Ravenscliffe Read Online Free PDF

knife and it fell with a discordant clatter, disturbing the respectful silence.
    ‘Can’t grow them in Netherwood soil,’ said Amos.
    Eve looked at him, then back at the bananas, then back at Amos again. Her face was unreadable and the colour seemed to drain from it so that he was afraid she might be about to faint away. He put a hand out, rested it on her arm.
    ‘You’ve gone white,’ he said.
    ‘Silas,’ she said, and she seemed to be offering this enigmatic pronouncement as an explanation. The others, Amos, Ginger, Nellie and Alice, looked at her uncomprehendingly.
    ‘My brother Silas,’ she said.
    Still they stared.
    ‘A long time ago, when ’e wasn’t much more’n a bairn, ’e said that one day ’e’d send me bananas,’ Eve said. She was smiling now, her eyes bright with the beginnings of excitement. She looked down at the crate at their feet, at the exotic cargo, incongruous in this Yorkshire kitchen. Looking up again, she laughed at the miracle of it.
    ‘And now ’e ’as,’ she said.

Chapter 4
    P atient observation. This, Daniel knew, was what was required to make a new garden. Wait and watch over the course of a twelvemonth, see what comes up and how well it looks, or how incongruous. Walk the acreage daily, and let it slowly reveal its secrets to you. All very well in theory, he thought, but nigh on impossible in practice, when there was clearly so much to be done. He looked at the majestic gardens of Netherwood Hall, of which the countess was so fond and so proud, and he saw not a fine and finished product, but the greatest challenge of his life. There was no geometry to the plan. Indeed, he thought to himself, coming up once again from the ha-ha that separated the gardens from the park, there was no plan at all. Instead there were great swathes of undulating, tree-dotted lawns, interrupted here and there by the realisation of Lady Netherwood’s various whimsical fads and fancies. The Japanese water garden was monstrous, risible, and its days were numbered. The circular maze of yew could stay, but it needed regular close cropping if it wasn’t to resemble a shaggy, mythical beast. The wisteria tunnel was doubtless attractive for its three weeks of joy in late spring, yet it stood like a folly, without purpose, leading nowhere. Before it andbeyond, there would have to be created entirely new garden rooms with paths and beds and stonework, in order that the tunnel might then make sense and lead from one place and into another.
    There must be more water. A garden with lawns this size cried out for the shimmering, glassy counterpoint of a Grand Canal. There must be parterres. There must be knot gardens. There would still be flowers, and many of them, but there must also be clipped box and precise gravel paths and flowerbeds with perfect specimens selected for their rare and delicate qualities. He had made a start; the ruler and set-square were, to Daniel, as crucial to gardening as a spade and a hoe and he had already begun his drawings for Netherwood. These loose lines and undulating curves, the hallmark of the landscape movement, would not do. Gardening, to him, was the control and the manipulation of nature, not an attempt to mirror it. Let Capability Brown turn in his grave. This English garden – now
his
English garden – would, when Daniel had done with it, rival Versailles.
    Behind him, a soft footfall became suddenly apparent and, just as he registered the sound, Eve appeared at his side.
    ‘Found you,’ she said, slipping an arm through his.
    He smiled down at her. His Eve, his love, the reason he was here in Netherwood. She smiled back.
    ‘So,’ she said, looking away from him and at the garden. ‘What’s t’verdict?’
    He grimaced. ‘It’s just as I expected,’ he said. ‘Dull as ditch water. No vision, no imagination, no flair.’
    She laughed, quite sure he was joking. To her the gardens of Netherwood Hall looked magnificent, even now in the dog days of summer when the