How to Find Love in a Book Shop(21)

Sarah smiled a grateful smile. ‘Oh, I’ll know. But that’s good of you. I’m just too much of a wimp.’

Of course, Sarah was far from a wimp in reality. She was redoubtable, from her gumboots to her chambray denim eyes. Dillon Greene thought the world of her.

And she him. They were as close as could be, the aristocrat and the horny-handed son of toil, thirty years apart in age. They loved nothing better than sitting in the dankness of the garden room, drinking smoky builders’ tea and dunking custard creams. They could easily get through a packet in a morning as they put the world and the gardens to rights.

Sarah’s planting plans for the next year were spread on a trestle table in the middle of the room, the Latin names spidered all over the paper in her tiny black italics. Dillon knew the proper names as well as she did now – he’d been working with her at Peasebrook Manor since he left school.

As stately homes went, Peasebrook was small and intimate: a pleasingly symmetrical house of Palladian perfection, built of golden stone topped with a cupola, and set in two hundred acres of rolling farmland. When Dillon joined as a junior gardener in charge of mowing the lawns, he quickly became Sarah’s protégé. He wasn’t sure what it was she had recognised in him: the shy seventeen-year-old who hadn’t wanted to go off to university as his school had suggested, because no one else in his family ever had done. They’d all worked outdoors: their lives were rugged and ruled by the weather. Dillon felt comfortable in that environment. When he woke up, he looked at the sky, not the Internet. He never lay in bed of a morning. He was at work by half seven, come rain or shine, sleet or snow.

One teacher had tried to persuade him to go to horticultural college, at the very least, but he didn’t see the point of sitting in a classroom when he could learn hands-on. And Sarah was better than any college tutor. She grilled him, tested him, taught him, demonstrated things to him, and then made him show her how it was done. She gave praise where it was due and her criticism was always constructive. She was brisk and always knew exactly what she wanted, so Dillon always knew exactly where he was. It suited him down to the rich, red clay on the ground.

‘You really have got green fingers,’ she told him with admiration and increasing frequency. He had a gut feeling for what went with what, for which plants would flourish and bloom together. To supplement his innate ability, he plundered her library and she never minded him taking the books home – Gertrude Jekyll, Vita Sackville-West, Capability Brown, Bunny Williams, Christopher Lloyd – and he didn’t just look at the pictures. He pored over the words describing their inspiration, their visions, the problems they faced, the solutions they came up with.

Dillon, Sarah realised one day, knew much more than she did. More often than not these days he questioned her planting plans, suggesting some other combination when redesigning a bed or coming up with a concept for a new one. He would suggest a curve rather than a straight line; a bank of solid colour instead of a rainbow drift; a bed that was conceived for its smell rather than its look. And he used things he found around the estate as features: an old sundial, an ancient gardening implement, a bench he would spend hours restoring. It was reclamation at its best.

Her greatest fear was losing him. There was every chance he would be headhunted by some other country house because the gardens at Peasebrook Manor had become increasingly popular over the past few years. There were three formal rose gardens, a cutting garden and a walled kitchen garden, a maze and a miniature lake with an island and a ruined temple for visitors to wander around. There had been a flurry of articles in magazines, many of them featuring pictures of Dillon at work, for there was no doubt he was easy on the eye. More than once her own heart had stopped for a moment when she’d rounded a corner and seen him in his combat shorts and big boots, his muscles coiling as he dug over a bed. He’d be television gold.

She would do anything in her power to keep him. She couldn’t imagine life at Peasebrook without him now. But there was a limit to how much she could afford to pay him. Times were hard. It was always a struggle to balance the books, despite all their best efforts.

But today, at least the stress took her mind off her grief. Her secret grief. She’d had to put her heart in a straitjacket and she’d hidden her heartbreak well. She didn’t think anyone was any the wiser about how she was feeling or what she had been through.

Six months, if you counted it from the beginning. It had ripped through him, devoured him with an indecent speed and she could do nothing. They had snatched as much time together as they could but—

She shut off her mind. She wasn’t going to remember or go back over it. Thank God for the gardens, she thought, day after day. She had no choice but to think about them. They needed constant attention. You simply couldn’t take a day off. Without that momentum she would have gone under weeks ago.

‘What about the folly?’ asked Dillon, and Sarah looked at him sharply.

‘The folly?’

‘It needs something doing to it. Doing up or pulling down. It could make a great feature but—’

‘We’ll leave it for now.’ Sarah used her ‘don’t bring up the subject again’ voice. ‘That’s a long-term project and we don’t have the budget.’

He looked at her and she held his gaze, praying he wouldn’t push it. Did he know? Is that why he’d brought it up? She had to be careful, because he was perspicacious. More than perspicacious. He almost had a sixth sense. It was one of the things she liked about him. Sensitive wasn’t quite the right word, she thought. Intuitive, maybe? He’d once told her his grandmother had ‘the gift’. That kind of thing could be hereditary. If you believed in it. Sarah didn’t know if she did, but either way she wasn’t going to give anything away at this point.