Chapter Five
“DO you think that’s wise?” Brad asked tightly. “I don’t mean to criticize, but do you really think you should let a strange man move into your house?”
“He isn’t strange, remember?” Eden said, her back to Brad so he wouldn’t see her smile. “Your friends at the police station ran a check on him. I was told that Jared McBride is a full-fledged hero. Considering that I was his assailant I thought that the least I could do was put him into a place where I could take care of him.” She turned to look at Brad, batting her mascaraed lashes. “Did I do wrong?”
Brad started to answer, then grinned. “Am I right in thinking that you’re telling me to mind my own business and that it’s your house.”
“More or less,” she said, pleased that he understood. She unwrapped the pecan-encrusted trout from the foil packages that Brad had brought from Soundside, the seafood restaurant that was steps from his office.
When Brad took plates out of the glass-doored cabinet, Eden noted that he seemed to know where everything was. He said he’d often visited Mrs. Farrington, but that they’d never become true friends; yet he seemed to have visited often enough that he knew his way around the house well. Had he been telling the truth?
He carried the dishes into the dining room and set the table. “So how long is McBride staying?”
Eden ignored his question as she put the fish onto the plates. She’d steamed green beans and made a salad. “Tell me everything that’s happened in Arundel since I left here twenty-two years ago. Who got married, who died, who had babies? Any scandals?”
It took Brad a few moments to get his mind off the man Eden had invited into her home, but when he did, she found that he was a wonderful storyteller. As far as she could tell, Arundel hadn’t changed much. But then, its residents fought hard against change. When Wal-Mart wanted to put in a store on the outskirts, the company met with so much protest that they slunk away in silence. The residents were quite willing to drive a hundred miles to buy goods, just so their pretty town wouldn’t be polluted with ugly, modern stores. Brad’s three last names were an example of the residents’ dislike of change. All of his names came from the founding families of Arundel. Mrs. Farrington told Eden that there were certain names that were all over Arundel, on the street signs, on the buildings, on the businesses. The families had started the town and, for the most part, had never left it. The children still carried the old names, and they still left for college, but they returned to Arundel with spouses from good families to live in the family home, then bear children who were given three last names. Anywhere else it might be unusual to meet a girl named Haughton or Pembroke, but not in Arundel. The names were a permanent calling card, a way to let people know who they were and where they fit into history. Some people thought the whole idea was pretentious and snobbish, but others swooned over the historic continuity, which was so rare in the United States.
As Eden looked at Brad across the table, she thought how well he fit into the old house. It was as though he was a reincarnation of his ancestors who had often visited the place and had twice married into the Farrington family. When he poured her a glass of wine, she smiled at him and he smiled back. She felt comfortable with him.
“Okay,” Brad said, “I know I’m too pushy and too forward, and I know that I’ve been taking liberties with you, but you have to realize how much Mrs. Farrington talked about you.”
“Did she?” Eden said, smiling. “I think I missed her every day I was away from her.”
“I don’t know how! She was a demanding old woman. I can’t tell you how many times she made me mow her lawn! I wasted two Saturdays a month here behind that hideous old push mower of hers. I used to…” He stopped and smiled at Eden. “If I hadn’t had Alice Augusta Farrington while my wife was ill, I think I might have gone insane. My wife took nearly three years to die.” He looked down at his plate, then back up at Eden. “In this light, at this table, I can almost see her, Mrs. Farrington, I mean. There are things about you that remind me of her.”
When he pushed his food around on his plate, Eden felt that he had something to say but was afraid to say it. Silently, she waited for him to go on.
“You’ll hear stories about me,” he said softly.
“Will they be worse than the ones about me?”
“No,” he said, then grinned and took a big bite of his fish. “After what you did to McBride, this town will have gossip for the next ten years. You’re going to beat our resident clairvoyant for causing talk.”
“A clairvoyant? Great! I can have my fortune told. Does this mean that Arundel is becoming New Age?”
“Far from it. She’s a Pembroke.”
“Ah,” Eden said. That explained everything. While no one in Arundel would put up with eccentricity from an outsider, they tolerated pretty much anything from one of their own. “So tell me about your wife,” she said.
“We weren’t exactly a match made in heaven. You’re going to hear that. We’d already started divorce proceedings when she told me she had cancer.”
“But you stayed with her.”
