The first lesson I learnt about what happens between a woman and a man I must have been about eight, maybe nine. In the House of the Rose there was a courtyard and it was the duty of all the young girls to make sure it was perfect.

There were many trees and plants planted in a complicated design there. Roses, as you would expect, cherry blossoms that shed their petals each year. It was our job to tend the garden all year round, make sure it was perfect and we did it well. Working hard, about eight or nine of us.

In one tiny corner there were some white pebbles, really smooth and hard but light. They covered the base of a really old rose bush with wicked, curved thorns that never forgave careless movements. It was my favourite. I tended to spend longer there than on any other plant, shrub or tree in the courtyard, fancied sometimes that the rose bush whispered to me, told me things I did not understand but which were comforting.

 
One morning I woke up earlier than usual. It was summer and first light had not yet come but the horizon, beyond the buildings was beginning to lighten. I got dressed and sneaked out, going through the tunnels and passages that led me to the central courtyard of the House of the Rose.

There were rooms whose doors and windows which faced the courtyard but I ignored them and moved on silent feet, walking like a ghost to my corner. The old rose bush stood there silent. Waiting.

I sat down in front of it cross-legged and waited for the sun to light the sky. It was not cold and I was not hungry or tired. I felt like a girl in a picture. Things around me did not touch me. The rose bush did not scare me. Its wicked thorns could not hurt me. Nothing touched me.

I waited.

I have always done things like this. All my life I have listened to some mysterious inner urging and followed its dictates. I sat and waited.

Nothing happened.

Eventually the sun got a little higher and the Household began to wake and I sat there feeling like some mystery was being explained to me and I was a girl coming to life, except I could not understand. The white pebbles round its base looked to me, in the early morning light, to be exceptionally white and somehow dissonant with some kind of message. The message of the pebbles, I thought, thinking of the fairy tale and the girl in the lake. I reached out to touch them, cold still from the night just past, slightly wet with dew.

“You should not be here.”

I jumped. The woman who spoke to me was new. I had never seen her before but then I did not know everyone in the House of the Rose. Not yet. So engrossed had I been in my imaginings that I had not heard her come out of one of the rooms facing the courtyard and walk in the garden.

She was young. Maybe no more than twenty with a face that looked sad and deep though I could not say in what way.

I made to move, shrink back, but the woman stopped me with a small move of her hand.

“You are interested in the pebbles?” she asked.

I looked at them, back to her.

“They have an interesting story because they are all that is left of Letitia.”

“Letitia?” I could not help myself.

The woman ignored my question. Her eyes were focused on the pebbles as she spoke. “There was once a courtesan the likes of which the world has never seen. A woman so deeply involved with the world of men that she understood exactly how they functioned, what they wanted and what they could be made to do.

“Such was her power she could make men love her with little more than a glance. Such was her control she could make them do whatever she wanted and still make them think that they acted of their own volition. Her services were highly sought after her and she was the favourite of some of the most powerful men in the land.”

The woman paused in this account and her eyes blinked a couple of times. She realised she was out in the garden speaking to a child.

She stopped.

“What happened?” I asked trying to make my voice sound more mature.

She looked at me with a calculating look in her eyes. “She fell in love,” she said. “Those are her bones.”