Gabriel stood before it, hands shoved in his pockets, glaring at the pink and gold blooms as if they'd personally offended him.
"Showing off, are we?" he asked the rose. "Look at me, thriving against all odds, proof that beautiful things can survive neglect and time and terrible circumstances?"
The rose, obviously, didn't respond.
"She's going to leave," he told it. "In spring. She'll fix me just enough to satisfy Aunt Agatha's requirements, and then she'll go find some position somewhere far away, and I'll be alone again. Which is what I want. What I've always wanted."
The wind rustled through the garden, making the rose bob as if disagreeing.
"Don't look at me like that. You're a plant. You don't have opinions."
“Conversing with roses now, are you?” Clara’s voice floated to him from behind, light and steady but threaded with something he couldn’t quite name. “I had always understood that sort of behaviour to be the first sign of madness.”
“The first sign,” Gabriel replied without turning, “was allowing you across my threshold.”
“No,” she said, her tone softening. “The first sign was you catching me when I fell.”
“I ought to have let you strike the ground.”
“No,” she murmured, stepping closer, “you oughtn’t.”
She came to stand beside him then, close enough that he could feel the faint warmth of her presence and yet, deliberately, she did not touch him.
“It’s absurd,” Clara said at last, her gaze fixed on the stubborn little rose before them. “A bloom in winter, defying frost and reason alike.”
“Roses,” Gabriel said quietly, “are notoriously stubborn.”
“Must be why we chose it.”
“We were children,” he answered, a trace of old bitterness creeping in. “We chose nothing. We simply grafted two ill-matched things together and prayed it would take.”
Her mouth curved faintly. “Seems to have done.”
“Has it?”
Clara turned her face to him then, and for an instant her eyes were as sharp as pins. “Are we still speaking of the rose?”
“What else could we be speaking of?”
“Us.”
“There is no us.”
“No,” she agreed after a pause, her voice low, almost lost to the garden. “There isn’t.”
They stood in silence, the impossible rose holding itself upright in the dying light as though it might outlast the season by sheer will alone.
“I have chosen Mary to be in your services.” Mary,” Clara said at last, the words falling like pebbles into still water. “And Susan for the carriage, and young Peter for the footman’s post.”
“Not Thomas?”
“Not Thomas.”
“Very well. His shoes were absolutely ridiculous.”
“His shoes were perfectly respectable.”
“His shoes were an outrage to leather and good sense.”
