I could have had triplets, though, and Bill’s aunts would have gone on resenting me. Thanks to Aunt Dimity’s bequest, they couldn’t accuse me outright of being a gold digger, but the suggestion of social climbing was always in the air, and they never failed to comment acidly on my numerous gaffes and blunders.
Bill’s friends and, associates commented, too, but to them I was “refreshing.” The governor found my description of the primitive washing facilities in certain Irish youth hostels “refreshing.” A board member of the Museum of Fine Arts had been equally “refreshed” by my story of rescuing a rare Bront? first edition from the birthing stall of a barn in Yorkshire. It seemed that, every time I said something that would shrivel the tongue of a well-bred society matron, I was “refreshing.”
Maybe having a “refreshing” wife got old after a while. Maybe Bill was listening to his aunts. Maybe all of those deeper things we’d discovered in each other at the cottage didn’t matter if the surface things weren’t quite right.
When I tried to talk to Bill about it, he just ruffled my curls and said I was being silly. And I couldn’t confide in my father-in-law. Willis, Sr., had been so utterly delighted by his son’s marriage that I couldn’t bear to tell him that things weren’t exactly working out as planned. Emma Harris was my best friend in England, and Meg Thomson was close by in the United States, and I know they would have listened, but I was too embarrassed to say a word to them. People who get all three wishes aren’t supposed to wish for anything ever again, yet there I was, wishing with all my might that someone would brain Bill with a metaphysical two-by-four and bring him back to his senses, and to me, before it was too late.
In desperation, I arranged an event which I dubbed our second honeymoon. Bill astonished me by going along with the idea, agreeing that we would stay at my cottage in England, unplug the phones, repel all messengers, and spend the entire month of August getting to know each other again. That was the plan, at least, and it might have worked, if it hadn’t been for the bickering Biddifords.
After thirty years of wrangling over the late Quentin Biddiford’s will, the Biddiford family had finally agreed to discuss a settlement. They’d asked Bill to mediate, and with what seemed like malice aforethought, they’d chosen the first of August, the exact date of our planned departure for England, as the start of their summit meeting. The Biddiford dispute was the professional plum Bill had been waiting for—plump, juicy, and decidedly overripe—and since it had been handed to him instead of his father, it had been a no-contest decision. Bill had to stay in Boston.
Heartsick, I’d flown off to England, and Willis, Sr., had flown with me, graciously offering to keep me company until his son arrived. Bill had promised to fly over the moment he’d wrapped up the negotiations, but I couldn’t help feeling that Fate—in the form of the pea-witted Biddifords —was conspiring against me. Thanks to that fractious brood, I was about to spend my second honeymoon with my father-in-law.
It was too much. I couldn’t talk to Willis, Sr., but by then I needed to confide in someone, and Emma Harris was right next door. And that’s why I was knee-deep in Emma’s radishes, and Bill was back in Boston, working, the day Willis, Sr., disappeared.
2.
Emma Harris’s radishes flourished in the southeast corner of her vegetable garden, a verdant patch of land that lay within view of the fourteenth-century manor house where Emma lived with her husband, Derek, and her stepchildren, Peter and Nell. Emma was an American by birth, but her love of gardening had brought her to England, and her love for Derek, Peter, and Nell had kept her there.
Emma’s manor house was about halfway between my cottage and the small village of Finch, in the west of England. It had been three days since Willis, Sr., and I had arrived at the cottage, delivered safely after an overnight in London by a chauffeur friend of ours named Paul, and although I was still too jet-lagged to trust myself behind the wheel of a car—especially in England, where I found driving to be a challenge at the best of times—I’d recovered sufficiently to walk over to Emma’s after breakfast and offer to lend a hand with the radishes.
She needed all the hands she could get. Emma was a brilliant gardener, but she’d never quite learned the lesson of moderation where her vegetables were concerned. In the spring she overplanted, muttering darkly about insects, droughts, rabbits, and diseases. During the summer she lavished her sprouts with such tender loving care that every plant came through unscathed, which meant that, when harvesttime hit, it hit with a vengeance.