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“Thank you, Macalister,” said Mrs. Barnes. “You have been most helpful.”

He rose with a nod and ambled off to the garden once again.

“Well, you certainly showed him in that negotiation,” teased Mrs. Barnes as soon as the man was out of earshot.

Adele sat back, slightly stunned that the gardener had effectively run rings around her. “I cannot say I’ve ever met a servant quite like him.”

“I believe you are fated to discover that Mr. Macalister is not the sort of man who would take kindly to being classed a servant.”

“Well, I can only hope that he is worth it,” Adele said.

chapter twenty-eight ADELE

On Sunday afternoon, Adele smoothed her hands over the large rolls of paper that she’d spread out over Rosewood House’s dining table. On them were the plans she had drawn up for her garden. As soon as she’d hired Macalister, she’d gone home and stolen into Guy’s study to lift some of the spare paper for blueprints he always seemed to have lying around. After locking herself away in her little study, she’d spread the sheets out on her desk and frowned, looking down at the lists of many plants she’d drawn up while reading her books. Lists, she swiftly realized, were not plans.

“Well,” she’d murmured, “I suppose one has to start somewhere.”

Then she’d taken up a pencil and begun to sketch.

It had taken her several drafts, but she had settled on something that she liked, refined over the last few days. She had even edited her list of plants down to her favorites: lilac, clematis, roses, salvia, hydrangeas, lavender, and hellebore.

She had no doubt Macalister would have a great many opinions about her work, but as she’d set aside her pencil a final time the previous evening, she had felt confident that even he couldn’t find fault with her plans. Now, however, as she stared at the wide sheets of paper she’d anchored on all four corners with a paperweight, a teacup, and a pair of books, her hands itched to roll them up again and cast them away.

They were all wrong, and she didn’t know why.

She clasped her hands and then unclasped them again, embarrassed to find them clammy. There was the bang of the iron knocker on the front door, and she hurriedly wiped her palms on her light-blue-and-white sprigged cotton skirts she’d changed into after attending church with Guy that morning. She heard the murmur of voices and the heavy tread of boots on the hardwood floors of the hall, and then Hildy appeared in the doorway.

“Mr. Macalister to see you, madam,” said Hildy as the man appeared behind the maid’s shoulder in the doorway.

“Macalister, thank you for coming,” Adele said.

“You didn’t think I’d go back on our agreement, did you?” he asked. His tone was serious, but she thought she could see a lift in the corners of his mouth.

She drew her shoulders back. “For fifteen dollars a week, I should hope not.”

He gave a short grunt that could have been a laugh and strode over to the table. “This is what you want for your garden?”

“Yes.”

She silently chided herself for being afraid of what this man might think of her ambitions. He was not her husband or a family member. He was hired help, not a society matron ready to judge her every move in hopes of finding her somehow wanting. As long as he believed her vision for the garden was achievable, his opinion hardly mattered.

Still, her heart pounded as she watched him examine her work. She had laid the bird’s-eye view of the property on the top of the pile. In it, she’d mapped out the path from the road, the house, the patio, the caretaker’s cottage, and the orchard. After looking out the window of her study at the Gables, she’d drawn out long, meandering borders through the current rose garden that curved and flowed down a path to a large bed at the bottom of the property edged in chaparral—the very antithesis of the formal, straight lines of the Gables’s garden.

“What are these?” he asked, pointing to circles she’d placed at random intervals in the borders.

“Obelisks.”

He grunted. “And these pencil marks?”

She saw he was pointing to the places she’d rubbed out several times. “I had thought to include a fountain and a pond, but I removed them.”

“Why?” he asked.

“I assumed that the sun would steal the water away every summer,” she said.

He tilted his head, which she took to be an acknowledgment that this was not an unreasonable assumption.

“Is there more under here?” he asked.