Free The Rose Garden by Susanna Kearsley Page A

that meant finding Susan.
    She was in the greenhouse with Felicity, standing just inside the door and staring at the plumber who’d arrived a few minutes before, sent by Andrews & Son from St Non’s to inspect the old plumbing and give her a quote for the work to be done. I couldn’t help but stare a bit myself—he was a decidedly well-built young man, so much so that Felicity, watching him study the pipes, nudged her friend and said, ‘Well done you. Recreating the past with precision, aren’t you?’
    Susan asked, ‘What?’
    ‘Recreating Claire’s Cloutie Tree Tearoom, right down to the good-looking plumber. I’d like to see him take his shirt off.’
    ‘Fee!’
    ‘What? He can’t hear us. God, will you just look at that.’
    I looked too and smiled a little as the plumber, seemingly completely unaware he had an audience, reached up to test the soundness of an overhead joint in the piping, a movement that showed off his broad muscled chest.
    ‘What’s his name?’ asked Felicity.
    Susan, equally awed, shook her head. ‘I don’t know. They just sent him.’
    ‘Well, they’ve got my business.’
    I smiled even more at Felicity’s tone, but it didn’t convince me. She’d been up to Trelowarth a few times this past week, enough for me to come to the conclusion that Felicity, for all her talk, was already quite hopelessly infatuated.
    Mark, of course, had no idea. I could see how Felicity looked at him when he came into a room, and the way that she constantly watched him, the light in her smile when he spoke to her. But men could be so impossibly blind, I thought, just as the plumber was blind to the fact we were all of us watching him now.
    ‘Perhaps I ought to see if he has any questions,’ Susan said, all innocence, then spoilt it with a wink and crossed the greenhouse with a more purposely feminine walk than her usual breezy stride.
    Felicity watched her friend go with approval. To me, she said, ‘It’s good to see her taking an interest in men again, after the last one.’
    After Susan’s sharp reaction to my mention of her time in Bristol, I hadn’t pried further, but I felt safe in asking Felicity now, ‘Was he awful?’
    ‘Not at all. But he was older. Much older than Sue, and that made things quite difficult sometimes. She didn’t really fit in with his friends, and he didn’t fit in with hers, and… well, they came from different generations, different worlds, and sometimes that’s a gap that can’t be bridged. I know she tried. It was your sister’s death,’ she told me, ‘that decided things, I think. Sue said it made her realize life was just too short, so she came home.’ She glanced at me confidingly. ‘Your sister’s death affected everyone round here. It was a blow.’
    ‘To me as well.’
    I liked the way Felicity accepted that, not leaping in with platitudes. ‘Was she your only sister?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I can’t imagine. Me, I’ve got three sisters and two brothers. Breed like rabbits, we do. Every time I go home for a visit it seems that I’ve got a new nephew or niece.’
    ‘Where’s home?’ I asked her.
    ‘Somerset.’
    It surprised me she wasn’t from Cornwall. She looked Cornish enough, with her dark hair and eyes and her small tidy figure set off to advantage in jeans and a form-fitting shirt and the gypsy-like scarf that today bound her curls in a long swinging ponytail. She’d picked up a bit of the accent as well, the distinctive and musical cadence of West Country speech, and I wouldn’t have known that she wasn’t a native.
    ‘It’s not all that far away, really,’ she told me, ‘though when I first came down here it seemed like a different world, like I had crossed some great divide.’
    ‘You did,’ I said. ‘You crossed the Tamar.’ And I told her what my mother had told me about the crossing of the river Tamar and how it affected those with Cornish blood.
    ‘Well, I must have an ancestor from Cornwall then,’ she said, ‘because