Remembering Rose (Mapleby Memories Book 1) Page 7

  “We’ll talk about this later,” I told him. Then I hurried through to the nursery. By the time I returned to the bedroom Daniel was fast asleep, one long leg outside the covers and his arms thrown wide across the bed. For a moment I contemplated waking him and having an argument right then and there, but I didn’t. Instead I slipped into bed beside him and thought about the implications of Millie Carter living above the shop. Then I thought about Rose and how my imagination had got the better of me earlier that day. Then, just as I was dropping off to sleep, I thought about the twinkle in Robbie Parker’s blue eyes.

  * * *

  Leah was fractious the following morning, and Daniel was late, so any discussion about Millie Carter had to wait. To work off my anger, I cleaned the cottage from top to bottom, emptied the ironing basket and then, in an excess of energy, decided to weed the front path. Leah, who once she had recovered from her earlier irritability had gurgled and chuckled her way around the cottage as I lugged her from room to room, was tired out, so I parked the stroller under the cherry tree and left her sleeping.

  I’d almost reached the end of the path when the gate clicked and I found myself looking up at Robbie Parker. He was wearing a t-shirt and jeans the same as yesterday, and his hair was just as tousled. This time though, I noticed it was so dark it was almost blue black. His eyes were also bluer than I remembered. He smiled a sexy, lop-sided grin.

  “Hello again.”

  I straightened up. “Hello.”

  “I…uh…I’ve come to beg for a glass of water. Next door’s water is still turned off at the mains and I’m parched after spending the past hour digging down to look at the damp course.”

  I pointed to the rocking chair. “I can do better than that if you can wait until I’ve washed my hands.”

  I knew, when I returned with the beer and wearing a fresh slick of lip-gloss, that I was being provocative, but I didn’t care. If Daniel was going to spend half his life worrying about Millie Carter instead of spending time with Leah and me, then I wasn’t going to feel guilty.

  Popping the can open, Robbie tilted it to his lips and took a long drink. Watching him, I noticed what I had missed in the confusion of our first meeting, that as well as being tall, he was tanned and muscled and looked very fit. I turned away as soon as he lowered the can but I knew he had seen me staring.

  “Do you want me to open one for you?” He gestured to where I had dropped a four-pack of beer onto the grass beside him.

  I nodded. One weak beer wasn’t going to harm Leah, not now she was down to two breast feeds a day. When he handed me the can our fingers touched. The unexpected contact sent a sharp surge of lust through me, as unexpected as it was disturbing. Muttering that I just needed to check on Leah I hurried across the garden, beer sloshing onto my shaking fingers. What the hell was I doing?

  Looking at the crescents of Leah’s long, dark eyelashes curving across her cheek brought me to my senses. So what if my quest for a little fun had turned out to be a bit more than I expected, no-one would ever know. Robbie Parker probably hadn’t even noticed the effect he had on me. I walked slowly back towards him, settled on the grass and asked him what was happening next door.

  “Building is starting in two weeks,” he said. Then he nodded towards Leah’s pram. “While we’re knocking walls down it might be too noisy for her to sleep outdoors.”

  I stared at him. “I thought you were renovating it for the new owners, not demolishing it.”

  “I am, but as they want it open plan there’s quite a bit of bashing about to do.”

  “Is bashing about a builder’s technical term?” I asked with a grin, feeling a lot more relaxed now we were talking about other people.

  He laughed. “I can show you the plans if you like. They’re pinned to the wall in the kitchen.”

  Nosiness fought with caution and won out, and a couple of minutes later I was pushing a still sleeping Leah through next door’s gate and round to the back of the house. Robbie walked ahead, clearing a spade and a pickaxe out of the way for me. Leaving Leah beside the kitchen door, I went inside.

  Despite the hot weather, it felt cold and damp. I shivered slightly. “It’s very dark.”

  He nodded, serious now we were looking at the plans. “That’s why the new owners want it opened out. We’re going to take out the wall overlooking the garden and put in a long run of bi-fold doors.”

