The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  Quoynt whistled and waved a white kerchief over his head. Men from the estate, tenants and labourers alike, all hired for the day, ran down the slope to begin to clear the broken rubble from what was to be the fair-standing for her new house.

  Before the end of the day, Quoynt had drilled holes for and set off six more charges. The labourers heaped the smaller rubble along muddy patches of the section of the parish high road that fell to Hawkridge Estate to keep in good repair. By sundown, Zeal was able to walk across a large flat space cut out of the hillside.

  This must have been how God felt during creation, she thought. If He did not care for the shape of a hill, He could change it.

  She was already forgetting how it looked before.

  ‘I did not think this much could be done,’ she said. ‘Now it seems that anything is possible.’

  ‘The only limit is in the imagining.’ Wentworth was as excited as she. ‘Another two days, and you’ll have your cellars as well.’

  The two of them stood looking back down into the Shir valley.

  ‘Our backs and a hill to the north, our faces to the south,’ Zeal said happily. ‘It will be the most perfect house in England.’ She would write to tell John about this first day of creation. He might even write back with suggestions for the new house, as if he were here to share the building of it with her.

  Jonas Stubbs, the estate mason, had set aside a large pile of boulder-sized rubble, which he was tapping in an exploratory way to discover which of them could be fashioned for use. Though Zeal and Wentworth had decided to build mainly of brick, the new house would need stone architraves, lintels, sills, steps, floors and hearths. And though the sandstone of Hawkridge was soft, it was strong enough and easy to work. It was also local.

  ‘We’ll get some good ones out of that lot,’ said Stubbs. He clearly relished a greater challenge than his main job of repairing walls and carving the occasional tombstone.

  Zeal studied the pile of stone with pleasure equal to his. The cost of transporting stone could often exceed the cost of the material itself. Even very small fragments of her own hillside might serve to make arch corbels, keystones or, at the very least, decorative masks to set above doorways.

  ‘You were right,’ she told Philip that night. ‘There are more ways than I ever imagined to defeat the tyrant, Poverty.’

  She set a candle to study the rough drawings she and Wentworth had made of the house, imagining its great H-shape against the hillside with a broad terraced forecourt in front, where carriages could stop before driving on to the stables. Then the green slope falling away to the river and fishponds.

  Wentworth came to stand beside her. ‘Who’d have thought Francis and his bangs would so lift everyone’s spirits?’ He laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘New beginnings are good for the soul. If it’s not still too soon, why not lift their spirits further with your news?’

  23

  Mistress Margaret clapped a hand to her mouth. Zeal saw speculation, then knowledge, blossom in her eyes.

  ‘Will you stand for the babe at its christening?’ she asked quickly, to ward off the questions that were sure to tumble out of the older woman’s mouth.

  Mistress Margaret had begun the day’s baking when Zeal told her. When Agatha went out to the pump with a bucket to refill the kitchen cistern, Mistress Margaret leaned across the table. ‘Forgive me, but I must know. Please, dearest Zeal, tell me! You were so quick to fall…Please! Can it be?’

  ‘You must tell no one!’

  ‘John’s!’ Mistress Margaret stood very still, cradling her ball of dough as if protecting it from attack. Then she burst into tears.

  ‘Master Wentworth learnt of it and made me a most Christian offer. Otherwise I…’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I was so unkind! Had such wicked thoughts!’ Mistress Margaret pushed aside her dough and leaned across the table again to grip both of Zeal’s hands in hers. ‘My darling girl! I can’t believe it! We shall have him still here with us, through his child. We’ll have a young master again. God be praised!’

  ‘I’m not sure He would want to claim any part in this matter,’ Zeal said dryly.

  At the sound of Agatha’s returning footsteps, Mistress Margaret released Zeal and pushed herself upright. ‘Master Wentworth is a king among men.’

  ‘He is indeed. And generous in spirit.’

  ‘The only true generosity. A Christian gives what he can and no one blames him if it’s not more. Our Saviour, Himself, was known to distribute fish!’

