The Rose Garden

He half-turned and fixed me with that dead blank stare that meant I’d caught him off his guard, and then he made a great show of considering the question. ‘Well, you could, were you a fishwife or a whore, but since you’re neither you’ll do best to keep here safely in the cabin,’ he advised me in a dry tone that asked whether I had any sense at all. ‘What sort of men would you be thinking that we are, to take a woman in to shore?’

‘Well …’

‘You watch from this window and see how many women from the village leave the safety of their homes to welcome us,’ he said. ‘More likely when they see the Sally drop her anchor they all scurry out of sight to guard their precious virtues.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that’s probably because they think it’s Jack.’

Again I got the blank look, then his eyes began to crinkle at their corners and he grinned. ‘Ay, like as not they do.’ He handed me the pistol. ‘Bolt that door, now.’

When he’d gone, I set the pistol back in place within the drawer. It felt too dangerous to hold. Above my head I heard the heavy tramp of feet as those last crewmen bound for shore climbed down into the waiting boat, and when the splash of oars passed by I took a step back from the windows so that I was partly shielded by the curtains at their edge. I didn’t want to be caught watching like a child left behind; but that was how I felt.

Still, there wasn’t any point in sitting stewing in self-pity when there wasn’t anything that I could do about it, other than find some way to amuse myself while everyone was gone.

The captain’s cabin wasn’t fitted out for entertainment. I could only see that single shelf of charts and papers on the wall beside the desk, with several books wedged in among them, and the books at first glance didn’t hold too much appeal. One was mathematical, another was in Latin … the third appeared to be either by Alexander Pope or about him, since his name was printed on the spine, which meant it might not be too terrible. But when I tried to take it from the shelf it was so tight against the others that it brought the book beside it out as well and sent it tumbling to the floor.

The unknown book fell both face down and fully open and I scooped it up as quickly as I could, so that the pages wouldn’t bend. I’d planned to simply close it and return it to the shelf, but when I turned it over in my hands I saw the scratchy lines of handwriting in black and blotted ink, and realised what I held was not a printed book.

It didn’t seem to be a journal or a log book, either. There were no divisions for the dates and times, just paragraphs of writing.

Then a sudden thought occurred to me. I closed the book and opened it again at the beginning, to the words that I’d suspected I might find there, written in that same uneducated hand: ‘Jack Butler, His Book’.

Jack was midway through his memoirs, from the look of it. The memoirs that he’d find a way to publish later on in life, and which in turn would find their way to me three hundred years from now.

I hadn’t had a chance to read much more than the first several pages of my copy of A Life Before the Wind, the book that Oliver had no doubt paid a shocking sum of money for. He might have saved himself the bother, I thought smiling. I could read the whole thing now for free. After all, it wasn’t really an invasion of Jack’s privacy if all this was already published openly in my own time. And from my first quick glance at the initial page, it seemed that he had published it exactly as he’d written it – the words had not been changed.

With that decided, I put Alexander Pope back on the shelf instead and settled down with Jack’s book in the gently swinging hammock.

It felt curious and strange to read the same exact words I had read two nights ago, the same account of Jack’s and Daniel’s upbringing, but this time as a manuscript. And this time I was able to go further on. The focus stayed on Jack, of course – he’d clearly set himself up as the hero of the narrative – but now and then he widened out his viewpoint to include things like,

It was at this time that my brother Daniel, going up to London, chanced upon two men who were then being pressed into the Queen’s service, and taking it upon himself to intervene he did effect their rescue and did find himself indicted for a Trespass for his troubles. Having languished several weeks in Newgate he was finally brought to trial, whereupon it was discovered there were none who would appear against him, and he was happily acquitted to rejoin us…

I could remember Fergal making mention of that episode when I had overheard him arguing with Daniel in the next room on the first day I had come to their Trelowarth – the Trelowarth of the past. He had been reminding Daniel that the Duke of Ormonde’s battles weren’t their own. ‘When did the flaming Duke of Ormonde ever think to do you favours?’ I recalled him saying. ‘Never, that’s when. Did he think to put his hand in when they had you up to Newgate? Did he come to pay you visits?’

Evidently not, although from what I’d read so far it didn’t seem the Butler brothers needed anybody’s intervention. They appeared to lead charmed lives. Just reading Jack’s accounts of his own captures and escapes, and the few tales he told of how both he and Daniel had outwitted Queen Anne’s agents while at sea, I was ready to believe the only luck they had was good luck.

With one notable exception.

And at summer’s end my brother’s wife succumbed to her long illness and was laid to rest with God.

He said no more about Ann’s death, nor its effect upon the family, though I thought the constable came into things a little bit more often after that, a darker presence in the background of the narrative.