He was told there were shears in the garden and that he was free to cut flowers to take home to his wife, so he said goodbye, his money in his pocket. He went down the corridor paved with polished bluestone, then into the courtyard. The gate to the garden was wrought iron, and he pushed through into the sunlight. His shadow fell before him. Two girls sat on a bench near the silver roses, one blond and one dark and small with a foreigner’s features, both so intent in conversation they did not look up. Such strange flowers, these roses, looking as if they had dropped down from the moon, with their silver sheen and black, leathery leaves. Most of the other flowers were long past their bloom, and he thought these might be the sorts of roses that Jews grew; perhaps they were fed with the blood of children and that had caused their unusual color, for since medieval times Jews were thought to be magicians, suspected of sorcery. He had no idea that the flowers were a strain of roses created by a woman more than three hundred years earlier whose husband was so jealous of her beauty he wouldn’t allow her to leave their house. She could only go as far as her garden, and often she sneaked out while he was asleep so that she might work in the moonlight. She wanted a bloom the color of the moon, a hybrid between a white Bourbon and a black climbing rose. After years of cross-pollinating and covering the plants with white burlap bags so the bees would not play havoc with her plans, she at last completed her task. When her husband found her with her silver roses, he locked her in the house, commanding her maid to dig up the rosebushes. They were given the name la Lumière Volée, stolen light.

The maid couldn’t bring herself to do as she was told. She kept two specimens in her own garden, and when the husband died she returned them to their rightful place. From these plants six more grew, and then another six, and then six more, so that an entire section of the garden looked silver at certain times of day.