  They exchanged watery glances across the table.

  As Agatha emptied her bucket into the copper cistern, Mistress Margaret wiped her eyes with the back of a floury hand. ‘Who’d have thought? Our old sojourner…’ she said with heavy meaning.

  Agatha left once more for the pump in the stable yard.

  Mistress Margaret lowered her voice. ‘I don’t suppose he’d agree to christen the babe “Nightingale”?’

  ‘There will be gossip enough.’

  ‘People have mean minds, but words kill no one. Oh, the wonder of it!’

  She set her shaped loaf on a wooden board and covered it with a damp cloth. ‘All the infants’ swaddling clothes were burnt!’ she said in sudden dismay. ‘And the old cradle. It was in the long gallery with the silk table carpet John brought from Amsterdam, and those two walnut chairs with the…anyway, I will ask Todd to make a new one…’

  She began to wipe the wooden mixing bowl with an oiled cloth. ‘I shall bake a loaf with a softer crust, for Master Wentworth. He must need it for his old teeth.’

  She won’t be the only one to guess the truth, thought Zeal. But it doesn’t matter now. Except that rumour might somehow reach John. I must make myself write again to tell him before he hears. But that means telling him that I’m married.

  What if he doesn’t believe me and thinks that the child is really Wentworth’s?

  A letter was such a fragile container for so great an event. But the longer she delayed, the greater the event grew.

  I will wait until he sends the second letter he promised, she told herself. Until he replies to mine and tells me exactly where to send the next.

  But his ship might have been sunk by pirates off the African coast. He had contracted a fatal ague. Been bitten by a serpent. His life seemed so much more fragile when she could only imagine it.

  We will need to talk for five years to tell all, even after so short a time apart.

  Before going to find Doctor Bowler, Zeal helped Mistress Margaret set the shaped loaves to rise on a shelf above the oven.

  ‘The wonder of it!’ the older woman said again.

  Doctor Bowler now rose daily from his bed, but his face was still blotched purple and green with fading bruises. He could not use his swollen, distorted left hand to feed or dress himself.

  In spite of the number of bastards he had christened and the number of unwed mothers he had tried to find it in himself to rebuke, he stared at Zeal in innocent delight. ‘A babe at Hawkridge again! Of course, old Sir George never had any of his own, but John and then Harry visited as small boys. Oh, my dear! I should think Master Wentworth can’t contain himself for joy!’

  ‘He is very content.’

  ‘I shall compose…’ Bowler began. ‘No. I shall do better than that.’ He looked at her defiantly. ‘I shall play at the christening!’

  Zeal pinched her lips to keep from crying, then smiled brightly. ‘No doubt you will.’

  ‘I can’t bear it!’ she said to Wentworth later when she met him in the lodge parlour. ‘Doesn’t he understand what was done to him?’

  ‘Trying very hard not to, I should think.’ He was preparing to go out for a night on the river. ‘I have another surprise for you, by the way. Now that you are officially with child, you will need help with the house more than ever. From someone who knows far more than I about how to keep roofs from falling down or how to marry a fireplace to a wall. I have arranged it.’

  ‘Who is it? What will he
do?’

  ‘Surveyor is one title he bears. He is also the author of the drawing I gave you on our wedding night. You will have to wait to learn the rest.’

  ‘I think you wanted a wife only so you could refuse to tell her anything!’ said Zeal. But she knew Philip could see that she was pleased all the same. ‘Another man who owes you favours?’

  ‘As it happens, his father does.’

  He wanted so much to take her into his confidence. He had forgotten the joy of shared purpose, though in his life, the purpose had seldom been so benign.

  I could win her heart through this house, he thought, and the rest of her with it.

  All the weapons of seduction lay within his reach – shoulder leaning on shoulder, shared glances, voices tumbling excitedly on top of each other as one thought built on the next.

