The Rose Garden

by Susanna Kearsley

  ‘What year were the uprisings?’ asked Susan.

  ‘1715.’

  ‘Before the Halletts came here, then. Well, as you say, you never know. It would be fun to have some kind of tale to tell to tourists, and a Jacobite rebellion’s always good.’

  Not for the Jacobites, I thought. Things never had gone very well for them. At least the Irishman named Fergal had appeared to sense that it was not a fight worth fighting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever managed to convince the man in brown. Perhaps I’d never know.

  I pushed the thought aside and settled in to work with Susan on the press release, a thing I’d done a hundred times before with other clients, so the process was predictable and calming. Susan had some good ideas.

  ‘We should use the word “romance”,’ she said, ‘and “lost”, because they paint a sort of picture, don’t they? And I think what makes Trelowarth interesting is that we have so many roses here that might otherwise have vanished, been forgotten. It makes Trelowarth like a …’ Pausing as though searching for the proper phrase, she finished, ‘Well, it’s like a time machine. One step into the gardens takes you back a hundred years.’ Her face grew bright. ‘That might make a brilliant heading, don’t you think? “Step back in time – come visit the old roses of Trelowarth”.’

  I kept my fingers steady on the keyboard as I typed. ‘Yes, that’s quite good.’

  Step back in time. Step back in time. The words kept playing over in my mind and stayed there even after Susan had gone off again to see to something over at the greenhouse. Back in time …

  My fingers hesitated on the keyboard. Then I opened a new window for a search, and typed in: ‘Time Travel’.

  I didn’t know what I’d expected. Strange stuff, I supposed. A lot of people writing, ‘Hi, my name is Zog, I’m from the future.’ But that wasn’t what I found. Instead I found page after page of true science, with actual physicists – some of them famous – discussing the concept as though it were wholly respectable, even conducting experiments at universities.

  Much of their dialogue, arguing theories and drawing those squiggly equations that filled half a page, was beyond me. They talked about space-time and wormholes and String Theory, extra dimensions and closed timelike curves. But not one of them said that it couldn’t be done. Even the great Stephen Hawking was quoted as saying, in one of his lectures, that ‘according to our present understanding’ of the laws of physics, travel back in time was not impossible.

  It all had to do, so I gathered, with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity having proved that time and space were curved and changeable, not fixed and absolute as Isaac Newton had maintained.

  There was a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton in his old age, painted sometime, it said, around 1710. He had a pleasant sort of face, but it was not his face I noticed; not his face that made me shrug away the shivers that chased lightly down my spine.

  It was the simple fact that he was wearing the exact same style of dressing gown that hung now in my wardrobe. And the sight of it convinced me, even more than Stephen Hawking’s words, that all the reading I had done on mental health and all my plans to see a doctor had been nothing but a wasted effort. Though it seemed incredible, I had gone back in time.

  And that wasn’t something a doctor could cure.

  There were voices in the next room.

  My eyes opened to the darkness with a wary sensibility, and waited to adjust to the faint moonlight from outside my bedroom windows. The house had always had a lonely feel this late at night, and as a child I’d hated waking up this way, surrounded by the shadows, but tonight I only felt relieved to see that everything was in its proper place – the beds, the chair, the wardrobe. I was where I was supposed to be.

  Three days had gone by since I’d travelled back into the past, and in the meantime things had been so normal I might easily have slipped back into thinking I’d imagined what had happened, if there hadn’t been the dressing gown as evidence.

  The voices went on talking, low and quiet, from the far side of the wall behind my head. The man-in-brown’s voice was familiar to me now, at least in tone, and I presumed the other speaker was the Irishman. His voice was the more animated one that rose and fell as though in argument, while through it all the other answered back with level calm.

  I wasn’t feeling calm, myself. I knew I’d heard the voices on their own before, when nothing else had happened, but a lot had changed since then, and now the sound of them unnerved me, made me want to put a bit of space between us. Just in case.

  Forcing myself into action, I got up and went to the bathroom.

