The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  ‘Now fill the hole you’ve made in the bank,’ said Zeal. ‘I recall no mention anywhere of a legal right to dig holes.’

  Harry ignored her, but Pickford gave the shovel to young Fox.

  ‘Now back one of the carts down here to the pond,’ ordered Harry.

  ‘How?’ Zeal stood up from the corner of Amphritite’s plinth, where she had stayed on guard during the dinner break.

  From the arch in the hedge, Fox and Harry contemplated the maze. Then Fox set off towards the forecourt, traversing the maze with exaggerated care. A few moments later he reappeared with a measuring rod, which he held against the opening in the hedge.

  ‘We can’t get a cart down to the pond in any case, sir. It’s too wide to pass through this arch.’

  ‘Then cut down the hedge.’

  ‘That right is not given in the deed,’ said Zeal.

  Harry turned to the estate manager. ‘Tuddenham, bring us that bill you had earlier, and three others, and an axe. The hedge is already ruined. And no one has mazes any longer, in any case.’

  ‘Tuddenham, please do nothing of the sort.’ To Harry, she added, ‘I have a maze.’

  The watchers shifted in anticipation of new drama.

  With an oath, Harry seized the nearest boy by the arm. ‘Come, my lad. You show us where the things are kept!’ He dragged the boy towards the stable yard, with carters hopping over the maze walls behind him.

  Wentworth cleared his throat.

  Zeal called a second boy and sent him to fetch her neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet. ‘Beg him to make the greatest possible haste. For our part, we must hold them off until he arrives.’

  Wentworth touched her arm. ‘Do you recall what you asked me yesterday morning?’

  She and he arrived back on the pond bank just as Harry’s men returned with four billhooks and an axe. When Harry gave the order to attack the hedge, Zeal produced Wentworth’s pistol from the folds of her skirts.

  ‘Shit!’ said Pickford under his breath.

  Harry was the only one to laugh. ‘She won’t shoot,’ he told his men. ‘Carry on.’

  There was a long uneasy silence. Zeal leaned against Amphritite and braced her arm, which had begun to tremble under the weight of the gun. She aimed first at Fox. Then at his son. Then at Pickford.

  Pickford scratched his neck and sat down. The others looked from her to Harry and back again. They laid down their billhooks.

  Zeal watched Harry eye the tools as if considering even the gross impropriety of taking up one himself.

  ‘The law is on my side, madam,’ said Harry. ‘I shall call for a constable if you don’t let us proceed.’

  ‘Better than that, I’ve already sent for a magistrate.’

  After examining the deed, which Zeal kept in a casket in the estate office, Sir Richard was forced to agree that Sir Harry did indeed have the right to remove the statues. But, on the other hand, Sir Richard also had to agree with Zeal that Harry could not cut down either hedge or maze.

  ‘That’s absurd!’ Sir Harry reached over Sir Richard’s shoulder to take the deed for a closer look. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ He threw his arms to the Heavens in protest.

  ‘Mind the candlestick on the mantle,’ Zeal said quietly.

  ‘This is a madhouse!’

  ‘Let me see that deed again.’ Sir Richard frowned at the document as if it would yield something it had failed to say before. Zeal wondered if the old knight had simply forgotten what it said. His once-keen mind had seemed to lose its edge quite suddenly, early that past summer, and his memory had begun to misplace things.

  ‘Most definitely can’t cut the hedge,’ said Sir Richard.

  ‘Then how am I to take possession of what is lawfully mine?’ demanded Harry. ‘Perhaps Doctor Bowler would care to pray for a miracle…should be easier to move hedges than mountains.’

  They trooped out of the estate office back into the forecourt, where the carters, Wentworth, Bowler, Mistress Margaret and the others waited with faces ranging from expectant to glum.

  ‘Legal niceties!’ said Sir Harry bitterly. ‘All law and no justice!’ To Fox, he said, ‘You’re going to have to figure out how to get the statues without going through there.’

  Sir Richard lowered his massive head and glared at Harry through his eyebrows. The carters examined the entrance to the paddock to the west of the maze garden.

