Cottage by the Sea (18 page)

   "Here, let me," Luke intervened quickly, and followed Chloe to the rear of the Jaguar, abandoning Blythe at the front door. Blythe watched silently as he lifted the visitor's elegant luggage out of the car and returned to the entrance where Blythe silently stepped aside to make way for the pair.

   "Perhaps you'd like to freshen up before we sit down?" Luke asked, mounting the stairs carrying Chloe's luggage.

   "In the blue bedroom?" Chloe inquired expectantly. "I'm looking forward to a new view of the Channel."

   The lord of the manor—doing double duty as the butler— hesitated on the carpeted landing.

   "Mrs. Quitter's made up the yellow room in the guest wing… out of habit, I imagine," he said, swiftly turning his back on the two woman to continue up the stairway, adding, "I hope you don't mind?"

   Ah, the yellow room…

   Blythe had convalesced in that sunny chamber, she remembered with a start. She had stared for hours at every inch of those wall coverings that age had mellowed to a warm, buttery color. As she continued to gaze at Luke's and Chloe's retreating backs, she wondered how close to the master suite the blue room might be located.

   "At least I won't run into the furniture at night," Chloe assured her host as she followed in his wake. However, her tone of voice had gone from sultry to Arctic Circle. "I rather expect there to be a plaque with my name on the entrance to the yellow room by now, Lucas."

   To Blythe's surprise it was Richard who ultimately ate his lunch in the kitchen. And considering Chloe Acton-Scott's interminable and content-free exchange with Luke about people Blythe had never met, she concluded that (a) the woman was certainly beautiful to look at; (b) she was no rocket scientist; and (c) most men would never notice that fact.

   As far as Blythe was concerned, she would have vastly preferred joining Master Teague and Mrs. Q in the servants' quarters.

Mrs. Acton-Scott, a divorcee with no children, remained a guest at Barton Hall for several days. One morning Luke and she arrived at Painter's Cottage with an invitation to join them for luncheon at the Old Ferry Inn in Bodinnick, near Fowey.

   Chloe's shoulder-length honey-colored hair had been allowed to escape from its sophisticated chignon and, today, was held back sleekly by a smart black velvet headband. She had donned an elegant pair of gray gabardine trousers and a forest-green cashmere pullover that enhanced both her come-hither figure and her sea-green eyes.

   Blythe, in contrast, still had on the first thing she'd slipped into after rising from bed: a faded pink running suit she preferred to wear when she sat down alone to do some sketching.

   "Ah…" Blythe's ex-husband, Christopher, was wont to comment whenever he perceived his wife choosing comfort over style, "I see Minnie Rag Bag's with us today."

   Six thousand miles from Hollywood, this same item of clothing had somehow acquired a blotch of tea absentmindedly spilled on the fabric between her breasts during her morning's labors. Holding her sketchpad under her chin, Blythe politely declined her English host's invitation to lunch, explaining that she was deeply engrossed in du Maurier's
Frenchman's Creek
and was sure they'd forgive her if she begged off.

   "It takes a foreigner, doesn't it, Luke, to make us appreciate our own authors?" Chloe said cheerfully. "Although personally I find du Maurier's writing a bit swoony."

   "Well," Blythe replied, "you know how sappy Americans can be." Then she added sweetly, "I'm loving every word. Enjoy your lunch."

   
Bitch.

   The woman made her feel like a clod, Blythe thought indignantly.

   She managed to maintain a polite smile plastered on her lips until Luke had put the Land Rover in reverse and headed down the dirt track that led away from her cliffside abode.

   An hour later Blythe was still in a foul mood. The billowing clouds of midmorning had congealed into an overcast sky, and the wind was starting to whip the waves into whitecaps across Veryan Bay. The Old Ferry Inn would be gloomy indeed on a day like this, she concluded with satisfaction.

   Blythe changed into jeans and a sweater, donned her green Barbour jacket, and struck out toward Hall Walk, sketchbook in hand. She and Luke had not had an opportunity to further discuss her proposal to parlay his estate's magnificent gardens into a paying operation. Meanwhile she hoped to complete her blueprint outlining places on the estate where propagation and growing areas, plant stock storage, and the office, the Internet servers and sales points might be situated on his property with a minimum of disruption to life at the Hall itself.

