Chapter fourteen
Connor had been dropped off at school with only a mild case of grumbling, for which Darcy was supremely thankful, prepared as she had been for more extreme forms of protest, especially given that it was his birthday. Now she was off on her own private adventure to check out the walled garden that Gabriel had told her so little about. Resorting to subterfuge to get out of the cottage without the kitten trying to follow her, Darcy had distracted Napoleon with a kitty treat in his food bowl, which had given her just enough time to make it out the door without worrying about tiny paws becoming caught in the jamb. She pulled the cottage door firmly shut behind her and turned towards the chateau, striding rapidly along the overgrown gravel lane in front of the stables.
They had all woken to drizzle and a soft grey misty sort of morning but the weather had cleared shortly after nine and the sun was making a brave attempt to poke its head through the clouds. Darcy was so keen to start her ‘secret-garden adventure’, as she had privately named it that she was determined not to be put off by the prospect of getting a little damp. She hadn’t said to Gabriel, but she had a fascination with walled gardens that she knew had its roots in her childhood reading of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden and she had wanted to design her own version of that space ever since she had read the pages describing the famously derelict, unloved garden that lay slumbering behind its tall, ivy clad walls. That book had part of the inspiration for her desire to train as a landscape architect but she had been subsequently disappointed to discover that secret gardens were not generally included in the lexicon of modern landscape design careers and had put the idea of ever having the opportunity to create her own secret garden to bed years ago.
As she walked along she sighed happily, thinking, this whole project was already something of a dream-come-true, but the addition of a walled garden just put the icing and several candles on the cake as far as she was concerned.
On a more prosaic level, she had come prepared and intending to check out and measure up the space. She’d tucked a fifty metre measuring tape she’d bought from a bricolage on the outskirts of Bourg-Montfort after the school drop-off in one of the pockets of her coat. Her digital camera was in the other and she had a clipboard with paper and a pencil tucked under one arm for jotting down notes.
Walking in the shadow of the north aspect of the chateau Darcy was glad to get back into sunshine once she reached the end of the tall building. Feeling as if she was diving into the unknown, she stepped off the gravel and began wading through long wet grass that quickly soaked her jeans above the top of her poppy-decorated wellies. Heading in the direction Gabriel had described, she was hoping to arrive at the gap in the brick wall that was the current main entrance to the walled-garden-stroke-hay-pasture without falling down the well he had warned her was lurking somewhere hereabouts.
It seemed that she had successfully missed an encounter with the well shaft as she had made it across the expanse of grass to a solid bank of shrubbery that now blocked her way. She looked for a route through and found a narrow path among the dense growth marked by recently broken branches, presumably the work of Gabriel on his last foray. The shrubs stopped abruptly at the western garden wall. Reaching well above her head-height was the first of the three existing brick walls Gabriel had said there were. Darcy was pleased to see that it had been constructed of the same rose-coloured brick as the chateau-proper.
She searched along the wall until she found an opening, -wider than she had expected-, half way along its length. Whilst the romantic in her would have preferred to discover a locked weathered timber arched door (to which she held the only key) set into the high wall, pragmatically, this was a little more useful as entries went as it would admit a small vehicle. She pushed her way through the gateless gap to find the unmown hay pasture of Gabriel’s rhetoric. Recalling her last conversation with him and what he had said about the gardener’s cottage she turned her gaze towards the north-west corner of the space …to fall instantly and profoundly in love with the daintily-pretty, terracotta-tile roofed, red-brick, plaster and timber-filigree cottage that was slumbering like a little sleeping princess up against a backdrop of untidy hedges and tall trees. Granted, its beautiful proportions were partly obscured, -camouflaged with untamed shrubbery and engulfed in so much rampantly growing ivy that it instantly reminded her of ‘Ivy Cottage’, a favourite bedtime book of Connor’s when he’d been little …it would have been an apt name for the little cottage, she thought, but this was not fairy-tale and the ivy would have to go. Ivy and timber cladding was not a match made in either gardening or building heaven. The cottage’s ivy blanket might have already pitted and split the timber cladding, allowing water to seep in, which inevitably resulted in irreparable rot. If this was the case, she hoped the damage was minimal.