“Yes, I did. I wasn’t faithful, though. You’ll hear that too. There was a woman…But it didn’t last. After my wife died, I realized that I didn’t want anything to do with her, not long-term, anyway. Mrs. Farrington made me see that.”
“Really? But Mrs. Farrington was such a proponent of extramarital sex.”
“Yeah, my grandfather and my great-uncle.” Brad grinned. “But in between the Willow Stories, as I came to think of them, Mrs. Farrington told me about you.”
Eden was flattered and curious. “What could she have told you about me?”
“What you liked to eat, what you wore, what you were good at, what you couldn’t do. What interested you, what didn’t. You name it and she told me about it. She said you liked the garden more than the house, so that’s why she went to all the trouble of renovating this old house, but left the gardens a mess for you to have the pleasure of cleaning up.”
Eden smiled. “I can hardly wait to get my hands on them. Know any muscular teenage boys who need summer jobs?”
“At least twenty of them. Mind if I help?”
“Don’t tell me you’re a gardener?”
“More or less. Well, actually, less. But I can dig holes with the best of them.”
His look was so intense that Eden looked away for a moment. He seemed to want her to comment on what he’d told her about himself. “Brad, you don’t have to confess your past sins to me,” she said. “Really, at my age, I’ve committed a few of my own.”
“You?” he said, one eyebrow raised. “What possible sins have you committed? According to Mrs. Farrington you were an angel come to earth.”
“Didn’t she tell you that I was lazy and daydreamy and all the other things that she complained about me?”
“She never said a bad word about you.” His eyes were twinkling, and Eden was enjoying his teasing. “I got the impression that you worked nonstop and that you never said an unkind word about anyone in your life.”
“She didn’t tell you about all the horrible things I said about the youngest Camden boy? He decided he was going to marry me.”
Brad groaned. “I know him well. Doing you a favor, was he?”
“Oh, yes. I think he had an idea that Mrs. Farrington would leave me the house, and he wanted it. There weren’t enough old Camden houses for him to have one. I think he thought he’d die if he had to live in a new brick house. Whatever happened to that boy?”
“He moved up north where he got a Yankee wife, but when his brother had financial reverses, he moved back home. He lives in the Camden-Minton house now. He’s good with money. He must have figured out that Mrs. Farrington couldn’t leave the house to her son.”
“Did everyone in town know about her son? About what he did?”
“Sure. We know about each other.”
Eden looked down at her wineglass to hide her smile. To someone who’d never lived in Arundel, what Brad had just said was impossibly pompous. He was a member of a society that “knew” the others in that society. They would have known about Mrs. Farrington’s son, but they would still have accepted him into their houses because he was one of them. But if an outsider had come into town and done what Alester Farrington had tried to do, they might have hanged him.
“When Mrs. Farrington died, you lost one of your families,” Eden said, smiling at him. She had lived too many places and seen too much in her life to dislike “family” in any form. To her mind, that’s what these people in Arundel were: a large family with a very long history.
“Yes, but as Mrs. Farrington said to me, perhaps it was for the better. Many bad things had happened in the Farrington family. She was of the old school and believed there was a bad ‘strain,’ as she called it, in her family. Genetics.”
Eden started to say that she probably knew more about the Farrington family than anyone else on earth, since she’d spent years reading about them, but she said nothing. And she was tempted to tell him about her book, but again, decided to say nothing.
“What I really want to say is that if I seem a bit too familiar I ask your forgiveness. It’s just that I feel as though I’ve known you for a long time. I know that we both share a fondness for cheesecake and that we both dislike hollyhocks. I know that you like rabbits but don’t like dogs much. By the way, I own three dogs, all of them well mannered and polite, I might add. I know you aren’t married, that you’re beautiful, talented, and smart, and with those things added to owning this big house, you’re going to have a lot of male interest. I’m concerned that in a sense of everything being fair in love and war, that half a dozen people will rush to tell you all about how horrible I was while my wife was dying.”
“Were you horrible?” Eden asked softly.
“No. I stayed with her, but I didn’t love her. As I said, we’d already filed for divorce. I spent a lot of time here in this house during those years. I think I needed someone as bossy as Mrs. Farrington so I wouldn’t have to think. It was the worst time of my life.” He leaned back in his chair, and after a moment, he smiled. “Now that I’ve told you my deepest, darkest secret, what about your life? And I know about what happened to you to give you your daughter, so that doesn’t count.”
