The Rose Garden

by Susanna Kearsley

  I understood him then. ‘All right.’ I took a breath. ‘I didn’t like being left behind when you all went ashore. I didn’t expect it.’

  His gaze swung back to mine. ‘And I apologise. I should not have assumed that you would know you could not join us.’ I could see him thinking further. ‘You do understand the reasons?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would not have been safe.’

  ‘I know. I really do, it’s just …’ I paused, and tried to put it into words. ‘You talk of travelling. Well, even in my own time there are countries where a woman has to live with limitations. She can’t get an education, or go out of doors unless her husband lets her, but that’s not the way I live. And when you’re used to certain freedoms, it’s just very hard to lose them.’

  I wasn’t thinking, when I threw that last bit in, that Daniel would have first-hand knowledge from his time in Newgate prison of how losing freedom felt, until he told me slowly, ‘I assure you, Eva, I do have a high regard for liberty.’

  ‘I know you do.’

  ‘And whatever custom may decree in public, in my family every woman has been free to speak her mind.’

  ‘Behind closed doors.’

  He smiled and said, ‘I’ve found that there are many things more safely done behind closed doors than in the public view, by men as well as women.’ Then, more serious, ‘Do you think I am free to say exactly what I please, and when? In truth you’d be mistaken. If I stated my opinion of the current state of politics, I’d soon be clapped in irons for treason.’

  He was right, I knew. ‘But even if you can’t state your opinions, you can act on them.’

  ‘Not openly. No, you and I are both confined to showing but one part of us in public, and another to our friends. As for the whole of us … well, that must be reserved for those few people we are fortunate enough to love and trust.’

  He glanced at me then and appeared to mistake my continuing silence for sulking, because he said, ‘Would it be any comfort if I told you you’d missed nothing of importance on our trip to shore this morning? That even Fergal could not rouse himself to anything but boredom? Would that help?’

  ‘Not much.’ But still I smiled. ‘Did Fergal tell you that I asked to come along?’

  He clearly hadn’t, from the lift of Daniel’s eyebrow. ‘And what did he say to that?’

  I told him, and he gave a short laugh, his eyes warming. ‘Well, ’tis certain you’ve won his affection, for had any other woman asked him, Fergal would have thought it a fine joke to tell the crew.’

  I said, ‘I thought he might have told you, that was all.’

  The laughter faded from his eyes but left the warmth. ‘I’ve no need of Fergal to tell me when you are unhappy. Not even he can match my knowledge of your moods, I think, or know the way to read them in your face.’

  The ship rolled and I put a hand against the window for support. It was no more than that, I thought – the movement of the ship, and not the words that Daniel had just said, or how he’d said them, or the fact that he was standing half a step from me.

  Looking up at him I said, ‘I’m not unhappy.’

  ‘Are you not?’

  ‘It’s not unhappiness. It’s …’ Trying to find some way to describe the confusion of emotions I was feeling, I looked past his shoulder seeking inspiration. ‘Daniel?’

  ‘Yes?’

  I touched his arm and for a moment he misunderstood and stepped in closer, so my cheek was pressed against the roughness of his jacket when I gripped his arm more firmly, turning him so he could see what I was seeing.

  In the Sally’s wake a tall black ship was following, her bowsprit spearing through the waves with predatory purpose.

  He briefly tightened his embrace, his mouth brushing over my hair in a quick kiss of apology or promise before he released me altogether. ‘Keep back from the windows,’ he told me. ‘And no matter what may happen …’

  ‘I’ll stay here,’ I said.

  He gave a nod. ‘If there is any danger, I will come for you. I promise. Oh, and Eva? Lock—’

  ‘—the door. I know.’

  The quick flash of his smile was my reward for that as he stepped out and shut the door behind him.

  Whatever signal passed between the French ship and our own it must have proved this was indeed the ship that Daniel thought it was, the one he had been sent to meet. He brought us hard around into the wind so that we all but stopped, and the next sound I heard was the orderly scramble of men going over the side of the Sally and into the boat.

