The Girl in the Mirror

Sometimes I think that I can feel the garden, like a prickle of awareness on my skin. As if sight – and smell, and sound – were not enough and I want to wrap myself in it, like you wrap yourself in a fur on a winter’s day. I suppose those times should come most often in the mayday, the hay day, when the roses and the fleur de luce and the honeysuckle are in flower. When, in the knot gardens of my childhood, gillyflowers jostled strawberries, with the fruit already beginning to show. When, in the great gardens where they bring even the meadows within their walls, they’re already scything the bloomy purple grasses, fine as the silk tassel on a nobleman’s cloak. I have always loved the garden then, of course I have, but sometimes I thought I loved it better earlier, when the pinkish apple blossom and the green-white pear first begin to break out on the grey lichened branch, or before that, in the time of violets and Lenten lilies. When the grass is sparser and the great trees are still bare, and things bloom with less of a rash and threatening luxury. Or earlier still, when the first snowdrops show above the frosty ground; a promise, but only of the most modest kind. The kind of promise in which one can trust, without too much uncertainty.

I forgive the garden the dog days, the sullen weeks between the hay and the harvest. I forgive it, even though wet days leave the tired plants spoiled and leaden, and on dry ones the gardeners have to trail twisted rags between water tank and root; and sometimes the change comes so suddenly that the ground steams, as though the earth were no more than a giant stew pot. I like the fact that the garden, then, is not for everyone; only for those who will come on its own terms, at the beginning or the end of the day. The weather has dried leaf and bud, and from childhood I remember the thrill of dead husks yielding life between the fingers – the sharp oily strength of lavender as it’s crushed. I’ve seen other ways, since, to deceive the heat – gardens with canals big enough to row a boat around, planted with overarching trees for shade. But it’s still the smell of lavender, every time I open a linen chest, or turn over in new sheets, that brings the garden close to me.

Every husbandman loves the first sniff of autumn, when the golden days light up each separate leaf. Days when the bite in the air goes hand in hand with the sunshine, like the claws emerging from a velvety cat’s paw. Even in winter – when the only colour comes from the tied bundles of the onion tops, and a trace of gilding on the rosemary leaves left over from the last visit of the queen’s majesty, when they dip sticks in honey and sweet wine and put them in the hives to keep the bees alive – the garden was always my place of safety.

Except when it wasn’t. Except when it was a place of puzzlement, of mystery. Of a dead bird thrown over the garden wall, of a warning given, cryptically. Of a man’s teasing face as he dodged between high dark hedges, laughing out at me. Of not knowing what or where my place should be.

The garden in May-time is a place for lovers, with flowers dotting the grass like stars in the sky. The garden in autumn is a place of maturity. In early spring, perhaps it’s for the children, who will crouch down by each new flower and give it the tribute of a wondering eye. I used to crave the early springtime, but now it’s roses and cherry blossom, great lakes of bluebells and the lush smell of the new shrub, the lilac, they have in the garden on the Strand that fill all my fantasy.

When I was a child, the garden seemed a magic place. Not so much for the miracle of the annual rebirth – perhaps only adults, who’ve understood death, can appreciate that – but for its smallness, its perfection, the low clipped hedges of the sweet herbs dividing and defining a bright tiny world, safe and ordered as it should be. I’ve seen other gardens since that aim at more than safety. Where plants are brought from strange new lands, and bright jewels are painted into the walls of an aviary. Where statues spell out subtle messages, where fountains run with wine, and hidden water jets spring up to soak the unwary. These too I am learning to love.

Fashions move quickly: there was a time, not so long ago, when every man at court dyed his beard bright red, they say. Fashions change in the garden also – but then, everything changes. It’s the one thing gardeners, more than anyone else, should know with certainty.

Everything changes. Even me.

Jeanne
The English Channel, 1583

We’d been on the boat for all my lifetime, or so it seemed, suspended in an eternity between black water and black sea. The sailors hadn’t wanted to set out in this weather, that much I’d understood, but the shouting mob of passengers, desperate to get away, and the fists waving money had persuaded them. There’d been no cabins left, but Jacob had settled us on deck, said it would be easier that way, and I’d almost believed him – until we cleared the harbour from Antwerp and the first freezing slap of a wave washed over me. Then the lurching began, and the strange feeling in my belly, and though I knew that five years was too old to be a baby, I started to cry. I would have cried for Maman, but I knew that was no use. I knew by now that, however much I wanted her, she couldn’t come to me. Because we hadn’t been on this boat forever, not really, and before the terror here there’d been the terror at home, where things ought to have been safe, behind us in the Low Countries.

What I remember most is the moment before it started – a pause in time, like the pause of a bee hovering in the air, before it crawls into the bell of the flower. It had been a mild day, almost sunny, and I remember the flat warm light on the canal waters, and a moored boat rocking, and the blue of my new dress as I walked slowly, brimful of pride.

