The Rose Garden

My fingers closed protectively around the rusted knife. ‘You wouldn’t sell it?’

‘That?’ Mark looked as though the very thought were ludicrous. ‘Of course not.’

Susan smoothly interjected, ‘And you don’t mind if Eva takes it down to Oliver?’

‘If that’s what she wants to do.’ It was a bit of a challenge, but I wasn’t paying attention, not really. My own thoughts were concentrated on the unaccustomed weight of Daniel’s dagger in my hand, and I was trying to remember if I’d ever seen him when he wasn’t wearing it.

Except for that one time when I’d surprised him late at night in bed, I didn’t think I had. For all I knew he’d had it with him then, as well – it seemed to be his favoured weapon, and the one he reached for first when he was faced with any threat.

What threat had Daniel faced down in that cave, I wondered, that had made him draw his dagger? And why had he lost it?

Of the older stones still standing in the overgrown churchyard most had been so worn by weather and by time that it was difficult to read the date or name, and of the names I could read none was ‘Butler’.

The Halletts were all here – Mark’s father and grandfather and his great-grandfather and varied cousins and other relations, since this little church of St Petroc’s had stood its whole life within view of Trelowarth and served all the families who’d lived there by turns.

It was really no more than a chapel of ancient stone set by the side of the road that ran up from Polgelly, wound past the back of Trelowarth and on to St Non’s and beyond that to Fowey.

The tale went that back in the dark, misty times lost to memory a raiding ship from Ireland had wrecked upon the coast, and the sea and the black rocks had taken the lives of the people aboard her and spared only one man who, wanting to show thanks to God, had built with his own hands this little church upon the hill. It made a rousing legend, but there was no way of knowing what was true, or if he’d ever found his way back home to Ireland, or if in fact he ever had existed.

Time was good at erasing the tangible proof that a person had lived.

Behind me the gate to the churchyard creaked open and clanged like the chime of a clock. ‘Morning,’ said a man’s voice and, turning to answer, I saw the church sexton approaching with his wooden-handled garden shears in hand. I remembered those shears, and remembered the sexton who, though he’d grown greyer, still walked with the stride of a working man. And he seemed to remember me, too, though his memory had likely been helped by the fact that my coming to stay at Trelowarth would have been a subject much talked about down in the pubs in Polgelly.

‘Now Miss Ward, see, I thought it was you.’ The broad smile, with its row of impossibly even teeth, took me right back again.

Feeling about five years old, I smiled back. ‘Mr Teague.’

‘You’re a little bit bigger than my memory of you, I’ll admit, but then it’s been … what? Twelve years?’

‘More like twenty.’

‘Never.’ He pretended shock. ‘You’ll have me feeling ancient, so you will.’

I didn’t think it likely, and I said as much. ‘You look the same.’

‘You’ll want to have a doctor test your eyes, my dear.’ But he was pleased. And then he said, as though it needed saying, ‘I was sorry when I heard about your sister. Never seems right when the young ones go. I’m told you brought her back with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good for you. The dead deserve to have a peaceful place to rest. She wouldn’t find that in America,’ he said with the certainty of someone who’d never set foot out of Cornwall himself, looking round at the shaded green churchyard with its leaning rows of grey stones. The vicars of St Petroc’s came and went, but Mr Teague had been a fixture of this churchyard for as long as I’d been coming here – it had seemed to me that every time I’d chanced to pass this way he’d been here somewhere, with his crowbar or his mower or his old wood-handled shears, and he had always taken time to stop his work and chat a minute.

It occurred to me that Mr Teague might be the one to ask about the Butlers, so I did. He turned the surname over in his mind, and frowned a little.

‘Butler. Seems to me as there might be a grave or two of that name.’

‘I didn’t see any.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t now, not if they’re old as you say. Let me just fetch the book from the vestry.’ Setting his shears down beside the church’s side porch, he took out his great jangly key ring and opened the old arched oak door with its black iron hinges. I could have gone in with him, but I preferred to wait out in the fresh morning air with the songs of the birds spilling out from the trees and the warmth of the sun on my back. In a minute or two he returned with a small book with plain cardboard covers, the kind of book that local history societies everywhere tended to publish.

Mr Teague turned the pages with work-calloused fingers, in search of the one that he wanted. ‘In 1822,’ he said, ‘there was a survey done of where the graves were to that time, and the inscriptions that were readable were copied down. Ah, yes, Butler. There be two graves here, for Butlers. In the south-west corner. Come, I’ll show you where they’re to.’

The churchyard’s south-west corner was the closest to the road, and Mr Teague had waged a battle here against the hawthorn hedge that had been planted at its edge along the bank. The hawthorn hedge was fighting back. It had begun to creep across the top of the flat stones set horizontal in the earth. The stones themselves, already partly hidden beneath moss and waving grass, were both so beaten and eroded by the weather I could scarcely make out any traces anywhere of letters, much less read what had been written there. But luckily, in 1822, the words had still been legible.