Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series Book 3) (7 page)

The following Monday, Pru stopped in Iain’s office to talk further with him about Menzies’s mention of the fuchsia.

“I’m currently occupied, Ms. Parke,” he said, not looking up from his desk. “Surely you can read the document on your own.”

She didn’t answer, but fumed her way back to her own office. Iain had exhibited a moment of compassion when he had helped her down off the stairs in the glasshouse, and now this. Such a talent for rubbing people the wrong way.

She had not mentioned the incident to anyone, not even Christopher. It was embarrassing to think of her fear on the stairs, and the pot falling had been an accident—at least, that had been the conclusion. She had not forgotten Iain asking if she’d seen anyone on the catwalk, however—and the power of that suggestion had added to her memory of the event a shadowy figure hovering over the teetering pot. She had wanted to ask Iain about it again, but not when he was in this mood.

Her days had fallen into a pattern as she sought clues to the found journal’s legitimacy. She had cross-referenced plants; researched the horticultural history of each; compared journals written by other officers who were on board the
Discovery
—all were missing the crucial last year of the voyage—and read Menzies’s letters and accounts side by side with the newly discovered pages. Now, because of Iain’s prodding, she focused her search on one plant: a fuchsia.

“
Fuchsia coccinea
, found it,” Pru said, looking up from reading, but keeping her finger on the place. Saskia sat at the table reading a biography of George Vancouver and making notes. “Although it had a longer name to begin with—
Fuchsia triphylla flore coccinea
. Thank God Linnaeus shortened botanical names.”

“Is it Chilean?” Saskia asked.

“No, from Brazil. But Mr. Menzies mentions it here—just one line—saying he acquired seeds. He doesn’t say from whom.”

“Is that enough to authenticate the journal—Menzies’s one reference?”

“No, we’ll need more than his mention of a new fuchsia. I’ll need a contemporary confirmation—something that proves Mr. Menzies was the one who brought the seeds back. I need to find the earliest mention of this fuchsia grown in Britain attaching it to him after his return in 1795.”

“And that link would show that this is the real thing?” Saskia said, nodding to the journal, the corners of her mouth curled up in a smile.

Pru’s pulse quickened at the thought of it. “Yes—that might just do it.”

Pru had worried about keeping one step ahead of Saskia, but by the end of her assistant’s third half day, the two had settled into a rhythm, and Pru found it easy to accumulate a variety of assignments to hand over—tracking down letters written by other crew members after the journey, checking on the conditions on board the ship, finding descriptions of the food served to the visiting British officers in Santiago.

“We’ll start with the letters between Sir Joseph Banks and Mr. Menzies,” Pru said.

“I have them for this afternoon,” Saskia said. “I thought we’d start after tea.”

It didn’t do to mess with Saskia’s schedule; she divided up each of her half days into compartments of assigned work broken up by tea at three o’clock. But when Pru looked out the window behind her, she saw a break in the clouds and a ray of sun sent its light into the office.

“I could use a wee break. Let’s take a walk first, shall we?” Pru asked.

“But we might get finished.”

“Just for a few minutes,” Pru said, pulling on her coat and handing Saskia hers. Pru loved to stroll through the garden and often took the long way when she walked from building to building just to be outdoors for a few minutes longer; it brought her back in touch with the reason she was there—plants.

Saskia had made a good sounding board from the start. No, not a sounding board—more of an acoustic tile, absorbing Pru’s frustration in dealing with Iain. “Who does he think he is, treating a co-worker like that?” Pru wondered aloud as they took the hill up to Inverleith House. “ ‘Show some initiative, Ms. Parke,’ ” she said in mocking imitation of him. “I know how to carry out research—but I’m supposed to stay in touch with him.” She pressed her lips together and muttered, “I’ll stay in touch with him, all right. He’ll see.” Saskia didn’t speak, only watched and listened.

Pru paused for a moment to soak up the sun and Saskia held up, too. Murdo sauntered by. “Ladies,” he said, nodding his head. “Off to do a bit of pruning today.”

On his heels was a co-worker, who murmured as he passed, “He will not be pruning, today or any other day. He will be hauling all of our rubbish out of the garden—and that’s as far as it goes.”

