff.

  ‘You right, mate?’ Will yelled above the wind. ‘You zoned out there for a minute. I thought it was Megs and I who
were struggling. Lack of sleep and all that. Wait till you guys have a baby.’

  ‘Don’t hold your breath, mate. Pip’s hoping for a research gig and I’ll be flat chat next year in the vineyard. Building a winery. Looks like we’ll both have to take on a lot more projects than we planned for if we want to make Ashfield House work. My bloody brother keeps telling Mum and Dad to accept this offer.’

  ‘So Nicko’s not coming home?’

  ‘You kidding? Now he’s got the corner office at the great Goldman Sachs you think he wants to get his hands dirty?’

  ‘Like me, you mean?’

  ‘Ha. No, mate. At least you try! Nicko’s in New York for good. Besides, Wei would never move out here.’ Jack snorted. Now his big brother had a green card and glamorous local lawyer Wei Cohen as his partner there’d be no homecoming.

  Jack continued, raising his voice above the wind and the revving motor. ‘He sent me this text last night …’ He fished his mobile out of his back pocket and scrolled through the messages until he found the one he was looking for. ‘Jack, mate. You’re crazy! I talked to Mum and Dad and told them the offer is too good. Just buy yourself another patch of dirt. I’ll help sort you. Call me.’

  Will grimaced. ‘That’s a bit rough. I mean, I remember when you planted those vines—what? Seven, eight years ago?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Took some convincing for the old man to convert from grazing to pinot noir and chardonnay. I mean, he’d never even heard of sangiovese.’ He gave a rueful smile. ‘I know nothing’s ever certain, but I always thought that I—we’d—have a shot at buying them out.’