The Walled Garden

The walled garden was the oldest part of the grounds, and the only part where Aurelie was, for reasons of pure architecture, genuinely alone. Its stone walls were too high for the long lenses that lived beyond the palace fence. Its single gate was old and stubborn. The cameras of the kingdom, which had photographed Aurelie's first steps and her first ball and would, in three months, photograph her wedding, could not reach over the wall of the walled garden, and so she had loved it her whole life with the particular fierce love a person reserves for the one room in which they are not a picture. She had not expected to have to share it. "You've found my garden," she said. Lucas Harrow was on his knees among the herb beds, and this time he did look up at once, and this time there was the smallest delay before the *Your Highness* — half a second in which he was simply a man caught somewhere, deciding how sorry to be. "I've found the garden I was hired to restore," he said. "I didn't know it was yours. Though I might have guessed. It's the only part of the grounds that's been allowed to be a little wild." He sat back on his heels. "I can work the far end. You'd hardly know I was here. I'm good at that." "At being hardly here." "It's most of the job, Your Highness. A gardener is meant to disappear into the result." He said it without bitterness, simply as a fact of his trade, and Aurelie thought of the two hundred and forty windows and the angles she had spent her life mapping, and recognized, with a small unwelcome lurch, a fellow scholar of how not to be seen. She sat down on the stone bench, which committed her to the conversation, and which she told herself she had done because the bench was there. "You said something, the first morning," she said. "About things grown only to be admired from a distance. You apologized for it." "I shouldn't have said it. It wasn't my place." "It was exactly accurate, which is rarer than place." Aurelie looked at the herb beds, at the green coming up between his hands. "I'm to be married in the autumn. To the second son of a kingdom three borders east. I have met him twice. He is not unkind — I want to be fair; he is not unkind — and the treaty our marriage completes will keep two armies in their barracks for a generation, which is not nothing. It is, in fact, a great deal. I know the worth of it." She found, to her own surprise, that she was still talking. "I have simply never been asked whether I wanted it. There was no window in the schedule for the question. And I have spent my whole life learning which windows can't be seen into, Mr. Harrow, and it turns out I never learned the only thing that would have helped, which is how to be seen and survive it." Lucas Harrow did not rush to comfort her. She noticed that, and was grateful for it; comfort, in the palace, was a kind of management, and she had had a lifetime of being managed. He simply sat among the herbs and let her sentence finish landing, the way he had let the rose remark land in the kitchen garden, unhurried, as though words deserved the same patience as plants. "I can't change a treaty," he said at last. "I'm a gardener. I cut things back so they'll flower where they can be reached; that's the whole of my power, and it ends at this wall." He stood, and brushed the soil from his knees, and looked at her across the green of the oldest garden in the kingdom. "But this is the one place no one can photograph you. You said so yourself — too high for the lenses. And as long as I'm working it, Your Highness, I can promise you one thing, which is small, and which is the only thing I have to give. In this garden you are not a picture. In this garden you're just a person who came to sit down. I'll keep to the far end. But you don't have to perform anything, in here. Not for me." It was, Aurelie thought afterward — walking back up the servants' stair, telling no one — the most generous thing anyone had offered her in years, and it had cost the man nothing, and it had been about the only thing she had ever truly wanted, and she did not have the faintest idea what she was going to do about any of it. She came back the next morning. And the morning after that. And by the end of the week, the far end of the garden and the near end had begun, quietly, against every rule that governed her life, to meet somewhere in the middle.