China Garden

by Liz Berry

  “So, with the help of his son, Edmund, he landscaped the gardens and the park as other landowners were doing. The valley of the Raven was dammed to make the Great Lake, the Upper Lake, and the Pool of Poseidon. And he employed Henry Flitcroft to design the island Temple of Demeter and Persephone and other garden follies.”

  “He made the China Garden?”

  He nodded.“His problem was the Maze, you see. He had to find some way of protecting and concealing it. The best way to conceal something is to put it in an obvious place and pretend it’s something else. Chinoiserie was fashionable, so James Edward had a China Garden constructed. He brought over real Chinese gardeners. They built a wall around the Maze. Planted suitable trees and shrubs and put a Pavilion in the centre. Of course, Chinese gardens do not have mazes in them, but many have winding paths and bridges.”

  Clare said,“Why did you lock it up, let it go to ruin? And you bricked up the Fourth Gate.”

  He was silent, looking out of the window. He said, at last, heavily,“I believed there would be no more Guardians. No one to dance the Maze. I thought it better to let nature cover it.”

  But he had given the key to her so she could open the China Garden again and do the Maze Dance.

  Clare could feel a clammy perspiration breaking out all over her body.

  She was Rosamond, Protectress. Did he really think she was the next Guardian? She was too frightened to ask.

  The Guardians weren’t allowed to leave Ravensmere.

  She took a deep breath, trying to hold down her panic. They couldn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do. It was just a legend. Her mother had refused to be Guardian, had left Ravensmere, and she had survived. I ought to go now, Clare thought, before I get in any deeper. But Mark was here. She realized suddenly that she badly did not want to leave Ravensmere, at least not yet.

  She said abruptly,“Have I got to go? I’ve made friends with Mark Winters. Mr Fletcher says you don’t like him and I’ll have to leave.”

  His green eyes flickered coldly over her and she was sure he understood everything. A slow blush burned up her neck and cheeks.

  “Mr Fletcher is mistaken. Of course you will stay at Ravensmere. Is there more tea?”

  “What? Oh yes, of course. Sorry.” It was cold, but he didn’t seem to mind. He drank it slowly, the long veined hand trembling on the cup.

  “What else have you been doing?”

  Clare told him about her visit to Salisbury Museum and the model of the dig at Ravensmere.“They said they found a crystal goblet. I’ve looked in the Etruscan Gallery and asked about it, but no one knows.”

  He smiled.“Over there, next to the fire.”

  There was a small cupboard partially concealed in the square panelling. Clare opened it and took out a round object wrapped in a silk cloth. It was surprisingly heavy.

  He said,“Here.”

  She put it on his knees, and he unwrapped the cloth, revealing an irregular, shining shape.

  “It’s a skull!”

  “One of the great treasures of Ravensmere. Carved rock crystal. Of unknown age and provenance. Buried in the barrow on Barrow Beacon Hill over five thousand years ago.” He lifted it into her hands.

  “They couldn’t have made it then, surely? It must have come from somewhere else.”

  The surface of the crystal had been polished to an exquisite finish, reflecting and re-reflecting endlessly. The top had been hollowed into a shallow bowl. At the bottom of the bowl were carved three joined spirals.

  Clare stared at the reflections within each spiral. There were tiny segmented pictures as clear as a photograph—Mr Aylward, the books on the shelf behind him, a huge dark statue, Barrow Beacon Hill crowned with a double stone circle ...

  “What do you see?”

  She blinked and handed it back to him hastily.“Nothing. Nothing at all. This is the Benison?”

  He croaked into laughter.“No. Certainly not.” He cradled the skull, stroking its surface. His green eyes stared at her as translucent and reflective as the crystal he was holding.“Not the Benison. That is a different matter altogether. As you will discover.”

  The days began to fall into a pattern. Every morning she helped in the House, or the garden centre, or drifted dreamily about the park and the gardens. She tracked down, with the aid of the old pamphlet she had found in Salisbury, the Great Cascade, the Obelisk dedicated to King William and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the Hermit’s Grot in the Wilderness, the Gothick Bathhouse, and Merlin’s Cave, where life-size statues of King Arthur and his Knights lay sleeping, the walls wonderfully studded with glittering amethysts.

