“Can I be of service?”
He was short and slim and mild-eyed; a dark-haired cipher of a man with a neat name tag pinned to his blue dress shirt. MR. TREVELYAN, it said. Such a self-effacing soul would never put ROGER or IAN or HAL on his breast. He would always be Mr. Trevelyan. This, to Jo, was reassuring: she had found authority in a sea of doubt.
“I’m researching my grandfather,” she said. “He grew up somewhere near Knole House.”
“When?” Mr. Trevelyan inquired.
“He was born in 1924. June sixteenth, actually.”
“In Sevenoaks? Or on the estate itself?”
“I don’t know. He’s dead,” she added, by way of explanation.
“Let’s start with official records. Polling data, parish registry, that sort of thing.” He led Jo toward the card catalogs. “And the name?”
She told him. While Mr. Trevelyan pulled drawers from cabinets, Jo debated whether to broach the subject of police records and an unknown woman’s death nearly seventy years before, the sudden terrible divide that might have fallen between childhood and going for a soldier.
“Bellamy?” Mr. Trevelyan repeated. “That’s a very old name. Norman in origin. Belle Amie.”
Jo smiled to herself. Jock was no aristocrat. If the blood of the conquerors descended in her veins, it was surely from the wrong side of the blanket — a belle amie, a beautiful mistress with an illegitimate child.
“Here it is.” The archivist’s finger was poised over a catalog entry. “Quite straightforward. We’ll just fetch the parish records, shall we?”
From the parish records Jo learned enough to fill half an index card. The names of Jock’s parents, Rose and Thomas Bellamy; the date of Jock’s birth, which she already knew; that of his younger brother, Christopher, called Kip; and a street address in Sevenoaks: 17 Bells Lane. There was also a single date of death for Rose, Thomas, and Kip, in February 1944.
“That would be a bomb, of course,” Mr. Trevelyan observed. “One hit Knole itself that month. Damaged a good bit of the building.”
It was so bald, that date. So quiet, in the records of the parish registry. When what it really recorded was the end of Jock’s known world. He had emigrated to America with Dottie after V-E Day.
“Thomas Bellamy’s profession is noted as gardener,” Trevelyan added. “Nine chances out of ten, he was employed at Knole House. The family gave the place into the National Trust in 1946 — with a two-hundred-year lease on the private apartments and complete retention of the park — but in the first half of the century, Knole kept most of Sevenoaks in bread and butter. The garden is five hundred years old, and largish — a full mile of ragstone wall encloses it. They’d have needed a small army of gardeners, I should think. Shall we consult the estate records?”
It was here that Jo came into a kingdom.
The catalog of Knole’s books was astonishingly vast and various: steward’s accounts dating to the fifteenth century; gamekeepers’ records of pheasants bagged and deer killed; workshop accounts of upholsterers and woodsmen and joiners and glaziers; tenants’ accounts; harvest figures; housekeeping and stillroom books; lists of servants, the same local surnames appearing generation after generation. And records of the state visits of kings and queens: Henry VIII. Elizabeth I. James II. Edward VII.
She ignored all of these. Only one group of documents held any interest for her: Knole’s garden archives.
She would have liked to waste an hour scanning the drawings from Britannia Illustrata in 1707, or the accounts of George London, royal gardener, who’d supplied fruit trees in 1698; or Thomas Badeslade’s record of the bowling green’s construction, or the third Duke’s pineapple hothouse, or the Orangery that dated from the Regency period. But she had too little time. Another stranger was scheduled to take her numbered seat in less than forty minutes. She was forced to concentrate on the years between 1918 and 1939 — England’s Long Weekend between two devastating wars — when Thomas Bellamy, gardener of 17 Bells Lane, had raised his sons.
War with Germany declared this day and the Staff can talk of nothing else than soldiering. Tom Bellamy to join up.
No word of Jock.
Jo’s fingers fluttered nervously over the final days of 1939, and on into the spring of 1940. Tom Bellamy refused the service due to dicky heart. Knole’s garden ranks dropped by two-thirds; only the unfit, the old, and the young remained to work the beds and maintain the plantings. Copper sulfate for the roses was impossible to find, due to the demands of munitions factories; the kitchen garden was all anybody cared about now, for the production of desperately needed food.
Sissinghurst. Her grandfather had once bent and strained over the very beds she’d photographed in recent days — and she hadn’t known.
Was it possible that Vita was the Lady? But no — Jock had distinctly written about the woman’s death. And Vita had survived the war by several decades.
Jo sank back against the unforgiving Searchroom chair, baffled. It made sense that Lady Nicolson, desperate for garden help, would look for it at Knole — Vita made a habit of borrowing from her childhood home. Furniture, pictures, garden urns — and now a teenage boy who bid fair to be strong and canny with his hands.
Jo skimmed ahead, hoping against hope for something more — but the Head Gardener’s account ended abruptly in June 1941 with the words: Called up for service this day, and will report for duty tomorrow at dawn. Five years of silence were contained in the single page separating this entry from the next — which was dated September 1946, and written in a stranger’s hand. Knole House to be given into the National Trust.
Jo went in search of Mr. Trevelyan.
“Do you keep anything about the Sissinghurst Castle Garden in this archive? From the war years, I mean?”
He straightened from the pile of books he’d been tidying. “No. Particularly not the garden. Sissinghurst passed to the Trust in the late sixties, you know — and the Head Gardeners employed by the Nicolsons at the time were retained for decades after. They’d have kept their own records. Probably passed them on to their successors, whoever they are. You might check with the National Trust.”
Jo thanked him, and turned in her numbered seat tag. She felt a pang of guilt. She should have kept to her proper job that morning — should indeed have earned Gray’s money. The answers were with Imogen Cantwell, at Sissinghurst.
“WE’D GIVEN YOU UP,” THE HEAD GARDENER CALLED GENIALLY through the open office door. “Thought you’d had a late lie-in and spa treatment at the George.”
Imogen was bent over her computer, the kind of work she detested, but the obvious task for a day of steady rain. Let Ter and the others slog around in their Wellies while she tended to the business of the Castle gift shop: stocking orders for tea towels and gardening books and potpourri that captured the scent of Vita’s musk roses. A few plants associated with Sissinghurst were sold there as well — stout rosemary shrubs and viola. All of this fell under Imogen Cantwell’s purview. She worked incessantly. She had no family, only a trio of indifferent cats she loved with pathetic ferocity.
“I suppose it’s the jet lag,” the American said vaguely.
Jo Bellamy did look strained for a person who’d slept late. Her skin was pallid, and the hollows of her eyes almost bruised. But something — a barely discernible crackle of excitement — churned beneath the surface, Imogen decided. It was evident in the lower lip she worried surreptitiously with her teeth, in the flutter of her restless hands.
Imogen’s eyes slid to the wall clock hanging near the room’s sole window: nearly half-past two. “Care for a cuppa?” she suggested, and closed her file.