The first thing Elowyn noticed about the garden was that it had forgotten how to die.
Bramble and ivy swallowed the stone balustrade in thick green tongues. Somewhere beneath the decay, marble cherubs leaned at broken angles, their cherubic faces streaked with lichen the color of old bone. Crickets sawed their endless hymn against the dusk. The air carried the green-rot sweetness of things returning to soil, and beneath it, faintly, the iron-rich memory of rain from three days past.
Caelum stopped at the rusted gate and pressed his shoulder against it. The hinges screamed their objections into the quiet. He did not look back at her. He simply waited until she had stepped through, then followed, leaving the gate ajar behind them, a mouth frozen mid-word.
"You haven't been here," Elowyn said. Not a question.
"No."
The single syllable fell between them, a stone dropped into still water. Caelum moved ahead of her down the weed-choked path, and she watched the way his hand rested on the pommel of his sword, not gripping, never quite gripping, as though the weapon were an extension of a thought he kept trying to dismiss. His shoulders were too broad for the coat he wore. The coat had once been finer than this. She had not asked him about that, either. There were so many things she had not asked him.
The path forked. To the left, a wooden arbor sagged beneath the weight of some ancient climbing rose, its canes braided so tightly they had begun to fuse into woody ropes. To the right, the path widened into what must once have been a clearing, ringed by hedgerows grown tall as a man's head and twice as thick. Between the hedgerows, she glimpsed the dark geometry of something she had only heard described in her grandmother's letters, read aloud by her mother in a voice that always softened at the edges.
"Aye," he said, as though he had heard her think it. "The labyrinth."
"You knew it was here."
"Your father mentioned it once. In his cups." Caelum's voice had that low northern roughness she had grown accustomed to in three weeks of travel, the consonants softened by moorland, the vowels drawn long as winter twilights. "He said his mother built it for his father, when they were first married. Said she planted every hedge herself."
Elowyn's throat tightened. Her grandmother. A woman she had never met, whose letters she had only discovered after the funeral that was never held, sealed in a cedar box with a lock her father's housekeeper finally broke with a kitchen knife. The letters smelled of rosewater and something faintly bitter, like the aftertaste of medicine.
"Show me," she said.
Caelum hesitated. It was the only hesitation she had ever seen from him, in all their days on the road. He did not turn. His hand rose instead of his jaw, his thumb pressing briefly against the hinge of it, then dropping.
"It's not what you expect."
"Show me anyway."
A long breath left him. He stepped into the hedge.
The labyrinth's mouth was narrow. Elowyn had to turn her body sideways to slip between the hawthorn branches, and they caught at the wool of her traveling cloak, snagged threads she would mourn later when there was time for mourning. The green closed around her. Sound shifted, the open garden's crickets fading into a muffled hush, replaced by the papery rustle of dry leaves skittering along gravel that crunched softly beneath her boots.
Caelum's silhouette moved ahead. She followed by the sound of him, by the creak of his belt, by the faint metallic whisper of his coat's threadbare lining. The path curved. Curved again. Twice she thought she glimpsed the garden beyond through gaps in the hedge, glimpses of golden dusk and crumbling statuary, but the path bent inward each time, drawing her deeper into the green.
"This way," he said, and his voice came from somewhere unexpected, somewhere to her right, though she had been following the sound of him straight ahead.
"How do you know?"
"The gravel pattern. Whoever built this, they set stones at every turning. Different colors. A guide for someone who couldn't see."
Elowyn stopped. Her boot hovered above a stone darker than the rest, almost the color of dried blood. Beyond it, the path opened suddenly, and the hedge drew back, and she stood at the heart of the labyrinth.
The oldest rosebush grew there. It could not have grown anywhere else, so vast were its canes, so deeply did its roots seem to grip the bones of the world. It had climbed the inner wall in some places, woven itself through gaps in the hedgerow, formed arches and curtains of itself. The blooms were the deep, complicated red of old wine held up to firelight, and there were so many of them that the air beneath the bush seemed almost bruised with their scent. Petals littered the ground. They had collected in the hollows, drifted against stones, stuck to the damp earth like fallen letters.
