The Rose Garden (10 page)

I saw a different side of Fergal in the kitchen than I’d seen before. His roughened edges smoothed a bit and what I’d seen as grumpiness revealed itself to be a dry and entertaining wit. He even smiled now and then, and from the crinkling lines that marked the outer corners of his eyes when he was smiling, I imagined that he did it much more often than he’d led me to believe. On top of which, he seemed to be completely in his element in this room of the house. He cooked with skill.

‘And wasn’t I sent off to sea the minute I was walking,’ he replied when I remarked on it, ‘and I proved myself of no great use to anyone except the ship’s own cook, who taught me all I know. ’Tis why I’m better stewing fish than roasting fowl, as you’ll be learning to your cost.’

I didn’t recognize the type of bird that he was now preparing. There were two of them, narrow and lean. Perhaps ducks. I said, ‘But you are not a ship’s cook now.’

‘I am at that, from time to time. Whenever Danny sails.’

‘He has a ship?’

‘The very best of ships.’ He gave a nod. ‘The
Sally
. She’s away just now with Danny’s brother at her helm, but when he brings her back you’ll likely see her for yourself.’

I took this in. ‘So who’s the captain? Mr. Butler or his brother?’

Fergal’s sideways look said I’d amused him. ‘Well now, there’s a question no man yet could answer for you. ’Tis for certain sure that neither Jack nor Danny could; they’ve argued it for years between their own selves. Like as not the
Sally
knows, but being such a lady as she is she goes as nicely for the one as for the other.’ He skewered the birds with a long spit and set them to roast on the hearth while he dusted his hands and moved on to the vegetables.

There I could help him, at least. I could peel things and chop them and toss them together into the three-footed iron kettle in which he was making what looked to be some sort of soup, richly thickened with barley.

He shot me another glance while I was working. ‘You’re not a woman to complain, I’ll give you that.’

‘And who would I complain to?’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Besides,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to practice being silent, won’t I, now you’ve got the constable convinced that I can’t talk.’

‘Ay, well, I’m sorry for all that,’ he said, not looking in the least bit sorry. ‘But ’twas all that I could think to keep him from discovering the queer way that you talk. He’d have asked questions, to be sure.’

‘No, don’t be sorry. It was very gallant of you.’

‘Was it, now?’

‘It was. And thank you.’

With his head tipped to one side he wiped the blade of his own cutting knife to clean it, while he kept his eyes on me as though deciding something. Then he set the knife down and remarked, ‘I have a thirst from all this work now. Will you have a drink of cider, Eva Ward?’

I was hesitant, remembering Mark’s Scrumpy, but I knew that this was more than just the offer of a drink; it was the offer of a hand in truce. I couldn’t turn it down. ‘Yes, thank you.’

Which was why, when Daniel Butler finally came in from whatever chores he had been doing, he took one look at my eyes—which looked far too bright even from my side—and lifted his eyebrows.

‘Take your boots from under there,’ said Fergal, stopping his friend from taking a seat. ‘Have you no manners at all? We’ve a lady among us; we’ll dine at the table we’re meant to be dining at.’

That turned out to be in the long room beyond the pantry that in my time was a games room but in this time had wood-paneled walls, not wallpaper, and shutters on the windows, and where Uncle George’s billiard table should have been, right at the centre of the room, there stood a trestle table built of heavy oak, with ten imposing chairs.

Fergal set us three places around the one end. ‘You’ll pardon the dust,’ he said, giving the table a wipe that whirled particles upward to dance in the light. ‘We’d a girl coming up from the village to clean for us, but her da’s fallen ill and she’s needed at home, so we’ve had to make do for ourselves this last while.’

It was a big house for two men on their own. When I’d visited Trelowarth as a child there’d been a local woman, Mrs. Jenner, who had done most of the housework, and even today Mark and Susan had cleaners come in every week.

Daniel Butler took the end seat with a smile and told me, ‘Do not let him stir your sympathies. He charms a girl up here with regularity, and ’tis the rare occasion that one leaves without first taking up a broom.’

‘You’re telling secrets, now,’ said Fergal, but he winked as he went out to fetch our dinner from the kitchen.

I looked at Daniel Butler’s handsome face and asked him, disbelieving, ‘Fergal charms the girls up here?’

