“I would do anything for this family. You know that, Poppy,” Andrew said. “Besides, it’s not as if I’ve got a full docket just now.”
Sorrel put her glass down and waved her arms like a referee.
“Enough,” she said. “I have hard-won expertise in places that, for whatever reason, don’t thrive, so I get why I’m here. But before you all become caricatures of yourselves . . .”
“Too late,” Poppy said.
“Probably.” Sorrel laughed. “Why doesn’t one of you show me the garden while there’s still a chance I won’t leave on the next train to London?”
“I’ll take her,” Stella said before anyone else could. “Poppy, meet us at the Shakespeare Garden in twenty minutes. I’ll fill Sorrel in on all our secrets, and you can reassure her that we’re not dangerous at all.”
THE RAIN HAD stopped, but the damp of the day hadn’t lifted. The sky was featureless and gray, and everything under it was as well. Stella had pulled on boots and offered Sorrel an extra pair. As they squelched down the gravel path that led around the back of the house, a path that stretched for a good thousand feet, Stella apologized for her family.
“We aren’t nearly as barking as that conversation made us sound,” she said.
“Really?” asked Sorrel.
“Ha, really! We are only as cracked as we need to be to live here.”
A ghostly silence built around them the farther they walked. Behind the stable buildings and the carriage house facing the forecourt where lords and ladies had once alighted from their mounts came the Shakespeare Garden. It announced itself with red brick walls that should have been lined with espaliered apple and pear trees or perhaps draped with clematis and wisteria. Instead, the brick was shadowed with dry brown lichen that fell away in Sorrel’s hand when she touched it. Stella led her to the gate in the center of one wall.
“Don’t touch anything else,” she said. “Not that it’s dangerous, exactly. Still, it’s rather nasty in here.”
Sorrel and Stella entered the opening of the garden; the gate screeched in protest, catching on broken branches and clumps of shriveled roots. How it was ever called a garden was beyond Sorrel. Of course it made her think of the Nursery last summer, after the men had come through with their shovels and axes, after the rot had set in and the plants had fallen, defeated by so much hate, and the greenhouse glass had been broken by rocks. Only here there didn’t seem to be anything left at all. Here were ruined parterres defined by wide gravel paths, all set into a precise rhombus. Any flowers or fruit, any shade trees or ornamental shrubs were long, long gone. The soil itself stirred under Sorrel’s boots like powder sending up puffs of fine grit and the iron tang of rust and decay.
“Good God,” Sorrel whispered.
“Indeed,” Stella agreed. “Although I suspect God has left this place altogether.”
“What happened?” Sorrel asked. “This can’t just be age and neglect.” She picked her way down the center path, the pea gravel breaking into dust with each step. “Was there a toxic event? Was it intentional, like ours?”
“No and no, or yes and yes. It all depends on how you look at it.” Stella took Sorrel’s elbow. “Let me tell you a story. But first come with me to a place more welcoming.”
Stella led Sorrel out of the garden, and they each shook the brown dust and clinging grime from their clothes. They walked in silence to the churchyard. It was warmer there, as if a veil had lifted as soon as they left the garden. The grass was still green, mown long and scattered with buttercups and purple clover. Headstones, some looked as old as the church, leaned this way and that, their inscriptions all but worn away by time. A wooden bench circled an oak tree, and Stella drew Sorrel to sit. Birdsong settled around them and for the first time since she’d come outside, Sorrel’s breath came easy.
“Kirkwood Hall has a long and illustrious history of which we can all be proud,” Stella said. “But it also has a darkness that gathered force centuries ago and burst out in the most awful way in the sixteenth century when the riches of the Catholic Church and the politics of the time brought forth the very worst in the family. That sinister vein lingered, resurfacing every now and then, as ugliness does. Graham would tell you that he feels personally responsible for his relatives, and Andrew would tell you that history is not made nor told without blood, but I will tell you that, in the case of the Kirkwoods, it is both.” She pointed at one of the headstones.
“Now here we have Cosima Kirkwood, gone too young, completely harmless in life, known mostly for her collection of Venetian glass, which I’ve given to the Victoria and Albert. As you can see, she is one of the newer residents, post–World War I, I believe. Spanish influenza I think.” Stella patted Sorrel’s hand. “Graham and I are undecided about where we wish to be buried. He’s quite set on being scattered somewhere on the estate, but I’d rather like to have visitors at my grave.”
“Stella,” Sorrel said, “when do we get to the story of the garden?”
“Right, right. Here it is, or as much of it as I have been able to tease out from books and records and Graham. Also, the tapestries have been invaluable, as you will see. After the money had settled in and the poor monks were long-forgotten, the Kirkwoods polished up their reputation by creating an estate of both beauty and wealth. For some time that wealth was spread about to create a healthy little economy in the region. In the early seventeen hundreds the grounds were the pride of Thomas, Lord Kirkwood. Actually it was his wife, Elizabeth, Lady Kirkwood, who planned and planted the Shakespeare Garden. Thomas, it seems, was a thorough shit,” Stella said with some gusto on the epithet. “At any rate, the garden thrived for some years and grew to include not just specimens from Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets but also from Anne Hathaway’s cottage.”
“You mean actual plants?” Sorrel asked.
“So the stories say although I can’t believe she would travel to Stratford-upon-Avon. Apparently Elizabeth never went anywhere without her secateurs.”
“That is terrific,” Sorrel said. “Our mother was not above a little neighborhood nocturnal pruning herself. Our most productive lilac started from a cutting she took near the little train station one year.”
“My kind of girl!” Stella laughed. “The garden was a wonder and was known throughout the area. Eventually, Elizabeth consulted with locals about some medicinal botanicals she wanted to add, and that’s when Thomas got involved. He was not happy about his wife’s forays into the village, I suspect because he’d been making his own visits to dip his wick, so to speak.”
Stella looked at Sorrel to make sure she understood what was meant. Sorrel did.
“Lovely thought,” Sorrel said.