Free The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys Page A

someone doesn’t stay around after they’ve gone, doesn’t hang in a room like smoke. Maybe longing itself is the ghost, and all evidence of the actual lover vanishes instantly.
    The Genus Rosa feels unbearably heavy tonight. I lie on my back and think of Raley’s fiery roses above my head. I must ask him what colour they were. I like to know the names of things. Maybe I can figure out what kind of roses appeared to him in that dream he had.
    I think of the anemone I found in that neglected garden today. An Anemone narcissiflora . Why is that longing? Is it to do with the myth of Narcissus—the boy who fell in love with his own reflection? And then I think of the common name for anemones. Windflower. Anemones are opened by the wind. Yes, I think, that’s it. Longing is opened by the wind.
    I don’t have the blackout curtains pulled yet in my room, but I have no lamp lit, no light to be glimpsed from outside. And besides, here in the depths of Devon there don’t seem to be any wardens going around checking for chinks of light between the curtains, as there were in London. Not much danger of the five-pound fine for having a streak of light showing. It is so nice not to have the curtains pulled. I can see the pale cast of moonlight in the sky. If I arch my neck back, I can see a fine spray of stars above the quadrangle.
    Anemones are opened by the wind. They are hard to raise from seed, and are not easily divided.
    Sometimes The Genus Rosa is the exact weight of my loneliness. I push it off me, struggle off the bed, and go over to the window. I shove open the glass and thrust my head out into the cool night air. It’s after midnight. There’s the smell of damp rising from the stones of the building. Off in the distance there’s the soft call of a nightingale. I look down at the strict rectangle of the quadrangle. There’s a dark blur, moving from the shadows of this building, running across the grass towards the stables. From this angle and height I can’t tell who it is. The moon disappears behind a cloud and I momentarily lose the figure in the shadows of the opposite buildings. When the moon returns, the figure has vanished.

14
     
    In the next week we finally settle into a routine at Mosel. The chickens are purchased and moved into the coop in the walled garden. They are fed kitchen scraps and almost immediately start producing eggs. Even though no one was enthusiastic about the chickens when I first mentioned them, the actual fact of the eggs has cheered everyone up no end.
    Vittelette Noir has vastly improved the evening fare. She cooks dishes with names I can’t pronounce. She occasionally bakes fresh bread. Sometimes she even manages to cook a pudding to follow the main course. She makes a very good flan. In honour of her new duties in the kitchen, I have secretly renamed her Victualette Noir.
    After our initial faulty start there is now a rhythm to our days, a certainty of routine that, I hope, provides some comfort to us all. Jane rises first in the mornings, well before any of the rest of us are even awake, and goes out to milk the cows. Breakfast is porridge and tea, both laced with the fresh milk Jane has procured. Then, after breakfast and washing-up, Jane takes the cows and the two horses out to graze, and the rest of the girls go to work in the walled kitchen garden. They have started planting the potatoes there now, having cleared off all the debris and prepared the ground for the setting of the seed. I have also had them plant cabbage, peas, broad beans, runner beans, and onions, since there is currently an onion shortage in Britain.
    Ever since the decision to take control of our own cooking, there has been a mood of self-sufficiency among the girls. There is a marked improvement in their attitude, or perhaps they have just become more adept at their various deceptions. I cannot tell. But I am grateful they have decided, under Jane’s prodding, to work the garden. I periodically forget that we