The Insistent Garden by Rosie Chard Page B

written in a shaky hand: wax angel, donkey clamp, sky measurer .
    â€œCome on Edith, let’s delve,” said Dotty reappearing at my side. Ducking to avoid a bunch of dried flowers nailed to the top of the doorframe, I followed her through a narrow entrance that led to the next room.
    Slivers of sunlit garden seemed to pierce the darkness of the ground floor rooms and I couldn’t help but look out of the window during Dotty’s breathless descriptions of the artifacts. But I listened happily, fingering a dusty ‘don’t touch’ sign I found on the window ledge while absorbing the stories of the manor house: dinner guests too cold to hold their forks, secret marriage vows taken at the dead of night, and mischievous ghosts living inside the curtains.
    Dotty knew everything: the name of every curiosity, the name of every room: ‘ Nadir ’ glowing with Venetian lanterns, ‘ Zenith ’ ticking with the sound of a thousand bracelet clocks, and ‘ Meridian ,’ long, thin, ‘ Meridian ’ running through the centre of the house like a lost corridor. Her commentary had a pace of its own, slow and detailed on the ground floor, gathering speed round the tiny medieval beds up on the first floor before reaching a peak on the approach to the attic. Following behind the trail of explanations, I felt rising claustrophobia as the hallways narrowed and steps heightened and by the time we reached the top of the house my throat was dry.
    â€œThis is the best bit, darling,” whispered Dotty, balancing on top of a high threshold. “The attic!”
    A draft of nausea flushed my throat as I ducked down to enter the room. I tried to focus on the walls; the walls were dancing.
    Dotty peered into my face. “Darling, you look pale.”
    â€œIt’s the slope,” announced a man, emerging from the gloom. “Steepest floors in all of England.”
    â€œCan’t say I ever noticed,” replied Dotty sniffily.
    â€œIt only gets the sensitive ones,” said the man, jerking his jacket cuffs straight.
    Dotty threw him a condescending glance, patted my arm and trotted off towards a massive iron contraption sitting quietly in the far corner of the room. I followed, trying to ignore the headache that was working its way down the side of my head. I felt disoriented: the sloping floor, the bright squares of sunlight dotting the walls, all disconnecting my mind from our guide’s monotone voice that accompanied us across the room. We halted in the far corner and just as Dotty launched into an explanation of the strange machine in front of us the man cut in with a dramatic, “Sheets!”
    Dotty and I turned as one.
    â€œSheets,” he repeated, then pointed at the ancient appliance in front of us, “The bane of the scullery maid’s life.” He wiped a sticky-looking tongue across his lips. “A steel backbone was required to survive laundry day three hundred years ago. But this box mangle, as it was known, invented in 1785. . .”
    My head throbbed. I looked over the man’s shoulder, through the window and down into the garden. Shadows, thrown from the hedges, accentuated the shape of the borders and wide stone walls, invisible at ground level, were now thick lines on the earth. The attic seemed darker when I looked back at the man’s face. He was still relishing the two-hundred-year-old details of the scullery maid’s tortuous journey from the garden to the kitchen, dragging stones in a leather bucket, the burn in her shoulders as she heaved them up the stairs. . .
    The floor yawned upwards. “Dotty, I have to go home.”

    The magazine cover had suffered from friction in my pocket. Yet the details of the garden still looked sharp when I sat on my bed and pulled it out; the tree held onto its apples, the leaves still stuck to the grass. But now I knew what lay beyond the gate; I knew what cast a shadow on the lilies slumped in