The Rose Garden (29 page)

‘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 forwards. 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 Arabic, 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.’

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.

I’d forgotten, from the time that I’d encountered him at night in the front bedroom of Trelowarth, just how quickly he could wake. My hand had barely touched his shoulder when his eyes came halfway open.

‘Eva?’

‘You’re not comfortable.’

He closed his eyes again. ‘I am.’

‘You’re not. That chair’s too small,’ I said. ‘Let me sleep there. You take the hammock.’

‘No need.’ His voice had the cavalier slur of a man who’d had too much to drink and was past really caring; who’d happily sleep in a ditch if he had to.

But I cared. With a bit more persuading I managed to get him to stand. He was less steady on his feet than I’d expected, and I had to steer him to the hammock with his arm around my waist, and when he obligingly lowered his long body into it, he didn’t let go but kept his arm there so that I was pulled partway into the hammock too.

I tried to straighten. ‘Daniel.’

He’d already started falling back to sleep.

If he’d been sleeping deeply it would have been easy to dislodge his hold and step away, but as it was, his arm lay heavily and firmly round me, keeping me in place. And to be honest, once I’d thought about it, I was not all that inclined to step away.

He’d said a hammock held the weight of two men when it needed to. I took him at his word, and since I was already halfway in, I cast propriety aside and slipped in properly, turning a bit so my head nestled onto his shoulder. I let the rhythm of his heartbeat, strong and sure beneath my cheek, chase off my worries.

He had been right earlier when he’d suggested that I’d been expecting adventure; that I’d seen a certain romance in the notion of a smuggling run to Brittany. But the romance of the voyage could no longer mask the actual reality of what was going on, not with the cargo we now carried from the French ship we’d been sent to meet in secret by the Duke of Ormonde’s orders.

I might be prepared to believe that what Daniel had taken in trade for the wool at our first port of call had been only the usual brandy and lace, but whatever the French ship had given us now had to do with the coming rebellion. And although I knew the rebellion would fail, I had not learned yet what that would mean to the man lying next to me, or to his brother and Fergal, or even the men on this ship and their families. In the history books they likely wouldn’t even rate a mention, just as Shakespeare’s Henry V, having read aloud the list of noblemen who’d died at Agincourt, had then dismissed the countless others lying lifeless in the mud as ‘none else of name’.

But these men were not nameless to me. Not to me, I thought, laying my hand on the chest of the man at my side in a move that was faintly protective. Daniel half-woke again, drew me more closely against him and lowered his head so his wine-scented breath warmed my temple, and went back to sleep. And in time, as the ship creaked and rocked with the wind and the waves, I slept too.

***

When I woke to a knock at the door there was light in the cabin—a grey light that spilled round the edge of the curtains. I shifted, not wholly remembering, and felt the weight and warmth beside me.

Daniel hadn’t moved much in the night. He still held me against him, my head cradled into the curve of his shoulder, his hand lying heavily over my hip. It couldn’t be comfortable for him, I thought. If nothing else, he’d likely lost all circulation in his arm. Carefully I eased out of the hammock without swinging it too much and crossed to answer the door.

Fergal’s face was impassive. His dark gaze briefly rested on my rumpled gown and loosened hair before it flicked beyond me to where Daniel lay asleep, and then returned without expression. ‘Waken him, would you?’ the Irishman told me. ‘He’s needed on deck.’

He turned away, not waiting for an answer and not making any comment on the way that he had found us, but I sensed his disapproval.

I tried talking to him later, as we washed the dinner plates together in the galley alcove on our own. I did it quietly. I told him, ‘What you saw… it wasn’t like that. Nothing happened.’

Fergal didn’t answer. Didn’t even glance around.

I tried again. ‘I said—’

‘You’re not meant to be speaking.’ His hard sideways glance cut me off. ‘And the other is none of my business.’

I knew where the coldness was coming from; knew he was not angry but concerned, and I could only guess that his concern was not for me but for his friend. He’d have seen how losing Ann affected Daniel, and no friend would ever wish to see that twice. No matter how well Fergal liked me, I felt certain that he viewed what was developing between myself and Daniel as a road to sure disaster.

And I wasn’t so convinced that he was wrong.

***

My troubled thoughts stayed with me as the
Sally
slowly settled back into the shelter of her private mooring place below the dark woods of Trelowarth, with the black cliffs at her back.

We had slipped in on the rising tide and darkness was beginning its descent upon the pebbled shoreline, cloaking our activities from idly prying eyes. And by the time the men had off-loaded the cargo with efficient speed and silence, there was barely light left in the cabin for me to make out Fergal’s features when he came below to fetch me.

