The Rose Garden (8 page)

‘Well, I don’t believe in
you
,’ I told him. ‘Go away.’

I might as well have swatted at a fly. He didn’t vanish this time either. All he did was settle back, the cup of brandy cradled in his hand, and watch me quietly a moment as though trying to decide how he should deal with me. ‘Where are you from? I only ask because your speech is strange,’ he said. ‘Your accent is not of this place.’

‘Yours isn’t either.’

‘I was born and raised in London.’

‘Really?’

‘You do not believe me?’

‘You’re not real,’ I reminded him. ‘You can be born where you like.’

‘Thank you.’ Now he looked amused.

How long was this going to last? I wondered. All my previous hallucinations had been brief ones. This was going on for far too long. Maybe, I thought, if I took more charge of what was happening, controlled the situation more, I’d speed things up.

I drained my glass and told him, ‘Look, I can’t just sit here, I have things to do.’

He stared at me. ‘You do?’

‘Yes. So if you’ll excuse me…’

As I stood, he stood as well as if by reflex, and when I went out he followed. Happily the corridor looked very much the same as in the real Trelowarth, and I headed for my bedroom door.

The man behind me asked, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To my room.’ The old thumb-latched door handle actually fit in quite well with the age of the other things I was imagining, though the room itself looked a bit different inside when I opened the door. Unfazed, I stepped across the threshold, turned to face the man who wasn’t really there, and told him, ‘Look, you’re being very nice, but really I just want to be alone so
go away
.’

I put as much force as I could into those words, but as before he only stood and looked right back at me instead of disappearing as he was supposed to.

With a sigh I said, ‘Oh, fine,’ and closed the door between us.

***

There were voices in the next room.

One was now familiar to me, but the other was a stranger’s who was making no great effort to be quiet. His was not a Cornish voice. It sounded Irish, and impatient.

‘Have you no sense left at all? ’Tis not your battle, and you know it.’

‘And whose battle is it then?’ That was the man in brown, I recognized his level tone.

‘Not yours.’ The Irishman was firm. ‘Not mine.’

Half an hour or more had passed, or so it seemed, and I was still as deep as ever in the same hallucination, in this room that was my own, yet not my own. The walls were plaster white, not green, and where the wardrobe should have stood there was a simple washstand with a bowl and pitcher on it. Gone too were the rocking chair and chest of drawers, replaced by two low trunks and a small writing desk tucked in the window alcove by the fireplace. But the fireplace was the same one, and the wide-planked floor still creaked when I set foot on it, and the bed was where it should be. Not the same bed, to be sure. This was a larger one—a tester bed with wooden headboard and high posts and railings set with rings to hold the curtains that hung drawn back to the posts at all four corners. With the canopy above it looked like something that belonged in a museum or historic home.

I was sitting on it now. I’d heard the footsteps in the next room as the man in brown went into it, and several minutes after that a different man—the Irishman, presumably—had climbed the stairs and come along the corridor, and now the two were arguing.

The Irishman went on, ‘When did the flaming Duke of Ormonde ever think to do you favors? Never, that’s when. Did he think to put his hand in when they had you up to Newgate? Did he come to pay you visits?’

‘Fergal.’

‘Did he?’

‘I am bound to him by blood.’

‘Well fine,’ the man named Fergal said. ‘Let him go spill his own then, and leave us a bit of peace.’

A low laugh answered him. ‘You will remind me not to ever cross you?’

‘Sure if I’d thought you ever would, you’d have been dead before now.’

‘’Tis a comforting thought.’

‘Jesus, you need to be thinking now. Fine if you’re putting your head in a noose, that’s your business. But not for those bastards.’

‘I thought you were all for the king.’

‘So I am. ’Tis the men he keeps around him I’ve no faith in. They’ve had nearly one full year to bring him back since Queen Anne died, and they’ve done nothing.’ I heard footsteps cross the floor, and heard the handle of a door turn. ‘Just you think on what I’ve said now.’

