Drake nodded calmly and took a bite. Their eyes met over the crusty slice and she saw that his news was true. ‘Oh! This is wonderful news!’ she exclaimed. Drake saw the years fall from her features and he was able to glimpse the young woman she had once been before widowhood had taken its toll. He was pleased his news had been the cause of the change.
‘Your father would have been so proud.’
‘He would have been prouder if I had followed in his footsteps.’
His mother laughed. ‘I think even your father knew you would never make a preacher.’
They fell into silence as they both thought of him. Richard Vennor had been a kindly man, who often remarked that prudence, sobriety and a calling from God in his darkest hour, set him on the path to Methodism. Life could be wicked, he had often warned. His cousin was proof. Anne had been abandoned to bear an illegitimate child alone. The circumstance of Anne’s eventual demise was pitiful. If she had placed her faith in God and asked for forgiveness, his father had often lamented, he would have protected her and she’d have lived to a ripe age.
By the time Richard was in his mid-twenties he had become a lay preacher, walking for miles to preach the gospel in neighbouring villages. Mother estimated he took sixty services a year, weekly Sunday Schools and evening bible classes, as well as his labouring jobs. It was at such a class he had metDrake’s mother, a shy young woman who was oblivious to her own beauty, or so his father had often recalled. Drake would squirm with embarrassment, as children often do when they are confronted by their parents’ intimate teasing. At the time his mother’s fine looks were diminished by being seen through a son’s eyes. Now, sitting opposite her and a little older, he could see his father had been right. His mother could turn heads if she had a mind to, but her love for his father endured beyond his death and she would never marry again. Drake felt a frisson of surprise at the realisation that he was glad she would never replace him.
‘I will have to live there,’ Drake warned her.
His mother nodded. ‘I knew it would have to be so.’
‘It will not be easy.’
‘You knew that.’
‘Twelve hours a day, six days a week, although if something happens, frost or high winds, I will be called upon at all hours.’
‘Tell me about the training,’ she asked, folding her arms on the table and leaning forward expectantly.
‘One year as a pot boy,’ he replied, with a mouth full of bread. In answer to his mother’s raised eyebrows, he swallowed before he spoke again. ‘I will be washing pots, stoking boilers and studying at night. Then I will spend four years learning the basics of gardening in all the different areas . . . kitchen, ornamental, glasshouses.’
‘And then what?’
‘I will have to go away as a journeyman, to work on other grand estates.’
‘Go away?’
‘For only two or three years. And then I will gain a position of a head gardener. Nowhere grand at first, but in time it will come. One day they will be requesting my services. It will be my name that will go down in history as the designer of the greatestgardens in the county. I will buy you a grand house, Mother. Just like the one I saw today.’
He saw his mother’s eyes sparkle with curiosity.
‘Did you see anyone from the big house?’ she asked.
Drake thought of the fair-haired girl hiding in the bushes.
‘No.’ Drake took another bite, a large one that would take a while to eat.
‘How was Mr Timmins?’
Drake shrugged in reply.
‘Did he question you about your background?’
Drake shrugged again.
‘Drake?’
‘A bit.’
His mother got up and walked to the window to look out onto the road. ‘Does he look healthy?’
Drake laughed. ‘I don’t want him to drop dead just yet, perhaps when I am fully trained and then I can have his job.’
His mother shot him an angry look. ‘That is not what I meant.’