‘Danny’s waiting at the cave,’ he said.

We were the last to leave. The other members of the
Sally
’s crew had scattered to their own devices with a stealth that marked them true-born smugglers.

Fergal handed me down into the Breton rowboat that we’d brought back to replace the one we’d lost to Creed’s accomplice. I could see the smashed remains of that one sitting on the beach as Fergal rowed us quietly across towards the Cripplehorn.

The constable, it seemed, had not been pleased to find his spy left on the shore. And despite Jack’s claims no local jury would convict the Butler brothers, I knew better than to underestimate the constable. What Creed could do within the law and what he’d dare to do outside it were, I knew, two very different things.

The boat scraped bottom on the shingle. Fergal held it steady while I scrambled out to stand beside the waterfall, which, having passed midsummer, had thinned down to a trickle that shifted and danced down the long drop from overhead, splattering onto the already wave-wet rocks close by my feet. It was a good thing I already knew about the hidden entrance, otherwise the sudden figure stepping from what looked like solid rock might have unnerved me into jumping even higher than I did.

Daniel touched my arm. ‘We’ll have to put the boat up. Will you wait inside a moment?’

With a nod I sidled past him through the long cleft in the stone.

The rush of silence struck me with the same swift force that I remembered from the day I’d come down here with Mark. The sea sounded suddenly very far off, and the lyrical dripping of water from somewhere came echoing back from the walls of wet stone.

This was not the unused and abandoned space I’d seen that day, though. The scents of the sea and the salt-dampened rocks were overlaid here with more human ones—pipe smoke and new wooden barrels and candles that had only just been extinguished, the smell of their smoke still a sharpness that lingered unseen. The one candle they had left burning sat stuck in its own melted wax on a small tin plate set on the top of a barrel—one barrel among many others that stood stacked in staggering rows down the long curving wall to my right. I couldn’t tell from looking at the barrels what was in them, but I would have bet the bank it wasn’t anything to drink.

More likely, I decided, they held guns or arms of some sort that were meant for the rebellion. From the articles I’d read I knew the Duke of Ormonde’s plans had been to raise a loyal army in the west of England that would fight beneath his banner in support of young James Stuart, when he came across the sea to claim the throne so many in these times believed was his by right of birth.

James Stuart would come, I knew. He would land in the north, up in Scotland, and men throughout Britain would rise in his name and would pay with their lives, and their cause would be lost in the end. All for nothing, I thought. All the risks that these men were now taking to bring back these guns or whatever they were, and to hide them down here, it was all wasted effort.

I felt a sudden heavy sadness in my chest, and yet I knew that, even if I did warn Daniel of what was to come, he would do nothing differently. He stood with his king, no matter what the odds or consequences, because that was where his heart and honor told him he must stand. Fergal had explained this at the woodpile when he’d said, ‘To Danny, knowing that the battle will not end the way he wishes does not make it any less worthwhile to fight.’

I heard a quiet step behind me on the stone and Daniel’s head came round the corner of the entrance. ‘Done,’ he said. ‘Would you mind fetching me that candle, Eva?’

Being closer to it, I nodded and crossed to lift it from the barrel, being careful where I put my feet upon the floor with all its slippery rocks and damply filled depressions. As I lifted up the candle on its small tin plate the flame dipped briefly sideways, dancing light across a gleaming length of metal near the barrel’s bottom edge—the blade of Daniel’s dagger, lying on the floor. He must have dropped it there by accident, I thought. I nearly bent to pick it up… but then I stopped myself, remembering Mark’s treasure box, and Daniel’s dagger buried at the bottom of it.

Here was where he’d lost it. And where Mark, in time, would find it. It was not my place to interfere.

Daniel must have seen me hesitate. ‘Is everything all right?’

My fingers folded to a tight fist at my side, to stop me reaching for the dagger as I wanted to. ‘I’m fine,’ I said, and turning I walked back to him, the candle held in front of me. It hardly shook at all.

He took it from my hand and thanked me for it, then to my surprise he blew it out. ‘I would not wish to see our work destroyed by fire,’ he said, by way of explanation.

‘Won’t we need the light for walking home?’

Which was, I later thought, a really stupid thing to ask a smuggler who would hardly want to call attention to his presence in the woods at night. But Daniel only smiled, a smile I couldn’t see but clearly felt against my lips as he bent close to lightly brush his mouth across my own—the barest kiss, because there wasn’t really time for more than that with Fergal waiting just outside.

‘Sometimes,’ said Daniel, ‘’tis better to be in the dark.’