‘Brilliant,’ he said after a while. Then he wheeled around, pressed his notebook to the carriage window and resumed his scribbling for the next minute and a half. She pursed her lips again and rocked onto the balls of her feet, unused to be left dallying on the pavement but equally unwilling to interrupt his presumable genius. She turned and stared through some wrought iron railings at the greenery beyond.
‘Shall we get on?’ She jumped as he appeared at her side, tucking the book into his jacket. ‘I do hope you will like the garden.’
‘I am sure I shall,’ she said automatically. It was her job to like everything people showed her, outwardly at least. ‘And I would like to ask you about my daughter’s rash.’
He turned to look at her and actually saw her, she thought. Few people did, these days. Not that she let them. ‘Of course,’ he said, clearly understanding her reticence. ‘The primary reason for your visit and paramount. But while you are here and if you have a little time, Your Grace, I would greatly appreciate your expertise in the garden. The planting is quite extraordinary.’
She jogged a little to keep up as her heart swelled with the recognition. Apparently, Kit Speckle was not a man who did things either by halves, or slowly. ‘It would be my pleasure,’ she said. ‘Is Doctor Herbert here?’ she remembered the sour, unpleasant doctor to whom Speckle was apprenticed.
‘Hopefully not,’ said Speckle. He caught himself as he pressed the latch on the gate. ‘I mean, probably not. Tuesday morning is Mayfair.’
‘Then I shall enjoy hearing from you,’ she said, relaxing a little.
‘A little of me,’ he said, leading them into an astonishing oasis of green in central London. The houses around them cast shade on the plot, but that didn’t see to have stopped Kit. Thea gawked around her at the layer upon layer of planting, neat rows, everything ordered, healthy and waiting to be explored. ‘But mostly our ridiculously talented gardener, Frankie.’
Thea immediately looked forward to meeting Frankie. She knew how important skilled gardeners were – that they made the difference between success and failure. She followed Speckle across neat paving edged with bricks, brushed past lush asparagus, artichokes, mustard, garlic, nettles and St John’s wort and she thought how talented this one must be to cultivate so much in so small a space. She wondered who he trained with, and how she could drag Elton to this standard. If it was even possible. Early on in her marriage, when she still had enthusiasm and hope for her growing and Martha was still in touch, she had written to Mr Constable in the East Riding of Yorkshire and even tried sending Elton on a tour to improve his knowledge. She had brought in her father’s gardener, Scip, to enthuse him, but all he wanted to do was blousy, colourful plants. He wasn’t interested in the rare botanicals at all. Passionate gardeners were worth their weight in gold, she had realised.
‘Aha,’ said Speckle, making for a glasshouse about sixteen feet square that leaned against an external wall. A girl with a peaked, felt cap, a grubby skirt and a shock of red hair exited its door as they were approaching. She looked like she needed a good meal. And a wash.
‘Here we are,’ said Speckle to Thea.
‘A pleasure.’ Thea greeted the girl absent-mindedly as she looked around herself. ‘Lovely glasshouse.’
‘I promised to introduce you to our talented gardener,’ said Speckle, a crinkle briefly appearing in his smooth brows.
‘You did,’ said Thea, looking around. ‘Will he be along?’ She looked at Speckle, who looked at the girl and seemed to hold his breath. Then Thea looked at the girl, who was in the midst of an eye roll of proportions Thea had never witnessed. With a flush she felt right from her toes to her ears, Thea realised her mistake. ‘Oh!’ she said a little too loudly, as the girl she now supposed to be Frankie – blasted androgynous names – leaned back on the glasshouse wall to regard Thea with arms crossed and a not-at-all disguised derision. The garden seemed suddenly devoid of any noise or distraction, as if even the birds had paused to witness Thea’s discomfort. She shifted her weight, trying to remain outwardly duchess while squirming inwardly. After a while, she decided that she better say something else.
‘What a pleasure to make your acquaintance,’ she tried. It came out terribly snootily, as it often did when she was nervous.
Frankie smirked and looked to Speckle, as if questioning what he was doing bringing this sort of useless high society into her garden. Thea’s stomach dipped – did she not even fit in with the enthusiasts now?
‘Frankie is both the artist and the scientist of this garden,’ said Speckle, looking between them, clearly hoping to diffuse the tension. ‘She came as a girl collecting apples and never left.’ That couldn’t have been too long, thought Thea. Frankie couldn’t have been above nineteen, nine years younger than Thea, but she had the air of someone who had needed to get on with life just to survive. She was small, maybe only a little above five feet, but she was wiry and watched Thea with an intense amusement that Thea found a little unnerving.
‘That sounds a good run of work,’ said Thea, trying to sound down to earth and failing. ‘Doctor Herbert must be a good employer?’
Frankie snorted, pushed off the wall with a bent leg and made for the glasshouse. ‘Kit said you’d be wantin’ to see the propagation setup?’ The pause was almost imperceptible before she followed with, ‘duchess.’
‘Ah, it’s, Your Grace…’ said Speckle, beginning to follow Frankie and looking nervously between the ladies.
Frankie turned back and looked Thea up and down. ‘Sure it is,’ she said, and strode through the door.
The glasshouse was packed, even at this time of year when Thea would have expected to see most things outside for the end of the summer. Thea tried to see everything at the same time as attempting to make up for her apparent disregard of women in traditionally male roles. She chose being over-the-top interested and complimentary.
Frankie’s veneer of politeness was intact, but thin. It was the kind of politeness that Thea recognised in someone speaking to a duchess, when they knew deference was necessary but didn’t have any truck with rank. Thea actually didn’t mind – the title still sat uncomfortably on her, like an ill-fitting coat. Made of bees.
‘What are all these?’ she asked, pointing at hundreds of shallow terracotta pots filled with an assortment of small sticks. She recognised them as cuttings but wasn’t sure why there were so many in September. ‘New specimens?’
‘The perennials that are tender, my lady,’ said Frankie in her thick town accent, leaning forward and plucking a leaf that showed the first signs of blackening. Thea saw Speckle lookto the heavens at Frankie’s second incorrect address. She just listened. ‘There’s not much space,’ went on Frankie, ‘so I can’t bring the whole plant inside like you can in them big country houses. They overwinter as small plants under glass and then go out with more vigour in the spring.’
‘And they still reach a reasonable size?’ asked Thea, her mind calculating how much space they could save in the greenhouses at Hawkdean if they applied this method.
‘Just as big as the mature plants, Your Ladyness.’ Out of the corner of her eye Thea thought she saw Speckle close his eyes, but Frankie went on. ‘They’re growing out of new wood, not old.’
Thea looked sideways at Frankie as the gardener leaned forward and rotated a pot to prevent the leaves of two cuttings from touching. The tendons in her forearm flexed – a forearm that was clearly used to demanding, physical work and had no meat on it at all. Two thoughts hit Thea’s brain at once – that she really must read up on how muscle connected to bone before Dr Withering’s next class as she hadn’t followed that at all, and another, more surprising thought that hadn’t happened to her since Martha left and didn’t seem to be limited to her brain.
‘I see,’ she said, still looking at the forearm.
‘So they’re generally more lush,’ said Frankie, glancing at her, and then back at the sand bed full of potential. ‘They’ve a covering of glass until they’ve struck their first roots, then it comes off to stop any damping off. After that they get misted in the day to stop ‘em drying, then they lie quiet through the winter if you keep the frost off.’