More questions, Eden thought. “Of course Mrs. Farrington would have told you about that,” she said grimly. “But then I’m sure it was all over town from years before.”
“Yes, she told all of us, but she did so because she didn’t want people thinking you were just some hot pants teenager who’d fooled around with her boyfriend. She wanted people to understand.” He smiled at her. “All of us did understand. I don’t think anyone was discourteous to you while you were here, were they?”
“No,” Eden said, looking at him. She realized that Mrs. Farrington had told the “family” about Eden and the word was sent out that, in spite of her unmarried-and-pregnant state, she was to be treated kindly, not snubbed. Even though Brad had not been in Arundel during those years, he included himself in the “we” of the people who understood.
Eden was about to say more when a movement at the doorway caught her eye. It was just a flash, then it was gone. A mouse? she wondered. But no, she didn’t think so.
“How about if we take our wine outside?” Brad asked. “I’d like to see that lawn I worked so hard on, and maybe you could tell me of your garden plans.”
“I haven’t had time to really look at the outside,” she said, thinking that the only time she’d been out was when she’d gone to McBride’s house to take him soup. And with the thought of that man she knew what she’d seen in the doorway: McBride’s foot. He was just outside the door, listening to her and Brad. How long had he been there? And, more important, why was he there? Just old-fashioned snooping? Prurient interest? Was that all it had been when he’d been snooping through her house at night?
“Yes!” Eden said. “Let’s go outside.” She said this too loud and too fast. Part of her wanted to let McBride know that she knew he was there. She’d like to see his face when she caught him!
As she pushed away from the table, she glanced at the glass-doored cabinet and saw McBride’s reflection in the glass. He didn’t look guilty or embarrassed, just gave her a little nod and a smile, acknowledging that she’d seen him.
Her first instinct was to confront him, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to get Brad involved in this. She would deal with McBride on her own.
Standing, Eden tucked her arm in Brad’s, and they left the house with their full wineglasses. Brad was telling her about the fenced garden that Eden had designed so many years ago, but it was difficult for her to concentrate on what he was saying. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she realized that Brad knew a great deal more about gardening and about Mrs. Farrington than he’d let on. Something he said made her give him her attention. “What did you say?”
Brad chuckled. “Didn’t think I knew about that, did you? I said that I helped Mrs. Farrington pull the silver out of the floors and the walls. By that I mean that I used the crowbar and she criticized. I told you she made me work like a slave. Before the renovation could begin, she made me help clean out the inside of the walls and the floors. I must say that you ladies certainly did a lot of work when you put all those in there.”
“And that’s when you found the Paul Revere teapot.”
“Not me, but yes, that’s when it was found,” Brad said. “I was the one who arranged the sale for her.”
Eden looked at him. “I think she must have cared a great deal about you if she trusted you with a Farrington heirloom.”
He leaned toward her so close that his lips were near her ear. “But she wouldn’t show me what’s buried in the garden. She told me about what you two had done, but she also said that whether or not those things were dug up was up to you.”
Eden had to laugh. She was beginning to like this man a lot. Perhaps even beginning to trust him. Maybe she should tell him about McBride’s snooping. Maybe Brad would go in there and beat him up for her. She didn’t care if McBride was bleeding from every orifice, after Brad left she was going to tell McBride to get out of her house. Spying on her! Of all the ungrateful—“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
Brad was looking at her. “You suddenly seem distracted. And why do you keep looking at the house?”
“I saw someone at the window. I’m sure it was only Mr. McBride.”
“I really do wish you hadn’t moved him into your house.”
“I didn’t. The invitation was until he recovered from the wounds I gave him.” Her tone let him know that it wasn’t any of his business. She changed the subject. “Now, tell me, what would you do with this garden?” It was growing dark; the warm air felt wonderful. She could smell the freshwater creek down the hill, and the night was so quiet that she was sure she could hear fish jumping.
They stopped when they reached the fenced garden. Many years ago, not long after Melissa was born, Eden had found some garden plans tucked inside a book. They were just crude sketches, but the paper was so old it had intrigued her. The book holding the papers was from the 1930s, but the drawings looked much older.
