7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (1)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (1)
The gardener Gaston was the caretaker of the "Tomato Greenhouse."
The Tomato Greenhouse referred to the garden district in the northwest of the shuttered Black Palace—home to the Regent's Residence of Charlotia. To be called the caretaker of the Tomato Greenhouse was, in effect, to be called the finest gardener in all Charlotia.
The reason Gaston could not be called the Royal Gardener was simple: Charlotia had no royal family.
The royals had been massacred. The palace had been closed. The queen had vanished.
Gaston was the foremost candidate to be called Royal Gardener on the day the missing Queen Charlotte returned. When he first set foot in the Regent's Residence, he would often picture himself eventually bearing that title.
But the queen who had vanished before he turned ten remained unfound even as he passed sixty. Queen Charlotte was now regarded as a figure from a fairy tale, invoked only to explain why the country was named "Charlotia" at all.
Among the young who had grown up in the hands of people with no memory of the queen's reign, a murmur was beginning to rise: perhaps it would be better to simply acknowledge the Regent's line as the royal house. They thought the very fact that a regent governed the nation eroded its prestige.
Whenever Gaston heard some callow youth spout such nonsense over drinks, he clicked his tongue inwardly. But he restrained himself from openly scolding them, wary of being dismissed as just another old man muttering, "Things were better in the queen's day."
Fools.
Did they not realize that keeping a sovereign no one could see as the head of the nation was what kept a fracturing country bound together? Look at the Holy See and the Papal States.
Gaston had held his post as caretaker of the Tomato Greenhouse for over thirty years.
Thirty years was time enough for even a man who considered digging in the earth and pruning branches his true calling to develop a sharp political eye—especially for someone in a position to observe, from just beyond the hedgerows, the laughter and tears of Charlotia's supreme leader.
Gaston recalled his earliest days in the Regent's Residence.
The leader of his country had been a far weaker figure than he had expected.
His role was to perpetually gauge the mood of the great nobles of the aristocracy—and to flounder helplessly between their warring factions. Or rather, to perform helplessness convincingly for both sides.
His son had even less power, to the point that the performance was no longer required.
And his grandson, the current Regent, had only just taken office, but the gardener was certain he would prove even worse than his predecessors.
Because unlike the previous Regent—a man who, for all his weaknesses, could still bellow at his own wife and kick the hunting dogs in the garden—this one couldn't stand up to his own mother and was liable to get bitten by the dogs instead.
That alone made it clear he was a lesser man than his father.
Even those who hadn't watched him grow from infancy over thirty years—as Gaston had—could sense it.
Several days ago, Gaston had heard that the garden of the Metropole Hotel in Rouge had been reduced to a wreck.
It was a garden that had drawn high praise from the then-Regent's wife when Gaston had completed its landscaping—a place he visited once each year to refine its form.
When he heard of the incident, he naturally assumed he would be summoned.
After all, the woman who had been the Regent's wife was now the current Regent's mother, and the current Regent could not refuse his mother a thing.
Yet no order for his dispatch came from the Regent's Residence.
It was not that the current Regent had finally begun to defy his mother.
Nor was the man such a fool as to invite needless scorn by abandoning the garden of a hotel frequented by powerful nobles.
When the gardener's request to go to Rouge reached him, the Regent had simply evaded the question with an awkward smile.
Instead, he suggested Gaston take a vacation.
Gaston's experience told him at once that politics was at play.
The gardener armed only with the pure craftsman's spirit of thirty years ago would have grabbed the trunk holding his tools and boarded an airship for Rouge, heedless of the circumstances.
But he was not that young man anymore.
First, he was too old to carry that tool-packed trunk alone.
Second, the years had taught him that staying out of political squabbles was always the wiser course.
Politicians had a habit of interpreting a flower's spurious meaning at a table setting, or the shape of a landscape feature in the background, as a deliberate signal aimed at them.
Gaston's predecessor had been driven from his post because a great noble protested that a particular arrangement of stones evoked his house's symbolic beast prostrating itself before the symbol of a rival house—and held the Regent responsible.
These days were not quite so fraught, but Gaston still strove to be meticulous.
The Regents of Charlotia had been trained, generation after generation, to signal their neutrality at any moment—through physical cues, rhetorical flourish, or political gesture.
Dispatching his own gardener to Rouge right now to repair the grounds, it seemed, might be interpreted as a political signal favoring the nobles who had leased the hotel. He wanted to avoid that.
The Regent, by way of covering himself for the future, granted his gardener a special vacation in commemoration of thirty years of service.
In doing so, he had manufactured an excuse for his failure to send the gardener.
