Bowler clearly shared her premonition about the letter. He fanned himself with it, unopened. He shoved it into his pocket, then took it out again. He studied the outside as if for a hint of what lay within. He sighed.
‘We both know we won’t like whatever’s in it,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’
Bowler nodded and broke Gifford’s seal. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said after a moment. All colour drained from his cheeks. He held the letter out to her. ‘What are we to do now?’
Doctor Gifford wrote:
…I am gratified to inform you that at the last vestry meeting it was agreed to ban the decadent Roman practice of playing music in church services of any sort, throughout the parish from this date forward. All Psalms are henceforth to be read, not sung. All prayers must be spoken. Any making of music during holy worship (full list of occasions given below for avoidance of confusion) will be deemed a return to the outlawed practices of the Church of Rome. All violations will be punished with fines or other more severe penalties, at the discretion of the vestry council. May God’s hand guide you always, Yours most sincerely, in Christian brotherhood…
‘We ignore it,’ said Zeal. ‘If I don’t have your music to buoy up my spirits, I don’t think I can go through with the wedding at all.’
‘Oh.’ Bowler looked both pleased and alarmed. ‘My dear. Goodness.’ He blushed but bit his lower lip at the same time. Then he looked at her with concern.
‘I’ll pay the fines,’ she said, pretending to misunderstand his real question. ‘I’ll say I ordered the music. Don’t fear. What with summer plague and a war in Scotland, and no parliament and all the new taxes, people have more important matters to worry about than whether I have music at my confounded wedding.’ She folded the letter and stuffed it into her sleeve. ‘Don’t tell anyone else about this yet.’
They turned back onto their own track along the river and walked a silent, thoughtful furlong. Then Bowler began to hum. ‘“Praise Him with timbrel and dance,”’ he sang quietly. ‘“Praise ye the Lord.”’
‘And so we shall!’ She felt lighter for having at last hinted to someone how she really felt about the marriage, in spite of all those approving nods from Reason.
Having been given licence by Zeal, Bowler went to work with fervour. She sometimes wondered whether it was wise to defy Gifford. Then she heard Bowler’s plangent counter-tenor leading the estate children in rehearsal among the trees beyond the ponds. From time to time, the heavy clanging rhythms from the forge gave way to the boom of the smith’s drum. Twice she caught groups of girls practising a dance with garlands.
Mind you, she reassured herself, Gifford’s letter did not forbid dance. She knew that she should warn Sir Richard of all they planned. He must have had a letter too. But what if he said that she must obey it?
Apart from the music, Zeal tried to keep the celebration a modest one. But anticipation wrote its own rules. A rest day for any reason was to be made the most of. The wedding gathered its own momentum in spite of the bride’s half-heartedness. There was much urgent cooking, laundering, and stitching. There were secrets behind closed doors.
Mistress Margaret relented far enough to confer with Sir Richard’s steward about the details of the wedding feast, which was to be held at High House.
‘The weather should still be fine enough for us to dance outdoors,’ she reported. ‘Sir Richard will let us move back into his great hall if it rains.’ The old knight himself began to trap and shoot anything with wings or fur that might be eaten at the feast.
While she had agreed with Wentworth about the special licence, Zeal would have been content merely to exchange promises before witnesses, which was enough to make a legal marriage. However, Wentworth had insisted, for the child’s sake, that they have a church blessing. ‘And more witnesses than any man could ever be accused of bending,’ he said.
Zeal feared that preparations would interfere with the autumn work, already behind schedule. Five pigs remained to be butchered and preserved. The brewing was at a critical stage. They had to make enough soap to replace their entire stock, which had melted in the fire. Sheep waited to move to winter pastures where shelters still needed repair. Cows had to come in for the winter. Their quarters must be prepared and dried bracken laid on the ground. There was hay to cut and get into the barns. Winter lodgings to find for the house family who now camped in the outbuildings. And, of course, the salvage of building stuffs from the old house.
