Still, she couldn’t live on challenge alone, and since Sydney would be paying her bills for nearly a year, she would humor Sydney’s ideas. Within reason.
“I’d be glad of the company,” she said, putting as much enthusiasm as she could into her voice.
“Are you coming, darling?” Sydney asked Andrew.
“I would, but Greg said something about floor joists earlier,” he said.
“What about them?” Sydney asked.
Andrew gave a half laugh and pushed his glasses up. “Apparently we don’t have any in the music room. They’ve rotted straight through.”
Emma’s brows rose as Sydney’s mouth formed an O.
Andrew waved a goodbye, darted around the ladder, and disappeared through one of the doors off the entryway.
“I’m afraid that’s been happening a lot recently.” Sydney pointed to a pair of French doors that had been stripped of their paint and looked like they were waiting for a good sanding. “The easiest access to the garden is just through here.”
Emma followed her employer out onto a wide veranda. Some of the huge slabs of slate were cracked underfoot and weeds pushed up through the gaps, but there was no denying the view’s beauty. A long lawn rolled down a gentle hill to trees lining a calm lake. She squinted, conjuring up the old photograph she’d found in the Warwick Archives showing the garden during a party in the 1920s. There had once been a short set of stairs down to a reflecting pool surrounded by two quarter circles of box as well as a long border that ran the eastern length of the property. Now there was nothing but a stretch of uninterrupted lawn that held none of the charm that surely would have imbued Venetia Smith’s original design.
Excitement pricked the back of her neck. Emma was going to restore a Venetia Smith garden. Long before she’d become famous in America, the Edwardian garden designer had designed a handful of gardens here in Britain. Emma owed her career to a BBC program about the restoration of Venetia’s garden at Longmarsh House. At seventeen, she’d insisted that her parents take her there on holiday. While most of her friends were thinking about where they might go to university, she stood in that restored garden and realized what she wanted to do with her life.
As they descended the veranda steps, Sydney gestured to the western edge of the lawn. “There isn’t much of the shade border left.”
Emma walked to one of the gnarled trunks that made up the long straight path that ran the length of the great lawn. The cold, rough bark felt comfortingly familiar under her hand. “The trees along the lime walk look as though they’ve been well maintained.”
“That would be the garden service. Dad kept on the same company that Granddad employed. They do what they can to keep things tidy,” said Sydney.
Tidy but nothing more.
“This whole stretch would have been much more vibrant when it was first created,” said Emma.
“Even in the shade?”
Emma smiled. “It’s a common misconception that shade gardens are dull. I haven’t found an archival photograph of how it looked when Venetia planted it, but she loved color, so we can assume she used it.”
“I bought a couple of collections of her books and diaries after our last call,” Sydney said. “She wrote so much, I almost didn’t know where to start.”
“Her diaries are my favorite. She published a few between the wars, but about twenty years ago someone bought her old house in Wimbledon and found two from her very first projects,” said Emma.
“But not Highbury.”
Emma shook her head. “If they had, we’d have a built-in project plan. The tea garden is through there?” she asked, nodding to a gated passageway between the lime trees.
“Yes,” said Sydney.
The neatness of the lime walk dropped away as soon as they crossed into the tea garden. An enclosed room with walls of brick and yew, it would have been created as a sanctuary for ladies to gossip among soft pastels of whimsical flowers. Now it was chaos.
“The gardeners don’t make it into the garden rooms much,” said Sydney, a touch of apology in her voice. “Dad said it was expensive enough to do the lawn and the parts you can see from the house.”
It showed. A stand of dead gaura twined with Queen Anne’s lace, all dried-up and falling over itself. Several sad clumps of roses heavy with hips had become scraggly from too many winters gone without a good hard pruning, and Emma doubted they threw off more than a dozen blooms in June. Everything else was an indiscriminate mix of long-dead flowers and weeds.
“I can help you find a crew to maintain the gardens when I’m done here,” she said.
“That bad, is it?” Sydney asked with a laugh.
“If I were your dad, I’d ask for my money back. That entire patch looks like it’s just weeds,” she said, pointing to an odd gap of packed earth where a single bindweed-covered teak bench sat forgotten. “There was probably once a gazebo or a pergola of some sort there.”
“It was one of the casualties of the Great Storm of ’87. I know we lost some trees on the edge of the lake and in the ramble. I found receipts for the tree surgeons in Granddad’s records,” said Sydney.
“Did you have any luck finding anything from the year the garden was created?” Emma asked.
“Not yet, but don’t worry. Granddad never threw anything out. I’m still pulling boxes of papers out of the study, and I haven’t even tackled the attics yet. If there’s something there, I’ll find it,” said Sydney.
Emma followed Sydney through a yew hedge into the lovers’ garden, which featured bare clumps of ground and struggling tropicals Emma was certain Venetia wouldn’t have had access to in her time. Beyond that, the children’s garden was little more than a collection of wildflowers and four large cherry trees in desperate need of pruning, and the lavender walk was wildly overgrown but thriving. The sculpture garden was now mostly lawn and a few broken, weather-scarred statues. Next was a mismatched garden Emma still couldn’t place the purpose of, despite her research, and what was supposed to be a white garden that had self-seeded into what she was certain would be a multitude of colors come spring. Down they walked into what Emma guessed was a long-defunct water garden, the low trough in the middle of it now choked with nonaquatic weeds. It all struck her as… sad, an indistinct mess of sprawling neglect.
“And that,” said Sydney, as they walked down a path between the water garden and the white garden, “brings us to this.”
At first, all Emma saw above the tall brick wall were the reaching tops of trees and long canes of a climbing rose fighting for supremacy and sunlight. However, as they walked around the gently curving wall that formed a circle of brick, they came to an iron gate rusted brown and orange. Vines twined around its bars, and stems shot out rudely. Everything in this garden seemed desperate to escape.
“This must be the one Charlie warned me about,” she said.
“The winter garden. When I was little, we only came up to the house two times a year—for Granddad’s birthday and on Boxing Day—but I remember Dad walking me around the gardens every time. In the depths of December, this would be the only bit that seemed alive,” said Sydney.
“You’ve been inside?” Emma asked, wrapping her hands around the iron bars and trying in vain to see beyond the thick foliage.