‘The White Hart.’
The tavern was the place where the coach sent by her aunt was supposed to be waiting to convey her to Kent. There was no coach, of course, just as there was no aunt, but it had pleased her to pretend to Edward that she did not need his help. He had given her guilt money, enough for the journey and more. She could survive on her own. She had done so after both her parents had died of the pox and her brother and sister with them. Both the manor and the village of Hartmere had been decimated. It had been weeks and weeks before anyone had ventured to look for survivors and found her, foraging for food whilst her family rotted upstairs in the fetid heat of summer. She had been six years old.
Now she was sixteen but the emotions were the same; the fear so great she could only look at it out of the corner of her eye in case it would swallow her whole; the determination that the fear would not win no matter how monstrous. Now she had something else to survive for too: the babe growing inside her. She had to be strong for her child.
At first she had thought she might get work making lace, or pins. There was plenty of industry in Marlborough, though most of it was too crude for her, the tanning of hides and the spinning of coarse cloth. But she had a talent for embroidery and sewing and she had been well taught. Then she had realised that it was too dangerous; someone would see her. Edward would hear of it. But the world was a big place and she should have bigger ambitions. There was Salisbury, or Bath, or London, where she could lose herself amongst the thousands of others. London appealed to her; she had heard that a man—or a woman—could make a fortune in that febrile, exciting society that felt so different from anything she knew.
She would be able to keep the child if she was brave and followed her plan. Her hand strayed to her swollen belly. She had tried to hate the baby for ruining everything but to her surprise she had failed. Accustomed to thinking herself cold, she had found nothing but maternal warmth towards the unwanted child. It was hers and she loved it fiercely. If she were honest with herself, and she had no wish to be, she had loved its father as well. Loving him had been a mistake but perhaps she was not as strong as she liked to imagine herself. That, however, was no way to think when she was facing the future alone.
She thought of Mary then. Mary was lucky and the thought turned Alison’s stomach sour as it always did. Mary might be an orphan, but her status as the late Queen Katherine’s daughter would protect her for as long as there were people to remember it. Even if they did not care, the Seymours had to be seen to do right by her. They would provide her with a dowry, or the Queen would grant her an estate, or perhaps two. Alison closed her eyes and rested her head against the hard wood of the side of the cart. The Seymours might once have provided her with a modest dowry to encourage some rustic squire to take her to wife, but not now. She told herself she was glad and swallowed the bubbles of unhappiness that rose in her throat.
The cart crossed the river by the stone bridge, turned right into the high street and rolled past the town cross, weaving across the street to avoid a pile of brushwood stacked haphazardly in front of a house. Craning her neck, Alison could see the mound, with its tumbledown castle atop, cutting the skyline to the west. The castle belonged to Edward, too, but since his father’s fall from grace he did not have the funds to restore it and it had been slowly decaying for at least a hundred years. It was said that the mound beneath contained the body of the wizard Merlin, which Alison thought was a ridiculous idea. People were very credulous. Never had she believed in magic. Dame Margery babbled about witchcraft because she was frightened, of life, of those matters she could not explain. Alison had always considered life to be mundane and without any sort of enchantment except perhaps of the sort she had briefly found in her lover’s arms.
This was the end of the town where the tannery was situated and Alison drew a fold of her cloak across her face, trying in vain to blot out the smell of dung and urine and blood. Her stomach lurched with sickness. She had eaten nothing and so there was nothing to bring up; a blessing perhaps.
‘We are at the White Hart, mistress.’
The cart had stopped. The horse waited patiently, the carter less so. He had errands to run. He did not offer to help her down and when she jumped it was awkwardly, hampered by her pregnancy and the full skirts. She gave him a penny and no thanks.
There was no waiting coach in the inn yard. For all his haste, Alison could feel the carter pausing to watch her so she walked nonchalantly under the arch of the gatehouse and through the open door into the hall. It was dark enough to make her stumble after the light outside and the smoke from the open fire caught in her throat. A woman was standing by the hearth, stirring one of the pots that were hanging over the flames on an iron frame. A wooden hourglass stood on the table to the right of the fire. The sand in it had almost run through.
