The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  Adam sat down beside her. ‘Look at this.’ He opened a file. ‘Will Fenner in the flesh.’

  It was a wonderful portrait in the sense of being a great example of the artist’s skill but even so it chilled Alison to the bone. All the arrogance of an Elizabethan nobleman was captured there in the tilt of the head, the narrowed eyes and the faint smile that curled Will’s lips. He was dressed in black but the heaviness was lifted by the sparkle of diamonds. In the background sat Middlecote and its lush acres as a testament to his wealth.

  ‘Handsome?’ Adam asked, looking at her quizzically.

  Alison shook her head. ‘No. Too cruel.’ She closed the folder and pushed Will Fenner away. ‘Presumably that wasn’t painted by Francisco Estense?’

  ‘No,’ Adam said, ‘Federico Zuccari. He visited the Elizabethan court in 1574 and was commissioned to paint the Queen and Lord Leicester.’

  ‘Typical of Will Fenner to want the best,’ Alison said.

  ‘Here’s something from the Elizabethan court records,’ Adam said, passing her another sheet of paper. ‘Apparently, in the summer of 1566, William Fenner petitioned Elizabeth I to grant him various manors local to Middlecote on the strength of being affianced to a Mary Seymour. They had belonged to her father and Fenner claimed them in her name.’

  Alison’s mouth fell open. ‘Will Fenner planned to marry Mary?’

  ‘It would seem so,’ Adam said. ‘It doesn’t seem to have come off, though. I mean, there’s no record of such a marriage and he didn’t get the estates either. Elizabeth threw out his claim and called him a greedy knave.’

  Alison laughed. ‘It sounds as though she had his measure.’

  ‘What’s really interesting, though,’ Adam said slowly, ‘is that only a couple of months later, Elizabeth received another petition for the restitution of Mary Seymour’s lands and fortune, this time allegedly from Mary herself.’

  ‘Mary wrote to the Queen?’ Alison said. She tried to work it out. Mary would have been about nineteen in 1566, she supposed, plenty old enough for Will Fenner to plan to marry her if it was to his advantage. He seemed to have been the sort of man with an eye to the main chance and if Mary were ever restored to her father’s estates she would be a rich heiress indeed.

  ‘The letter doesn’t survive, unfortunately,’ Adam said, ‘or we would know for sure that this is the same Mary Seymour who was Katherine Parr’s daughter. As it is, the evidence is circumstantial but strong since she is claiming the estates that were once the property of Thomas Seymour. She made no mention of Fenner, apparently. He was in gaol at the time and it was his half-brother, Thomas, who presented the petition on Mary’s behalf, which is odd since Will and Thomas Fenner were violently opposed in just about everything.’

  Alison’s lips twitched. ‘Maybe Mary traded in one brother for the other,’ she said. It seemed unlikely that the meek and mild Mary she had known would do anything so calculating, but she liked the idea. Perhaps Mary had outgrown her naivety.

  ‘It’s interesting that you should say that,’ Adam said slowly, ‘because later in his life Sir Thomas Fenner, as he became, did receive some of the former Seymour lands from the Queen. It does feel as though there had to be some connection to Mary.’

  ‘What else do you know about Thomas?’ Alison asked.

  Adam shook his head. ‘Very little. He’s an elusive guy. It’s odd the way that right from the start he drops out of the record for years at a time and then reappears. There’s a book of local legends that even suggests he possessed magic because he was said to appear and disappear all the time. It’s only in later life that he settled down, tended to his estates and became a respected local gentleman.’

  ‘And what about Will Fenner?’ Alison asked. ‘What happened to him? Didn’t you say he fell off his horse or something?’

  Adam laughed. ‘Oh, there is a great story about him. He went thoroughly to the devil, mired in debt, hated by his relatives and enemies alike. You remember me telling you he was reputed to have killed his illegitimate child? Well, it’s said that Will Fenner died one day when he was out hunting because the ghost of the slain infant appeared and startled his horse, which threw him. Legend has a way of meting out justice.’

  Alison shuddered. ‘How horrible.’

