Oh, I see.
I wasn’t getting credit for my genius here.
“Gabi eventually grabbed some of Miles’ strawberries—you owe him some plants, by the way—and lured them back in. Caleb locked them up, but we spent ages fixing the fence. You’re going to have to get it properly reinforced or they’ll have to be secured with a stake.”
She turned to him, flattening a hand against her chest. “You will not stake Queen Victoria!”
“A stake in the ground,” I quickly pointed out before she got too upset. We all knew how it was when she went on a tangent. “Not like a vampire.” I motioned staking a vampire.
“I know perfectly well what he meant, Gabriella,” she said, looking at Alexander. “My goats will not be staked.”
“Then you’ll have to work to ensure their field is fully secured,” Alex said without batting an eyelid. He was completely unfazed by her rising annoyance. “You have a legal obligation to keep your livestock in their designated area.”
“They’re pets, not livestock.”
“You can call them whatever you want, but the government defines goats as livestock. That’s why you need a smallholding license to have them. It stops every Tom, Dick, and Harry getting one in their back garden,” he replied calmly. “You have to understand that it’s a very real possibility that they will escape and injure somebody. If that happens, you are entirely liable for whatever claim they might make.”
She blinked, shocked.
I don’t think she’d thought of that.
I didn’t know that either, to be honest. I knew she legally had to keep them in, but I wasn’t exactly working for the government department that regulated such things.
“Oh,” Aunt Cat said after a moment. “I’ll get that fence sorted, don’t worry.”
“Caleb is coming to talk to you in the morning.”
She nodded and picked up the pot of tea. “If nobody is joining me, I shall take this in the library.”
“You go ahead,” I said gently.
I watched as she set it on a tray with a small jug of milk, a tiny bowl of sugar, and a teacup and saucer with a little silver spoon. She picked up the tray and trotted out, turning when she entered the hall.
When she’d disappeared, I looked at Alex and said, “You have got to teach me how to do that.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Blank pages were daunting.
My unworked garden plan was staring at me, and it was due in three days. I was having a complete brain fart, and this block on garden design was something I was extra interested in.
The problem was that I couldn’t envision what I wanted the garden to look like.
It was crazy when you considered the wealth of options outside of my window. The rose garden, the maze, the vegetable gardens, the country lanes, the box hedges, the cottage garden… I knew if I asked my aunt, she’d tell me to pick my favourite, and Alex would likely say the same, but there was an issue with that.
I didn’t want to copy something that already existed. I wanted to create my own.
I shut down the design program, moved my notebook to the side, and fired up my internet browser. The Lady Love website popped up, but I opened a new tab and went to Pinterest. It was a minefield of wonderful ideas, and I got stuck into the endless inspiration it would provide me.
It should provide me.
I doom-scrolled through several searches, pinning the odd thing here and there to a board but ultimately coming up short every single time. I looked at hundreds of pictures, all of which should have given me an idea, but I was completely and utterly stumped.
I huffed and slumped forward. I was going to fail if I couldn’t do this. Maybe if I spent less time trying to fix everyone else’s love life and didn’t walk about the gardens daydreaming, I might get somewhere.
This was a major unit in this course, and I had to nail it.
Had to.
This, this, was what I wanted to do with my life. And there was no way I’d get accepted into the actual garden design course if I couldn’t design a quarter-acre patch of flat ground.
My phone pinged obnoxiously from somewhere on my desk, and I shuddered. When had I taken that off silent? I reached for it, moving open files and books about until I found it under a Walkers crisps packet, half-buried in a Kit-Kat wrapper with chocolate smeared on the back of the case. I licked it off and then checked the notification. It was a text from one of my best friends, Adelaide, and I pressed my thumb against the screen to unlock my phone so I could see what she wanted.
ADELAIDE: I’m bored. What are you doing?
I should have known.
ME: Trying to work on this assignment. You?
ADELAIDE: Texting you. Fancy meeting me and Eva for lunch?
Eva was short for Evangeline, her twin sister. For as long as I could remember the three of us had been largely inseparable with only time and adult responsibilities putting some kind of distance between us. Neither Adelaide nor Evangeline held titles, but since their grandparents and parents did, we moved in the same circles.
Their grandfather was the Duke of Leicester, and after their mum, Lady Victoria Montgomery, moved to Bath for university, she decided to stay, fell in love, and that was that.
As it happened, Lady Vic—as she insisted everyone call her after a couple of brandies—had been best friends with my mum. Their heritage gave them the key to the snobbish upper-class society of the aristocracy, despite the fact she’d married a—gasp—commoner.
If you asked me, their dad was the best guy in the country.
After my own, of course.
ME: Sure. I’m not getting anywhere here. When and where?
ADELAIDE: Booked a table for three at Barty’s in half an hour.
Ugh, my favourite place.
ME: I’ll see you there.
***
Lord Bartholomew’s, known fondly as Barty’s to the locals, was the premier restaurant in our sleepy countryside village. It was supposedly named for some bard in the seventeenth century who roamed the southwest, met Elizabeth I, and made her fall in love with him.
Naturally, he was in none of the history books, but if there was anything Southwest England loved, it was a bit of local lore, whether it was true or not.
The United Kingdom in general, actually.
That was why most of us believed King Arthur was buried in Glastonbury and would awaken to save us when the world went to balls.
It was nice to have something to look forward to.
Who wouldn’t want a medieval king to awaken and sort out the mess that was the world? They knew how to handle people back in the day, if you asked me.
Lied? Beheaded. Treason? Hung. Murdered someone? Burnt at the stake.
I had no problem with that. When I rose to power, the Tower of London would be restored to its former glory.
Not that I would ever rise to power. There were about one hundred and twenty people ahead of me in the line of succession to the British throne, so I wasn’t getting near Buckingham Palace anytime soon.
State banquets notwithstanding, and I hated those.
Did like the gowns, though.
I paid the parking charge on the machine and returned to my car to put the ticket on my dashboard. The last thing I needed was another parking ticket because I’d run out of change, so thank God I kept a stash of pound coins in my glove box for this reason.