EG02 - The Lost Gardens (6 page)

‘I know we will,’ she replied with a smile.

‘Would it be all right with you if we picked up our discussion in the morning?’ he asked, stifling a yawn.

For a second, Jamie’s expression was blank. Then, as quickly, she smiled again. ‘Yes, of course. But there’s one thing we haven’t talked about yet, perhaps the most important of all. I apologize for not bringing it up sooner.’

Finally, thought Kingston.

‘The question of compensation,’ she said. ‘Your fee.’

For reasons unknown—but no doubt to do with his lifetime in the halls of academia, where talking about one’s income was considered boorish and salaries were rarely negotiated—he had always found discussing such matters uncomfortable. With his curiosity piqued, now could be an exception, though.

‘I must confess, Jamie, I hadn’t given it much thought.’ The minute the words left his mouth he knew they sounded hollow. ‘Well, that is to say—it wouldn’t necessarily be the deciding factor.’

She said nothing, as if enjoying his momentary and rare lapse of equanimity.

Kingston broke the awkward silence. ‘Perhaps you should tell me what you had in mind.’

To his surprise, Jamie got up from the table and went over to a nearby bureau. She opened the top drawer and withdrew an envelope. Returning to the table, she slid the envelope towards him. ‘I suppose I should have given you this much earlier.’

Kingston opened the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it and started to read. After a few seconds he looked up at Jamie, astonishment registered on his face. ‘This is—well, what can I say—this is more than generous. Are you sure—?’

‘We don’t have to discuss it now. It will keep overnight, Lawrence.’ Suddenly, her eyes hardened, locking on to his. ‘I would like to say one thing, though, she said. ‘I don’t want the money to influence you unnecessarily. I want you to be well compensated but above all I would want you to accept the assignment
only
because you believed in it and would put your heart and soul into it. I would like to think of you as a partner, not an employee. The two of us can create something of extraordinary beauty here. I’m certain of it.’Just as quickly, the brown eyes were soft again, still fixed on Kingston but not demanding a reply. She fell silent.

Kingston took a deep breath and placed the letter on the table. The sum she was offering was more than double his former annual salary. He was still struggling to contain his shock. ‘Jamie, it’s far more than is necessary,’ he said softly. ‘And you’re right. If I accept, you have my word for it that it will only be for the reasons you have stated.’ He smiled. ‘Can we sleep on it, then?’

By noon the next day, he and Jamie had reached a handshake agreement. He would return one week hence to further familiarize himself with the estate and start to address the myriad tasks confronting them. During his absence she would start checking with the county and the local borough to find out what permits or special procedures might be required. Equipment and materials would be purchased as needed, starting with two pickup trucks, a small backhoe loader, and a laundry list of items like axes, chainsaws, power and gardening tools.

They said goodbye at the front door portico under gloomy skies. Kingston slipped effortlessly behind the wheel of the TR4—a remarkable feat, considering his size—slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition and with a wave of a kid-gloved hand, drove off round the circular drive and out of sight.

Passing through the two stone pillars, leaving Wickersham, he looked in the rearview mirror at the black wall of the jungle. It had started to drizzle. He flicked the wipers on and headed for the A39 to Bridgwater, wondering whether to put the top up. ‘What
am
I getting myself into?’ he muttered under his breath.

Chapter Five

On his return to London, Kingston made all the necessary arrangements for the care of his apartment, forwarding of mail and other exigencies required during his extended absence. A friend and neighbour promised to keep an eye on things. Within six days he was back at Wickersham, comfortably lodged in one of the estate cottages that Jamie had decorated in a cheerful country look.

First order of the day had been to hire a foreman for the project who, in turn, would assemble a work crew. Of the dozen or so applicants, Kingston had chosen Jack Harris, as best of a mediocre bunch. Jamie’s impression was not quite as charitable—a little too cocky, she had commented after meeting him. Despite her misgivings she went along with Kingston’s decision.

