The Garden of Yesterday

A Time Slip Flash Fiction Story

FOREWORD

We are all refugees from our own choices. Some flee into work, others into silence, a few into houses too large for broken hearts. But what if escape could be literal—what if the earth beneath our feet held doors to elsewhere, to elsewhen? What if, in our darkest hour, time itself offered sanctuary?

The following account concerns such a possibility: a man's discovery that loss can be the very thing that makes us worthy of finding something extraordinary. In gardens where past and present blur like watercolours in rain, where desire speaks in foreign tongues, and love might reach across centuries to touch the wounded places we thought beyond healing.

Some doors, once opened, can never truly be closed again.

THE GARDEN OF YESTERDAY

James Harrington knelt in soil that had swallowed his marriage along with everything else. Seven years since Sarah had taken the children to her sister's—indefinitely, she'd said—and seven years on, he found himself tending this crumbling Oxfordshire manor as if stone and mortar could fill the spaces people left behind.

The garden was a ruin. Like him, he supposed, digging his fingers into earth that hadn't known care in decades. His hands, soft from years of pushing papers in London offices, were already blistering.

Something hard met his fingertips. Not a stone—metal, cool and substantial. He brushed away the soil to reveal a pocket watch, its silver case black with tarnish. The moment his palm closed around it, the world lurched.

Air thick with jasmine and roses flooded his lungs. Golden light, impossibly warm for England, painted formal parterres where his weedy plot had been. Marble statues gazed from pedestals that belonged to Versailles, not Oxfordshire. And there, beside a fountain carved with dancing nymphs, stood a woman who made his heart skip a beat with something he'd forgotten he could feel.

She wore eau-de-nil silk that rustled like secrets, her dark hair piled high in the elaborate style of another century. When she turned, her eyes—the colour of aged cognac—assessed him with amusement and unmistakable hunger.

"Monsieur," she said, her accent making music of the word. "You appear quite lost."

"I..." James struggled for words that wouldn't sound mad. "I seem to have taken a wrong turn."

Her laugh was liquid silver. "Indeed, to find yourself in the gardens of Château de Valois. I am Geneviève. And you, with your curious English vowels?"

"James Harrington."

"James." She savoured his name like wine. "Tell me, do all Englishmen materialise in French gardens, or are you singular in this talent?"

He looked beyond the parterre to spires that belonged to the age of Louis XV, to windows that caught light with the peculiar brilliance of hand-blown glass. This was no hallucination—he could feel the sun's warmth, smell the box hedges, hear the fountain's gentle music.

"I don't understand how I'm here."

Geneviève moved closer, silk whispering against gravel. "Perhaps understanding is overrated. My father keeps me caged here like a songbird, surrounded by tutors and chaperones who think passion can be educated away." Her smile held wicked promise. "They underestimate French ingenuity."

James felt the heat climb his throat as she approached. There was something predatory in her grace, something that made his pulse quicken despite every rational thought screaming warnings.

"Mademoiselle, I should explain—"

She pressed a gloved finger to his lips. "Explanations are for philosophers and priests. Neither of which you appear to be." Her gaze dropped to his mouth, lingered, then returned to his eyes. "You have the look of a man who has forgotten how to be surprised. I find that... intriguing."

"I'm married," he said, though the words felt hollow.

"Married," she repeated, as if testing a foreign concept. "And where is this wife while you wander through time into my garden?"

The question hit like a physical blow. Where indeed was Sarah? Probably reading bedtime stories to children who now asked why Daddy lived alone in a house too big for one person.

Geneviève saw his flinch and stepped closer still. "Ah. I begin to understand. You are not lost in space, mon anglais, but in time. Running from what was, perhaps, toward what might be."

Her hand traced his jaw with shocking intimacy. "French women do not wait to be courted like your English roses, all thorns and propriety. When we desire something..." She rose on her toes, breath warm against his ear. "We take it."

Her lips found his before he could protest, and for a heartbeat that stretched like honey, James forgot everything—Sarah's accusations, the children's tears, the hollow rooms of his new exile. There was only this: jasmine-scented skin, silk beneath his hands, the dangerous thrill of a woman who chose her own desires.

When she pulled back, triumph lit her eyes. "You see? Even time itself conspires to bring us together."

But even as she spoke, the golden light began to dim. The scent of roses faded to damp earth and bitter herbs. Geneviève's face blurred with sudden panic.

"Non!" She reached for him as the world tilted again. "Ne me quitte pas!"

James felt reality reassert itself like a tide, pulling him back to the grey English afternoon, to his ruined garden and blistered hands. He knelt in the same spot, the watch heavy in his palm—but its tarnished surface now gleamed silver, revealing engravings that spiralled like frozen time.

Inside the cover, words in flowing script that hadn't been there before:

Pour mon anglais perdu— Ton Geneviève

The scent of jasmine lingered in the cooling air. On his lips, he could still taste wine and possibility and the dangerous sweetness of a woman who refused to be caged by any century.

James closed the watch and stood, legs unsteady. Time, he was learning, was not the linear progression he'd always believed. And somewhere in the gilt and shadows of eighteenth-century France, a woman waited for the Englishman who had appeared like an answer to her prayers and vanished like smoke.

He looked at his empty house, at windows that reflected nothing back. Tomorrow he would return to the garden. Tonight, for the first time in months, he would dream of jasmine and silk and the possibility that some kinds of love could reach across centuries to touch the wounded places in a man's heart.

This story may end here as  a piece of flash fiction, but I decided to continue the story. If you wish to continue reading it, click the 'Episode 2' link below and if you enjoy it, there are six episodes in total.

My song, "Mon Anglais Perdu", which gently nods to this story, can be heard by clicking the play button on the Soundcloud link below.