  She climbed to the delightful Temple of the Zephyrs, and one day let herself through the pointed arch that led to the original Abbey. The Cloisters were silent and deserted, the dust motes dancing in the sunlight. She sat on an arched stone seat in the Chapter House, feeling peaceful and curiously at home, and thought, I have been here before.

  Every afternoon Mark rode his motor bike into the stable yard, and Clare went with him. She was determined not to get involved, but no matter how many resolutions she made, when he came, somehow, suddenly, there seemed no good reasons for not going.

  He took her to Glastonbury, and they wandered around the ruined Abbey, and climbed the spiral way up and around the great hill called the Tor, trying to pick out the figures of the terrestrial zodiac reputed to be laid out in a vast circle below. They went to elegant Bath. They climbed Bratton Hill to the giant white horse cut in the hillside. And in the evenings, they rode home in the sunset with the sky flaring gold and geranium red, and he kissed her until she was wild and trembling.

  Sometimes it was too hot to move and they lay in the cool shade of the ring of trees on top of Raven Hill, overlooking Ravensmere dreaming in the sun.

  “All this,” Clare waved her hand at the House and garden.“It’s so beautiful, it’s like living in a painting. I keep forgetting that it’s all temporary for me.”

  Mark rolled over and stared at her.“You’re not staying? You’re going back to London?”

  Clare realized that he was angry, although she didn’t understand why. He must have known she couldn’t stay here permanently.

  “Well, eventually, I suppose. I’ve got into Sussex University. I’m just waiting to see if I got my grades.”

  “What are you studying? History? English Lit?”

  She said stiffly,“Economics and Computer Science.”

  He laughed and rolled on to his back again and stared at the sky.“Yeah, I can see you with a document case under your arm getting into a Porsche. I bet you’ll even have a boyfriend called Jonathan or Adrian or something.”

  “Adrian,” said Clare, tightly.“Present tense.” She got up and brushed down her jeans.“It’s better than not having a proper job, just bumming around the countryside on a bike.”

  He said angrily,“Who do you think does all the heavy work at Kenwards? You think my mother mucks out?” He laughed.“You don’t know my mother.”

  “You live at the farm?” Somehow she had got the idea that he lived in the village near his mates.

  He stared at her.“Of course I do. Where d’you think? My mother runs it as stables.”

  “Mrs Carlton-Winters,” Clare said, remembering.

  “My stepfather’s name. I don’t like double names.” There was a long silence. Into it, he said reluctantly,“Are you still with him, Clare?”

  For a moment she didn’t understand.“Who?”

  “This Adrian.”

  She shook her head. Surely he knew she couldn’t think about anybody but him?

  He put his arm around her and pulled her into the side of his body, just holding her. They leaned against a tree, looking down into the valley, glowing like copper in the evening sun, each leaf outlined in glistening gold.

  “I don’t know why we’re having a row,” she said.

  “Don’t you?”

  She moved away restlessly, and sat down again.“You’ll go on w
orking with horses?”

  “No. I’m leaving. Quitting. Getting out. I want to farm. In Australia or Canada maybe.”

  Clare took a deep, unsteady breath. She had always known there was no future for them, hadn’t she? She tried to keep her voice even, unemotional.“I don’t understand. You’ve got a farm already. If you want to farm why go all that way? What’s wrong with Kenward Farm?”

  “It doesn’t belong to us. It’s leased from the Ravensmere estate. My mother moved in on the tail end of a lease three years ago and set up the riding stables. The lease runs out soon. Most of the land is farmed, if you can call it that, by the Ravensmere estate. Taking the heart out of the land. Ripping up the hedgerows. Intensive farming of animals. Very profitable.” He picked up a stone and smashed it into a rocky outcrop half-way down the hill.

  “You have to make a profit, don’t you?”

