Chapter 9 - The Garden at Round Hill
The middle of June brought the roses out along the high stone wall behind the stable.
They were old roses—Damasks and Bourbons that Marcus Vale had planted in the thirties because his mother had remembered them from her garden in Shropshire. They were heavy, messy flowers that had too many petals and smelled like cold honey and lemon peel, dropping their red and white skirts across the flagstones every time the wind came up from the Sound.
Evelyn Vale sat in the wicker Bath chair beneath the tulip tree.
She had an afghan over her knees—the one Naomi had knitted from the gray Shetland wool two winters ago—and her spectacles were on a black cord around her neck. Her right hand was still weak; it lay in her lap like a dry leaf, the fingers curved slightly toward the palm, but her left hand was holding a horn-handled magnifying glass over the pages of the Financial Times.
Adrian stood by the stone balustrade, skipping flat pebbles across the surface of the ornamental pond.
He was wearing gray flannel trousers and an old Shetland sweater that had the elbows patched with pigskin. He had lost ten pounds; the line of his jaw was sharp again, like his father’s had been before the Scotch took him in the library.
“They accepted the plea, Mother,” Adrian said, not turning his head. “Julian gets eight years at Fort Dix. He’s surrendering all claims to the New London stock to satisfy the restitution order.”
Evelyn didn't look up from the newspaper. “Fort Dix is too good for him. His grandfather would have put him before the mast on a lumber schooner and let the mate knock the grease out of him with a belaying pin.”
“And Celeste?”
“Nine years at Bedford Hills,” Adrian said. “Her lawyer tried to get her into the youthful offender program. The judge told him that when a woman uses an eighty-dollar pillow to execute an eighty-year-old woman, she isn't an offender. She’s a mechanic.”
Evelyn made a small, dry sound in her throat—the Vale laugh, which sounded like dry leaves being raked over a gravel walk.
“She was a stupid girl,” Evelyn said. “If she had waited three months, I would have died of the pneumonia anyway, and she would have had half the foundation and all the pearls. Greed is always stupid, Adrian. It never has any patience. It thinks the world was made this morning at eight o'clock and has to be eaten before lunch.”
Naomi came through the arched gate in the wall, carrying a willow basket filled with the first cuttings of the lemon verbena and three heads of early cabbage from the kitchen garden.
She had her straw sunhat on, tied under the chin with a piece of green parcel tape because the ribbon had rotted in the shed.
“You’re sitting in the draft, Mrs. Vale,” Naomi said, setting the basket down on the flagstones with a dull, heavy thump.
“The wind is from the south, Naomi,” Evelyn said, not moving the magnifying glass. “A south wind never killed a Vale yet.”
“Your cousin George died of a pleurisy that came off the water in nineteen-sixty-two,” Naomi said. “And he was three years younger than you and had two coats on.”
Adrian stopped skipping stones. He walked over to the wicker chair, looked down at his mother for five seconds, then looked at Naomi.
“Naomi,” Adrian said.
“Yes, Mr. Adrian?”
“The board met yesterday,” he said. “We’ve reconstituted the family foundation. We’re establishing the Carter Endowments for Nursing Education at the Stamford hospital. Two million a year for women from the municipal districts who want to get their registered degrees.”
Naomi looked at him. Her face didn't change. She reached into her apron pocket, took out her horn-handled pruning knife, and trimmed the dry stalk off the largest cabbage head with a clean, sharp snick.
“You’d better put somebody from outside the bank on the committee, then,” she said.
Adrian blinked. “Why?”
“Because if you let Julian’s friends have it, they’ll spend forty thousand on the brochures and sixty thousand on the lunches at the yacht club, and some girl from the South End won't have enough money to buy her white shoes for the floor rounds.”
Adrian’s mouth twitched. He looked at his mother.
Evelyn Vale let the magnifying glass drop against her wool afghan. She reached with her good left hand, took Naomi’s wrist—not the fingers, but the strong, dry bone of the forearm where the tendon moved like a wire under the skin—and pulled her down six inches until their faces were level.
“Naomi,” the old woman said.
“Mrs. Vale.”
“The tea was cold this morning.”
“The tea was nineteen minutes from the pot, Mrs. Vale,” Naomi said, not pulling her arm back. “Because the boy who brings the cream was twenty minutes late with the truck from the dairy. If you want it hot, you tell Adrian to buy cows again.”
Evelyn held her wrist for three more seconds. The gray eyes were clear now, hard as flint, the pupils identical and sharp beneath the drooping lid.
Then she let her hand fall back into the wool.
“Tell the cook to put more pepper in the soup tonight,” Evelyn said. “That French girl makes it taste like dishwater from a convent.”
May you like
“The French girl left on Thursday, Mrs. Vale,” Naomi said, picking up her basket of cabbages. “I’m making the soup myself. And it will have what it has in it, the same as it has had since nineteen-ninety-four.”
She turned and walked back toward the gate, her flat shoes rhythmic on the stones, her shadow long and dark across the grass where the roses were dropping their white skirts in the noon heat.
