She shuffled her buttocks a little farther over the edge. Breathed in, to fill herself with the void in advance, so to speak. To join it by degrees, as if such a thing were possible.
Don’t look down. Just do it.
Please, God, don’t let me scream.
As she leaned forwards, a sharp corner of his letter in her bodice prodded her breast.
I’ll read it just once more before I jump.
She unfolded the paper, still warm from her skin.
Sweetest Zeal,…I would tear out my heart and send it if I could…
She rocked in misery. She had shouted at him when he told her, had blamed him for pig-headedness that had brought about this horror. Even without other cause, she deserved to die for that cruelty.
…I meant what I said. I will stay true…
And so will I!
I regret only that I did not make you take me with you, regardless of the dangers. I should have followed secretly and stowed away! I would have worked in the fields beside you.
She held his letter against her face, breathed in the smell of damp paper and the wax seal, imagined that she could also smell a trace of him.
I will be true to my vow, she thought. Faithful until death.
She saw the fine, lean lines of his hand and how the tendons shifted under his skin as he moved the pen. Her fingers searched like a dowser’s wand for the exact places he had touched.
She could not wait seven years. She could not wait even seven months.
She wondered if he would feel the shock in his own sinews, lift his head as if at an unexplained noise.
3
‘It won’t work!’ At the foot of the ladder, Philip Wentworth stood panting and clinging to a rung as if holding himself upright. ‘Did you hear me? It won’t work! Not high enough!’
She closed her eyes. ‘Go away!’
‘I’m coming up.’ Without waiting for her answer, he began to climb the ladder.
Jump now! she warned herself. Or you’ll have to endure another night like last night, all over again. But if she did jump, he would now feel responsible.
She sighed and leaned back. It was beyond belief that the old estate hermit should choose now, of all times, to turn sociable. She heard him stop on the way up to puff and wheeze. Then his head appeared above the parapet. She looked away, pinched with desperate fury. He heaved himself onto the roof and settled beside her on the edge. After a moment, his breathing eased and he gave a little cough.
They sat in silence. The intense greens and yellows of the beech hanger began to bleach in the growing brightness of the sun.
‘So?’ she asked at last. She still could not look at him.
Silently, he tossed a fragment of moss out into the air and watched it fall into the garden below. ‘You’re waiting for argument?’
‘I’m not a fool.’
‘But I understand the pull of the edge. If you’re secretly hoping to be dissuaded, I’m not your man.’
‘Then why did you climb up?’
‘If you wish it, I will, of course, be glad to argue that you’re young, beautiful and much needed on this estate. I will even, if you like, add that the world is precious, that despair is a sin and that taking your own life is a worse one.’ Another clump of moss arched through the air. ‘I’ve always wondered what fool decreed that suicide was a crime to be punished by death.’
She finally turned to look at him. ‘Why come up?’
‘To advise you the best way to do it.’
‘You’ve come to help me kill myself?’
‘You sound outraged.’
She shrugged, then shook her head.
‘Don’t mistake me. Nothing would please me more than to talk you out of dying.’
‘Hah!’ she said with grim triumph.
‘Is there no other way? At seventeen you haven’t begun.’
‘I knew you were lying.’
‘I need to be certain,’ he said quickly. ‘And don’t be a fool! This roof is not high enough for a clean death.’
She leaned. Closed her eyes.
‘Oh, go to the devil, then!’ he said sharply. ‘But I tell you, you will survive! Most likely crippled and helpless as a babe, depending on others to eat, to dress…even to change your soiled clout. I know, I’ve seen it.’
She opened her eyes and looked down. ‘What else do you suggest, then? Must I drown myself in one of the fish ponds? Or impale myself on a hook?’
‘There are other ways.’
‘Believe me, I’ve considered them all.’
‘I very much doubt that.’
‘What can you know, living here…? Forgive me, I’m too desperate to be civil.’
‘I’m not in the least offended.’ He stared at his hands while he opened and closed them five times. ‘I understand, madam, that this is difficult for you. But it is not altogether easy for me.’
‘All it will cost you is words of advice.’
‘But my advice involves confession, you see.’ He fell silent and stared moodily across the valley to the slopes of Hawk Ridge.
She studied him sideways with a surge of curiosity. He had come with the estate, like its fields and trees. A rent-paying, gentleman sojourner, already in residence when she had arrived as a fourteen-year-old bride.
‘I can’t,’ he said suddenly, with decision. ‘Forgive me. But I had sworn never to reveal myself to anyone here.’ He prepared to rise.
‘Even when it concerns her life?’
‘Even then.’
‘But if I am dead, I will have to keep your secret. Your confession will cost you nothing while it will oblige me.’
He sighed and looked at her at last. She saw a profound uneasiness in his eyes. ‘Very well. You prevail.’ He levered himself to his feet.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘With your permission, I would like to continue this discussion at a lower altitude.’
‘If you are toying with me, I shall jump right now.’
Giving her a cool look that made her heart jump against her ribs, he slapped at the back of his long black coat. ‘Don’t threaten me, mistress. I said I’d tell and so I shall.’
