The Last Garden in England(27)

Sydney had told her that Henry Jones came from a long line of farmers who had worked Highbury House Farm. The property had once belonged to the house’s original owners, the Melcourts, before it was sold to the Joneses in the 1920s. It had weathered a world war, industrial agriculture, and countless other changes and remained in the family to this day.

The farmhouse came into view. She ran her hands over her temples to find that her wispy brown baby hairs had started to pull free from her ponytail. She tugged the band free to retie it, catching sight of the dirt under her nails, despite the gloves she wore religiously while working. Henry Jones would just have to face the reality that a woman who worked in dirt all day might be dirty.

The sky had already begun to turn inky, so she wasn’t surprised when she saw farm equipment standing idle in the yard a hundred yards or so away from the house. Not seeing anyone around, she made for a redbrick building with lights on in the ground-floor windows.

As she approached, she could hear music—something with a good beat and some brass behind it. It only got louder as she approached, and when she knocked on the pale green door, she wasn’t surprised at the lack of response.

She pounded the side of her fist against the door as the mist turned to a steady rain. After a moment, the music lowered. She stepped back. The door swung open, revealing a man sporting a James Brown with the Dramatics T-shirt over a white thermal. His dark hair was messy and all bunched up on one side, as though it had spent all day under a hat.

“Hi,” the man said.

“Hello, I’m looking for Henry Jones,” she said.

“You found him.”

“I’m Emma Lovell. Sydney Wilcox may have mentioned me.”

His expression brightened. “The gardener. She did mention you. You wanted to see if I had some of my nan’s old drawings?”

“That’s right.”

“Shit, sorry. I shouldn’t be making you stand outside in this rain. Come in,” Henry said, making way for her.

“Thanks.” Noticing he was only wearing socks, she asked, “Do you want me to take off my boots?”

He rubbed his hand over the crown of his head, mussing his hair even more. “Do you mind? Normally I wouldn’t ask, but Sue’s just been through and done the office. She’ll kill me if I tread mud over the floors less than twenty-four hours after she’d cleaned.”

“Who is Sue?” she asked, toeing off her boots.

“She keeps the accounts for the farm. Occasionally she gets tired of my mess and does a cleanup. Come through here,” he said.

Emma followed him down a short corridor and into an office with two desks. One was neat as a pin. The other was… not.

Henry took a seat behind the messy desk, moving a stack of seed catalogs off a spare chair and shoving some forgotten tea mugs to the side. There was a laptop on this desk, but it was half buried under a stack of paper, including what looked like a chemical analysis report, an old edition of the Saturday Telegraph, and a paperback book bent open at the spine.

“I’m guessing you can tell which side is Sue’s,” he said over the sound of a classic soul song.

“I think so. Charlie, who heads up my crew, and Sue would get along.”

“He’s the neat one, then, huh?” Henry asked.

“Comparatively, although I’m not as bad as you.”

Henry laughed. “No one’s as bad as me. Now, tell me more about what you’re hoping to find in my nan’s drawings.”

She explained a bit about her project and what she was hoping to find in his grandmother’s old sketchbooks. “Drawings can sometimes fill in the gaps between intention and reality.”

“Wouldn’t photographs be more helpful?” he asked.

“Yes, ideally, but this was 1907. It was still pretty rare for people to document a garden really closely unless they knew it was significant. Venetia Smith didn’t become famous until years later.”

“She wrote books, right?” he asked.

“Pardon?” she asked, leaning in to hear over a series of horn blasts from the music.

He snatched up his phone and lowered the volume on the speaker set on a bookshelf. “Sorry about that.”

“What was the song?” she asked.

“Jackie Wilson. It’s called ‘The Who Who Song.’ Dad used to drive up to Stoke-on-Trent to dance Northern Soul at the Golden Torch before he took over the farm from Granddad. Soul, Motown, Stax. He listened to all of it when he did the accounts, and I just sort of kept doing it after he died.”

That explained the James Brown shirt.

“I asked if Venetia Smith wrote books. The name sounds familiar,” he said.

“That’s right. She moved to America, got married, and lived there until she died. Highbury House was her last British commission.”

“Well, it’s decades later, but Nan was at Temple Fosse Farm during the war, and she used to do deliveries up to the big house. She didn’t get serious about her art until the fifties, after my mother was born.”

“Sydney said that your grandmother was a well-respected artist,” she said.

He grinned. “She wasn’t well-known enough for me to pack in farming and live a life of luxury, but she did sell to some galleries in London for a while. She used to take me up to visit her old favorites in the early nineties. A friend of hers used to travel all the time, so we would stay at her flat in Maida Vale.”