I will accept the answer, she vowed. Life, or death. Either way.
She went to sit beside Nereus on the bank of the upper pond, to wait until she was alone. She found the old sea god’s company comforting. Like her, he could never have expected to end up at Hawkridge, and she was sure that he was equally content to be here. A white dove sat on the head of the nearest nymph, who also wore a wilted daisy chain around her neck. Her sister just beyond still had a fishing line tied to her wrist.
‘I don’t suppose any of you knows what I should do,’ she said. ‘Never mind. I mean to ask elsewhere.’
The estate workers and house family usually collapsed soon after supper, worn out by the battle to keep up with daily chores, while also salvaging whatever they could from the house, restoring what they could recover and remaking or rebuilding the rest. Meanwhile the advance of autumn brought its own burdens of digging, cutting, picking, binding, threshing, butchering, salting and preserving.
When she passed the bake house on the way to the ponds, Rachel and Agatha had nearly finished clearing supper, with the help of the kitchen grooms. The two women stood side by side in the last of the dusk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, scrubbing the last of the spoons and cups with fistfuls of green horsetail pulled in the water meadows.
The two kitchen grooms came out to the ponds with the dry ends of bread and hard-baked dough trenchers they all had to use until the cooper could make more wooden plates. These, in their turn had replaced the pewter plates Sir Harry had taken when he left Hawkridge for London. The grooms threw the bread onto the middle pond and disappeared downstream towards the mill where they were nested.
While she waited impatiently for all the others to go to bed, Zeal stared up into the sky. A faint glow in the haze showed where the moon was trying to press through the clouds.
Six ducks splashed down and jostled each other aside to get at the bread. With obscure pleasure, Zeal watched a female snatch a crust from under the jabbing beaks of two battling drakes. The mêlée reminded her of a gang of drakes she had once seen pile onto a single duck and drown her in their eagerness to tread her.
A carp slapped the water with its tail. Sheep bleated raggedly in unending querulous complaint. Frogs had begun to sort themselves into soprano, alto and bass. In the still air, the voice of a house groom carried clearly from the stable yard, headed at last for bed in the loft of the hay barn. She heard Rachel and Agatha set off with Mistress Margaret and her maid on the long walk to High House.
The moon pressed harder against the restraining clouds. In the final luminous glow as dusk slid into true night, straight lines wavered and the black humps of bushes breathed. The nymphs around the ponds stirred and reached out their hands to her. She felt their concern, and a pull, as if they invited her into sisterhood.
If only I could turn to stone and stay here with you, she told them.
In the remains of the house, Doctor Bowler began to play his fiddle in the dark, in the chapel antechamber. His tune was fierce, incautiously pagan, and totally suited to her present purpose.
6
When Zeal unlocked the gate into the kitchen garden, next to the orchard, Ranter, the night mastiff on patrol, pushed his huge head into the front of her skirt and swung his ropelike tail.
She heard Arthur’s laugh. A door slammed. Somewhere, closer in the darkness, a hen muttered to itself. With Ranter bumping and huffing at her heels, Zeal walked slowly between the rectangles of the raised vegetable beds.
Moonlight, triumphant at last, began to pick out the fruit trees espaliered to low internal walls. Late pumpkins and gourds, which should already have been harvested, gleamed like huge jewels against the dark earth of the beds. The blade of a forgotten weeding knife sparked in the grass. Absently, she picked it up.
Until John had unlocked her heart, she had imagined no love greater than that she felt for this place – house, gardens, fields and hills, its people, its sheep, even the ducks.
She looked back. Had the whole house been standing, she could have been seen from one of the upper windows. Even so, she stepped into the deep shadow of the garden wall. Doctor Bowler might smile forgivingly on sinners, but Doctor Gifford had a keen nose for sulphur and a personal mission to save souls. Unlike Bowler, he would not turn a blind eye. Gifford would never doubt that she meant to practise witchcraft.
Ranter gave her a final friendly shove and settled under a gooseberry bush.
