The Rose Garden

‘French loaf.’ He had crossed behind me to the bookshelf, and now slid a panel just below it to the side and rummaged in the recess.

The food had a restorative effect on my senses. It struck me how quiet the ship seemed. ‘Where is everybody?’

‘There is one man standing above on his watch. All the rest are yet aboard the French ship by her captain’s invitation, having supper with her crew.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘Even Fergal?’

‘Fergal,’ Daniel told me, ‘has few weaknesses, I will admit, but he is very partial to French cookery, and when he did discover that this French ship in particular has lately paid a visit to the Islands of Canaries and is carrying a goodly load of strong Canary sack, that decided the matter.’ He’d found what he was looking for. He straightened from the recess with a flash of silver showing in his hand, and slid the panel shut.

‘And what is “sack”?’ I asked.

He answered by carefully lifting a green bottle out of his deep jacket pocket. ‘This,’ he said, and set the bottle down upon the desk, ‘is sack.’

‘And Fergal likes it, does he?’

‘More than cider.’ Daniel set the two small silver cups he’d taken from the cupboard in the wall down, too, and easing out the bottle’s cork began to fill them. ‘Will you have some?’

‘Please.’ It tasted like sherry, but stronger.

A burst of raucous laughter drifted over from the French ship, and the distant lilt of music, and I said, ‘It sounds as if you’re missing all the fun.’

He raised his own cup, unconcerned. ‘For my part, I would rather have your company.’

Despite the plainness of the food, that supper was the best I’d ever eaten. No fine restaurant, no expensive gourmet offering, could match the simple wonderment of sitting there with Daniel in candlelight, the ship’s boards creaking to the gentle rocking of the dark sea all around us that made all the world seem, for this one evening, very far away.

We talked about our families. I didn’t tell him I already knew some details of his own from reading Jack’s book, and anyway it didn’t matter. Daniel settled in and told the tales to me himself, and then he asked about my family so I talked about Katrina and our summers at Trelowarth and the reason I’d come back.

‘And you came all that way,’ he asked, ‘because your sister wished to rest where she had once been happy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was she not happy elsewhere?’

‘Yes, of course she was. Just not in the same way. Trelowarth was – it is – a very special place.’

‘Trelowarth,’ he countered, ‘is rooms gathered under a roof, nothing more.’ He refilled his cup and my own. ‘I would argue ’tis never the place, but the people one shares it with who are the cause of our happiest memories. That is why we find that having lived them once, we never can recapture them.’

I’d never really thought of that. But now I wondered if he wasn’t right, and if that might not be the reason why, though Claire and Mark and Susan had done all they could to make me welcome, nothing at Trelowarth in the present felt exactly as I’d hoped it would. The place was the same, but the times had moved forward. My sister, my parents, were no longer there. And the girl I had been then … well, she too was gone.

I said, ‘The Moving Finger.’

Daniel looked a question at me, and I gave myself a shake and told him, ‘Sorry, it’s a reference from a poem, a very lovely one.’ I quoted the whole stanza for his benefit:

‘The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.’

He said, ‘You’re right, it is a lovely poem. I do confess I’m not familiar with it.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘you wouldn’t be. It isn’t written, yet. That is, the original version in Persian, that’s been around for—’I tried to remember when Omar Khayyam had lived – ‘well, for a few hundred years. But it won’t be translated to English until the next century.’

‘Rather a long time to wait.’ He glanced at me as though I’d just done something that intrigued him. ‘I’m surprised you thought to share it. You are usually more guarded with your knowledge of the future.’

He was right, I thought. Again I blamed the sack, and told him so.

‘I see.’ There was a trace of mischief in his half-smile as he took the bottle in his hand. ‘Then let us fill our cups again,’ he said, ‘and you can tell me about India.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Even with the fortified Canary wine relaxing me and spreading warmth through all my weary muscles, I found it near impossible to will myself to sleep.

So I lay there in my hammock watching Daniel sleep, instead.

He’d had more wine than I’d had, and the day’s events had been much harder on him, and he’d drifted off while he was sitting in his chair with legs outstretched beneath the desk, head falling forwards till his chin was nearly resting on his chest.

It didn’t look the least bit comfortable, especially since now and then he’d jerk his head up with a sudden start and let it slowly droop again, and on the third time that he did this I felt certain that I heard a crack of protest from his neck.

I lay a moment more in silence and debated what to do. And in the end I swung myself out of the hammock and went quietly over to wake him.