The Rose Garden Read Free

the taxis that each summer ferried tourists to and from the trains. Mark’s van, as compact as it was, could barely squeeze between the buildings.
    Polgelly had once been a fishing port of some renown, but with the tourist influx into Cornwall it had changed its face from practical to picturesque, an artist’s haven full of shops that sold antiques and Celtic crafts, and bed & breakfast cottages with names like ‘Smuggler’s Rest’. The old shop near the harbor where we’d always bought our fish and chips still looked the same, as did the little fudge shop on the corner. And The Hill, of course, remained the same as ever.
    From the first time I’d walked up it I had thought of it like that— The Hill, for surely there could be no other hill on earth that could with more perfection test the limits of endurance. It was not its height alone, nor just the angle of its slope, though both were challenging. It was that, once you started up it, there seemed not to be an end to it—the road kept rising steadily through overhanging trees on stone and earthen banks, a punishing ascent that made the muscles of your thighs begin to burn and left them shaking for some minutes when you’d finally reached the top.
    Yet being children, and not knowing any better, we’d gone down it every day to play with Mark’s and Susan’s school friends in Polgelly, and to sit along the harbor wall to watch the fishermen at work, and in the cheerfully forgetful way that children have, we’d pushed aside all thoughts about The Hill until the time came round again for us to climb it. Mark had actually carried me the final few steps, once, which was no doubt why I’d developed such a crush on him.
    This time, we had the van, but even it seemed to approach The Hill with something like reluctance, and I could have sworn I heard the engine wheezing as we climbed.
    From either side the trees, still bright with new spring green, closed overtop of us and cast a dancing play of light and shadow on the windscreen, and I caught the swift familiar blur of periwinkle tangled with the darker green of ivy winding up along the verge. And then I looked ahead, expectantly, as I had always done, for my first glimpse of the brick chimneys of Trelowarth House.
    The chimneys were the first things to be seen, between the trees and the steep bank of green that ran along the road—a Cornish hedge, they called it, built of stones stacked dry in the old fashion, herringbone, with vines and varied wildflowers binding them together and the trees arched close above. Then came a break in both the trees and hedge, and there, framed as impressively as ever by the view of rising fields and distant forests, was the house.
    Trelowarth House had weathered centuries upon this hill, its solid grey stone walls an equal match to any storm the sea might throw at it. For all its size it had been plainly built, a two-storey ‘L’ set with its front squarely facing the line of the cliffs and the sea, while its longer side ran fairly close beside the road. In what might be viewed as a testament to the skills of its original builders, none of its long line of owners appeared to have felt the need to do a major renovation. The chimneys, dutifully repointed, were in the original style, and a few of the casement windows still had the odd pane of Elizabethan glass, through which the people who had lived here then might well have watched the sails of the Armada pass. The house itself did not encourage such romantic fancies. It looked stern and grey, unyielding, and the only softness to it was the stubborn vine of roses that had wound their way around and over the stone frame of the front door and waited there to bloom, as they had done in all the summers of my childhood.
    Three-quarters of the way up The Hill, Mark took the sharp left turn into the graveled drive that angled right again along the fifty feet or so of turf that separated house and road. The garages themselves were in the back,