‘I want the child.’
She caught her breath.
‘I’ve no children who are alive to me,’ he said. ‘I’d be proud to claim Nightingale’s pup as my own. Until he wants it back, of course.’ He shouldered his rod. ‘In the name of the man you love, consider my proposal. Save his child. Life need not change much. Take time to reflect. I won’t retract my offer. You will find me at Pot Pool, below the mill.’
Zeal had not meant to go back to High House, but now that Rachel had intercepted her, she could not think what else to do. She had used up all her will on the chapel roof during the night. The two women paused for breath on the brow of the grassy ridge that separated the two estates.
‘Winter’s coming.’ Rachel gazed back across the ruined house at the bright slaps of colour on Hawk Ridge.
‘I need to sit down,’ said Zeal.
‘Madam! Think of your skirts,’ cried Rachel, too late.
After breakfast, Zeal rode her mare back to Hawkridge. While she waited in the office for her estate steward, Tuddenham, to finish in the stables, she picked up a stack of sooty papers, then set it down again. The old lethargy sucked at her again.
Wentworth offers a way out. Take it.
But I vowed to stay true to John. I believe that excludes marriage to someone else.
But this would be merely the form of marriage. An arrangement.
A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.
‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.
She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.
She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.
‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’
She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’
Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.
Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.
I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.
Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.
How do I know I can trust him?
She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.
Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.
She turned back, then found that she had to rest.
He was clever to have used the child.
The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.
5
She took her place at the middle of the long, scrubbed elm table in the Hawkridge bake house kitchen where the small house family most often ate supper following the fire. Even this outbuilding smelled like the inside of the smokehouse, but with a colder, seeping edge. A light dusting of ash from the fire seemed always still to salt the food. She looked at the familiar faces around the table with a stranger’s eye. She might as well have been a Mede or Ethiop dropped by magic carpet.
Since the recent fire, the estate residents had split their lives between Hawkridge House and assorted temporary lodgings. Her nearest neighbour, Sir Richard Balhatchet, had given rooms at High House to Zeal and Mistress Margaret, who was the unmarried aunt of Harry and John. Their two serving women, and Agatha, the chief house maid, and Doctor Bowler the estate parson also slept at High House. Others of the house family, including three house grooms, two kitchen grooms, and John’s former manservant, Arthur, slept where they could in the outbuildings and barns. The large mid-day dinner was served at High House to those not in the fields. Apart from the house family, the rest took supper wherever they found themselves.
Thank the Lord, Master Wentworth never comes to the table, Zeal thought. I could not bear to see him just now.
According to Mistress Margaret, he had never eaten in company since he first took up residence on the estate long before Zeal arrived.
Now, as they sat on borrowed stools along either side of the long table, their voices and laughter, the sound of their chewing, the scrape of stool legs on the stone floor, a dropped knife, all made her flinch.
As Mistress Margaret supervised the passing of rabbit stew, she hummed with grim glee at news that a neighbour (not Sir Richard) had been fined five hundred crowns for ploughing across the boundary of an adjoining estate. ‘He always takes the largest portion at table, too!’ she said. ‘And the last sweetmeat.’
Doctor Bowler paused for a polite beat of silence then ventured, ‘But surely, that is exactly what the king did to John! Boundaries, I mean, not sweetmeats.’
The king meant to cut across John’s land – the very same estate so recently awarded to him for service to the Crown. A great wall was to be built right between John’s new horse barn and his paddock, to enclose a royal hunting park at Richmond, taken from common grazing land and other men’s farms.
‘But the king is the king,’ protested Mistress Margaret. ‘Our dear neighbour is not even a knight.’
‘Do you mean to say that the right to trespass is defined by rank?’ asked Doctor Bowler with a degree of heat uncommon in him. ‘Do you say that John did not have good reason to protest to the king? Did the king have the right to call such reasonable protest “treason”? I expected more support for your nephew’s cause!’ Doctor Bowler turned to Zeal. ‘Are you not proud of him, my lady? He did not creep away with his tail between his legs like so many others who were equally wronged.’
Zeal stared blankly at their animated faces, then realized that they were expecting her to speak.
Mistress Margaret and Zeal’s serving woman, Rachel, exchanged looks.
‘Zeal,’ begged Mistress Margaret, her face mottled pink with emotion. ‘He puts words into my mouth! Why don’t you help me? Our parson has me at an unfair advantage with all his education. We women are never taught the tricks of debate.’