Caelum had stopped at the bush's edge. He was looking at the ground beneath it.
"Caelum."
"Aye." His voice had dropped lower. "I see it."
She moved toward him, and the rose canes parted for her with a dry whisper, their thorns catching at her sleeve, her hem, the loose braid down her back. The scent thickened as she drew closer. It was not the clean scent of bouquets or the sharp scent of single blossoms pressed in books. It was the scent of something older, something that had been growing long before any of them were born and would go on growing long after. Beneath the sweetness, there was musk, and beneath the musk, something almost human. Like skin warmed by sun.
The stone was small. Smaller than she had imagined. Plain granite, unworked, its face rough with lichen, set flush with the earth. No name. No dates. Only a faint, almost imperceptible depression at its center, as though something had once rested there and been removed, or as though time itself had pressed its thumb into the stone and left the print.
Elowyn knelt. The damp of the earth soaked through her skirt at once, cold against her knees. Her hands found the stone's edges. They were warm. Warmer than they should have been. The stone had been holding the last of the day's sun, and she felt it leach into her palms, the bones of her wrists, the soft vulnerable hollow at the base of her throat.
"My father," she said, "never told me she was buried here."
Caelum was silent for a moment. Then he crouched beside her, his knee settling into the damp earth with a faint squelch that made her aware, suddenly and absurdly, of the smallness of the grave. Of how shallow it must be. Of how close she was to all of them, all this time, while her son drank himself toward the grave he had just met.
"He didn't tell me, either." Caelum's voice came from somewhere low in his chest. "I only knew because I saw the ledgers. Your father's estate payments to a stonemason in the village. Twice a year. For nineteen years. I thought, at first, it was for the house."
Elowyn traced the depression in the granite with her fingertip. It was exactly the width of her thumb, worn smooth. She thought of all the times her grandmother might have touched this same spot. Or her grandfather. Or no one at all, and the depression was simply the work of weather and time, a kindness she was inventing for herself.
"The roses," she said.
"They were already here when I came. They were already old. When the house was built, they say the bush was already here. The masons had to work around it." A pause. "Your grandmother asked for that. In her will. That the bush not be cut."
"She wrote about it." The words came without thought, out of some reservoir she had not known was waiting. "She wrote that the bush had been her mother's, and her mother's mother, and that she had been given it as a girl, a cutting from the original, and carried it with her when she married. She wrote that the bush had been alive longer than anyone could remember and would go on being alive, and that when she was gone, she wished to be near it. She wrote that the bush would remember her even if no one else did."
Caelum said nothing. His hand, she noticed, had come to rest on his thigh, very close to hers, not touching but near enough that she could feel the warmth of his skin across the half-inch of air between them.
"I should have come sooner," Elowyn said.
"You came."
"I should have come years ago. Before my father. Before my mother. I should have come when the letters first arrived, when I was nineteen, when I was twenty, when I was twenty-three and read the one where she begged me to come home."
"You couldn't."
"I could have. I chose not to."
"There are reasons."
"There are always reasons." Her voice came out sharper than she intended. The rosebush shifted in a breath of wind that had found its way down through the hedge walls, and a drift of petals fell across the stone, across her hand, catching in the small of her palm where they stuck damply to her skin. "I told myself I was waiting until my father asked. Until he sent for me. Until I was summoned properly, like a proper daughter, to a proper homecoming. I told myself that until I believed it, and then I used it as an excuse to stay away."
Caelum's hand moved. His fingers brushed a petal from the stone's surface, an unhurried gesture, the kind a person might use to clear a place setting before sitting down to a meal.
"And yet you are here now," he said.
"Yes."
"And your grandmother is here."
"Yes."
"And you found her."
The words landed somewhere deep. Elowyn looked at the rosebush, at the way its oldest canes had grown into one another and become indistinguishable, a single organism with a thousand hearts. She thought of all the years she had not been here. All the years the bush had been here, blooming, dropping its petals, growing another inch, sending down another root, without anyone to notice or care or kneel in the damp beside it and press a palm against the warm earth above where her grandmother's bones had settled.