Mrs. Farrington had smiled when Eden showed them to her and said that her father had searched for those drawings for years. They were the original garden plans, drawn by Josiah Alester Farrington in 1720 when the house was built. Her father said the garden had stayed intact until the 1840s, when his grandfather had torn them up and put in what were called “carpet beds,” designs created with annuals. The colorful gardens had been all the rage then but were extremely labor intensive. During the First World War, most of the grounds had been plowed up and put to cotton. After the war, paths were mowed through the weeds, and sometimes an industrious wife would put in a patch of vegetables and flowers, but with the decline in the family fortune, the gardens were mostly left on their own.
By the time Eden arrived, the gardens were a shadow of what they once were. After Melissa was born and Eden found the original eighteenth-century plan, it was Mrs. Farrington who suggested that she restore the gardens. Eden was young and restless, and Melissa was a good baby, so Eden had put her unused brain to studying the principles behind eighteenth-century gardening. After she’d nearly memorized the contents of the three books Mrs. Farrington owned, the woman had called the owner of the little bookstore in Arundel and told her to order “whatever Williamsburg had.” When eleven brand-new books had arrived and Mrs. Farrington had told Eden they were a gift for her, Eden had sat down and cried—which had embarrassed Mrs. Farrington so much that she’d left the room.
The books had been the start of what became a passion with Eden. She read, sketched, ate, and drank eighteenth-century gardening until the day she and Melissa left Arundel.
Mrs. Farrington hired Toddy. He had worked for her family during the war when he was a boy, to help put the garden in, and when Eden saw him, ancient beyond belief, skin the color of a black walnut husk, she asked Mrs. Farrington if it had been the Civil War when he’d worked for them. But Toddy surprised her. He may have been old, but his brain was sharp, and he approved of what she was doing. Together, the two of them laid out the first of Josiah Alester Farrington’s gardens.
It was fifty feet square, divided into four quarters by wide brick sidewalks. In the center was a circle containing a tall carriage lamp surrounded by a barrel full of jasmine that ran up the lamppost. Rosemary was planted at the base of the barrel, with dianthus around the edges. The four quarters of the garden were encased internally by a low boxwood hedge and externally by a three-rail cedar fence. Eden well remembered how the garden had once looked, but now it was mostly empty. A few shrubs were beginning to sprout in the early spring air, but for the most part it was a huge expanse of mulch.
“It took me over a month to clean it up,” Brad said. “It had been allowed to grow into such a tangle that I had to chainsaw my way in.”
She looked at him sharply and found that she rather liked the idea of him with a chain saw and sweat dripping off his forehead. The image aroused feelings in her that she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Brad was watching her. “Fill it,” he said succinctly, and when she said nothing, he continued. “You asked what I’d do, and I’d fill this garden with tall plants in the center and work outward. For those two sunny squares, I’d put buddleia there in the middle to draw butterflies, then I’d flank it with caryopteris, sedum, monarda, and coreopsis.”
Eden’s smile grew broader as he spoke. She hadn’t heard those words in years, not since she’d gone to New York and lived amid concrete and steel. “You do like butterflies, don’t you? What about fennel?”
He smiled broader, and it was a smile shared by gardeners. “Ah, yes, the swallowtails. I can’t forget them. But we’d have to put the fennel in pots. Too invasive.”
“Or a bottomless pot buried deep.”
“Perfect. Now, that corner is under the pecan tree, so it’s fairly shady.”
“Astilbe and pulmonaria,” she said. “Not hostas, too big.”
“Exactly. Of course you could go wild with some native orchids.”
“Orchids,” Eden said, her breath drawn in. “But no monkshood. Grandchild coming.”
“Yes,” he said. “Nothing in the deadly nightshade family. Maybe my grandson could visit.”
“You have a grandchild too?”
“Oh, yes, my daughter Camden’s son. His name is—”
Eden put up her hand. “Let me guess. Granville Braddon Something.”
“Nope,” he said, smiling. “It’s Farrington Granville Robicheaux. Robicheaux being the name of the man my daughter married.”
“Farrington,” Eden said, smiling. “Only in Arundel could that be a child’s first name. I’m glad he was a boy.” She stopped teasing. “Mrs. Farrington would be pleased. Maybe her name can be kept alive after all.” They smiled at each other and she pointed to the fourth quarter. “Not that you know anything about gardening, but what would you put there? And I warn you that if you don’t like dicentra, it’s all over between us.”