Then out of nowhere my mother had been there, snatching at my hand. ‘Run!’ she panted. ‘Run, Jeanne, that’s right, quickly.’ I looked sideways at her, consideringly, and I did run, but not that fast. I could almost have thought it was a game, if it weren’t for the little mewing sounds she was making as she tried to catch her breath, and the fact that her grip on my arm was hurting me. It had been weeks and weeks that she hadn’t wanted to play any games, or to do anything that meant moving quickly, but now she was a pace ahead and tugging me along, despite her huge swollen belly.

We’d almost reached the canal water by the bridge when she stopped, as hard as if she’d run into a brick wall. ‘Oh,
mon Dieu
. Oh God protect us, they’re here already.’ I didn’t know who she was talking to. ‘Maman,’ I said clearly, ‘where is Papa?’

She looked at me almost as if I were a stranger. Or as if I were a grown-up, maybe.

‘They got him,’ she said, as if she wanted me to remember. ‘They came to the silk merchants’ district first. Everyone knows where the chief Protestants live in this city.’ While she spoke her eyes were casting around. ‘There!’ she said, and stumbled sideways down an alley. I followed, but I didn’t move as fast as she did. My petticoats were in the way, and I didn’t understand why we were running, anyway. At the corner I paused as I heard a man yell. A man with a curved metal cap on his head, and something long and shining in his hand. He yelled again, with a sound of triumph in it. He was pointing at me.

As we reached the end of the street Maman was banging on a door. I knew the man who opened it; I’d watched him talking with my father, though he’d never spoken to me. ‘They’re coming, they’re coming, you can get away, you’ve got money, if you can only get up north there’ll be a boat to take you away. You won’t be on the list, Jacob, they won’t stop you, you’ll be all right, only you must take Jeanne.’ She was talking so fast she sounded as if she were crazy, like the old woman in the house next door. Maman always said her wits had gone awry. Jacob was slinging his bags round his shoulders. He must have packed them already. His head jerked up, like a bird when you startle it. The man in the tin hat was rounding the corner, leisurely, and I could see that he was laughing, I could see his black beard and his dark eyes. At that moment my mother doubled over, clutching at her stomach, and giving a gasping little cry.

‘Go!’ she hissed at Jacob, fiercely. As he darted away round the corner she sank down against a wall. Whoever lived in that house had been doing their washing, and the sheets were all hung up to dry. My mother pulled one down right over her, almost as if she were hiding, but that’s silly. ‘Go, go.’ It was as if she were screaming in a whisper to me. For a second I hesitated, then I dashed round the corner. From the dark of a doorway a hand reached out and Jacob grabbed me.

‘Shhh –’ Then, as if to make sure, he clamped his hand over my mouth. From behind us I could hear soft thuds, like the blows a baker gives to the dough, and voices in a foreign language, and my mother’s voice crying ‘No!’ and a scream cut off. I would have run back but Jacob was holding me. There was a horrible rasping, gurgling sound, then the voices were moving away. For what seemed like long minutes Jacob held on, until at last he released me. There was a pile of white and red where my mother used to be. The corner of the sheet had fallen over her face and below it … I gazed, uncomprehending. I couldn’t understand the glistening mass of red tubes and bags, like something left over on the butcher’s counter, as being part of her in any way.

‘Dear God in Heaven,’ said Jacob behind me. I could hear someone retching, but it was him, not me. I was staring at a strange small figure, like a deformed doll or like a devil in an old wall painting, lying bloody on the ground beside my mother, and at the hilt of the knife standing up from her belly.

Beside me on the boat Jacob half reached out a hand, but uneasily. As if he were trying to comfort me, but didn’t quite know how. Maybe he didn’t know about children. Or maybe there wasn’t any comfort. When he touched my blue dress it was slimy and stinking, from when I hadn’t been able to lean over in time, and I’d just been sick down my own front until everything inside me was aching. Around us, I could hear other people crying and moaning but I was tired, so tired, and as I slid down to sleep the dreams took me.

My dreams were full of jolting, and the running, the not being able to run fast enough. Not the blood, or only occasionally. After that there had been the squeak of the cart wheels, and the cold of the night air, and me not understanding yet that it was no use to cry for my mother, and Jacob telling me to hush, we weren’t safe yet, and the piles of still, silent shapes by the roadway. Another child screaming on one high note, and the sound growing and fading as the cart moved closer and then slowly away. A man pinned to a wall – if I did see this, or did I imagine it? – pinned there with spikes, and his hands and his feet lying a few yards away. Other people, people who weren’t dead or dying but who looked away as we passed by in our little island of catastrophe.

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