When he’d died five years previously, Edward’s father had left the house to Edward and the business jointly to Edward and his mother. Edward had sold his share of the business to his cousin Francis, who was more suited to it than he. His mother had retained her share, which provided an income on which she could live comfortably, while she ran the house in Edward’s absence. They were both much the happier for it.
‘Talking of Lily, where is she?’ said Mrs Clark. ‘It really is about time we were going.’
‘I could sense she was getting bored with our conversation,’ said Edward’s mother, ‘so I sent her down to the wood.’
The loosely styled ‘wood’ was an area of the garden that Edward had long wanted to change, but had so far lacked time and funds to do so. In the spring it was full of blue-bells, but the trees were old and creaking, and overshadowed the house too much in Edward’s opinion. He longed to cut them back and open up the space in the middle to make a more formal garden. It was his hope that after he had completed his studies, he would design gardens for the gentry, and he planned to start here.
‘I’ll go and fetch her,’ offered Edward, happy to escape the clacking of the women for a moment. The veranda steps led down to a green lawn, which fell away from the house for nearly two hundred feet. In the bottom left-hand corner the offending trees stood in a dip, and Edward made his way down to it. He couldn’t see any sign of anyone at first, so he strode through the trees to the clearing, where he caught sight of a tiny, dark-haired girl, framed in the sunshine. She was wearing a white muslin dress, and peering intently at the flowers in her lap. Long, brown curls tumbled down her back, and her sun hat was slung halfway down it. Her dress was covered in grass stains, and her hands looked rather grubby.
Edward’s first impression was of a small, and no doubt tiresome, child, and he immediately regretted his offer to fetch her. Then she looked up at him and his preconceptions fell right away. Her green eyes opened wide and her perfect heart-shaped mouth formed an ‘oh’ of surprise at seeing him, and her slender hands flew to her mouth, as she blushed prettily with embarrassment. This was no child, but a girl on the verge of becoming a woman. Her radiant beauty was like nothing he had ever seen before, made more charming by her unconscious ignorance of it.
‘Hallo,’ she said, shaking the daisies from her lap, as she rose in some disarray. He could see that even standing she was small, but her petite frame couldn’t hide her womanly figure. He swallowed hard again. ‘Are you Edward?’
‘Yes,’ said Edward, still reeling from how wrong his first impression had been. ‘How did you know who I was?’
‘Oh, your mother talks about you all the time,’ said Lily. ‘It’s Edward this and Edward that. How did you know my name?’
‘Your mother sent me to fetch you,’ Edward offered.
‘Oh,’ Lily pulled a face. ‘I was enjoying it here. No doubt I shall be summoned back home to face Papa and be told off again for my hoydenish ways.’
She looked down ruefully at her stained skirt. A stray curl fell across her face and she absentmindedly pulled it back, reminding him again of the child he had thought her to be.
‘Are you often told off for being hoydenish?’ Edward said, laughing. There was something so lively and disingenuous about her, it was impossible not to be enchanted.
‘All the time,’ said Lily, with an impish look on her face. ‘I don’t know how it happens but I was so interested in seeing the plants, I hadn’t realized I had made such a mess of my clothes. Did you know you had heartsease growing in this wood? It seems such a shame to hide it. If it were my garden, I’d cut down some of these gloomy oaks and make a proper garden here, to show them off.’
‘Oh, would you now?’ Edward was caught between captivation and irritation. She really was the most enchanting creature he’d ever seen, but he rather resented her telling him what to do in his garden.
‘Oh dear,’ Lily looked stricken. ‘I shouldn’t have said that should I? Please forgive me; it’s none of my business what you do in your garden. It’s just that gardens are rather a passion of mine.’
‘Are they?’ said Edward with a smile. ‘They’re rather a passion of mine, too.’
‘Have I drawn it properly?’ Lily looked at him anxiously, as Edward came over to see how her work was progressing. In the six months since he’d left university, Edward had become used to having Lily for his assistant on his expeditions into the Sussex countryside to document the flora and fauna. Her mother, Lily confessed, had given up trying to keep her at home and teach her how to be ladylike. And though it was an unconventional career choice, learning about flowers was still an important part of Lily’s education, so Mrs Clark had been easily persuaded to let Lily come on these trips with him, so long as Sarah the housemaid accompanied them as a chaperone. As it happened, Sarah was rather fat and lazy, so more often than not she’d accompany them as far as the first field, and sit down to await their return. It meant that Lily and Edward were spending more and more time together, and Edward for one was not sorry.
‘It’s perfect,’ declared Edward, impressed by the delicacy of the poppy that Lily had painted. She had a natural affinity with plants, and a talent for drawing them technically. It was Edward’s plan to put together the material he had collected to make a small book about the plants of Sussex, in the hope that not only could he earn some money in his own right, but also build up a reputation as a serious botanist. His desire was to go abroad, to visit far-flung corners of the globe and make his reputation by bringing back exotic plants the like of which the world had never seen.
‘Hark at you,’ teased Lily when he told her. ‘Who do you think you are? A mighty explorer like Doctor Livingstone?’
‘No,’ said Edward, very serious – Lily’s laughter made him realize just how intensely serious he could be sometimes, ‘I just want to see the wonders that are out there. Imagine trekking through the Amazon, or scouring the deserts of the Sudan. There’s such a huge world out there, I want to go out and explore it. I want to find something new and different. I’d bring it back for you.’
‘Oh, would you, now,’ said Lily, her laughter putting him in mind of silver bells. It was impossible for him not to feel cheerful when he was with Lily. It was as though she made the sun shine. ‘Suppose I don’t want your smelly plant. It might be poisonous for all I know. Besides, why do you want to search for the exotic, when we have perfectly good flowers of our own here?’
‘I could take you with me,’ he said. ‘You could come as my assistant.’
‘Shocking shocking, man,’ she declared with a coquettish smile. ‘I suppose Sarah would have to accompany us as my chaperone then. I don’t think she’d make it past the first step into the jungle.’
Her pretty green eyes danced across her face, and her boisterous curls spilled out of the plait they were supposed to be in and tumbled down her back. Edward took her upturned chin in his hands and kissed her gently on the lips.
‘You don’t have to come as my assistant,’ he said. ‘You could come as my wife.’
A wife. To have a wife. That would be quite a thing. Edward turned the word over in his head. In a few short months Lily would be his, and nothing could ever take them away from one another. In the meantime, much to the amusement of his mother, he had finally started work on creating the garden he had always envisioned, but now with renewed purpose; it was to be a wedding present for Lily.
‘Look at this!’ he would cry every day, as he pored over plans and read books about the gardens of the past. He was transfixed by the idea of creating a knot garden in