There it was, again — the false apology — but the American merely nodded. “You do a magnificent job. Marguerites, of course — they’ll soldier on until frost — but the thistles are a surprise. We view them as weeds, where I come from. I’ll have to educate Mrs. Westlake on the subject of five-foot-tall onopordum. Is that Spirea ‘Arguta’? You’re deadheading the antirrhinums with a vengeance, I imagine.…”
It was remarkable, Imogen thought, how competent a gardener became within smelling distance of the soil. Even a woman like this one — not a pushing sort of person at first blush — became ruthlessly authoritative on the topics of hothouse seedlings and the proper batter of hedges. They moved slowly among the beds, looking and talking, the American avoiding the mistake of pulling a tablet of paper or a digital camera from her pocket; she conveyed the impression that there would be time for more sordid studies, more wholesale theft, later. For now, she simply enjoyed the garden in Imogen’s company. When they had exhausted the tendency of foxgloves and lupines to sport, and the necessity of extensive hawthorn staking, Imogen glanced at her watch.
“God! It’s gone past one. Have you eaten? Can I offer you something? A cup of tea?”
Jo Bellamy hesitated. “I hate to take more of your time. And I should find a room nearby, if I’m going to stay — ”
There was a question implicit in the words. Imogen studied the woman: brown eyes crinkled from constant work in the sun; hands weathered by soil and exposure. A pretty face and a self-assured air — but no pretense, no drama. A gardener.
“They might have a room at the home farm,” Imogen said. “I could ring. Or there’s a much posher place in Cranbrook called the George. Flat-screen telly, and all that. How long do you reckon you’ll stay?”
“A few days.”
“You’ll want to draw up a plan, I expect — consult our records for the past several seasons, take pictures and measurements, and so on?”
“If you’ll allow me.” Jo peered under the rose arbor at the elaborate mesh of trained Rosa mulliganii canes, intersecting to form a perfect pyramid. “It’s going to be a bear to maintain this garden once we plant it. The Westlakes, of course, have no idea what they’ve asked for. How many people do you employ?”
“Eight actual gardeners,” Imogen answered. “But that’s National Trust funds, and we cover the entire six acres, not just the White Garden. Vita and Harold — her husband, Harold Nicolson — made do with two. But they also worked the place themselves, of course. Your Mrs. Westlake — ”
“ — Never gets her hands dirty. These beds must glow like stardust at night. Did the Nicolsons ever see the great ghostly barn owl sweep silently across the pale garden?” Jo asked, ducking from under the arbor.
Imogen stared at her. It was a quotation from one of Vita’s gardening columns, written ages ago for the Observer, when the White Garden was just an idea in the Nicolsons’ brains. The pale garden that I am now planting, under the first flakes of snow…
“I’ve no idea,” she replied. “I’m not often here at night. You’ve read about her, then?”
“For years. I grew up with Sissinghurst. I think I mentioned my grandfather was from Kent.”
“Was he a gardener?”
“Professionally, you mean? Yes. A long time ago. I inherited his green thumb.”
She held up her hands, which were already stained brown with dirt, and dusted them matter-of-factly on her corduroy jeans.
And for reasons she could not afterward explain, Imogen Cantwell felt a sudden frisson of fear — as though a serpent, in the form of this mild American woman, had suddenly slithered through Sissinghurst’s garden.
Chapter Two
CRANBROOK SAT A FEW MILES DOWN THE A262 FROM Sissinghurst. It was famous for being the smallest town in Kent, for being unreachable by train, and for possessing a windmill — all of which Jo Bellamy learned from a town council flyer over breakfast the next morning. This was a solitary if splendid affair involving silver chafing dishes and broiled pale pink tomatoes, both of which Jo ignored in favor of more humble carbohydrates. Posh, Imogen Cantwell had called the George; but hip was more accurate — it was a place that cried out for French manicures and Manolo spikes. Jo possessed neither. She could not imagine Vita Sackville-West loping along the inn’s half-timbered corridors, as she certainly once had — the Nicolsons set up camp at the George just after buying Sissinghurst in 1930, their newly acquired ruins being uninhabitable for several years. Jo wondered, inevitably, whether her bedroom (repainted a deep mandarin orange) had once been Vita’s — then put the notion firmly out of her mind. Copying Vita’s garden was one thing; copying her life was another.
Jo’s habit of early rising had marooned her amidst the breakfast buffet at an hour when mere tourists were still snoozing. Without the council flyer or the landscape drawings nestled by her elbow, she might have lost herself in thought, and Jo was avoiding her inner life at the moment. Her cell phone was stationed on the table, yet she had deliberately silenced its ring. Everything about her gentle appearance suggested welcome and pliability, when in truth she was rigid with denial.
She pushed aside the china plate littered with the crumbs of her scone, and unfurled a sheaf of black-and-white CADD blueprints. Westwind was noted in careful print on the lower-left-hand side of each sheet; and beneath that, Plan for Landscape Development, The Westlake Residence, East Hampton, New York. Stamped on the right were the interlocked B and D of Bellamy Design’s logo, the firm’s Delaware address, and a dated notation with her initials. This was the fourth revision of her original drawings, printed only six days ago, after her tenth meeting with Graydon Westlake and his wife, Alicia — the woman Jo always referred to as her client, when in fact it was not the pretty, whipcord-thin blonde on the shady side of thirty who planned the gardens with Jo, but her husband: Graydon the enigmatic. Graydon, who could shave half an hour from his departure by helicopter in order to run his sensitive, long-fingered hands over the kitchen garden’s walls, an idea of pear trees rising in his mind. Jo had watched those fingers caress the stone, had felt the hooded eyes fix on her bent head, and had shivered.
She would not think of Graydon.
He was past fifty. Alicia was his third wife. There were two children from an earlier marriage, already grown. People who knew such things referred to Graydon as a financier, which meant that he had inherited an investment firm founded by his father. As CEO of the privately held, multibillion-dollar international concern, he spent his time tending the fortunes of universities and pension funds, the hopeful college savings of middle-class people he would never meet. Without understanding an iota of his business, Jo recognized Gray’s intelligence, his scrupulous concern for detail, his drive for perfection, his ruthlessness. The force of his personality at times was paralyzing. Alicia seemed to adore him — her well-tended hand hovering always a half-inch above his French-cuffed sleeve, as though for comfort or support — but Jo detected hypocrisy in that air of devotion. She suspected Gray saw it, too. This was one of their complicities: she and Gray, mutually recognizing the truth about Alicia. Didn’t most betrayals begin with a sharing of some kind?
The house the Westlakes were building in the Hamptons was a Shingle-style sprawl covering more than twenty thousand square feet; and the six flat, farmland acres Jo was charged with turning into a corner of England were also expected to incorporate the aforementioned helipad, a four-thousand-square-foot guest cottage, a pool house designed as a rustic Parthenon, the pool itself, and a caretaker’s quarters. Incidental to her plans were security cameras, decorative lighting, speaker systems for music; a ten-car garage set at a remove from the house but requiring visual and physical linkage with a series of paths, or perhaps, as Graydon had recently suggested, a Federal-style arbor draped with wisteria vines.…