The old gardener's decision at the airport to exchange his ticket bound for Florand for one headed to Rouge had nothing to do with a sudden aversion to Florand's warm sun, nor with a wandering eye for Rouge's glittering demimonde.
Neither was it fury at the present insult to the work to which he had devoted his life.
Over the past thirty years, he had learned politics from the garden.
He was preparing for the day the great lady of the Regent's household learned the truth and flew into a rage. By coming to Rouge to discreetly inspect the Metropole Hotel during his vacation, he was securing himself a measure of absolution.
The hotel's general manager readily agreed to the request of Charlotia's finest gardener that his visit be kept secret. The manager assigned him a corner room where he was unlikely to encounter other guests.
Gaston opened his trunk and pulled out his patchwork straw hat and overalls. Inside, besides his work clothes, the trunk brimmed with chisels, hammers, measuring tape, softening compound, sandpaper, tongs, pruning shears, trimming shears, a small saw, fixing nails, rings, rubber binding ties, and more.
That he had packed all this while wondering what southern gardens might be like—even as he departed on leave—served him well now.
For the moment, he gathered only a few simple surveyor's tools—a tape, some marking chalk—and stepped out into the garden.
The garden, as expected, looked like a bomb had detonated in it.
The ground around the scorched epicenter had been churned upside-down, and flowers and trees lay tangled together in heaps, discarded like rubbish.
"Looks like some wretched troublemakers had themselves a romp."
He clicked his tongue at the expensive landscaping plants strewn across the ground.
Plants he had raised from sprouts, carefully apportioning water and sunlight so they would grow at perfect angles and to just the right dimensions—all of them utterly ruined.
"From here to there, I'll have to design something entirely new. Hmm, for this spot, I can just replant replacements from the arboretum. That side should be fine with just the branches tidied up..."
Muttering to himself, Gaston was surveying the rear garden when he spotted someone standing in the corner.
The figure held a gardening knife and shears, examining the very tree he had just judged might need only its branches tidied.
'Huh. A gardener hired by the hotel? The manager didn't mention anything.'
Gaston studied the figure closely.
A young man with blond hair and blue eyes.
He was tall, his skin pale and fine, his face as clean-lined as if it had been carved with a chisel.
He did not look like someone who worked with plants, no matter how one looked at him.
Contradicting his aristocratic appearance, his clothes were the sort worn by hotel menials who handled odd jobs.
Likely a young man hired to clear away the wreckage.
A faint smile on his lips, the young man was carefully studying the tree with its broken, snapped, and bent branches.
His eyes and his movements gave him away: he was play-acting at being a gardener.
If he came to work, he ought to work. What a waste of those looks.
The gardener grumbled to himself.
Just then, the young man abruptly brought his knife to an edge of bark that had been stripped away.
The motion made Gaston flinch.
Because a set of movements that had seemed so plainly ignorant of gardening a moment before had suddenly turned fluid and crisp.
It was the motion of a veteran gardener who had studied trees for decades.
Scrape. Scrape.
His appearance was not the only surprising thing. His skill in treating the damaged bark was flawless. Among the disciples working under Gaston himself, plenty were less competent than this young man.
With the bark fully stripped, he examined the tree's exposed inner flesh from several angles.
Gaston found himself waiting for his next move with a trace of tension.
Stripping bark was not simply a matter of tearing away the damaged parts at random.
It demanded the ability to read the inner flesh, trace the direction of the tree's growth, and predict the shape and thickness the new bark would assume as it regenerated.
Dexterity alone could not solve the problem.
It required long experience in observing how trees grew and healed.
A gardener of Gaston's caliber could, with only a brief inspection, identify exactly where to make the cut.
Taking all the available information together, there was precisely one correct line along which to set a blade to that wound.
Stray one centimeter from that line, and the finished result would drop to ninety percent. Stray two centimeters, and it would fall below fifty.
Gaston could not say why he felt tense.
There was no reason to be surprised just because the young man's knife work a moment ago had been a little skillful.
He looked nothing like a gardener, but he appeared to be in his mid-twenties—he might well be a young man with ten years of experience.
That would make his level of skill understandable.
The line for stripping bark was not something a young man of his age could grasp with a mere glance.
The best that a gardener of his years could normally manage was to bring out a horticultural reference book and calculate from every angle, or simply carve out a chunk wholesale and then repeatedly trim a little here, a little there, as he watched it grow back.
The young man set his knife to the inner flesh.
There was not a trace of tension on his face.
Only a serene, untroubled smile.
His knife moved.
"Ah."
The sound escaped Gaston before he knew it.
The blade had traced the exact line he himself had predicted, without even a tenth of a centimeter's deviation.
The knifework, if nothing else, was flawless.
"Who might you be?"
The young man turned to face the old man.
Gaston swallowed involuntarily.