The Blue Rose

by Kate Forsyth

  Within seconds, the side door was unlocked and Viviane was inside. She found the kitchen almost exactly as she had left it. The table and dressers were thick with dust, and cobwebs were spun in grey cocoons about the herbs hanging from above the fireplace, but the copper pots still gleamed dimly on their shelves and the kettle hung on its hook above a hearth of grey ashes.

  Viviane ran down the corridor to her stillroom, Luna loping at her heels, and had to rub tears from her eyes to find her book of remedies still lying open on its stand, its pages a little nibbled by mice.

  ‘I’ll get this place cleaned up and some soup on,’ Ivo called from the kitchen. ‘There are some potatoes and leeks in the garden, and I can hear doves cooing.’

  ‘I’ll get some water,’ Pierrick replied.

  Viviane went to the secret door, and climbed up the tight circular staircase to the height of the tower room. It too was just as she had left it. Here was the place where she had stood clasped in David’s arms, kissing for the last time. Here was the spot where she had found his severed finger, marked by an ugly stain on the carpet. And here she had lain all night, weeping, her bloodied hands pressed against the wound in Luna’s breast.

  She walked about the room. Le Roman de la Rose still lay open on the table, a faded ribbon marking the illustration of the lover entering the walled garden. One of David’s little notebooks lay nearby, a stub of a pencil tucked inside. The candelabra stood in the window embrasure, its candles burned down into fantastical shapes like icicles.

  If it had not been for the dust and the cobwebs, Viviane might have believed the past six years had been nothing but a nightmare.

  She went to explore the rest of the château.

  At least half of it was charred and ruined, but the chapel where her mother’s tomb lay was untouched. Viviane knelt beside it for a long time, her face hidden in her hands, silently giving thanks. Then she rose, whistling to Luna, and picked her way through the burnt ruins of the eastern wing to the garden David had made for her.

  The yew hedges were wildly overgrown, and she had to force her way through the pathways of the maze. Her arms scratched, her face bruised, she at last made it through to the hidden garden at its heart.

  The pool was green and slimy, and the statues stained with damp, but the flowers and weeds bloomed together extravagantly. Pansies, asters, sweet alyssum, hollyhocks and daisies were tangled together with grass and field bindweed and mouse-ear chickweed, below rose bushes drooping with vivid orange hips.

  Swaying everywhere in the grass were the dainty seed heads of dandelion clocks.

  Viviane picked one, and blew its seeds away.

  David turned in at the château gates, and saw the long avenue of linden trees, blazing golden in the sunshine, their beauty doubled in the lake.

  He made his way along the avenue, his horse plodding beside him. The road was overgrown with grass and weeds, and the fields were untilled and lying fallow. No sound but crickets and birds. Ahead was the château. He could see half of it lay in ruins. His heart began to pound heavily.

  He passed the weavers’ cottages and the barn, all empty and half-derelict. The cottages seemed to have been abandoned in a rush, for a few looms stood with cloth still half-woven upon them. David unhitched his horse under a tree, and brought it some water from the lake, then – taking up his battered leather satchel – crossed the bridge and went through the deep archway into the courtyard. Everything was deserted.

  Misery heavy as a millstone on his chest.

  For a moment he stood, not knowing what to do or where to go.

  Then slowly David became aware of two things.

  The first was the faint delicious smell of soup.

  The second was the sound of a sweet familiar voice singing. He turned and saw Viviane coming through the archway from the rose garden, flowers in her hands, and Luna at her heels. She stopped abruptly when she saw him, her expression full of wonder and disbelief.

  David cleared his voice. ‘Bonsoir, mamzelle.’

  Her face lit up with laughter. Dropping her flowers, she raced across the courtyard and leaped into his arms.

  ‘Good evening, sir!’ she cried, and kissed him.

  It seemed as if the whole world stilled upon its axis.

  Viviane was alive, and she was in his arms.

  At last they had to part, if only to breathe and steady themselves. Luna leapt about, barking joyously, and David had to bend and pet her and tell her what a good dog she was.

  There was so much to say, and yet it seemed there was no way to say it. He kissed her again, her face between his hands.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘It’s me who is sorry,’ he said. ‘I should never have left you.’

  ‘If you’d stayed, you would have died. I should have gone with you in the beginning. I was afraid …’

  She spoke between frantic kisses, her arms clinging to him with all her strength.