She thought of her father in his study at Thornfield, the windows shuttered, the air thick with the smell of brandy and old regrets. She had seen him three days before she left. He had been thinner than she remembered, his collarbones sharp beneath his shirt, his eyes unfocused in a way that made her think of fog over moorland. He had not stood when she entered. He had not stood when she left. He had said only one thing to her, and it was not what she had hoped for, not what she had prepared herself for across all those careful years of rehearsing what she would say if he ever opened his mouth.
He had said, "The stonemason in the village. He will have a key."
She had thought, for a wild moment, that he was talking about the house. About the garden gate. About some small practical matter of entry and egress that could be settled with a tradesman and a brass key. Then she had understood, and the understanding had moved through her slowly, like cold water filling a boot.
"What did he tell you?" Elowyn asked now, without looking at Caelum. "When you came to negotiate with him. What did my father say to you, about her?"
Caelum was quiet for long enough that she thought he might not answer. A bee, drowsy with the day's last light, blundered into a bloom near her shoulder and emerged dusted gold, then rose and vanished into the hedge's small sky.
"He said," Caelum said, and then stopped, and began again. "He said he had failed her in every way a son can fail a mother, and that he could not ask forgiveness because he did not deserve it, and that if I brought you here, I should not let you kneel in the wet, because you had a tendency, when you were a girl, to catch chill, and he had never forgiven himself for the time you fell into the millstream and he had not been paying attention."
Elowyn closed her eyes. The petal in her palm had gone cold against her skin. She felt the damp of the earth soak further through her skirt. She felt the warmth of Caelum beside her, the careful nearness of him. She felt, beneath the rose-scent and the green-rot of the garden and the small mineral smell of the stone, the first true weight of the thing she had come here to do.
She opened her eyes. Caelum had drawn back slightly, giving her room, and in the half-light his face had lost some of its usual guarded cast and looked, for a moment, almost boyish. Almost sorry.
"Tell me about him," she said. "Tell me what you saw, when you came to Thornfield. Tell me what he was like, in those last days."
Caelum's hand, resting on his thigh, curled briefly into a fist, then opened again.
"He was a man," he said, "who had been waiting a long time for something, and could no longer remember what."
Elowyn looked down at the unmarked stone. The petals on its surface. The depression worn into its center by no one and everyone and the slow patient work of years.
"I am going to stay here," she said, "for a little while."
"I'll wait outside the hedge."
"You can stay."
A pause. Then Caelum settled back on his heels, his cloak spreading in the damp grass, and nodded once.
They stayed. The dusk deepened. The first stars pricked through the gap in the hedge overhead. Somewhere beyond the labyrinth, an owl called, low and questioning, and received no answer from the garden's overgrown ruins. The petals continued to fall, one by one, at the unhurried pace of all true things.
Later, when the stars had thickened overhead and the air had grown sharp with the first true bite of autumn, Elowyn rose. The cold had settled into her joints and her fingertips, and her skirt was blackened with dew at the hem. Caelum rose too, a half-second behind her, and they did not speak as they picked their way back through the labyrinth, past the ruined fountain with its upturned stone face, past the borders of boxwood gone wild and self-sown. The hedge gave them back to the open night. The house waited beyond it, dark and patient, its many windows holding the last of the starlight in their glass like water.
Caelum walked her to the side door. His hand, at the small of her back, was brief and impersonal, the gesture of a man who had been taught to guide a lady through a doorway and could not quite bring himself to unlearn it. Inside, the corridor smelled of lamp oil and the faint sweet rot of a house that had been closed too long. The solicitor's candle had gone out. There was no sound from anywhere in Thornfield except the slow ticking of the long clock in the front hall, counting out the hours as if they were still worth counting.
"Lock your door," Caelum said, when she turned to him at the foot of the stairs.
"I always do."
"Good."
