Free The Witness on the Roof by Annie Haynes

Davenant’s death had asserted itself once more, and marriage had increased her comeliness. She looked indeed a wife of whom any man might be proud, as she smiled a welcome across the room, and Warchester’s eyes took an added tenderness as he gazed at her. She had discarded her mourning, in so far as she was wearing a white gown with no touch of colour save a bunch of purple heartsease at her throat. Her hair was dressed as Warchester best liked to see it—waved low in front so as to form a frame for the charming oval of her face, and gathered up behind in a mass of curls. She wore no jewellery; the soft transparency of her gown fell away from her rounded arms dimpled at elbows and wrists, and her slender throat rose from a foamy mass of lace.
    There had not been time while they were away for the completion of all the improvements at the Towers that Warchester had contemplated. Many of them were scarcely begun. All Joan’s rooms, however, were in perfect order; on that point his instructions had been explicit and an army of workmen had been employed.
    The morning-room particularly had been his especial care, and he had felt amply repaid when he heard Joan’s exclamation of delight.
    The walls were painted in the faintest shade of dull grey, with exquisite water-colours let in as panels; the carpet was of the same shade of grey pile, with a tiny pattern of rosebuds forming a border; the furniture was upholstered in white plush; the writing-table of ormolu had once occupied a recess in the Trianon. The book-case at Joan’s elbow held most of the world’s classics in éditions de luxe; the great chesterfield near the fireplace was piled with white velvet cushions, painted with palest mauve or glittering with costly Eastern embroidery; and everywhere, on the escritoire, on the Chippendale tables, on the Brackets before the Sèvres mirror, there stood great silver bowls of roses—pink, fragrant La France, big glowing damask Prince of Asturias, tawny, copper-coloured William Allen Richardson.
    If Joan, in her heart of hearts, was a little afraid of her beautiful room, and secretly preferred a cosy little den at the end of the corridor where her bedroom lay, she allowed no hint of it to appear.
    She rose as her husband spoke.
    â€œOf course I will come! The Dutch garden is going to be a success, Paul.”
    â€œI think it is,” he acquiesced. “It is just the touch of colour that one needs coming on to the terrace from the gloom of the pinetum, and those stiffly-shaped beds filled with brilliant-hued flowers will look from above like jewels glowing in the grass beneath. It was a capital idea of yours.”
    â€œOf mine!” Joan laughed as she stepped out on to the terrace and put her arm within his. “Mine was the merest suggestion; it is you who have carried out everything.”
    They walked across the lawn together. The sun was beginning to sink below the horizon, and the last rays fell upon Joan, touching her hair with gold.
    The terrace lay on the other side of the lawn on the western front of the house. The grass at the Towers was the especial pride of MacDonald the old gardener’s heart; soft with the growth of centuries, it was kept as smooth as a carpet. Great beeches shielded this lawn from sight of the avenue, and it was dotted about with big clumps of rhododendrons. From the terrace there was a view of the distant Derbyshire hills; flowering plants, fuchsia, honeysuckle, ampelopsis, sweet-scented hydrangea, climbed the grey old wall; and immediately beneath there lay a level stretch of grass that had been in olden times the bowling-green. It was here that Warchester was planning his Dutch garden. He and Joan lingered on the terrace, while he explained the whole scheme anew. There was to be a fountain in the centre; on either side the oblongs and triangles that were being cut were to be filled with the most gorgeously-coloured flowers—brilliant-hued