The Sea Captain's Wife by Jackie French

Author:Jackie French
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HQ Fiction
Published: 2024-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

Mair

A pig will never look as sweet as an apple tree in bloom, until it’s stewed in cider

And there she found paradise.

The first garden bed had lines of what looked like peas, their stems twisted around small stakes, but the pea flowers were in shades of pinks and blues and had a scent she could almost float on, though the pods looked thin and tough. Flowers almost as big as her hand bloomed in clumps around each tree, yellow and white and cream. Everywhere she looked there was colour.

Thank goodness, she thought, that even in mourning these people couldn’t turn a garden black.

‘Excuse me?’ She spoke to a wizened man in a leather apron and the permanently dirt-ingrained hands of a gardener. ‘What kinds of food are these?’ She pointed to bright yellow cups under trees just beginning to show spring leaves.

‘You the new Mrs Dawson? Pleased to meet you, missus.’ This man met her smile with one of his own, and removed his cap. ‘Them’s daffodils, missus, and if you eat ’em you drop dead.’

‘Oh, flowers! I have read about plants grown just to be beautiful. I never guessed they would be so lovely.’

He nodded at her approvingly, one flower lover to another. ‘Those over there is sweet peas, and you don’t eat them either, though they won’t kill you. Grown to pick for the house, they were, but can’t be any flowers indoors till the mourning year for the master is up, God rest his soul. You don’t have daffs an’ sweet peas where you come from?’

She shook her head. When soil must be created from rock, every nook was precious. Sometimes the umbrella-shaped white platters of gone-to-flower carrots might be jammed in an old jar to brighten a kitchen, or the long-stemmed yellow flowers from cabbages, though after a day or two the house smelled of sulphur, just as the garlic flowers gave off a slow but pervasive scent that was as unpleasant as the flavour of the herb was delicious.

‘What are those buildings there?’ They looked like stone cottages but had no windows, just a thick wooden door.

‘Them’s storerooms, missus, and the dairy. My cottage and the servants’ quarters are further back, with the cow paddocks one side and the sheep on the other with the hen run and the pigs. Then you got the orchard and a gate onto the bush track the late master put in, takes you along the headland and down to a cove the other side. It’s a pretty walk.’

‘Thank you, Mr …’ She waited for his name.

He nodded his head. ‘I’m Peaches, missus. Peaches by name and peachy by nature, me old woman calls me.’

‘Thank you, Mr Peaches.’

She walked, trailing her hands on petals, bending to smell the perfume. Women laughed in the dairy. She smelled the comforting sweetness of cheese-making and longed to join them, but not today. She had already shocked and hurt Michael’s mother. She needed to feel her way in case she inflicted more unintentional cruelty.

But

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