‘Why gild the lily?’ murmured Doctor Bowler. He peered closely at Zeal across the table and changed tack. ‘Isn’t it excellent news, my dear, that Sir Richard plans to give us that wagon load of oak beams from his old barn to help us rebuild the hall and west wing?’
‘Indeed,’ cried Mistress Margaret, diverted into this new turning. ‘We could never afford to buy them! It’s all very well to say that the Lord will provide, but kind neighbours are more certain.’
Doctor Bowler pounced with delight. ‘And who do you think prompted this Christian charity in Sir Richard?’
I must act, one way or another, thought Zeal. And if I can’t decide for myself what
to do, I must leave it to chance. Or ask Doctor Bowler’s advice.
‘My lady…?’ The little parson always requested attention as if certain that you had far more important things to do than talk to him.
Zeal forced herself to smile at his anxious face, with its slightly too-close eyes. She sometimes thought of him as an earnest moth. A man of infinite good will and equal fragility, Doctor Bowler should never have taken on the moral burdens of a clergyman.
While Sir George Beester was still alive, Bowler, an Oxford man, had been tutor to the baronet’s two nephews, Harry Beester (who had married Zeal and brought her to Hawkridge) and John Nightingale, the son of Beester’s only sister. His sweet temperament, urgent curiosity and good Latin and Greek made him an excellent tutor for a willing pupil like John but a poor task-master for the likes of Harry. He had survived on an allowance from Sir George, and on small tithes, eggs and milk from estate tenants whom he christened, confirmed, married and buried. When John took over running the estate, which Harry inherited after their uncle’s death, Bowler bent his classical education to the estate accounts. When on the annulment of their marriage Harry deeded the estate to her, Zeal saw no reason for change.
‘When you have a moment,’ Bowler said now, ‘if such a time should ever arrive, I would be grateful for your thoughts about the Fifth of November.’
‘The Fifth of November?’ She gazed at him blankly.
A flush slowly rose all the way to the top of his shiny bald head. ‘The bonfire. Bonfire and Treason Night. It seems a little…After what happened. In any case, I’ve heard some…’
‘Of course. We’ll speak whenever you like.’ She could never consult Bowler. His own helplessness would cause him too much pain.
‘Troublemakers!’ said Mistress Margaret briskly. ‘It’s the young men.’
‘Some older heads agree with them,’ protested Doctor Bowler. ‘Doctor Gifford for one. Then we also have to consider the bells.’
Zeal looked at them both as if they were speaking an alien tongue.
With revulsion, she eyed the rabbit stew in front of her, smooth white flesh to which adhered a blob of shiny, mucilaginous pork fat. She swallowed against her rising gorge and smiled brightly in the direction of Doctor Bowler’s voice.
‘Does anyone have a coin I could borrow?’ she asked.
When supper finally ended, she put on her wool cloak and took Doctor Bowler’s farthing to the solitude of the orchard. The quincunx of trees shifted before her eyes, one moment apparent disorder, the next a harmony of straight lines.
‘Good evening, to you, madam.’ An estate worker intercepted her cheerfully. ‘Can I have a word about moving the piglets?’
In the dusky shadows under the trees, she was free at last of all those eyes.
She felt out of control, as if bits of her might fly off without warning. It was a new experience. The world had given way, in the past, more than once. It was the nature of the world to give way. But she herself had always survived, clamped down like a limpet to the best piece of rock she could find at the given time.
She threw the farthing in the air, caught it, covered it with her other hand. Then she put it back into her hanging pouch without looking.
She sat in the grass and leaned back against a tree, trying one last time to think straight. She felt as if she were already a ghost, out of place in the living world. Her hands moved in her lap like small restless animals.
She had already been Harry’s wife when she first met John. If John should find her married again, neither of them would survive it, she was certain.
But Wentworth was an old man. Anything might happen in seven years.
She stopped, appalled at her own wickedness. If she did accept him, she must not ever let herself wish for his death. He was a good man, to make such an offer.
Even though he did trick me down from the roof.
He was also taciturn, solitary, obsessed with fishing, spent most of his days on the water and his evenings alone in his chamber. He disappeared during feast days and celebrations, when work eased enough for people to take fresh note of each other in their unfamiliar clothes and exchange glances of startled rediscovery as they passed each other in a dance. He ate and walked alone. He was less present in her life, in fact, than the cat.
His offer was all the more surprising because she felt that he avoided her even more than he did the others. It was perfectly reasonable for a man of his age to find an inexperienced chit like her to be of little interest. Her guardian, of much the same age as Wentworth, had no more than tolerated her, and he had had the use of her fortune.