The woman glanced up as Alison came in. ‘There’s no work here. Not for the likes of you.’ Quick to judgement. Her gaze flickered over Alison’s stomach making her meaning explicitly clear. Like the carter, she knew. She had heard about the Seymour cousin, who was no more than a trollop.
‘I am waiting for a coach to London,’ Alison said haughtily. ‘I will sit if I may.’
The woman tossed her head. ‘Sit if you want.’
Go to hell if you want, Alison thought.
She woman offered no refreshment.
The bench was of wood but made slippery by the cushions balanced on its narrow surface. Alison sat gingerly. What now? She was waiting for a coach that would never come and, judging by the sly look in the landlady’s eye, the woman knew it.
A sudden clatter from the yard outside, the sound of voices in some imaginative curses, the splintering of wood made the woman exclaim and sent her hurrying out of the door towards the buttery, wiping her hands on her stained apron as she went. Quick as a flash, Alison slid off the bench and hurried over to the pot. Beef stew; it smelled good now that the nausea had subsided. She tried a spoonful, then another. Too hot, it scalded her mouth.
There was the sound of a latch lifting across the other side of the hall.
Caught.
She turned. The wind blew the smoke sideways, setting it swirling in the draught flowing between the two open doors. For a moment, Alison was blinded by it, eyes stinging, head aching. The world jolted as though she had missed a step in a flight of stairs and tripped over an unseen obstacle lurking in the dark below. She moved instinctively towards the door, seeking light and air and clarity.
The darkness cleared, the smoke disappeared. She was out in the street, but it was a different street in a different place completely. The sunlight was bright enough to make her shade her eyes. The air was full of noises. They assaulted her; shouts, crashing sounds, a roaring she could not begin to identify. Everything was shockingly intense, frighteningly loud and utterly unfamiliar, spiralling outwards into a spinning top of sensation. Her knees sagged. Her heart pounded.
‘Are you all right, love?’ A woman with a broad West Country accent had stopped in front of her. She was wearing very few clothes, legs and arms exposed, brown as a nut and wrinkled. It was disgusting.
‘You should take it easy,’ the woman said. ‘You can’t go rushing about in the hot sun when you’re pregnant, not in fancy dress like that.’ She pushed something into Alison’s hand, a bottle, made of a clear substance, not glass but something lighter.
‘Drink it,’ the woman said. Then, impatiently, meeting Alison’s blank gaze. ‘It’s only water, for God’s sake. I’m not trying to poison you.’
‘I…’ Alison did not know what she was trying to say but the sound was lost in a roar of noise as some sort of vehicle drove past. Beyond it Alison saw the façade of a house that looked familiar with its jetties and steep gabled roof. Familiar and yet different; the distortion was like looking through a glass window at something she knew and yet no longer recognised.
Alison dropped the bottle on the stone at her feet. It bounced. She turned and ran, back through the door of wha
t had been the tavern. Immediately, the sound died, shut off, the silence so loud it hurt her ears. The landlady was stirring the pot over the hearth. The smoke still stung her eyes.
‘There you are,’ the woman said. ‘There’s a man in the yard outside asking for you. Seymour livery.’ There was a grudging respect in her tone now.
Alison sank down onto the cushioned bench and raised a hand to her head. She could feel the sweat, sticky and hot, at the roots of her hair. She had no idea what had happened to her; whether she was mad, possessed, or sick. Perhaps those fools who believed in enchantments were not such fools after all. She had seen… What precisely had she seen? She had no notion.
‘Mistress Banestre?’
Edward’s squire did not look best pleased to have been obliged to come looking for her. He was a dark, surly fellow with a sly expression in his eyes. Alison had seen him before. Edward used him to arrange his amours.
‘She’s sick,’ the landlady said, sounding pleased and important. ‘It’s too hot for someone in her condition to be travelling.’
