The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  After a moment, Zeal slid across the mattress. She had never touched him without several thick layers of clothing between them. Now there were just two thin films of linen. She looked sideways at the grey hairs which curled from the open neck of his night shirt.

  He sighed. ‘I had never thought to feel the warmth again of another human creature against my flank. Are you comfortable?’

  She nodded.

  ‘But are you at ease?’

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Do you want to wander off again across that vast cold expanse of mattress?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘Are you at ease, sir?’

  ‘I am perfectly content.’

  ‘Then I shall stay where I am.’

  They both stared straight ahead.

  ‘Bowler is an astonishing man,’ said Wentworth.

  She nodded.

  ‘Don’t forget the gift of truth you promised me,’ she said after a moment of silence.

  ‘Ah, you remind me, I have something else for you first.’ He extracted his arm, threw back the coverlet and fetched the leather pouch.

  ‘I had these from a young friend I want you to meet. Just back from Italy and ablaze with fervour for the Italian architecture. I meant to give them to you earlier as a wedding gift but forgot in all that to-do over pagan abominations.’ He unrolled a drawing in sepia ink. ‘Inspiration for rebuilding Hawkridge House. What do you think of this for the new south front?’ He flattened against the coverlet a finely drawn fantasy of stone corbels, architraves, pediments, niches and tapering steps. ‘Or is it a little rich for Hampshire?’

  ‘It’s beautiful, but I could never afford to build such a thing.’ She touched the drawing with a tentative finger and sighed. ‘And I wouldn’t know where to begin. There’s so much to learn.’

  ‘You’ve had a long and tiring day. I should have waited until morning.’ He picked up the drawing again. ‘You must sleep now. I forgot your condition.’

  ‘That’s rich – considering that my condition is why we’re both here!’

  ‘Hurrah! You can jest about it!’ He rolled the drawing. ‘On reflection, it’s a touch pompous for Hawkridge Estate.’

  ‘I like that frieze of garlands. Do you think our own Jonas Stubbs could guide his chisel into such intricacies? What a shame that we can’t afford to import Dutch stone masons.’ She looked up and caught him watching her with satisfaction. ‘Please, sir, do tell your friend that the drawing is very fine.’

  A young friend with an interest in Italian architecture. Another crumb of information.

  Wentworth put the pouch on the floor, snuffed the candle on the ledge of the bed, and settled to sleep. To Zeal’s relief, he did not offer his arm again. On the other hand, he seemed to think his evasion had worked. If she were to survive their bargain, he must not assume that he could always play her as he wished.

  ‘Your promise!’ she reminded him.

  ‘No, my dear. Not tonight. My speech is grown as rusty as my gun. And I talked more today than in all the last ten years. Tomorrow night, I swear.’

  Zeal felt the silent tussle between them. ‘Marriage should not begin with a broken vow,’ she said at last.

  ‘Not seven hours wed and hen-pecked already.’ Though still good-humoured, his voice held an edge of irritation.

  Zeal clamped onto her rock and waited.

  Wentworth sighed and sat up in the dark. ‘I shall give you an opening chorus, no more. Then I need to sleep even if you don’t. I’m an old man and not used to dancing.’ He shuffled his buttocks up the bed to lean against the bolsters.

  ‘Close your eyes. Now imagine a ship. The Golden Seal, bound for Hispaniola. Unfurling its white sails with the sound like a thousand wings battering the air. Shouts…men crawl like ants along the spars. The wind catches. The first swell hits her so that she lies over and drops into the trough, already yearning towards her demon lover, the seabed. Or so it seemed to the young man I once was.’

  ‘Were you already a soldier then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How did you come to be one?’