A pause. He had not moved from where he stood, one hand on the newel post, his face half in shadow. The lamplight from somewhere down the hall touched only the line of his jaw and the glint of one eye.
"Ma'am," he said, and then stopped, as if the word had caught in his throat. "Elowyn."
"Yes."
"I should have told you. About the boy. Before you saw the stone."
She considered him. The corridor smelled of dust and something older, the faint ghost of lavender that must once have been kept in sachets in the linen presses and had long since faded to memory.
"Yes," she said. "You should have."
"It is not a thing I knew how to say."
"I know."
He nodded once, as if that closed something between them. "Get some sleep. We will see to the house in the morning."
She climbed the stairs. At the landing she looked back, but the hall below was empty. He had moved like smoke through the house, the way he did everything, without sound. She heard, a moment later, the distant soft thud of the kitchen door, and knew he had gone out into the garden again to make his rounds. The man did not seem to sleep. Or perhaps he did not dare.
Her room was cold. She built up the fire in the small grate, though the chimney drew poorly and the smoke stung her eyes. She undressed in the flickering light, folding her travel-stained clothes over the back of a chair, and washed her face and hands in the basin on the washstand. The water was so cold it numbed her fingers. She climbed into the high bed in her shift, pulled the coverlet up to her chin, and lay for a long time watching the fire die.
The diary, she thought. Where would he have kept it.
Not in his dressing room. Not in the desk in his study, where Mr. Hadley had already gone through the papers with the brisk efficiency of a man cataloguing a small bankruptcy. Not in any of the obvious places. Her father had not been a man for obvious places. He had been a man for hiding things in plain sight, as if daring the world to find them.
She slept, in the end, because the cold and the road and the day together were heavier than her vigilance. She dreamed of roses, and of a stone worn hollow by a hand that had not been hers, and of a man she did not know the face of standing in a doorway she could not quite reach.
She woke late. The fire had gone to ash. The room was full of the grey, even light of a northern morning that did not mean to clear. Somewhere below her, she could hear the low murmur of voices, and once, the clink of a pail against stone.
She dressed quickly, in the same clothes, for want of any others. Her hair she pulled back and pinned with two of her own hairpins, the silver ones her mother had given her before the long parting that had become, in the end, a silence. She looked at herself, briefly, in the spotted glass over the washstand, and did not linger on what she saw. The face that looked back at her was her mother's face, and she did not care to examine it too closely.
Downstairs, she found Caelum in the kitchen with Mrs. Dorn, the gaunt housekeeper whom Mr. Hadley had somehow summoned from her retirement in the village. Mrs. Dorn moved through the cold kitchen as if she had never left it, her face closed against both of them, and she set out bread and a hard cheese and a pot of tea without comment. Caelum sat at the long table with his cap in his hand, looking, in the pale light from the window, as if he had not slept either. Perhaps he had not. There was a smudge of soot on his cuff, and his knuckles were scraped across the back as if he had been doing something with the range.
"Chimney in the back parlour wants relining," he said, by way of greeting. "I have not touched the range itself. I do not presume."
"You presume very little, Mr. Vance."
"Have to. It is one of my better qualities."
Mrs. Dorn set the pot down between them with a small unnecessary clatter. She did not look at either of them. Elowyn poured for the three of them, and they sat, in the cold, bright room, and drank their tea, and did not speak of the night before.
After a while, Elowyn set down her cup.
"I want to go into the library," she said.
Caelum looked at her over the rim of his own cup. His eyes, in the grey light, were the colour of shallow water over stone.
"Now?"
"After breakfast. Yes."
"It will be cold in there. Has not been lit in months. Perhaps longer."
"I know."
He nodded. He did not ask her why. Perhaps he understood that to ask would be to be told, and that what she wanted was not to be told, but simply to be allowed to do the thing she had come to do.
She left him with Mrs. Dorn and went, alone, through the front hall and up the broad, shallow stair to the gallery that ran the length of the house. The portraits were all in their places along the wall, though three of them had been taken down and leaned, face inward, against the skirting. The gilt frames she passed without stopping to look at. She did not want, this morning, to look at the dead.