  ‘They were an unlucky family all round,’ Thomas said. ‘Eleanor Fenner was widowed young and the mother, Agnes Fenner, née Essex, drowned. Apparently she slipped on the frozen grass one winter and fell through the ice on one of the Middlecote fishponds. A nasty end. It was said that no one heard her cries for help, but I wonder.’ He tapped his pen on the table. ‘She was reputed to have been a very unpleasant woman. Perhaps no one wanted to help her.’

  Alison shuddered. ‘As you say, fate has a way of meting out justice,’ she said.

  Adam opened his tablet and tapped to call up an image. ‘Thomas Fenner,’ he said. ‘You can see a resemblance to Will.’

  ‘Nice,’ Alison said. ‘He’s better-looking than Will. Will was more classically handsome but something ugly inside him spoiled it. Although I suppose it’s easy to say that with the wisdom of hindsight.’

  She looked at Adam. ‘Are there any other records for Mary?’

  Adam shook his head. ‘Nothing but conjecture. As is often the case when someone disappears, there are ideas and myths. One has Mary joining a band of pirates in Ireland, another that she married a nobleman at the court of King James I. Neither seems likely. The only artefact ever found that was said to belong to Mary is a golden ring which was once Thomas Seymour’s. It is inscribed with the words “What I have I hold”.’

  ‘Where is the ring now?’ Alison asked. She remembered it; remembered Mary sitting on the bed at Wolf Hall counting out her pitiful belongings. How she had scorned Mary for her attachment to her dead parents’ meagre legacy. How jealous she had been to be so unkind to her, how lost, how unhappy.

  Adam was reading from his tablet. ‘The Seymour ring was in the possession of the Seymour-Hart family for many generations. It was given to a museum in the 1920s.’

  ‘The Harts,’ Alison said. ‘I’ve heard of them. I think they were yet more cousins. I’ll check the family tree.’ She stirred. ‘But you don’t think either of those stories about Mary are true,’ she said, ‘yet there’s no record of her death, or a grave.’

  It was only what she had found when she had been trying to discover more about Mary Seymour’s life but still she felt disappointed. If there had been anything to find she was sure that Adam would have found it. It was starting to feel as though in chasing Mary to find Arthur, she was searching for two phantoms not one.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about the box as well,’ Adam said. ‘And the riddle of the contents. Had you had any more ideas on that?’

  ‘Not really,’ Alison said. ‘I still think it is a puzzle of some sort and I’ve been trying to decipher it.’ She hesitated. ‘There was the green thread and the wire, for instance. I wondered if it could be a place name like Fiddler’s Green, or something, but when I looked it up I couldn’t find any family connection to any villages called that…’ She stopped, feeling the hopelessness of it overwhelm her. To start with the challenge had almost felt like fun, a riddle she could solve and each step would bring her closer to Arthur. Now, though, she felt as though she had hit a dead end.

  ‘Let’s play a game,’ Adam said. ‘It might prompt a few ideas.’

  ‘A game?’ Alison stared at him.

  ‘Yeah.’ Adam was smiling at her. ‘A game of chess. There was a chess piece in the box, wasn’t there? Perhaps a bit of thought association will help you.’ Then, as Alison still hesitated, ‘Don’t pretend you don’t know how. We played it before, do you remember? You said your father had taught you when you were little.’

  ‘Did I?’ Alison felt the brush of time over her skin. She had had no recollection of telling Adam anything at all about her childhood before she had gone to live at Wolf Hall. Suddenly, she was scared. She was walking such a fine line in what she
disclosed and what she kept secret. If there were something she had forgotten, if she made a mistake, Adam would guess. It laid a layer of guilt over the discomfort she already felt at deceiving him. The closer they became the worse it made her feel.

  She followed him into the living room and watched as he took out a chessboard and set it up on the low table in front of the fire. It was a nice set, wooden like the piece in the box, and obviously a family favourite as the pieces were worn smooth from years of handling and the squares on the board had faded over time.

  ‘It was my father’s,’ Adam said, looking up and seeing Alison’s look of appreciation.

  They played for a little while in silence. Adam won the first game easily. Alison was trying to remember, reaching into the past, memories flickering through her mind, the fire, the dogs sleeping, the peace in the house, her father moving the pieces.

