The Rose Garden (34 page)

He turned his head to leer at me, and that brief shift of focus was the chance Jack had been waiting for. Arm’s length now from the constable, he closed the distance in a final surge of motion, one hand reaching for possession of the pistol.

It was over in an instant.

With the gun’s report still ringing in my disbelieving ears I watched Jack stagger back and fall, and felt a sudden stinging in my eyes that wasn’t from the burning whiteness of the smoke.

‘No,’ I whispered, blinking back the pricking blur of tears.

I’d saved him, hadn’t I? I’d made a choice and changed things so this wouldn’t have to happen, so he wouldn’t have to die.

But he
was
dead. There was no question of it.

‘No!’

I must have spoken that more strongly, for the constable glanced up and, with a twisting of his mouth, turned back and spat once with contempt on Jack’s unmoving body. ‘Now,’ he said, preparing to reload his pistol as he’d done before, ‘we’ve but to wait for your brave husband, have we not? I must admit I did have some misgivings as to whether he would truly hold your life so dear that he’d agree to let me take him prisoner. A mistress, after all, is but a mistress. But a
wife
…’ His tone was confident and mocking at the same time, and it struck some switch inside me that I hadn’t known I had.

I didn’t afterwards remember when I moved or how, but in the next breath I was somehow there in front of Creed and Daniel’s dagger was no longer in my hand.

He dropped the pistol with a clatter to the weeping stone and raised one hand to grasp the dagger’s handle in his turn. It looked so strangely out of place there, stuck hilt-deep into the centre of his chest.

His face was angry as he yanked the short blade out and tossed it clattering aside, and looking at the rush of bright red blood that followed seemed to make him even angrier, because he raised his head and started cursing me…

The words froze on his lips.

I saw the change in his expression, saw the darkness of his glare give way to fear, and heard the horror in the word he whispered: ‘Witch!’

He was already fading as his legs gave way beneath him and he dropped hard to his knees, this man who had so often fed upon the fear of others rattling out his final breath with terror in his eyes. And then he fell and his grey shadow tumbled down and thinned to nothingness.

Jack’s body faded too, and all the dimness of the cave around me shuddered once and melted into the back passage of Trelowarth House, and I was standing ready to walk through the kitchen door.

Except I couldn’t move.

The night had sent me back too traumatized. I couldn’t seem to manage the transition; I could only stand there trembling with the tearstains on my bruised and swelling cheek, wrapped in the rough coat of a dead man that weighed heavily upon my shaking shoulders.

I’m not sure I ever would have found the will or strength to move if I had not heard footsteps clipping with a cheerful and familiar beat across the kitchen floor, though even when the heavy door swung inwards and Claire stood there in amazement at the sight of me, I couldn’t think of anything to do but fling myself into her arms and cling there weeping like a child who’d just awakened from a nightmare.

Shock does strange things to the mind.

My senses telescoped to focus on a few small, random details while the rest of what was going on I only grasped in fragments. Which was why I knew that Claire had seven buttons on her shirt but didn’t know how we’d come halfway up the steep back stairs.

I heard somebody entering the kitchen and Mark’s voice below us called me, ‘Eva?’

Claire answered for me, still guiding me upwards, ‘She’s here with me, darling. I gave her a nasty hard whack in the face with the kitchen door, probably blackened her eye.’

A tiny voice deep in my mind argued,
That’s not what happened
, but they had moved on to the subject of doctors and whether I needed one.

Claire said she wouldn’t be sure till she’d had a good look at it. ‘I’ll let you know.’

And the next thing I knew I was soaking alone in the tub in the bathroom upstairs. On the edge of the tub sat a small dish of guest soaps, impractical things shaped like roses, six roses, quite violently pink.

Very slowly, my shaking subsided.

I wasn’t in the bathroom anymore, but in my bedroom.

‘There, now.’ Claire was beside me again. I could feel the slight dip of the mattress as she took a seat on the edge of my bed, leaning over to tuck the sheets round me. The cool of her hand smoothed my damply hot forehead while my eyes stayed fixed on the place where a small flake of paint had been chipped from the wall near my headboard.

Claire’s tone was gently undemanding. ‘Do you want to talk about it?’

No.

I couldn’t form the word yet, but my head moved slightly on the pillow and she understood.

‘All right.’ I felt her hand against my forehead for a second time, and then she left.

At least, I thought she did.

But in the middle of the night I briefly woke from fretful dreams, and rolling over in the tangle of my blankets, I was sure I caught a glimpse of someone sitting in the shadows of the corner by the fireplace, watching over me.

***

The house was quiet when I woke.

No laughter floating up the stairs, no whispers from the room next door, no movement but the swaying of the curtains at my windows as they sought to catch the currents of the spindrift-scented summer breeze before the wind’s inconstant nature dropped them limply back to lie in wait against the window ledge.

The room felt warm. Too warm to be the morning. And the shadows were not in their proper places.

Without thinking I turned slightly on the pillow and the sudden painful pressure on my swollen cheek called back the night’s dark memories in a swift, depressing rush.