“Bleeding heart,” Brad said. “My absolute favorite. Speaking of which, Friday is the annual Shrimp Festival. Would you go with me?”
“On a date?”
“Yes. I’ll pick you up in my ’57 Chevy, take you to the festival, then later we can go to the local make-out hill.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her.
“It sounds wonderful. I’ll be ready. If only I had a poodle skirt to wear.”
“I think poodle skirts were well before your time.”
“One can only dream.” Her head came up. “Where do you live?”
“Guess,” he said, then they both laughed. The Granville house, of course. It was a big old monster of a house on the corner of Granville and Prince streets. Built in the eighteenth century, it had once been a small, elegant house, but it had burned down in the 1850s. The Granville who owned the land at that time had bought the four lots surrounding him, torn down the houses, and built a huge Queen Anne–style Victorian, complete with porches and a gazebo. There was a wisteria vine on a pergola in the front that was said to be the oldest wisteria in the state. Oldest or not, the trunk was as big as a tree.
“I want a tour,” Eden said. “From basement to attic, I want to see every inch of that house.”
His eyes were twinkling as he lifted her hand and kissed it. “A woman who owns an eighteenth-century house would never settle for a Victorian, would she?”
She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she knew she didn’t like it. Too much, too fast! She pulled her hand from his grasp, and just as she was about to speak, a movement made her glance up at a second-story window. She saw McBride watching her. She looked back at Brad. “Do you have a garden?”
“Of sorts,” he said, smiling modestly. “A few Victorian things here and there that go with the house. Not much.”
At that she laughed. She knew he was lying, and she imagined that he had a garden that had been in more than one magazine. She very much liked that he believed a garden should match the house. “Ever since I lived with Mrs. Farrington, my gardening mind has been pure eighteenth century. If I’d had the opportunity, I would have loved to study gardening.” She looked at him. “I think that had my life been different I would have done anything I could to get to work for the Williamsburg foundation.”
His eyes widened. “What do you know about Queen Anne?”
“Very sad woman. On the throne for a mere nine years, pregnant and drunk the entire time.”
“Uh, yes, well,” Brad said, blinking at her. “Major in history, did we?”
Eden laughed, a bit embarrassed. “Not the Queen Anne you meant?”
“I meant the new subdivision. They named it Queen Anne after the creek, which of course was named after your drunken pregnant lady. They’re building two hundred houses on Route 32 by the water. Very high end. Preserving the wetlands, that sort of thing.”
“I haven’t heard a word about it,” she said, trying hard not to glance up at the window to see if McBride was still spying on them.
“It’s mainly a retirement community for rich people. There’ll be boutiques and lots of services, such as a hair salon and a spa. And there’ll be a purchased doctor or two.”
“A what?”
“You haven’t heard of those? I don’t know what they’re actually called, but a family pays a doctor a retainer, usually something like twenty grand a year, and for that they get personal service, such as house calls and checkups. Mainly, they get a doctor who remembers their name from one visit to the next.”
“For twenty grand, I’d think so,” Eden said.
“The point is that the houses in Queen Anne look as eighteenth century as we can make them. And the gardens surrounding them won’t just be a few nasty evergreens along the driveway and the house foundations. They’ll be structured gardens. Rooms. You know what I mean. Pure Williamsburg. We think they’ll appeal to our clients.” He hesitated, looking at her hard. “Maybe you’d like to help plan the gardens. Professionally, I mean.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
Brad gave her a sheepish grin. “I’m one of the investors, but that’s because I believe in this. Our young people are leaving Arundel because there are so few jobs here. These new houses will create a lot of jobs and will run a lot of money through the town. Did you know that six months ago one of our only two grocery stores closed? If we don’t do something soon, Arundel could turn into a ghost town.”
She could see the passion in his eyes. She’d had no idea that Arundel was in trouble. To her, the place had always been paradise. It was true that the mosquitoes and chiggers were enough to drive a person mad, but a little clear fingernail polish over the spots stopped the itching. To Eden’s mind, the warm weather and rampant growth of the plants more than made up for whatever problems the bugs caused. And made up for the snakes that found their way into everything. And for the muskrats in the ditches. And for the raccoons that ate anything you put in a decorative pond.
“Is that look a yes or a no?”