The man’s gaze flicked over Alison carelessly. It told her that he had seen plenty of light women come and go and her condition was by no means unusual.
‘She’ll manage,’ he said, ‘if she wants to please Sir Edward.’
‘I was not expecting you,’ Alison said coldly. ‘Sir Edward did not mention sending a carriage.’
The man smirked. ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl, then? Sir Edward’s changed his mind. He’s not done with you yet.’
He put a hand beneath her elbow, levering her to her feet, steering her towards the stable yard. His grip felt like a manacle on her arm. Suddenly Alison was desperate to escape. She could not give herself to Edward again when he treated her with such contempt.
She threw a glance over her shoulder towards the other door, the one out into the street. What future lay behind that one in a place so foreign and strange? The servant had her in a tight grip, half dragging, half lifting her towards the carriage and, suddenly, now that it was too late, Alison wished she had found out. She struggled but the man only laughed. And then the door slammed and the darkness closed about her.
Mary, 1560
I missed Alison. It surprised me. I was growing up and the gulf between the younger children and me seemed accentuated by her departure. Wolf Hall was quiet. No new waifs and strays came to take Alison’s place. My lessons with the chaplain and with Liz Aiglonby continued and, in between, I avoided Dame Margery and spent any spare moment in the forest.
I had never been afraid of the forest despite the nightmare that had been my introduction to its secrets. Forests were full of concealment and surprise and I had known that from the beginning. I took delight in exploring Savernake. It was by no means an empty land. It seethed with people: Sir Edward’s ranger, the foresters, the villagers whose pigs grubbed for nuts in the undergrowth in the autumn, the poachers who risked their lives to take the Queen’s deer, the thieves, gypsies, runaways, witches. I saw them all and avoided them as much as I could, slipping between the trees like a wraith, like a hind.
Now that I had a bedchamber to myself, it was easy enough to slip away at night, simply by climbing down the ivy that covered the old brick wall of the manor. I knew every ancient oak in the forest now including the one that marked the boundary of Edward’s land with its huge bulging belly. It was rumoured to be the oldest tree in the woods, already ancient when the Conqueror had claimed Savernake along with the rest of the kingdom, a tree in possession of old magic. I had heard Dame Margery whispering to the scullery maid, with many gestures to ward off evil, that the witches sought its power to summon the devil. I could imagine that they did and I shuddered to think of it. Old magic was dangerous and unpredictable. Even though I had never dealt in it myself, I had an instinct for it, never knowing where my knowledge had come from, only knowing that I saw and heard things that others did not. However, the threat of heresy, of witchcraft, haunted my every step. I thought of my mother and longed for an ordinary life, free of visions, untouched by magic.
One day, when I had tired of my lessons with the chaplain, who was even more tedious than usual, I asked permission to visit the privy and rather than return to the schoolroom went instead out into the garden and through the orchard gate into the forest. It was high summer, hot and heavy. The closeness of the air made me want to sleep. I followed a track through the dreamy woods, until I came to the top of hill where another of the old oaks grew, the Duke’s Vaunt, named for my uncle Protector Somerset, who had liked to hunt here. From there the view was wide out across the treetops and down to the cottages below, where a number of youths and maids cavorted naked in the pond, their shrieks of excitement and pleasure floating up to me. What I saw of their sport made me feel even hotter and I plunged back into the woods feeling that I was spying. Instead, I found a warm clearing used by the charcoal burners for one of their kilns. The sun cut through the trees and the wild raspberries grew and I sat down to eat some. They were sweet and burst on my tongue like sunshine and I ate too many, greedy for them, until my tummy ached.
I must have fallen asleep after that, although I don’t remember. I do remember waking because it was sudden and frightening and there was a pain in my head that felt like a shout.
‘Cat! Wake up!’
It was Darrell.
‘Danger to you. Run. Hide…’
I didn’t question. Already I could hear it, the clash of steel on steel, brutal, closer by the second. I dived through brambles, cowering behind the widespread roots of a nearby tree, shaking.