Jack was single and had lived in the Taunton area for the last several years working in construction and general landscaping but the London accent was still there. Kingston was soon to learn that though Jack might be sparing on words and somewhat lacking in good manners and diplomacy, his energy and drive were Herculean. He claimed the immediate respect of his crew by demonstrating that there was nothing he would ask them to do that he couldn’t do himself. On one occasion, to prove a point, he scrambled up a fifty-foot Chinese cedar tree without the help of ropes or a harness.

Within five days of Jack’s hiring, work commenced on the uphill task of clearing the land. Bulldozing was kept to an absolute minimum. It would have been the quickest and simplest method but by and large it was out of the question since there was no way of knowing what was buried underneath the rampant mass of bramble, ivy, laurel, impossibly tangled vines and fallen trees.

Teams called ‘bramble bashers’ did a lot of the preliminary clearing work. The nickname had survived from the Heligan days. Working in pairs, under the watchful eye of a gardener lest they should start hacking away in the wrong places or at plants that were to be saved, one ‘basher’ would slash away at the dense growth with a machete while his mate cleared the hacked-out debris with a long rake. Chainsaw crews were at the ready should they hit fallen trees. Once an area was cleared, a dumper truck would appear to cart away the debris.

Extreme care had to be taken not to destroy anything above or under the ground that might be a remnant of the former gardens. It was Kingston’s hope, indeed, expectation, that they would be able to salvage all kinds of plants, shrubs, and garden treasures that were entombed under the sixty-plus years of rampant vegetative growth. While various pieces of mechanical equipment were employed for some of the heavy-duty work, most of the clearing was done by sheer hard labour.

Once it was completed, a comprehensive survey of the site would be undertaken. First, all the landscape features: the pathways, steps, walls and rock areas like the grotto would be established on the map. Next the structures and garden features that had been unearthed would be catalogued. Then, finally, the most labour-intensive of all, identifying and marking the precise location of every tree and shrub. These would all be tagged and numbered and entered into a computer database.

The hope was—although, rather slim—that later, if plans of the original gardens were found, the new plan could be figuratively superimposed over the original, thereby establishing the evolution and development of the garden through to the present day.

The early stages of the restoration process would have taken months longer were it not for the help of Gillian Thomas. An amateur historian, she worked at the library in Bridgwater. Gillian had volunteered to conduct historical research and to compile an official record, written and photographic, of every stage of development on the estate. As a start, she had undertaken a thorough search of the vaults of the Somerset Record Office in Taunton and other public record offices. Three weeks into the task, she unearthed two detailed plans of the estate drawn in the early part of the nineteenth century. Later she procured an 1840 Ordnance Survey map and an 1852 tithe map of Wickersham. These documents were invaluable in forming the foundation for the new design.

One of the first priorities had been to raze the grounds immediately surrounding the house. This done, the house took on a much more pleasant aspect. Opened up to the skies on all sides, it seemed to flourish in its new environment, assuming an even grander mien, looming larger than before. For Jamie—and she made no secret of it—progress was unbearably slow but as every day passed, nature grudgingly surrendered piece after piece of the puzzle. Victorian and Edwardian garden features, structures, ornaments and artifacts, abandoned long ago, were salvaged, photographed, catalogued and subjected to critical scrutiny by Kingston and his crew.

Some discoveries were not of great significance—like that of a derelict potting shed entombed in a sarcophagus of nettles and blackberry. It surrendered hundreds of terracotta pots, a stockpile of glazed Victorian edging and a trove of vintage garden tools. Another find provided much-needed clues to the botanical history of the gardens. In a derelict, fern-shrouded structure, built up against a high brick wall—Kingston thought it might have been a peach house—several wooden crates, too rotted to even lift, contained a hundred or so old zinc plant markers. Back in the days before the war, a gardener had had the foresight to wrap them in oiled paper and tie them in neat bundles. Not only were they beautifully preserved, each bore the name of a plant variety that had been planted or was about to be planted in the gardens. As he read off the Latin names like
Lychnis chalcedonica, Campanula lactiflora, Nigella damascena, Astrantia major
, Kingston’s eyes lit up. ‘Better than digging up a box of gold coins,’ he declared to Jamie. Over the last weeks, the lack of plant information had become a recurring topic. Surprisingly, up until now, not a single work ledger, planting layout or sales receipt had surfaced. Now, at the very least, they possessed the beginnings of a list that would enable them to start planting.