  ‘If you want me to relate every tedious detail of birth, rearing, names of dogs and horses and so on, I won’t live long enough to reach the end of my story.’ He shifted under the coverlet. ‘Jump four weeks. A ship set for the West Indies must call first at the Canaries, to take on fresh water and the last fresh food until landfall in the West Indies. After Madeira, it begins a long ride on the currents which sweep round in a great curve, first eastwards towards Africa, then turning south west again to pour themselves into the Caribbean Sea…have I lulled you to sleep yet?…Pity!…’

  He seemed to debate with himself for a moment, then continued. Like water trapped behind a dam, his story forced itself through the narrow sluice of his throat and teeth.

  ‘Whatever he thought of himself, that young man was an innocent, crammed full of images from books and travellers’ tales but with no experience farther afield than the grey skies of England and a few skirmishes in the Low Countries…’

  Aha! she thought. Finally let slip a fact about himself instead of all that navigation.

  ‘As they sailed south,’ said Wentworth, ‘the sun felt like a fire seeking him out to temper and burnish. It was a crucible in which all men were transmuted by its power into something new and strange in their own eyes…’

  ‘John sailed for the West Indies,’ said Zeal.

  ‘Yes.’ The bedclothes rustled as he re-crossed his feet. ‘Yes, he did.’

  After a long silence, she said, ‘I didn’t mean to break the thread.’ When he did not respond, she pressed him. ‘Why were you sailing to Hispaniola?’

  ‘Ambition.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Greed…you see how truthful I am being.’

  ‘You wouldn’t want to buy my life with counterfeit coins.’

  He made a sound she could not interpret. ‘This ambitious young man,’ he said. ‘…this former self, who had rattled with arrogance when he boarded, now found himself trying to stay out of the way of running sailors and uncoiling ropes, like a cur in a busy kitchen. He hunted down a quiet place, above the hen coop, as it happened, where he could perch and stare out at the sea, hour after hour, unable to stop staring.

  ‘The earth had disappeared forever. He was a speck in infinity. He felt no advance through space, just an endless rolling up and down in the same place. They were all trapped, immobile, under the vast cupping heavens. He wanted to think of himself as a brave man but his guts were crimped with an unexplained terror that had nothing to do with an understandable distaste for drowning.’

  She saw John at the rail, squinting at the water, already changing from the man whom she had loved at Hawkridge.

  Wentworth again fell silent.

  ‘Is that the end?’

  ‘Yes. For now.’ A moment later, however, he added, ‘I shall give you a short epilogue.’

  ‘One night, this young man lay on his back on the poop deck, where the captain had graciously permitted him access, looking up at the stars. Suddenly, he found that he had given himself over to the constant rising and falling and was taking pleasure in riding those arcs through space. Then a bright star fixed him with its beam. No longer trapped, he climbed the shaft of light, higher and higher, until he began to feel he might be sucked through a hole in the sky and vanish into whatever lay on the other side. He gripped onto the light beam for safety but his hands closed on nothing.

  ‘He sat bolt upright, heart pounding. Pressed his palms flat on the deck, felt the sun’s heat lingering in the planks, was grateful for their relative solidity. And for the scents of tar, resin, damp wool, and wet feathers from the hen coop. His senses clung to an everyday world on which his spirit had almost lost its grip. He laid his hands on his belly, then on his face, to remember later how they had felt at this exact moment. He knew he was already changed from the man who came aboard. He feared that the man who returned from this voyage would barely recognize the one who had sailed. He also f
elt an intense thrill.’

  And if I ever see John again, I won’t know him. That’s what Wentworth is trying to tell me. His story is not really about himself at all.

  ‘Enough confession for one night,’ said Wentworth. However, he continued to sit against the bolsters, staring into the shadows of the bed.

  Zeal curled onto her side with her back to him. Could any woman’s love rival that thrill of adventure? She tucked her elbows into her sides, missing the comforting warmth of the cat, which had stayed to guard its territory at Hawkridge.

  She must have slept at last, for she woke with a start, then tried to scream. Someone was in her bed. The candle was alight again. His bulk seemed to fill the enclosed space.

  ‘Hush,’ said Wentworth. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’ He held a knife.