“It’s an ‘I don’t know.’ I never thought of designing gardens for a living. I didn’t plan this one. I just followed the original design.”
“Ha!” Brad said. “I know what you did and how you adjusted that plan to the modern world, and I know the way you studied the books Mrs. Farrington bought you. I even heard about the notebook of designs that you made. Most of all, I know how you loved doing it. Mrs. Farrington told me how you and Toddy were out here day after day, year after year.”
Eden smiled at the memory. “Toddy was so old he remembered the eighteenth century. I just picked his brain.”
Brad smiled at her so that his eyes crinkled at the corners. “You can’t BS me. I was told the truth about you, remember? By the way, the books you accumulated on eighteenth-century gardening are in that big pine cabinet in Mrs. Farrington’s bedroom. You must have every book ever published about eighteenth-century gardens.”
For the first time since she’d arrived, Eden smiled—really smiled. It wasn’t a polite little grin; it was a big wide smile that involved her entire face. She’d missed this in the years since she’d left Arundel. Someone who knew her. Someone who liked the same things she did. In the years since she’d been away, it seemed that all the men she’d met had wanted her for what she could give them. Their attitude toward Melissa had been one of tolerance. They were willing to put up with a child, but they hadn’t really been interested in her. She’d been too quiet and withdrawn to interest them. In the end, it seemed that it always came down to having to choose between her daughter and some man. Eden had never hesitated in choosing her daughter.
But now, for the first time since she was a teenager, Eden was alone—free, actually. It was difficult for her to remember a time when she wasn’t someone’s mother. When she was still a teenager, she’d seen kids her age jumping into convertibles as they ran off to spend the day at the beach. Sometimes she’d been nearly overwhelmed with envy. Never in her life had she spent an entire day at the beach. Her parents hadn’t believed in such frivolity, then she’d had the responsibility of a daughter. As for packing up Melissa and going by herself, that wasn’t something that Eden could quite manage to do.
What she had done was throw herself into gardening. She’d spent her days in the garden, with Melissa never far away from her. Often, Mrs. Farrington had joined them, not to work (she couldn’t contemplate using a hoe) but to sit under a tree in a pretty wrought-iron chair and read things like the Declaration of Independence (which one of her ancestors had signed) to Melissa, Eden, and Toddy.
Now, Brad was bringing back to Eden the memories of those wonderful days so vividly that she, well, she was feeling as though she was waking up. Design gardens? For a living? Get paid for doing something that she loved to do? When she’d put herself through college, it had been a small community college, and the choices of study had been limited. Garden design had not been offered. She’d taken courses that she thought would help her get a job as a teacher or in museum work or publishing. “Design gardens?” she said at last.
“Yes, something like what’s at the Belltower House.”
At that Eden’s eyes widened. “The Belltower House,” she said under her breath. It was one of the most beautiful houses ever built in the United States in the eighteenth century. In the 1950s it had been derelict but had been rescued by the local townspeople and restored beautifully. There had been a gasoline station in front of it, but that was torn down and in its place was put a reproduction of an eighteenth-century garden. No modern plants were allowed. It was gorgeous and accurate.
“The people we’re aiming at with these houses are retired D.C. people. Power, brains, been everywhere and seen everything. We think that the historical aspect of the houses will appeal to them, and we thought that making the gardens look as historically accurate as the houses would also appeal to them. Of course the landscape company that’s been formed by some of the local kids would put in the gardens and later maintain them, so you wouldn’t have to do the digging.”
“Local kids?”
“Okay, so they’re adults and they’re Drakes, Mintons, and one Granville by marriage, namely my daughter’s worthless husband, but I think they can do the job. Maybe you could manage them. They all need direction.”
She blinked at him. “If I’m understanding this clearly, you’re asking me to take over a landscaping company that has a contract, more or less, for two hundred houses.”
“That’s about it.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Did you just come up with this idea or did you develop it a while ago?”
His face lost its humor. “If you’re asking me if I’ve been wining and dining you in an attempt to get you to help with my new subdivision, the answer is no. But I’ll be honest with you: I am desperate for help. When you met my daughter, was she smiling?”
“No.”