She unfolded the pale ghost of a linen handkerchief onto the ground. With the point of her own knife, which always hung at her belt, she pricked the end of her left thumb. She had not pried, exactly, but her curiosity had always set off in hot pursuit after rumour. From all that she had been able to overhear and otherwise learn from her books and the talk of the women, she should have marked her charm with her monthly flow. She made a dark smudge on the linen with her thumb.
She sat back on her heels in the heap of her skirts. The moon looked cold and dead, like a bleached bone. At least it was waxing. Always sow your seeds in a waxing moon. Don’t try to conjure hope under a dying one.
She turned her head sharply at a falling leaf. The air in the garden was so still that she heard snail tongues rasping at the leaves of the cabbages and late beans. Even the distant sheep and ducks were temporarily silent. Then Ranter, who had also raised his head, gave a gusty sigh and flopped his dewlaps down onto his forepaws again.
Reassured by his indifference, she spat on the napkin. Then she lifted her pleated linen collar to dig under her armpit with the handkerchief. With a glance at Ranter’s tranquil shadow, she reached up under her skirts and wiped the napkin between her legs.
She took John’s glove from her bodice and held it to her face. She inhaled his scent beneath the salty tang of the leather. Felt his body heat and hard smooth muscles. Almost saw him. Then the details wavered and blurred.
I should have fed my eyes in our last moments together, she thought. Committed him to memory, inch by inch and hair by hair, instead of shouting at him in rage for abandoning me. I dared to be angry with him when he was going off to be little more than a slave.
The harder she tried to see him, the more he eluded her.
She put her hand into the void left by his and bent her fingers to fit the curves and bumps that he had shaped. Then she laid her hand in his glove against her right breast.
She looked down at the dark leather against the pale wool of her bodice. As a very young girl, she had imagined that such a touch would feel wicked. Instead, when it finally came, she had felt a deep peacefulness, as if a tightly-wound spring had loosened inside her. She had been waiting without knowing it, for his hand to arrive exactly there.
She put the napkin to her nose and inhaled her own musky smell. Suddenly, as clearly as if he had been there, she smelled the rich warm brew that rose up between their naked bodies after love.
She wiped her eyes with the napkin.
Ranter raised his head.
‘Good dog,’ she whispered.
The great rope of his tail thumped on the damp grass.
She kissed the glove formally, as if it were a bishop’s ring or a sword before battle, and folded the handkerchief around it. With her knife, she cut a long strand of hair from her nape and tied it around the bundle.
The mastiff rumbled like an earthquake and hoisted himself to his feet. Zeal froze. He lumbered to the back wall of the garden, growled again. A violent scuffling announced that whoever had begun to scale the wall had decided urgently against it. The sounds of retreat faded into the night.
She listened for a long time at the back gate. As mistress of Hawkridge Estate, she had the right to walk where she liked, at any time, however odd. The tenant farmers and her own house family, the gardeners, stockmen and grooms should all be clutching at sleep while another day of work rushed at them all too fast. But no one was in his or her right place just now. And boys slipped out to poach fish from the ponds. Unmarried couples, like Rachel and Arthur, sought darkness and solitu
de under the trees. The bundle she now carried could hang her.
Ranter gave a low reproachful bark when she finally closed the door behind her. ‘Stay, sir!’ she whispered through the wooden grille. ‘Guard my back.’
As she climbed the flank of Hawk Ridge, her feet slipped on the damp, crumbly beech mast and silvery patches of damp moss. Just below the spine of the ridge, in the darkness under the leafy roof, panting from her climb, she reached out to touch one of the dark columns.
He sat under this tree, and I leaned against him, rocked gently on the rise and fall of his breath.
As she began the last steep scramble, the chill of total solitude engulfed her. Here all human fires were quenched. A thick roof of branches shrouded the night sky and blotted out the moon. The air felt thick, as if a great weight pressed down on it. Though the night was almost windless, the trees around her rustled and sighed as if alive.
You enter the Lady’s realm, they murmured.