On the other hand, she saw that the wedding was bringing an unforeseen benefit. In spite of any reservations they might have about the match, Bowler, Mistress Margaret and all the others had grown animated again and brimmed with purpose as they had not done since before the fire. Zeal clamped tightly to her rock and let the sea wash over her.
She nearly washed off and drowned the night she saw John leaning against the doorpost of her chamber at High House, smiling at her. Even as she sat bolt upright and opened her mouth to cry out his name, he shook his head and faded.
He’s dead! she thought. His ghost came to tell me that his ship sank. He has drowned like my parents.
The next morning she took up a quill pen to write to him. If she acted as if he still lived, then he did.
She remembered his hand holding a pen. A hand browned by the sun, with a scar wrapped around the base of his thumb. A strong making and building hand. Standing in this same office, she had watched him trim the end of a split quill, locked with him in a shared silence like the breath between two musical notes.
He had felt her gaze, looked up and pinned her like one of his moths. She let herself be studied, wings, antennae and all. Then he smiled ruefully and she had smiled back. Their silent complicity felt like the embrace they had not yet shared and did not imagine would ever be possible.
My dearest love, she now wrote.
She leaned back. Now what? My dearest love, I miss you so painfully that I am to marry someone else in three days’ time.’
She bent her head over the paper again. I…Again she stopped.
How can I write that I bear his child but that it, like me, will soon belong to another man? She could think of no words strong enough to survive that burden. The truth would melt and reform into dreadful smoking lumps like the disasters of an apprentice smith. In any case, she did not yet know exactly where to send a letter.
I will wait until he writes again, from Nevis, she decided. So long as I write before rumour can reach him. I shall use the time thinking what to say.
She pulled a pile of accounts over the letter.
The day before the wedding, she peeped into the chapel and felt an easing at the base of her throat. The colours – the bright leathery red of the oak branches, the golden firework sprays of oats, the deep musty greens of fern and ivy, the polished, sweet-scented russet and gold of apples heaped in baskets – were a soothing draught for her senses.
Things may turn out all right, after all, she thought. So long as I try not to think. Just look and listen and work and care for John’s child. I’ll get through those seven years. John will write again and let me know that he is alive. I will write back in such a way that he will understand and forgive me.
Somehow, she did not ever get around to discussing Gifford’s letter with either Wentworth or Sir Richard. Sir Richard would have mentioned it, if he thought it important, she told herself.
And Gifford won’t dare make a scene in front of Sir Richard. Not once we have all begun.
A harsh observer might have said that, in spite of reason, she wanted to prevent the wedding. She had most certainly misjudged the minister.
14
In the chapel gallery, Bowler’s musical consort struck up a sedate march. Zeal and Wentworth entered under the swag of ivy above the chapel door, with Gifford close behind them. Mistress Margaret, Sir Richard, Rachel, Arthur and other house family followed the minister.
‘No!’ Gifford stopped so suddenly that Mistress Margaret bumped her nose on his back. The minister’s
cry held such horror that there was a general pressing forward by those still outside to see what calamity lay within. The music broke off.
Zeal’s precarious calm wobbled. I should have gone ahead and jumped! I’ve always known it. Here comes the confirmation!
Gifford’s eyes widened. ‘“What is this that thou hast done?”’ His face flushed purple. ‘I will not solemnize any union amongst these pagan trappings!’ With the clenched brow of a man struck by an excruciating megrim, he surveyed the ropes of ivy around the pillars, the swags of red oak leaves, the jugs of wheat sheaves and golden oats. His eyes fell on a pair of stuffed cloth figures, each a foot high, propped side by side on the altar among heaped baskets of apples and pears. Zeal and Philip Wentworth, recognizable by his silver hair, black coat and fishing rod, by her red-gold hair. Both dolls wore crowns of plaited wheat, and they were tied together by a golden thread.
‘Idols!’ Gifford whispered in an exhalation aimed at the back pews. His terrier body vibrated with emotion. ‘The props of witchcraft! I am struck dumb with horror!’