On two occasions over more recent days, work had come to a complete halt. A jubilant shouting had signalled these events, bringing everybody within earshot running to the scene. These were important finds. The first was unearthed after a full day’s hacking away at a fifty-foot stretch of house-high bramble. All these years the impenetrable mass had mothballed the rotting remains of a large Victorian greenhouse. Most of the algae-stained windows were still intact and its shiny cobbled floor was none the worse for its incarceration. Gillian had snapped off at least three dozen digital photos that afternoon.

The second recovery was even more impressive. In an area of the garden close to the house, a twelve by thirty-foot mosaic-tiled reflecting pool looked skyward again after sixty years in hibernation. The central motif of the design, the head of a griffin, was identical to those Kingston had encountered earlier on the stone pillars—the Ryder family crest. The decorative Italian tiles were in remarkably fine condition.

And now, of course, there was the chapel and the well. Since that discovery Kingston had returned to the site twice. Although he had said nothing yet, it had struck him straight away that there was something not right about the dates of the coins. Since it was already known that the gardens had been abandoned in the years prior to the war—the late thirties—it seemed a reasonable assumption that the chapel would have been buried since that time, too. But the coins were dated 1959 and 1963. The only explanation was that there had to be another way of entering the chapel. The coins had appeared sometime
after
it was sealed by nature.

For this reason, Kingston’s visits to the chapel served only one purpose: to see if there had once been another means of entry; a way in that was used by the man who had either fallen down the well or whose body had been dumped there. So far he had not been able to come up with any evidence of another means of access. As a result, he had concluded that Jack and he were wrong and that somehow nature had given the chapel a reprieve and had not consumed it until much later than the rest of the garden.

As encouraging progress was on the horticultural front, one deficiency in the garden’s restoration still had Kingston in a quandary. While the mosaic pool, the greenhouse and other minor architectural features were pronounced triumphs at the time of their discovery, he had been expecting much more. Where, he kept asking himself, were the statues, decorative urns, fountains, elaborate ironwork gates, benches, pergolas and other architectural treasures that were shown on the pages of the books he’d seen in the library after Jamie had described them in their first meeting. He could only conclude that they must have been stolen in the early days, prior to the decay setting in.

In Britain, theft of architectural garden features has now reached epidemic proportions. As values of antique garden ornaments continue to rise so does the black market. With nineteenth-century iron benches selling at auction for £2,000, important statues from £10,000 up, it’s little wonder that thieves find gardens lucrative and easy pickings. A recent Sotheby’s sale of six hundred lots in Sussex netted £1.4 million.

Among his gardening colleagues and friends, Kingston had heard of some horror stories in the last few years. It seemed that anything was game now and organized criminals were becoming more skilled and more audacious. At one time it was only garden statuary, urns and ornamental wrought-iron garden gates. Now, nothing was safe. Items reported stolen from private and public gardens ranged from potted trees, paving stones, fish ponds, koi and carp, entire avenues of trees, potting and tool sheds, and several cases where entire gardens have vanished—every single plant dug up and hauled off.

Sadly, the rate of recovery of stolen items was low but Kingston had read of one case where a company specializing in identifying and locating stolen antiques met with success. A life-size statue worth tens of thousands of pounds, weighing a half a ton, that had been its garden position in an East Yorkshire stately home for one hundred years, was knocked off its plinth during the night and carted off by thieves. Following circulation of a picture of the statue, a call was received by someone who remembered seeing it being placed in a crate at a shipping agent in East London. With the agent’s cooperation, the ship that had taken the statue out of the country was determined and soon thereafter, the unwitting Chicago buyer, who very accommodatingly handed it over.