  Can’t use them. Must not even try. Got myself into enough of a tangle with that unthinking bribe of the truth about myself. Have to be so careful with what I let myself give.

  What the devil do you think you are doing, you old frog?

  He allowed himself a chaste kiss on her warm smooth forehead before he left. He imagined that she leaned a little towards him.

  The next night, when she took him by the sleeve after supper and told him firmly that the fish must wait on his long-postponed story, he found it hard to deny her. Nevertheless, he tried.

  ‘I was born,’ he said. He sat in the lodge parlour on one side of the fire, watching her face while she knitted a scarlet stocking on the other. ‘I grew. I left home to become a soldier. I returned. I ventured again. Prospered. Returned. Ventured again. Returned. And here I am. What more can I tell you?’

  She gave him a stony look across her needles. ‘Were you wed? You said on our wedding night that young women had changed.’

  ‘Did I?’ He looked into the fire.

  She knitted a few more stitches. Of course a man of his age must have been wed before. ‘What was she like?’

  ‘Fragile,’ he said unexpectedly.

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘Not as much as she loved me, it seems.’

  Zeal dropped a stitch and tried to hook up the escaping loop. Wentworth stood and brought his sempster’s candle stand from his room, lit the candle and set the stand on a table beside her. The lens threw a magical oval of bright light onto her work.

  ‘In what way did you love her less?’ Zeal asked at last. In spite of the increased light, the loops of wool kept unravelling.

  ‘I gave her what she wanted.’

  ‘How were you at fault in that?’

  ‘It killed her.’

  She set her knitting down on her lap. Nodded once, blew out a small breath.

  He was standing by the fire, watching her.

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘Never to be parted from me.’

  She bent to pick up her ball of wool, which had fallen to the floor. ‘I can understand how a woman might want such a thing.’

  ‘So much that she could not be without her husband, even for a night? So much that his next voyage would surely kill her, for she meant to kill herself rather than be left behind?’ He left the fire and went to adjust one of the shutters.

  ‘Yes, I can imagine that,’ she said.

  ‘Not one single night?’ he asked angrily. ‘Can you imagine weeping and clinging to his knees to keep him in the room? No, my dear, I think not.’

  I fear I see where he is tending, thought Zeal unhappily. She felt him begin to pace in the shadows behind her. ‘You took her with you on a voyage?’

  ‘Being a weak fool, even knowing her weakness, I did.’ He picked up one of his rods that stood beside the door, then set it down again. He remained by the door, as if poised to flee. ‘That young man I told you of had a young wife weeping in terror in their cabin. She too felt the crucible at work. She feared the sea, but even more, she feared the changes she knew must come as the world around us changed from what she knew. She could not be parted from me, but she could not survive where we went and what it showed her about me. She hanged herself on St Kitt’s. It seems that she could bear to be parted from me, after all.’

  ‘Are you warning me?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ His clothing rustled. ‘Are you not dissolved in tears at my sad tale?’

  He had put on his cloak and taken up one of his rods again.

  ‘I think it’s sadder than you choose to make it sound. But I also think you’re warning me not to try to follow you either, even in my imagination.’

  Nor to follow John.

  He took his bag from its hook and slung it over his shoulder.

  ‘I’m not fragile,’ Zeal said.

  ‘I know. But I have learned to take care enough rather than love too much.’

  From the door, she watched him disappear down the drive into the darkness. His story had made it impossible to call him back.

  Damnation! Damnation! Wentworth thought as he strode angrily towards the river. That was not what I intended at all! How must I seem to her now? And how many other questions have I stirred up? At least I did not tell her all. I must think exactly what to say if she manages to catch me off guard again. I must be ready. And resolute.

  24

  Zeal lifted her head sharply at the cry of pain. She had waxed the balancing acrobat and dolphin finials of the first two pews and moved on to the leafy face of the wild man carved into the side of the next pew.

  There was a second cry, a strangled yelp, followed by panting.