  ‘I didn’t understand,’ he said. ‘If only I’d …’

  Viviane stopped his words with her fingers. ‘No, no. No regrets. You are here now, you’re alive, it’s like a miracle. I was just wishing for you with all my heart.’

  ‘I can’t believe I found you.’

  ‘Where have you been? How did you get away?’

  ‘I skated,’ he said, and saw the quick understanding in her face. ‘And I’ve been to China.’

  ‘To China? No!’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been to China and you will never believe what I found there.’ Laughing, he caught her hand and ran with her across the bridge. His cart stood under the tree, his horse grazing nearby. He rummaged through the straw.

  A tall porcelain pot decorated with blue roses was revealed to her wondering eyes.

  ‘It’s beautiful.’

  ‘Just wait till you see what’s inside.’ David carefully lifted off the cobalt-blue lid. The pot was full of rice. He carefully stirred the white grains and pulled out a slender briar of rosehips.

  ‘It’s the ever-blowing red rose of China,’ he told her. ‘It blooms again and again, even in frost. I found it for you, and brought it back all these thousands of miles.’ He passed her the rose briar, and then took her in his arms and kissed her again with immense tenderness.

  When at last he let her go, she was giddy. She steadied herself against his shoulder and looked down at the blood-red rosehips in her hand, then up at the château glowing in the evening sun, and then to his face, his grey eyes intent on hers. ‘It seems impossible,’ she whispered.

  ‘Nothing is impossible to a valiant heart,’ he replied, laughing. ‘Or so my grandmother always said. You will love her when you meet her, and she will love you. Oh, Viviane, do you think …’

  ‘Yes?’ she asked.

  ‘Would you marry me? Indeed, I love you so. We could stay here at Belisima, I know what it means to you. And maybe, just maybe, we could invent a new rose.’

  He plunged his hands into the Chinese jar, drew out a dozen rosehips and offered them to her with a bow, as if they were jewels.

  She took the briars, laughing at him. ‘Yes, indeed, Davy bach. I would love to invent a rose with you.’

  Author’s Note

  I first got the idea for The Blue Rose in March 2015 when I read a memoir called Chasing the Rose by the Italian journalist Andrea di Robilant, about his quest for a rare rose. In one passage he wrote: ‘In 1792, Gilbert Slater, a nurseryman from Knotts Green, Leyton, introduced a dark, rich crimson rose known in China as Yue Yue Hong, or “Monthly Crimson”. Europeans had never seen a rose of that colour (called pigeon’s blood). The cultivar, which became known as “Slater’s Crimson China”, quickly spread to France … It became the ancestor of many of the red roses we have today …’

  How fascinating, I thought. Surely Europe had red roses before 1792?

  Then I thought … 1792 … that was during the French Revolution. I have always wanted to write a book set then, it is a period of history that
has always fascinated me.

  Andrea di Robilant went on to say: ‘Around that time … Sir George Staunton, a young diplomat and enthusiastic gardener, travelled to China as secretary to Lord Macartney. Taking time off from his embassy, he went looking for roses and found a lovely re-flowering silvery pink specimen in a Canton nursery, which he shipped to Sir Joseph Banks, the powerful director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew.’

  I had read about the Macartney Embassy before. In the eighteenth century, Britain imported vast quantities of Chinese tea, silk and porcelain, but China was buying nothing in return. So, in 1793, Lord Macartney and his entourage travelled to Peking to meet with the emperor. At that time, it was Chinese custom to kowtow before the emperor, a ritual obeisance that involved prostrating oneself on the floor and knocking one’s forehead to the ground nine times. Lord Macartney, as a representative of King George III, refused to kowtow. The emperor refused to open trade.

  I knew about this failed ambassadorial journey because it was one of the things which led to the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the nineteenth century. I did not, however, know the British had brought back roses.

  I was so interested by this story that I went browsing amongst the many books on roses I have on my shelves. (I’ve always been a rose fancier.) I found out that the introduction of the China roses to the West at the end of the eighteenth century revolutionised rose cultivation. For the first time, roses could be grown that had more than one flush of blossoms. And for the first time Europeans could grow a rose that was truly red, long considered the symbol of passionate love.

  I began to dig deeper. I discovered that Gilbert Slater was not responsible for introducing the Crimson China rose (rosa chinensis semperflorens) to the Western world. He certainly sent his gardener, James Main, to Canton. However, none of his plant specimens survived the long journey home. James Main later wrote that the Crimson China was never among Slater’s botanical collections.