  I shook my head. “You’ve lost me already. What are bi-fold doors?”

  “They’re just fancy patio doors that open right up. In the winter the room will be warm but it will still be bright and airy because the whole wall will be glass. In the summer the doors can be folded right back so the room is completely open to the garden.”

  I listened as he explained the finer points of the architect’s drawing pinned to the wall in front of me. It sounded as if whoever was buying the house had a lot of money to spare. I asked if he knew them. He shook his head.

  “I haven’t met them but I know they’re American. I think they’re moving to the UK because of his job.

  “Why Mapleby though?”

  He chuckled. “Why not?”

  “Well, for a start it’s in the back of beyond. There’s not much going on here, is there? I can’t imagine it’s got anything that would attract foreigners, especially Americans. Don’t they insist on walk-in fridges and huge washing machines and stuff?”

  He was really laughing at me now. “Maybe they’re not those sort of Americans, and even if they are it doesn’t make them bad people.”

  I shook my head. “I’m just jealous of the bi-fold doors.”

  “You can have them too. They’re easy enough to install.”

  “Everything is easy if you have money,” I said gloomily. Then I brightened up. “Perhaps one of their ancestors came from Mapleby and they are going to research their family tree. Americans are always interested in their past aren’t they?”

  “I wouldn’t know because I don’t have any American friends and I don’t think you have either. I don’t think you’ve even met an American, what with living in all your life in this boring little backwater.”

  I flushed because he was right. Mapleby was the sort of place that only attracted hikers and dog owners, those hearty outdoor types who were happy with pub grub and a pint of beer. Exotic it was not, although the countryside surrounding it was very beautiful.

  I was about to answer with a piece of face-saving repartee when, always anxious about Leah, I glanced out of the open doorway to check on her, and saw Rose. She was sitting on a swing that had been fixed to the upper branches of the old plum tree at the bottom of the garden, and her face had a dreamy look as she swung gently to and fro. Even as I saw her I remembered there were no longer any trees in the garden and the confusion must have showed in my face.

  “Are you okay Rachel? You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost.” There was concern in Robbie’s voice as he moved across to the door and peered through it. I knew he wouldn’t be able to see Rose, or the tree, or the swing. I knew too that what he had just said was true. I had seen a ghost. What I didn’t understand was why it was this version of Rose, not the one who sometimes stood beside Leah’s crib in the mornings. At the same time that these thoughts flashed through my mind I was searching for a way to explain my odd behavior.

  “I’m fine. I thought I saw someone in the garden but it was just a shadow, probably a dark cloud drifting in front of the sun or something.” I turned to leave.

  Taking his cue from me, Robbie nodded and then followed me out of the house, locking the door behind us. I made my excuses, saying Leah needed feeding. Then I thanked him for showing me the plans and carried on chattering inanely, anxious to deflect his attention from the sky. So much for my excuse about a cloud. There wasn’t even a wisp of white, just a great arched dome of forget-me-not blue, the same color as the ribbon Rose had been wearing in her hair.

  He pushed the pram back down to the path for me and maneuvered it through the gate. Leah
was awake now and she gave him a toothless grin when he spoke to her. “You tell your mother to stop jumping at shadows young lady. Tell her it’s time she got out more.”

  I was sure his words were laced with double meaning. Even though he wasn’t going to pursue it, he didn’t for a moment believe my excuse about the clouds. He didn’t think much of my way of life either, so if I was up for it, he was going to stir things up a bit. The thought was enough to send me hotfoot back to the safety of my own cottage with barely a backward glance.

  He watched me go, his eyes full of a sardonic humor which I tried hard to ignore. Robbie Parker could see right through me in a way that made me squirm. He knew I had some sort of secret, he knew I was fed up with the sameness of my life and, worse, he knew I found him far too attractive for my own good, and I had a feeling he intended to play it every which way he knew.

