The Rose Garden

They’d been talking long enough as if I wasn’t in the room, and I decided it was time for me to cut between them. ‘If I may?’

I felt a little like a referee as both men turned their heads to look at me.

I said, ‘There’s not a thing that I can do about the way I come and go, or where it happens. If I could, I …’ Daniel’s eyes were too distracting. ‘Well, I can’t, that’s all. But once I’m here, it seems to me the best thing I can do is to stay close to one of you, because you both know what it looks like when it happens. You would know if I was … leaving. And if someone else was with us you could maybe find a way to draw them off, or stop them noticing.’

I watched them both consider this, each in his way, and Fergal gave a nod.

‘Ay, so we could. Though let us hope it never comes to that.’ He fixed me with a gaze that seemed to recognise I hadn’t really had a proper welcome, yet. ‘So. Did you eat before you came, or will you want a second meal?’

‘A second one?’

‘Ay.’ The empty plate that he’d slammed down before was still in front of him, and he gave it a nudge. ‘See, the first one’s been eaten, I’ve just brought that down from your room, where you’ve been lying ill these past two days.’

‘Oh. I see.’ Of course, I realised, he and Daniel would have had to think up some excuse to give to Jack and Mr Wilson. I felt a twist of guilt that I had put them to such trouble.

Daniel said, ‘She ate it all again, I see.’

Fergal’s mouth twitched. ‘Ay, she has a fair appetite, so she does, even when she’s feeling poorly.’

To me, Daniel said, ‘And a good thing you came back before he burst all of the seams of his clothing.’

The mention of clothing drew my own attention to what I was wearing. Self-conscious, I crossed my arms over my T-shirt and faced him. ‘I’m sorry, I seem to have … that is, the gown that you gave me is … well, it’s …’

‘I did notice,’ Daniel said.

Fergal had turned away and was bent over a loaf of bread, cutting thick slices that I assumed were meant for me. He paid no attention as I looked at Daniel.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘It was only a gown.’

No it wasn’t, I thought, and his shrug didn’t fool me. I wondered for a moment how he’d feel were I to tell him that I’d visited her grave – Ann’s grave – and seen the grasses blowing round it in its quiet corner of the churchyard, by the stone that would be Jack’s.

‘You needn’t look so troubled,’ Daniel said. ‘I do have other gowns.’

Fergal, without looking round, remarked, ‘The flowered one would suit her.’

Daniel looked at me. ‘It would at that.’

And so the flowered one it was. When I went upstairs after eating it was waiting on the bed, the full skirt trimmed with a broad edge of blue that matched the small sprigged flowers, like forget-me-nots, that danced across the bodice of the gown. The neckline of the bodice, low and rounded, had the same blue edge. Its simple lines were lovely.

I had trouble with my hair at first, but after two or three attempts I got it right and set the little linen cap that Fergal called a ‘pinner’ tidily on top. If I could trust the little looking glass, I thought, I almost looked the part convincingly enough to leave my room.

The sound of my door opening made Daniel call along the landing from his private study. ‘Eva?’

‘Yes?’

‘Is everything all right? Do you want help?’

I crossed the few steps to his open door and breathed the aromatic scent of pipe tobacco swirling from the room. ‘No thanks, I’m fine. I …’

He was sitting in the chair where he had sat when we’d first talked in here, beside the little window with his shoulder to the wall. A book lay open in his hand but he’d stopped reading and was staring at me silently.

My voice trailed off. ‘It is a lovely gown,’ I said uncertainly. ‘If you would rather that I didn’t wear it, then—’

‘It is not that.’ He set his pipe down as his quiet gaze trailed up to judge the full effect: the gown, my hair. He said, ‘You did your hair yourself?’

I raised a hand to check the placement of the pins. ‘Did I get something wrong?’

‘No.’ Daniel stood and offered me the chair beside him. ‘Will you join me?’

As I sat, he sat as well and closed his book, and would have tapped the ashes from his pipe except I said, ‘It’s all right, I don’t mind you smoking.’

‘Thank you.’ Leaning back, he shifted round to face me properly. ‘You move well in a gown. Do women wear them in your time at all? Or are you all in breeks, like men?’

‘We still wear gowns sometimes. Not quite like these,’ I spread my hand across the lacings of the bodice, flat across my waist, ‘but we do wear them sometimes.’

‘I confess I am not sure which I like best.’ He smiled. ‘Where have you left your other clothing?’

‘In the box that’s in the bedroom. Underneath your shirts.’

‘They will be safe there for the moment. But you really should let Fergal have them later, he knows corners of this house where even I would fail to find what he has hidden.’

Fergal seemed to have a lot of talents, and I said so.

‘Ay,’ said Daniel, ‘there are few to equal him. It was his own idea to tell Jack and Wilson you had fallen ill, and he did play the role of nursemaid so devotedly at times that I was half-convinced myself.’