She swished her way through the long grass and weeds, keen to take a closer look, forgetting in her haste Gabriel’s warning about the broken glass, until she was swiftly reminded by stepping on a shard that pierced all the way through her boot. Alerted by the prickle of something sharp against her sole and thinking she might have picked up a thorn in her sock she balanced on one foot as she held herself upright by holding on to the corner of cottage’s front wall. She extracted her foot from the boot, wobbling a little but determined not to put her stockinged foot onto the wet ground. It was only when she’d found nothing in her sock and set the clipboard on a window sill to pick up the boot, shaking it and examining the sole that she discovered the long glass shard that had impaled itself in the rubber. Good thing she hadn’t put her full weight on it …Urgh, she didn’t want to imagine what the consequences would have been. She carefully pulled the glass out of the sole and left the wickedly sharp shard sitting on the window sill next to the clipboard. She was more mindful where she put her feet afterwards. If it detracted from the little cottage’s fairy tale character, the shard was also a reminder that most fairy tales had thorns or their equivalent somewhere in the story. Now, belatedly, Darcy noted the smashed front windows that she had missed at her first perusal of the cottage.
She stepped back a few paces to take stock of the sight, away from the shattered glass and bits and pieces of rubbish that had been thrown near the entrance. Unless there was a door round the back from what she could see there was only one way in. And ...-Praise be!- … The cottage wasn’t locked … quite the opposite, one of the double half-glazed doors was ajar … practically an invitation to explore Darcy reasoned … so she walked forward, ducking under the errant boughs of an out-of-control wisteria to push the door a little wider open and ventured inside.
The interior was simple but had definite potential, she decided. Granted, the downstairs rooms were a bit nasty …empty aluminium cans and rubbish were strewn across the floor, but no beer cans, as she might have expected elsewhere … she wondered if French teenagers didn’t feel the need to drink alcohol on the sly since it was so freely available around the dinner table. If she’d been able to translate them, the graffitied walls of the dark and dank living room that opened off the larger kitchen would have increased Darcy’s limited vocabulary of French slang and cuss words …though the majority of the messages were more of the “Jean-Paul loves Marie-Claire” variety with a scattering of exceedingly amateurishly drawn spray-painted images, tags and lines of what might have been poetry or smutty limericks -Darcy couldn’t tell.
The air was musty and she wrinkled her nose in disgust, placing a hand over her mouth and nose to block the smell. If the sagging bed in the corner of the room was any indication, it looked as if the place had been reduced, at some time in the past, to having become something of a young-lovers make-out base or a shelter for homeless tramps. She noted that for some reason she could not fathom, the windows to the side and rear of the room had been bricked up and plastered over, leaving only the front windows with their broken panes for light. Fortunately for future renovations the lintels, decorative brickwork jambs and stone sills of the infilled window
s hadn’t been touched which would make for a fairly easy reinstallation of sashes and frames once the debris was cleared. With its windows reinstated the room would be lit from three sides which would make for lovely views out to her new garden. Darcy could all but ‘see’ the garden in her mind’s eye overflowing with texture, light, colour and interesting features to draw the eye.
A peek from the doorway into a tiny lean-to addition at the back that was the toilet and next to it a basic bathroom of sorts left Darcy unimpressed within the existing sanitation facilities. She didn’t venture any further into either room.
Instead, she traversed the tiled floor of the large farmhouse-style kitchen; the only real indication of its intended function being a deep porcelain butler’s sink in one green mildew-coated corner, to climb a set of rickety narrow stairs set in the far corner. She really wanted a peep at the upper rooms. Gaping rotten holes surrounded by split and shattered timbers in the centres of the lower treads had her tiptoeing close to the wall in the hope the wooden steps might be better supported near their edges. She made it past the worst of the rot without falling through. Upstairs, the rooms mirrored those of the ground floor -although, like the chateau this small cottage appeared symmetrical on its outside, on the inside it was a quite different story. The stairs led to one larger bedroom which was situated over the kitchen, with a full-height dormer extending a little from the front walls and half-glazed double ‘French’ doors set directly over the front door. By necessity the doors opened inwards because there was no balcony, instead three horizontal bars outside acting as a kind of safety railing. Darcy tugged the doors open and stood for a moment staring out, imagining the view to her completed garden. A breeze wafted over the uncut grasses of the field below, causing a sort of Mexican wave across the expanse of green before blowing in the open doors. She breathed in the freshly moist morning air, watching a flight of starlings swooping over the meadow and feeling as if she couldn’t wait to get started on transforming the space into the garden of her imagination.
For now, she closed the doors and turned to the final room. This was smaller than the first and built directly over the footprint of the living room below. It was almost a sort of annex from the larger room, accessed by more glazed doors and dropping a single step down to the floor, which gave a little more headroom under the low ceilings. If necessary, Darcy saw, this could be an independent room from the larger as there was also a narrow door from the miniscule hall at the head of the stairs.
