She’d seen Derek unloading them while Seth checked them over, so it seemed that he hadn’t spent the entire afternoon helping Mel with her bedding, after all.Not that it was any of my business anyway, unless it affected his work—but I couldn’t imagine any woman ever becoming more important than the garden, even one as beautiful as Mel.By a strange coincidence, that evening Jonah had removed the flotilla of paper-napkin swans and replaced them with red ones folded into roses. He’d laid a separate one, with a stem of green florist’s wire, by my plate.‘Thanks, Jonah,’ I said. ‘The roses are really pretty—you are clever!’‘Seth won’t mind about that one, and no earwigs neither,’ Jonah said, grinning. ‘The kitten ate one that dropped on the floor and it went through the poor little thing like a dose of salts. If I hadn’t caught him with the last bit of red paper, I’d have been that worried, because the litter tray—’‘Jonah,’ Aunt Hebe interrupted firmly, ‘I can see lamb chops, but are we to have no mint sauce?’Later, as I sat sewing in the parlour, I reflected that roses seemed to be a recurring theme at Winter’s End for, once I started to notice them, I discovered they were everywhere.