  I knew Daniel was with them. I caught the timbre of his voice above the now-familiar slap and splash of oars as they rowed off.

  And so I settled in to wait, and let myself slide down the wall till I was sitting curled against it with my legs tucked up and my head resting comfortably on my knees. I sat like that a long time, drifting idly with my thoughts, rocked by the Sally’s gentle motion on the water, and at last that combination brought my heavy eyelids down and I was lulled to sleep.

  My dreams were deep and pleasant, filled with Daniel’s smiling eyes, his touch, his voice …

  ‘You cannot stay here,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I want to,’ I replied. ‘I want to stay.’

  I felt him lift me, then, and reaching up I linked my arms around his neck and snuggled to his chest before the hardness of it warned me that I was no longer dreaming.

  Blinking stupidly, I looked around, or tried to. It was night, the only light within the darkened cabin coming from a single candle set upon the desk, the curtains drawn across the curving sweep of windows. Daniel shifted me a little higher on his chest. I must have been a burden with the weight of my green gown, but he made no complaints. He only said, ‘You cannot sleep here on the floor.’

  I wasn’t totally awake yet. ‘Didn’t mean to. I was waiting.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘You took a long time.’

  ‘Ay, we had a fair lot to discuss, and then the cargo to bring over.’

  They’d already transferred cargo from the French ship to the Sally? I’d heard nothing. ‘Did I sleep through that?’

  ‘Apparently.’ He set me on my feet but kept a light hold on my arms as though he thought I might topple over. ‘Fergal was guarding your door for the most of it, I only came with the final load.’

  Fergal. Guarding my door. With my reason returning, I looked at the door, which I knew I had locked. ‘How did you get in?’

  He raised one hand and briefly let a brass key dangle from his fingers. ‘The captain’s advantage. I’ve brought you some supper.’

  Now that I thought of it, I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and my stomach did feel hollow.

  On the desk beside the candle lay a hunk of cheese half-wrapped in muslin, two pears and a few round buns that looked a little squashed as though he’d brought them in his pockets, which he very likely had done.

  ‘Thank you.’ Picking up a bun, I took a bite. ‘It’s very good. What is it?’

  ‘French loaf.’ He had crossed behind me to the bookshelf, and now slid a panel just below it to the side and rummaged in the recess.

  The food had a restorative effect on my senses. It struck me how quiet the ship seemed. ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘There is one man standing above on his watch. All the rest are yet aboard the French ship by her captain’s invitation, having supper with her crew.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘Even Fergal?’

  ‘Fergal,’ Daniel told me, ‘has few weaknesses, I will admit, but he is very partial to French cookery, and when he did discover that this French ship in particular has lately paid a visit to the Islands of Canaries and is carrying a goodly load of strong Canary sack, that decided the matter.’ He’d found what he was looking for. He straightened from the recess with a flash of silver showing in his hand, and slid the panel shut.

  ‘And what is “sack”?’ I asked.

  He answered by carefully lifting a green bottle ou
t of his deep jacket pocket. ‘This,’ he said, and set the bottle down upon the desk, ‘is sack.’

  ‘And Fergal likes it, does he?’

  ‘More than cider.’ Daniel set the two small silver cups he’d taken from the cupboard in the wall down, too, and easing out the bottle’s cork began to fill them. ‘Will you have some?’

  ‘Please.’ It tasted like sherry, but stronger.

  A burst of raucous laughter drifted over from the French ship, and the distant lilt of music, and I said, ‘It sounds as if you’re missing all the fun.’

  He raised his own cup, unconcerned. ‘For my part, I would rather have your company.’

  Despite the plainness of the food, that supper was the best I’d ever eaten. No fine restaurant, no expensive gourmet offering, could match the simple wonderment of sitting there with Daniel in candlelight, the ship’s boards creaking to the gentle rocking of the dark sea all around us that made all the world seem, for this one evening, very far away.

