CHAPTER 1
Sussex, EnglandSummer 1808
The problem with secrets, Clara Whitfield had discovered at the tender age of ten, was that they were only fun if you had someone to share them with. Fortunately, she had Gabriel Hale, who was excellent at keeping secrets, terrible at climbing walls, and currently stuck halfway up the garden gate In a state of total confusion.
"You're doing it wrong," she informed him, hands on her hips in unconscious imitation of her governess. "You've got to use the crossbar as a foothold, not a chin rest."
"I'm not using it as a…" Gabriel's protest was cut short as his foot slipped, sending him tumbling backward into the herbaceous border with a crash that likely alerted half of Sussex to their whereabouts. A shower of lavender petals erupted around him like purple snowflakes.
"Graceful," Clara observed. "Very duke-like."
"Be silent!" Gabriel muttered, extracting himself from what had once been a perfectly decent herb garden. His dark hair now stuck up at odd angles, decorated with bits of rosemary and what appeared to be an entire spider web. "And I'm not going to be duke for ages and ages. Father's only two and forty."
"Two and forty is ancient," Clara said with the confidence of someone for whom twenty seemed impossibly far away. "Mygrandmother's five and forty and she can barely remember where she puts her spectacles."
"That's because she refuses to wear them, not because she's ancient."
“It amounts to the same thing." Clara plucked a sprig of lavender from his hair. "You smell like my mother's linen closet now."
"Brilliant…Precisely what a young gentleman destined for the dukedom requires, to carry the sweet, fresh scent of fine linens.” He made a face that caused Clara to giggle. "Come along, I wish to show you something brilliant I learned from the gardener."
This was how their Tuesdays and Thursdays went or better yet, for the past two years, ever since Gabriel had discovered Clara reading in the abandoned garden that sat between their estates, and instead of running off to tell the adults like any proper heir should have done, had sat down and asked what the book she was reading contained.
“It concerns a gentlewoman who was responsible for her husband's untimely demise, administered by a noxious draught.”
"That's clever. I'd use pudding. No one suspects pudding.” From that point on, they met there at the very same place they had met, religiously, weather permitting and sometimes weather not permitting, because as Gabriel said, “What is the use of childhood, pray tell, if we are to be forever mindful of the mud?”
He led her to the far corner of the garden where the sun filtered through in lazy patterns, past the fountain they'd tried to fix the month before, which still leaked, around the apple tree with their initials carved with great care into the trunk, to stand before a withered rose bush.
“This is what you wished show me?" Clara wrinkled her nose. “The poor thing has quite faded,”
“It is quite alive, but it is dormant, there is a difference.”
“Indeed!”
Gabriel dropped to his knees beside the plant, producing various implements from his pockets like a magician with a very specific interest in horticulture. "Mr. Morton showed me this yesterday. It's called grafting. You take a piece from one plant and attach it to another, and if you do it correctly, they grow together into something new."
“What, pray tell, if you fail to execute the task correctly?”
“Then, I will be guilty of sending this poor specimen to an untimely grave and the rites of burial must be observed. I've already composed a eulogy should there be need.”
Clara knelt beside him, immediately acquiring grass stains on her second-best dress which had been destroyed in what they referred to as The Blackberry Incident and never spoke of “What words of praise and remembrance are to be spoken?”
"Here lies Rose Bush. It spent its last dying breath in the name of science, a most commendable quality, when one considers the matter fully.
"Very moving. I am quite sure its family will be comforted."
Gabriel handed her a cutting from another rose, this one healthy and green with promising buds. "You do it. You've got steadier hands."
"That's because I don't spend my all my morning’s sword fighting with the fire irons."
"That was one time!"
"Three times. I've been counting."
She took the knife he offered, their fingers brushing in a way that made her feel oddly warm, though she attributed it to the sunshine. Following his instructions, she made a careful diagonal cut in the rootstock, then fitted the new cutting against it.
"Now we wrap it," Gabriel said, producing twine. “In the fashion of a dressing for a wound.”