‘Do you mean to roast the squabs tonight?’

I heard the footsteps pause. ‘Now what the devil does that have to do with anything?’

‘I think more clearly when I’m fed.’

‘Is that a fact?’

‘You might do well to roast an extra bird.’

‘I’ll roast the flock for you,’ the Irishman said dryly, ‘if it helps you find your sense.’

He didn’t slam the door exactly, but he closed it with a force that gave his final statement emphasis. I heard his footsteps tramping down the stairs.

Now where on earth, I wondered, had I conjured
him
up from? And why was his name Fergal? I had never met a Fergal.

From the hall below, the Irishman called up the stairs, ‘The constable is coming!’

Oh, terrific
, I thought.
Someone else to join the party.
I’d have stayed exactly where I was, except I caught the faint sound of a horse’s hooves above the wind and couldn’t help but wonder if I’d actually hallucinated horses, so I rose to have a look.

I heard the floorboards in the next room creak as though somebody else were doing likewise, crossing to the window, looking out towards the road.

The horse and rider coming up The Hill had an official look—the horse a gleaming bay, the man who rode him middle-aged and wearing black clothes with a hat that slanted down to hide his face. From the next room I heard an exhaled breath that might have been annoyance, and then footfalls crossing back again, the opening and closing of the door, and steps that took the stairs by twos on their way down.

I found it strange to stand there at the window where I’d stood so often and gaze out upon a scene that looked the same yet not the same, as though an artist had gone over it again but lightly, painting trees where none had been before, erasing roofs and buildings from the village of Polgelly and retexturing the road to rutted dirt.

The rider had turned off that road now, and halted his horse at the front of the house, and was shifting as though to dismount when the front door banged below me and the man in brown—still hatless but wearing his jacket again—came in view.

With my window tight shut and the wind beating hard on the glass I heard nothing of what the men said, but they didn’t shake hands, and the constable stayed in the saddle. I couldn’t see anything of his face under the hat, but his gestures had an arrogance I found unpleasant, and from their body language I’d have guessed the two men didn’t like each other. As the man in brown shrugged off some comment the constable made, the sun glinted on something and I saw that he’d put on more than his coat before coming outside. He had strapped on a sword belt. The sword itself hung at his left side, a deadly thing partly concealed underneath the long jacket but meant to be seen.

I was focused on that when the constable lifted his head.

He was looking up, scanning the windows. His gaze landed squarely on me and without really thinking I took a step backwards…

The room slowly melted.

And just as before on the coast path, I found myself back in the same place I’d been when the vision had started. This time I was standing at the desk in Uncle George’s study, with my hand outstretched to switch off the computer, with the carriage clock in front of me still chiming off the hour.

The final chime fell ringing in the silence as I noted that the clock’s hands were still pointed to the same position: five o’clock.

Incredible, I thought, that the hallucination could have taken no real time at all. Yet here I was, and there the clock was, showing me the proof.

I turned off the computer and sank gratefully into the green chair, propping both elbows on the desk for support as I lowered my head to my hands. Then in sudden confusion, I stopped.

Raised my gaze again. Stared at my sleeve. Touched it, just to be sure.

The red silk of the dressing gown ran smoothly through my fingers, still as dark as wine. And somehow now as real as I was.

It was still there the following morning, when, having locked my bedroom door, I pulled the wardrobe open and drew the garment on its hanger from the very back, where I had hidden it. Not something I’d imagined, but a real, substantial dressing gown, a little faded now and frayed a bit around the seams, but still the same one I had worn while I was… well, that was the problem, because now I didn’t know
what
I’d been doing.

All I knew was that whatever had occurred, it must have happened in the blinking of an eye. The carriage clock on Uncle George’s desk could not be argued with. Even if I’d fallen into some kind of a trance for that brief instant, and the dressing gown had been there in the study—which it hadn’t, I was sure of it—I’d scarcely have had time to put it on before the clock had finished chiming.

