The Rose Garden

Claire answered for me, still guiding me upwards, ‘She’s here with me, darling. I gave her a nasty hard whack in the face with the kitchen door, probably blackened her eye.’

A tiny voice deep in my mind argued, That’s not what happened, but they had moved on to the subject of doctors and whether I needed one.

Claire said she wouldn’t be sure till she’d had a good look at it. ‘I’ll let you know.’

And the next thing I knew I was soaking alone in the tub in the bathroom upstairs. On the edge of the tub sat a small dish of guest soaps, impractical things shaped like roses, six roses, quite violently pink.

Very slowly, my shaking subsided.

I wasn’t in the bathroom any more, but in my bedroom.

‘There, now.’ Claire was beside me again. I could feel the slight dip of the mattress as she took a seat on the edge of my bed, leaning over to tuck the sheets round me. The cool of her hand smoothed my damply hot forehead while my eyes stayed fixed on the place where a small flake of paint had been chipped from the wall near my headboard.

Claire’s tone was gently undemanding. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

No.

I couldn’t form the word yet, but my head moved slightly on the pillow and she understood.

‘All right.’ I felt her hand against my forehead for a second time, and then she left.

At least, I thought she did.

But in the middle of the night I briefly woke from fretful dreams, and rolling over in the tangle of my blankets I was sure I caught a glimpse of someone sitting in the shadows of the corner by the fireplace, watching over me.

The house was quiet when I woke.

No laughter floating up the stairs, no whispers from the room next door, no movement but the swaying of the curtains at my windows as they sought to catch the currents of the spindrift-scented summer breeze before the wind’s inconstant nature dropped them limply back to lie in wait against the window ledge.

The room felt warm. Too warm to be the morning. And the shadows were not in their proper places.

Without thinking I turned slightly on the pillow and the sudden painful pressure on my swollen cheek called back the night’s dark memories in a swift, depressing rush.

I’d killed a man. I’d stabbed a man and killed him, and although he’d murdered others in his turn and would have doubtless murdered me, the fact remained that I’d done something I had always thought I’d be incapable of doing, and that wasn’t such an easy thing to wrap my thoughts around.

And if my thoughts were horrible for me, I knew it would be even worse for Daniel, coming to the cave to find his brother dead. That the constable lay dead as well would be at least a minor consolation, but it wouldn’t be a balance for the loss of Jack, in Daniel’s view. Or mine.

I closed my eyes to shut the memories out. It didn’t work. Against the blackness of my mind I saw the play of images, and I remembered everything. The only part that seemed less clear was how I’d come to be up here, in my pyjamas, in my bed … then I remembered that as well, and looked around for Claire.

I’d need to talk to her, I knew. I’d need to give some explanation for the state she’d found me in last night, though for the life of me I really didn’t know what I could say, where I’d begin.

But knowing Claire, I wouldn’t have a choice. She might be patient and prepared to wait, not rushing me, but in the end she’d want to have the answers to her questions.

Getting up and getting dressed took time. My limbs were stiff and everywhere I saw the scrapes and bruises that the night had left. The sight of my face in the mirror wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. My eye had been left unaffected; the worst of the swelling had kept to the curve of my cheekbone and most of the bruising was up by my temple, the cut that had bled barely visible where it ran into my hairline.

In fact, if I left my hair down and allowed it to swing forward slightly it covered up most of the damage.

The damage that showed, I corrected myself.

There was worse on the inside that, while it was simpler to hide, would be harder to heal. But I hid it the best that I could, and went downstairs, composing a speech in my mind as I went, forming lines and discarding them, finding a few that I liked and rehearsing them mentally so they’d sound normal.

I needn’t have bothered. Nobody was there.

As I moved through the rooms I tried keeping my thoughts in the present day, focusing on what was actually there, but I found the lines blurring and shifting at random; and when I came into the kitchen my steps dragged a little. I didn’t want to be in here, didn’t want to think of everything I’d seen in here last night, or to remember Fergal lying on the floor just there, between the Aga and the door, the fight knocked cruelly out of him.

I thought of Fergal’s dark impassive eyes and his dry wit and felt a twist of pain not knowing what had happened to him. With the sharp edge of that broken piece of pot held in his hand he would have had at least a chance against the constable’s man, Leach, who’d been left to guard him. But that was only if Leach hadn’t used his pistol, and assuming Fergal ever had gained consciousness again.

I couldn’t bear to think of Fergal dead.

And yet I knew they all were, now. The world had turned and they were dead and in the ground, and there was nothing I could do about it. Daniel had been right the day he’d said to me, ‘This life that I have lived, it has already passed and faded from the memories of the people of your own time …’