The Rose Garden

‘And?’

‘Well, how the devil will you be explaining her?’ This with a nod across the table towards me. ‘You know as well as I do Jack can never keep his mouth shut, and he’ll never be convinced she came the way she says she did.’

I watched while Daniel Butler weighed the options in his mind, and then he gave a shrug and said, ‘She is your sister, come to help us keep the house. Is that not what you said to Creed? And he believed it.’

‘Did he? Sure of that then, are you?’

‘No.’ His eyes were thoughtful on my face. ‘But Jack is not as clever as the constable. And Eva, I suspect, is rather more so. Will it bother you,’ he asked, ‘to play a part?’

I wasn’t sure, despite his faith in me, that I could pull it off. I’d never been much good at acting; never had Katrina’s gift. She would have loved this whole experience, I knew, of stepping back into another age. She’d have thrown herself into the role, would have altered her accent and gestures until Daniel Butler himself would have thought she was from his own time. She’d have had an adventure.

I smiled faintly, feeling for the thousandth time the small and pulling pain of separation and the hollow ache of being left behind. I saw his eyes grow quizzical, and so I said, ‘I’ll try. But I’m afraid I’m not an actress.’

‘It was not my intention to suggest you were. I would not so insult you.’ The apology was so swift and sincere it surprised me until I remembered that actresses had once been seen as no better than prostitutes, women who offered themselves to the public for money and couldn’t be classed as respectable. I thought of the actresses I’d known and worked with, the wealth and the power of some of them, and couldn’t help but reflect on how far we had come in a few hundred years. But I felt much too tired at the moment to try to explain that, and all that I said was, ‘I wasn’t insulted.’

Fergal feigned insult on my behalf. ‘Mind how you speak to my sister, now,’ he warned his friend. Then, to me, ‘I’d best show you the house, so you’ll know where things are.’

Daniel said, ‘I can do that.’

Fergal’s long look assessed him, and seemed to see something he hadn’t expected, because he leant back in his chair with new interest. ‘All right.’

To be honest, I paid more attention to Daniel than I did to what he was telling me as I was shown through the rooms of Trelowarth. The downstairs I’d already seen, which was a good thing because all that I managed to take in down there was that Daniel had nice hands he used when he talked, and that when he smiled it carved a shallow cleft in his right cheek. All useful things, but as we climbed the stairs I tried to focus more on my surroundings, and a little less on how his shoulders moved beneath his jacket.

Only that, too, wasn’t altogether pointless, as it prompted me to say, ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t bring your dressing gown back with me.’

He half-turned on the landing. ‘What?’

‘Your dressing gown. The one you loaned me.’

‘Ah.’ He gave a nod. ‘My banyan. It is of no consequence. I’ll have another made.’

But I realised that if I returned to my own time in what I was wearing right now, in this gown that had once been his wife’s, that was something he couldn’t replace. And I wondered if he realised it, too.

If he did, he kept it to himself as he began to show me through the upstairs rooms. I had already seen his study, but he added, ‘Should you wish something to read, you may take any book that you please from in here, or from downstairs. You saw the shelves there?’

I assured him I had. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nobody else in this house has much liking for books,’ he said. ‘Fergal has no patience for reading, and my brother Jack would rather be the author of his own adventures. This,’ he said, ‘is Jack’s room.’ He nodded to the door of the back bedroom. ‘And I’ll warn you, though I love my brother dearly, you’d be wisest not to venture near this door when he’s at home. ’Tis not for nothing all the mothers in Polgelly lock their daughters up for safekeeping when Jack comes into harbour.’

The warning was a light one, so I answered him in kind, ‘I doubt your brother will be bothered with me, seeing as I’m sleeping in your room.’

His eyes were laughing when he looked at me. ‘My brother might just take that as a challenge.’

We were so close now in the corridor I had to look a long way up. A man would have to be a fool, I thought, to challenge Daniel Butler’s right to anything. It wasn’t just his height, or strength of build, it was the whole of him, that certain quiet sense of self-assuredness that told me he would not be on the losing side too often in a fight. Were I a man myself, I wouldn’t want to test him.

I was looking at him, thinking this, when I first realised that his eyes weren’t laughing any more. And then he noticed I had noticed and he let his gaze drift upwards from my own and said, ‘Tomorrow I shall find you pins, so you can dress your hair.’

‘I don’t know how to.’

‘No?’ He focused on my eyes again, but briefly. ‘No, of course you would not know. Well, that will be a minor thing to overcome.’

I asked, ‘Where are you sleeping?’ because suddenly it seemed like something I should know.

For an answer he crossed to the door of the room beside mine. ‘Here,’ he told me, as the door swung open.