The library was at the end of the gallery. Its double doors were closed. When she put her hand to the nearer one, it swung open on its hinges with the reluctant creak of old wood that had not been oiled in too long. The smell that came out was the smell of a closed book, and of dust, and of mouse, and of paper going slowly brown at the edges in the absence of any hand to turn it.
She stepped inside. The morning light came in through the tall windows in pale slabs, lying across the carpet, which had once been good and was now worn down to the warp in the paths between the chairs and the desk. The shelves went up to the ceiling. There was a rolling ladder on its brass rail, askew, as if someone had stepped off it mid-reach and never stepped back. There was a fireplace, and a desk at the near window, and a leather chair behind the desk that was not, she noticed, quite pushed in. Her father's chair. She did not sit in it. She went past it to the shelves and began.
She did not know, exactly, what she was looking for. A book with a hollow cut in it, perhaps, as one had heard of. A volume too thick for its covers. A place on a shelf where the dust had been disturbed, and then laid down again, by a man who knew how to lay dust down again. She began at the near corner of the room and worked her way along, shelf by shelf, taking down the volumes that seemed most likely and setting them on the carpet in careful piles. She was methodical about it. She had been methodical about everything since she was seven years old and her mother's last letter had not come, and her aunt had sat her down in the cold parlour in Antwerp and explained, in the careful tones one uses for the dying, that she was not to expect any more letters from England.
She worked through the morning. The light moved across the carpet and then off it. Mrs. Dorn brought her, at eleven, a cup of broth and a heel of bread, which she left on the desk. The broth grew cold. She did not notice. Her fingers grew dusty and her back ached from bending, and once she sat back on her heels and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until she saw sparks.
She was near the end of the third shelf from the floor when she found it.
It was a volume of sermons, a thick octavo in a calf binding that had once been handsome and was now scuffed at the corners and along the spine. It had no title on it, and when she opened it the pages were blank, but the front board was heavier than it should have been, and when she ran her thumb along the inside edge of the back board she felt, with a small shock of recognition, the thin cold line of a blade's work.
She carried it to the desk. She did not sit in the chair. She sat on the floor beside it, with her back against the desk's apron, and laid the volume flat on the carpet and worked the back board free with the small knife she kept in the pocket of her skirt for parcels and string. The board came away. Inside, fitted neatly into the hollow that had been cut for it, lay a bundle of paper, sewn through with a thin blue ribbon, and beside the bundle a single pressed rose, so old it was the colour of dark tea, and so dry it crumbled at the edge when her finger brushed it.
She undid the ribbon. The papers inside were thin and yellowed and covered in a handwriting she knew at once, though she had not seen it in twenty years. Her mother's handwriting. The round, slightly forward-slanting hand of a woman who had been taught to write by governesses and had never quite unlearned the discipline, and who had set down her words with the even care of one who meant them to be read.
The first page was dated. Thornfield, the 17th of September, in the year of our Lord's mercy 1814. The day after Elowyn had left England, at the age of seven, in the care of her aunt, on the packet from Dover. Her mother had begun the diary the day after she had lost her only child, and she had hidden it in a hollowed book, as if she could not bear to have it seen but could not bear, either, to have it lost.
Elowyn smoothed the page flat against her knee. Her hands were steady. Her face she could not have said.
She read.
She read.
The first entry was short. Her mother had written it in the kind of plain, careful sentences that sound as if they are being read aloud to a child, or to a God one is not entirely sure is listening. My daughter left this morning with her aunt. I did not say goodbye at the door. I could not. I stood at the window of the breakfast room and watched the carriage until it was out of sight, and then I sat down and drank a cup of tea that had gone cold, and I did not know what to do with my hands. I have been a mother for seven years. Now I am only a woman in a house that is too quiet. I do not know how to be a woman in a house that is too quiet. I do not think I was ever taught.