They had reached the clearing. There were only two men, for all the noise and fury, but they fought with a ruthless intensity that was terrifying. I watched through the veil of bracken and nettle. The light glanced off the sword blades in a run of fire. The crack of metal on metal bounced off the trees. It was not like anything I had seen before; I’d seen men fight, in practice, as a game, even in earnest when blood ran too hot, but it had not been like this. These men were dressed strangely and their swords were like none I had ever known.
The conflict was as brief as it was brutal. The shorter and stockier of the two men was lighter on his feet than his bulk might have suggested. He parried a blow aimed for his neck and counter-attacked, dancing forward on the balls of his feet, beneath the guard of his opponent to slide his blade between his ribs.
Blood spurted. The stench of it made me want to retch. I had seen wounds before. I had even seen death in my short life. It was ever present in the pecked corpses that hung from the gibbets at crossroads to the beggars dying in the filth of the gutter. It stalked childbirth and shadowed every step we all took. It had taken both my parents before I was a year old. Yet to witness such violence in death was still unusual for me.
The murderer looked around quick, furtive, and then dragged the body roughly towards the kiln. As I heard the crack of bones, I stuffed my hand into my mouth, biting down on my knuckles to crush my screams. He was trying to push the corpse into the furnace, which glowed with the sullen light of old burning, but the body would not fit. Finally, with much cursing under his breath, he managed to wedge it inside. Grey smoke belched suddenly from the open roof. Soon, I knew, it would start to smell of burning flesh.
Despite my attempts to keep still and quiet I must have made a sound. I was shaking, my hand pressed to my mouth to keep the sickness down. The murderer’s head came up. He turned slowly, like a hunting dog scenting the air. I saw his face clearly then, the lank hair darkened with sweat and his narrowed blue eyes. He withdrew his sword from the corpse, cleaning it with great deliberation on the grass. Then he took a step towards my hiding place and I flattened myself even closer to the roots like a cowering mouse. There was no sound but the slam of my heart against my ribs as I waited for him to find me. I could feel Darrell with me. He was afraid also, but there was anger in him too, and frustration, and despair. His feelings seemed to sweep through mine, merging with them, flowing like a tide. Any moment now
I knew we would be discovered.
The ground vibrated the same way it had when I had seen the apparition of the woman on horseback only this time the noise was louder, the vibrations more intense. The man’s head snapped around. His breath hissed in on a fierce whisper.
‘King’s men!’
He ran.
The air was full of noise now, the thunder of hooves raising dust from the track. I saw the flash of men through the trees, cavalry, with buff coats and crimson sashes, a whole column of them. I waited until they had gone and the world had turned quiet and then I waited some more. I could not have moved had I wished it. I was paralysed with terror and confusion.
Stiffly, I stood and stretched, feeling the tension slowly leach from my body leaving me exhausted. Darrell had gone. I felt light-headed, as though my mind was empty.
King’s men…
Yet we had a queen now, Elizabeth, and before her another queen. There were no king’s men in England any more and had not been for more than a decade.
I walked home very slowly along the track. It didn’t occur to me that the riders might return. I made no attempt to hide. The forest was in one of its silent moods when it felt as though nothing lived, nothing moved in it. I felt dizzy and drained of emotion. I placed one foot in front of the other and thus I got back to Wolf Hall.
‘You imagined it, lovey,’ Liz said later. I was lying on my bed and she was stroking my hair, soothing me, as though I were still a child. ‘Doubtless you were asleep and dreaming. Raspberries can give you nightmares.’
All the raspberries had given me was an ache in my stomach. However, I said nothing. When I had arrived back at Wolf Hall I realised for the first time that my skirts were in shreds and that there were leaves in my hair and dirt on my face. I had had to come up with some explanation and I thought it best to stick as closely to the truth as I could. So I said that I had witnessed a fight in the woods and seen a troop of soldiers, and had run from them in terror.
The Phantom Tree Page 5