“The arbor is still there,” Lucy said, “or at least it was when I was a child. It had a seat made out of turf and was covered in honeysuckle, which I loved. I’d never seen anything like it before and I used to play hide and seek in it with Cleo.”

Finn smiled. “Children have probably been doing that for centuries,” he said. “We dug a test pit near that spot and found a layer of gravel at the right strata to suggest late sixteenth-century pathways. Some of the plants in the wild part of the back garden are old herbs and cultivars as well—they are probably the descendants of the original formal gardens.”

“They had herbs in a formal garden?” Lucy asked.

“It was a great way to provide fresh herbs for the household and scent the air at the same time,” Finn said. “Plus some herbs and vegetables have very colorful flowers. They probably mixed them with gillyflowers—pinks and wallflowers and stocks to us.”

“How lovely,” Lucy said. She drew her knees up to her chin. “It would be amazing to be able to recreate that.”

Finn nodded. “I’m looking forward to it. The older designs fascinate me and it’s great to have the chance to explore a knot garden.”

“How did you get interested in historic gardens in the first place?” Lucy asked.

“I studied landscape archaeology at uni,” Finn said, brushing the baguette crumbs from his trousers, “and one of my first projects was working on an excavation of a seventeenth-century garden at a country house that was destroyed during the Civil Wars. That gave me a taste for combining archaeology with unraveling the history behind the sites, which really interested me. I also worked on some community urban garden digs, which was great, finding evidence of the lives of people who hadn’t grown up in a castle. I went on to do a diploma in garden history at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh.” He rubbed his chin. “That made my mum laugh—the trouble she’d had getting me to help on our allotment as a kid! But I love being in the open air and doing practical work as well as poring over old maps and books, so it suits me well.”

“So you’re definitely someone who could recognize a knot garden when you see one,” Lucy said, smiling, “and I know you and Johnny have tentatively identified other features leading down the valley, but now I’m down here at the pool it’s even more intriguing.” She shielded her eyes against the sparkle of the sun on the water. “Are those the pieces of colored glass and stone you mentioned that I can see at the edge of the pond?”

“Some of them.” Finn nodded. “They are scattered around. The pattern’s interesting, as though there has been some disturbance to them.” He stretched. “We’ve got much more work to do down here so although the test pit has identified some elements, including cisterns and stone carvings, there’s a load more to check out. I’m trying to prioritize where we dig—next it will be Clarabelle’s field, to see whether those lines we saw on the photos earlier are garden features.”