  ‘Can’t get a wagon through over here, either.’

  Beyond the paddock, stretching up to the high road, lay the hedge of the Roman field, reinforced with stones and willow hurdles set to try to stem the constant leaking of sheep. The stable yard and walled garden blocked access around the eastern end of the house.

  ‘I’m taking those statues, and I don’t care how!’ said Harry. ‘I’ll stay until someone works it out.’

  ‘An ox without a cart could reach the ponds through the paddock.’

  Heads turned towards this unexpected voice. Harry looked startled, as if he had not known the man could speak at all. Indeed, given Wentworth’s absence from table during Harry’s short time on the estate, perhaps he had never before heard the older man utter. ‘You can’t drag a statue across the ground like a plough.’ Nevertheless, Harry eyed Wentworth with hope.

  ‘The Indians of the New World shift blocks of stone twenty times greater than that statue, without even horses, let alone oxen or carts.’

  ‘Pray, enlighten us,’ said Harry.

  Though she was curious to hear Wentworth’s solution, Zeal went to see Sir Richard off on his horse.

  ‘A word in your ear, young mistress,’ the old knight murmured as he prepared to mount. ‘Keep an eye on that Fox man. Wanted me to have you arrested for threatening him with a gun. I told him not to be a fool, that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. What a business!’

  When Zeal returned, the carters were prising planks from sides of two of the carts.

  ‘I’ve no doubt, sir, that you’ll pay me to replace the sides of my carts,’ Fox said to Sir Harry.

  ‘I’ll pay you if you ever manage to do the job you’re contracted to do.’

  ‘Four will be enough,’ Wentworth told the men. The reclusive fisherman had assumed authority with apparent ease. The carters obeyed him without question.

  ‘Imagine him knowing about things like New World Indians,’ said one of the knitters. ‘Or talking so much,’ said another.

  As he gave orders, Zeal observed her future husband with increasing interest and surmise. I must ask him more about those Indians. She was looking forward to his wedding gift of truth even if she avoided thinking about any of the rest of it.

  On Wentworth’s instruction, the carters led one of the draught oxen through the paddock. Then they laid the four cart planks on the ground, end to end in pairs, beside the recumbent statue.

  ‘You haul him up…’ Fox pointed at the two men on the pulley rope. ‘…then you lot over there swing him over the planks, crosswise, mind. Then you…’ he pointed at the first pair again ‘…let him down again, nice and easy. Ready?’

  The men settled their feet and drew deep breaths.

  ‘Heave!’ cried Fox.

  Nereus did not wish to be heaved. Instead, his weight drove the feet of the poles down into the mud. The harder the men tried to lift, the deeper they drove the poles into the ground.

  ‘I did say,’ said Pickford. ‘Straight off. Soon as I saw all this mud.’

  ‘God’s Teeth and Toenails!’ cried Sir Harry.

  ‘I’ve never had such trouble, ever before!’ exclaimed Fox. His scowl included Zeal in the trouble. ‘The thing acts as if it’s been cursed!’

  Doctor Bowler began to sing quietly as if to himself.

  The sun was sinking, orange as a pumpkin beyond the water meadows.

  ‘“To labour is the lot of Man below,”’ sang Doctor Bowler. ‘“When God gave us life, he gave us woe.”’

  ‘Put something flat under the feet,’ said Fox. ‘Is there anything about that we can use?’ He looked
around for Wentworth, who had seemed to be the only sensible authority, but Wentworth had gone.

  ‘Leave the wretched thing till tomorrow!’ Harry wiped his face and jammed his tasselled handkerchief back into a slash in his sleeve. ‘We soon won’t be able to see the road back to Ufton Wharf.’ He glared at Zeal. ‘If anything is taken or harmed, I shall have you indicted for theft and wilful damage. In spite of your tame magistrate.’

  If I were a man, I could call him out, thought Zeal as she watched Harry ride away up the drive, leaving Nereus abandoned on his sling. Now there’s a grand thought! Rapiers, not guns. Snick, snick, snick. Cut off his buttons. Whisht! Whisht! There go the bows from his shoes! Whisht! And a tassel from his handkerchief! And he’d never touch me. Not even close! With enough people watching such humiliation, I wouldn’t even need to draw blood.