Elowyn turned the page. The next entry was a week later, and it was longer, and the hand was less even, the words pressed harder into the paper as if she had been leaning on the pen. I walked in the rose garden today. I have not been in the rose garden since the spring. I had forgotten how much I loved it. I think I had been avoiding it, because it was where I used to take E. when she was small, and she used to make me pick the dead heads off the roses and put them in a little pile, and she called the pile the bonspiel of the roses, which was a word she had heard somewhere and did not understand, and I did not correct her. I do not think I will ever correct her again. I walked the length of the allée and back, and I cut a single bloom from the Souvenir de la Malmaison by the sundial, and I put it in a vase on my dressing table, and I sat and looked at it for an hour. It is a very pink rose. It smells of nothing much. I do not know why I cut it.
Elowyn's vision blurred. She blinked, and the room came back. She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, which left a faint damp streak across her cheekbone, and she turned another page.
The diary went on, day after day, for months. Her mother wrote about the weather. She wrote about the cook, who had a cough that would not mend. She wrote about the gardener, who was getting too old to lift the barrow. She wrote about the new curate, who had called and been invited to tea and had talked about nothing but the state of the roads. She wrote about the post, which came at half past nine every morning unless it rained, and which brought nothing now from her daughter, because her daughter was seven and in France and had not yet learned to write a letter that was not a drawing of a cat.
And then, in the entry for the 12th of November, the tone changed.
I have been in the garden again. I think I am in the garden most days now. The roses are going to sleep for the winter. I have been cutting back the new wood on the rugosas along the south wall, and I have been thinking about the old story that my mother told me, that if you bury a thing that you have lost at the root of a rose, the rose will keep it safe for you until the person who lost it comes to look for it. I know it is nonsense. I know that roses do not keep things. I know that what is buried is only in the ground. But I have been thinking about it all the same. There is a thing I have lost. There is a thing I have not been able to speak of, not to H., not to anyone, not even in this book, which I have promised myself I will be honest in. I have been thinking about it all the same. I have been thinking about it every day.
Elowyn stopped breathing. She read the next line.
The thing is in the garden. It has been in the garden for nine years. I have not looked at it in nine years. I have not let myself look at it. I have been walking past the place where it is, every day, twice a day, and I have not looked down. I think, perhaps, I have been waiting for E. to come home. I think, perhaps, I have been waiting for her to come home and ask me about it. I think, perhaps, I have been waiting for her to come home and ask me about it because I could not bear to tell her of it in a letter. I do not know if I will ever tell her. I do not know if I will ever see her again.
Elowyn turned the page. The next entry was three days later. I went to the garden at dusk. I took the spade from the she'd. I did not dig. I stood with the spade in my hand for a long time, and then I put it back. I am not ready. I am not ready. I am not ready.
The next entry was a week after that. I am still not ready.
The next was a month. I have been unwell. H. says it is nothing. I think it is the waiting. I think I am wearing myself out with the waiting. I think I will go mad if I do not tell someone, and I cannot tell H., because H. would not understand, and I cannot tell the curate, and I cannot tell my sister, and so I have been thinking about the man in the village. The man who came down from the north last spring and took a cottage on the Green and who is, I think, not quite what he seems. He has a way of looking at a person that makes one feel as if one has been read. I have seen him in the churchyard on Sundays, and once I saw him on the lane that runs along the bottom of the garden, and he stopped and looked at the roses for a long time, and then he went on. I do not know what he was looking at. I do not know why I have been thinking about him. I have been thinking about him all the same.
Elowyn sat very still. The light in the study was changing. The candle had burned down to the socket, and the wick was beginning to smoke. She did not get up to snuff it. She read the next entry.
He is called Caelum Vance. I have made it my business to find out. He is a captain of men, I am told, though what men, and what captaincy, no one in the village can quite say. He has a scar on his left hand, and he speaks like a man from the north, and he has been lodging at the inn for three months now, and he has not been in any hurry to be gone. I think he is waiting for something. I think, perhaps, he is waiting for me. I do not know how I know this. I do not know why I have written it down.
Elowyn turned the page. The next entry was dated a week later.
