The Rose Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

just above them, and this bolt shot home with a satisfyingly sturdy click that made me feel a little more secure while I got dressed.
    In the corridor outside my room I met Mark, who was coming upstairs. ‘Good, you’re up,’ he said. ‘Susan just sent me to see if you were. She’s got breakfast on. How did you sleep?’
    ‘Very well, thanks.’ I gave a nod towards the closed door to the spare front room and added, ‘You can tell them they don’t have to be so quiet, now I’m up.’
    He looked at me. ‘Tell whom?’
    ‘The workmen,’ I said, ‘or whoever they are. In there.’
    Still looking at me strangely, he opened his mouth to reply and then shut it again, as though wanting to make very sure he was right before speaking. He turned the handle of the room beside my own and pushed the door wide enough to put his head round, then said to me, certain, ‘There’s nobody in here.’
    I looked for myself. ‘But I heard them. Two men. They were talking.’
    ‘Then they must have been outside.’
    ‘They didn’t sound like they were outside.’
    ‘Sound plays tricks, sometimes,’ he told me, ‘in old houses.’
    Unconvinced, I made a final study of the empty room then let him close the door.
    He said, ‘Come down for breakfast.’
    Downstairs, Susan had a full cooked breakfast on the go, with sausage spitting in the pan and floured tomatoes sizzling beside them, eggs and toast and juice and coffee that smelled sharp and rich and heavenly and brought my eyes more fully open.
    Susan, turning, waved a spatula towards the table. ‘Have a seat, it’s hardly ready.’
    The kitchen had had a remodel since I’d last been here, and the table was a larger one than I remembered, but it occupied the same spot by the window that looked out across what used to be the stable yard, now greenly ringed with overhanging trees and with the former stable building now converted to a garage at its farther edge. I sat where I had always sat, my shoulder to the window-wall, and looked across the yard towards the terraced gardens, sheltered by their high brick walls.
    The gardens were all separately enclosed and named: the Lower Garden, closest to the house; the Middle Garden; then the largest one, the Upper Garden, and my favorite of them all, the Quiet Garden, which I’d loved best for its name.
    These were the legacy of Mark and Susan’s great-great-grandfather, who’d returned from the Boer War with only one leg and a mind in sore need of tranquility. Nostalgia for a simpler time had driven him to cultivate traditional varieties of roses that were falling out of fashion with the rise of the more modern hybrids gaining popularity because they could bloom more than once a season.
    Disdainful of these new hybrid perpetuals, he’d cared for his old-fashioned roses with a passion that he’d passed to his descendants, and through the hard work and investment of subsequent Halletts, the business had grown into one of the country’s most highly regarded producers of older historic varieties. In fact, thanks to the family’s obsessive caretaking, these gardens now sheltered some roses that might have been lost altogether to time were it not for Trelowarth.
    The sizzling from the cooker brought my gaze back from the window and I watched while Susan turned the sausage.
    ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘you didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Cereal and milk would be enough.’
    Mark, who’d been pouring the coffee, came over to hand me my mug and sat down in the place just across from me. ‘It’s not for you,’ he assured me. ‘She’s trying to soften me up.’
    ‘I am not,’ was Susan’s protest.
    Mark said, ‘So I guess it’s coincidence, then, that you’ve set your big file of plans for the tearoom out here on the table?’
    ‘I wanted to look at them.’
    ‘Wanted to show them to Eva, more like.’
    ‘I did not.’ Susan scraped the sausages out of the pan and, crossing to the table, set Mark’s plate down, hard,