The Skeleton Garden Read Online Free PDF Page A

softly right at the corner of his mouth. He took a quick breath, turned toward her, and without waking buried his face in her neck. After a moment, she felt him kiss her shoulder, and then work his way up to her mouth. He ran his hand over her hip, but stopped all at once, opening his eyes halfway.
    “What time is it?” he whispered.
    “Time doesn’t exist today,” she whispered back. “It’s Saturday.”
    She adored the weekend, and having Greenoak to themselves. Pru took to wandering around half of Saturday in her pajamas, draping a thin shawl over her shoulders and scuffling down the halls in fuzzy slippers. She’d take a steamy bath instead of a quick shower, adding scented oil to the water. They would drink tea out of mugs—Evelyn didn’t approve of mugs and would serve only out of cups and saucers—while they sat on the terrace, basking in the last heat of autumn.
    “We’re spoilt for choice,” Pru had said when they’d arrived and been faced with choosing among the six upstairs bedrooms. They had settled in the Wilsons’ cleared-out space; it was the largest room with a huge bath attached and an enormous dressing-room closet, which they used as storage. She didn’t want the rest of the house to waste away though, and so made sure to admire the views out of every bedroom window. From theirs, she could see the hornbeam walk that led to the orchard; the walled garden could be seen from the bedroom over the kitchen, each vegetable bed lined in boxwood, forming a tidy pattern; from the front bedrooms and the floor-to-ceiling windows at the top of the stairs, the parterre lawn commanded the view.
    They ate simply but well over the weekend, piecing together lunches from leftovers; Saturday evenings they would often eat at the Blackbird. Sundays, Christopher would go to the shop and get the newspapers, and they would stretch out in front of the fire on the leather sofa in the library. As Sunday drew to a close, they patrolled the house, collecting tea trays, coffee mugs, stray lunch plates, newspapers folded to the crossword. They would wash up dishes, dust surfaces, and straighten pillows before Evelyn arrived Monday morning to start cleaning.
    —
    “I’m off,” Pru said, pulling on a jacket. “There’s an organizing meeting at the church hall about the Christmas fête. A theme—we’ve yet to come up with a theme.” She walked up beside Christopher, who stood over a map he’d unrolled on the library table. “Is that your badger sett?” she asked, nodding to a red circle.
    “I believe it is. At the far edge of the copse the land begins to rise. They’ve dug into the hill.” As a founding member of the awareness group Badger Care, encouraging peaceable relations with the iconic black-and-white-faced animal, Christopher had been on the hunt for a local badger den for a few weeks. Pru had spent several evenings with him in the dark, holding still, waiting for one to trundle by.
    “Do you want to go out this evening and look?” she asked. “We could pull our gear together when I get back.” She enjoyed the outings, as much for the search as for standing in the wood at night with Christopher’s arms around her.
    “We’ll save it for another time.”
    “Hang on,” she said, taking a closer look. “That map is wrong. It shows a big courtyard for parking in front of the house instead of the parterre lawn and borders. Oh, but look—there’s an
X
right in the center. That’s where Simon planted that little tree.
X
marks the spot.” She loved the parterre lawn—a square as wide as the house itself and defined by a yew hedge with the drive circling it. Two paths crossed on an axis, and shrubs and perennials filled each deep corner.
    “This is an old map that Harry gave me,” Christopher said, pointing to the scrolly label in the corner that read: G REENOAK 1961 . “After Alf inherited from their great-uncle, he had some landscaping done before he let the place to Harry and