The Rose Garden

by Susanna Kearsley

  It was a good analogy. ‘It feels like that a bit.’ I hadn’t really stopped to analyse it all that much. A part of me, I knew, was still adjusting to the shock of being tossed around in time, and I could only cope with every situation as it came. But now I came to think of it, it was like being washed up on the shore of some strange country not my own. Except, ‘The house is still the same,’ I said. ‘At least, I know my way around the rooms. That helps a little. And the fact that you believe me, that helps too.’ I hadn’t realised how much that last fact meant to me until I’d said the words out loud.

  I looked away from him, and coughed to clear my throat, and changed the subject as I glanced around the room for inspiration. ‘Have you lived here at Trelowarth long?’

  ‘Twelve years. It was left me by an uncle who desired I should settle myself to a more honest trade.’

  But before I could ask him, ‘More honest than what?’ Fergal came with an armful of plates heaped with food.

  ‘There,’ he said, as he set mine in front of me, ‘best to enjoy that, I’ve nothing so fancy to serve you tomorrow. It’s stirabouts now, till I’m next to the market.’

  It was plain food, but flavourful. Fergal had basted the roast birds with honey, and seasoned the barley and vegetables with unknown spices and herbs that made everything sit on my stomach with comfortable warmth. I ate with knife and spoon, as both of them were doing, grateful for the light ale Daniel Butler offered me in place of cider. Although the small tin tumbler it was served in gave the ale a faint metallic taste, it was at least a drink that, slowly sipped, could leave me sober.

  The men drank wine, a rich red wine they drank from tumblers like my own, of beaten tin. As Fergal poured the dregs into his own cup, he remarked, ‘We’ll soon be out of this as well. We’ve but a single case remaining in the cellar.’

  Daniel Butler said, ‘’Tis good we’ve got your cider, then.’

  ‘The devil you do. Any man will be losing his hand if he touches those kegs.’

  ‘Do you see?’ Daniel Butler directed that comment at me, with a smile. ‘Did I not say he guarded his casks like a dragon?’

  ‘Ay, and did you think to tell her why I do that, now? Did you say what your brother did the one time that I turned my back? And didn’t he have all my cider on the Sally and away on the next tide without so much as a farewell and by-your-leave?’

  ‘Well, that is Jack for you.’

  ‘Ay, steal the coins right off a dead man’s eyes and do it smiling, so he would.’ But there was still a grudging admiration in his tone, from which I guessed he couldn’t help but like the man they spoke of. Then he seemed to think of something. ‘Jesus, Danny, he’ll be coming back at any time now.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, how the devil will you be explaining her?’ This with a nod across the table towards me. ‘You know as well as I do Jack can never keep his mouth shut, and he’ll never be convinced she came the way she says she did.’

  I watched while Daniel Butler weighed the options in his mind, and then he gave a shrug and said, ‘She is your sister, come to help us keep the house. Is that not what you said to Creed? And he believed it.’

  ‘Did he? Sure of that then, are you?’

  ‘No.’ His eyes were thoughtful on my face. ‘But Jack is not as clever as the constable. And Eva, I suspect, is rather more so. Will it bother you,’ he asked, ‘to play a part?’

  I wasn’t sure, despite his faith in me, that I could pull it off. I’d never been much good at acting; never had Katrina’s gift. She would have loved this whole experience, I knew, of stepping back into another age. She’d have thrown herself into the role, would have altered her accent and gestures until Daniel Butler himself would have thought she was from his own time. She’d have had an adventure.

  I smiled faintly, feeling for the thousandth time the small and pulling pain of separation and the hollow ache of being left behind. I saw his eyes grow quizzical, and so I said, ‘I’ll try. But I’m afraid I’m not an actress.’

  ‘It was not my intention to suggest you were. I would not so insult you.’ The apology was so swift and sincere it surprised me until I remembered that actresses had once been seen as no better than prostitutes, women who offered themselves to the public for money and couldn’t be classed as respectable. I thought of the actresses I’d known and worked with, the wealth and the power of some of them, and couldn’t help but reflect on how far we had come in a few hundred years. But I felt much too tired at the moment to try to explain that, and all that I said was, ‘I wasn’t insulted.’

