An Iron Rose Read Online Free

job. Don’t like it, off we fuck.’
     
    Francis’s eyes narrowed. Then self-interest clicked in and he cocked his head and smiled, the smile that had won many a society matron’s heart. And the rest, so the word went. ‘You’re absolutely right, Stan,’ he said. ‘I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me show you the magnitude of the task.’
     
    He got out of the vehicle, put a Barbour hat on his sleek head to complete his Barbour outfit, and led us down the driveway and into the wilderness. We couldn’t get far: this was a garden gone feral. Francis started down what was once a path and was now a dripping tunnel that narrowed rapidly. He wrestled with branches for a few metres, gradually losing confidence. Finally, faced with an impassable thicket, he gave up. We reversed out, Lew in front, then me, then Flannery, then Stan, then Francis.
     
    Francis pushed his way past us and tried another matted and sodden avenue. A few metres in, he missed an overgrown step, fell forward and disappeared into a dank mass of vegetation. His shriek hung in the cold air, wild enough to send hundreds of birds thrumming skywards.
     
    We all stopped. Stan began to roll a cigarette one-handed as we waited for Francis to emerge. ‘Hurt yourself?’ he said, no trace of sympathy in his voice, as the wet figure struggled upright, cursing.
     
    ‘Course I fucking hurt myself,’ Francis said, each word a small, distinct explosion. ‘Look at this shit on my trousers.’
     
    ‘On?’ Stan said. ‘We know there’s a shit in your trousers. What are we looking for here, Frankie? Don’t have to hack my way with a bloody machete to see it’s a jungle.’
     
    Francis was examining the slime on his palms, mouth pursed in disgust. ‘My clients want it restored,’ he said. ‘I was trying to show you the enormity of the task.’
     
    ‘Enormity? That’s not the word you want, Frankie,’ Stan said. He was a pedant about language. ‘Try enormousness. And if they want it bloody restored, what do they want it bloody restored to ?’
     
    ‘ I don’t know,’ Francis snarled. ‘Don’t fucking care. Its former fucking glory. That’s your department.’
     
    ‘Francis Keany doesn’t know and doesn’t fucking care. You should put that on your business cards.’
     
    Stan took pleasure in giving Francis this kind of needle. The only reason Francis tolerated it was because without Stan he wouldn’t be able to take on jobs like this. Francis had started out as a florist and conned his way into the garden design trade. He apparently wasn’t too bad at doing little squares of box with lollipops in the middle and iceberg roses lashed to dark-green trellis. But then one of his satisfied society matrons commissioned him to do a four-acre garden from scratch near Mount Macedon. Francis panicked: you couldn’t fill four acres with little squares of Buxus sempervirens. You couldn’t copy another big garden. People would notice. And then, somehow, he heard about Stan Harrop.
     
    Stan had started work at twelve as a garden boy at Sefton Hall in the south of England. Four years later, he lied about his age and went off to war. When he came back, five years on, he was all of twenty-one, sergeant’s stripes on his arm, the ribbon of the Military Cross on his chest, and a long bayonet scar on his right forearm. It was twenty years before he left Sefton Hall again, this time to catch the P&O liner to Sydney to be head gardener on an estate outside Mittagong. Over the next twenty years, he ran four other big gardens. Then he bought fifty acres with a round hill on it down the road from Ned Lowey and started a nursery. That was where Francis Keany found him. It was the luckiest day of Francis’s life. And for Ned and Flannery, and later for me, it meant fairly regular work at a decent rate of pay.
     
    ‘There’s a little clear bit over there,’ Lew said. We followed him through a grove of plane trees into a clearing. For some reason, rocky soil