The English Garden

FOREWORD TO EPISODE 2, "THE ENGLISH GARDEN"

Love, we discover, is not bound by the laws that govern ordinary matter. It does not recognise borders, acknowledge centuries, or respect the careful lines we draw between possible and impossible. When two souls call to each other across time, the universe seems to bend, creating doorways where none should exist.

The following account explores such a calling: a woman's discovery that cages built of silk and gold can be more confining than any dungeon, and that true freedom sometimes requires leaping into the unknown. In gardens where past and future meet like lovers in the dark, where desire speaks in mother tongues and foreign phrases with equal fluency, we find that courage is not the absence of fear but the decision that something else matters more.

Some bridges, once crossed, teach us that home was never a place at all, but a person we had yet to meet.

Some hungers can only be satisfied by the impossible made manifest.

THE ENGLISH GARDEN

Time, Geneviève had discovered, was a jealous lover. For three weeks since the Englishman had vanished from her garden like morning mist, she had haunted the parterres at every hour, clutching the silver locket that had belonged to her English grandmother—the one possession her father had never thought to confiscate.

The château felt smaller each day, its gilt walls pressing closer like a beautiful prison. Her tutors droned about Voltaire and proper deportment while she traced the locket's worn engravings and tasted memory: jasmine-scented air, a mouth that had answered hers with desperate hunger, eyes that had seen her not as ornament but as flame.

"Mademoiselle appears distracted," Madame Dubois observed during her literature lesson, her voice sharp as winter wind.

Geneviève's fingers tightened around the locket. "I was contemplating the nature of exile, Madame. Surely appropriate for our study of poetry."

"Exile?" The governess sniffed. "What would you know of such things, living in luxury?"

Everything, Geneviève thought. When one's spirit craved flight but one's feet remained caged, luxury became the cruellest exile of all.

That night, she stole from her chambers to the garden, silk nightgown whisper-soft against bare feet. The moon hung heavy and full, painting the formal paths silver. She pressed the locket to her lips and whispered words that had haunted her dreams: "James Harrington. Mon anglais perdu."

Reality fractured like dropped crystal.

But instead of her familiar moonlit garden, she found herself in gentle grey dawn, breathing air that tasted of dew and wild roses rather than formal perfection. The parterres had vanished, replaced by rambling beds choked with autumn's last blooms. And there, beyond a modest manor house that wore ivy like an emerald cloak, worked a man whose shoulders she would recognise across any century.

James knelt amongst herb beds, his shirt sleeves rolled up, earth dark beneath his fingernails. But something was wrong with this picture—his movements held a desperate quality, as if he were trying to dig himself into the ground.

She approached in silence, marvelling at this wilder England. No marble statues here, no geometric precision—just honest earth and plants that grew as they willed. It spoke of freedom in ways that stirred something restless in her soul.

"Your garden, it grows wild like an Englishman's hair, non?" she said, amusement threading her voice. "Very... unstructured."

He spun so quickly he nearly toppled into the herb bed, his face cycling through disbelief, joy, and something that looked dangerously like relief. "Geneviève? But how—"

"The same mystery that brought you to mine, I suspect." She gestured to the locket at her throat. "Though I confess, your England is not what I expected. Where are the... how you say... the rolling downs? The sheep? Do all English gardens look as if they have been tended by a drunk gardener?"

James struggled to his feet, acutely aware of his gardening clothes, the dirt on his hands, the stubble he'd forgotten to shave. Barefoot in flowing silk, her dark hair tumbling loose about her shoulders, she looked like something from a fever dream.

"You're really here," he said, his voice hoarse with wonder.

"Unless English gardens produce particularly vivid hallucinations. Though considering the state of this one, perhaps they do." She moved closer, studying his face with those cognac-tinted eyes that seemed to see too much. "Sainte Marie! You look terrible. When did you last sleep? Or eat something more substantial than guilt and English self-pity?"

The observation hit uncomfortably close. Since their encounter, he'd haunted the garden daily, neglecting everything else. His London colleagues thought he was having a breakdown. Perhaps he was.

"Time moves strangely when you're waiting for something impossible," he admitted.