Wentworth’s generosity deserved better than she could ever give him in return.
She began to pace the diagonal aisles between the trees. Fallen pears squelched under her shoes, releasing little gusts of fermentation.
He offers a solution just as reasonable as death. And kinder to everyone.
But marry him? Marry anyone but John?
No, she thought. She tried to imagine Wentworth in a nightshirt, in her chamber, without his flapping black coat, but her thoughts started to slither like a pig on ice.
She made another turn of the orchard. Plucked a leaf from overhead, shredded and dropped it.
Try once more to reason it through.
Have the child and expose herself as either blaspheming perjurer or fornicator? Impossible.
The parish minister was a fierce Scot named Praise-God Gifford, who brought the unforgiving spirit of Calvin with him to England when he had trotted south with his clergyman father in 1604, after Elizabeth died, at the heels of the Scottish king who had come to rule England. As he grew older Gifford added a moral ferocity all his own.
She feared that she could not trust her standing as a landowner to protect her from him, even if she somehow escaped the civil law. He would want to make an example of her all the more, she who stood above her people like the sun and should lead them into light, educating through her own peerless example. She had seen one poor girl – not from Hawkridge, thank the Lord – stripped naked in front of all the parish council and have her hands tied to the tail of a cart. Then she was whipped all the way from the Bedgebury market square to the May Common. As the lash laid bloody lines across the girl’s skin, Zeal had seen the eager faces of some of the watching men. The girl had later drowned both herself and her babe.
The brilliant light of the day had now softened into a lavender haze that promised a warm night. In the distance, a few cows complained that they had not yet been milked. The orchard smelled richly damp and sweet, with a prickling of rot.
If I died, I would so miss this place, she thought. She began a circuit of the high brick walls, noting the ripeness of espaliered apricots and cherries. She picked and ate a sweet black cherry and spat out the stone.
Try to hide the child?
Others had succeeded in that deceit, she knew. Fine ladies who put on loose-bodied gowns and paid a married woman to unlace her stomacher and pad her petticoats, then produce the babe as her own.
Not here on this estate. Rachel already knew the truth from washing Zeal’s linen. Though she would never tell, others might guess as she had done. Secrets here were as safe as pond ice in May, and now that they lived hugger-mugger on top of each other since the fire, any such sleight of hand stood even less chance of success.
‘If your mind’s not set that way,’ Rachel had said, ‘you know as well as I that not all babies that get planted need to be born.’
When Zeal did not reply, Rachel had folded the petticoat and pressed it flat with both hands.
‘Could you do it?’ Zeal finally asked.
‘Perhaps I have.’ Rachel met Zeal’s eyes defiantly. ‘Better than a public flogging, I daresay you’ll agree. But you won’t have to fear that, madam. You’re a lady.’
‘Would you take that risk, with Doctor Gifford?’
If I kill John’s child, I might as well kill myself at the same time.
She reached the far wall
of the orchard and turned to look back at the chapel roof.
But life had carried her on past that point, with a push from Philip Wentworth. Not knowing quite how it came about, she had fallen out of love with that flight into darkness.
People really do wring their hands, she thought, suddenly noticing that her own were turning and twisting together against her apron.
You are feeble, she told herself. Take a grip!
She climbed up into the nearest apple tree. No one can see me now, she thought, as the shadowy leaves closed around her. At the centre, near the trunk was like a secret house. An abandoned nest sat close above her head.
How lucky the birds are, she thought. She and John had first looked at each other properly, soon after she arrived, when he had caught her up an apple tree in her bare feet and mistaken her for one of the estate girls.
She smiled, shut her eyes, and remembered the warmth of his hand closing around her bare ankle, and the shock of their unguarded recognition. She had slipped and showered down leaves in catching herself, while he stood looking up at her with an expression both startled and benign.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said when safely on the ground, clutching stolen blossom, aware that she wore only her petticoats.
‘They’re your trees,’ he said. ‘Harry’s, anyway.’ After a moment, he added, ‘Trees ask to be climbed.’
For the next two years, they tried to pretend that look had never happened.
She pressed her forehead against the bark of a branch and felt his hand encircling her ankle again. Then it came to her how she could decide. She would not trust her life or death to the pettiness of a farthing, but Chance could take more noble forms than a plucked daisy or a tossed coin.
She climbed down and went to the estate office. In the thick dusk, she felt along the top of the mantle piece until her fingers found what they wanted. John’s glove, dusted with ash, like everything else.
The Memory Palace Page 3