  There was darkness in the corridor as well, but I had walked this route enough by night to do it with a blindfold. By the light above the mirror in the bathroom I examined my face with a frown. ‘You’re a coward, you know.’ Which was true. But I still took my time, and I waited a good fifteen minutes before going back.

  The bedroom was quiet. No more voices.

  Just the whisper of the night breeze through the partly opened windows. And the sound of someone breathing from the bed.

  My heart began to pound so heavily it held me to the place where I was standing just inside the door. I couldn’t move.

  It wasn’t my bed any more. The moonlight fell on posts and curtains and the figure of a man who lay stretched out full-length on top of the blankets, his hands behind his head, still clothed in breeches and the white shirt I had seen him in before. There was light enough for me to recognise the angles of his profile. I could hear him breathing evenly, asleep.

  Or so I thought.

  Until his voice spoke from the shadows.

  ‘I do confess I have forgot your name.’

  He’d spoken quietly, and mindful of the fact there might be other people sleeping in the house, I answered just as low. ‘You never asked it.’

  His head turned till he was looking right at me, though nothing else about him moved. The moonlight gleamed behind him but I couldn’t see his eyes or his expression. ‘Do you have one?’

  Did I have a name? I couldn’t quite remember. ‘Eva.’

  ‘Eva. Is that all?’

  ‘My name is Eva Ellen Ward.’

  ‘A good name.’ In the dark he looked at me a moment longer. ‘I did fear that you had come to harm since last I saw you, Eva Ward.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘So I do see. And glad I am to see it, for your welfare has weighed heavy on my conscience.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because I did not think to warn you not to leave the house,’ he said. ‘This countryside would offer little safety to a woman, and the roads around should not be lightly travelled.’

  ‘I wasn’t on the roads.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. And I didn’t go outside the house.’

  ‘So where, then … ? Ah,’ he told me. ‘You went back.’

  ‘Yes.’ I considered how to tackle this. The last time he had seen me I’d been claiming that he wasn’t real, and telling him to go away. He probably already thought I was crazy. But I wanted to know. ‘Am I right in thinking I’ve just travelled back in time?’

  He didn’t answer right away, but after some reflection he replied, ‘That would depend entirely upon where you began.’

  Which seemed a logical assumption. I could see no harm in telling him the year that I’d just come from. If he registered surprise, I didn’t notice. ‘Yes,’ he told me then. ‘You have indeed come back in time by some three centuries.’

  ‘It’s 1715?’

  ‘It is.’ That did surprise him. ‘How did you know the year?’

  ‘I did some reading.’

  ‘You can read.’ It wasn’t actually a question, more a challenge, I could hear it in his voice. ‘A brave accomplishment for a woman, even one who voyages through time.’

  ‘You don’t believe me?’

  ‘On the contrary. ’Tis ghosts and walking spirits that I never have believed in, so I must confess I find yo
ur tale a singular relief.’ He paused in thought. ‘So, have you learnt to work this magic at your will?’

  ‘And if I had,’ I asked him, ‘do you really think I would have turned up here, like this?’

  ‘In my own chamber, do you mean, and in the middle of the night?’ I sensed his smile, but was more focused on his words.

  ‘This is your room?’

  ‘’Tis why I chose to fall asleep in it.’

  I said, ‘But when I came in here the last time … when I—’

  ‘Told me I should go away?’ His tone was openly amused.

  I hoped the faint light covered my embarrassment. ‘You didn’t tell me this was your room, too.’

  ‘An oversight on my part, I’ll admit. Perhaps the shock of finding out that I did not, in fact, exist, after a lifetime of believing that I did, had some effect upon my manners.’

  I was blushing now in earnest. ‘Look, I’m sorry I was rude to you. I thought that I was seeing things.’

  ‘I did not take offence,’ he said. ‘It did not trouble me to share my chamber then, no more than it does now.’ He shifted round, and sat up slowly as he swung his long legs to the floor. Somehow he looked much larger that way, sitting with his white shirt gleaming ghost-like in the pale light of the moon. There was a silent moment. Then, ‘You’ve changed your clothes,’ he said, as though just noticing.