  We talked about our families. I didn’t tell him I already knew some details of his own from reading Jack’s book, and anyway it didn’t matter. Daniel settled in and told the tales to me himself, and then he asked about my family so I talked about Katrina and our summers at Trelowarth and the reason I’d come back.

  ‘And you came all that way,’ he asked, ‘because your sister wished to rest where she had once been happy?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Was she not happy elsewhere?’

  ‘Yes, of course she was. Just not in the same way. Trelowarth was – it is – a very special place.’

  ‘Trelowarth,’ he countered, ‘is rooms gathered under a roof, nothing more.’ He refilled his cup and my own. ‘I would argue ’tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.’

  I’d never really thought of that. But now I wondered if he wasn’t right, and if that might not be the reason why, though Claire and Mark and Susan had done all they could to make me welcome, nothing at Trelowarth in the present felt exactly as I’d hoped it would. The place was the same, but the times had moved forward. My sister, my parents, were no longer there. And the girl I had been then … well, she too was gone.

  I said, ‘The Moving Finger.’

  Daniel looked a question at me, and I gave myself a shake and told him, ‘Sorry, it’s a reference from a poem, a very lovely one.’ I quoted the whole stanza for his benefit:

  ‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ

  Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

  Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

  Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’

  He said, ‘You’re right, it is a lovely poem. I do confess I’m not familiar with it.’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t be. It isn’t written, yet. That is, the original version in Persian, that’s been around for—’I tried to remember when Omar Khayyam had lived – ‘well, for a few hundred years. But it won’t be translated to English until the next century.’

  ‘Rather a long time to wait.’ He glanced at me as though I’d just done something that intrigued him. ‘I’m surprised you thought to share it. You are usually more guarded with your knowledge of the future.’

  He was right, I thought. Again I blamed the sack, and told him so.

  ‘I see.’ There was a trace of mischief in his half-smile as he took the bottle in his hand. ‘Then let us fill our cups again,’ he said, ‘and you can tell me about India.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Even with the fortified Canary wine relaxing me and spreading warmth through all my weary muscles, I found it near impossible to will myself to sleep.

  So I lay there in my hammock watching Daniel sleep, instead.

  He’d had more wine than I’d had, and the day’s events had been much harder on him, and he’d drifted off while he was sitting in his chair with legs outstretched beneath the desk, head falling forwards till his chin was nearly resting on his chest.

  It didn’t look the least bit comfortable, especially since now and then he’d jerk his head up with a sudden start and let it slowly droop again, and on the third time that he did this I felt certain that I heard a crack of protest from his neck.

  I lay a moment more in silence and debated what to do. And in the end I swung myself out of the hammock and went quietly over to wake him.

  I’d forgotten, from the time that I’d encountered him at night in the front bedroom of Trelowarth, just how quickly he could wake. My hand had barely touched his shoulder when his eyes came halfway open.

  ‘Eva?’

  ‘You’re not comfortable.’

  He closed his eyes again. ‘I am.’

  ‘You’re not. That chair’s too small,’ I said. ‘Let me sleep there. You take the hammock.’

  ‘No need.’ His voice had the cavalier slur of a man who’d had too much to drink and was past really caring; who’d happily sleep in a ditch if he had to.

  But I cared. With a bit more persuading I managed to get him to stand. He was less steady on his feet than I’d expected, and I had to steer him to the hammock with his arm around my waist, and when he obligingly lowered his long body into it he didn’t let go, but kept his arm there so that I was pulled partway into the hammock, too.

  I tried to straighten. ‘Daniel.’

  He’d already started falling back to sleep.

  If he’d been sleeping deeply it would have been easy to dislodge his hold and step away, but as it was his arm lay heavily and firmly round me, keeping me in place. And to be honest, once I’d thought about it, I was not all that inclined to step away.

