The shriveled stalks that shivered in the breeze held no bright petals or sweet scents, and the withered vines that stretched like cobwebs across the walls would never blossom again. The chapel garden was a tangle of decay and desiccation, yet it held within it the sweet sadness of a place once loved and long forgotten.Two tiers of raised flowerbeds, deep terraces set one above the other, encircled a rectangular lawn. In each corner rounded ledges rose, like steps, almost to the top of the wall. To her right lay the dried bed of what had been a small reflecting pool, and a wooden bench rested beside it, bleached silver by the sun. The garden had been beautiful once, but now the ledges were crowded with cracked and crumbling clay pots, the raised beds dotted with dried flowerheads, the rectangular lawn matted with bindweed and bristling with thistles.A curious building straddled the center of the long rear wall, one end facing out to sea, the other planted firmly in the garden. Stubby, oblong, built of the same charcoal-gray granite as the castle, it had no belltower, no arches, nothing to entice the mind or enchant the eye.