  “Not that way.”

  “Couldn’t you ask Mr Aylward to renew the lease, let you take on the whole farm again?”

  He laughed bitterly.“You have to be joking. He hates my mother’s guts. And me. When my mother moved into the farm Roger Fletcher came over to frighten her out, but she’s a tough nut, and it was all proper and legal and they couldn’t shift us. Aylward’s just waiting for the lease to expire to chuck us out.”

  Clare said, puzzled,“But why does he hate you? What have you done?”

  He shrugged.“It’s all in the past.”

  “But he’s a reasonable person. I’m sure he would listen to you. I like him.”

  “Reasonable!” He roared with laughter.“We’re not talking about the same man. He’s a ravening grey wolf. A wounded tiger. He’ll tear you limb from limb if you cross him. I don’t mind telling you, he scares me—and the rest of the village too. There’s not a thing he doesn’t find out. It’s uncanny. You know he’s the Guardian?”

  Clare said, uncomfortably,“You don’t believe in all that do you?”

  He looked away and shrugged.“They all believe it in the village.”

  Clare said slowly,“You know a lot about this place, don’t you, Mark? You know every inch of Ravensmere, even though you’re not supposed to come here. I thought you hated it.”

  She watched his dark, averted, face.“But that’s not true, is it? I think you love it. You love it so much the idea of losing the farm is eating you up.”

  He stood up, and stretched. He stood over her, his hands on his hips.“Quite the little psychologist, aren’t you? Clare, I’m not staying around to watch the place turn into a disaster area when Fletcher gets his hands on it. There’s nothing to keep me here. Nothing and nobody! Come on. Let’s go somewhere.”

  Clare shook her head, dumbly.

  He shrugged.“Okay. See you.”

  Clare watched him leap away down the hill like a great cat. She made no attempt to go after him. She laid her cheek on her knees, and felt a great tide of depression sweep over her. There was no reason she should feel so bad. What did it matter to her that he was going away to the other side of the world? She was going to university. What did it matter to her what happened to Ravensmere?

  But it did matter. It mattered horribly.

  Chapter 17

  Most days Clare took Mr Aylward’s tray to him and stayed to talk. She had no illusions. She thought that Mark was probably right, that he was a ruthless and dangerous man. Certainly he was mysterious, with strange powers, but somehow she was not afraid of him.

  In fact her visits were increasingly precious to her. She had never met anyone so well-read, so worldly wise, so widely travelled, so full of interesting ideas. She enjoyed his black humour, and felt she could talk to him about everything. They understood each other on some deeper, unexplained level.

  He told her stories about the Aylwards and the Kenwards which Mrs Potts-Dyrham had discreetly avoided, like the Black Sheep Sixth Earl who had run away with Jenny Barleycorn, a pot-maid at the Sun and Moon Inn, and had been found murdered in a ditch six months later.

  Clare shivered. It was surely coincidence that so many had died suddenly when they had refused to be a Guardian.

  He said,“And then there are all the extraordinary women of the family. The wife of the Travelling Earl, who went with him to Tibet, disguised as a yak herder. Or the Regency Rosamond, an early feminist, who at seventeen went about the slums of Bristol vaccinating women and children against the smallpox—whether they liked it or not, I suspect. Her book, Concerning the Subjugation of Women is in the Library.”

  Mr Aylward’s eyes gleamed with amusement.

  “And there was Rosamond the Strong, who had the Tower rebuilt so that she could see all the approach roads to the House and be warned in advance of any marauding soldiers. She would be found innocently embroidering bed curtains in a virtually empty house while Royalist troops searched every nook and cranny, and meanwhile the servants and villagers melted away into the woods and hills with the valuables.”

  Clare laughed, remembering Rosamond’s portrait, with the smiling, intelligent eyes, and thought perhaps she had enjoyed outwitting all the men.

  “Her grandson’s bride, Clarissa Rosamond, was another Kenward, of course. People came to see her from miles around. She was a skilled healer, and her Herb and Physick Garden is still one of the glories of Ravensmere. There are many rare plants here.”