He held out a hand to help her rise. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you to go down. And I’d be grateful if you’ll do the same for me. Will you come fishing?’
Zeal followed Wentworth to retrieve his pole and sack from where he had dropped them by the lowest pond. In silence, they crossed the sluice bridge, then followed the muddy track downstream towards the mill.
How did I come to be here? she thought.
‘You don’t want my advice,’ he said at last. ‘You want the advice of my former self.’
She looked sideways at his strong nose and pugnacious chin. Though he was not as tall as John, and was a little stiffened by age, she had to walk fast to keep up with his purposeful strides.
‘And what was that?’ she asked.
‘An adventurer, you might say.’
‘I thought you were going to say you had been an executioner, or a footpad, or a murderer.’
‘Who told you that an adventurer is not all those things?’
‘Do you have a gun?’
He gave her an amused look. ‘Can’t shake you loose from the main point, can I? Yes, I have a gun. Most likely rusted solid among my nightshirts and stockings. I also have a dagger, a Spanish rapier, a dented buckler, an old-fashioned broad sword, and a poison ring bought in Italy. You can take your pick of ’em.’
He plunged off the track down a narrow, nettle-lined path along the very edge of the bank. They passed a hectic narrow rush where the river first stretched over hidden rocks like pulled sugar candy, then crashed into turmoil.
He is toying with me, she thought as she slipped on the mud and yanked her skirts free of the bushes.
Around a smooth elbow of a bend, the Shir widened into a polished pool rimmed with rushes and weed.
She stopped to untangle her hair from an overhanging branch. ‘What i
s a dangerous adventurer doing here at Hawkridge pretending to be a fisherman?’
‘I take exception to your saying that I pretend to be a fisherman…here we are.’ He stopped and peered down into the water.
Though he lived in her house, as many solitary people lodged in houses not their own, she had never before had opportunity to observe him. When not out fishing, he kept to his own two small rooms. He ate alone and refused all invitations to join the house family in the hall. He never came to prayers in the chapel. From time to time, he had shared a pipe in the gardens after supper with John and Doctor Bowler, the estate parson. Infrequently, he visited their neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet at High House, where Zeal and some of her house family had been lodging since the fire. But Zeal had never met him there. She had had to feed her curiosity with distant glimpses of his still figure by the edge of one piece of water or another.
He was at least sixty years old. Still a large man. Thick through the chest, but the shins beneath his stockings were pared down to sinew and bone. The rest of him between neck and knee was hidden under his bulky old-fashioned coat. The coat itself was tailored from fine wool and silk but had worn as smooth and green as a horsefly’s tail on the collars and cuffs.
A dangerous old man, she thought with interest. He must not think that I trust him or his promises. He won’t outwit me, whatever he might intend. I can’t let him.
She rubbed at the welts of nettle stings that had sprung up on the backs of her hands. ‘How must I die, then?’
Wentworth leaned his pole against a waterside oak and studied the undulating scales of light on the greenish surface. He gave a small grunt of satisfaction. Then he threw a handful of maggots into the water and returned to sit on the exposed roots of the oak. ‘We must wait till they recover from our arrival and start to feed again. Please sit down. You’ll frighten the fish.’
She continued to stand. ‘Were you also a hangman? And a highway man?’
‘I was a plain soldier,’ he said, with an edge of irritation in his voice. ‘Will that satisfy you? And my first concern is pain…’ He held up a warning hand and jerked his chin towards the water. ‘Expostulate if you must, but sotto voce… Those bent on dying imagine only the end of suffering but ignore the anguish of the road to oblivion. Believe me, the soul clings on by its fingernails. I’ve seen men live for days after a battle when you could barely recognize them as human.’
‘Master Wentworth, don’t imagine you can frighten me. I think you’re trying to change my mind after all!’
‘As a friend, how could I not? Quiet, I beg you!’ he hissed.
‘You gave me your word!’
After a moment, he replaced the jar in his sack and stood to face her. ‘Well then. The truth. I admit that it pains me to see a lovely young creature determined to throw her life away. Nevertheless, I accept your decision.’ He collected his pole again. ‘Therefore, we must find you the kindliest way. Shall we go back? I’m no longer of a mind to fish.’
Zeal’s heart began to race. She felt suddenly more terrified even than on the roof. Then, she had at least known what she meant to do.
They walked in silence until they regained the sluice at the bottom of the fish ponds and had scrambled up the shallow bank to the edge of the lowest pond. For a moment, they gazed up the length of the three ponds and their fringe of sea nymphs.
‘They do look absurd here, but I love them,’ said Zeal.
The statues stood mostly upright, though some of the plinths had begun to tilt in the mud of the banks. At the top of the highest pond, Nereus, the father of the nymphs, leaned forward as if trying to show his dolphin something in the water.
‘I thought Harry was mad when all those carts arrived from London, but they’ve settled in like the rustics they originally were.’ Zeal stroked the marble thigh of the nymph Panope, then smiled when she spied a hen’s nest between the marble feet. ‘I imagine they’re happy to be back where they belong. I would be.’
