The Rose Garden

‘No, really, this—’ Looking down at the tray, I deliberately dragged my mind back from my own worries, into the here and the now. ‘This is perfect. And so thoughtful. Thank you. You have to stop spoiling me.’

‘Well,’ Susan said, ‘you’re our guest.’ And when she saw me start to protest, she put in, ‘Besides, it’s not as though you’re doing nothing in return. You’ve spent the past week building us a website.’ With a smile she said, ‘That’s likely how you got your headache.

‘No.’ But since I couldn’t very well explain how I had got it, I took a bite of my toast instead. Then I remembered, ‘It’s ready, by the way. Your website.’

‘Really? Can I see it?’

I was hesitant to go back into Uncle George’s study after what had happened last time, but I couldn’t think of any good excuse to make. My indecision must have shown on my face because she said, ‘If you’re not up to it this morning—’

‘No, it’s fine.’ I squared my shoulders slightly. ‘I’m fine. I’d love for you to see it.’

She insisted that I finish off my toast first, but I brought the tea along with me and sipped it for its steadying effect as we ran through the different pages of the site.

It wasn’t until later, when we’d finished with the website and we’d talked about the next step of publicity – the press release – and she’d gone off to fetch some details of the gardens’ history to include in it, that it suddenly occurred to me that history might be one thing I could use to help shed light on what had happened to me yesterday.

The Irishman, as I recalled, had said a name: the Duke of Ormonde.

Though it had meant nothing to me then, and didn’t now, it sounded real enough. And real dukes would be mentioned in Burke’s Peerage.

There were, in fact, two Dukes of Ormonde listed on the Internet, but since the man named Fergal had said something about Queen Anne, too, I chose the second duke, who’d lived through Queen Anne’s reign.

I wished my mother had been here to give me one of her amazing history lessons, but she wasn’t, so I settled for the basics, starting off in 1714 with Queen Anne’s death and the dispute over who should inherit the throne – her half-brother James Stuart, who was Catholic and living in exile near France, or the properly Protestant German Prince George, a more distant relation. I read the accounts of how deeply divisive the politics were at the time, with the Tories who favoured the rights of young James locking horns with the Whigs who supported Prince George. And I read of the riots and public unrest that had followed George’s coronation as the King of all Great Britain.

Which brought me to the spring of 1715, when Jacobites – the followers of James – were plotting armed rebellion, making plans to rise in arms and bring young James himself across to claim his throne.

It seemed most people’s sympathies in Cornwall had been squarely with the Tories and James Stuart, and they hadn’t tried to hide the fact. And so King George’s parliament, controlled by Whigs, had swiftly moved to stamp out any smoulderings that might ignite the fires of a dangerous rebellion.

The Duke of Ormonde, hero of the people, had been right there in the thick of it. Three years earlier, when the mighty Duke of Marlborough had fallen out of favour, the dashing Ormonde had replaced him as commander of the British armies fighting on the Continent, and his patriotic exploits had increased his popularity to the point that the Whigs had grown uneasy. When Ormonde had taken the side of the Jacobites, the Whigs had moved against him, too. He and another leading Tory, Lord Bolingbroke, had been charged with High Treason, and though both men had managed to evade arrest and imprisonment by fleeing the country, Parliament had gone ahead and impeached them in their absence, stripped them of their rights and status, left them both as marked and wanted men.

I had his portrait on the monitor when Susan came back.

‘Who is that?’ she asked.

‘James Butler, second Duke of Ormonde.’ A man I’d never heard of until yesterday. A man who was as real as the red dressing gown. And how could I have even known his name, I wondered, if I hadn’t travelled to the past?

‘And who is he?’ asked Susan.

I gave her a summary of his biography, adding, ‘He played a big part in the Jacobite uprisings down here in Cornwall. Maybe I’ll find he’s connected somehow to Trelowarth. You never know.’

She frowned. ‘I thought the Jacobites were Scottish.’

‘So did I. But there were lots of them in England, too, apparently.’

She leant closer, studying the picture. ‘Nice wig.’

‘Yes, well, most men wore them back then.’ I knew one man who didn’t, or at least he hadn’t worn one either time that I had met him, but I couldn’t say that, either. Instead I looked more closely at the portrait, searching for some small resemblance to the man in brown who’d said, about the Duke, that he was ‘bound to him by blood’. If they were relatives, that blood appeared to be the only thing they shared. The Duke of Ormonde’s face was soft and overfed, his nose too long and large, his gaze too proud and condescending.

‘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.’