The Will

Aunt Cordelia's will was four pages long. Three of them were about the garden. Margot read it twice on the train and understood roughly none of it. She had met her aunt exactly four times, all of them awkward, all of them involving a great deal of tea and a smell of crushed leaves that Margot had never been able to name. Cordelia had always looked at her a little too long, the way you look at a parcel you are deciding whether to open. Now the parcel had been opened, posthumously, by a solicitor with an apologetic voice. The house was hers. Thorn House. And the garden, the will stressed, in Cordelia's own slanting hand at the bottom of page three: the garden must be kept. Not tidy. Not pretty. Kept. The word was underlined three times, and beside it, smaller, almost an afterthought: it knows when it is neglected, and it does not forgive. Margot put the will in her bag. She decided not to think about that last line until she absolutely had to.