A red brick road ran down the hill from the castle gates toward the forest below. Next to the road was a walled garden, with roses creeping over the tops of the walls. Dominic swung the barred gate open, and we went in.

I had thought the roses in the castle courtyard were good, but these were spectacular. “You can leave us, Dominic,” said the king. “I’m sure this young man can see me back safely.”

His burly nephew gave me a slightly sour look but left. The king seated himself on a bench while I wandered up and down the rows, admiring the different colors, the enormous blooms, the vibrant green of the foliage.

“I’m too stiff to work on them much any more, but I planted every bush you see,” said the king. “Most of them are hybrids I developed myself, though I’ve also picked up a few cuttings over the years. The newest one is that white bush; I planted it the day I married the queen.”

It was smaller than the other bushes but growing vigorously. The white blooms faded to pink in the shadows of the petals. When I bent to smell it, the sweetness was almost overwhelming.

“I’m looking forward to meeting the queen,” I said, realizing that she must be substantially younger than the king and wondering why I had ever thought otherwise.

“I’ve been king of Yurt a long, long time. It’s been a good run of years, but in many ways the last four years have been the best, even though I can’t crawl around with a trowel any more.”

So they’d only been married four years. I had to readjust several of my assumptions. It seemed most likely that the king had found a pliant young princess to marry, someone to adore him and do his bidding and fulfill the adolescent fantasies he had never been able to fulfill in his years in the rose garden. The only difficulty with this picture was that it was hard to see the king as the old goat. “You may think me silly,” I said, “but when I heard the queen was visiting her parents, I’d somehow thought of them as extremely old.”