Saskia rolled her eyes. “Seems that he ripped a whole bed of Royal Distinction salvia out of the Queen Mother’s garden one day when he should’ve been weeding,” she said to Pru. “They won’t let him near a proper job now.”

Pru led them up to a small piece of lawn that was almost hidden by surrounding trees. She stopped and looked up at a tall specimen with little glossy leaves that sparkled in the light.

“Look, it’s his,” she said to Saskia. “Well, named for him at any rate. Mr. Menzies’s southern beech—isn’t it a beauty? The southern beeches have such class—silver bark, evergreen leaves, and the way it spreads its branches.” Pru pulled the stem through her hand, letting the foliage brush against her. “Native to New Zealand. I wonder did he see one on his visit there, or was it just named for him?”

Saskia’s eyes followed the line of branches. “
Nothofagus menziesii
,” she said. “It can grow to almost thirty meters. It’s native to both islands. Small-toothed evergreen leaves. Called the silver beech usually. Hardy to minus twelve. Would you like me to find out how it was named?”

Pru had no doubt that Saskia could dig up that fact in no time, but vital statistics could not take the place of emotion, and she was a bit disappointed that her assistant did not share her love of plants.

They returned to tea. Pru tried to learn more about Saskia during their breaks, but she found it difficult to get more than a smattering of facts from the young woman. She grew up in Slough, but her old mum had moved up to Edinburgh to be with her. They lived in a flat off the Lothian Road. It had been just the two of them, always. “But I tell Mum, no worries, I’ll take care of everything.”

Today, Pru ventured a question about Saskia’s father.

The girl said she’d never met him. She shrugged. “It happens, doesn’t it?” she asked, flashing a smile at Pru. “Mum and I get on just fine.”

“No siblings?” Pru asked—families fascinated her, especially as hers seemed to be expanding by the minute.

Saskia shook her head. “You?”

“A brother,” Pru said and smiled. “I have a brother. He lives in Hampshire.”

“She’s very…efficient,” Pru said to Christopher one evening. “I’m finding more and more things for her to do—she gets them done, and fast.”

“Do you miss being out in the garden?” he asked. “What about all that digging and planting?”

Pru thought back to working at her desk that afternoon when a sudden drumming sound on the window had startled her. Lashing rain was beating down so hard, the drops were bouncing back up into the air, creating a solid wall of water. “I miss it now and then. But if I see the sun, I make a mad dash for it.”

Thursday afternoon. Saskia had just flipped the switch on the kettle, and was rummaging in the filing cabinet for a copy of Captain Vancouver’s 1795 letter to the Admiralty, when Iain walked in.

“I’m still waiting for the details on those plants I asked about,” he said.

Pru sighed and dragged her eyes up from her work. “Hello, Iain.”

He seemed to get the point. “Yes, hello,” he said, adjusting the pocket flaps on his tweed jacket. His eyes scanned her office.

Pru’s eyes followed his, and she saw Saskia standing almost behind the door, clasping a file folder to her breast, her eyes wide, and standing still as a deer caught in headlights. It was then that Pru regretted venting her frustration about Iain and painting him as an ogre—poor Saskia was afraid of him.

“Iain, have you met Saskia Bennett? She’s my assistant.”

He glanced over his shoulder and nodded.

“Tea?” Saskia asked, still glued to her spot.

“I don’t drink tea—do you have coffee?”

“It’s instant,” Saskia said, as she put her folder down on a chair and moved to the kettle without taking her eyes off Iain.

“Is there milk?” he asked.

Saskia’s head bobbed up and down.

“Two sugars,” he replied.

What were they, a cafeteria? Pru thought.

“Sugar, Pru?” Saskia asked her. It should annoy Pru that Saskia couldn’t remember this one little thing about her, but instead she found it endearing that the young woman—eminently efficient in all things—could actually fall short in this one tiny aspect.

“No sugar.”

Iain started to sit down, and Saskia dropped a spoon and scrambled to pull her file folder off the chair before he made contact. Iain looked back to see what the commotion was, and Saskia froze once again. Pru smothered a giggle.

“What about that fuchsia?” Iain asked. “Anything on that?”

Yes, the fuchsia. The subject came up in the glasshouse only a moment before the lemon tree fell and almost killed one or both of them. Pru glanced at the cut on the back of Iain’s hand, still covered in a bandage.

