Ryan chuckled and moved the stake a foot to the right, but when he tried to pound it in, he met something solid again. The same happened when he tried to place it a foot forward from the original point.
“There’s something under here,” he said, giving up on the stake and crouching to feel the ground.
Graeme did the same, suspicion welling up in him. “I could feel it when we were walking this way,” he said. “I shouldn’t have dismissed it in such a hurry.”
He and Ryan felt the ground, tugging at the grass and weeds in a few places and generally working together to solve the mystery of what was in the ground under their feet. Everywhere they pulled up the grass and a few inches of the dirt under it, they were met with stone. Not jagged, natural stone, though. Bit by bit, they uncovered smooth stones of the sort that had been used to build things. Things like houses. Some of it was coated with blackened soot.
“You know, I’m suddenly remembering what I’ve seen in old drawings,” Ryan said at one point, as he dug a bit deeper into the dirt between them.
“What was that?” Graeme asked.
Ryan’s expression contorted for a moment, then he pulled a strangely shaped bit of pottery from the ground. It looked like part of the handle and side of a teacup. “There was a gamekeeper’s cottage out here,” he said. “It burnt down after being struck by lightning in the early nineteenth century.”
“Oh,” Graeme said, twin feelings of interest and disappointment filling him. It was always interesting to find something unexpected in the ground, but not in the spot where he’d planned to build a garden. “I can’t just dig through this and plant a garden here if this is a site of archeological interest,” he said, sitting back with a sigh. “This could throw a spanner in the works of everything.”
THREE
So much forRyan’s fantasies of a hot summer fling with the adorable gardener. Graeme was married, or at least he had been. It was always the beautiful, sweet ones who succumbed to the curse of heterosexuality, ruining things for the rest of them.
It was probably better in the long run. Ryan had his fall collection and the future of his as-yet imaginary fashion house to think about. As surprisingly nice as it had been to work side by side with Graeme out in the June sun, using his muscles and getting dirty as they dug out the kitchen garden beds, it wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing. He was supposed to be sketching and thinking and studying the most innovative new designs that were walking the runways of the world.
But he couldn’t stop himself.
“So that’s why we should wait,” Graeme explained to Ryan’s mum and dad, and a few other family members the day after the discovery of the old foundation. Ryan stood by his side, nodding at everything he’d said like he understood what Graeme was talking about. “You never know with these old ruins. Sometimes they’re nothing. Sometimes they hold hidden dangers. And every once in a while, they change history.”
“Like the discovery of Richard the Third’s tomb under that car park,” Early said, their expression lit with excitement. “You never know who could be buried on the grounds of Hawthorne House.”
“If anyone is buried here,” Robbie said with a smirk, “it’s probably some house party guest who had too much port and wandered off in the dead of night.”
“That could be truer than you think,” Robert said with a laugh. “If I remember rightly, there was a house party here sometime in the late eighteen-thirties, and the gamekeeper’s lodge burned down. I don’t remember how or why exactly.”
“It was lightning, wasn’t it?” Ryan asked.
“Could have been.” Robert nodded.
“Was anyone important staying there at the time?” Early asked.
“I have no idea,” Robert said.
“Whatever the case,” Graeme said, rubbing his stubbly chin, his expression thoughtful, “I’d feel more comfortable continuing with the plan for the walking garden after someone official has taken a look at the area. I can work on all the other parts of the garden in the meantime.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” Robert said.
“I could make a trip into London, to The Chameleon Club, to see if Casper Penhurst is around,” Ryan offered, eager to do whatever he could to help Graeme and make him happy, even though he was straight. “If anyone would know what to do about ruins in the backyard, it would be Casper.”
“That would be great,” Graeme said with a relieved smile.
Ryan didn’t want to think too much about how that soft, slightly adoring smile made him feel. He didn’t want to think about it in the moment, and he didn’t want to think about it that night, when he was trying to go to sleep. Reflecting back on the last couple days he’d just spent with Graeme kept him uphalf the night, in more ways than one. Ryan had had crushes on straight men before, but it had never ended well. He needed to take action to end his warm, fuzzy feelings for Graeme before they got the best of him.
The only way to do that was to throw himself into the task of finding someone to take a look at the ruins. The next morning, he tried to be good and spend a few hours working, but his attempts to sketch out design ideas turned into a silly attempt to draw Graeme’s face from memory. Fortunately for him, he was terrible at drawing that sort of life detail. No one who might have found the sketch would have had the first clue who it was supposed to be.
He set out for London with a plan to get to The Chameleon Club in time for lunch. There was no guarantee Casper would be there, but since the university where he taught was just on the other side of Hyde Park and the food at the club was much better than that in the faculty dining room, or so Casper had said before, there was a fair chance Ryan would run into him.
Ryan was in luck.
“You dug up an old outbuilding in Hawthorne House’s gardens while trying to plant flowers?” Casper asked, all enthusiasm and charm as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Well, we started to dig things up,” Ryan reported as he ate a particularly good ham sandwich at one of the many large tables scattered through the club’s ballroom-cum-dining room. “I was driving in a boundary stake, actually. We don’t want to go any further until we have someone take a look at what might be there.”
