The Rose Garden

Not for the Jacobites, I thought. Things never had gone very well for them. At least the Irishman named Fergal had appeared to sense that it was not a fight worth fighting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever managed to convince the man in brown. Perhaps I’d never know.

I pushed the thought aside and settled in to work with Susan on the press release, a thing I’d done a hundred times before with other clients, so the process was predictable and calming. Susan had some good ideas.

‘We should use the word “romance”,’ she said, ‘and “lost”, because they paint a sort of picture, don’t they? And I think what makes Trelowarth interesting is that we have so many roses here that might otherwise have vanished, been forgotten. It makes Trelowarth like a …’ Pausing as though searching for the proper phrase, she finished, ‘Well, it’s like a time machine. One step into the gardens takes you back a hundred years.’ Her face grew bright. ‘That might make a brilliant heading, don’t you think? “Step back in time – come visit the old roses of Trelowarth”.’

I kept my fingers steady on the keyboard as I typed. ‘Yes, that’s quite good.’

Step back in time. Step back in time. The words kept playing over in my mind and stayed there even after Susan had gone off again to see to something over at the greenhouse. Back in time …

My fingers hesitated on the keyboard. Then I opened a new window for a search, and typed in: ‘Time Travel’.

I didn’t know what I’d expected. Strange stuff, I supposed. A lot of people writing, ‘Hi, my name is Zog, I’m from the future.’ But that wasn’t what I found. Instead I found page after page of true science, with actual physicists – some of them famous – discussing the concept as though it were wholly respectable, even conducting experiments at universities.

Much of their dialogue, arguing theories and drawing those squiggly equations that filled half a page, was beyond me. They talked about space-time and wormholes and String Theory, extra dimensions and closed timelike curves. But not one of them said that it couldn’t be done. Even the great Stephen Hawking was quoted as saying, in one of his lectures, that ‘according to our present understanding’ of the laws of physics, travel back in time was not impossible.

It all had to do, so I gathered, with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity having proved that time and space were curved and changeable, not fixed and absolute as Isaac Newton had maintained.

There was a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton in his old age, painted sometime, it said, around 1710. He had a pleasant sort of face, but it was not his face I noticed; not his face that made me shrug away the shivers that chased lightly down my spine.

It was the simple fact that he was wearing the exact same style of dressing gown that hung now in my wardrobe. And the sight of it convinced me, even more than Stephen Hawking’s words, that all the reading I had done on mental health and all my plans to see a doctor had been nothing but a wasted effort. Though it seemed incredible, I had gone back in time.

And that wasn’t something a doctor could cure.

There were voices in the next room.

My eyes opened to the darkness with a wary sensibility, and waited to adjust to the faint moonlight from outside my bedroom windows. The house had always had a lonely feel this late at night, and as a child I’d hated waking up this way, surrounded by the shadows, but tonight I only felt relieved to see that everything was in its proper place – the beds, the chair, the wardrobe. I was where I was supposed to be.

Three days had gone by since I’d travelled back into the past, and in the meantime things had been so normal I might easily have slipped back into thinking I’d imagined what had happened, if there hadn’t been the dressing gown as evidence.

The voices went on talking, low and quiet, from the far side of the wall behind my head. The man-in-brown’s voice was familiar to me now, at least in tone, and I presumed the other speaker was the Irishman. His voice was the more animated one that rose and fell as though in argument, while through it all the other answered back with level calm.

I wasn’t feeling calm, myself. I knew I’d heard the voices on their own before, when nothing else had happened, but a lot had changed since then, and now the sound of them unnerved me, made me want to put a bit of space between us. Just in case.

Forcing myself into action, I got up and went to the bathroom.

There was darkness in the corridor as well, but I had walked this route enough by night to do it with a blindfold. By the light above the mirror in the bathroom I examined my face with a frown. ‘You’re a coward, you know.’ Which was true. But I still took my time, and I waited a good fifteen minutes before going back.

The bedroom was quiet. No more voices.

Just the whisper of the night breeze through the partly opened windows. And the sound of someone breathing from the bed.

My heart began to pound so heavily it held me to the place where I was standing just inside the door. I couldn’t move.

It wasn’t my bed any more. The moonlight fell on posts and curtains and the figure of a man who lay stretched out full-length on top of the blankets, his hands behind his head, still clothed in breeches and the white shirt I had seen him in before. There was light enough for me to recognise the angles of his profile. I could hear him breathing evenly, asleep.

Or so I thought.

Until his voice spoke from the shadows.

‘I do confess I have forgot your name.’