Nearly blind now, she hauled herself up the last sheer yards, slipping and clutching at branches, into the cavern of darkness cast by the Lady of Hawk Ridge. Hands outstretched, she felt her way towards the ancient beech that had chosen human form. Her hands met damp, cool bark. Found a familiar wide taut hollow, and recognized a curve.
The Lady sprang upwards into the sky, feet first, from a short trunk twenty feet around. Her head and her raised arms remained imprisoned in the trunk, while her sappy fingers twisted into roots deep in the earth under Zeal’s feet. Her body, that of a giant female, was the lowest branch of the old beech, which spread close to the ground, the result of coppicing one hundred years before.
Zeal felt outwards along the damp bark from the hollow of the Lady’s throat until she reached the two large boles of her breasts with their broken stumps of nipples. Though lost now in the darkness, the Lady’s waist, hips and crossed legs curved upwards until her ankles sprouted, ninety feet above the ground, into an angular network of springy twigs. The Lady of Hawk Ridge rose naked and unashamed from the earth with such force and purpose that she seemed to hold its centre in her buried hands.
Zeal had overheard the muttered gossip. The Lady, not Gifford, was Doctor Bowler’s chief rival for souls on the estate. Zeal had admired the little parson for his pragmatic discretion on the subject of the estate oracle. Now she too, like so many others, would let the Lady decide her fate.
As she felt along the giant rib cage, she gave a little ‘hah!’ of terror and snatched back her hand. She had touched something cold, limp and damp.
She stared at the darkness until she thought her eyes would burst. After a time she began to make out a shape against the beech bark. It swam in the darkness but did not move away. Zeal clenched her teeth and forced herself to touch it again.
Wet feathers. Crumpled, wiry claws. A dead bird. Then her fingers found the noose of twine from which it hung and she smelled the whiff of putrefaction. She turned to flee, then reminded herself that she had plucked too many scalded chickens to run from a dead crow or thrush.
She crouched among the Lady’s roots and, with a sharpened yew stick she had carried in her belt, began to dig. Her fingers felt a sharp edge. A folded parchment.
Another desperate petitioner, she thought. Perhaps the one who left the bird. She covered over someone else’s private hope or grief and dug again. She buried her bundle. Then she stood, stretched up her right hand and found the triangle where the Lady’s legs divided. The damp bark under her fingers felt as rough and complicated as her own red-gold bush, though much colder.
‘Lady,’ she whispered. ‘If you can do what they believe…do it for me. I beg you, tell me. What should I do?’
Will I understand if she does answer?
The tree inhaled and exhaled. Zeal heard it clearly.
He is truly gone. Will never touch you again. You will never hear his voice.
‘No!’ Zeal cried aloud. ‘That can’t be!’
I imagined, she told herself. Heard my own fears speaking. The wind.
‘I shall ask three times,’ she told the tree. So as to be sure of what I hear.
Be careful what you ask and how you ask it, she told herself. Remember the stories. Beware of the literal and murderous precision of magical wish-granting!
Her mind leapt from danger to danger.
‘Will I ever see him…’ she asked carefully ‘…alive and not dead?…Don’t answer me yet! I must think.’ She pressed her free hand to her face. Her skin felt hot in spite of the chill under the tree.
‘With all his limbs and senses?’ Though I would love him without.
What other danger have I forgotten?
‘Will he still love me?’
With her hand still on the cleft of the Lady’s legs, she pressed her forehead against the dark, cold bark beside the dead bird.
No reply. What should I make of that?
She was no longer certain what she had heard the first time.
When her pulse had quietened a little, she tried a third and last time.
‘Speak to me now,’ she begged the Lady. I’m ready to listen.
The grove around her was absolutely still. The night held its breath. The tree did not speak.
‘Please, give me a sign, Lady! Shall I marry Wentworth and try to endure for seven years?’
Don’t even think about what might happen then.
‘Or should I kill myself?’
Why should I trust it? she suddenly thought. Why does everyone assume it’s friendly? If so, why does it want dead offerings?
The night still held its breath. Still the tree kept silent. Not a twig or leaf stirred.