He came to the door this afternoon. He had a letter in his hand. He said he was a friend of a friend, and that he had heard I had a piece of work that needed doing, and that he was the man to do it. I let him in. I do not know why I let him in. I think I let him in because I am tired of carrying the thing alone, and because he had a look in his eye that I recognised, the look of a person who has been trusted with a secret and has not yet broken it. We sat in the morning room, and I told him. I told him everything. I told him about the day E. was born, and about the day her father told me what he had done, and about the day I put the thing in the ground. I told him I could not leave it there. I told him I could not bear to dig it up. I told him I would pay him what I had, and that it was not much, and that I was sorry, and that I would understand if he walked out of the door and never came back.
He did not walk out of the door. He said, in that quiet voice of his, that he would stay. He said he would see the roses through the winter, and the spring, and the summer, and the next winter, and as many winters after that as were needed, until E. came home. He said he would not dig. He said he would not touch the place. He said he would wait. He said that was what he was for.
I think I have been saved, and I do not know how to bear it.
Elowyn closed the book. She sat with it flat on her knees, and she pressed her hands flat on the cover, and she looked at the candle for a long time. The wick guttered. The smoke rose in a thin line and dissolved against the ceiling. The house was very quiet. She could hear, very faintly, the sound of a man moving in the kitchen below, and the clatter of a pan, and the low, tuneless sound of someone humming a song she did not know.
She got to her feet. She tucked the diary under her arm. She left the study without looking back, and she went down the stairs, slowly, and she crossed the hall, and she went into the kitchen, where Caelum was standing at the table with his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pan of something that smelled of onions and bacon.
He looked up. He saw the book. He did not ask what it was. He set the pan down. He wiped his hands on the cloth that hung from the dresser, and he stood very still, and he waited.
She held out the book. "She wrote about you."
He took it from her. He did not open it. He held it in both hands, as if it were something that could be broken, and he looked at her, and she saw, in the low lamplight, the same look she had seen on his face in the lane, when he had looked at the white rose and then at her. The look of a man who has been trusted with a secret and has not yet broken it.
"I know," he said, quietly. "She read me some of it, that winter. She read me the part about the thing in the garden. She said she wanted me to know, in case anything happened to her before E. came home. She said she wanted me to be able to tell E., if E. ever came, and if E. ever asked."
"Did you know she was dying?"
"I knew she was unwell. I did not know she was dying. I think she knew. I think she knew, and she did not tell me, because she did not want me to try to stop her from doing what she had set herself to do."
"Which was?"
He was silent for a long time. The bacon sizzled in the pan. The lamp on the dresser threw their shadows, long and wavering, against the far wall.
"She set herself to wait," he said, at last. "She set herself to wait for you. And when she saw she could not wait, she set herself, instead, to make sure the garden would be here for you to come home to. She made me promise, on her last night, that I would not leave until you came. She made me promise that I would tell you, when you came, that she had not been alone. She said she could not bear the thought of you thinking she had been alone."
Elowyn set her hand on the edge of the table. Her fingers were very white. "Why did you stay, when she was gone? You had no money. You had no reason. You had only the word of a dying woman, and a cottage on the Green, and a garden full of roses that were not yours."
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he set the book down on the table, very carefully, and he turned to the pan, and he turned off the heat, and he stood with his back to her, and his shoulders were very straight, and his voice, when it came, was rough at the edges, as if it had been dragged over gravel.
"I stayed," he said, "because I had promised. And I stayed because the roses needed seeing to, and there was no one else to see to them. And I stayed because I had nowhere else to be. I had been a captain of men for ten years, and I had buried every one of them, and there had not been a place on earth that had wanted me for anything but the use of my sword arm. And your mother had wanted me for the use of my hands. She had wanted me to dig, and to prune, and to stand in a garden in the rain, and to be patient. She had wanted me to be of use, and not to be of harm. She had wanted me to be a man in a garden, and not a man with a sword. And I had not known, until she asked it of me, how much I had wanted to be asked."