Free This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart Page A

and below it there were roses. Somewhere to one side was a thicket of purple judas-trees, and apple blossom glinting with the wings of working bees. Arum lilies grew in a damp corner, and some other lily with petals like gold parchment, transparent in the light. And everywhere, roses. Great bushes of them rampaged up the trees; a blue spruce was half smothered with sprays of vivid Persian pink, and one dense bush of frilled white roses must have been ten feet high. There were moss roses, musk roses, damask roses, roses pied and streaked, and one old pink rose straight from a mediæval manuscript, hemispherical, as if a knife had sliced it across, its hundred petals as tightly whorled and packed as the layers of an onion. There must have been twenty or thirty varieties there, all in full bloom; old roses, planted years ago and left to runwild, as if in some secret garden whose key is lost. The place seemed hardly real.
    I must have stood stock still for some minutes, looking about me, dizzied with the scent and the sunlight. I had forgotten roses could smell like that. A spray of speckled carmine brushed my hand, and I broke it off and held it to my face. Deep among the leaves, in the gap I had made, I saw the edge of an old metal label, and reached gingerly for it among the thorns. It was thick with lichen, but the stamped name showed clearly: Belle de Crécy.
    I knew where I was now. Roses: they had been another hobby of Leo’s grandfather’s. Phyl had some of his books up at the Villa, and I had turned them over idly the other night, enjoying the plates and the old names which evoked, like poetry, the old gardens of France, of Persia, of Provence … Belle de Crécy, Belle Isis, Deuil du Roi de Rome, Rosamunde, Camäieux, Ispahan …
    The names were all there, hidden deep in the rampant leaves where some predecessor of Adoni’s had lovingly attached them a century ago. The white cat, posing in front of an elegant background of dark fern, watched benevolently as I hunted for them, my hands filling with plundered roses. The scent was heavy as a drug. The air zoomed with bees. The general effect was of having strayed out of the dark wood into some fairy-tale. One almost expected the cat to speak.
    When the voice did come, suddenly, from somewhere above, it nearly startled me out of my wits. It was a beautiful voice, and it enhanced, rather than broke,the spell. It spoke, moreover, in poetry, as deliberately elegant as the white cat:
    ‘
Most sure, the goddess
On whom these airs attend: vouchsafe my prayer
May know if you remain upon his Island?
’
    I peered upwards, at first seeing no one. Then a man’s head appeared at the top of the wistaria – and only then did I realise that the curtain of blossom hung in fact down some kind of high retaining wall, which it had hidden. I saw, between the thick trusses of flowers, sections of the stone balustrading. The terrace of the Castello. The rose garden had been planted right up beside it.
    I wanted to turn and run, but the voice held me. Needless to say it was not Max Gale’s; this was a voice I had heard many times before, spinning just such a toil of grace as this in the stuffy darkness of London theatres.
    ‘
My prime request
,’ added Sir Julian Gale, ‘
Which I do last pronounce
, and which in fact you may think impertinent,
Is, O you wonder, If you be maid, or no?
’
    I suppose if I had met him normally, on our common ground of the theatre, I might have been too overawed to do more than stutter. But here at least the answer was laid down in the text, and had, besides, the advantage of being the truth. I narrowed my eyes against the sun, and smiled up at the head.
    ‘
No wonder, sir,
But certainly a maid
.’
    ‘
My language! Heavens!
’ The actor abruptly abandoned the Bard, and looked delighted. ‘I was right! You’re Max’s trespasser!’
    I felt myself flushing. ‘I’m afraid I am, and I seem to be trespassing again. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t