Page 9 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

In the area below the box, something enormous was flowering in the shade, and she stopped again. An oakleaf hydrangea, ten feet across, the panicles already going rust-colored at the edges the way they did in August.

“Where did this come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not a nursery one.” She got under the leaves and put her hand on the trunk, which was the size of her wrist and shaggy with peeling bark. “This is a wild one. Somebody dug this out of the woods and carried it home.”

“My mother used to do that. Is that unusual?”

“It is now.” She stood up and brushed the leaves out of her hair. “People buy the little tidy ones with names. This is just what was growing on the mountain.”

She’d done the same thing herself, back in the spring, wandering through the woods with a trowel and a bread bag. Toby had accompanied her several times and she found herself wondering if a young Garrick had done the same with his mother. She didn’t ask.

The wisteria was two beds further down, and she stopped with a sigh. It had been planted against a wooden arbor, probably eighty years ago, probably by somebody who thought it would be pretty. It had been pretty. Now the arbor was nothing more than fallen timber inside a tangle of grey stems as thick as her thigh. The wisteria had covered it and moved up into the beech behind it, and the lower third of the beech was dead. She sighed again.

Garrick followed her gaze up to the tree. “Will the beech come back?”

“Not the part that’s gone. The rest will, if we get this off it now.” She put her hand on one of the thick grey vines where it twisted into the bark. “This has to come out of the tree.”

“No.”

She turned around. He hadn’t moved, but his wings had lifted off his back, and he was looking at the wisteria instead of at her.

“It flowers the first week of May,” he said. “This whole section turns purple and you can smell it from the gate.”

“I’m not arguing with you about that.” She followed the stem back down to where it came out of the ground. It took some doing. “I said out of the tree. I didn’t say out of the ground.”

He came a step closer. “You can do that?”

She got a hand around the old wood at the base. It was thick and twisted and grey as an elephant’s foot. “I take every stem off the beech, and every root that’s gone wandering, and I leave you this. Then you build me a new arbor. A real one, preferably steel, and not where that one is, because that one’s underneath the tree. Then I train it onto the new one.”

“How long until it flowers?”

“Three years. Possibly four.” He didn’t flinch, and she kept going. “It’s slow and it’s expensive and you’ll be looking at a bare frame for two of them. Ripping it out is cheaper and it’s done in a week.”

“I’ll build the arbor.”

She stayed crouched a second longer than she needed to, with her hand on the old wood. She hadn’t expected that. She’d expected him to want it ripped out, or at the very least to demand that it be flowering by the following spring. She hadn’t expected him to choose to keep it. She hadn’t expected to like him.

They continued on past the beech and found a huge section of roses, thorny and overgrown but full of the kind of traditional varieties that were almost impossible to find. The more she examined them, the more she discovered.

“Look,” she said excitedly. “This is a Madame Alfred Carrière. I’ve never seen one so big. And this is a Champneys’ Pink Cluster. They’re incredibly rare.”

She turned to smile up at him and found him looking off into the distance.

“This was my mother’s favorite place,” he said softly. “During the summer, the whole town seemed to smell like her roses.”

“It could again,” she said before she could prevent herself. “But it’ll take some serious work, and I might not be able to save all of them.”

“Does that mean you’ll take the job?” he asked.

Those stone-grey eyes fixed on her with a sudden intensity and for a second, they almost seemed to glow, as if the sunlight were reflecting off them.

“Um, well, it’s a lot of work, and I do have other commitments.”

“There’s no pressure,” he said quickly. “You can take your time and fit it in amongst your other jobs. Hopefully the fact that you live so close will make that easier.”

He gestured towards the wall separating their properties, and she wasn’t entirely sure if that proximity was a good thing or not.