‘He does. He is not always so ill-natured, as you seem to have discovered for yourself.’ The smile lingered in his eyes. ‘What were you drinking?’

‘Cider.’

‘Then you have impressed him, for the cider in our cellars here was made by his own hand, and he does guard it as a dragon guards its gold. He would not offer it to anyone he did not feel was worthy.’

‘Yes, well, I’m honored but I hope he doesn’t make a habit of it. Cider makes my head spin.’

‘Do you have it in your own time?’

‘Cider? Yes. It makes my head spin there as well.’

‘So there are some things at least that are the same for you.’ Beneath the lightness of his voice I thought I caught a trace of something like a scientific interest. ‘I should think it must feel strange, to step into another age and find yourself so far removed from all you know. Like being shipwrecked in a foreign land.’

It was a good analogy. ‘It feels like that a bit.’ I hadn’t really stopped to analyze it all that much. A part of me, I knew, was still adjusting to the shock of being tossed around in time, and I could only cope with every situation as it came. But now I came to think of it, it was like being washed up on the shore of some strange country not my own. Except, ‘The house is still the same,’ I said. ‘At least, I know my way around the rooms. That helps a little. And the fact that you believe me, that helps too.’ I hadn’t realized how much that last fact meant to me until I’d said the words out loud.

I looked away from him and coughed to clear my throat, and changed the subject as I glanced around the room for inspiration. ‘Have you lived here at Trelowarth long?’

‘Twelve years. It was left me by an uncle who desired I should settle myself to a more honest trade.’

But before I could ask him, ‘More honest than what?’ Fergal came with an armful of plates heaped with food.

‘There,’ he said, as he set mine in front of me, ‘best to enjoy that, I’ve nothing so fancy to serve you tomorrow. It’s stirabouts now, till I’m next to the market.’

It was plain food, but flavorful. Fergal had basted the roast birds with honey, and seasoned the barley and vegetables with unknown spices and herbs that made everything sit on my stomach with comfortable warmth. I ate with knife and spoon, as both of them were doing, grateful for the light ale Daniel Butler offered me in place of cider. Although the small tin tumbler it was served in gave the ale a faint metallic taste, it was at least a drink that, slowly sipped, could leave me sober.

The men drank wine, a rich red wine they drank from tumblers like my own, of beaten tin. As Fergal poured the dregs into his own cup, he remarked, ‘We’ll soon be out of this as well. We’ve but a single case remaining in the cellar.’

Daniel Butler said, ‘’Tis good we’ve got your cider then.’

‘The devil you do. Any man will be losing his hand if he touches those kegs.’

‘Do you see?’ Daniel Butler directed that comment at me, with a smile. ‘Did I not say he guarded his casks like a dragon?’

‘Ay, and did you think to tell her why I do that, now? Did you say what your brother did the one time that I turned my back? And didn’t he have all my cider on the
Sally
and away on the next tide without so much as a farewell and by-your-leave?’

‘Well, that is Jack for you.’

‘Ay, steal the coins right off a dead man’s eyes and do it smiling, so he would.’ But there was still a grudging admiration in his tone, from which I guessed he couldn’t help but like the man they spoke of. Then he seemed to think of something. ‘Jesus, Danny, he’ll be coming back at any time now.’

‘And?’

‘Well, how the devil will you be explaining
her
?’ This with a nod across the table towards me. ‘You know as well as I do Jack can never keep his mouth shut, and he’ll never be convinced she came the way she says she did.’

I watched while Daniel Butler weighed the options in his mind and then he gave a shrug and said, ‘She is your sister, come to help us keep the house. Is that not what you said to Creed? And he believed it.’

‘Did he? Sure of that then, are you?’

‘No.’ His eyes were thoughtful on my face. ‘But Jack is not as clever as the constable. And Eva, I suspect, is rather more so. Will it bother you,’ he asked, ‘to play a part?’

I wasn’t sure, despite his faith in me, that I could pull it off. I’d never been much good at acting, never had Katrina’s gift. She would have loved this whole experience, I knew, of stepping back into another age. She’d have thrown herself into the role, would have altered her accent and gestures until Daniel Butler himself would have thought she was from his own time. She’d have had an adventure.