  * * *

  I concentrated on Leah for the rest of the afternoon, ignoring the sporadic hammering noises coming from next door and the fact that Robbie Parker’s van was still on the grass verge. I didn’t venture anywhere near the garden until I heard him start up the engine, and even then I waited until I was sure he had disappeared over the brow of the hill before I popped Leah into her baby carrier, strapped it to my chest, and went next door again.

  Although it had been empty since before we moved into the cottage, I had never trespassed before. Now though, I had no qualms. Whoever had inherited it from the original owner who had died years ago, had obviously sold it to some nameless Americans who weren’t about to visit any time soon, so I could explore the garden as much as I pleased.

  Although it was quite late in the afternoon, the sky was still cloudless and blue as I pushed open the gate and retraced my steps down the garden path and then beyond, to the very end of the garden where I had seen Rose sitting on the swing. It wasn’t there of course, and nor was the tree. In their place was a flower bed full of weeds, a pile of broken flower pots and an upended wheelbarrow. I leaned against the wheelbarrow and look around. Robbie was right. There wasn’t a tree in sight. Nothing at all to suggest that it had once been an orchard.

  I had come prepared though. I pulled a small notepad out of my pocket and quickly sketched the shape of the garden onto a blank page. Then, screwing up my eyes, I concentrated on recalling exactly where I had seen the trees. I couldn’t remember all of them but I managed almost a dozen, including the plum tree where I’d seen Jed grazing and then seen Rose on her swing. When I finished I studied the result and quickly realized that the orchard had been cleared to make room for the house because half the trees were slap bang in the middle of the plot. For a moment it made me sad, then a thought struck me. If the orchard had once been part of my cottage’s garden, who had sold off the land, and why? Was it Rose’s parents, or even Rose herself after they died? I would probably never know. It was intriguing though because even in Mapleby where we had more trees than you could shake a stick at, cutting them down was frowned upon. It took months of form filling, telephone calls, and a visit from a purse-lipped councilor before a tree could be felled, even if its roots were undermining a house. I know because it had happened to Daniel and me when we first bought the cottage, and the bureaucracy had filled me with fury. Then I shook my head. Rules and regulations were probably totally different nowadays. I had to stop imposing my twenty-first century thoughts onto life in the nineteenth century.

  Although Leah loved being in her carrier, she was beginning to get restless. I knew it was her teatime but I wanted to walk right around the garden before I went home. Soothed by the silly songs I sang as I clambered around to the side of the house that was hidden from the road, she started smiling again. I was midway through my third tuneless rendering of her favorite nursery rhyme when I froze mid-tune because there, nailed to a rickety old fence, was a horseshoe. It wasn’t any old horseshoe either. It was huge, the sort of shoe a carthorse would wear. Carefully, I stepped over the debris of old furniture and broken planks that must have been there for years, and stood in front of the fence.

  The horseshoe had obviously been there for a very long time because it was encrusted with grime and there was the beginning of a strange yellow growth on parts of it. I put up my hand to brush the worst of it away and as I did so I saw the words etched into the space inside the arch of the horseshoe.

  Jed

  Died 10 July 1884

  And underneath, very small, was the shape of a heart.

  From the look of it, someone had used a hot poker to burn the words into the wooden plank of the fence, and I knew it was Rose because her father wouldn’t have drawn a heart, although he might have hammered the horseshoe onto the fence for her.

  I took a photo with my cell phone. Here was something else to show Grandma. Maybe she would be able to remember something about the cottage and the orchard if I prompted her.

  Chapter Nine

  While I was feeding Leah her tea, Daniel phoned to say he would be late. I didn’t ask why. Instead I built up a steam of resentment as I bathed her and got her ready for bed. It was Millie Carter again. I was sure of it. He was probably helping her decide where her furniture was going in the rooms over our shop, or repairing the dripping tap in the kitchen that I had been telling him to mend for ages, or maybe he was meeting her grandfather again and signing a rental agreement without discussing it with me.

