Prizewinning onions, cabbages, lettuces, leeks—I’d told Emma once that if the local rabbits ate a tenth of what she grew they’d be too fat to survive in the wild. I was still in awe of anyone who could get an avocado seed to sprout in a jar, however, so perhaps I wasn’t competent to judge. All I knew was that, come August, my normally placid and imperturbable friend became a human combine-harvester, filling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow with an avalanche of veg.
Derek Harris took his wife’s annual descent into agricultural madness in stride. Like Emma, he was in his mid-forties, but where Emma was short and round, Derek was tall and lean, with a long, weathered face, a headful of graying curls, and heart-stoppingly beautiful dark-blue eyes.
There were deep lines around those eyes. Derek had gone through hard times in his life—his first wife had died young, leaving him with two small children to raise—but he’d survived those difficult years, and his marriage to Emma had healed his grieving heart. He was a successful building contractor, specializing in restoration work, but he gladly put everything on hold in August, in order to help his veg-crazed wife pile up the produce.
He’d made an exception today, though, allowing himself to be called away—by the bishop, no less—to slap an emergency patch on the leaky roof of Saint James’s Church in Chipping Campden, where His Reverence was scheduled to conduct a rededication ceremony in ten days’ time.
Peter, Derek’s seventeen-year-old son, wasn’t at home, either. He wasn’t even in the country. Peter was studying medicine at Oxford and spending the summer in a rain forest in Brazil, battling Amazonian rapids and jungle fevers while searching for the cure for cancer. To someone like me, who’d spent every summer of her adolescence shelving books at the local library, Peter’s adventures seemed just a tad exotic. A letter from him had arrived the day before, postmarked Manacapuru, and bearing his ritual apology for not being on hand for the harvest.
My offer of help had been hastily, though politely, declined, Emma having learned through painful experience of my inability to tell a ripe radish from a rotten rutabaga; and twelve-year-old Nell, Emma’s golden-haired step-daughter, had strolled over to the cottage, with Emma’s blessing, to continue her ongoing chess game with Willis, Sr., who was, as far as I knew, where I’d left him: in the study, comfortably ensconced in one of the pair of tall leather chairs that sat before the hearth, with a cup of tea at his elbow and a first edition of F. W. Beechey’s A Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole in his hand. He’d been sitting, in fact, precisely where Bill should have been.
The thought filled me with gloom, and I heaved a woeful sigh as I watched Emma pluck radishes from the ground and toss them deftly into the wheelbarrow at my side.
“That’s the third time you’ve done that,” Emma noted. She tucked up a long strand of hair that had escaped from her straw sunhat, and adjusted her wire-rim glasses. “That’s the third time you’ve blown a great tragic sigh all over my radishes. They’re beginning to droop, poor things.”
“Sorry.” I thrust my hands into the pockets of my jeans and paced carefully to the eggplants and back before taking a seat on the lip of the wheelbarrow—between the handles this time, so it wouldn’t tip over again—and staring crossly at the oak grove that separated the Harrises’ property from my own. I wasn’t feeling very generous. I’d spent the last hour pouring my heart out to Emma, and her only advice had been to fly straight back to Boston and smack Bill in the kisser.
“I’ll bet you’ve never smacked Derek in the kisser,” I grumbled.
“That doesn’t mean I haven’t wanted to,” Emma responded airily. “I have it on good authority that a smack in the kisser is the only reliable way to get a man’s attention. I mean, really, Lori, a second honeymoon? You’ve only just gotten back from your first. Bill probably thought you were being frivolous.”
“I wasn’t being frivolous,” I retorted. “I wanted this trip to be special. I wanted to get Bill away from the office so he could relax a little and—”
“You’re the one who needs to relax.” Emma climbed slowly to her feet and brushed dirt from the padded knees of her gardening trousers. As she peeled off her work gloves and tucked them into the pocket of her violet-patterned gardening smock, she came a step closer, eyeing me shrewdly. “Been to see Dr. Hawkings already?”
I felt my face turn crimson, and dropped my gaze. “You said you wouldn’t mention that again.”
Emma put a hand on my shoulder. “Calm down, Lori. Pressure never helps.”
Dr. Hawkings had said the same thing in London, and so had my gynecologist back in Boston. Even Emma had said it once before, when I’d foolishly confided in her. Relax, they all told me. Let Nature take its course. Everything will be fine. But I had my doubts.
“What if I’m like my mother?” I said, still avoiding Emma’s knowing gaze. “She took ten years to have me.”