  After a quick supper at the long table in the bake house, Zeal slept in the estate office again, to be on the spot in the morning in case Harry arrived early. With John’s coat beside her, she yanked the smoky coverlet up to her chin and imagined setting her grooms on him with clubs. She would borrow Sir Richard Balhatchet’s old falconet, which he had recently had cleaned and made fit to fire.

  Then she heard again the danger in Harry’s voice when he warned her against opposing him. He might be a fool, but he was a fool with powerful friends and infinite self-esteem.

  Why do I care so much? she asked herself. They’re only stone!

  Her feet were now cold. She crawled to the end of the makeshift bed and tucked the coverlet in again, then banged her head ferociously back into the pillow. She still did not know how to deal with the hole where a piece of her life had been excised and then declared officially never to have existed.

  ‘We must find a way out!’ Harry had said one night on one of his rare and brief returns from London. He wore a grim but shifty look that told her he had already decided how to get his way.

  ‘From our marriage?’ She dared not hope that he meant to set her free. ‘But you need an Act of Parliament to be granted a divorce!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool! Do you confuse me with old King Harry? I don’t have that much influence yet.’

  ‘But given another wife, with grander connections, you mean to get it?’ she taunted him. ‘Lady Alice, whose fortune you have not yet spent.’

  But, oh, how she had snapped at his bait!

  The fleck of decency in Harry’s soul, which Zeal had once mistaken for a far larger portion, was the cause, ironically, of her fall into the crime of perjury. Harry had a mutually advantageous plan. If she would collude to dissolve their marriage, he would give her Hawkridge Estate.

  She rolled onto her side, then onto her back again. The ash still in the coverlet made her sneeze.

  Their bargain gave him the freedom to trade Hawkridge for Covent Garden and to pursue London heiresses with larger fortunes than Zeal had ever had. It left her free to love Harry’s cousin, John Nightingale.

  She turned her head to look at John’s stool and table. Then she reached out to touch the smooth polished dent at the base of one of the stool legs where he had always rested the heel of his right foot.

  She would have sworn to anything.

  She had sworn under oath that she had been younger than the legal age of fourteen when she and Harry were betrothed, which could well have been true. She also lied and swore that the marriage had never been consummated – for, who but Harry and she could ever prove otherwise? Particularly as the lack of issue was commonly taken as sufficient proof in such cases. Zeal’s guardian, who, by her marriage, lost all interest in either her or her fortune (now squandered by Harry, in any case), had been happy to testify that she had married against his wishes, as indeed she had. In the end, there had been almost excessive grounds for voiding the marriage and rewriting two years of her life.

  As always, her head began to throb at this point. Now came the part she could consider only sideways.

  Annulment meant that the marriage had never been. Therefore, if, as it had been ruled, Harry had never been her legal husband, then he had never had the right to spend her fortune. He had, nevertheless, gone through it all (and, of course, he really had been her husband all along).

  Almost worse, she had never been Lady Beester, no matter what she had believed at the time. She had not had the legal right to fall in love with Hawkridge, nor to delight in its gardens or the charming irregularity of its outline or the ornate chimneys, the unexpected hens’ nests, the dusty cupboards full of other people’s lives. She had had no right to feel full and warm, as she moved about the house, her house now, aflame with domestic purpose.

  Orphaned at six, she lived thereafter with relatives, with guardians or at boarding school. At Harry’s Hawkridge, she thought she had finally found her proper place on earth. She still felt as if she had missed a step in the stairs and wasn’t at all where she had thought she was, and was sick with the shock and unexpected pain.

  Outside the little office window, birds were beginning to shout out their territorial claims. The sky had just begun to lighten. Not much night left. She put one of her pillows over her head to muffle the birds and tried to think how to set about building a new house.

  10

  Sir Harry and the carriers returned an hour after what would have been sun-up if the sky had not been a chilly grey. The weather, as well as erosion of novelty, led to a thinner audience than the day before. Also, the smokehouse needed tending and there was the autumn ploughing, bread to bake, the butchering of a ewe that had crippled itself, and arranging warm lodgings to see them all through the winter.