I’d killed a man. I’d stabbed a man and killed him, and although he’d murdered others in his turn and would have doubtless murdered me, the fact remained that I’d done something I had always thought I’d be incapable of doing, and that wasn’t such an easy thing to wrap my thoughts around.

And if my thoughts were horrible for me, I knew it would be even worse for Daniel, coming to the cave to find his brother dead. That the constable lay dead as well would be at least a minor consolation, but it wouldn’t be a balance for the loss of Jack, in Daniel’s view. Or mine.

I closed my eyes to shut the memories out. It didn’t work. Against the blackness of my mind I saw the play of images, and I remembered everything. The only part that seemed less clear was how I’d come to be up here, in my pajamas, in my bed… then I remembered that as well and looked around for Claire.

I’d need to talk to her, I knew. I’d need to give some explanation for the state she’d found me in last night, though for the life of me I really didn’t know what I could say, where I’d begin.

But knowing Claire, I wouldn’t have a choice. She might be patient and prepared to wait, not rushing me, but in the end she’d want to have the answers to her questions.

Getting up and getting dressed took time. My limbs were stiff and everywhere I saw the scrapes and bruises that the night had left. The sight of my face in the mirror wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. My eye had been left unaffected; the worst of the swelling had kept to the curve of my cheekbone and most of the bruising was up by my temple, the cut barely visible where it ran into my hairline.

In fact, if I left my hair down and allowed it to swing forwards slightly it covered up most of the damage.

The damage that showed, I corrected myself.

There was worse on the inside that, while it was simpler to hide, would be harder to heal. But I hid it the best that I could and went downstairs, composing a speech in my mind as I went, forming lines and discarding them, finding a few that I liked and rehearsing them mentally so they’d sound normal.

I needn’t have bothered. Nobody was there.

As I moved through the rooms I tried keeping my thoughts in the present day, focusing on what was actually there, but I found the lines blurring and shifting at random, and when I came into the kitchen my steps dragged a little. I didn’t want to be in here, didn’t want to think of everything I’d seen in here last night or to remember Fergal lying on the floor just there, the fight knocked cruelly out of him.

I thought of Fergal’s dark impassive eyes and his dry wit and felt a twist of pain not knowing what had happened to him. With the sharp edge of that broken piece of pot held in his hand he would have had at least a chance against the constable’s man, Leach, who’d been left to guard him. But that was only if Leach hadn’t used his pistol and assuming Fergal ever had gained consciousness again.

I couldn’t bear to think of Fergal dead.

And yet I knew they all were now. The world had turned and they were dead and in the ground, and there was nothing I could do about it. Daniel had been right the day he’d said to me, ‘This life that I have lived, it has already passed and faded from the memories of the people of your own time…’

He’d been right, too, when he’d theorized that altering the past might prove impossible. By calling a warning to Jack as he’d entered the cave I had saved him from being shot then by the constable, but time had found another way to do what must be done, and even with my interference Jack had died the way that he’d been meant to. Even Daniel’s dagger that I’d used to kill the constable had, in the end, been thrown back to the cave floor and had scuttled to the shadows to lie waiting till Mark came to find it. History hadn’t changed.

At least, I didn’t think it had. I only knew the present seemed to be exactly as I’d left it. It just felt a little emptier.

As if on cue, a shadow passed the window and I heard the back door open and Felicity came in, balancing a plastic washing-up tub stacked with cups and saucers while she chatted on the mobile phone held wedged against her shoulder.

‘No, no,’ she was saying, ‘
all
over the floor. Well, we’ve switched it off, yes, but the thing is we’ve got a big tour group arriving a half hour from now, and… oh, would you? Thanks, that would be wonderful, Paul. You’re a prince.’

Carefully sliding the tub onto the worktop so the china didn’t clink too much, she rang off and greeted me, ‘Hi. I didn’t wake you with the last load, did I?’

Not sure what she meant at first, I glanced towards the sink and for the first time noticed it was nearly brimful too with soaking dishes, and a second empty washing-up tub sat off to the side.

‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s going on?’

‘The dishwasher’s leaking. We were putting these through so they’d be good and clean for our afternoon crowd, only something went wrong in the rinse cycle and we wound up with a flood in the kitchen and lovely baked soap on the dishes.’ She held up a teacup to show me and tapped the hard crystals of soap. ‘Just like rock. I’ve been scrubbing it off.’

I grasped at the chance to do something to keep my thoughts occupied. ‘Want some help?’

‘Claire said to let you rest.’ She looked more closely at my face. ‘She really got you with that door, didn’t she? How does it feel?’

I didn’t correct her assumption of how I’d been injured, I only assured her it wasn’t as bad as it looked. ‘I’m fine, honestly.’

Working together we had both tubs restacked with clean cups and saucers in under ten minutes.

‘Come on,’ I said, lifting the nearest tub carefully. ‘I’ll help you carry these back.’

It was going to rain. The air felt unmistakably heavy and carried the scent of a summer storm underneath clouds that were gathering grey. As I followed Felicity up to the greenhouse I noticed that the thorn tree now wore flutterings of cloth strips left by some of our new tourists, and it made a proper cloutie tree beside the charming tearoom.

