The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2) by Marty Wingate Read Free Book Online Page A

deep breath. “Well, then, are we all sorted now? Everyone happy?” She looked directly at Liam, who looked away.
    They got through the day, although the best thing that could be said about it was that it stopped raining. Ned and Robbie returned for lunch, which they usually took together, sitting along the warmest wall in the garden, but Liam said he had an errand and returned only when it was time to get back to work.
    Tension remained high in the following days, with glaring looks from Liam and sullen silence from Ned. All Pru could do was to make sure they were nowhere near each other. She gave Liam jobs to do on his own, which he did well and with no objection. She noticed that Fergal kept an eye on him, and once she saw the two of them deep in conversation, Liam’s face contorted with anger, while Fergal patted the air with his open hands, as if to calm his brother down. She tried to ask Liam what was wrong, but he stomped away, and, as usual, left Fergal to make excuses for him.
    “Sorry, Pru, he has a lot on his mind right now.” The brothers’ lives appeared fairly simple to Pru. Their parents had retired from local jobs and moved back to County Mayo in Ireland, but as Liam and Fergal had spent their entire lives in England, they decided to stay. They had bought a decrepit cottage that they lived in and worked to restore the days they weren’t at Primrose House. They hoped to sell the cottage, buy another, and do the same. They were handy lads and didn’t seem attached to anything in particular. Liam’s exploits with the ladies were common knowledge—mostly because Liam himself talked about them—but Fergal had a steady girlfriend who worked in the freight transit authority office in Tunbridge Wells.
    Fergal’s excuse did little to explain the problem, but as long as they made progress, and she could keep Ned and Liam apart, perhaps she could ignore it. She did, after all, have other things on her mind, at once more pleasant and more stimulating. Christopher rang when he arrived back from Dubai. They spoke about his flight, Graham’s job, and the
Courier
’s blog, but the volume of their unspoken conversation drowned it all out: “When will I see you?”
    —
    On Wednesday morning, she gave herself extra time to check the
Courier
’s website, as the first blog post was scheduled to appear. When she called up the page, the headline screamed at her: “American Takes the Reins at Historic Garden: ‘It isn’t all Humphry Repton, you know.’ ”
    Pru jumped back as if she’d been bitten.
Oh my God,
she thought, how crass, how presumptuous, how arrogant…had she said that? She thought back to her conversation with Hugo. Those were her words—she had tried to explain that many others had a hand in the gardens in the ensuing two hundred years.
    Half afraid to look, she turned her face away from the screen while she scrolled down and saw that there were already forty-two comments, many of them along the lines of “Leave it to some know-it-all Yank to take over one of our gardens.”
    She wouldn’t read any more now. She couldn’t let it get to her; there was too much work to do. Jo rang to provide a few encouraging words. Pru had told both Jo and Christopher about the blog, so she wasn’t surprised when Christopher was next to ring.
    “I think you shouldn’t let it worry you,” he said.
    She took a deep breath. “Yes. But I will have a word with Hugo. If he wants this to continue, then he needs to be fair.”
    That’s all she asked, for him to be fair. She rang him as she walked out to the walled garden—better to get this out of the way and get to work. Hugo had an entirely different take. “It’s fantastic, isn’t it, Pru? You’re getting the attention now—it’s started a real conversation online. Did you see that someone from the National Trust posted a comment?”
    This news did not make her feel better. “What did it say? That I should mind my own business and go back to