“O what foolishness is this!” declared Lady Rosalind, pacing frantically across her bedchamber. “That my heart should betray me so, falling for a mere gardener!”

Her trusted maid, Beatrice, watched with knowing eyes. “My lady, love knows not rank nor station. Young Thomas may tend the roses, but his soul speaks poetry.”

Indeed, Thomas had caught Lady Rosalind’s eye during her morning walks, his gentle hands coaxing life from dormant earth. Their secret meetings by the fountain had grown frequent, though propriety demanded distance.

“But Father would never approve,” Rosalind lamented, collapsing dramatically onto her bed. “This foolish bed! Each night it holds my dreams of Thomas, yet each morning I wake to cruel reality.”

“Perhaps,” Beatrice mused, “this bed is wiser than we know. For did not your mother once tell tales of meeting your father in these very gardens?”

Rosalind sat up, eyes bright. “What mean you by this?”

“Only that your father, now so stern and proper, once scaled these very walls to court your mother. She would leave her window open, and a rope of bedsheets served as his ladder.”

“Beatrice!” Rosalind gasped. “You suggest…”

“I suggest nothing, my lady. I merely dust this foolish bed and keep its secrets.”

That night, as moonlight bathed the garden, Thomas found a curious sight - white sheets cascading from Rosalind’s window like a waterfall of silk.

“What angel lets down her hair tonight?” he called softly.

“One who finds her bed too wise to sleep in,” came the reply.

Their midnight rendezvous was interrupted by Lord Edmund himself, Rosalind’s father, discovering them in the garden. But before his rage could burst forth, his wife laid a gentle hand upon his arm.

“My love,” she whispered, “do you not remember another foolish bed that once released its sheets to aid young lovers?”

The lord’s stern countenance softened as memory overtook him. “Indeed,” he chuckled at last, “it seems some beds are destined to play Cupid.”

Turning to the trembling couple, he declared, “Perhaps wisdom sometimes wears the mask of foolishness. Thomas, you shall apprentice as my steward, and if in a year’s time your love proves true…”

“Oh Father!” Rosalind flew into his arms while Thomas bowed deeply, joy radiating from his face.

And so it was that a foolish bed proved wisest of all, for love knows no boundaries save those we ourselves impose. Thomas and Rosalind were wed the following spring, their ceremony held in the very garden where love first bloomed.

As for the bed, it remained in Rosalind’s chamber, no longer a confidant of secret longings but a witness to dreams fulfilled. For as Shakespeare himself might say, “All’s well that ends well, and what seems foolish to the world may be wisdom to lovers’ hearts.”