Stella compiled an extensive historical library of her own as her family grew to include a son and another daughter. She spent less and less time in London, finding the air in Wiltshire clean, and the long walks she took across the estate, when her neck cramped from close reading, invigorating. Eventually, she took over a small room on the third floor near the tapestries and filled it with proper shelves and filing cabinets to store her research. She was pleased with her work, if not always with the characters and events she uncovered.
It happened that every generation or so a particularly hateful Kirkwood took the reins. This was what defined Thomas, who was Lord Kirkwood in the years that Queen Anne, last of the Stuarts, held the throne. His management of the estate was without peer, as was his temper, a fact that made it into history by way of village records that detailed his harsh treatment of anyone who dared to disobey him. He was an unpredictable bully, and his family and attendants lived in a state of almost unbearable tension. When Thomas, Lord Kirkwood exploded, no one was safe, and those explosions could be triggered as easily by an overcooked roast as by a run of fly strike in the sheepfold. His wife, Elizabeth, an accomplished woman of great beauty, kept a diary; there are references to how exacting her records were on the running of the household and gardens, any travels undertaken, the births of her children, and every single painting of her showed her holding her book close. The diary itself was nowhere to be found amongst the village or estate papers even though Stella dug away and pestered the town clerks about this frustrating gap in their otherwise impressive records. It might have proved most helpful to Sorrel and Stella, for it was Elizabeth, Lady Kirkwood who planted the first walled garden at Kirkwood.
If the documented history of the Kirkwood family was easily found in the dusty books and dustier local records of the area, the true stories needed to be teased out of those archives without the aid of Elizabeth’s book. And this is where Stella’s curiosity blossomed and took on the energy of a quest. This too would become Sorrel’s unexpected mission, to learn the secrets of the Kirkwood legacy of beauty and beasts. It would become the way to save the garden, and the family.
ON HER FIRST morning in London Sorrel rose with the sun as she often did back home in Granite Point, although it took some upward swimming to leave the ocean of bedcovers. Birdsong surprised her in this city of unexpected comfort, but she still missed her sisters. Nettie would be poking around in the bean patch by now, picking the edible flowers, tying up the grape vines of the tiny, only a bit illegal, vineyard hidden beyond the orchard. Patience would be back at Baker’s Way Bakers for another muffin and a cup of coffee before she pulled mugwort for her lucid dreaming sachets. Sorrel could almost smell the sweet peas Nettie promised to tend for Sorrel, the juniper berries, sharp and piney, that Patience used in her digestive tinctures. For a moment she thought she might not be able to stay away from her sisters and their nursery after all. She questioned why she had ever thought to leave in springtime. But other gardens were waiting, so Sorrel dressed for the unpredictable weather and went downstairs. It was still quiet in the early hours. She made toast and tea and looked through the A to Z guide Poppy had left on the table with a note.
“I assume you are phoneless at the mo’ so this little book will be your best companion. Look up the street you need in the back pages and you’ll find it on the map by the coordinates: very old school but utterly reliable. Use the Oyster card on all buses and tubes.”
Sorrel was relieved, for she’d wondered whether Henry’s tattered green guide would be of much use twenty years on, and now she had another worn but trusty handbook. Slipping it into her bag, Sorrel set off on foot. She crisscrossed Chelsea and Knightsbridge, walked through Kensington into the park and gardens that rolled gently away from the palace. The warm red brick and the upright yew hedges worked their way into her mind, and Sorrel began to think about the Wiltshire garden ahead. Walls, yes, she thought, but also boxwood, pea gravel paths, a mossy mound with a sundial, and a chamomile lawn. A roughly drawn plan began to form in her mind.
Just as Patience read the people in Granite Point, searching for the troubled bits in their bodies or hearts, and Nettie collected the harvest and composed meals that sustained the very same parts, Sorrel wove her plants and flowers into a tapestry of her own, first in her imagination, then on paper using watercolors and ink to bring a garden to life. Then, when everything was ready, each bulb accounted for, each tender sapling and fragile seedling, Sorrel poured that knowledge, and her body and heart, into the fertile soil. What sprang forth was as precious to all the Sisters as any child. And here, so far from home, Sorrel began to feel the rising of her gift again. It felt right and so very good after a time of fruitless anguish.
Sorrel approached the Long Water, the river that flows through Kensington Gardens to become the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and paused. She was suddenly surrounded by children and looked over their bobbing heads to see a statue of Peter Pan. Sorrel too was drawn to the boy who never grew up. She thought of Matty Short, whose death had ignited her town, of Patience and Henry, who found each other under fire. They mourned him still, the little boy who struggled so in his own childhood and now would never grow beyond it.
Sorrel bought an utterly tasteless and strangely satisfying ice cream from the Mr. Whippy truck near the Albert Memorial and sat on a bench with the pigeons and the old ladies who fed them. It could easily take months to get a handle on the crooked streets and swaths of green flowered parks in London, months more before a visitor could afford to stop staring at her A to Z map. But she didn’t have months or even days, so, recalling Poppy’s advice, she got on the 11 bus, which took her practically to the front door of the house on Cheyne Row.