“Her life is a mess right now. She married some big, good-looking kid from Louisiana in her last year of college and got pregnant right away. Actually, I think she was pregnant before, but that’s neither here nor there. She came home, and I saw right away that as soon as he saw the Granville house he planned to sit down and do nothing for the rest of his life. I gave him many lectures about how we all have to work for what we’ve managed to keep over the centuries, but nothing registered with him. He said that in Louisiana he helped his father do some landscaping. Between you and me I think he probably dug ditches. Anyway, at Camden’s crying requests I talked my partners into letting this moron become involved in the landscaping. He went out and hired the blackest of the black sheep in this town to work for him, and now he expects me to buy him half a million dollars’ worth of equipment and turn him loose on the gardens of all the houses. He doesn’t know a daisy from a liatris, so how can he put in gardens that look like something Thomas Jefferson might have enjoyed?”
Brad put his hand over his eyes. “I tell you I’m caught in a three-way vise. I have my investors threatening me if Remi messes up. I have my daughter, who expects me to perform a miracle and make her talent-less husband into a great businessman, and I have this kid telling me he can’t do anything until I buy him half of John Deere.”
Eden crossed her arms over her chest. “And just this minute you came up with the idea of turning this entire mess over to me and getting me to straighten it out?”
Brad grinned at her. “Actually, that’s completely accurate. One hundred percent right on. I think you must be a mind reader.”
In spite of herself, Eden laughed, and her body relaxed. “Your son-in-law is from Louisiana? Does he have one of ‘those’ accents?”
“Sometimes I can hardly understand him. You wouldn’t really consider doing this, would you?” There was hope in his voice, but also a belief that it would never happen.
“Let me think about it. You say the books are in my bedroom?”
“With your notebooks. Do you think you could make up your mind by, say, ten o’clock tomorrow?”
“What happens at ten?”
“I’m to meet Remi at the John Deere dealer.”
Again, Eden laughed. Family, she thought. All the problems of family. When she left Melissa and Stuart and the baby Melissa was about to have, Eden had thought she was saying good-bye to family. But here was an invitation to plunge into a family complete with squabbles and real problems. In this case, though, it looked a bit like diving headfirst into a swimming pool that she knew was empty.
“Is the John Deere dealer still on Berkshire?”
“Hasn’t moved since 1954.”
“I’ll meet you there at ten tomorrow and talk to your son-in-law.”
Brad grabbed both her hands in his. “I so appreciate this. You don’t know…” He stopped and smiled at her. “I’m not yet sure, but I think maybe everything Mrs. Farrington said about you was right.” He said the last very softly, and he had that unmistakable look on his face: he was about to kiss her.
As he bent his head toward her, Eden stepped back and the moment was lost. When he kissed her for the first time, she wanted it to be from passion, not gratitude. She took her hands from his. “You better go. I’ll need to go through my books tonight and see…See what a fool I am if I even consider this.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said, stepping back. He took his car keys out of his pocket. “Tomorrow.” He seemed to want to say more, but instead he turned and walked away. He looked back once and waved, then she heard his car start and saw the taillights as he drove down the driveway.
Standing alone in the moonlit garden, Eden shivered. Moments ago, it had seemed very warm, but now she was cold. Hurriedly, she ran up the stairs and back into the house.
It was utterly quiet inside, but she could feel the presence of another human being. McBride. Right now all she wanted to do was take a shower and settle down with her gardening books and think hard about Brad’s offer of a job. Could she do it? It had been years since she’d even read a gardening book. Could she remember all that she’d learned? Had she even learned enough to be able to design gardens from scratch? Plant heights, pH levels, bloom time, pruning—they all had to be considered. And then there was the entire eighteenth-century philosophy of design. They were complicated gardens. And would she be able to get along with Brad’s son-in-law, Remi? She’d never been able to get along with her own son-in-law, so how could she think of taking on someone else’s?
She made herself a cup of tea and finished cleaning the kitchen while her thoughts tumbled on top of one another. When at last she was ready to go upstairs, she thought about staying downstairs and sleeping on the couch. Upstairs was Mr. McBride and the confrontation she wanted to avoid. When she’d moved him into her house she had good reasons, but right now she couldn’t remember one of them. Had she really wanted protection from Brad? She smiled at that idea. She was beginning to think that being protected from Mr. Braddon Norfleet Granville was the last thing she wanted.
She stopped at the foot of the stairs and took a deep breath. Firm, she told herself. She had to be firm.