  Fergal feigned insult on my behalf. ‘Mind how you speak to my sister, now,’ he warned his friend. Then, to me, ‘I’d best show you the house, so you’ll know where things are.’

  Daniel said, ‘I can do that.’

  Fergal’s long look assessed him, and seemed to see something he hadn’t expected, because he leant back in his chair with new interest. ‘All right.’

  To be honest, I paid more attention to Daniel than I did to what he was telling me as I was shown through the rooms of Trelowarth. The downstairs I’d already seen, which was a good thing because all that I managed to take in down there was that Daniel had nice hands he used when he talked, and that when he smiled it carved a shallow cleft in his right cheek. All useful things, but as we climbed the stairs I tried to focus more on my surroundings, and a little less on how his shoulders moved beneath his jacket.

  Only that, too, wasn’t altogether pointless, as it prompted me to say, ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t bring your dressing gown back with me.’

  He half-turned on the landing. ‘What?’

  ‘Your dressing gown. The one you loaned me.’

  ‘Ah.’ He gave a nod. ‘My banyan. It is of no consequence. I’ll have another made.’

  But I realised that if I returned to my own time in what I was wearing right now, in this gown that had once been his wife’s, that was something he couldn’t replace. And I wondered if he realised it, too.

  If he did, he kept it to himself as he began to show me through the upstairs rooms. I had already seen his study, but he added, ‘Should you wish something to read, you may take any book that you please from in here, or from downstairs. You saw the shelves there?’

  I assured him I had. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Nobody else in this house has much liking for books,’ he said. ‘Fergal has no patience for reading, and my brother Jack would rather be the author of his own adventures. This,’ he said, ‘is Jack’s room.’ He nodded to the door of the back bedroom. ‘And I’ll warn you, though I love my brother dearly, you’d be wisest not to venture near this door when he’s at home. ’Tis not for nothing all the mothers in Polgelly lock their daughters up for safekeeping when Jack comes into harbour.’

  The warning was a light one, so I answered him in kind, ‘I doubt your brother will be bothered with me, seeing as I’m sleeping in your room.’

  His eyes were laughing when he looked at me. ‘My brother might just take that as a challenge.’

  We were so close now in the corridor I had to look a long way up. A man would have to be a fool, I thought, to challenge Daniel Butler’s right to anything. It wasn’t just his height, or strength of build, it was the whole of him, that certain quiet sense of self-assuredness that told me he would not be on the losing side too often in a fight. Were I a man myself, I wouldn’t want to test him.

  I was looking at him, thinking this, when I first realised that his eyes weren’t laughing any more. And then he noticed I had noticed and he let his gaze drift upwards from my own and said, ‘Tomorrow I shall find you pins, so you can dress your hair.’

  ‘I don’t know how to.’

  ‘No?’ He focused on my eyes again, but briefly. ‘No, of course you would not know. Well, that will be a minor thing to overcome.’

  I asked, ‘Where are you sleeping?’ because suddenly it seemed like something I should know.

  For an answer he crossed to the door of the room
beside mine. ‘Here,’ he told me, as the door swung open.

  This was where he and Fergal had been talking when I’d overheard them, in this narrow bedroom filled with soft light from the single window at the front. The bed here was not quite as big as the one he’d turned over to me in the room next door, but it was also high and canopied with curtains of a soft sky blue. A long-lidded blanket box sat at the foot of the bed, and a chair had been placed by the window so someone could sit looking out at the view of the green hills that rolled to the changeable sea.

  It was a woman’s room. I didn’t need to ask whose it had been because her presence was so tangible I all but saw her sitting in the chair beside the window. I imagined he did, too.

  I wondered how long she’d been dead, but didn’t like to pry, and so I turned my gaze instead towards the closed door in the wall between this room and mine. He looked as well, and said, ‘I do not doubt that I could find a lock to fit that latch, if it would ease your fears.’

