The gate was rusty; dandelions growing, twining around the metal bars, thick green stems and bold, soft, heads the color of the sun. I haven't seen the house for almost 15 years, yet it is as familiar to me as it was back then, the corners and contours firmly engraved in my wandering mind. But I had forgotten the smell. They say that the nose remembers better than the brain, but for me that was not true; the rich, heady scent of the overflowing garden hit me as strongly as it had the day I'd first peeped around the then-foreboding gate with the shy excitement of a boy unbalanced in the fervor of first love. I inhale, the strong, heavy scent of roses, undertwined with the lighter, more graceful perfumes of the delicate flowers. Moss grows up the side of the stone bench where I had first sat with Cosette; where we had kissed, talked; where I sat the day that changed my life, the one day about 3 months after I first met her, when I arrived at the garden to late and found her gone, when a voice had pierced me, rough and out of place in the misty midnight. Her voice.
0000000000000
"Monsieur Marius?" The voice, gravelly, creaking, seems to come from the very shadows themselves, as though the devil had sent up its minions to torment me in my despondency. I raised me head from my arms, and saw her face, half-hidden by branches, peering down at me where I sat.
"Eponine?" I said in disbelief. Her dirty face and lank hair seemed out of place in the elegant, wild garden that housed my beautiful Cosette.
"You are looking for her?" She says, and I dimly heard thorns in her voice.
"I am looking for Cosette."
" She left with 'er father in the mid-afternoon. To visit the poor. They shan't be back until tomorrow, perhaps." She said this with a sort of strange pride, and I noticed, briefly, that the way she spoke and the words she used had changed. She no longer sounded like quite the uneducated whore, although her voice still carried the rough tones and nuances of the Paris gutter. She cocked her head at me like a dog, and trailed her long – suddenly graceful – fingers over the ridged back of the bench I sat on. Although she had not touched me, I shivered, and pulled back, telling myself that my reluctance to come into contact with her was due to her sordid nature and dirty skin – not that strange, nervous type of fear that comes closer to lust than disgust. I stood quickly, and stepped back, making a formal little bow to her to hide the trembling of my hands and rapid beating of my heart.
"Thank you, madam. I am grateful for your assistance." I left her standing by the mossy bench, more like a goblin than a human girl, her face wreathed in shadow-dipped leaves, her hands tapering into claws, her eyes proud and vulnerable like a lions as she watched me leave.
0000000000000
The bench is warm against my legs, smooth with the caresses of sunlight, rain, and passion. My thoughts wander, not to the evenings with Cosette where love was ripe and sweet, but to a darker, shadow-filled night when a different, darker love, tangible, unspoken, and not quite in bloom, reached out it's thorny tentacles from her bare, filthy, hand, and opened my eyes to the sordid, corrupt, strange beauty of the girl who had given me everything.