  Chess is a game of skill and cunning. She could hear his voice. You need a strategy to win, as you do in life.

  If only he had lived, matters would have been so very different, but he had left her. Both her parents had. It had not been so notable in those days but it had been as painful as any loss. She swallowed hard and concentrated on watching Adam move the knight across the board. Two squares horizontally and one square vertically. She stopped.

  Two squares horizontally and one vertically…

  ‘Ali?’ Adam touched her hand. ‘What is it?’

  ‘The knight in chess is unusual, isn’t it?’ Alison said. ‘I mean, it can move in different directions?’

  ‘It can go either the way I moved it or it can go two squares vertically and one square horizontally,’ Adam said. He picked up the piece and demonstrated. Alison grabbed her bag and took out her tablet, her fingers shaking a little in her eagerness. Diana had said that the holly chess piece symbolised hope but that it also might be a clue to something else, a family name or a location…

  Two counties horizontally from Wiltshire to the west was Devon. There was nothing to the north but the sea. Two counties to the east and one vertically took her to Hertfordshire. To the south was Surrey. But what would happen if she travelled one county vertically and two horizontally? That threw up plenty of other options…

  She started to key in the name Fiddler’s Green and Hertfordshire, then realised that she had already checked the location of all the villages of that name in England and found nothing that connected any of them to Arthur. It didn’t matter which counties she checked. She did not know the name of the place she was looking for.

  She slammed the cover of the tablet shut in frustration. If Arthur had been fostered with a family in any of those counties there was no way to find him, not without their name or a definite location.

  ‘It was just an idea,’ she said, in response to Adam’s look of enquiry. ‘I thought the way that the knight moved might be a clue to the location of the person the riddle is about.’

  Adam looked intrigued. ‘Where are you starting from?’ he asked.

  ‘Wiltshire, I think,’ Alison said. She tried to imagine what Mary might have done when laying her clues. Surely she would start from the place where they had both grown up?

  ‘That would take you into Wales in the west,’ Adam said, ‘or Buckinghamshire to the east.’

  Alison doubted that Edward would have sent their son into Wales. He had no connections there.

  ‘What other stringed instruments were around in the Tudor period?’ She asked. ‘Viols, rebecs, dulcimers…’ She was keying them rapidly into the tablet. None of the them came up as place names.

  ‘Psaltery,’ Adam said. ‘Lute… um… citterne?’

  There were various places names that began with ‘Lut’ but none of them were musically related. Alison rubbed her forehead. She felt as though she was missing something.

  ‘Harp,’ Adam said suddenly. ‘I think harps could also be strung in catgut.’

  Alison felt a little shiver along her spine. She typed the name Harper’s Green into the place name finder. One location came up. Her heart leaped with excitement and then she saw it was in Northamptonshire, not in any of the counties they had identified.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Adam was watching her.

  ‘There is a place called Harper’s Green,’ Alison said slowly, ‘but it’s not where I’d hoped. It’s Northamptonshire, not Buckinghamshire My guess about the chess piece must be wrong.’

  ‘They’re next door to each other,’ Adam said. ‘Perhaps there was a boundary change? I mean the counties have all changed quite a bit since the sixteenth century.’

  Alison’s fingers were shaking. She typed in ‘Buckinghamshire boundary changes’ and checked the list that came up:

  ‘Transferred to Oxfordshire 1884… Transferred from Hertfordshire 1843…’

  There it was: Harper’s Green, transferred to Northamptonshire under changes made in 1884, but, in the sixteenth century, firmly within the county of Buckingham, as it was known then.

  Alison could hear her heart beating in long slow strokes now. It felt as though it shook her entire body. She could barely click on the link to the village, she felt so faint and breathless.

  Harper’s Green was a deserted village, she read. There was a long history of the place from pre-Conquest to the nineteenth century. The manor house had been built in the Elizabethan period to an E-shaped plan with gabled wings and a battlemented central porch. It had been gutted by fire in 1875 and subsequently left as a ruin. The thirteenth-century church still stood and was the burial place for many members of the Tercel family, who had originally come to England after the Conquest and remained lords of the manor of Harper’s Green for seven hundred years, only dying out in the male line in 1776.