I smiled faintly, feeling for the thousandth time the small and pulling pain of separation and the hollow ache of being left behind. I saw his eyes grow quizzical, and so I said, ‘I’ll try. But I’m afraid I’m not an actress.’

‘It was not my intention to suggest you were. I would not so insult you.’ The apology was so swift and sincere it surprised me until I remembered that actresses had once been seen as no better than prostitutes, women who offered themselves to the public for money and couldn’t be classed as respectable. I thought of the actresses I’d known and worked with, the wealth and the power of some of them, and couldn’t help but reflect on how far we had come in a few hundred years. But I felt much too tired at the moment to try to explain that, and all that I said was, ‘I wasn’t insulted.’

Fergal feigned insult on my behalf. ‘Mind how you speak to my sister, now,’ he warned his friend. Then, to me, ‘I’d best show you the house, so you’ll know where things are.’

Daniel said, ‘I can do that.’

Fergal’s long look assessed him and seemed to see something he hadn’t expected, because he leaned back in his chair with new interest. ‘All right.’

To be honest, I paid more attention to Daniel than I did to what he was telling me as I was shown through the rooms of Trelowarth. The downstairs I’d already seen, which was a good thing because all that I managed to take in down there was that Daniel had nice hands he used when he talked, and that when he smiled it carved a shallow cleft in his right cheek. All useful things, but as we climbed the stairs I tried to focus more on my surroundings, and a little less on how his shoulders moved beneath his jacket.

Only that too wasn’t altogether pointless, as it prompted me to say, ‘I’m really sorry that I didn’t bring your dressing gown back with me.’

He half-turned on the landing. ‘What?’

‘Your dressing gown. The one you loaned me.’

‘Ah.’ He gave a nod. ‘My banyan. It is of no consequence. I’ll have another made.’

But I realized that if I returned to my own time in what I was wearing right now, in this gown that had once been his wife’s, that was something he couldn’t replace. And I wondered if he realized it too.

If he did, he kept it to himself as he began to show me through the upstairs rooms. I had already seen his study, but he added, ‘Should you wish something to read, you may take any book that you please from in here or from downstairs. You saw the shelves there?’

I assured him I had. ‘Thank you.’

‘Nobody else in this house has much liking for books,’ he said. ‘Fergal has no patience for reading, and my brother Jack would rather be the author of his own adventures. This,’ he said, ‘is Jack’s room.’ He nodded to the door of the back bedroom. ‘And I’ll warn you, though I love my brother dearly, you’d be wisest not to venture near this door when he’s at home. ’Tis not for nothing all the mothers in Polgelly lock their daughters up for safekeeping when Jack comes into harbor.’

The warning was a light one, so I answered him in kind, ‘I doubt your brother will be bothered with me, seeing as I’m sleeping in your room.’

His eyes were laughing when he looked at me. ‘My brother might just take that as a challenge.’

We were so close now in the corridor I had to look a long way up. A man would have to be a fool, I thought, to challenge Daniel Butler’s right to anything. It wasn’t just his height or strength of build, it was the whole of him, that certain quiet sense of self-assuredness that told me he would not be on the losing side too often in a fight. Were I a man myself, I wouldn’t want to test him.

I was looking at him, thinking this, when I first realized that his eyes weren’t laughing anymore. And then he noticed I had noticed and he let his gaze drift upwards from my own and said, ‘Tomorrow I shall find you pins, so you can dress your hair.’

‘I don’t know how to.’

‘No?’ He focused on my eyes again but briefly. ‘No, of course you would not know. Well, that will be a minor thing to overcome.’

I asked, ‘Where are
you
sleeping?’ because suddenly it seemed like something I should know.

For an answer he crossed to the door of the room beside mine. ‘Here,’ he told me, as the door swung open.

This was where he and Fergal had been talking when I’d overheard them, in this narrow bedroom filled with soft light from the single window at the front. The bed here was not quite as big as the one he’d turned over to me in the room next door, but it was also high and canopied with curtains of a soft sky blue. A long lidded blanket box sat at the foot of the bed, and a chair had been placed by the window so someone could sit looking out at the view of the green hills that rolled to the changeable sea.

It was a woman’s room. I didn’t need to ask whose it had been because her presence was so tangible I all but saw her sitting in the chair beside the window. I imagined he did too.