   The leafy coolness along the shaded path served to remind Blythe once again how grateful she was to have found such a soothing refuge in Cornwall. She shifted her sketchbook from one hand to another, preparing to make the final ascent to the castle itself. Her new project with Luke, she realized thankfully, was the kind of all-consuming enterprise that would serve both to keep her from dwelling on the past, and provide her with a means of reentering the world of floral and landscape design.

   And most important, Blythe thought with a sudden, overwhelming sense of her own isolation, she needed to be connected to something!

   The opportunity to create Barton Hall Nurseries here in enchanted Cornwall was certainly the most appealing way she could think of to avoid the people and places in California that reminded her of Chris and Ellie and the scandal that had blown her life apart.

   As Blythe emerged from the "White Rabbit's Tunnel," as she had come to call the path leading from her cottage to the Hall, she noticed a gate near the stable yard with a rickety trellis arching above it. Suddenly she was reminded of the walled kitchen garden into which the hidden door leading from the library's secret storeroom had opened when Garrett Teague had—

   She peered through the gate's wooden slats. Sure enough, greeting her gaze was a weed-strewn vegetable garden, and beyond, a window in the castle's stone wall through which she glimpsed rows of leather-bound books.

   
Where would that hidden door have been?
she wondered.

   
Just forget it!
she admonished herself sternly.

   Now that she had a better view of the area, she could see that, in fact, Luke and John Quiller had put about one quarter of the walled garden in cultivation this year. The small patch provided enough vegetables, Blythe supposed, to meet the needs of Luke's reduced household. The stooped old man, accompanied by young Richard Teague, was hoeing weeds. Mrs. Q's husband expertly dug into the soil with a hand spade, assisted by Luke's son, who gamely yanked the unwanted vegetation out of the ground and threw it into an ancient wooden wheelbarrow.

   "Good morning, Mr. Quiller," Blythe called. "Hello, Richard. Mind if I make a few sketches while you work?"

   "Not at all, miss," Quiller replied, his unshaven face bristling a welcoming smile. "Dicken and me wouldn't mind a bit a company, would we, now, lad?"

   "Hello, Mrs. Stowe," Richard mumbled, and looked down at his pint-sized rubber gardening boots.

   "Please… call me Blythe," she replied, approaching the edge of the section where they were working. "Don't let me disturb you. I'm making a few sketches for your father, Dicken."

   The little boy looked up from his weed patch with curiosity. "Why?"

   Blythe shrugged to downplay her self-assigned task. "I told him the other day that I went to school and studied landscape design and that it might be fun to put in more vegetables and flowers next year."

   "Super!" Dicken said with the first burst of enthusiasm Blythe had seen in the child.

   She sat down on a wooden bench placed against the castle wall near the library window and began to sketch a proposed design for a vegetable and herb garden. Her mind was fired with ideas that bubbled up from her recollection of a similar plan that her grandmother had once devised.

   "Impulse items," Lucinda Barton had explained, pointing to clusters of rosemary, lemon basil, and thyme. Vacationers heading south on Highway 89 out of Yellowstone Park had been seduced into stopping at the small plant-filled lean-to positioned at the entrance of the Double Bar B ranch, nine miles outside Jackson. The potted varieties were arranged attractively near the cash register. "If you display herb plants where the customers pay for their seed packets and flowers, you're bound to make a sale," she advised. "Then they take along a catalog while they're there, and the next thing y'know, they've placed a nice big order by mail."

   Inspired by her grandmother's innate business acumen, Blythe quickly put the finishing touches on her design for an ambitious kitchen garden. Her thoughts drifted to pleasant memories of late-summer days spent with her grandmother gathering wilted wildflowers in the shadow of the Grand Tetons. Both she and Grandma Barton had fitted themselves out with long woven-wicker baskets shaped like a quiver for arrows. When they returned from these arduous expeditions, they'd hang their bounty upside-down in the barn to dry. Later, they dumped the harvest onto newspaper spread out on the long hand-hewn kitchen table. Then they'd carefully shake the seeds from their pods, identifying each type with a brief notation before twisting the specimens into small squares of paper, which they later sold to tourists driving down from Yellowstone.