As we came inside, the smell of scones fresh from the oven overpowered all my other senses for a moment, and my stomach rumbled as I set my plastic tub of dishes down behind the serving counter. Susan straightened from behind the broken dishwasher and dumped a sodden rag into the bucket at her feet. She looked remarkably controlled, I thought, considering the crisis.

‘Thanks,’ she said, and sent a smile to both of us. ‘The floor’s dry now, at least. Did you get hold of Paul?’

Felicity nodded. ‘I did. He’ll be here in a minute, he said.’

‘Right, then.’ Looking around, Susan noticed my face. ‘God, Eva. That must hurt. Claire said it looked pretty awful.’

‘I’m fine,’ I repeated. But she’d reminded me I wasn’t in the clear yet, and I glanced around in my turn. ‘Where is Claire?’

‘She’s gone up to keep an eye out for the coach, let us know what the numbers are.’

‘Let’s get these tables set, then,’ said Felicity.

We weren’t quite finished when I heard the steps crunching down the curved path from the gardens above, but it wasn’t the tour group just yet—only Paul, looking as though he’d rolled straight out of bed to answer Felicity’s emergency call, with his blue denim shirt hanging unbuttoned over the close-fitting T-shirt beneath.

Susan brightened. She was crouched behind the counter with him, showing him the problem, when another set of footsteps sounded briskly on the gravel and Claire came inside. ‘They’re here,’ she said. ‘Just coming down. The guide said forty-one.’

Susan stood, as did the plumber, who gave Claire a friendly nod and a good morning. He was chattier with Claire than with the rest of us. He asked, ‘Where’s this group from, then?’

Claire wasn’t sure, but Susan told him, ‘Wales. They’re going on to St Non’s after us.’

He said, ‘Bad day for it,’ and stretched his shoulders. ‘Looks like rain.’

‘We only have to give them tea,’ said Susan cheerfully. ‘They didn’t want a garden tour.’ Setting out plates she asked Claire, ‘Forty-one, you said?’

Claire seemed oddly distracted. ‘What? Oh yes, that’s right.’ She’d caught sight of me now. ‘Eva, darling, you ought to be resting.’ A motherly kind of reproach, but she said it with patience, the same sort of patience she’d shown when I’d strayed out of bounds as a child, and I felt the same need I’d so often felt then to just curl up at her side and tell her everything, because she’d understand.

But would she this time? How could anybody, even Claire, believe my story, much less understand it? She would put it down to stress or grief or even mental illness, and she’d worry…

‘Here they come,’ said Felicity, as the first tourists came into view on the path, and the next fifteen minutes were blissfully busy, keeping me from thinking about anything but filling and delivering the teapots—my assigned task—while the others served the scones with jam and clotted cream and Paul the plumber tried to keep his focus on the dishwasher, which couldn’t have been easy since the tour group seemed to mostly be young women, not a few of whom were pretty and the bulk of whom appeared to have
their
focus fixed on Paul.

Susan and Felicity were both too deeply occupied to take much notice, but I knew Claire heard the comments and the giggling and I saw her smile a few times, then I saw her smile more knowingly in Paul’s direction as it grew apparent he had eyes for one young woman in particular, a lively girl with laughing eyes who seemed to draw our plumber’s gaze each time he straightened from his work, and when she went outside with friends to have them take her picture by the cloutie tree, his frequent glances followed her with interest.

Passing Claire as I returned from filling yet another teapot, I nodded at the little group of tourists by the cloutie tree and shared a conspiratorial smile. ‘Susan has some competition.’

‘So it seems.’ She raised a hand to brush the hair back lightly from my swollen cheekbone. ‘That looks rather better than I feared it would. I’m glad.’

I drew a breath. ‘You didn’t hit me with the door.’

‘I know I didn’t. But I had to tell them something, darling, didn’t I?’

A laughing shriek from outside interrupted us. The rain had come at last, in a great sudden lashing downpour that was pelting on the glass roof of the tearoom like a drum roll and cascading down the windows as the small group of young women by the tree, caught unawares, made an impressive dash towards the door and tumbled through it, out of breath and dripping on the floor. Two of them had been wearing hooded raincoats and so escaped the worst of it, but the dark-haired girl Paul had been watching was soaked to the skin in her light cotton blouse.

And then Paul stood and shrugged his denim shirt off and stepped forwards, drawing all the female eyes now with his T-shirt closely sculpted to his muscled chest and shoulders and his lean flat stomach. ‘Here.’ He gallantly offered his shirt to the wide-eyed young woman, who took it and gave him a suddenly self-aware smile in return.

At the far edge of my vision I could see Felicity nudge Susan, and they stared together for a moment before Susan shook her head and made some comment to Felicity. No doubt she was remarking on how weird it was that history was repeating; that our plumber had done just what Claire’s own grandfather had done, such a coincidence.

And then a kettle whistled to the boil and she turned back again to give it her attention, and the moment passed.

But not for me.

For me the moment stretched as though it were a string and I’d just figured out the pattern of the beads to thread upon it. Because I was watching Claire.