Chapter One October 2008 Kent, England Jo Bellamy eased her rental car cautiously into the Slip Road roundabout, every fiber of her body braced for the shuddering crash that must surely come, and when it didn't--when the circular bit of carriageway remained miraculously free of maddened English drivers on this late October morning--she darted a glance in the wrong direction, cursed softly, then searched over her left shoulder for the first available exit from this particular rung of hell. She was looking for something called the A262, which ought to lead straight to the castle, but after an hour and a half of descending from London's Victoria Embankment through the Blackwall Tunnel, not to mention Margate and Maidstone, her patience was frayed and her calf muscles cramped. She was a brown-haired, crinkle-eyed American woman, thirty-four years of age, and this was her first visit to England--which sufficed to say that she had never driven on the left side of the road before. She had particularly never driven a stick-shift transmission on the left, and both her feet and her hands were disobeying her rational mind's orders. She had stalled twice, clipped the left side of the car with an errant curb (or kerb, as they insisted on spelling it here), and was desperate for a stiff drink, although it was only eleven o'clock in the morning. If she did not find the castle soon, she intended to drive the darling little Mini straight into one of the massive oaks that lined the carriageway, and walk to Sissinghurst. And then, quite suddenly, the tower rose up from the sheep pastures and tilled fields and she felt her pent-up breath exhale slowly from her lungs. For years she had read about Sissinghurst, in textbooks, magazines, and glossy coffee-table volumes her grandmother kept in her small house back in the Delaware Valley. She'd known what to expect: Elizabethan tower of rosy brick, rising some five stories with a weather vane on top, lapped by the burnished farmland and woods named the Weald of Kent, or what remained of it. The tower was almost derelict when the Nicolson family bought it in 1930, and they had set about clearing the weeds and neglected cottages at the tower's foot until a courtyard and a clutch of buildings remained. These they knit into a minor paradise with a series of gardens, as though tower, cottages, sweep of lawn, and surviving moat were a single house, half of it exposed to sunlight and rain. The Nicolsons took their meals in one room (outdoors) and made their beds in others; but the tower had been the sole province of Mrs. Nicolson: Vita Sackville-West, the writer. Jo frowned at her choice of words as she steered the Mini recklessly into the National Trust car park. The writer was one way to describe Vita Sackville-West, but the gardener was another. The woman had written about gardening as much as anything else, because the act of plunging her hands into dirt and making things bloom had been as intimate as sex for Vita--and she always wrote about what was most intensely intimate, including sex. She had had a good deal of that in her lifetime, with both men and women, and for this, too, she and Sissinghurst were famous. The castle was a place where genius and wild beauty were cultivated, a proving ground of eccentrics, and as Jo stopped in her tracks to stare at Vita's tower, gazing raptly upward, she felt suddenly and profoundly unworthy. Ordinary. A visitor. God help her, an American. No, she told herself firmly. You're a gardener. She braced her shoulders and strode in the direction of the nursery greenhouses, her shoes scuffing the gravel. Imogen Cantwell had forgotten that the woman was coming. It was Thursday, which meant the garden was closed to visitors, and the equivalent of a Friday Tidy was under way all over the plots of Sissinghurst--the Purple Border in the Top Court Excerpted from The White Garden: A Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
