“Professor Layton, at MIT,” Emma replied without hesitation. “He taught me everything I know, at any rate.”
Kate gave her a quizzical look. “If Professor Layton at MIT recommended someone for a job at your company, you’d hire that person, wouldn’t you?” Smiling reassuringly, she went on. “Ruth and Louise may not be professionals, like your Professor Layton, but they’ve been gardening since before you and I were born. I think we can trust their judgment.”
Emma took a deep breath, then let it out slowly before speaking. She was accustomed to thinking in straight lines. If you needed a gardener, you looked in the phone book. You didn’t sit in the middle of a hedge maze, waiting for the right one to come along. And you certainly didn’t hire someone selected by such a random process. Did you?
Perhaps you did, at Penford Hall, where no one seemed to think in straight lines. The gatekeeper thought he was Che Guevara, the footman thought he was Dickens, the maid thought she was the next Chanel, and the duke seemed to think he was Father Christmas, showering the villagers with new roads and flying doctors, his servants with laptops and cellular phones. Emma’s own way of thinking was beginning to bend under the influence. For a moment there in the garden, she’d thought she was Marilyn Monroe, ready to do battle with the delectable Ashers for the blue-eyed Derek of her dreams. She might as well pretend to be Gertrude Jekyll for the summer. Who would notice?
I would, thought Emma, sheepishly. I’m no more a femme fatale than I am a long-dead gardening genius, and I can’t work in the chapel garden as an impostor. If I stay on at Penford Hall, she decided, it won’t be under false pretenses. She vowed silently to tell the duke the truth about herself at the earliest opportunity.
“Oh, and one other thing,” Kate added, as Emma walked her to the door. “Mattie’s only been here for a few months and, unlike her grandfather, she can be a bit overdramatic about Penford Hall’s ... colorful past. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to what she says about that pop singer, if I were you.”
Emma’s understanding smile faded as soon as Kate had left the room. Great, she thought. Here I am, without a car, in a Gothic heap full of loonies, being warned off the subject of Lex Rex. What have the Pyms gotten me into?
Thanks to Crowley, who’d knocked on her door at precisely eight-twenty, Emma arrived in the library as the case clock in the comer chimed the half hour. She was relieved to see that she was neither the first nor the last to arrive. The duke was nowhere in sight, but Susannah had Derek pinned in a bay window beside a tall and quite beautiful harp, where she was lecturing him on—God help us, thought Emma—spirituality and good nutrition.
Derek had exchanged his worn jeans and blue pullover for an open-necked shirt and corduroys, and replaced his workboots with a pair of tired loafers. He seemed unable to tear his gaze from Susannah, who was wearing something black, strapless, and ankle-length that clung like paint to the places where most women had curves. Her makeup was flawless, her sleek blond hair pulled into a chignon at the nape of her spindly neck, and diamond studs glittered from her delicate earlobes. Neither she nor Derek seemed to notice Emma’s arrival.
Her entrance didn’t go entirely unremarked, however. Crowley had barely ushered Emma into the room when a shout rang out. “Hey! You the gal with the green thumb we been hearin’ so much about? Syd Bishop’s the name. Suzie’s manager. What’re you drinkin’?”
Syd Bishop was a paunchy American in his mid-sixties, with faded red hair plastered in long strands across his freckled scalp. His accent reeked of Brooklyn, and his voice was so loud that it almost drowned out the rumble of thunder as the first rush of rain spattered the windows. Syd’s tuxedo was black—Emma gave him credit for that much good sense—but the crimson trim on the wide lapels didn’t quite match the vermillion bow tie and cummerbund, or the pink-edged ruffles on the front of his white shirt.
Syd sat next to Kate Cole on a burgundy brocade couch. Kate’s wine-colored velvet gown had a tight-fitting bodice and a flowing skirt, a high collar and long sleeves. Syd Bishop looked as out of place beside her as a plastic gnome in the Chelsea Flower Show.
“I’ll have a sherry, thank you,” Emma replied.
Syd snapped his fingers at the bespectacled footman, who stood to one side, near the drinks cabinet. “Hallard, my man, a sherry for the lady.”