  “Mai is very proud of it.”

  “Ah yes. Mai Lee has done well.” He gave his croaking laugh.“Roger was somewhat...disturbed...when I appointed a woman. But she will be needed here.”

  Mr Aylward lifted his long bony hand, pointing, sweeping it around the bowl of hills.

  “There. That’s the Trust, Clare. Ravensmere. The valley and hills beyond. And further still, I suppose. The Earth. Gaia, they’re calling it now. In my time we called it Mother Earth.”

  “But...” she stopped, remembering Mark’s bitterness at the way Ravensmere was being farmed.

  “Go on.”

  “Did you accept the Trust?”

  “Oh yes,” he said softly.“In the beginning I accepted, with idealism and love. But they betrayed me. They took my Caroline and then I cursed the Benison. I cursed Ravensmere and I renounced my title. I went away and I fought them. All my life I have fought them. At terrible cost. And now at last I know they are too powerful for me.” He closed his eyes.

  Clare waited patiently. She knew he wasn’t sleeping, only deep in his mind, in the past. She wondered what Mark was doing.

  “What have you been doing?” The green eyes were open, staring at her.

  “Exploring the gardens.” She remembered then the Salisbury pamphlet she had brought along to show him.

  “An Account of a Visit to the Pleasure Gardens,”. He smiled, thumbing through it.“This one must have escaped. Edmund Aylward was obliged to buy up the entire edition in 1805. Keep Ravensmere out of the public eye, well-hidden, unpublished. That’s always been the golden rule.”

  “A low profile—but not so low that it becomes suspicious,” Clare said, remembering the lack of postcards, the strange tour arrangements, the mis-direction the village had given Joan and her friend.

  “Correct.”

  “To protect the Benison.”

  “To protect the Benison.”

  She looked into the glittering green eyes, and saw that he was daring her, willing her, to ask.

  “W-Wh...” What is the Benison? The question stuttered on the edge of her tongue.

  A trap.

  Suddenly she could feel his tension, the buried excitement. If she asked he would tell her, and when she knew the secret she would never be free of Ravensmere.

  She drew a deep, unsteady breath, looked away from the hypnotic green eyes. She said instead, lightly,“In the pamphlet they call the Upper Lake, the Moon Lake. And the bridge is the Elysium Bridge.”

  “A bridge to Heaven. An eighteenth-century joke.” The excitement had gone. She could hear the weariness in his voice.“You cross into the Land of Beulah, and take the Sublime Walk—they used t
o call it the Eleusinian Way- to the Moon Lake and the Temple of Demeter and Persephone...”

  He was staring at the book unseeingly, retracing the old walk.“Then you ...” He could not go on. Perspiration was standing along his upper lip and he fumbled out his box of small tablets, and lay back, breathing heavily.

  “Is he all right?” Clare said.

  “Of course he’s not all right.” Frances was standing in their kitchen in the stables, making herself a cup of tea. It was nearly nine o’clock and she had just got home.

  “There’s no need to snap. I’m worried about him.”

  Frances sat down wearily.“Sorry. I am too. He’s getting weaker all the time.”

  “But can’t they do anything? A bypass or something?”

  “He’s too weak. He’d never survive the op.” She put her head on her arms. When she looked up there were tears in her eyes.

  “You love him too,” Clare said.

  “Always. Since I was a little girl. More than my own father. He used to put me up on his big horse. He was so happy when Bran and I were getting married. He arranged this enormous wedding. Afterwards... I thought I hated him. I blamed him for making Bran into what he was, reckless and selfish. But somewhere along the way I must have forgiven him because now... now I only wish I could put the clock back and make him well and whole again as he used to be.”

  Next day Clare said to Mr Aylward.“Did you know my grandfather? My mother’s father?” ‘

  He looked at her under his brows.“Oh yes, I knew John Kenward. He was my friend. But I am bound to say that he was a hard man. Hard on himself and hard on all those around him. Unforgiving.”