She nodded to them, then put her hands behind her back, turned her face to the sun and kept walking. In the years that she’d stayed at home with Eddie, while he was wasting away, Faith had spent a lot of time reading. The books about the eighteenth century were always her favorite.
If by some chance she really was back in time, she knew what she most wanted to see. She took a left down a well-trod gravel road and there it was, that paragon of industry and efficiency: the kitchen garden. As soon as she stepped through the wide gate set in the tall, brick walls, she looked about her in wonder. It was at least four acres, and every inch of the space was being used in providing what was needed to feed the people of the main house and all the many employees.
There was a walkway wide enough for a horse-drawn wagon through the center of the garden and Faith strolled down it slowly, looking at everything.
She’d read that in the twentieth century many of the old varieties had been lost. If it couldn’t be put in a truck and shipped, nobody wanted to grow it. The fruits and vegetables that were too soft, too tender, or rotted too quickly, were discarded as “useless.” Flavor was not considered in choosing what would be offered for sale in the modern grocery store. But in a time when people ate what they could grow, enormous variety was encouraged—and flavor was the deciding factor.
Smiling, she walked on. She counted ten men working in the garden, but there were more in the seven greenhouses and six potting sheds. She stopped to l
ook into one building at the magnificent compost pile. It was truly a work of art. Layers of household waste, grass cuttings, leaves, and manure were piled up and tended to as though they were beds of gold—which they almost were.
She looked up at the top of the brick walls and saw that there were troughs along the top. Her eyes followed the curved spaces down and saw that every bit of rainwater was caught and diverted into covered barrels.
Green, she thought. The twenty-first century made much ado about being “green” but here it was on a scale and intensity that modern people could only dream of.
She kept walking. There was an enormous bed of flowers and she knew it was to be used for cut flowers for the house. She paced it off and saw that the bed was nearly two hundred feet long. It would supply enough flowers for a palace, she thought. The heavenly smell of them almost made her dizzy.
Beyond the flowers were the fruits. She had never dreamed there could be this much variety as she looked at ripening raspberries, red, white, and black currants, gooseberries and strawberries. Some of the beds were edged with plants that she knew were wild strawberries. The plants made no runners and the tiny berries melted on your tongue.
At the end of the garden, she halted and her eyes opened in wonder. Before her was the herb garden and it was magnificent. It was divided into three sections, with one having a six-foot-high fence around it and a lock on the gate. She could guess what it contained.
When she’d been nursing Eddie she’d become interested in herbology. She read a lot and had even persuaded her mother-in-law to allow her to put in an herb garden. “If you hide the hideous thing,” the woman said as though Faith had asked to plant tobacco in front of the house.
The herb garden was the thing she’d most enjoyed in her married life because she and Eddie had done it together. At first it had only been Faith’s interest, but Eddie, in bed by then and horribly bored, had wanted to work with her. They’d ordered a lot of books, then they’d read and talked and planned a design for the garden. Faith knew some rudimentary drafting techniques and she’d used them as she drew what she and Eddie came up with. The garden was to be beautiful as well as useful.
In the end, they combined two gardens from France and one from England into one design. When they finally had what they wanted, they’d celebrated with sparkling apple juice in Waterford crystal glasses.
As soon as the weather warmed up, she helped Eddie into a deck chair, nearly drowned him in blankets, and he directed her as she used string and spikes to lay out the garden so they could see how it would look.
Eddie had been near her while she’d argued with the brick mason. “You want all them little paths just so you can plant what you can buy in jars at the grocery store?” he’d asked. “Yes,” Faith and Eddie said in unison. The man shrugged. “It’s your nickel.”
It had taken two weeks to level off the quarter acre perfectly flat, then restring the walkways. The men came and put in the bricks in the intricate design that Faith and Eddie had made. A few months after it was done, by accident, Faith overheard the brick mason bragging about the garden he’d put in. His hint was that he had designed it. She’d run home to tell the story to Eddie and they’d laughed so hard that he’d gone into spasms and the doctor’d had to be called.
Besides designing, during the winter, she and Eddie had spent long hours poring over herb catalogs and Internet sites as they planned what to plant.
Everything was timed perfectly and the huge boxes of moss-wrapped plants arrived just days before the brick was finished. Eddie sat in his deck chair with the plans on his lap as he told Faith where they were to be set.
The garden had flourished and she and Eddie had had six years with it before he died. They’d added and subtracted plants every spring, and during the winter they read about uses for the herbs. Since it was difficult for Eddie to get up and down stairs, against his mother’s many protests, he backed Faith in converting one of the upstairs bathrooms into a sort of laboratory. He read recipes aloud while she made infusions and concoctions. They’d started with potpourris, but Eddie’s mother hated the smell of them, so they’d gone on to concoct potions meant to soothe nerves and calm nervous stomachs. They’d laughed together at the hideous tastes they created and celebrated when they made something delicious. They made some great shampoos, and Faith’s favorite, bath salts.
During all this planning, planting, tasting, and trying, Faith’s mother-in-law refused to participate in any way. Even Eddie’s attempts to draw her in had failed. When Faith was outside, she’d often seen the woman watching them from the upstairs window. Faith had waved, but the woman always turned away.
The day after Eddie’s funeral, his mother had had a backhoe destroy the herb garden.
Now, Faith looked at the big herb garden and she felt at home. Even without checking, she knew what the three gardens were. One contained herbs for cooking, and the second area was for medicine. When Eddie’s condition had worsened, Faith had delved deeper into finding out what herbs could do, and she’d tried some ancient remedies on him. They hadn’t cured him, but they had helped relieve his pain and make his last days easier.
Faith knew the third area was for the poisonous plants. She crossed the first two gardens and looked through the locked gate. She saw henbane, foxglove, wormwood, and Bad Henry. Most of the poisonous plants were unfamiliar to her as she’d not grown them or used them. She knew them only from reading.
She was at the end of the huge walled garden and she looked back to see a big patch of open ground that had been temporarily fenced and inside it were geese. She knew that they’d be kept inside the fence for most of the day to do the weeding, and they’d turn the weeds into fertilizer. The geese also provided meat and eggs; they were used to weed the garden, and nobody kept watch better than geese. If a stranger came onto the land, they let out a ruckus that was louder than any alarm system. On this place, in this time, everyone worked; everything had a purpose.
Reluctantly, she left the beautiful walled kitchen garden and kept walking. She saw the barn with its dairy cattle. Two women were carrying pails of fresh milk toward the house.
There was a new stone stable and the stone-paved courtyard was as well kept as any house. Workmen tipped their hats to her, but no one questioned her.
Faith started walking through what she knew was a gentleman’s parkland that was acres of what looked like an extraordinarily beautiful woodland. But Faith knew that this look of nature at its best had actually been designed by someone, perfectly laid out, and thoughtfully planted. There were huge rocks that she was willing to bet had been hauled in by a team of heavy horses. She could imagine Clydesdales, twenty of them harnessed together, and a man shouting as the giant horses hauled the boulder to where some human had decided it would look best.
She was musing on this thought, lost in it, and breathing deeply of air that had no car exhaust in it, and looking at a sky that had never seen an airplane, when she was almost run over by a horse. “Oh!” Faith cried as she put her arm up across her face and jumped back.
The horse, as surprised as Faith was, seemed to turn its head one way and its body the other, its front feet coming off the ground. The rider pulled hard on the reins to get the animal under control.