The Rose Garden

Then in front of us, as though we had all disappeared and he and Susan were the only people in the room, he took a little velvet-covered ring box from his pocket.

‘Nigel.’ Susan’s voice had lost its force and faded to a level that was just above a whisper. She looked shaken by emotion as he crossed the room towards her.

‘Susan Hallett.’ Like the hero in a fairy tale, he got down on one knee and pried the lid up on the ring box as he asked her, ‘Will you marry me?’

‘It’s her decision.’ Mark reached a gloved hand among the thorned branches and with his shears snipped off an unwanted shoot that had sprung from the roots of a red-petalled rose. ‘No one else’s.’

Two hours had passed now since Nigel had turned up and made his proposal, and Susan and he had gone off for a drive to discuss things. Like Mark, I was filling the afternoon hours with work while we waited for them to come back, though I realised my efforts to photograph some of the lovely old roses now coming into bloom here in the Quiet Garden might all be for nothing if it turned out Susan answered ‘yes’ and moved away to London.

‘She couldn’t run her tea room, then,’ I said, ‘and she’s put so much work into it.’

Mark shrugged and let the shoot fall with the other ones discarded at his feet. ‘It wouldn’t be the first time a project here has been abandoned. Dad did everything in stops and starts. That’s why we have a glasshouse,’ he reminded me, ‘and why it’s sitting empty.’

I’d forgotten about Uncle George’s unsuccessful foray into rose breeding. ‘Well, at least he tried,’ I said in his defence. ‘And now you have the greenhouse.’

‘So we do. And that, as well,’ he added, with a nod down at the sunburst coloured rose beside the one that he was tending. ‘My dad’s one and only hybrid.’

‘Really?’ Lifting my camera, I snapped off a photograph. ‘What is its name? And if you tell me something Latin, Mark,’ I warned as he prepared to speak, ‘I swear I’ll have to hit you.’

‘It doesn’t have a Latin name. Or any name, officially.’

‘Why not?’

‘Dad never gave it one. It was still being field-tested when he died.’ He looked at me a moment and decided, ‘I suppose that we could name it, if you like. It only takes a bit of paperwork.’

‘What would you call it?’

‘You choose.’

I touched a leaf with gentle fingers. ‘You can name them after people, can’t you, roses?’

He could see it coming. ‘Eva.’

‘Can’t you?’

‘Yes.’

I raised the camera for a second time to take another picture of the fragile-looking rose that held the colours of the setting sun. ‘Let’s name it for Katrina, then.’

I heard his silent argument and answered it.

‘It’s not the same,’ I said, ‘as using her name for publicity. You know it’s not. She loved this place, she loved these gardens, and it’s just a way of seeing she’s remembered.’

Mark’s eyes told me just how likely he considered it she’d ever be forgotten, but he thought it over. ‘Right, then,’ he said finally. ‘The Katrina Ward it is.’

The garden walls were built to block the wind and yet a dancing breeze brushed past my cheek as though Katrina were announcing her approval.

I’d been feeling her around me very strongly all this afternoon, as though she felt I needed my big sister. And I did. Above all, I needed to borrow a bit of her courage.

I still felt off-balance because of my run-in with Constable Creed in the stable yard only this morning. I knew I might not be so lucky the next time we met. Even if I managed not to disappear in front of him, he might make good his threat and come at me to get to Daniel. Odds were, if I left Trelowarth I’d remove that risk.

And yet, I’d risk another kind of pain by leaving.

If I’d wanted proof of that, I’d had it when I’d looked at Daniel last night, and he’d looked at me, and suddenly my choices had seemed more confused than ever.

Susan was facing that sort of a choice now, I thought. I’d seen the conflict in her face and heard it in her voice, and knew her heart was being pulled in two directions. And it occurred to me that there was someone else here who had faced that same choice long before myself or Susan, so I went off now in search of her advice.

I knew where I’d find Claire. I heard the lovely mellow tones of the piano long before I stepped inside the house, and knew that she was in the big front room. I went in quietly. I’d always loved to watch Claire play. The music took her so completely, shaped her mood and flowed from her so easily it seemed to be her own invention, her own voice. I recognised the peaceful, almost wistful notes of Chopin, and they seemed to be so perfectly in tune with my own feelings at the moment that I didn’t interrupt. Instead I focused my attention on the bookshelves, searching out with idle fingertips the worn spines of the old books that my mother had once given Uncle George.

I paused at a thick book whose title intrigued me, and was lifting it down when Claire finished her prelude, the final note drifting to silence.

I told her, ‘Don’t stop, that was lovely.’

‘I wasn’t sure I would remember it all,’ she confessed with a faint smile. ‘I haven’t played that one in years. Not since I was your age, in fact.’

‘And when was that?’ I teased her. ‘Yesterday?’