Even with the accumulated dirt, damp and detritus that had drifted in through a broken pane of one of the western windows the rooms were lovely. The spaces were intimate without being cramped though the ceilings were quite low in places. The dormers to the north and south provided some much needed head space as the ceilings followed the lines of the pitched roof. Darcy noted patches of damp on the floor that indicated that the tiled roof needed repairing in places but she was pleased to see that the walls were graffiti free.
Down the stairs, outside again and mindful of the glass, Darcy walked around the eastern end of the small building. The blocked up windows of this side and the rear reminded her of a weekend visit to Bath with Patrick and the children where she had stolen an hour alone and joined a walking tour that had concentrated on Bath’s unique architecture. The guide had been delightful –as well as getting some good exercise she’d learned about orders of columns, the ‘hanging loos of Bath’ and ‘window tax’, the cause of so many of Bath’s windows being infilled, but she doubted that window tax was the reason behind these spaces being blocked. It really wouldn’t take a great deal of time or money to reinstate the original windows …Darcy could easily imagine how the dull, damp and dim living room and the stairwell would be transformed with all that additional light. She had already begun the renovations in her mind…
Once the ivy that had grown up as far as the eaves was removed the timbers could be stripped and repainted the same pretty peppermint green that they were now…the paint was heavily weathered in a way that might be fine for distressed furniture but was death to vulnerable timbers exposed to the elements. Enough of the existing colour remained under the shelter of the wide eaves for Darcy to see that the hue worked well with both the rose-toned brick and orange tiled roof. Very little of the delicate filigree timbers appeared damaged but it wouldn’t do to be sentimental about the ivy… she might have to rethink the name for the cottage, she decided. However, the paint colour –which put her in mind of Fortnum and Mason’s signature shade-; and thinking about the herb garden she was planning for within the walls had given her an idea for an alternative.
The weeds were getting taller now and Darcy had to fight her way through tangled hemlock and nettles to get around the back…she could see a brick lean-to shed close to the rear wall that must have once housed the toilet. Given that the bathroom’s small window was inset and framed by a larger stone lintel and jambs of stonework in the same sort of alternating short and long rybat formation as the chateau it shouldn’t prove too difficult, she thought, to add an extension at the building’s rear, exiting from the existing bathroom, to create a more usable bathroom and toilet. It would certainly look and function better than the old lean-to, of that she was sure.
There was only a smallish patch of ivy clinging to the brickwork quoins of one corner of this face of the cottage though the menacing tendrils of the climber were creeping higher, -almost up to the vertical timber cladding. Looking upwards, she noted that the fretted timber detailing around the windows and eaves of the extended dormer walls above was every bit as delicate and pretty as the rest of the outer walls. Darcy liked the idea that the cottages’ designer and builder must have been the kind of people who cared about everything they created, whether it was part of the more visible sections of the building or hidden away at the rear and seldom seen. Becoming aware that her jeans were getting sodden from rain-drenched waist-high nettles she halted her musings and decided to retreat back around the front of the cottage … the trees behind the cottage were overhanging to such an extent that the north side must see little sun. Some judicious pruning would soon fix that, she thought, walking along the south frontage towards the kitchen windows.
These and most of the western end of the cottage were also hidden by overgrown trees. A huge magnolia and Portuguese laurels effectively blocked any view of the cottage from that side and their drooping branches had deposited masses of old leaves on the tile roof and the ground. The magnolia was massive and would be magnificent when it flowered but would need thinned and pruned, as would the laurels but Darcy was sure Gabriel’s garden construction crew could handle the job. All in all, she decided, it was a restoration project just waiting to happen. She hoped Gabriel felt likewise because she intended on making fixing this cottage up a priority. Restored, it would be the perfect focal point that would complete her walled-garden project. Beautiful small buildings like this were like jewels and as rare as hen’s teeth – it put her in mind of the cottage in the middle of the garden at Sissinghurst Castle, that kind of thing couldn’t be manufactured, it just had to happen … but, unlike most National Trust properties, she’d like to see this one lived in. It would make a gorgeous little house for someone…and she had just the person in mind for Peppermint Cottage. The name seemed appropriate but she’d run it by Gabriel first to hear his reaction before making it official.
With this thought in mind she picked up her clipboard and pulled the tape from her pocket, collecting a solid twig from the ground to use as an anchor for the end of the tape so that she could measure the area for drawing up her new ‘secret’ garden.