  So it is a mystery how the ever-blowing red rose of China (as it was romantically called) was brought to Europe. Examining Sir George Staunton’s record of his journey to China, I discovered that the embassy gardeners – one named John Haxton and one named David Stronach – had found not one, but two, rose specimens in Canton. Was it possible, I wondered, that the second rose found was ‘Yue Yue Hong’, the blood-red repeat-flowering rose that is the ancestor of all our red roses today? If so, why was it hybridised in France?

  Historical novelists love the gaps and holes in historical records, because that is where the imagination can play. Nonetheless, much of what happens in The Blue Rose is inspired by known historical fact. Apart from Viviane and her family, most of the characters in the book once lived and loved and died. David Stronach really did travel on HMS Lion to China (though I doubt very much whether he fell in love with a French marquis’s daughter and settled in Bretagne to invent new roses).

  The research for a project like this is immense. I read everything from the diaries of the Sansons, the family of executioners who operated the guillotine, to the memoirs of Lord Macartney’s valet, Aeneas Anderson, who wrote: ‘We entered Pekin like Paupers, remained in it like Prisoners and departed from it like Vagrants.’

  The most useful books for me in writing Viviane’s story were biographies of Marie-Antoinette by Antonia Fraser, Will Bashor and Evelyne Lever, books about the French Revolution by Simon Schama, Eric Hazan and Peter McPhee, and books about daily life in eighteenth-century France by Jean Robiquet and James Anderson. The Immobile Empire by Alain Peyrefitte was my key source for the Macartney embassy’s journey, as well as the memoirs of Sir George Staunton and his son Thomas.

  Thank you also to my friend and horticulturist Libby Birley, who helped me understand the deep story of Chinese gardens and lent me her books on the subject; Li Jianjun, the director of the Centre for Australian Studies at Beijing Foreign Studies University, who invited me to speak to his students about my writing and suggested a number of helpful books to me, including A Photographer in Old Peking by Hedda Morrison, which was incredibly useful in helping me visualise the streets that the English embassy rode through; and Henrietta Harrison, the Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at the China Centre in Oxford, Great Britain, who helped me with questions about the Chinese priests who travelled with the Macartney embassy (in particular how they could have avoided the death penalty for having cut off their queues).

  As always, my heartfelt love and thanks to my husband Greg and my children Ben, Tim and Ella, for suffering through another of my long obsessions. My sister Belinda for sharing my fascination with the French Revolution and lending me her books, her insights and her never-failing emotional support. My family and friends, who forgave me for long months of absence while I travelled to France and China (both in real life and my imagination). Thanks to my friend Susie Stratton, who came with me to France, and my son Ben, who came with me to China (being tall, pale-skinned and blue-eyed, he taught me what it felt like to be stared at all the time).

  To my brilliant agent Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia, thank you for your unwavering faith and support – and for many a glass of champagne! To all the wonderful people at Penguin Random House – but especially my publisher Meredith Curnow and editor Patrick Mangan – thank you for your wisdom, your insight and your clear-sightedness. I am so blessed to have you.

  And to all of my readers, for following me on my long creative journey and for loving my stories – I thank you all from the bottom of my heart!

  Kate Forsyth wrote her first novel aged seven and has now sold more than a million books worldwide. Her novels include Beauty in Thorns, which tells the extraordinary love story behind the Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones’s famous painting of ‘Sleeping Beauty’; The Beast’s Garden, a retelling of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ set in the underground resistance to Hitler in Nazi Germany; Bitter Greens, a retelling of ‘Rapunzel’, which won the 2015 American Library Association award for Best Historical Fiction, and The Wild Girl, which tells the story of the forbidden romance behind the Grimm brothers’ famous fairy-tales and was named the Most Memorable Love Story of 2013. Kate won the 2017 William Atheling Jr Award for Criticism, and was recently awarded the prestigious Nancy Keesing Fellowship by the State Library of New South Wales. Kate has a doctorate in fairy-tale studies and is an accredited master storyteller.

  VINTAGE

  UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

  India | New Zealand | South Africa | China

  Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published by Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd, 2019

  Copyright © Kate Forsyth 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, published, performed in public or communicated to the public in any form or by any means without prior written permission from Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd or its authorised licensees.

  Cover illustration by Cat_arch_angel/Shutterstock

  Cover design by Louisa Maggio © Penguin Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  ISBN 9780143786184

  penguin.com.au

  Sign up to Read More and discover new favourites

  Visit penguin.com.au/readmore