She turned her head to see Wentworth watching her. With the morning sun behind him, the grey stubble on his chin glistened. Dried oak bark and pieces of leaf had stuck to his ancient coat.
‘You’re not ready to die,’ he said. ‘You overflow with life. You can’t deceive me.’
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I have reasoned it through, again and again. You won’t change my mind. Don’t make it even harder for me.’
‘Why are you so set?’
‘That’s not your concern. But it’s my only reasonable choice.’
‘I’m offering a dreadful service. You owe me the truth.’ He bent to pick a large grub from the grass at his feet and tossed it onto the pond.
In silence, she watched the spreading circles, then the violent spasm on the surface as a pike struck.
He cursed under his breath. ‘You will love again, you know! Even if John Nightingale is never able to return.’
‘Don’t presume!’
‘Grant my age some small advantage! Please believe me – love comes and goes without apparent reason. You think you will never love again. Then it strikes…’
‘You’re wrong to think…’
‘Your heart was a desert and then it bloomed. And now you fear the rain will never fall again. Is that why you despair?’
‘How dare you!’
‘Forgive me,’ he said at once. ‘But I do not understand your rush to self-destruction. Nightingale may come back…in spite of what I said…Men have been pardoned before, exiles have returned home. They have even survived sea voyages, as I myself can testify. The man’s ship has scarcely cleared Southampton. Why not defer despair for a year or two?’
Zeal backed away from this unexpected outburst of passion. She hugged herself tightly. ‘I can’t afford to wait.’
‘You’re pregnant.’
‘How do you know? Is it so clear to see?’
‘You just told me.’ He threw another grub into the pond. ‘Is it Harry’s or John’s?’
‘John’s.’
‘Does he know?’
‘When he left, I wasn’t sure.’
Wentworth studied the water for some time. ‘Could it not possibly be husband Harry’s?’
‘Never! By my own testimony!’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘I didn’t see the danger then.’ She laid both hands on her belly. ‘Like a fool, I swore falsely, as Harry asked me. I lied under oath and swore that I was still a virgin, that the marriage was never consummated. And Harry was judged never to have been my true husband.’
‘Ah,’ Wentworth said. ‘I see. I wondered at the ease of the annulment.’
‘So, whoever is deemed to be its father, the babe is still a bastard. It can never inherit this estate nor anything else. What sort of life could it have? A beggar! And it’s my fault, for lying! I should never have agreed!’
Wentworth raised a hand to try to calm her.
‘As for me…a criminal either way.’ She shivered. ‘Either perjurer or fornicator, no escape. And our parish minister is violent against all odious depravity…unlike our own forgiving Doctor Bowler. Doctor Gifford will want to see me naked at the back of a cart.’
‘I don’t think…’
‘But I have thought! Again and again. Carefully, reasonably. Can you see a sworn virgin turned unwed mother trying to act as the mistress of an estate? Always assuming that the estate is not made forfeit! But I can’t kill John’s child secretly and still live myself. I can’t have the child and survive the consequences. Death is the only reasonable way!’
‘I have a kindlier way.’
She waited, eyes closed, as if he had offered to deliver the fatal blow himself.
‘Marry me.’
4
‘There you are!’ Rachel, a ripe twenty-four, had acquired Zeal as her mistress while the latter was still a Hackney schoolgirl and did not intend to change her manner just because the girl now owned an estate in some godforsaken corner of Hampshire. ‘I left your tray on your bed back at Hig
h House. Did you want me to do something with this?’
‘Not yet!’ Zeal snatched back the letter she had left to be sent to John after her death.
‘Your skirt hem is covered in mud.’ Rachel did not quite dare to ask where she had been so early. However, Zeal felt curious eyes on her back as they trudged up the track that led to High House.
‘We both have wet feet now,’ observed Rachel.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Zeal had said.
Wentworth flinched. ‘Is it my age?’
She shook her head.
‘The only ridicule I fear is yours,’ he said. ‘I meant the form of marriage only. Please don’t fear that there’s any need for love. Warm friendship, perhaps, in time.’
‘No.’
‘Is it my modest circumstances, then?’
‘At least you can offer me a set of fine fishing rods. All I would bring you in jointure are a bastard, ridicule, a burned-out house and a few sheep. It’s a fine gesture, but I can’t accept.’
‘Don’t mistake me, Zeal. I’m not a man for fine gestures. I’m old and lonely. You would do me a great favour.’
She stepped back and collided with the nymph. ‘You know very well which way the favour lies. To marry a woman with a bastard in her belly, abandoned by both husband and lover…you won’t survive the laughter.’
‘Laughter has never concerned me so long as I get what I want.’
Their glances collided for the length of a heartbeat.
‘Master Wentworth, only three weeks ago, I vowed to stay true to John Nightingale.’
‘A vow won’t help him if you’re dead.’
She did not reply.
‘I hate to think that death is preferable to a few years of my company,’ he said.
‘You don’t want to marry any more than I want to die. I’ve never seen a man so content with his own company.’
The Memory Palace Page 2