Everlasting Read Online Free Page B

her to know him.
    Here were the pictures of Kathryn’s childhood home, the original Everly in England. Most of the photographs were blurry and curling with age, showing the house sprawling in a grand and formal dilapidation.
    In contrast, the Boxworthy family, who now owned the British Everly, looked young, robust, infinitely attractive. Years ago, when Kathryn’s dissipated brother, Clifford, sold the estate to the Thorpes who then sold it to Dr. Boxworthy and his wife, Madeline Boxworthy had written to Kathryn Paxton Eliot. She wanted to revive the gardens and asked for any helpful advice Kathryn might have about how to go about it. This had resulted in a hearty correspondence between the two women, including eventually the arrival of photographs of the three Boxworthy children: splendid Ned, the eldest, and the sisters, Elizabeth and Hortense. Ned was Catherine’s age, the girls were a few years younger. They had always been Catherine’s dream family. They always looked so carefree, so jolly, as if caught in a bit of mischief. She wanted to be them. Or at least, someday, she wanted to meet them.
    Suddenly restless, Catherine laid the albums aside and went off to search for her grandmother. Perhaps Kathryn would be in a sociable mood.
    Catherine found her grandmother in the conservatory. This was a room Catherine was not fond of, for she found the plants that wintered here—the monstera and philodendron, schefflera and dracaena, the rubber plants and all the hanging plants whose tendrils brushed against her face or caught in her hair—slightly menacing, with their gnarled woody stems and far-reaching, beseeching leaves. Her grandmother’s joy was an enormous jade tree, as fat and glossy in its huge Chinese pot as a Buddha. She had been growing the thing for years.
    Kathryn was watering her African violets. First she stuck her finger under each fuzzy leaf, testing the moistness of the dirt, her lips moving as she mumbled instructions about the plants to herself. At sixty-three she was still as ethereal in her beauty as an angel, and just about as approachable.
    Every person in her family was a mystery to Catherine. Because her father favored daring, incorrigible Shelly, and her mother doted on baby-sweet beautiful Ann, the only living adult left to Catherine was her grandmother. She had after all been named after her.
    But Kathryn was the most mysterious of all. At least Marjorie made it clear that Catherine was the embarrassment and Ann the embellishment of her life. Obviously Drew would feel closer to his male child. But Kathryn was an ambiguous woman, cool and vague, who made only one thing clear: that she preferred the company of flowers to that of people.
    Catherine knew from the albums and newspaper clippings in the Everly library that her grandmother had been exquisitely beautiful as a young woman, with a delicate figure, blue eyes, blond hair, and serene, elegant manners. It was no wonder that Andrew Matson Eliot, a brash egotistical New York journalist, fell in love with her during World War I and brought her home to live with him. It was no wonder she fell in love with him—he was handsome, charismatic, infinitely charming. But he loved society and could never get enough of people, while his wife found people exhausting and became increasingly obsessed with her plants and gardens. Before the Depression—and before their divorce—he had bought her this house and the surrounding six acres. The rest of her life she had spent transforming the place into her garden, which was really several different sorts of gardens: an open meadow, which she had sprinkled with wildflowers and bulbs, the forest, the formal garden with its paths and fountains and steps down to the lily pond, the kitchen garden, the cutting garden. Kathryn had stopped pining for her English country home. She had been happy at this Everly—so happy that she hadn’t needed anything or anyone else.
    Kathryn seldom left Everly, but she always kept