  Tercel…

  It was an unusual name. She typed it into her tablet and waited what seemed like hours for the results to come up.

  A tercel was a peregrine falcon.

  With crystal clarity Alison recalled the wording of the list Adam had given her:

  ‘One plate from a falcon.’

  It was curious how the unravelling of one clue suddenly seemed to spin out into a pattern, the links finally weaving together to create a fragile whole. Almost she did not dare to examine it in case it vanished beneath too close a look.

  ‘A twig of wood, badly rotted, but identified as Rosmarinus officinalis (rosemary). For remembrance. You see, Alison, I did not forget you.

  A silver button engraved with the shape of a bear. For your son Arthur, named for courage.

  One hammered silver penny dating from 1560, showing the profile of Queen Elizabeth I on the obverse and a quartered shield of arms on the reverse. Very worn. The year your son was born.

  One woollen thread in green tied to a piece of catgut. For Harper’s Green.

  One knight from a chess set carved from holly. One county north, two east.

  One plate from a falcon. For the Tercels.

  So now she knew. Mary had not forgotten her promise. After ten long years, she knew where Arthur had gone.

  She sat quite still, the tablet forgotten in her lap while she thought about it. For a moment she felt nothing, no emotion at all, and then a huge burst of elation swept over her and she turned to Adam, hugging him tight.

  ‘Hey.’ He sounded surprised, then pleased, at the ferociousness of her emotion. He put his arms round her and hugged her back. The tablet dug into her ribs, but she ignored it. She was swept by so many feelings she could not identify and separate them: relief, joy, excitement, hope and a love so fierce it shook her.

  ‘Ali,’ Adam said, his voice changing into tenderness and she realised that there were tears on her cheeks and he was wiping them gently away with his thumb. She didn’t want him asking her questions. She did not want to explain anything of how she felt. She could not.

  ‘I think we’ve done it,’ she said shakily. ‘I think I know where to find him. Arthur Tercel, Harper’s Green.’

  Adam was smiling. He could have no concept of what this really meant to her, bu
t she realised that the reason he was so happy was because she was happy.

  ‘We’ll go and find him,’ he said. ‘We could go to Harper’s Green tomorrow. There’s bound to be something left of the ruined village, perhaps even the manor. We can check out the history of the Tercel family.’

  He sounded so pleased for her. Alison’s heart swelled with love and gratitude and utter misery. She could not bear it, could not endure Adam’s happiness when she knew what it truly meant. Now she could go to find Arthur. Now she possessed the knowledge and soon she would have the means.

  She did not want to think about it so instead she kissed Adam, putting all she was feeling into it, and the emotion blazed between them and it was beautiful. It left her reeling.

  Only, later, when Adam was asleep and she wasn’t because her mind was too active to rest, the sadness came back. She slid closer into the curve of Adam’s shoulder and heard the steady beat of his heart and inhaled the scent of his skin. She loved him. She thought he might love her too. And that was enough to shatter her heart because all unwitting, Adam had helped her to find Arthur, the one person for whom she would leave him.

  Chapter 25

  Mary, 1566

  They let Will go. When it came to the murder of the child it was the midwife’s word against his. Mother Barnes had never met Will before, nor had she ever been to Middlecote Hall. In addition, she was old and poor and Will, despite the wrath of his enemies, had powerful friends. They said she was confused, mistaken, and that there was no evidence to support her wild accusations. Will rode back to Middlecote on a new horse and a wave of defiance and pride. No one, knowing him, would have expected him to go quietly and he did not. That evening he called his cronies around, those he had left, and drank and gambled late into the night.

  It was impossible to sleep. Not only was the house in uproar but also I was too afraid. There was such a febrile atmosphere at Middlecote. Eleanor was to depart for Yorkshire and her wedding in only ten days’ time and after that I had no notion what might happen. Lady Fenner had intimated she might leave Wiltshire to return to her own manors in Kent. She could not control Will, nor did I have the sense that she wanted to any longer. She, like the rest of us, saw he would go to hell in his own way.