   Suddenly Blythe recalled a vision of Ellie, alone outside the kitchen window, sitting forlornly on the swing made from an old rubber tire that their father, Will, had attached to a branch of a lone pine tree. Her sister must have been around six years old, which meant Blythe would have been twelve. Ellie always refused to join their project, even just to watch. The previous year their mother had crumpled to the ground on a windy spring day while she was hanging out the family laundry—felled instantly by a blood clot that traveled from her heart to her brain. After that event Ellie had never wanted to help with anything around the ranch, and because of her tender age, neither she nor Grandma Barton pressed the issue.

   It was often during these hours Blythe spent with Lucinda that the old lady reminisced about her pioneer forebears and her girlhood growing up on a neighboring ranch. She delighted in telling stories and repeating sayings that always seemed, to the impressionable pre-teenager Blythe had been, chock-full of rustic wisdom.

   "As your ol' granddad used to say, cowgirl," Grandma Barton concluded most seed-harvesting sessions, "ask no more—and give no less—than honesty, courage, loyalty, generosity, and fairness. Stand by this Barton Code, m'girl, and it'll stand by you."

   The reward for an afternoon of such sustained effort was a cup of tea and a scone made from a recipe Lucinda swore had been handed down, generation to generation, from the original Barton Cornish ancestor—whoever that might be.

   Blythe was startled from her reverie by the presence of someone looking over her shoulder.

   "That doesn't look much like our garden!" Luke's tenyear-old son scowled, pointing at the precise schematic Blythe had been making.

   "It doesn't, does it?" she agreed cheerfully. "It's a plan for how the garden could be if your dad and Mr. Quiller decided to go whole hog."

   "Whole what?" Richard asked, confused.

   "Really put this garden back in shape," she translated. "Got any ideas where a nice big parsley patch could go?"

   "There!" the boy responded emphatically, pointing to a section of open ground in the middle of her drawing. "That part of the garden gets lots of sun… at least when it bothers to shine," he amended, glancing overhead at the dark clouds scudding across the sky.

   Blythe burst out laughing, and Richard allowed himself to smile, pleased with the little joke he had inadvertently made.

   "Tea time!" Mrs. Q called from the kitchen door. "Oh, Mrs. Stowe, how nice to see you. Perhaps I should be layin' tea in the sitting room?"

   "Naw…" Blythe responded in her best Wyoming accent. "I reckon your cozy kitchen sounds much more invitin', don'cha think so, Dicken?"

   "Yes, ma'am," he agreed, only for politeness' sake, Blythe realized instantly. After all, he was being educated in a British boarding school, where manners counted for a lot.

   Young Richard Teague was neither rude nor friendly. Rather, he seemed… watchful. Like Blythe and Ellie, he had lost his mother at a tragically early age, and she suddenly had an overwhelming urge to put her arms around him right there in the middle of the kitchen garden.

   Instead, Blythe ruffled his chestnut hair that was many shades lighter than Luke's dark mane. Richard shot her a startled look, as if such casual physical contact was definitely not what he was used to.

   "You sound kinda like the Wyoming cowboys where I grew up," she commented as they trooped into Mrs. Quiller's domain. "Except they all say it this way: 'Yesss, may-yam!'" she drawled.

   "Yesss, may-yam!" Richard mimicked her, and everybody laughed.

   They sipped their tea sitting around the trestle table that was positioned near a wall at the far end of the large rectangular kitchen that had served the household when the castle's fiftyseven rooms had been fully occupied. A platoon of copper pots in a myriad of sizes hung from iron hooks overhead, along with large metal skewers, chestnut roasters, and quaint kitchen implements whose functions had long been superseded in most modern households by toasters, waffle irons, and Cuisinarts. An enormous cast-iron Aga cooker, stoked by oil, not only served as a stove, but heated the room as well.