  By the time Leah was asleep I felt so sorry for myself that I couldn’t be bothered to cook. Instead I made myself a cheese sandwich and decided Daniel could have the same when he came home. Then, ignoring the unwashed dishes in the kitchen, I took Rose’s diary out of the drawer where I’d put the pile of notebooks for safe keeping, and settled down to read it.

  If I expected to be sucked into a time warp again then I was disappointed because nothing untoward happened as I devoured her daily entries. By several pages in, however, I had built up a picture of a fairly leisurely life. It really surprised me because Ma is forever telling me and all my sisters how lucky we are compared to when she was young. Grandma used to do the same before she began to forget things, so I thought I knew all there was to know about the hardships of rural life in the past. Rose’s description of her life was so different, however, that it took me a while to realize she got off lightly because she was the baby of the family.

  From the diary entries it was obvious that May worked harder, although not very willingly, and who could blame her when her little sister spent all her time outside in the sunshine while she had to help her mother in the house. The other sister, Daisy, was rarely mentioned at all because she was a maid at a house several miles away, and Rose hardly ever saw her. Her brothers, Harry and Joseph, were away too. Harry was a farm laborer, married with a child of his own, and Joseph was a junior footman somewhere in London. The only time Rose mentioned him was when he wrote home to say he had just been promoted. She wasn’t very complimentary about it either, saying his ambition to be a butler seemed a very dull thing to her.

  By the time her entries became more sporadic, I had gone off her a little bit because she didn’t appear to care about anybody’s feelings except her own. Then I remembered how young she was, and how every teenager was fixated on their own world, and I forgave her. I wasn’t so sure about her parents though. Couldn’t they see they were storing up trouble for her by letting her skip chores and be forgetful? The thought that maybe I had been brought up the same way didn’t enter my head then, or for many weeks afterwards.

  The sound of Daniel’s van interrupted my thoughts and suddenly I wanted to talk to him about it, so I decided not to be angry with him any more. Instead of the cheese sandwich I had planned, I would cook him his favorite ham and cheese omelet with all the trimmings. I was halfway through slitting open a bag of oven ready fries when he came into the kitchen and dumped a couple of plastic bags on the table. One of them toppled over, spilling a couple of overripe bananas.

  “I thought you could make some banana bread with those,” he said, tipping the rest
of the contents of the bag into the fruit bowl.

  I bit my lip because I hated having to use up things he hadn’t managed to sell. I wasn’t going to lose my temper though. Besides, Grandma enjoyed banana bread and I was planning to visit her again the following day. I let the milk that had reached its use-by-date go too, and the packs of cold meat.

  “You must have read my mind,” I said brightly, tearing open one of the packets and beginning to chop the ham.

  He walked around the table to where I was standing and hugged me because he knew how I felt. “I’m sorry, Rachel, I over-ordered for the deli counter and then forgot to tell Millie to discount it.”

  I wanted to say surely she could have worked it out for herself but I stopped myself, partly because I knew she hadn’t been working there for long enough to understand how carefully we had to manage the stock, and partly because I didn’t want her to start making the decisions I used to make on a daily basis when I was working. Once she did that my fate was doomed. First he would say she was doing well, then he would say she was indispensable and surely I’d rather stay at home with Leah all day while she was small, so I never uttered a word. Instead, I laid a place at the table, poured him a beer, and told him to sit down.

  He did so gratefully and it was then that I noticed how tired he looked. Immediately I felt guilty. Was I responsible for the shadows under his eyes and that new hollowing beneath his cheeks? He saw the question on my face and gave a weary smile.

  “It’s just work, Rach. We were getting a bit low on some things so I had to make an extra trip to the wholesalers today, and by the time I got back school was out so I had to serve in the shop instead of unloading the car.”

  He knew, as soon as he said it, that he had dropped himself in it, and this time I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “The result of employing Millie Carter, I suppose. Anyone else could have stayed to help but she had to collect her boys from school, didn’t she? I can’t imagine what you were thinking of, taking her on. I suppose you had to do all the lifting on your own as well.”