Chapter 7
The letters flew back and forth those first months, abounding in jest, narrative, and small complaints.
Gabriel wrote about the boring cricket, his tyrannical teachers and Edmund's continuing education about rural life he'd finally seen a cow and been appropriately terrified.
Clara wrote about the village scandals, her ongoing war with her governess, and detailed reports on their rose's progress.
But then, gradually, things changed.
The letters grew and less frequent. Gabriel's handwriting changed, as it became more formal and proper. He stopped mentioning Edmund or cricket or anything specific, really.
Dear Clara, School continues well. Studies are progressing. Weather is fine. Trust you are well. G. Hale
No jests. No stories. No mention of their garden or rose or anything that mattered.
Clara kept writing her long, newsy letters for a while, but when the responses stayed short and distant, she began to match his tone.
Dear Gabriel, All is well here. Garden remains satisfactory. C. Whitfield
By Christmas, she was dizzy with anticipation. Surely when he came home, things would return to normal. Surely it was just the distance, the pressure of school, the difficulty of writing letters.
She waited in the garden on the day he was due to return. Waited until her fingers turned blue with cold. Waited until dark.
He never came.
She learned later, from kitchen gossip, that the young master had returned home but was "much changed." Taller, yes, but also different in manner. Proper. Distant. He attended formal dinners with his parents, visited appropriate neighboring families and acted every inch the future duke.
He did not visit the garden.
Clara went every day for a week, sure he would come. Their rose bloomed despite the winter cold, as if trying to summon him. But Gabriel never appeared.
Finally, pride and hurt taking over, she stopped going.
She saw him once, at church on Christmas Eve. He was indeed taller, his face already losing its boyish roundness, his clothes immaculate and clearly expensive. He sat with his family in their box pew, back straight, eyes forward.
When their eyes met briefly during the processional, Clara smiled, tentative, hopeful.
Gabriel nodded. The kind of nod you'd give a distant acquaintance. Polite. Proper. Empty.
Then he looked away.
Clara felt something crack in her chest, sharp and definite as breaking glass.
She didn't try again.
The letters stopped entirely. The garden grew wild without them. Their rose, surprisingly, thrived on neglect, growing in enthusiastic tangles as if making up for their absence.
At Easter, Gabriel returned again but attended a house party at Lord Pemberton's estate the entire time. At summer, he went to London with his father.
Clara heard about it all second-hand, through servant gossip and village talk. How handsome the young master was becoming. How refined. How he was sure to be a credit to the dukedom.
How he never once asked about the physician’s daughter.
Clara’s mother was taken suddenly of a fever when she was in her tender years. Her father, broken by grief, sent Clara to live with her aunt in Bath, unable to bear the reminder of his wife in his daughter's face.
The morning she left, Clara walked through the garden one last time.
Their rose had grown into a magnificent tangle, wild and beautiful and abandoned.
She picked a single bloom, pink edged with gold, exactly like that first flower and pressed it between the pages of the journal Gabriel had given her.
The journal that was still mostly empty, because what was the point of recording extraordinary occurrences when the most extraordinary thing in her life had already ended?
The carriage pulled away from her childhood home, from the garden, from all those memories of a boy who'd promised to write and never held onto to his promise.
Clara didn't look back.
She couldn't know that Gabriel stood at his window in Ashbourne Hall, watching her carriage disappear down the road.
That he had the pressed flower she'd given him on his desk, carefully preserved all these years despite himself.
That he'd walked to the garden gate a dozen times over the holidays, only to turn back, convinced by his father's words: "You're too old for such childish friendships.
It's beneath your station. The physician’s daughter must learn her place, as must you. "
He couldn't know that she'd waited for him until hope turned to hurt, hurt to anger, and anger to a kind of hollow acceptance.
They were just children who'd played at grafting roses. Who would have believed that two different things could grow together into something beautiful?
But gardening, they'd both learned, was more complicated than they'd had ever imagined. Sometimes grafts didn't succeed. Sometimes they grew apart despite the most careful tending.
Sometimes they broke your heart.
The garden kept its secrets with their initials in the tree, slowly being covered by new bark. The bench where they'd sat together, weathering in the rain. And their rose, growing wild and magnificent and alone, proof that some things survived even when the gardeners walked away.
But the children who'd planted it? They were gone. In their place, a proper future duke and a physician's daughter learning to be alone, both carrying pressed flowers they'd never admit to keeping, both changed by a friendship that had bloomed too brief and beautiful to last.
The boy in the garden and the girl who'd waited for him they were just a memory now, sweet and distant as the scent of roses on the wind.
And neither of them would speak of it again.
At least, not for eight more years.