'Perhaps you'd like to go exploring,' the Señora suggested with a smile, startling Kara out of her reverie. 'You'd best use one of the back entrances this time; that way you may let yourself in and out without making Maria drop whatever she's doing at the time. But don't you go traipsing through my gardens! If you feel you must look at them, stay to the footpaths. I daresay they're clearly enough marked.'
Kara didn't need to be prompted twice. She took her dirty dishes into the kitchen and washed them, found a back door through a utility room beyond the kitchen, navigated her way through a back utility shed full of tools, cleaning implements, unused kitchen and food preserving equipment and firewood, and then found herself standing on a narrow side path in the midst of the most bewitching back garden she had ever laid eyes on.
The place had an exotic, wild look, every flower, tree and shrub appearing to be native to the island. It was more like stepping into a sort of floral jungle than a garden: she felt dwarfed by enormous broad-leafed plants and tall brakes of fern, by flowering shrubs high as small trees, by clumps of towering palm trees that leaned like watchful sentinels. Everywhere there grew a silent cacophony of brilliant flowers, some of them too enormous to be believed- but something of their colour and their brilliance soon got to be overpowering, sending Kara moving on in search of a setting more suited to her present mood.
Within moments she was out of the garden and onto a grassy lea with a number of small sheds and glass greenhouses, and she followed a well-used footpath that brought her eventually to a field and another footpath that wended its way down toward the lake, to a more subdued place of grassy knolls dotted with small white flowers and low marshland with tall blowing grasses. Tiny brown birds occasionally and noisily betrayed their presence in the grasses, chirping busily and chasing one another about, occasionally stopping to cling to a tall grass or marsh plant.
Kara found a knoll that seemed sunlit and inviting and lay herself down so that she could watch the clouds roll slowly on by- something she hadn't done since she was a little girl. At once, her heart seemed to swell from within her- and then, for no reason she could have put into words, a profound grief stole over her, and she hugged herself, fighting back tears, trying to contain a hurt so intense that it made her breath short.
'Is the Isla Fiero such a terrible place that it makes you weep?'