  I turned to him. ‘My fears?’

  ‘You surely have them, being far from home among strange men. And you were frightened when we met.’

  ‘You had a knife, and you were angry,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Did it seem like anger to you? For my part, it felt like cowardice. I’d never faced a ghost.’

  ‘Well, any ghost that saw you come at them like that would likely take off running.’

  Daniel Butler smiled. He hadn’t moved, and yet I felt the space between us shrinking as he said, ‘But you are not a ghost.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘And I’ll admit you do not seem afraid.’

  I said, ‘I’m not afraid at all.’ The words surprised me when I said them, for I knew that they were true. I said them over, to be sure: ‘I’m not afraid.’

  He watched my face a moment, then he gave a nod and told me, ‘Good. For that is a beginning.’

  Sleeping was impossible. I rolled my face into the pillow, eyes closed tightly.

  I did not belong here. This was not my room, and not my bed. And yet, a part of it felt right to me, and somewhere deep inside my mind a tiny voice kept speaking up to say that Daniel Butler had been wrong to tell me I was far from home.

  It was a voice I couldn’t quiet, and I rolled again and dragged the covers with me, staring out the open window at the moonlit sky shot through with stars that danced against the blackness of infinity. The sea had a voice tonight, rolling and whispering on the dark shore as though trying to give me advice. I ignored it at first, but when other sounds, equally furtive and low, rose to join it, I gave in and rolled from my bed, crossing barefoot to stand at the window.

  I’d changed back into my pyjamas, and the beautiful gown was spread out on the chair in the corner to wait for tomorrow.

  Tomorrow, when I would see Daniel and Fergal, I would be shown what to do with my hair so that Daniel could take me outside, as he’d promised, and give me a tour of the property.

  From where I stood now at the front of the house I could see the broad slope of the hill rolling down to the cliffs and the sea, with the darkness of the Wild Wood pressing closer to the house and looking larger than my memory of it, shot through in places with the ghostly white of blackthorn still in bloom. The sounds continued, and I saw a stir of shadows in the woods.

  They slipped out one by one and left the path to turn uphill and climb towards the house, a silent line of darkened figures, moving in the moonlight. Well, not wholly silent. I could hear the rustle of their footsteps and the heavy tread of two dark horses being led in single file behind, with bundles piled on their backs.

  The floorboards in the next room creaked as Daniel Butler rose as well, and stealthily went out and down the stairs. A moment later from my window I could see his shadow going out to join the others, and to clap the shoulder of the man in front in greeting, and to guide the line of men and horses up around behind the house.

  It didn’t in the least surprise me that he was a smuggler, I had guessed already from the things he’d said about his less-than-honest trade, and from the character he’d painted of the brother who shared the command of his ship. Besides, this was Cornwall, and every house here had its smugglers.

  I wondered what the men had carried up tonight, then I decided that I didn’t need to know. It didn’t matter.

  It felt colder on my feet now standing there beside the window, so I turned away and headed back to bed.

  And then I stopped.

  Because the bed had started wavering. Across the blankets shadows played and shifted as the hanging curtains caught the breeze that blew in from behind me like a long, regretful sigh.

  Another breath and it had faded like a swirl of smoke in wind, and I was once more in the corridor, just crossing from the bathroom and a few steps from my bedroom door, while all the house around me went on sleeping as though nothing had changed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘You’re quiet this morning. You feeling all right?’ Mark had already been up and out and hard at work for hours by the time I ventured outside. There’d been a sharp change in the weather, and all round the flowers were ducking in front of the wind, gusting damp and chilly for this time of year. Even the dogs hunched their backs to it, keeping their tails down and gathering closely around Mark and me as we walked to the greenhouse.

  The truth was, I wasn’t too sure how I felt. I was glad to be back. But if things had gone differently I might be taking this same walk with Daniel right now, and not Mark, and for some reason that left me feeling a little bit … well, a bit cheated, though I knew that didn’t make sense.