But if that wasn’t what I’d done, then that would mean that what I had experienced was real. The man in brown was real.

I shook my head. It simply wasn’t logical. I couldn’t wrap my thoughts around it. Traveling through time was something people did in books or films. It didn’t really happen. Yet the dressing gown here in my hands, and its obvious age, seemed to stand in denial of that line of reasoning, and I couldn’t think of how else to explain it. I’d tried. I had spent the whole night trying hard to come up with another excuse for the dressing gown’s being here, and I’d come up empty-handed, with nothing to show for the effort except a real headache in place of the fake one I’d used last night as an excuse to miss supper.

I would have skipped breakfast this morning as well if there hadn’t just then been a knock at my door.

‘Eva?’ Susan’s voice.

Thrusting the dressing gown back in the wardrobe I crossed to the door and unlocked it to open it.

‘Still have the headache?’ she guessed when she saw me. ‘Poor you. I’ve made tea and some toast. You can’t go without eating.’ She brought the tray in with her, setting it down on the bed. ‘Is there anything else I can get you?’

‘No, really, this—’ Looking down at the tray, I deliberately dragged my mind back from my own worries, into the here and the now. ‘This is perfect. And so thoughtful. Thank you. You have to stop spoiling me.’

‘Well,’ Susan said, ‘you’re our guest.’ And when she saw me start to protest, she put in, ‘Besides, it’s not as though you’re doing nothing in return. You’ve spent the past week building us a website.’ With a smile she said, ‘That’s likely how you got your headache.’

‘No.’ But since I couldn’t very well explain how I
had
got it, I took a bite of my toast instead. Then I remembered. ‘It’s ready, by the way. Your website.’

‘Really? Can I see it?’

I was hesitant to go back into Uncle George’s study after what had happened last time, but I couldn’t think of any good excuse to make. My indecision must have shown on my face because she said, ‘If you’re not up to it this morning—’

‘No, it’s fine.’ I squared my shoulders slightly. ‘I’m fine. I’d love for you to see it.’

She insisted that I finish off my toast first, but I brought the tea along with me and sipped it for its steadying effect as we ran through the different pages of the site.

It wasn’t until later, when we’d finished with the website and we’d talked about the next step of publicity—the press release—and she’d gone off to fetch some details of the gardens’ history to include in it, that it suddenly occurred to me that history might be one thing I could use to help shed light on what had happened to me yesterday.

The Irishman, as I recalled, had said a name: the Duke of Ormonde.

Though it had meant nothing to me then and didn’t now, it sounded real enough. And real dukes would be mentioned in
Burke’s Peerage
.

There were, in fact, two Dukes of Ormonde listed on the Internet, but since the man named Fergal had said something about Queen Anne too, I chose the second duke, who’d lived through Queen Anne’s reign.

I wished my mother had been here to give me one of her amazing history lessons, but she wasn’t, so I settled for the basics, starting off in 1714 with Queen Anne’s death and the dispute over who should inherit the throne—her half brother James Stuart, who was Catholic and living in exile near France, or the properly Protestant German Prince George, a more distant relation. I read the accounts of how deeply divisive the politics were at the time, with the Tories who favored the rights of young James locking horns with the Whigs who supported Prince George. And I read of the riots and public unrest that had followed George’s coronation as the King of all Great Britain.

Which brought me to the spring of 1715, when Jacobites—the followers of James—were plotting armed rebellion, making plans to rise in arms and bring young James himself across to claim his throne.

It seemed most people’s sympathies in Cornwall had been squarely with the Tories and James Stuart, and they hadn’t tried to hide the fact. And so King George’s parliament, controlled by Whigs, had swiftly moved to stamp out any smolderings that might ignite the fires of a dangerous rebellion.

