I had to garden.

I didn’t even care if Mr. Grumpy was out there doing his job. I would stay out of his way and pick weeds. I didn’t care. I just needed to be outside in the fresh air surrounded by the greenery, and maybe I’d get enough confidence to hunt Dad down and speak to him.

I pulled my hair to one side and plaited it as I walked down the stairs, then secured it with a hairband. I saw nobody except Emily, the housekeeper, as I made my way out. She ignored me on account of the fact we didn’t particularly get along anyway, so that was no skin off my nose.

Secretly, I hoped Aunt Cat would fire her.

But I was a petty cow, so there was that.

I slipped my Muck Boots on and gently closed the mudroom door behind me. I had no idea where Miles would be, so I went to the old horse barns we used for storage with every intention of getting a small wheelbarrow to throw the weeds into for the compost, but I pulled up short when I caught sight of a little pink one in the corner.

That was mine.

I leaned back against the cold stone wall. I remembered it, just about. It was my fifth birthday present from my darling grandmother, who was the Duchess of Bath at the time. I used to follow her around, helping her do everything from picking weeds to plucking dandelions for her tonics to harvesting fruit from the trees in the orchard.

Then she died.

My grandfather, despite his visions, never had quite the green thumb she did, and it fell to my parents. My mum desperately tried to fill the hole in the house that she’d left, but Nanny had been larger than life in everything she did, and Dad had slowly taken over some of the gardening duties.

I pulled the old, child-size wheelbarrow from the corner and, wrinkling my face, swept out the cobwebs. It was filled with dust and debris that had accumulated over the years it’d been stored here, but I smiled at it.

Ridiculous, I knew.

But I was a grown woman and if I wanted to use a child-sized wheelbarrow to collect weeds, then by gosh, that was what I was going to do.

I put the wheel on the floor and laughed. In order to wheel it along I had to pretty much hold it upright, and that amused me the entire way to the part of the garden I’d dubbed the Dahlia Walk.

It was a gorgeous stone path with moss growing between each steppingstone, and either side of it were beds filled with different dahlias. Not many were in flower now, but the summer season was approaching, and the stalks that would eventually bud and bloom were creeping up through the foliage.

It was also a haven for slugs and weeds.

Why didn’t slugs ever eat the weeds?

Nanny’s voice flitted through my mind at that. “Weeds are just plants in the wrong place.”