The Rose Garden

He didn’t slam the door exactly, but he closed it with a force that gave his final statement emphasis. I heard his footsteps tramping down the stairs.

Now where on earth, I wondered, had I conjured him up from? And why was his name Fergal? I had never met a Fergal.

From the hall below, the Irishman called up the stairs, ‘The constable is coming!’

Oh, terrific, I thought. Someone else to join the party. I’d have stayed exactly where I was, except I caught the faint sound of a horse’s hooves above the wind and couldn’t help but wonder if I’d actually hallucinated horses, so I rose to have a look.

I heard the floorboards in the next room creak as though somebody else were doing likewise, crossing to the window, looking out towards the road.

The horse and rider coming up The Hill had an official look – the horse a gleaming bay, the man who rode him middle-aged and wearing black clothes with a hat that slanted down to hide his face. From the next room I heard an exhaled breath that might have been annoyance, and then footfalls crossing back again, the opening and closing of the door, and steps that took the stairs by twos on their way down.

I found it strange to stand there at the window where I’d stood so often and gaze out upon a scene that looked the same yet not the same, as though an artist had gone over it again but lightly, painting trees where none had been before, erasing roofs and buildings from the village of Polgelly and retexturing the road to rutted dirt.

The rider had turned off that road now and halted his horse at the front of the house, and was shifting as though to dismount when the front door banged below me and the man in brown – still hatless, but wearing his jacket again – came in view.

With my window tight shut and the wind beating hard on the glass I heard nothing of what the men said, but they didn’t shake hands, and the constable stayed in the saddle. I couldn’t see anything of his face under the hat, but his gestures had an arrogance I found unpleasant, and from their body language I’d have guessed the two men didn’t like each other. As the man in brown shrugged off some comment the constable made, the sun glinted on something and I saw that he’d put on more than his coat before coming outside. He had strapped on a sword belt. The sword itself hung at his left side, a deadly thing partly concealed underneath the long jacket but meant to be seen.

I was focused on that when the constable lifted his head.

He was looking up, scanning the windows. His gaze landed squarely on me and without really thinking I took a step backwards …

The room slowly melted.

And just as before on the coast path, I found myself back in the same place I’d been when the vision had started. This time I was standing at the desk in Uncle George’s study, with my hand outstretched to switch off the computer, with the carriage clock in front of me still chiming off the hour.

The final chime fell ringing in the silence as I noted that the clock’s hands were still pointed to the same position: Five o’clock.

Incredible, I thought, that the hallucination could have taken no real time at all. Yet here I was, and there the clock was, showing me the proof.

I turned off the computer and sank gratefully into the green chair, propping both elbows on the desk for support as I lowered my head to my hands. Then in sudden confusion, I stopped.

Raised my gaze again. Stared at my sleeve. Touched it, just to be sure.

The red silk of the dressing gown ran smoothly through my fingers, still as dark as wine. And somehow now as real as I was.

CHAPTER NINE

It was still there the following morning, when, having locked my bedroom door, I pulled the wardrobe open and drew the garment on its hanger from the very back, where I had hidden it. Not something I’d imagined, but a real, substantial dressing gown, a little faded now and frayed a bit around the seams, but still the same one I had worn while I was … well, that was the problem, because now I didn’t know what I’d been doing.

All I knew was that, whatever had occurred, it must have happened in the blinking of an eye. The carriage clock on Uncle George’s desk could not be argued with. Even if I’d fallen into some kind of a trance for that brief instant, and the dressing gown had been there in the study – which it hadn’t, I was sure of it – I’d scarcely have had time to put it on before the clock had finished chiming.

But if that wasn’t what I’d done, then that would mean that what I had experienced was real. The man in brown was real.

I shook my head. It simply wasn’t logical. I couldn’t wrap my thoughts around it. Travelling through time was something people did in books or films. It didn’t really happen. Yet the dressing gown here in my hands, and its obvious age, seemed to stand in denial of that line of reasoning, and I couldn’t think of how else to explain it. I’d tried. I had spent the whole night trying hard to come up with another excuse for the dressing gown’s being here, and I’d come up empty-handed, with nothing to show for the effort except a real headache in place of the fake one I’d used last night as an excuse to miss supper.

I would have skipped breakfast this morning as well, if there hadn’t just then been a knock at my door.

‘Eva?’ Susan’s voice.

Thrusting the dressing gown back in the wardrobe I crossed to the door and unlocked it to open it.

‘Still have the headache?’ she guessed when she saw me. ‘Poor you. I’ve made tea and some toast. You can’t go without eating.’ She brought the tray in with her, setting it down on the bed. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’