The Secret Life of Lady Gabriella

used. Beneath his hand, her wrist felt fine, delicate, and it took an effort of will to release her, to deny himself even the innocent pleasure of kissing her cheek. There would, he knew, be nothing innocent about it. Instead he took a step back, leaving the way clear to the door.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Ellie. If you’re not too busy maybe we could take that trip to the garden centre. If you’re really thinking about replanting the old herb garden.’

‘I hadn’t got beyond the thought,’ she said. ‘Besides…’He didn’t help her out. ‘It’s not my garden. I can’t just start doing stuff.’

‘That’s never stopped you before.’

‘Curtains, ferns…’ she said.

And a lot more. But she looked so utterly miserable that he couldn’t keep up the teasing.

‘It’s okay, Ellie. If I didn’t want you changing things I’d say so. What would it take? To restore the herb garden?’

She shrugged. ‘It would need planning. A planting design…’

‘That’s your department. Why don’t you sketch something out?’

‘I don’t know anything about gardening.’

‘Like cooking? Between us we managed.’

Ellie knew she wouldn’t sleep. Didn’t want to think. Did not, despite her proclaimed enthusiasm for it, want to confront reality. And she would find no release staring at a blank screen, battling with words that wouldn’t come. Since she’d started writing her column, her attempts to write anything else had been a complete waste of time.

Instead, she took out the sketchpad she’d bought for her Milady drawings, a fine pen, curled up on the sofa. She’d found the bones of the original herb garden, the overgrown brick paths, when she’d been hunting for green stuff for the animals, and it had occurred to her that the renovation of a herb garden could be used as an on-running theme in her column.

She’d intended to pick Laura’s brains for ideas for a planting scheme; that was now out of the question. Clearly since the last time they’d met she’d seen the Milady issue with the ‘ferns’ column, put two and two together, and she’d know exactly what Ellie was up to. At least that had been all her own work-even if it had only been in her head until Laura had given her the ferns to match her imagination.

This time it seemed she was going to have to do all the work herself. The planning, at least. As for the rest of it, well, the idea of working side by side with Ben-as she had this evening, preparing supper-made the whole thing feel much more real. Much more appealing.

For a while she worked on a plan, checking out the plants Laura had suggested against a book she’d borrowed from the library. After a while she found the lack of colour irritating, and hunted through a small tin trunk in which she kept the kind of stuff that she couldn’t bear to throw away, found the box of precious oil pastels that her mother had given her years before.

Two rows of barely used colours. She ran her fingers over them, breathing in the scent of them, the feel of the new sticks under her fingers. Choosing the colours. Blending them to make the glaucous grey-green of lavender, rosemary, using hot orange and yellow and white for the glowing brightness of pot marigolds, pale pink for the flowers on low spreading thyme…

When it was done she ripped the sheet from the pad, carried on.

She drew the kitchen table covered with small dishes, each containing a spice or some other ingredient of the dish she’d cooked with Ben.

She drew the heavy red cast-iron pot, shining with heat and colour on the top of the Aga.

She drew the table set for two. Pristine, fresh, with its blue cloth, pale candle.

Drew it again with crumpled napkins, crumbs, the candle burned low, Ben’s hand around a glass, his strong wrist; the rest of him was out of the picture, but she could see him clearly, leaning back in the chair, laughing at some memory he’d shared with Laura.

She drew and drew and drew, ripping pages from her pad as she filled them, dropping them on the floor.

Images stored in her memory poured out on the paper. She drew the garden from her window. The porch trailed with honeysuckle, her bike propped up against it.

The soft, warm rose and peach colours of the bricks of Wickham Lodge. The mock medieval turret. The wisteria, its thick twisted grey stems, long blue racemes echoed in the slate of the roof.

She drew a detail of the newel post, furniture she polished and knew as intimately as her own hand, the fold of the shawl over the sofa. She drew swift sketches of the people she worked for, producing in a few lines a feature, a look, going back further and further until her slashing pastels produced Sean, lying in the road, the small hi-tech headphones still blaring out the blast of noise that had masked the sound of the approaching car. His hand resting against the bloodied headline proclaiming United’s triumph in the league.

‘How dare you?’ she demanded. Slash, slash, slash. Her tears puddled in the red, so that it ran into the black just as it had on that hideous day. ‘How dare you be so careless? So thoughtless? How dare you die?’

She caught her breath on a sob, and in the sudden awful silence she heard the sound of a bird, whistling up the dawn. Shocked, she looked up, saw the pale arch of early pre-dawn grey against light. Heard a step, turned, and saw Ben standing in the open doorway, hair tousled from bed, wearing only a pair of cut-off jogging pants, his bare feet pushed into old tennis pumps.

‘There was a vixen in the garden,’ he said, as if that explained everything. ‘She can’t get at Roger, but she’s like you, Ellie, just won’t quit. So I went out to chase her off. That’s when I saw your light. You’ve been up all night.’

Not a question.

She was still wearing the same clothes, jeans, a T-shirt; it wouldn’t take a genius to see that she hadn’t been to bed.

She let the pad fall to her knee, rubbed a hand across her face, eased her shoulders. ‘What time is it?’

‘Just after five.’

She nodded. ‘About time I was up, anyway,’ she said, attempting to make light of it.

‘Why don’t you give it a miss today, Ellie?’

She blinked. She looked that bad, huh? ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘People are relying on me.’

‘They will manage for once.’ He came close, knelt in front of her, said, ‘It’s your turn to call in favours.’

She tried to look somewhere else, ignore the wide smooth gold of shoulders that lived up to the promise offered by his tweed jacket, the highlights and shadows of silky skin that made her fingers twitch-not for her pastels to reproduce them, but to reach out and touch. The faint shadow of hair that arrowed to a point as it dived below the sagging waist of his pants. Only the puckered cicatrice of a scar across his shoulder, down one arm, marred his beauty. Recent. Only just beginning to fade.

‘If only it were that easy,’ she said, resisting the urge to run a finger along it, take the pain to herself. ‘I have to pick up Daisy Thomas from nursery school at twelve. No one else can do that. It has to be someone they know.’

‘Give me Sue’s number. I’ll call her and tell her you’ll pick up Daisy, but you’ll have to pass on everything else today.’

‘No…’

‘I’m not giving you a choice, Ellie. Go to bed, get some sleep. I’ll wake you in plenty of time.’

She knew he was right. She didn’t feel fit to lift a duster, let alone wield a vacuum cleaner, and she needed to be alert to keep up with three-year-old Daisy. ‘Promise? If I don’t turn up-’

‘You have my word, Ellie. I won’t let you down.’

No. He had the straightest look of any man she’d ever known. He was honest, forthright. Everything she was not.

‘Her number’s on the Busy Bees card. It’s pinned to the board.’

‘I’ll get it when I’ve seen you safely down to your room.’

‘I can manage…’ She tried to move. Her legs were locked beneath her, her hands stiff. Ben took the pad from her, doing his best not to look at the shocking image, but it was compelling in its awfulness. And he must have heard her…‘I was so angry with him,’ she said. ‘Not just about the milk.’

Without warning, Ben found himself recalling an occasion when he’d been angry with Natasha when, without consulting him, she’d arranged an evening out with some visiting politicians from eastern Europe, booking a table at