Boxtel's Garden

"You've barely looked at your own beds in a month," his housekeeper said, finding him again at the study window, the telescope angled toward the wall separating his garden from Cornelius van Baerle's.

"I'm working."

"You're watching a rich man garden through a telescope. I've heard it called many things. I've never heard it called working."

He didn't answer that, because there wasn't a version of the answer that made him sound like the man he'd once been: a man who'd loved tulips for their own sake, long before Cornelius van Baerle moved in next door with money enough to breed anything he pleased and time enough to breed it patiently.

"He has everything I don't," Boxtel told her, when she pressed him further. "Money. Time. A father's fortune behind him instead of thirty years of my own hands in the dirt. It isn't fair that his results outstrip mine when my actual skill exceeds his."

"You've said that before."

"It's still true."

"Is it envy or is it unfairness? You call it one thing some days and the other thing on others."

Boxtel didn't have a clean answer for that either, and he'd stopped, some months back, trying to find one. He told himself it was principle: that a system rewarding inherited wealth over decades of hard-won skill was really unjust, and that his growing resentment of Cornelius was simply righteous anger dressed in gardener's clothes. He believed that most days. On the days he didn't, the telescope stayed where it was regardless. "You're not gardening anymore," she said. "You're only watching him garden. When did that happen?"

He couldn't say precisely. He knew only that somewhere in the last two years, the pleasure he'd once taken in his own beds had thinned into something considerably smaller than the attention he now gave his neighbor's, a slow trade he hadn't consciously agreed to and couldn't now remember refusing.

By the time he finally climbed that wall and took what wasn't his, he'd traveled far enough from the man he used to be that he barely recognized the theft as theft while he was actually committing it, only as, at last, some overdue correction to an unfairness he'd spent two years convincing himself was the actual point.

He understood, much later, sitting with the full ruin his crime had eventually brought down on him, exactly what the housekeeper had been trying to tell him all those months at the window. He'd begun as a man who loved tulips. He'd ended as a man who could no longer remember what that love had felt like before it curdled into a telescope pointed permanently at somebody else's garden, and he'd lost, in the trade, not merely his reputation and his freedom but the one thing he'd once had that Cornelius van Baerle's money could never have bought him: the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of tending his own beds for no reason beyond the tending itself.