Page 44 of Too Scot to Handle
Joe looked up from spading a bed farther down the wall. His glance was enough to quell the bout of fisticuffs that might have erupted between John and Dick.
“Dickie’s right,” Tom said. “After what Miss Anwen did for us yesterday, I’ll not insult her.”
John sniffed the plant. “Saying she smells good and she’s tough is an insult?”
“Are ladies supposed to be tough?” Tom asked, taking a whiff of the plant and passing it to Joe.
Joe rubbed his fingers over the silvery green leaves and brought them to his nose. “L-lavender. F-french lavender. For soap.”
“We should change your name to Encyclopedia,” John said. “Do I put it back in the dirt?”
“I will,” Dickie said, retrieving the plant. He tore off a leaf, stashed the bit of greenery into his pocket, and gently tucked the roots of the lavender into a patch of soil Joe had spaded free of weeds.
“Think it will grow?” The poor thing looked lonely to Tom, all on its own in a garden that was otherwise rioting with weeds.
“If it’s as tough as Miss Anwen,” Dickie said, “I don’t think anything can stop it. It’s been growing here for years, without any attention from a gardener, and Joe says it’s a useful plant.”
Now that Joe had identified the shrub, Tom recognized it. In back gardens all over Mayfair, lavender grew in great billowy borders. Ladies made sachets out of it, and biscuits, and dried bouquets.
Tom fetched the watering can from near the downspout at the corner of the building and gave the lavender a drink.
“I think we should each take a wall,” he said, “once we get rid of the damned weeds. If it’s your wall, then you keep after the weeds and the watering and the whatnot.” He had no idea what else was involved in caring for a garden besides weeding and watering, but gardening was an occupation, so there must be work involved beyond the initial effort.
“That’s not fair,” Dickie said, getting back to his weeding. “The garden is a rectangle, not a square, so two fellows would have short walls, and two would have long walls.”
“Dickie’s right—for once,” John said, “and the short walls have either the door to the house or the back gate in them, so they’re even less work.”
Joe was turning over turf in a slow, steady rhythm, as if he’d done it many times before, though Tom didn’t see how that could be.
“Trade off.”
Leave it to Joe. “Take turns, you mean?”
Joe nodded.
“How about we put in a proper garden before we decide how to manage it,” John suggested. “It’s not like we’ll be here much past June.”
Dickie pitched a clump of weeds so hard against the stone wall that dirt exploded in every direction. “We might be here. Lord Colin has ideas.”
“We need blunt,” Tom said. “We could last through summer, but once the coal man starts coming around again, we’ll need money, not ideas.”
They all fell silent, and got back to work, when for once, Tom wished the other three would try to argue with him.
* * *
“Think of it as a jest,” Winthrop Montague said, sighting down the barrel of a Manton dueling pistol. “Officers were always getting up to pranks, you no less than anybody else. So the lads charged a few items to your accounts, or a few toasts to your health. That is a gentleman’s version of a prank.”
He aimed and fired. Birds flew from the surrounding trees in a cloud of indignation, but the clay pot he’d targeted remained sitting on a lower branch.
“Win, what sort of prank costs a man a fortune?” Colin retorted. “I’m not laughing, and I am considering pressing charges.”
He took aim with the second of Win’s matched pair of pistols, pictured the laughing, half-drunk pack of jackals Win called friends, and blasted the pot into a million pieces.
“Nice work, MacHugh.”
They passed the firearms back to Win’s groom, who reloaded while another groom set up more targets among the branches of the surrounding trees. Richmond Park was quiet this late in the afternoon, a good place for Colin to let his temper loose.
“Win, who did this to me? Or are the names too numerous to recall?”
