The Rose Garden

To my relief he looked away again. With slightly narrowed eyes he judged the movement of the clouds above our heads. ‘We do have time, I think, to walk awhile.’

‘But shouldn’t we … the firewood, I mean … and Fergal’s dinner—’

‘Will be every bit as inedible an hour from now. Salt beef,’ he promised, ‘cannot be destroyed. A single piece of it would outlast any civilisation.’

And so I let him lead me past the woodpile, up the slope of field that lay beyond the stables and the ordered garden plots where Fergal grew his vegetables.

The wind blew wilder here, and whipped my skirts about my legs and made it hard to hear when Daniel spoke ahead of me. He had to turn his head to ask the question over. ‘Do you ride?’

I told him that I did. Not all that well, but I could ride.

‘Then I shall introduce you to my favourite mare, and mayhap someday you may ride her,’ he said. ‘Come, the field’s not far.’

I wasn’t sure at first which field he meant. The hillside had been altered through the centuries so that I had to work to get my bearings here, and what I’d always known as garden plots with walls and hedges was now open land with long grass chased in ripples by the wind, and the dark of the woods lying off to my left. We climbed to the top of the hill where the road was. That still had the same shape, although it was more of a track than a proper road, rutted and grassy and curving in ways that had never made sense to me until this moment, when I saw the great tree that stood in its way.

The tree was an ancient one, oak from its shape and the way it stood spreading its limbs in defiance of any assault the winds wanted to make. The road, too, had run straight towards it until, clearly meeting its match in the tree, it had veered to the side and gone round it instead, curving off round the hill and away to St Non’s while the tree held its ground as it had done for years, maybe hundreds of years. It looked stubbornly capable of standing there a few hundred years more, but I knew that it hadn’t. This tree wasn’t part of the grounds of Trelowarth that I knew. I’d never heard tell of it.

‘Really?’ said Daniel when I said as much to him. ‘Was it cut down?’

‘I don’t know.’ I would have to ask Oliver. He might have come across something about it, I thought, in his reading.

‘There’s no one round here would dare cut the Trelowarth Oak,’ Daniel informed me. ‘The old ways die hard in these parts, and a lone tree is still seen as sacred. An oak even more so. Ask Fergal sometime about oak trees,’ he said with a smile. ‘For all that he does not believe in witches, he does yet keep the old beliefs.’

The Irish and the Cornish and the Welsh were Celtic peoples, bound by their shared myths and superstitions, and I didn’t doubt that Fergal’s ‘old beliefs’ were not so different from Claire’s grandmother’s. I found myself curious, all of a sudden, to know just what Fergal did think about oak trees.

The leaves of a low branch brushed softly against my blown hair as I stepped from the field to the roadway with Daniel. The church lay behind us, sedately unchanged though its churchyard was smaller and lonelier looking, exposed on all sides with no sheltering woods and no stone wall built round it. I stole a quick backwards glance over my shoulder, but from where we were I could not see Ann Butler’s grave.

Daniel saw me look behind. ‘You’ve naught to fear,’ he said. ‘The road is lightly travelled at this time of day, and I am with you.’ To reassure me further he slowed his steps so they matched my own and leisurely he walked close by my shoulder.

Round the bend again, we came to a long field on level land that had been fenced and gated. Through the grass there ran a darker line that marked the cut banks of a narrow stream that crossed the paddock, passed beneath the fence and underneath a wooden bridge set in the road before it carried on its way to feed the waterfall that tumbled down the Cripplehorn.

Daniel told me, ‘This is where we turn the horses out to pasture when we are away from home.’

I’d guessed as much. The field was shaded well by trees, and with the running water and the green, abundant grass it made a perfect place for horses.

‘They must hate to see the stables after this,’ was my remark.

‘Ay, I have little doubt they curse me when I come to fetch them in.’

There was just one horse in the paddock now, a bay mare who stood against the treeline at the far end of the field and eyed us both expectantly. And she did seem to be cursing Daniel when he whistled sharply to her now. Her head came up, but she stayed obstinately in her place of comfort by the trees.

He grinned, and whistled once again.

The mare stayed put, but I could hear the distant clopping of a horse’s hooves responding to the call, then more hooves following and growing quickly nearer, coming briskly down the road. I turned, and Daniel moved a step towards me, and although I didn’t see his hand move this time to his belt I knew he would have taken out his dagger and be waiting, just in case there might be danger.

There was no time for the two of us to move where we could not be seen. The horses were already at the turning of the road … and then they came around and crossed the little bridge in single file and we saw Jack on horseback, leading them.

Or so it seemed at first. Until I noticed that his hands were strangely still upon the horse’s neck, and moments after that I saw the rope that bound them, and the warning in his face as he caught sight of us.