  Nor was it really fair to Mark, who was still looking at me with concern. I made an effort, and met his gaze brightly. ‘I’m fine.’

  He seemed prepared to take me at my word. His own attention was distracted by the dogs, who had gone wild because Felicity was coming out to meet us from the greenhouse.

  Her good spirits, at least, were as buoyant as ever. Dancing her way through the onslaught of leaping dog bodies and wagging tails, she said, ‘It took you both long enough. Wait till you see what we’ve done!’ As we neared the doorway to the greenhouse she slipped in behind Mark, covering his eyes with both her hands. ‘Don’t look, not yet. You either, Eva. Close your eyes.’

  ‘Felicity, what … ow!’ Mark whacked his elbow on the door frame as he tried to step through blind.

  ‘All right. Now.’ Lifting up her hands with an enthusiastic flourish, she revealed the latest triumph she and Susan had achieved. They’d painted. Everything was green and ivory, beautifully elegant and restful. For the first time, it looked less like an old greenhouse than a tea room in the making.

  Even Mark was forced to say a heartfelt, ‘Wow.’

  And that one word, because it came from him, was all the benediction that Felicity had hoped for. I could see it in her eyes, her brightened smile, and once again I marvelled that Mark couldn’t see it for himself. She said, ‘Of course there’s still the floor to do, and all the rest, but doesn’t it look wonderful?’

  It really did. I told her so.

  Susan was cleaning the paintbrushes in the new sink that the plumber had just installed, but when she saw us she turned off the water and came across. ‘Well, brother? What do you think?’

  Mark was still looking up. ‘I think maybe you might have a tea room.’

  ‘I told you.’ But she seemed pleased, too, to have won Mark’s approval. ‘Now all we have to do is bring the tourists in, and Eva’s got a start on that already. Did she tell you that she’s found a duke who might have some connection to Trelowarth?’

  ‘Really?’ Mark turned. ‘Who would that be?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘The Duke of Ormonde.’ I’d forgotten all about him, but for the benefit of Mark and Felicity I gave an account of his career, how he’d fought against the Jacobites initially and then switched sides and tried to bring the young King James across to take the throne when Queen Anne died. ‘He was raising a rebellion right down here,
’ I said, ‘in Cornwall, only Parliament got wind of it and voted to arrest him as a traitor, and he took off into exile.’

  ‘A Jacobite rebellion? Here in Cornwall?’ asked Felicity.

  ‘I know,’ said Susan. ‘That’s what I said. But it’s quite romantic, don’t you think?’

  Mark asked, ‘And how’s this duke connected to Trelowarth?’

  If I’d had Fergal’s gift for lying I’d have answered that I’d read somewhere the Duke of Ormonde might have had a blood relation living here in 1715, but as it was I only glanced away and shrugged and said, ‘I haven’t really got it all worked out. I’ll have to do a bit more research, yet.’

  Susan said, ‘You should ask Oliver. Remember him?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, of course. I just bumped into him Wednesday, in fact, in Felicity’s shop.’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Felicity. ‘He didn’t mention that to me.’

  I felt the quick surge of new interest all round.

  Susan asked me, ‘And what did you think of him?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘He’s filled out a bit, hasn’t he?’ Susan grinned. ‘Who knew he’d grow up to look like a film star?’

  Mark said, ‘I should imagine Eva’s seen her share of film stars, Sue.’

  ‘Well, I’ll take him, if she doesn’t want him. The point is,’ she told me, ‘if it’s history you’re after, he’d be a good person to go to, because he knows all sorts of obscure things. He researched a lot, when he set up his smugglers’ museum. If he doesn’t know the exact facts you’re after, he might point you in the direction to find them.’

  Mark looked doubtful. ‘Would he be open on a Sunday?’

  Susan said, ‘If the museum’s closed, he only lives upstairs. I’m betting if you knocked he’d come and open up.’

  ‘Especially,’ Felicity said, teasing, ‘for the right sort of a customer.’