The Rose Garden

I’d started shivering a little and my voice had changed because of it, and Daniel looked beyond me to the darkness of my bedroom.

With a slight frown he remarked, ‘You have no fire.’

‘I didn’t think I’d need one when I went to bed, it only got cold afterwards, and Fergal was asleep by then, and I’m afraid I’m not too good yet with the tinderbox,’ I said. ‘I know the theory, but it never seems to work for me.’

‘It only takes a bit of practice. Shall I show you?’

I was torn. On the one hand I was cold, and that was obvious. Not only would a fire be very welcome, but it probably would seem a little odd if, after standing here and shivering and telling him I couldn’t start a fire myself, I told him not to bother. But the problem was that if I told him yes, then he would come into my room and I would have to try to act as though I weren’t the least affected by it, and if I was already this nervous and aware just standing near him in the doorway, who knew what kind of a fool I might make of myself if I had to stand next to him here in my bedroom. At night. In the dark. But there really was no other answer to give, so I told him, ‘Yes, please.’

Daniel must have been into the rum himself, down at the Spaniard. I caught the faint scent of it on his breath as he stepped into the room, but the drink didn’t seem to have had an effect on him. Free of Jack’s weight he moved surely and easily, taking the tinderbox down from the mantel and crouching beside the cold hearth of my fireplace. I followed, and did likewise.

Through the window on the eastern wall the moonlight cast a slanting square of pale light onto Daniel’s hands, so I could see what he was doing.

Choosing a piece of charred cloth from the box he set it on the hearth and said, ‘You hold the steel like this.’ He slid his fingers through the oval ring until it reached his knuckles, then made a fist to secure it. ‘And the flint in your other hand, and strike the two together, thusly.’ Steel met stone, a sharply ringing sound, and raised a single spark that scudded sideways on the hearth and quickly died.

He held his hand out, straightening his fingers in the steel ring so that I could take it from him. ‘Try it now.’

I hesitated. ‘Couldn’t you …?’

‘’Tis better learnt by doing,’ he insisted, with his hand still stretched toward me, waiting.

Silently I took the steel, amazed at how that brief and sliding contact of our fingers made my insides leap. The steel itself was cold but where he’d held it I could feel faint warmth, and shifting my own grip I tried to hold on to that small sense of shared contact while he handed me the flint.

I tried to strike the two together in the way he had, but my attempt was clumsy. Adjusting the angle at which I was striking, I tried again.

‘Patience,’ he said. ‘It is never done quickly.’

‘I’m learning that.’ The edge of my frustration made my words come out more sharply than I’d meant them to, and Daniel’s own tone grew indulgent, in the way an expert tries to make an amateur feel better.

‘You’ll soon have the way of it,’ he told me. As my efforts went on he asked, ‘What do you use in your own time, then?’

‘Matches.’

‘Matches?’ I’d somehow astonished him.

‘What’s wrong with matches?’

‘Nothing, if you seek to fire a cannon, but I would not think them practical for household use.’

I paused for a moment to send him a puzzled frown. ‘Sorry? I mean, what do you call a match?’

He described what a match was, in detail, and smiling I nodded with new understanding.

‘We’d call that a fuse,’ I said. ‘No, modern matches are like …’ I tried to remember what he called the match-like lengths of tightly twisted paper that they used here to transfer a flame from one source to another. Spills, that’s what they were. ‘Well, they’re like little spills,’ I told him, ‘only with their ends dipped in chemicals that self-ignite when you strike them on something rough.’

‘Indeed.’ I’d forgotten that he had a very scientific mind that would find certain things intriguing. ‘Spills that light themselves,’ he mused. ‘What are the chemicals you use to make this happen?’

‘I don’t know. I … ow!’ I’d hit the flint too wildly and the steel had bashed my thumb instead. I took a breath against the sudden pain and said, ‘You see? I’m hopeless.’

He fell silent for a moment while he watched me in the darkness. Then his hands reached out to close around mine calmingly. His quiet voice assured me, ‘’Tis not such a complicated thing.’

I couldn’t have replied if I had wanted to. The breath I’d drawn had somehow lodged within my chest and I could only sit there being glad that in the dark he wouldn’t see the foolish way that I’d reacted to his touch.

He carried on, ‘It wants some effort, yes, and patience, but then …’ Tightening his hold he moved my hands for me, his fingers curving slightly round my knuckles and the steel. ‘… but then, what in this life that is of any worth does not?’

I couldn’t answer that one, either. Get a grip, I urged myself, but Daniel’s touch was sending all my senses into overdrive. He’d shifted closer in the dark until our shoulders almost brushed, until his words came close against my ear when he said, ‘If you give them time, the flint and steel will make a spark. They cannot help but do so.’