  She could not speak. The thing she had not known was to destroy her after all.

  ‘To avoid all question,’ he said. With the knife, he cut his finger. ‘We must not forget that you are a virgin.’ He wiped his finger on the bed sheet. ‘Go back to sleep. I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

  17

  The day after the wedding, Zeal sat down with resolve at the estate office table, where she and John had worked. Though the wing in which the office lay had escaped the worst of the fire, everything smelled of smoke, including John’s quill pen – the last he had cut – and his coat.

  She took the coat from its peg and put it on again. Held the front away from her body and bent her head to catch his odour, to conjure him.

  There they were. At the table, two ghosts, reaching for papers, bending their heads together to read the same bill or list.

  ‘We must…’ They spoke at the same moment.

  ‘Cows?’ she asked.

  ‘Barns.’

  They looked at each other. ‘Dried bracken,’ they said in unison. They laughed. She had been absurdly amused by this small, mundane coincidence.

  She now sat at the table, on the same stool as her ghost, and picked up his quill pen. She drew the edge of the plume across her cheek. The occasional accidental brush of his hand against her own had stirred in her a contradictory mix of agitation and peacefulness. She had not known, then, how to interpret it. As she was still married to Harry, it did not, could not, occur to her that she might be falling in love with someone else.

  She smoothed the barbels of the feather between thumb and forefinger, then kissed the pen.

  My dearest Love…she wrote.

  She leaned back. This task grew no easier with time.

  If only he sat beside her now, and she had only to speak.

  My dearest Love, Your child and I now belong to another man…though of course, you do not yet know about the child…

  She bent her head over the paper again. ‘I…’ Again she stopped. The words closed between them like steel shutters. The stool at her side was empty.

  She did some calculations on the paper, then dropped her head into her hands.

  Seven years made two thousand five hundred and forty-something days to be survived.

  The child. The new house. Keeping everyone alive and fed. Learning who Wentworth was. More than enough to keep her occupied.

  She pulled a pile of accounts over the letter and began to make notes in her work book.

  18

  Zeal’s Work Book – November 1639

  Choose new house site

  Go with forester and carpenter to Pig Woods and Coombe Hay to choose timber for cutting and planking. To season till next year. (How does one judge a tree? she asked herself. And how many are needed?)

  Dig Quarry pit for small dressing stones for windows and doors as may be. Ask Jonas Stubbs how many more apprentices, masons and labourers needed

  Least cost of carriage of stone from Ufton Wharf, is 5 shillings the load. (But how many loads will I need? How will I know?)

  Make place for burning and slaking lime. Buy sand to cover it until next year. How many mortarmen? Unskilled wages are 8d the day

  Dig up brick clay and spread on field for frost to work

  Timber hovel for Sam to work, as present forge is too small. When work permits, send Sam to London to choose iron for:

  Clamps for stonework

  Glazing bars

  Fire-backs

  Hinges

  Nails

  Costs?

  Nota bene: By Grace of God and good will, Master Wentworth has secured gift of an old barn, all timbers and slates, from acquaintance near Midgeham. Carriage gratis by Thames to Ufton. Thereafter to me.

  Consult with those who have built a house

  To meet costs:

  Sell some pasture with way to river to Master Wilde?

  Sell eggs?

  Salvage all lead from Hawkridge House as cost of new lead is very great

  Master Wentworth suggests approaching Lord S. for monastic lead granted to him

  Dismiss some house servants until again needful, thereby saving expense of their food and clothing

  (How will I pay the king’s new levies, on top of the other taxes?)

  19

  ‘Samuel,’ announced Gifford. ‘Chapter thirty-two, verse thirteen. “I know the pride and naughtiness of your heart.”’

  His congregation stirred in universal guilt. Zeal and Wentworth exchanged glances. To her surprise, he had chosen to accompany her.

  After long thought and much prayer for guidance, Doctor Bowler too had decided to accompany the Hawkridge party on their next required attendance at Bedgebury church.

