• PROLOGUE •
JANUARY 1908
Her steps in sturdy walking boots are steady on the stone path despite the ice that crunches underfoot. All around her, snow-covered branches bend and bow, threatening to break. All is quiet.
She walks deeper into this winter garden. Stark and beautiful, with its clusters of silver birches broken by dogwood, bloodred stems violent against mournful grasses bending in the wind. Pure white hellebores—the Christmas rose—dot the border. It pains her to think that, in a month, the first green heads of snowdrops will burst forth through the snow in elegant white blooms before purple crocuses with vibrant yellow stamen follow. She will not see these heralds of spring. Others will have to read the signs that this garden is ready to relinquish its crown.
She stops at the edge of the stone path, sorrow clawing at her like a feral beast desperate to break free. She wipes away a half-frozen tear. She should not be here, yet she could not leave without once again seeing this place of love and loss.
No. She won’t stay long. Only the length of a goodbye.
WINTER
• EMMA •
FEBRUARY 2021
Even if Emma hadn’t been looking for the turnoff, Highbury House would have been hard to miss. Two brick pillars topped with a pair of stone lions rose up from a gap in the hedgerow, harkening to a time of carriages and riding to hounds, hunt balls and elaborate house parties.
She turned into the gravel drive, steeling herself to meet her clients. Normally she wouldn’t take a job sight unseen, but she’d been too wrapped up in the restoration project at Mallow Glen to travel down from Scotland for a site survey. Instead, Emma’s best friend and the head of her crew at Turning Back Thyme, Charlie, had gone ahead and done the measurements, while Sydney Wilcox, Highbury House’s owner, had arranged a series of video chats to explain the project: to return the once-spectacular gardens to their former glory.
The short drive opened up into a courtyard, around which the U-shaped house was built, but its elegance was marred by piles of construction debris.
Emma parked behind a steel-gray Range Rover and climbed out, slinging her heavy canvas workbag over her shoulder. The high-pitched whine of power tools filled the air, followed by a volley of barks. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a flash of red. A pair of Irish setters bounded through the front door, straight for her.
She threw up her hands to fend off the smaller of the two dogs, who still managed to rear up on its hind legs, planting its paws on her shoulders and licking her face. The other danced around her feet, barking encouragement.
She tried to push the dogs away as Sydney burst out of the doorway, half jogging across the courtyard. “Bonnie, get down! Clyde, let Emma through!”
“They’re fine,” said Emma, hoping she sounded at least a little convincing as Bonnie managed another lick. “You’d be surprised how many of my jobs start like this, especially in the country. Everyone keeps dogs.”
“I really am so sorry. We spent so much time and money training them, and we still ended up with two of the most ill-behaved dogs in all of Warwickshire.” Sydney grabbed Bonnie’s collar and hauled her away while Clyde went to sit obediently at his owner’s feet.
“Don’t pretend you aren’t as bad as her,” Sydney chided Clyde, her voice reminiscent of good schools, lessons at the local riding club, and Saturday cricket on the village green.
Straightening, Sydney reached up to reclip her curly red hair.
“I’m sorry about that. These two follow the builders around all day long. Someone must have left the door open. Did you have any trouble getting up here? Was there traffic on the M40? Sometimes it’s a nightmare. Did you find the turnoff okay?”
Emma blinked, wondering which question to answer first. A cheery chaos seemed to swirl around the owner of Highbury House. Emma had noticed it on their calls, but in person, surrounded by a pair of dogs, in the shadow of a house under construction, it was an entirely different experience. Finally, she said, “I didn’t have any problems finding the house.”
“I’m so glad you arrived when you did. It rained this morning, and I told Andrew that it wouldn’t do for your first real look at the garden to be in the middle of a rainstorm. But then it cleared, and now here you are!” Sydney turned toward the house, gesturing for Emma to follow. “You’ll have to forgive the noise.”
“Are you living here through the construction?” Emma raised her voice to ask as she peered around the entryway draped in drop cloths. A ladder stood next to a grand staircase bracketed by a hand-carved banister, and the scent of fresh paint hung in the air, although the walls looked as though they had only just been stripped of wallpaper.
“We are,” a man’s voice came from over Emma’s shoulder. “I’m Andrew. It’s a pleasure to meet you in person.”
Emma shook Andrew’s hand, letting her eyes slide between the husband and wife. He towered over sprightly Sydney, his Clark Kent glasses sitting on the bridge of his nose and his short brown hair combed neatly to the side. He wrapped his arm around his wife’s waist as though it was the most natural thing in the world, looking down at her with a healthy mixture of amusement and adoration.
Even standing amid the dust of a half-finished house, the Wilcoxes exuded polish, education, class. They were a golden couple, which—experience had taught her—made them all the more likely to be huge pains. However, they were paying customers who wanted a restoration project, not a brand-new garden, and they hadn’t even flinched when Emma had given them a quote.
“Andrew let me convince him that we should be on-site through the restoration work.” Sydney bit her full lower lip. “It’s been a bigger project than even we expected.”
Andrew shook his head. “Six months they said.”
“How long has it been going on now?” Emma asked.
“Eighteen months, and we’ve only done up one wing of the house. There’s so much still left,” said Sydney. “Darling, I was just going to take Emma for a tour of the garden.”
“I don’t want to bother you,” Emma said quickly. “I’ve been working off Charlie’s specs. I’m sure I can find my own way.”
“I insist,” said Sydney. “I’d love to hear your first impressions, and I have a few ideas.”
Ideas. All her clients had ideas, but so few of them were good. Like the man outside of Glasgow who insisted he wanted a tropical garden in the middle of Scotland despite her warnings that it would require intensive work to maintain. He’d called her six months after Turning Back Thyme had packed up and moved on to another job, complaining that every single one of his banana plants had died over the winter and wanting them replaced for free. She’d politely referred him to her contract, which stated she was not responsible for neglect on the part of the owner.
At least Highbury House would be different in that regard—a respite from all of the contemporary design projects she took on to keep the business afloat. A historic garden of some importance that had lain virtually abandoned for years, the Wilcoxes wanted to see it bloom again just as it had when it had been created in 1907.
Although they took up time and research well beyond her modern projects, Emma loved nothing more than sinking her spade into a restoration. She’d done battle against poured-concrete patios and cursed stretches of lawn previous owners had laid down because it was “easier” than doing any real gardening. In one particularly egregious instance, she’d ripped out a half acre of artificial lawn installed in the 1970s and re-created the eighteenth-century French knot garden through which ladies in powdered wigs had once strolled. She could make long-forgotten gardens bloom out of pastures and paddocks. She could rewind the clock. Make things right again.