  The carters brought flat stones to place under the feet of the tripod to keep them from sinking into the mud. But when the ox began to drag Nereus along the track of planks, the dolphin’s nose dug into the ground and acted as a brake.

  Once she had grasped the principle of Wentworth’s method, Zeal left the men grunting and puffing in their effort to roll the old god onto his other side. Back in the office, she began to list all the different building parts she had envisioned with such delight the morning before, and the stuffs needed to make them. This morning, however, she found the work tedious.

  She had imagined a house built of brick.

  Therefore, I know I will need bricks. But will it be less costly to buy them or to hire men from Southampton to enlarge our own kiln? Need…dear Lord…how many thousand? How do I work it out?

  I’m not sure I can do this alone, after all, she thought. Do you suppose Master Wentworth knows about houses, as well as about New World Indians?

  The carters reached the forecourt. Unable to keep her mind on her great purpose, she went out to watch the final lifting of the old sea god onto the cart. On the firm footing of the forecourt the sheer legs and pulleys worked perfectly. The surrender was easily achieved by only three men.

  Amphritite was next. Her fishing line had vanished during the night. As she stood on relatively dry ground, the traitorous nymph, unlike her father, yielded easily to her abductors.

  ‘We’ll be done by evening, after all.’ Fox sounded greatly cheered.

  Zeal returned to the office. Then she had to confer with Mistress Margaret in the bake house kitchen about collecting more urine for soap making. She could not help walking back to the ponds. Unlike her sister, Panope resisted until just before dinner. After dinner, although the carters had begun to get the measure of both subjects and terrain, they shifted only Galatea, Psamanthe and the last three nymphs on the near side of the ponds. Eight more waited on the opposite banks. Harry left in a vile temper for a second night at Ufton Wharf, where the barges were moored, at his expense.

  Unhappily, Zeal examined the muddy track that the ox’s hoofs had churned up across the grass of the paddock.

  By the third morning, the battle had lost all novelty for the estate residents. Also, a slow, depressing drizzle had begun to seep down from the sky. Wherever she was, however, Zeal could still hear Sir Harry shouting from his shelter under the re
ar portico, and the curses of his workmen out in the rain. She felt paralysed by his presence. Life on the estate was frozen so long as he was still here. More than anything, she now wanted him gone for good.

  The rain stopped in mid-afternoon. A warm clammy wind blew down the river valley and tugged dying leaves from the trees.

  ‘Only two more to go,’ said Sir Harry as they left for yet another night at Ufton.

  Fox said something under his breath.

  Mid-morning the next day, shouts and splashing sent her running out to the ponds.

  Only one nymph remained – Thetis, mother of heroes and nest guardian. The muddy berm where she stood, at the far end of the pike pond just above the weir, was too narrow to give the feet of the sheer legs a firm base. When the statue finally toppled, the leather loop holding the sling to the lifting rig snapped. She now lay on her back with an arm raised in mute protest, her right hand snapped off at the wrist.

  Young Fox was searching among the lily pads, ducking his head under the surface, then lifting it to gasp and splutter.

  ‘Mind the pike!’ a boy warned. ‘They’ll bite your fingers off! They nearly ate my baby brother’s whole foot!’

  ‘Farewell at last?’ Zeal asked, in the early afternoon. ‘Or will you be back when you suddenly remember something else you want to give your new bride?’

  ‘Your manners have not improved with time.’ Harry swung up into his saddle, then leaned back down to her. ‘I have influence in London now, mistress, so don’t challenge me.’ He turned and kicked his horse so savagely that she had to jump back out of the way of its swinging rump. ‘And when you get around to draining the pond, I want that hand!’

  Zeal resolved to have the fish man rescue it as soon as Harry had gone.

  As his cart passed her, Fox made a sign against the evil eye.

  When the last cart had gone, she went to the ponds and scuffed her foot on one of the bare mud patches on the banks. Hawkridge felt deserted. There was too much raw empty air around the ponds.