The Rose Garden

‘Likely not.’ He’d moved to stand behind me and I saw him now reflected in the looking glass that I was holding, with his head bent, concentrating. ‘Though I’ll have to warn you this may not be in the latest fashion. I’ve not done this for some years, and even then I doubt I did it well. Ann used to say I made her look more like an ill-made bird’s nest than a lady.’

‘Ann?’

He’d caught himself, and in the mirror his eyes briefly flicked to mine, then down again. ‘Ay.’

‘Daniel’s wife?’

‘Ay.’ Silence for a moment, then, ‘When she grew too ill near the end to attend to her own hair I helped her, for she was determined that he would not see her as less than she wanted to be.’

I was holding the hairpins. I fingered one thoughtfully. ‘Was she ill for long?’

‘Ay, for some months. It started as a cough that would not leave her, and it wasted her away, and by the summer’s end we’d lost her.’

I was silent in my turn, because essentially that was how I had lost Katrina too. I knew the pain of it.

‘He’ll have my head for telling you,’ said Fergal.

‘Fergal?’

‘Ay?’

‘Could you … could you do my hair a little differently than you did hers?’

His hands stopped, and again his eyes met mine within the mirror for an instant, and he nodded understanding. ‘I was thinking that myself, I was. Come, put that glass down and I’ll teach you how to do this back part, for we’ll not be fooling Jack for long if I’m here in your chamber every morning doing this.’

‘Where is Jack?’

‘He’s gone to fetch the horses back. Whenever we’re away we loose the horses in the paddock at Penryth where there’s a farmer who can see they’re fed and watered.’

I hadn’t even thought of the horses. They might have been starving in their stalls within the stable, and I wouldn’t have known. But when I confessed as much Fergal just said, ‘Well, you had other worries, I expect. And no harm done.’

I barely recognised myself when we had finished. All my hair had been piled up and fastened daintily, making a circlet on top of my head with a few curls escaping as though by pure chance. ‘I’ll never be able to do this myself.’

‘Ay, you will,’ Fergal told me. ‘’Tis nothing to facing down Constable Creed. Now then, put your pinner on your head,’ he said, handing me a modest-looking cap of soft, white linen, ‘and we’re done with this fussing and on to the next of your lessons.’

‘What next lesson?’

‘’Tis sure any sister of mine should know how to cook mutton without setting fire to it, and at the least, how to season a stirabout. Our ma,’ he informed me, straight-faced, ‘would be scandalised.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Sally didn’t lie at anchor long. Next morning Jack was off again in his turn, and I stood with Daniel on the hill below the house and watched the sloop’s white sails pass by the harbour of Polgelly far below us, heading east.

‘Where is he taking her?’ I asked, but Daniel only glanced at me and answered non-committally, ‘I cannot say.’

‘Because you still don’t trust me.’

‘Because,’ he said, ‘’tis best that you do not concern yourself with certain things.’ I felt him glance at me again although I kept my own face turned towards the sea and the departing ship. ‘Are all the women of your time so curious?’

‘The women of my time are many things,’ I told him. ‘Doctors, lawyers, heads of state. We can do anything a man can do.’

I couldn’t tell if he believed me. ‘Heads of state? Well, we have had a queen ourselves, till lately.’

‘Not only queens. I mean elected heads of state, leaders of parliaments.’

‘You jest.’

‘You don’t believe a woman’s capable?’

He seemed to give the matter thought. ‘’Tis not that I dismiss a woman’s capability,’ he said, ‘nor her intelligence. ’Tis only that I would be fair amazed to see society permit it. I would think that she would find herself opposed by members of my sex, and ridiculed by members of her own.’

I had to smile. ‘Yes, well, that does still happen sometimes. But at least the opportunity is there. We can be anything we choose to be.’

I looked away again. The Sally’s sails had grown much smaller now, a little blot of white against the rolling blue of the Atlantic.

Daniel was still thinking. ‘If in truth there is such freedom for the women of your time, then you must find it difficult to be here.’

I actually hadn’t thought that much about it. I’d only been here for short periods, and I’d had more on my mind than my freedoms and rights. But if I were to stay here forever, I thought, he was right. It would not be an easy adjustment.

To know that my opinions would no longer count for anything in public, and that all the legal rights I’d come to take for granted were no longer mine; to be dependent for support on someone else because I could not earn my living.

Daniel watched my face a moment, then he turned his own gaze out to sea and said, ‘My brother sails to Brittany.’

It was an open declaration of, not just his trust, but his respect.

I turned to look at him as he went on, ‘There is a harbour there where he has friends who keep him well supplied with wine and silk and wigs for trade, and where there are young brides whose husbands are too often gone off to the fishing. ’Tis most likely more than one child in that town does bear a passing likeness to my brother.’ He was smiling when his head came round. ‘No doubt the women of your own time would be too wise to fall such victims to his wicked ways.’