Merryn Allingham - The Buttonmaker’s Daughter

Those eyes were resting on her and she said hastily, ‘You seem to have met a problem here.’ She waved a cuff of shadow lace towards the quagmire.

‘The gardeners have certainly. Mr Simmonds and I will keep supervising the building work, but a temple without its lake is a sad sight. Do you know why this has happened?’

‘Why there’s no water?’

‘I know why there’s no water – I walked upstream for half a mile and saw the dam that’s been built.’

The Amberley estate lay above Summerhayes and Henry Fitzroy had evidently used this advantage to divert the river and render Joshua’s beloved garden a sad joke. Elizabeth felt intensely sorry for her father. He was a rough man. A life devoted to making buttons had not conferred the polish needed to succeed in the highest circles, but for all that her father possessed a deep and instinctive love of beauty.

Aiden Kellaway was looking at her enquiringly. ‘I meant why your uncle – I’m presuming it is your uncle who ordered the diversion – why he should wish to ruin the most beautiful part of a very beautiful garden.’

She wasn’t sure how to answer. She knew the reason only too well but Mr Kellaway was a stranger and she had no wish to confess the family feud. Something in his face, though, invited her to be honest. ‘There is enmity between Amberley and Summerhayes. There has been for years and most local people know of it. Anything Uncle Henry can do to upset my father, he will.’

Aiden shook his head. ‘That’s sad. And to hurt his own sister, too.’

‘I doubt he cares much about my mother. He’s not that kind of man.’ She stopped abruptly. Honesty was one thing, gossiping in this unguarded fashion quite another. ‘In any case,’ she hurried on, ‘the Italian Garden is my father’s idea. Mama never ventures further than the lawn.’

‘Why Italian? Does your father have connections there?’

‘None that I know of, but when he was very young, he travelled to Italy and spent several months journeying northwards from Rome. He still talks of it. He told me one day that it was a revelation to him, how people all those years ago had created a beauty that endured for centuries. I think it made him want to create something himself – something that would delight people for generations.’

Her father’s one Italian excursion, it seemed, had crystallised a yearning that until then had lived only in his heart.

‘Your father is a visionary man. Summerhayes is a wonderful project,’ Aiden said warmly. ‘He can be rightfully proud of creating a glorious site out of what was once barren pasture. Or so I understand.’

‘The gardens are my father’s pride and joy. But the barren pasture, as you call it, once belonged to Amberley.’ She would not spell out her uncle’s jealousy, she had said too much already, but she saw from the young man’s expression that he understood.

He simply nodded and looked out across the swathe of mud to the laurel arch, now faded to shades of grey in the disappearing light. ‘I wonder, though, why your uncle is so opposed. Having such a magnificent garden as a neighbour must add distinction to his own property.’

‘I doubt he’d agree. Amberley is an old estate and Uncle Henry clings to its past glory. My father has the money to indulge himself with projects such as this.’

‘And your uncle does not?’

She would say no more. The subject was too intimate and too painful. Any more and she might reveal the whole sorry business, the transaction between Amberley Hall and her father. A transaction of which for years she’d been only dimly aware.

‘I see,’ was all he said. But she knew that he was thinking through the answer to a question he couldn’t ask: why her mother, a Fitzroy of Amberley, with a family history stretching back to the Conqueror, had married a man like Joshua Summer.

The dusk was closing in and the crêpe de chine dress she had donned for dinner was proving uncomfortably thin. She shivered slightly and he noticed. ‘It’s getting chilly. May I escort you back to the house?’

‘I won’t trouble you, Mr Kellaway. You will wish to be getting home and I can find my own way back, even in the gloom. I know the gardens too well to get lost.’

‘I’m sure.’ He smiled the slightly crooked smile again. ‘But I’m walking your way. My bicycle is waiting for me outside the bothy, though I must be quiet collecting it. The boy on duty has to be up and dressed before five.’

She hadn’t noticed the bicycle when she’d passed by, but that wasn’t surprising. How her father’s men came and went barely impinged on her. Why would it? She lived in a bubble, an affluent bubble, but real life went on elsewhere. Or so it had always seemed.

‘Do you live far from Summerhayes?’

The bicycle had prompted the question but she was genuinely interested. Then she worried that she had been too personal. The rigours of a London Season had not cured her of the candour her mother deplored. Alice’s strictures rang loudly in her ears. They had been repeated often enough for her to know them by heart: A girl should keep her distance from anyone who is not family or a family friend.

Aiden seemed to find nothing amiss with her question and answered readily enough: ‘I have lodgings in the village. A room with board in one of the cottages by the church.’

‘And is it comfortable?’

‘Comfortable enough. Though the cooking could be better.’

‘It’s late. You will have missed your evening meal.’

‘I will. But I’ll get cold meat and pickles instead – my favourite supper.’

She wondered for a moment how cold meat and pickles tasted, and how wonderful it must be to sit at a kitchen table, still in your work clothes, and just eat. No dressing for dinner, no servant hovering, listening to a stilted conversation, and no trudging through course after unnecessary course before escape beckoned.

‘Allow me,’ and before she could protest, he’d tucked her hand in his arm and was steering her along the flagged pathway and out beneath the laurel arch into the Wilderness.

‘This is an amazing place,’ he said, as they followed the winding path towards the walled garden. ‘So many rare and beautiful plants.’

‘My father chose every tree and shrub. They come from all over the world, I believe. He told me that it was plant hunters in the last century who brought them back to this country, and made a fortune doing so.’

‘And each with an adventure attached to it, I’d swear, and a story to tell.’

She wondered what Aiden Kellaway’s story might be. In the cool of late evening, the warmth of his body as they walked side by side was unnerving her, and she tried hard not to think of it.

‘Do you often walk in the gardens?’

She grabbed at the mundane question. ‘I take a turn on the terrace – where you saw me with my mother. Sometimes I venture a little further.’ When I can, she thought. When I can be free of parents, free of servants.

‘Like tonight. What tempted you to wander so far?’

‘I suppose because it was such a wonderful evening.’

They had reached the kitchen garden and in the silvery spread of a just risen moon the most humble of vegetables had taken on a majestic air.

‘I thought it wonderful, too. There was no need for me to stay behind. I could have finished the few tasks I had in the morning, and Mr Simmonds urged me to leave with him. But this evening was too good to waste behind the door of a poky cottage.’

‘Do you enjoy working with Mr Simmonds?’ It was something else she genuinely wanted to know. Questions seemed to be tripping off her tongue tonight, far more than she’d ever needed to ask.

‘He’s a brilliant architect and an excellent mentor. I’ve worked with him for five years and learnt a great deal. I’m lucky he’s one of the old school. He likes to work on site from his own drawings, rather than sit in an office and direct others. And that suits me very well. Since my uncle organised the apprenticeship, I’ve never looked back.’