“You think it’s the Brazilian one, don’t you?” she asked with a zing of excitement after having read up on it. “
Fuchsia coccinea
. No one can pin down exactly when it was brought into cultivation—do you think Menzies brought it back?”

Iain had a gleam in his eye. “It’s not my job to make that discovery, now is it, Ms. Parke?” he asked.

The frisson of excitement disappeared, and Pru threw her pencil down. “Why is it such a problem for you that I’m working on this project?”

“I’m just not accustomed to how you do things in Texas,” he said, shrugging. Pru opened her mouth to ask what Texas had to do with it, but Iain spoke first. “Well, perhaps I’ll stop by tomorrow,” he said.

After he left, Saskia sprang back to life, jumping up from her chair, gathering the cups and spoons, and picking up the tray. “I’ll just do the washing up before I go, shall I?”

“Saskia,” Pru called to her, and the young woman held up. “Iain can be irritating, but…”

“No explanation necessary,” Saskia said, shaking her head. “We’ll need to get to those Sir Joseph Banks letters next week, Pru. I know we’d planned on them for today, but occasionally it just happens that you need to alter your plans to make things work out. Don’t you think? Sometimes we need to be flexible.”

Pru smiled. She’d yet to see any flexibility from Saskia—she seemed to move only in a straight line. “Yes, right you are.”

Her third week ended on two fairly high notes.

Another good meeting with Iain. She made them coffee, and they compared excerpts from both documents—the authentic and the unverified—and Pru read aloud a note from Mr. Menzies on July 9, 1791, when the
Discovery
had reached the Cape of Good Hope:

“I could not help being charmed with the native and romantic suggestions of a country so celebrated for the uncommon variety of its vegetable productions…”

“You don’t think he’s a bit flowery?” Iain asked, and she knew he meant no pun by it.

She shook her head, waving her spoon around for emphasis. “I believe he was a kind man and he was constantly delighted by what he saw.”

Iain’s eyebrows jumped slightly in reply. And then, picking up a conversation that began on her first day, he said, “It’s an old Scottish pronunciation—Mingis. It’s because the Scottish letter for that sound looks like a cursive zed—the letter zee to you. Printers inserted a zed, and it’s been confused ever since.”

Pru swallowed the cutting reply she had readied for the moment this topic came up again. If Iain offered even the slightest conciliatory comment, she would accept it in the spirit of collegiality—and in hopes that the rest of her encounters with him would go as smoothly.

“Oh, I see,” she said, and thought she would try for some idle chitchat. “Are you from Edinburgh?”

Iain shook his head. “A village in the Borders. But I left a long time ago. I went to University of Sheffield.”

Pru perked up. Christopher’s son, Graham, had gone to Sheffield—environmental sciences. “Did you stay and teach?” she asked.

“No—not there, at any rate.” He nodded toward her. “You have a degree in garden history?”

“Well, garden history isn’t exactly listed as a major at Texas A&M,” Pru said and shrugged. “I created my own speciality, you might say. I kept after my professors until they let me do what I wanted. What did you study at Sheffield?”

“I wrote
The Native Flora of Britain: Its Social and Practical History
. It’s a text they still use where I taught before I came here. You’d be surprised at how many uses there are for a spindle tree.” He stood. “Well, Ms. Parke, I’ll see you on Monday.” Just before the door closed she heard, “Have a good weekend.”

And, at the end of the day, Madame Fiona rang. Pru’s heart fluttered.

“Ms. Parke, your dress is ready for its first fitting. I’ll expect you on Monday afternoon at quarter past four. At that time, we will discuss your undergarments.”

A smile spread slowly across Pru’s face. Yes, she thought, I can do this. The dress is finished—maybe planning a wedding will be fun after all.

Having nothing left in her fridge to eat—and cheered by progress all round—she decided a celebration was in order and took herself to her local pub, the Pickled Egg, where tables were already set for the evening service. She walked in and stood, reading the daily specials on the chalkboard. Salmon chowder was on the menu. She approached the bar to order a pint of 80 Shilling and found herself standing next to Murdo, who jumped when she said hello.

“Pru, hiya.”

“Murdo, I didn’t know you came in here,” she said, watching as he played with his empty glass. “Is it your local?”