Geneviève reached out, her fingers brushing his jaw with audacious familiarity.. "Impossible? Bah! You English, always so... how you say... pessimistic. I am here, am I not? Though I must say, this England of yours is most peculiar. That cottage—" she nodded toward his house, "—it lacks any proper towers. And where are your servants? Your formal grounds? Do you live like a peasant by choice, or has your king fallen on difficult times?"

James found himself laughing despite everything. "Welcome to the twenty-first century, Mademoiselle. We've grown rather democratic about towers. And kings, for that matter."

"Twenty-first?" Her eyes widened. "Mon Dieu! I have travelled far indeed." But then her expression sharpened with characteristic determination. "Show me. Show me this impossible world you inhabit where Englishmen live like hermits and gardens grow like... like..."

"Like nature intended?"

"Exactly! Such a mad idea."

What followed was perhaps the strangest hour of James's life. Leading an eighteenth-century French aristocrat through his thoroughly modern manor, watching her marvel at electric lights ("Like captured sunshine!"), running water ("Such sorcery!"), and his laptop computer ("A window into the thoughts of the world").

But it was in his kitchen that she truly undid him. She touched the simple wooden table, traced the grain with reverent fingers.

"You eat here? Alone? At this... this table of a carpenter?"

The question was innocent enough, but something in her tone made his throat constrict. "Yes."

"In my time, meals are theatre—thirty guests, six courses, endless conversation about nothing that matters. I have never eaten a quiet meal chosen for pleasure rather than display." She looked up at him, and for a moment her carefully constructed wit faltered. "It sounds like paradise."

James saw himself suddenly through her eyes: a man who'd gained solitude and lost connection, who'd traded gilded cages for empty rooms. "It's lonely," he said quietly.

"Loneliness and solitude, they are not the same thing." She stepped closer, silk whispering promises. "One is imposed, the other chosen. You chose this exile, James. Pourquoi?"

The directness of her question, the way she used his name like an incantation—it cracked the careful walls he'd built around his heart." Because I wasn't enough. For my wife, my children, the life I thought I wanted. When it all fell apart, I retreated here."

"And I," she said softly, "am drowning in others' protections. Mon père, he thinks love and marriage can be arranged like furniture—beautiful and proper and utterly without passion." Her hand found his cheek. "Perhaps we are both refugees, non? You from too little freedom, I from too little choice."

Standing in his kitchen with dawn light painting her skin pearl and rose, James felt time fold in on itself again. Not the dramatic temporal shifting of their meetings, but something quieter—the sense that past and future had conspired to deliver this moment, this woman, this impossible gift of understanding.

"Geneviève," he began, but she pressed her fingers to his lips.

"In my century, I have learned to speak in coded phrases, to express desire through the language of flowers and hidden glances. But here, in your strange free world where even gardens are permitted to be wild, perhaps I can say what I mean." Her eyes held his steadily. "I have thought of nothing but you, James Harrington. Of your mouth, your hands, the way you looked at me as if I were a woman rather than a prize to be won or a burden to be managed."

Before he could respond, she rose on her toes and kissed him—not the desperate claiming of their first encounter, but something deeper, more deliberate. A promise rather than a theft.

When they broke apart, the light had changed. Golden warmth was seeping into the grey dawn, and James felt the familiar tug of temporal displacement.

"Non," Geneviève whispered, echoing his thoughts. "Not yet, s'il te plaît."

But already her form was beginning to blur, the solid warmth of her fading like smoke. She pressed something into his hand—her locket, still warm from her skin.

"Find me again," she called as reality wavered around them. "Find me, James. I shall not wait forever, but I shall wait. Even if your English punctuality kills me with boredom."

And then she was gone, leaving only the scent of jasmine and the phantom warmth of lips that had tasted like wine and wild promises.

James stood in his empty kitchen, the locket heavy in his palm. When he opened it, a miniature portrait gazed back—not Geneviève, but a woman who could have been her sister, painted in the English style of the 1740s. On the reverse, an inscription in faded ink: Margaret de Valois, beloved wife of Thomas Harrington, 1743.

His hands trembled. Harrington was not an uncommon name, but still... He thought of Geneviève's English grandmother, of the inexplicable pull between them, of time that bent like light around desire.

Some doors, once opened, revealed not just other places but other truths—about love, about choice, about the threads that connected hearts across centuries. And somewhere in the space between was and might be, a French woman waited for an Englishman who was beginning to understand that running away might have been the first step toward running home.