The Rose Garden

I kept that thought in mind as I creaked lightly up the steep slope of the stairs to the first floor, and crept past the door of the room that Daniel had informed me was his brother’s. It was closed, as were the other doors up here, but I was still relieved to reach the large front-corner room and shut myself inside it.

And relieved again to find the blue gown draped across the chair before the writing desk, where I had left it. This time it was easier to dress myself, though fastening the bodice with the pins still took some time and patience. But I could do nothing with my hair yet except comb my fingers through it and allow it to hang loose.

Prepared now, I sat on the bed’s edge patiently, and waited.

Maybe I’d come back too early in the morning. It was difficult to judge the time with dark rain sluicing down the windows, driven hard against the glass by a rough wind that rose and wailed and died again into a weeping moan. It was a lonely sound.

The minutes passed. My shoulders stiffened, unaccustomed to the damp, and I got up and paced a little in an effort to get warm. I thought for certain that my pacing would wake Daniel in the next room, but the house stayed silent. Finally, after what seemed an interminable time, I raised the courage to cross over to the door between our rooms, and very gently eased it open. If he was in there asleep, I thought, I’d simply close the door again and wait.

But the blue-curtained bed was empty.

Moving cautiously past it, I knocked at the next connecting door, but that room, too, had no one in it. That discovery and the need for movement made me bolder, and in time I had repeated the manoeuvre with the other upstairs rooms, and then with those downstairs, and found that, for the moment, there was no one in the house but me.

I might have gone outside to see if they were there, but I remembered Daniel saying clearly that it was not safe for me to leave the house, and I agreed. I really didn’t want to meet the constable alone.

The problem was, it had been a while now since I’d woken up at Claire’s and come away without my breakfast, a decision I regretted now. It wasn’t just the food – I could go hungry for a while with no real ill effects – but I had never coped too well with thirst. The more I tried ignoring it, the deeper it took hold, and if I didn’t find some water soon I knew I’d get a headache.

I’d seen Fergal dipping water from a pail beside the kitchen hearth, but when I checked the pail I found it empty. I stood frowning for a moment till a blast of rain against the kitchen window gave my thoughts a jolt. Taking the pail with me, I went to open the back door and set the pail out in the rain. It took several minutes before I’d collected enough for a small drink of water, but that was enough. With my thirst partly satisfied, I put the pail back outside to get more, just in case I got thirsty again before Daniel or Fergal came back.

They’d be back soon, I thought. They had left the doors open, and surely they wouldn’t have done that unless they’d been somewhere close by. In the meantime I felt sure they wouldn’t begrudge me a handful of food.

And a handful of food was the most I could find in the scullery. One of the sacks held the barley that Fergal had used for his broth, but uncooked it was hard and inedible, and in the other sack there was just coarsely ground flour. I found two soft apples in one corner of an otherwise empty box under the worktable, but all the other food must have been in the tall cupboard, and that was locked.

I ate one apple, saving the other for later, and went in search of something that would help me pass the time.

It felt strange being in that house with no one else around. I wasn’t used to it, and even with the wind and rain Trelowarth had a multitude of voices – stairs that creaked with no one on them, joists that settled with a sigh, and unseen mice that scrambled through the walls with tiny, furtive noises.

What had Daniel’s wife done on the days he was at sea, I wondered? True, she would have likely had the house to keep and clean, and meals to make, if only for herself. And housework might have filled her waking hours with no time left for boredom. But for me this was a foreign country, really, coming from a place where I could flip a switch and instantly have music or the hourly news to chase away the loneliness.

I wondered whether Daniel’s wife had ever gone upstairs, as I did now, to seek the comfort of the study where the fragrance of his pipe smoke lingered as though he were not far off. I scanned his books in search of something I might know. The books themselves were lovely things to look at, bound in half-calf leather so the scent of them alone enhanced the beauty of the room. Some had their titles stamped in gilded printing on the spine, and curious, I picked out a copy of Jonathan Swift’s poems, so recently printed that I could still smell the sharp scent of fresh ink on the pages. As I read the satirical lines I was struck by the strange realisation that Jonathan Swift was alive right now somewhere and walking around, maybe forming ideas for Gulliver’s Travels, a book that he hadn’t yet written.

Now I’d noticed it, several of the books in this room were by writers who would have been very much alive in 1715: Alexander Pope, and William Congreve, and the poet Matthew Prior. It was thrilling just to hold those books in the same form in which the authors would have held them, in what likely were the first editions published, with their covers smooth and new and all the pages crisply cut.

I wondered how the writers would react were I to tell them that a woman living in this house three hundred years from now would know their names, and still be reading what they’d written.

Putting back the Swift poems I chose instead a folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and flipped through till I found The Merchant of Venice, the first play I’d ever seen on the stage, when my parents had taken Katrina and me up to Stratford as children. Katrina had always said that one performance had started it all for her, switched something on deep inside her that told her that acting was what she was meant to do, what she’d been made for.