‘Not so you’d notice,’ someone said at the back of the crowd, just loudly enough to be heard by all.
The minister’s head swung around, rusty hair bristling. Bland faces looked back at him from the chapel porch. Then Gifford spied the choir of children, dressed in green, standing beyond Bowler near the altar.
‘How dare you?’ he demanded of Bowler. ‘You were warned yet you disobey! Oh, rebellious soul! And you!’ He pointed a shaking finger at the children. ‘You wait to do the devil’s work here! Quake in terror of God’s wrath, for you are lost. You are fallen!’
Two of the younger children burst into tears.
Zeal heard a rustling from the gallery behind them as the string players ducked out of sight.
Ignoring Zeal, Gifford gripped Wentworth’s arm. ‘You will come to Bedgebury to be wed. This place was always a temple of Rome. It should have been destroyed with the others!’ His eyes razed the acrobat, fish and monkey pew finials, smashed the tiled pomegranates in the floor and torched the carved Rood screen to which Doctor Bowler seemed to be clinging.
Wentworth detached his arm from the minister’s grip.
Gifford’s glance fell next onto Zeal’s cat, which was pretending to be asleep on a pew. He looked away quickly. ‘How dare you permit such desecration?’ he demanded again of Doctor Bowler, gesturing at the decorations. ‘What do you think you are doing?’
‘Letting all Nature reflect the general joy,’ the parson replied. He tightened his grip on the wooden arch post.
Wentworth stepped just a little too close to Gifford. ‘I think my betrothed wishes to be blessed here on her own land, among her own people.’ Though Wentworth’s voice was quiet and his bearing restrained, Gifford retreated. Wentworth towered over him by a head, and the older man’s square jaw had set like a pike’s.
‘Too far to walk from your place to High House,’ said Sir Richard, who had been rocking on his feet, watching calmly. ‘Some of our guests are too young. Or too old. Wouldn’t care to do it myself.’
The cat woke and sensibly slipped away.
Gifford circled around Wentworth. He swept the dolls to the floor then upended a basket of apples, which rolled and bounced across the stone floor. ‘There can be no marriage until you clear away these abominations.’
‘But the marriage will take place here?’
Gifford tilted his head toward Zeal and narrowed his eyes as if drilling into her soul. He looked again at Wentworth, then at Sir Richard. ‘Your actions must now reflect the Lord’s admonition to be plain and pure in both thought and deed. Most of all when you are about to enter into the sanctity of marriage. Strip away these vanities. I shall return after dinner. Then I shall decide.’
The crowd parted to let the minister through to the door. With the keen sense of timing that made his sermons so popular with a like-minded congregation, he paused at the threshold. ‘Doctor Bowler, pray come with me. I want a private word.’
‘You may speak with Doctor Bowler when he has finished stripping away these abominations,’ said Zeal hotly. ‘Not before!’
Wentworth set a warning hand under her elbow. ‘Perhaps after the wedding,’ he suggested. ‘…if we are to be ready by early afternoon, as you ask.’
Sir Richard clapped a genial hand on the minister’s shoulder and pushed him out the door. As he went, however, he cast a stern questioning look over his shoulder at Zeal.
Mistress Margaret and Rachel began collecting up the fallen apples into their lace-trimmed aprons.
‘I’m so sorry, Doctor Bowler.’ Zeal tried to smile at the dismayed faces. ‘And all who helped you. It looks exactly as a wedding should. And I shall tell Doctor Gifford that it was I who insisted on music.’
Doctor Bowler waved a hand abstractedly. ‘Never mind. Should have seen it coming. The man’s never been a Solomon with eyes for the virtues of ivory, apes and peacocks. As for music, well…we did know.’
Zeal imagined a glint in the parson’s close-set eyes which agreed with her own furious disappointment. ‘I don’t intend to apologize for wanting to hear your epithalamium.’ She retrieved an apple from behind a pew.