  He’d said a hammock held the weight of two men when it needed to. I took him at his word, and since I was already halfway in I cast propriety aside and slipped in properly, turning a bit so my head nestled onto his shoulder. I let the rhythm of his heartbeat, strong and sure beneath my cheek, chase off my worries.

  He had been right earlier, when he’d suggested that I’d been expecting adventure; that I’d seen a certain romance in the notion of a smuggling run to Brittany. But the romance of the voyage could no longer mask the actual reality of what was going on, not with the cargo we now carried from the French ship we’d been sent to meet in secret by the Duke of Ormonde’s orders.

  I might be prepared to believe that what Daniel had taken in trade for the wool at our first port of call had been only the usual brandy and lace, but whatever the French ship had given us now had to do with the coming rebellion. And although I knew the rebellion would fail, I had not learnt yet what that would mean to the man lying next to me, or to his brother and Fergal, or even the men on this ship, and their families. In the history books they likely wouldn’t even rate a mention, just as Shakespeare’s Henry V, having read aloud the list of noblemen who’d died at Agincourt, had then dismissed the countless others lying lifeless in the mud as ‘none else of name’.

  But these men were not nameless to me. Not to me, I thought, laying my hand on the chest of the man at my side in a move that was faintly protective. Daniel half-woke again, drew me more closely against him and lowered his head so his wine-scented breath warmed my temple, and went back to sleep. And in time, as the ship creaked and rocked with the wind and the waves, I slept, too.

  When I woke to a knock at the door there was light in the cabin – a grey light that spilt round the edge of the curtains. I shifted, not wholly remembering, and felt the weight and warmth beside me.

  Daniel hadn’t moved much in the night. He still held me against him, my head cradled into the curve of his shoulder, his hand lying heavily over my hip. It couldn’t be comfortable for him, I thought. If nothing else, he’d likely lost all circulation in his arm. Carefully I eased out of the hammock without swinging it too much, and crossed to answer the door.

  Fergal’s face was impassive. His dark gaze briefly rested on my rumpled gown and loosened hair before it f
licked beyond me to where Daniel lay asleep, and then returned without expression. ‘Waken him, would you?’ the Irishman told me. ‘He’s needed on deck.’

  He turned away, not waiting for an answer and not making any comment on the way that he had found us, but I sensed his disapproval.

  I tried talking to him later, as we washed the dinner plates together in the galley alcove, on our own. I did it quietly. I told him, ‘What you saw … it wasn’t like that. Nothing happened.’

  Fergal didn’t answer. Didn’t even glance around.

  I tried again. ‘I said—’

  ‘You’re not meant to be speaking.’ His hard sideways glance cut me off. ‘And the other is none of my business.’

  I knew where the coldness was coming from; knew he was not angry but concerned, and I could only guess that his concern was not for me, but for his friend. He’d have seen how losing Ann affected Daniel, and no friend would ever wish to see that twice. No matter how well Fergal liked me, I felt certain that he viewed what was developing between myself and Daniel as a road to sure disaster.

  And I wasn’t so convinced that he was wrong.

  My troubled thoughts stayed with me as the Sally slowly settled back into the shelter of her private mooring place below the dark woods of Trelowarth, with the black cliffs at her back.

  We had slipped in on the rising tide and darkness was beginning its descent upon the pebbled shoreline, cloaking our activities from idly prying eyes. And by the time the men had off-loaded the cargo with efficient speed and silence, there was barely light left in the cabin for me to make out Fergal’s features when he came below to fetch me.

  ‘Danny’s waiting at the cave,’ he said.

  We were the last to leave. The other members of the Sally’s crew had scattered to their own devices with a stealth that marked them true-born smugglers.

  Fergal handed me down into the Breton rowboat that we’d brought back to replace the one we’d lost to Creed’s accomplice. I could see the smashed remains of that one sitting on the beach as Fergal rowed us quietly across towards the Cripplehorn.