  If he’d asked me at that moment I could not in truth have told him what clothes I was wearing. Glancing down myself at my plain T-shirt and pyjama bottoms, I said by way of explanation, ‘I was sleeping, too.’

  He seemed to be deciding something. ‘If you are still here by day, you will need proper clothes to wear.’

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  He stood and said, ‘Wait here.’ I had forgotten just how tall he was. His shoulder passed me at the level of my eyes as he went through the door connecting with the small front bedroom next to us, returning not long after with what looked to be a bulky length of fabric that he pressed into my hands. ‘Take this, and wear it if you will.’

  I told him, ‘Thank you,’ and he gave a nod, still standing in the door between the two rooms, his expression too obscured by shadows to be clearly seen. He told me, ‘Sleep well, Eva Ward,’ and with a backwards step he closed the door between us.

  There was no way I could sleep. I didn’t even try. Instead I sat and faced the window near the bed, the one that had the most familiar view, and fixed my gaze on the far place where the dark sea was met by sky, and stayed there waiting till the sun began to rise.

  Its first rays came, not through that window, but the ones that faced the road and flanked the fireplace. The slanting sunlight, faint at first, chased out the shadows from the corners, falling warm across the floorboards and the surface of the writing desk that sat against the wall.

  It touched the fabric that I still held in my arms as well, and I could finally see it was a dress – a bodice and a separate trailing skirt, with something like a nightgown underneath them, and a pair of shoes like slippers that fell tumbling to the floor as I rose carefully and spread the clothes out on the bed to have a better look.

  The gown – for that was what it was – was plain but beautiful. The bodice had a low round neck and straight three-quarter sleeves, and was stiffened at its seams with supple boning, like a corset. The skirt was plain as well but full. It ran like silk between my fingers when I touched it, and its colour shifted in the light from blue to grey and back again.

  It seemed so strange to think of wearing clothes like these, but then again, if I were truly stuck here in this time I couldn’t very well walk round in my pyjamas.

  And it was easier than I’d expected, sorting out how everything went on. First came the undergarment, a simple plain chemise with rounded neck and sleeves that fit quite closely to my elbows and below that widened into tiers of lace, so when I put the bodice on, that lace peeked out from underneath the bodice’s three-quarter sleeves and softened the effect. I ought to have put the skirt on, really, before the bodice, but I managed to get everything adjusted – the skirt tied round my waist and the bodice smoothed down over that, so it all looked like one piece.

  Both the slippers and gown fitted me well, which surprised me. I’d thought that I might be too short or not slender enough, but the skirt brushed the floor without trailing too much and the bodice, while snug, was not tight, though I found it a bit of a challenge to fasten. It closed at the front and was held not with buttons but pins, so I pricked myself painfully trying to do it, and swore out loud once in frustration. I was sliding in the last pin when the room’s door was flung open and a man angrily asked, ‘Who the devil are you?’

  I could not have mistaken the voice of the Irishman, but his appearance surprised me. He wasn’t a large man, as I had expected. He stood average height with black hair and a face that I guessed would ordinarily have been quite friendly.

  It wasn’t, though, just at the moment.

  He glowered. ‘I said, who the devil might you be?’

  ‘I’m Eva.’ It sounded inadequate, even to me, and too late I decided I shouldn’t have spoken at all, since the sound of my accent had narrowed his eyes.

  ‘Eva.’ Planting himself in the doorway, he folded his arms firmly over his chest. ‘Tell me, where do you come from? And how did you come to be here in this house?’

  Neither question was one I could easily answer. I didn’t feel safe with this man, like I had with the other one. There was anger and open distrust in his eyes, and no promise that he would behave like a gentleman. Not that I thought he would actually hurt me. I only suspected he wouldn’t much care either way if he did.

  I tried calming the waters. My memory raced backward in search of his name. ‘Fergal. That’s your name, isn’t it? Fergal?’

