A Hint of Rosemary

The walls around the doors are dilapidated, crumbling rock, cracks wide enough to walk through and into the shadowy garden beyond. The door arches over her in a great carved likeness of crashing ocean waves, silvery and blue, so familiar she can almost taste the salty wind and hear the roar on invisible surf.

She twists the handle and the door sticks, with a little more pressure it swings open slowly, catching on withered ivy.

The garden is a labyrinth of putrefying wet greenery, flyblown rose bushes and scraggly low growing shrubs, withered climbing clematises and shriveled berries. There are low weather beaten stonewalls that curve around fountains no longer filled with water, and hazy grey lanterns, circling in toward a colossal hedge maze.

A gigantic oak stands at the entrance to the maze, twisted and gnarled with blackened branches, roots pale and fracturing with age. A huge fissure runs through its middle. It smells heavily of rotting wood, deadened and choked by tendrils of ivy.

The hedge maze is foreboding tall and dark and overrun with twisting roots and branches. She enters cautiously, glancing to the towering hedge, where only a pocket of sky is visible. The pathways are slightly claustrophobic, so winding and dark and close, fill of neglected flowers with sharp thorns. There is a hint of rosemary among the impossible angles the paths create.

She enters slowly, running her fingers over the green walls as she makes her way. She finds no dead ends, does not walk in any circles. She feels compelled in certain directions, to go left or right at a fork in the maze. She finds the middle soon, very soon, and cannot remember her path back, yet she feels unconcerned. The clearing may once have been taken care of, but the white statues covered in moss are falling apart, limbs and faces lying across the leafy ground like cracked ice. Cobwebs thick as swaths of fabric lay in the crooks of arms, the space between ram’s horns. The moss has become dry and brown but it still spreads over the expanse of the statues’ bodies, blurring the only features they may have maintained.

Leaves crackle behind her. When she turns, he lifts his great snowy head and regards her with cold blue eyes.

“Is this where you come from?” she asks. She does not expect an answer. When he turns and disappears behind a hedged corner, she follows. 

Text by Lucie MacAulay