The Duke of Ormonde, hero of the people, had been right there in the thick of it. Three years earlier, when the mighty Duke of Marlborough had fallen out of favor, the dashing Ormonde had replaced him as commander of the British armies fighting on the Continent, and his patriotic exploits had increased his popularity to the point that the Whigs had grown uneasy. When Ormonde had taken the side of the Jacobites, the Whigs had moved against him too. He and another leading Tory, Lord Bolingbroke, had been charged with high treason, and though both men had managed to evade arrest and imprisonment by fleeing the country, Parliament had gone ahead and impeached them in their absence, stripped them of their rights and status, left them both as marked and wanted men.

I had his portrait on the monitor when Susan came back.

‘Who is that?’ she asked.

‘James Butler, second Duke of Ormonde.’ A man I’d never heard of until yesterday. A man who was as real as the red dressing gown. And how could I have even known his name, I wondered, if I hadn’t traveled to the past?

‘And who is he?’ asked Susan.

I gave her a summary of his biography, adding, ‘He played a big part in the Jacobite uprisings down here in Cornwall. Maybe I’ll find he’s connected somehow to Trelowarth. You never know.’

She frowned. ‘I thought the Jacobites were Scottish.’

‘So did I. But there were lots of them in England too, apparently.’

She leaned closer, studying the picture. ‘Nice wig.’

‘Yes, well, most men wore them back then.’ I knew one man who didn’t, or at least he hadn’t worn one either time that I had met him, but I couldn’t say that either. Instead I looked more closely at the portrait, searching for some small resemblance to the man in brown who’d said, about the duke, that he was ‘bound to him by blood’. If they were relatives, that blood appeared to be the only thing they shared. The Duke of Ormonde’s face was soft and overfed, his nose too long and large, his gaze too proud and condescending.

‘What year were the uprisings?’ asked Susan.

‘1715.’

‘Before the Halletts came here, then. Well, as you say, you never know. It would be fun to have some kind of tale to tell to tourists, and a Jacobite rebellion’s always good.’

Not for the Jacobites, I thought. Things never had gone very well for them. At least the Irishman named Fergal had appeared to sense that it was not a fight worth fighting, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d ever managed to convince the man in brown. Perhaps I’d never know.

I pushed the thought aside and settled in to work with Susan on the press release, a thing I’d done a hundred times before with other clients, so the process was predictable and calming. Susan had some good ideas.

‘We should use the word “romance”,’ she said, ‘and “lost”, because they paint a sort of picture, don’t they? And I think what makes Trelowarth interesting is that we have so many roses here that might otherwise have vanished, been forgotten. It makes Trelowarth like a…’ Pausing as though searching for the proper phrase, she finished, ‘Well, it’s like a time machine. One step into the gardens takes you back a hundred years.’ Her face grew bright. ‘That might make a brilliant heading, don’t you think? “Step back in time—come visit the old roses of Trelowarth”.’

I kept my fingers steady on the keyboard as I typed. ‘Yes, that’s quite good.’

Step back in time. Step back in time
. The words kept playing over in my mind and stayed there even after Susan had gone off again to see to something over at the greenhouse.
Back in time
…

My fingers hesitated on the keyboard. Then I opened a new window for a search and typed in: ‘Time Travel’.

I didn’t know what I’d expected. Strange stuff, I supposed. A lot of people writing, ‘Hi, my name is Zog, I’m from the future.’ But that wasn’t what I found. Instead I found page after page of true science, with actual physicists—some of them famous—discussing the concept as though it were wholly respectable, even conducting experiments at universities.

Much of their dialogue, arguing theories and drawing those squiggly equations that filled half a page, was beyond me. They talked about space-time and wormholes and String Theory, extra dimensions and closed time-like curves. But not one of them said that it couldn’t be done. Even the great Stephen Hawking was quoted as saying, in one of his lectures, that ‘according to our present understanding’ of the laws of physics, travel back in time was not impossible.

