The Girl in the Mirror. Sarah Gristwood

garden, I’d find Sir Robert was by my side, and stopping to speak to me. He didn’t spend all his time here, I’d learned – much of his work was done in the Duchy of Lancaster offices across the Strand – but he used to walk in these gardens very regularly. He’d rarely touch – he wasn’t one of those great garden owners who had to know better than the gardeners did – but his dark eyes were everywhere, quietly. He’d always stop by the aviary, and scatter a handful of the seeds that were kept ready nearby. Sometimes he’d raise his eyebrows in invitation, and pass a handful of seed to me.

      ‘Do you like the birds?’ he said one day. I knew him well enough by now to be aware that his most banal questions were the ones with the layers of meaning behind them, but I had to answer.

      ‘I’d like them better if they were free.’

      He nodded, as if I’d said something intelligent – or maybe just something expected, and his was the intelligence, for having foreseen it so accurately.

      ‘If we set them loose now they’d be back for their food next day – those the sparrow hawk had spared, and that hadn’t been mobbed by their wild fellows.’

      ‘At least that would be their decision.’ I didn’t know why I was arguing the cause of liberty so passionately. I didn’t know why he was talking to me this way. But as he moved on, he gestured me to walk with him, our footsteps crunching on the icy gravel, our breath mingling on the frozen air. We must have looked like brothers as we walked there – he couldn’t have been much more than a decade older than me – but his containment, and the experience that wrapped him round like a cloak, made me feel like a callow child and, childishly, I found myself blurting out more than I meant as he asked me more about my upbringing and my family.

      ‘I’m sorry,’ he said gravely, when I told him how my parents died, and he led me on to speak of them, as I had done so rarely. How my father had always said he wanted to become the finest silk merchant in Antwerp, and how my mother joked she wanted a house with a garden, where the flowers would be brighter than all his woven finery.

      ‘And you? What do you want, Jan?’ I stared at him, dumbly, all my newfound ease of speech, all the pleasure of reminiscence, vanished like smoke, instantly. It wasn’t just the boy’s name he’d called me – the reminder that, while I kept my secret, there could be no true intimacy with anybody. A reminder that, while I kept my secret, I couldn’t dream a happy future with a girl’s dream or a boy’s. It was those things, but it was more. I’d never, you might say, allowed myself to want – not for anything more lasting than a sweet or a sunny day, or for the toothache to go away. I’d lived like the beggars in the streets, not wanting anything more than the food to get by. I felt inadequate, naked and ashamed, as Sir Robert stood there, eyeing me quietly. Then, with a slight twist of his lips and an inclination of his head, he allowed me to slip away.

      They kept Christmas well in the great house. I’d found my way into the kitchens soon after I’d arrived. Even the dogs turning the spits were too busy to talk for long, but I don’t think they minded seeing me, especially after the master cook stopped shouting at the scullions long enough to fling a thin foreign book at me and demand I translated a recipe – leg of lamb it was, in the French way, its meat minced with spices, suet and barber-ries, and stuffed back into the skin again. I thought it sounded nasty, but the cook was pleased.

      I didn’t care so much for the dairy, or the game larder where they hung birds of every size, ready to be stuffed one inside the other, from the quail to the turkey – nor even for the confectionary, with its candied mock flowers, its cloying marchpane and gilded subtleties. But they soon got used to me in the main kitchen and they’d tease me with tales of what I could expect in summer. Asparagus in a butter and ginger sauce, sweet potatoes boiled in wine, fresh sheep’s cheese and French Angelot. Pies of artichokes with bone marrow and dates, and the crisp, watery cowcumbers, of which I had heard but never tasted. Against the outside wall, the gardeners sheltered pots of herbs, to make sallats for Sir Robert even in winter and dress the celery they’d nursed through the cold days. The smell of the rotting manure came up from the melon pits – ‘Though if we’re not careful the master will be eating them raw as soon as they’re ripe,’ the under-cook said, ‘instead of baked in milk, the proper way.’ The household laughed at Sir Robert’s tastes, but they laughed affectionately.