Page 31 of Lady Waldrey’s Gardening Almanac for Cultivating Scandal (Love from London #3)
F rom the Quentin Daily ?—
A great sea serpent was seen swimming up the River Thames!
Witnesses say that the beast is nearly twenty feet long and as big as three wine barrels lashed together.
“Farmers up-river have reported missing sheep for weeks!” Meyer Millerson, a local man, said.
“Doubtless this beast is to blame!” Hopefully the creature won’t develop a taste for men, instead!
The next day, Candace stood in a shed. Dim light filtered in from three small windows, illuminating dust motes in their feeble rays. The building smelled of a hundred years of layered history—rich loam, decomposing wood, the mold creeping up the back wall where wood wicked a rain puddle upwards.
When Candace had inquired about replacement bulbs for the pot that Seamus had destroyed, she’d been directed here. Mrs. Penn said she’d have a footman see to the crates, but Candace wanted a project and set out alone, a thick apron borrowed from the housekeeper over her wool dress.
Thankfully, the lid of the nearest crate had already been pried open and divested of its nails.
Candace still fumbled with the heavy thing as she peeled it off and set it aside.
She inhaled the clean smell of cedar and rummaged through the first layer of wood shavings.
If the words daubed onto the side were to be believed, this crate alone contained two hundred hyacinth bulbs.
Percy, you romantic idiot.
Her brother had become smitten with a beautiful lady of noble birth who possessed exceedingly limited resources.
In true Percy fashion, he hadn’t been content with simply marrying the woman, which was what most noblemen would have done.
Instead, he’d befriended her, assigned ridiculous dowries upon her and her sisters, then wooed her into loving him back before he proposed.
Part of the aforementioned wooing was buying her an entire estate’s worth of flowers. A normal man would have sent them to her house in cut-flower installments, but Percy wasn’t normal.
He’d bought her thousands of flower bulbs so she could recreate the effect of her late mother’s garden. A dreadfully romantic gesture, except that the two lovebirds had escaped on a months-long honeymoon directly after their wedding, leaving the bulbs to molder in this shed.
Candace sighed. If she were honest, at the moment she felt much like these forgotten bulbs. She could pretend that her current dejection was about Shelbourne or her self-imposed exile from society, but the truth was that she’d been feeling excellent as of late .
Until she saw the smile that James and Vera shared on the picnic.
Candace pressed her lips together in irritation.
She’d come out here to distract herself from such thoughts.
James and Vera were friends. Friends smiled at one another.
Besides, Candace shouldn’t care, even if the smile had been of the more-than-friendship variety.
She shook her head and refocused on the flowers.
Candace didn’t doubt for a moment that her brother would replace the forgotten bulbs once he returned from his honeymoon and realized they were no longer useable. His devotion—and nearly limitless pocketbook—would allow no less.
But that did nothing for these poor flowers. Candace translated the latin names—hyacinth, gladiolus, daffodil, tulip, crocus.
Closing her eyes, she could see the estate transformed—the inner garden cleaned and planted with a riot of tulips and hyacinths, the outer gardens planted with drifts of daffodils, crocus, and lily of the valley, all left to naturalize…
She shook her head. It would take at least a week to plant them all, even with a full staff. And someone would have to design the layout. What a project that would be.
Candace smiled and whirled for the house.