‘Do you mean to tell me, Geoffrey, you knew about the shell? How—it—er—’
‘How it whispers?’ put in the gardener as the other hesitated. ‘Grows hot when others speak of you? Yes, Sir. I was listening to it a few minutes before you came along.’
He turned back to his work on the rose tree. Giles could not make him out at all.
‘You meant to keep it, then?’ he asked at last, glancing at the jacket on the tree-limb.
‘No, indeed. What would I want it for? To hear people talk about me? No. People have to talk, Sir. And if they want to talk about me, let ’em, I say. But listen to them?’ A smile came over the Gipsy’s calm, lean face. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time, Sir, lying in meadows watching the clouds sail over me, changing their drifting shapes. But I haven’t got time for listening to folks chatter about me. If I could hear ’em talk of someone else, or tell stories or something, maybe ’twould be different.’
‘Were you, then, going to sell it for money?’
‘Money, Sir?’ The gardener shook his head. ‘No. The King’s wage is enough for all I need.’
He drew a pruning-knife from his belt and cut a faded bloom from the white rose tree.
‘Well, what did you mean to do with it, then?’ asked Giles. ‘You had put it in your pocket.’
‘I was going to grow ferns in it, Sir. It would look elegant in the rockery behind the Queen’s bench—with maidenhair and maybe myrtle. I’d planned to set it there when I was done with the roses. But if you want it, Sir, of course that’s—’