It all had to do, so I gathered, with Einstein’s Theory of Relativity having proved that time and space were curved and changeable, not fixed and absolute as Isaac Newton had maintained.

There was a portrait of Sir Isaac Newton in his old age, painted sometime, it said, around 1710. He had a pleasant sort of face, but it was not his face I noticed, not his face that made me shrug away the shivers that chased lightly down my spine.

It was the simple fact that he was wearing the exact same style of dressing gown that hung now in my wardrobe. And the sight of it convinced me, even more than Stephen Hawking’s words, that all the reading I had done on mental health and all my plans to see a doctor had been nothing but a wasted effort. Though it seemed incredible, I
had
gone back in time.

And that wasn’t something a doctor could cure.

***

There were voices in the next room.

My eyes opened to the darkness with a wary sensibility and waited to adjust to the faint moonlight from outside my bedroom windows. The house had always had a lonely feel this late at night, and as a child I’d hated waking up this way, surrounded by the shadows, but tonight I only felt relieved to see that everything was in its proper place—the beds, the chair, the wardrobe. I was where I was supposed to be.

Three days had gone by since I’d traveled back into the past, and in the meantime things had been so normal I might easily have slipped back into thinking I’d imagined what had happened, if there hadn’t been the dressing gown as evidence.

The voices went on talking, low and quiet, from the far side of the wall behind my head. The man in brown’s voice was familiar to me now, at least in tone, and I presumed the other speaker was the Irishman. His voice was the more animated one that rose and fell as though in argument, while through it all the other answered back with level calm.

I wasn’t feeling calm, myself. I knew I’d heard the voices on their own before, when nothing else had happened, but a lot had changed since then, and now the sound of them unnerved me, made me want to put a bit of space between us. Just in case.

Forcing myself into action, I got up and went to the bathroom.

There was darkness in the corridor as well, but I had walked this route enough by night to do it with a blindfold. By the light above the mirror in the bathroom I examined my face with a frown. ‘You’re a coward, you know.’ Which was true. But I still took my time, and I waited a good fifteen minutes before going back.

The bedroom was quiet. No more voices.

Just the whisper of the night breeze through the partly opened windows. And the sound of someone breathing from the bed.

My heart began to pound so heavily it held me to the place where I was standing just inside the door. I couldn’t move.

It wasn’t my bed anymore. The moonlight fell on posts and curtains and the figure of a man who lay stretched out full length on top of the blankets, his hands behind his head, still clothed in breeches and the white shirt I had seen him in before. There was light enough for me to recognize the angles of his profile. I could hear him breathing evenly, asleep.

Or so I thought.

Until his voice spoke from the shadows.

‘I do confess I have forgot your name.’

He’d spoken quietly, and mindful of the fact there might be other people sleeping in the house, I answered just as low. ‘You never asked it.’

His head turned till he was looking right at me, though nothing else about him moved. The moonlight gleamed behind him but I couldn’t see his eyes or his expression. ‘Do you have one?’

Did I have a name? I couldn’t quite remember. ‘Eva.’

‘Eva. Is that all?’

‘My name is Eva Ellen Ward.’

‘A good name.’ In the dark he looked at me a moment longer. ‘I did fear that you had come to harm since last I saw you, Eva Ward.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘So I do see. And glad I am to see it, for your welfare has weighed heavy on my conscience.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because I did not think to warn you not to leave the house,’ he said. ‘This countryside would offer little safety to a woman, and the roads around should not be lightly traveled.’

‘I wasn’t on the roads.’

‘No?’

‘No. And I didn’t go outside the house.’

‘So where then…? Ah,’ he told me. ‘You went back.’

‘Yes.’ I considered how to tackle this. The last time he had seen me I’d been claiming that he wasn’t real and telling him to go away. He probably already thought I was crazy. But I wanted to know. ‘Am I right in thinking I’ve just traveled back in time?’