  ‘As a gesture of peace and goodwill,’ Bowler explained, to himself as much as to anyone.

  But even before Gifford announced the day’s Scripture, Zeal knew that Bowler’s gesture had been misjudged. As soon as their little party arrived, the minister began to vibrate with buoyant tension, like a young girl approaching her first flirtation. He knew he held power. He knew his target. He meant to test his power.

  ‘We live…’ Gifford skewered individuals with hot, rusty-lashed eyes, ‘…in the land of darkness and the shadow of death. In a land where light is as darkness and darkness is seen as light.’ He looked straight at Zeal.

  ‘Job, Chapter ten, verse twenty-two, more-or-less,’ murmured Doctor Bowler on Zeal’s right.

  A large-breasted woman in the opposite pew, whom Zeal knew to be Gifford’s wife, turned to glare.

  ‘In our ignorance, we believe that we are safe in the hands of the Lord,’ continued Gifford. ‘But we, poor fools, ignore our danger. Even as we toil at honest labour, even as our innocent children take their places beside us, we are all in mortal danger. And let me tell you why this is.’

  He leaned forward over his pulpit and lowered his voice as if he feared being overheard.

  ‘There are deceivers among us.’ He glared about, seeking these demonic spies. ‘Wolves dressed as sheep. They are among us, even here, even now as I speak. Today, in this house of God.’

  Backs straightened. A sharp intake of breath flared a number of nostrils. Most of the congregation kept their eyes forward, but a few could not help speculative glances at their personal candidates for wolf-in-disguise.

  Gifford had the edgy need to make his mark that sometimes affects small men in a warrior society. As a student, he had seemed to soften his Scottish Calvinism. He held his tongue on the subject of Anglican bishops and celebration of Anglican mass. He made much of the shared Anglican and Protestant hatred for the Great Whore of Rome. At the same time he cemented his connections with the growing number of English Puritans who opposed what they saw as the recidivist Catholic tendencies of the king and of Bishop Laud. Once he had a congregation, his political and religious views hardened.

  ‘When a king abandons his people to Satan, then a man’s conscience must be his king,’ he often said, if rebuked for speaking against the Crown. ‘Would you entrust any English soul to a half-Danish monarch, married to a French Catholic who now declares himself ready, given certain conditions to once again declare Catholicism to be a true
religion? Though his own father banned the Roman church from English shores!’

  Gifford, like many others, recognized the beginning of a foreign conspiracy to bring Catholicism back to England. The burnings would begin again. New Protestant martyrs would be made. Like a plague detector, he sniffed out the faintest symptoms of infection in his parish. Only constant vigilance could forestall the enemy, who might be anyone – your landlord, your neighbour, your manservant, even your son.

  With a glance at the Hawkridge party, Gifford shifted back to declamatory mode:

  ‘England is become a battlefield for the souls of men. We are not torn between King and Parliament, as many would have it, nor even between Englishman and Scot, though these armies are at war even now. No, our choice is between the Lord Our Father and the Great Harlot of Babylon! And, my friends, beware! The battle is come to us, here among these peaceful fields and clear-running waters. Even here in our own parish, the soldiers of the Antichrist are at work. They corrupt. They seduce with music and sweet perfumes…’

  Doctor Bowler flushed until his scalp glowed like a beacon. He trapped his hands between his knees and sucked his lips in between his teeth.

  ‘They dare even to profane the calling of clergymen. They profess to speak for God, yet lead their sheep ever farther from the light of His Grace. These ravening wolves of Satan disguise themselves as shepherds in order to lead their flock into the slavering jaws of Hell!’

  Zeal sat up as if her spine were a spear stuck quivering into the pew. To stay was intolerable, but to leave would be as good as hanging Doctor Bowler up in the stocks with a label pinned to his coat.

  ‘The Lord would have the wicked cease from troubling. You must not by your idleness sanction the work of the Antichrist.’