  She moved warily to the back of the chapel. The sound could have been made by a wounded animal or by a human. Close by, not up in the family gallery. Whatever it was did not cry out again. Instead, it seemed to be holding its breath, as if it had heard her and feared detection.

  The vestibule through which the house servants had once entered the chapel was empty. She heard a sharp intake of breath and pushed open the door in one side of the vestibule.

  ‘Doctor Bowler!’ She rushed forward into the little room which he used as both parlour and sleeping chamber.

  ‘Don’t touch me!’ His tone was like a slap.

  She stopped, shocked.

  ‘Please,’ he added. His face was grey-white under its green and purple bruises, his brow oily and damp. He trembled and sucked his breath in and out between his teeth. Tears stood in his eyes. He was sitting at a table with his left hand lying flat in front of him, without the bandages, which were tangled beside his hand. Two sturdy splints of firewood also lay on the table.

  ‘The bones of the last two fingers weren’t healing straight,’ he said. ‘I had to break…’ He swayed on his stool.

  ‘I’ll be back at once!’ She ran to the bake house kitchen as fast as her condition allowed and returned with a bottle of aqua vitae.

  She held the cup to his mouth but had to steady his head. His skin was clammy and cold. ‘Have you gone mad?’

  ‘I mean to play again.’

  She caught him as he fell from the stool. He shouted with pain.

  ‘Lie there and don’t move.’ She covered him with a blanket from his bed. ‘I’ll fetch someone to help me lift you onto the bed.’

  ‘I must tie the fingers straight first. Help me sit up.’

  She wavered, then obeyed the astonishing firmness in his voice. She passed him the splints and bandages. When he had worked his fourth and little fingers into the desired line (a process which she could not watch and which he accompanied by gasps and whimpers), he allowed her to help him tie the splints into place.

  ‘That will be much better, thank you,’ he said, and passed out.

  The following day, he dictated a letter for her to write down, to an instrument-maker in London asking the price of a new fiddle. Wentworth returned from a four-day retreat on the river in time to volunteer that he needed to visit a Flemish needle-maker in Basingstoke to buy more fishhooks. He would take Bowler’s letter and arrange for it to be sent on to London.

  He brought back not only his hooks but a fiddle
and bow.

  ‘It’s old and not half so fine as your own,’ he told Bowler. ‘It’s a second fiddle, in fact. Belongs to a tavern busker I know who prefers another instrument. On loan till you can get a new one.’

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Zeal demanded later of Wentworth. ‘You saw how they smashed his left hand! It’s the left that has all the movement over the strings. Why make it harder for him?’

  ‘“Oh, ye of little faith!”…Don’t, please…I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

  Bowler sent for the pale-haired, angel-voiced Jamie to help him with some mysterious task.

  Two weeks after he had rebroken and set his fingers, Bowler took to carrying the borrowed fiddle with him at all times. Whenever there was a pause in his other activity, he tucked the fiddle under his chin and silently fingered the strings with his right hand, which had been bruised but not broken, miming scales and trills.

  Zeal observed him with the heavy heart of a parent helplessly watching a child ride full tilt at failure.

  ‘We re-strung it, Jamie and I,’ Bowler explained jubilantly, as if re-stringing were the only obstacle. ‘Not so hard as you might think with quick young fingers at work. And turned the bridge, of course. It’s a looking glass fiddle, now, but I’ll soon get accustomed to it.’ He tucked it back under his chin and began the awkward, wrong-handed fingering again.

  ‘Listen, you can just hear the notes.’ He struck down on a string with his finger. ‘Is it in tune, Jamie my boy? Then tighten it for me, there’s a good lad.’

  Francis Quoynt finished blasting out the footprint of the new house and left in the third week of November. Zeal had accepted tenders for work and engaged craftsmen to start in the spring. A roofed workshop was built for Jonas Stubbs not far from the building site. Nearby, he stacked the sandstone boulders, sorted by size and shape. The small broken rubble was pounded into the mud of the high road.