Free Laura Rider's Masterpiece by Jane Hamilton Page B

some blooms now, please?”
    She had come to buy whatever he would recommend to set along the path to the woods. She wanted wispy flowers that would grow
     tall and fall over. Dame’s rocket was supposed to be an evil, invasive weed, but she wanted a brilliant stand of anything
     that would run rampant. She had been thinking in the last day or two that instead of ordered beds she wanted a mess; she wanted
     riot and indelicacy. She had not planned to make a morning of this errand, and when he offered a tour of the farm, a stroll
     to the Lavender Meadow, a walk in the forest, she said, “Yes, yes,” in a distracted way, hoping they would hurry.
    Off they went along a path with black iris in bloom, a blossoming sage, yellow iris with orange centers, and a long row of
     peonies going from pink to red to dark red. He opened a wooden lattice gate, and they climbed mossy steps to a line of birch
     trees planted in parallel form. The fractured sunlight wavered on the grass, the slim, straight birches were nymph-ish and
     regal, and there was nothing in the distant opening but pale-green rye swaying in the wind. The world behind them was fading.
     She tried to speak but found she could not. “Charlie,” she croaked so softly he did not hear her. She wanted him to wait,
     but he had turned a corner into what could only be called a room, a group of small apple trees, and underneath them a wooden
     table and two chairs.
    “Charlie!” she tried again. No one had told her about the beauty of this place, about the simplicity of its charm. No one
     had warned her. He did seem to understand that she was stricken, and so he kindly said nothing. They went down a mowed path
     into another sanctuary, this one an old cherry orchard, the thick limbs gnarled, the ancient bark papery and peeling. Someone
     else would have cut down the trees, but the mastermind here had studied the elemental Gertrude Jekyll, and a host of others,
     Penelope Hobhouse, Edith Wharton and the Italian villas, Bunny Williams, Tasha Tudor, Beatrice Farrand, and perhaps even the
     godly Olmsted himself. There was nothing overly rusticated, nothing cute or cluttered or studied or pretentious. They came
     to a terraced pond with chipped Tuscan oil jars defining the entry, fieldstone walls around the beds of lady ferns, meadow
     rue, soapwort, and forget-me-nots. When Jenna touched the top of the wall, Charlie muttered, “One fuc— I mean, one stone at
     a time.” She wished he had not spoken, but then the fact of his labor came to her, Charlie, alone, building the perilous wall,
     rock chinked to rock, one after another, his tendrils falling into his eyes.
    Jenna was unaccustomed to being speechless. She was sure he sensed her awe, and perhaps he could tell that, as much as their
     silence was a part of the wonder of it, she did also want to understand how, rock after rock, the place had been made. As
     they went on, he now and again quietly pointed out a structural challenge, or he explained what the hillside had looked like
     when they’d arrived. At first he gave all the credit to Laura, for seeing the potential, for giving the farm what amounted
     to a makeover. He had merely done the grunt work, he said; he had merely followed her commands. But then, trailing his hand
     on the wall, he said, “I’ve never told anyone this—I would never tell
her
—but there were times when I disobeyed orders, because I knew that from an engineering standpoint—and sometimes even visually—I
     knew that she was wrong. There are tokens all over of my adjustments which for whatever reason we never mention.”
    “That’s nice,” Jenna murmured.
    They climbed another set of steps that led to the field of lavender—an acre of romance, he called it—that Laura had planted
     on a whim. Jenna would have liked to fall into the flowers, into the windy softness of the smell; she wanted to climb into
     the field itself, to be of it somehow. She wanted—she wanted—she hardly