She wasn’t sure what he meant, but she knew she didn’t like it. Too much, too fast! She pulled her hand from his grasp, and just as she was about to speak, a movement made her glance up at a second-story window. She saw McBride watching her. She looked back at Brad. “Do you have a garden?”
“Of sorts,” he said, smiling modestly. “A few Victorian things here and there that go with the house. Not much.”
At that she laughed. She knew he was lying, and she imagined that he had a garden that had been in more than one magazine. She very much liked that he believed a garden should match the house. “Ever since I lived with Mrs. Farrington, my gardening mind has been pure eighteenth century. If I’d had the opportunity, I would have loved to study gardening.” She looked at him. “I think that had my life been different I would have done anything I could to get to work for the Williamsburg foundation.”
His eyes widened. “What do you know about Queen Anne?”
“Very sad woman. On the throne for a mere nine years, pregnant and drunk the entire time.”
“Uh, yes, well,” Brad said, blinking at her. “Major in history, did we?”
Eden laughed, a bit embarrassed. “Not the Queen Anne you meant?”
“I meant the new subdivision. They named it Queen Anne after the creek, which of course was named after your drunken pregnant lady. They’re building two hundred houses on Route 32 by the water. Very high end. Preserving the wetlands, that sort of thing.”
“I haven’t heard a word about it,” she said, trying hard not to glance up at the window to see if McBride was still spying on them.
“It’s mainly a retirement community for rich people. There’ll be boutiques and lots of services, such as a hair salon and a spa. And there’ll be a purchased doctor or two.”
“A what?”
“You haven’t heard of those? I don’t know what they’re actually called, but a family pays a doctor a retainer, usually something like twenty grand a year, and for that they get personal service, such as house calls and checkups. Mainly, they get a doctor who remembers their name from one visit to the next.”
“For twenty grand, I’d think so,” Eden said.
“The point is that the houses in Queen Anne look as eighteenth century as we can make them. And
the gardens surrounding them won’t just be a few nasty evergreens along the driveway and the house foundations. They’ll be structured gardens. Rooms. You know what I mean. Pure Williamsburg. We think they’ll appeal to our clients.” He hesitated, looking at her hard. “Maybe you’d like to help plan the gardens. Professionally, I mean.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
Brad gave her a sheepish grin. “I’m one of the investors, but that’s because I believe in this. Our young people are leaving Arundel because there are so few jobs here. These new houses will create a lot of jobs and will run a lot of money through the town. Did you know that six months ago one of our only two grocery stores closed? If we don’t do something soon, Arundel could turn into a ghost town.”
She could see the passion in his eyes. She’d had no idea that Arundel was in trouble. To her, the place had always been paradise. It was true that the mosquitoes and chiggers were enough to drive a person mad, but a little clear fingernail polish over the spots stopped the itching. To Eden’s mind, the warm weather and rampant growth of the plants more than made up for whatever problems the bugs caused. And made up for the snakes that found their way into everything. And for the muskrats in the ditches. And for the raccoons that ate anything you put in a decorative pond.
“Is that look a yes or a no?”
“It’s an ‘I don’t know.’ I never thought of designing gardens for a living. I didn’t plan this one. I just followed the original design.”
“Ha!” Brad said. “I know what you did and how you adjusted that plan to the modern world, and I know the way you studied the books Mrs. Farrington bought you. I even heard about the notebook of designs that you made. Most of all, I know how you loved doing it. Mrs. Farrington told me how you and Toddy were out here day after day, year after year.”
Eden smiled at the memory. “Toddy was so old he remembered the eighteenth century. I just picked his brain.”
Brad smiled at her so that his eyes crinkled at the corners. “You can’t BS me. I was told the truth about you, remember? By the way, the books you accumulated on eighteenth-century gardening are in that big pine cabinet in Mrs. Farrington’s bedroom. You must have every book ever published about eighteenth-century gardens.”
For the first time since she’d arrived, Eden smiled—really smiled. It wasn’t a polite little grin; it was a big wide smile that involved her entire face. She’d missed this in the years since she’d left Arundel. Someone who knew her. Someone who liked the same things she did. In the years since she’d been away, it seemed that all the men she’d met had wanted her for what she could give them. Their attitude toward Melissa had been one of tolerance. They were willing to put up with a child, but they hadn’t really been interested in her. She’d been too quiet and withdrawn to interest them. In the end, it seemed that it always came down to having to choose between her daughter and some man. Eden had never hesitated in choosing her daughter.
But now, for the first time since she was a teenager, Eden was alone—free, actually. It was difficult for her to remember a time when she wasn’t someone’s mother. When she was still a teenager, she’d seen kids her age jumping into convertibles as they ran off to spend the day at the beach. Sometimes she’d been nearly overwhelmed with envy. Never in her life had she spent an entire day at the beach. Her parents hadn’t believed in such frivolity, then she’d had the responsibility of a daughter. As for packing up Melissa and going by herself, that wasn’t something that Eden could quite manage to do.
What she had done was throw herself into gardening. She’d spent her days in the garden, with Melissa never far away from her. Often, Mrs. Farrington had joined them, not to work (she couldn’t contemplate using a hoe) but to sit under a tree in a pretty wrought-iron chair and read things like the Declaration of Independence (which one of her ancestors had signed) to Melissa, Eden, and Toddy.
Now, Brad was bringing back to Eden the memories of those wonderful days so vividly that she, well, she was feeling as though she was waking up. Design gardens? For a living? Get paid for doing something that she loved to do? When she’d put herself through college, it had been a small community college, and the choices of study had been limited. Garden design had not been offered. She’d taken courses that she thought would help her get a job as a teacher or in museum work or publishing. “Design gardens?” she said at last.
“Yes, something like what’s at the Belltower House.”
At that Eden’s eyes widened. “The Belltower House,” she said under her breath. It was one of the most beautiful houses ever built in the United States in the eighteenth century. In the 1950s it had been derelict but had been rescued by the local townspeople and restored beautifully. There had been a gasoline station in front of it, but that was torn down and in its place was put a reproduction of an eighteenth-century garden. No modern plants were allowed. It was gorgeous and accurate.
“The people we’re aiming at with these houses are retired D.C. people. Power, brains, been everywhere and seen everything. We think that the historical aspect of the houses will appeal to them, and we thought that making the gardens look as historically accurate as the houses would also appeal to them. Of course the landscape company that’s been formed by some of the local kids would put in the gardens and later maintain them, so you wouldn’t have to do the digging.”