Zeal sat, closed her eyes. Fortunate Daphne, she thought. Transformed to a laurel tree. All grief ended…she presumed that trees do not feel grief.
She dug her fingers into the leaf mould, imagined the chill of the ground rising slowly towards her heart, reaching it, slowing its beat until her thoughts darkened and faded into a long dream of leaf fall, rain, nesting birds and slow rot.
She sat upright with a jolt of terror and tried to remember where she was. Who she was. Not a tree. Almost, but not yet. She scrambled up, tripped on petticoats, half-fell when a numbed foot gave way. The darkness and chill pressed on her like water. She could not breathe. This was not mere fancy. She felt the silent presence in the grove, which had refused to help.
I am such a fool, she thought.
In a growing rage at the Lady, at herself, she slid and stumbled back down the slope away from the tree. Back in the clear moonlight of the kitchen garden, Ranter still waited just inside the gate.
‘Nature does not trouble itself with our petty human affairs!’ she told him, with ferocity. ‘And why should it care? Why should I expect anything, even Chance, to relieve me of my decision? I shall have to make up my own mind, after all!’
She could not bear to go back to High House, to be among all those breathing bodies, the snores, the night time farts and cries, to be attacked by the miasma of other people’s dreams. She stalked down river to the mill, where she climbed out on the narrow platform that led to the great wooden wheel. She glared down briefly into the water while moss dripped near her head and pale leaves slid into the current of the race and dived beneath her feet.
Ask nothing of anyone. I’ve always known that.
She had to keep moving lest she start to take root again.
Upstream, where the suck of the race did not disturb it, the surface of the millpond looked cold and as hard as metal.
Though the tree had stayed silent the night now seemed filled with advice. As she crossed the sluice bridge at the bottom of the ponds, the leaping water burbled, ‘Build a little, build, build, build.’
‘Dieeee!’ cried a sheep.
‘Build, build a little,’ insisted the water below the sluice.
‘Yes,’ whispered the trees on the riverbanks.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ instructed a pair of antiphonal frogs.
Her blood pounded in her head. She coul
d tolerate indecision no longer, felt ablaze with furious purpose, though she could not yet say what it was. She wanted to tear through the milky membranes of the night, sweep away the clouds. Propelled by a horror of that quiescent stillness in the beech grove, not knowing what she would say, and without thought for the hour, she headed for the tack room to find Philip Wentworth.
7
‘One moment!’ The heavy door muffled his voice. There was the thud of a chest lid. Zeal imagined she felt the remains of the east wing tremble. The door opened so suddenly that he nearly caught her with her ear against it.
He was still arranging his coat. His shirt collar was caught up on one side, the ties still undone. His eyes widened when he saw her.
‘I think I’ve come to say, yes.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Think?’ He smoothed his silver hair with his hand.
‘May I come in?’
He stepped back and left the door standing open behind her.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘I looked for you in the tack room. If you won’t stay at High House, you should sleep in the tack room until that wall is braced. The back staircase shook under my feet just now.’
‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’ He finished tying up his shirt.
‘You won. Aren’t you pleased?’ Her eyes darted around his little room. A chilly breeze blew from the corridor onto her back. ‘Or didn’t you expect me to accept? Do you want to retract your offer, after all?’
He took her elbow and sat her on a back stool in front of the low fire. ‘Stop talking for a moment.’ He took a glass from his cabinet, blew into it, then poured wine from a jug which stood on the table behind her.
She turned in her chair. He had been working. Papers lay higgledy-piggledy. A pewter mug, a dirty wineglass and a pair of spectacles sat among the papers. A sempster’s candle stand, fitted with a lens set vertically, focussed the light of the flame.
‘Tell me again,’ he said.
‘I said, yes.’
He gave her the glass of wine. He had rolled back his cuffs from strong broad hands flecked with age spots. Then he refilled his own glass. He pulled out a second back stool from the wall and sat on the other side of the fire. He raised his glass. ‘To friendly union, then.’ The greying bristle of his chin glistened in the firelight.
The Memory Palace Page 4