The Rose Garden

I knew just how they were feeling. Flint and steel were not the only things in this room striking sparks off one another, though I doubted Daniel noticed the effect that he was having on me. He was only being nice, I told myself. For all that he might flirt with me from time to time by daylight, that was all it ever was with him – flirtation – and he was too much the gentleman to try the same game on with me here in the darkness of my bedroom, at this hour, with us alone.

If he was sitting close to me it was because he had to sit that close to hold my hands the way he needed to, and that touch was itself a light and helpful one, designed to show me what to do and nothing more.

I was being a terrible student, I knew. My head bent lower still, my focus narrowing more fiercely on the task as I tried shutting out the knowledge of his nearness. But it wasn’t any use. Each time he breathed, the faintly mingled scents of rum and pipe tobacco warmly brushed my hair, and it occurred to me that if I turned my own head just a little bit towards him, we’d be close enough to … close enough to …

‘There,’ he said.

From our joined hands a shower of small sparks cascaded to the hearth, and two of them fell squarely on the piece of charred cloth kindling where they glowed like tiny eyes against the dark.

Releasing my hands, Daniel bent forward, shielding the cloth with his cupped hands while he breathed on the growing sparks. They glowed more surely now, their reddish light cast upwards to illuminate the hard edge of his jawline. And then suddenly the light turned golden, dancing up between his fingers as though he’d created it by magic. When he took his hands away there was a proper curling flame along the charred cloth.

‘You see? ’Tis as I said. A simple thing,’ he told me.

Taking up a bit of splintered wood he held it to the cloth until it caught the fire as well, before he carefully positioned it beneath a larger length of log.

I found my voice. ‘And what’s the trick to doing that?’

‘There is no trick. ’Tis only patience, once again.’

I watched him while he crouched there by my hearth and brought the fire to life with expert and unhurried movements, shifting this bit here and that bit there and sitting back to wait for the result, his focus idle on the flames.

I found I couldn’t take my eyes from him. We were no longer touching but I still could feel his hands on mine, and still my heart was beating much more loudly than it should have been.

Each bit of wood that caught the spreading fire on the hearth threw more light out to chase the shadows from our corner of the room, but I saw nothing more than Daniel’s now familiar features, nothing more than that, and I could only sit and stare like some infatuated schoolgirl.

A simple thing, he’d said, and so it was. A random meeting and a touch – that’s all it took to make a spark that could, with care and time, become a flame …

‘Here, try it for yourself,’ said Daniel, shifting to make space for me and holding out a sturdy length of stick. ‘Or do you fear to burn your fingers?’

My imagination could have read a double meaning in those words of his, but pushing those romantic fancies firmly to one side I met the challenge in his face and took the stick from Daniel’s hand and concentrated on the hearth until the fire leapt to the largest log and raised a dancing blue along its length.

Approving, Daniel turned his head to me and I could see those flames reflected in his smiling eyes.

I should have looked away. I should have smiled back and looked away, but the emotion I’d been feeling surfaced suddenly, betraying me before I could conceal it, and whatever he had been about to tell me fell forgotten in the silence as the smile in his eyes took on a faintly puzzled aspect, and then finally shuttered over into something that I couldn’t read.

The large log cracked and settled on the smaller ones beneath it, and I pulled my gaze away and strove for something normal. ‘So,’ I said, with no idea what came after that.

After a moment Daniel filled the pause himself. ‘You have your fire,’ he said, and standing to his full height stretched his shoulders.

I stood too, before he had a chance to offer me a helping hand. I didn’t trust my own reactions to his touch just now. Lowering my head I mumbled, ‘Thank you’, and I would have stepped away except my foot caught in the trailing blanket I’d wrapped round me and I half-tripped as I tried to pass him.

Daniel moved to steady me – a gentlemanly gesture, just one hand around my arm, but all that did was knock me more off balance.

‘Sorry,’ I said, putting out both hands from instinct.

He’d reached out as well. My fingers landed on his chest as his clamped firmly round my elbows and I closed my eyes without exactly knowing why. Maybe because I was trying to keep my composure, to behave like a twenty-first century woman instead of some swooning Victorian heroine, to not let him see just how incredibly, hopelessly, helplessly hard I was falling in love with him.

‘Eva.’

Opening my eyes, I met his own and found them not quite as unreadable as they had been before.

In fact, they weren’t unreadable at all.

We looked at one another for so long I started wondering if time, instead of flinging me from place to place, had stopped completely. The air grew charged between us with a thousand things unsaid, and with a growing sense of wonderment I thought, He feels it, too. My God, he feels the same way I do.

And he did. I sensed it in the subtle change in how he held me, in the way his fingers shifted on my arms, and all at once I felt uncertain in a way I’d never felt before. I wanted him to kiss me and I feared it at the same time without really knowing why. I felt a mix of joy and dread and everything between, as though someone had thrown a switch and scrambled all my circuits.