  His gaze narrowed further. ‘And who told you that?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Who did?’ he challenged me, moving another step into the room.

  Damn, I thought. I had no clue what his name was. ‘The man …’

  ‘Which man would that be?’

  ‘The man who lives here.’

  He took one more step and the black eyebrows rose in a mocking expression. ‘He told you my name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘’Tis odd, do you not think, that he’d tell you my name and not tell you his?’

  I had no easy answer to that one, and so I said nothing while Fergal advanced.

  ‘So he told you my name. And he gave you that gown, no doubt.’

  Something in how he was looking at what I was wearing felt wrong, but I didn’t know why. ‘Yes.’

  He spat the word, ‘Liar.’

  I lifted my chin. I was scared and confused but I still had my limits, and deep in me I felt the stir of rebellion. ‘It isn’t a lie.’

  I’d surprised him with that. I saw his flash of hesitation and drew strength from it.

  ‘You go and ask him,’ I said bravely. ‘Go and ask him where I got this gown. He’ll tell you.’

  ‘Will he, now?’ His tone was still belligerent, but he had lost a little of the righteousness. He tipped his head to one side while he looked at me and thought. And then he said, ‘All right then, if you’ve got a mind to test the devil, we’ll go ask him, you and me together.’

  ‘Fine.’ I said it bravely, though I didn’t really have a choice. He’d taken such a firm hold on my arm that I could not have broken free of it if I’d been fool enough to try.

  The whole way down the stairs he kept on muttering his certainty, as much for his own ears as mine. ‘Haven’t I known him these twenty long years and he’s never once done a thing yet without telling me first, and he’d be burning that gown with his own hands I think before he’d let another woman wear it in his sight, you mark me …’

  On and on the tirade went, as Fergal dragged me with him through the hall into the kitchen. He apparently expected me to show the fear appropriate for somebody about to have their lie exposed, but all I re
ally felt as we got closer to our goal was the relief of knowing I would soon be proven right. The fact that I was growing calmer by the minute didn’t help his mood.

  ‘All right then,’ he repeated, when we reached the back corridor and the door leading outside. ‘We’ll just see who’s telling tales, now.’

  He had thrust me through the heavy door ahead of him, so when I stopped abruptly on the threshold there was nothing he could do but stop as well and swear an oath, and it was luck alone that kept us both from going down like dominoes.

  But I paid no attention. I was busy staring at the man who stood not far in front of me, my man in brown who looked as though he’d just been at the stone-built stables set beyond the sweep of yard. His boots were clumped with mud and there were straws still clinging to his sleeve. There was no welcome in his eyes. His gaze had locked with Fergal’s past my shoulder in a wordless kind of warning.

  And beside him, dressed in black as he had been before, the constable stood watching us as well. Or, more correctly, watching me.

  ‘Well, now.’ The constable’s voice was as smooth as the fin of a shark slicing water. ‘And who have we here?’

  CHAPTER TEN

  I’d met people in my life who were pure poison. I had learnt to know the look of them – the way their smiles came and went and never touched their eyes, those eyes that could be so intense at times and yet revealed no soul. Such people might look normal, but inside it was as though some vital part of them was missing, and whenever I saw eyes like that I’d learnt to turn and run and guard my back while I was leaving.

  The instant that I looked into the cold eyes of the constable, I knew what sort of man he was. But here I couldn’t turn and run. I still had Fergal standing solid at my back.

  The constable came forward slowly, sizing up this new turn of events. He looked to be in his mid-forties, not a tall man but a lean and wiry one, his long face lean as well and framed by the uncompromising curls of a white-powdered wig beneath the brim of his black hat. His gaze travelled my length from my loose-hanging hair to the hem of the gown that he too seemed to recognise. The sight of it kindled a new light of interest behind the dark eyes that returned to my face as he said, in a tone that was meant to provoke, ‘Butler, you do surprise me. I would not have thought you a man to waste time with a harlot.’