The Garden Plot Read Free Page A

occasional dinners she and Jo shared, meeting for drinks or coffee, and certainly being included in Christmas, but had to remind herself during the long stretches of empty evenings that Jo was a busy woman and new friends were sometimes hard to work in.
    After Pru had finished at Wisley, she acquired her first few business contacts in the gardening world, and Jo introduced her to several potential clients in the general Chelsea/Kensington neighborhood. Jo had the enviable position of being distantly related to the Bennet-Smythe family, who owned Grenadine Hall, a Grade II–listed house in Upper Oddington near the town of Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds where, unfortunately, they had no openings for a gardener, head or otherwise.
    After a quick cup of tea, Jo left and Pru packed her preliminary client kit into the large canvas bag that rarely left her side: a few colored-pencil garden renderings made to look as if they were dashed off in a moment, when in fact Pru had labored over them, drawing not being her strong suit; notepad; pencils; pens; hand pruners, because you never knew when someone wanted to try you out by having you clean up a misshapen boxwood on the spot; and two pairs of gloves. When she stepped out, a shaft of sunlight hit her, and so she stored her slicker in the bag, too. She headed out to the bus stop.
    What seemed odd transportation for a jobbing gardener moving from client to client through the day actually suited her. Pru found a patchwork of journeys on the Underground and buses to be the best transportation. All of her clients lived in central London, and many kept the necessary tools already—spade, fork, rake—which Pru need only augment. For particularly dirty or large jobs, she could give Sammy a ring. He would haul anything around, although his battered Mercedes truck looked as if it should be chucked in the tip along with whatever trash he was dumping.
    Pru sized up the front entry at the Wilsons’ when she arrived. Two stone pots flanked the door; they contained the remnants of a summer planting of pelargoniums, perilously hanging on to life in powdery dry soil by a few leaves and a couple of optimistic, but unopened, flower stalks. Knowing there would be just cause for the name “Toffee Woof-Woof,” Pru took a second to wonder which would prompt the bigger outburst, the knocker or the bell.
    She opted for the bell, and a barrage of barks greeted her from the other side of the door. Mrs. Wilson answered. Well-dressed in tweeds, she held back a caramel-colored terrier by the collar and said, “Oh, the bell always sets him off. He’s so much better with the knocker.”
Good start, Pru.
    The town houses around Chartsworth Square had the usual two-up-two-down arrangement, including a hallway that led straight to the back door. Halfway down the hall, a door on the right opened to a combined sitting and dining room, and at the end of the hall, the kitchen. Stairs led straight up from the hall to two bedrooms and a bath. It was the same arrangement in Pru’s house, although flipped: the rooms were left of the stairs. As she followed Mrs. Wilson through the entry hall, she thought the Wilsons could easily have spread into the next town house over.
    Pru dodged a maze of half-moon display tables with spindly legs, each one covered in framed photos, enameled boxes, and monogrammed letter openers. She caught bits of wording as she passed: “In great appreciation to Harry Wilson from his friends at the AASL” engraved on a gold plaque; “To Harry Wilson on the occasion of his first successful dig …” on an unrolled parchment scroll; and, on a silver-framed certificate, a pen-and-ink sketch of what looked like a Roman bust, and scrawled underneath, “To Harry—a prince of a …” Pru didn’t have time to decipher the illegible last word or the equally illegible signature.
    Mrs. Wilson led her straight through to the back door and opened it. As they stood at the top of the outside stairs