‘It’s all right, my lady. We might manage it yet. And leave the clearing away to us. Which we’d best start at once.’ The parson beckoned to his unhappy choir and retrieved his fiddle from behind the altar. He stared up at the hammer beams of the roof, then down at the tiled floor. ‘Would you know, sir,’ he asked Wentworth for no apparent reason, ‘…does Sir Richard keep a boat on his lake?’
Zeal felt a little as she did when she came down from the chapel roof. Having got to the point of jumping, she feared she could not bring herself to it a second time. After Bowler shooed all but his workers out of the chapel, she stood on a brick path in John’s herb garden, trying to think what to do next. She looked down at her lace-trimmed apron and yellow silk skirt. The cheeses needed turning. But there was not time to change to workaday clothes and then change back again. Sir Richard’s household allowed no interference with their preparations for the wedding feast. Even so, Mistress Margaret had gone back to High House to hover while they awaited Gifford’s return. Rachel and Arthur had stayed in the chapel to help Bowler. Sir Richard had said he would go shooting. Zeal had to do something or she would find herself fleeing over Hawk Ridge and not stopping till she reached York.
‘Come fishing with me,’ said Wentworth.
She suppressed a rush of irritation. Gifford had told Wentworth that the wedding must move to his church in Bedgebury, as if she, the mistress of the estate, had not been standing three feet away.
He is not the master yet. I have a few more hours as my own woman, not a wife.
‘We need not speak,’ he said. ‘Indeed, best if we don’t.’
Who is this old man? she asked herself. Can I truly be about to marry him?
Perhaps Gifford’s refusal was a sign.
Wentworth stood with his hands on his hips. For the first time, she saw that he was wearing a new black coat. ‘The next few hours are time that does not exist. You may do anything with them. Why not fish?’
Raised, urgent voices came from the chapel. Three boys ran out of the door like animated bushes, arms full of boughs, with only their legs exposed.
‘The tranquillity of the riverbank might ease your mind. Come hide with me from all the consternation.’
I dare say, other women have been even unhappier on their wedding days, and lived.
She tugged at her cloak, on which she was sitting, to protect her skirt hem from the damp earth under the willow.
Wentworth stood motionless, some way downstream, planted like the stump of an ancient tree. Every once in a while, his hands moved, making some fine adjustment to the placement of his line.
Why am I so angry with him? she wondered. He didn’t put a foot wrong during all that dreadful scene with Gifford. Indeed, Gifford was afraid of him. Maybe he does keep chests full of severed heads as Mistres
s Margaret said.
She considered the still, solid figure on the bank. A finger of breeze stirred a strand of his silver hair. Otherwise, he seemed not even to breathe.
What a lather he was in to get away from the chapel, she thought. I suppose I should be flattered that he finds my company tolerable. So long as we don’t speak.
Please, God, let it all be over soon.
When the bake house bell rang at dinnertime, she did not move. Wentworth merely shifted farther down stream.
She shut her eyes. Otherwise, she might see John poised naked on the bank, preparing to dive into the water. Or coming through the trees on fire with urgency to show her the fringed miracle of a double buttercup.
The pealing of the chapel bells woke her. The sun was slanting low through the trees.
‘They’re ready for us.’ Wentworth gripped his wriggling chubb and dislocated its head with a quick jerk. He put the fish into his sack, then helped her to her feet. ‘Back to the fray.’ He shouldered his rod and set off up the riverbank with Zeal trudging behind, her hands upraised like a supplicant so as not to be married while covered in nettle welts.
What am I doing? Philip Wentworth asked himself. How did I let myself get so tangled in other lives after all those careful years?
The most absurd fact was that he wanted to go through with this commedia. He was wilfully, in full knowledge of his risks, putting himself in danger again.
15
To judge by his open relief at the denuded chapel, Gifford had clearly expected more resistance. The reassembled company were fewer in number and subdued. None of the children had returned, and who could blame them? Nor was Doctor Bowler there.
Zeal imagined him seated alone somewhere, gathering the courage to be chastised by the man who had wounded him.
The Memory Palace Page 10