‘The minister says that that music is wicked idleness. And encourages other sins.’ Grindley turned his hat in his hands. ‘He says that you and Doctor Bowler persist in the ways of wickedness.’ He gave her a malevolent look. ‘I won’t have my son singing mass!’
‘He doesn’t sing mass here!’
‘Doctor Gifford says it might as well be.’
‘The minister says…’
And who taught Jake Grindley to be so insolent to his landlord?
She wrapped herself in her warmest cloak, twisted a scarf around her neck, pulled a felt hat low over her ears, and set off to try to find Philip. He was not on the river after all. As she left the lodge, she saw his figure up at the new house, apparently pacing out distances.
Whatever is he doing? she wondered. But her present urgency drove the question from her mind.
‘What shall we do?’ she demanded, when she had struggled up the hill, which seemed to grow steeper every day. She panted in the cold air. ‘Jamie doesn’t want to be a farmer! He wants to be a musician! Doctor Bowler says. You can tell just by listening to him. And you should have seen him just now at the lodge.’
‘His father is right, then. By his own light.’
‘It’s Gifford!’ said Zeal. ‘Using Grindley to punish Doctor Bowler for not giving in.’
‘Perhaps Grindley is truly concerned for his son.’ Wentworth hesitated, then continued. ‘There’s another point. While gutting a pike some weeks ago, I overheard him telling someone that he did not think Master Parsley was the sort of gentleman who could advance a boy’s prospects.’
‘I hope you stood up and put Grindley straight.’
‘He may be right.’
Zeal glared at her husband but said nothing more. She had begun to learn that he often took his time to act, but when he did act, it was to considerable effect.
She trudged back to the lodge, trying to think how she would tell Doctor Bowler that Jamie was gone, if he did not already know.
There was worse to come, before Twelfth Night had gone.
The usual Twelfth Night celebration at High House was muted. Bereft of his bowing hand, Doctor Bowler could not play and did not feel like singing. The company, which was Sir Richard, Comer the parish councillor who had attended the inquiry into Harry’s death, Lamb, the Wildes of Far Beeches with their four children, together with the combined house families of High House and Hawkridge plus Tuddenham and his brood, had to make do with the rough entertainment offered by a troupe of travelling mummers who knocked at the gate.
After miming the battle between Saint George and the Dragon with thrown squibs and sulphurous smoke, which were the high points of the evening, they juggled apples and brass cups, sang, and produced live doves from the ladies’ sleeves. Zeal sat at the back, in case weariness forced her to leave. Even so, a boy wearing a monkey mask found her and produced a farthing from her ear. It was not until preparing for bed back at the lodge that she found the paper slipped into her apron pocket.
When Wentworth knocked on her door, with a rod in his hand and wearing his heaviest coat, she did not answer. He entered, saw her curled tightly on the bed and set his rod beside the door.
‘Are you ill?’ he asked urgently. ‘Zeal, what is wrong? Is it the child?’
‘I’ve had another letter.’
The same knife-slash strokes of the pen. The same venom. Both letters were from the same hand, Wentworth was certain.
‘For lawless joys, a bitter ending waits.’
Though not particularly biblical, the words might still be Gifford’s, but not the hand. Wentworth pulled at his lower lip and frowned at the paper on the table in his room.
And why would the minister write again now? Surely the removal of Jamie Grindley was enough of a victory.
He liked and trusted the scrawny, self-important little man no better after their confrontation in the vestry at Bedgebury, but he did not judge him to be a snake. He had known soldiers like him, good at the head of a charge, bad tacticians. Gifford liked to attack by the searing light of hell fire, with an audience if possible. He was a thunderbolt man, not a server of poisoned ice.
Some fanatic in the congregation then, stirred by Gifford’s rabble rousing?
Wentworth sighed heavily and pinched the bridge of his forceful nose, as if starting a megrim. He had learned so well to avoid thinking unwanted thoughts. Now he felt he had begun to lose his grip on his thoughts entirely.
I believe this letter may be aimed in part at me.
Much as he wanted to be proved wrong, he thought he might suspect who could have written the letters.
If so, it proves that I was right in the first place to do as I did all those years ago, he told himself. Though that’s no consolation.
He put the letter with the other in his locked chest.
But I’ve no proof. None at all.
He blew out his candle lantern and stood for a moment in the dark. Then he left his room, crossed the parlour and let himself into the opposite chamber.
He listened for her breathing.
Seems asleep at last.
Carefully, he eased into the bed and edged towards her until he met a warm soft curve of hip. She sighed and settled back against him.
Dreaming of Nightingale, no doubt, he told himself wryly. But I’m the one who’s here. He fell asleep stretched out beside her small warm body, his earlier discomfort wiped out by a deep and selfish joy.
30
Zeal’s Work Book, The Lady Day Quarter Day – March 1640
Prepare hot beds in garden
Dig ground and mix in manure
Drive sheep onto common land
Leave eggs under brooding hens
Sow spinach, cabbages, coriander, parsnips, peonies and pumpkins Transplant red cabbage
Begin the spring cleaning of bake house, brew house and lodge
Scour churns
For the New House:
Dig cess pits against hiring of labourers, to be lined with poles and reeds, with sheds over
2 cooking huts for same
Clear level ground for their tents and huts
Clean water supply for same
Water and trample brick clay and sift out stones
Agree lists with Lamb
By March, the salvage of building stuffs was well advanced. Most of the ash had been spread on garden bed and fields. Most charred wood had either been burnt on Bonfire and Treason Night, or further reduced to charcoal and burnt in the winter braziers. Teams of estate labourers had rescued much of the precious lead from the roof and down pipes, which, though most often found in deformed lumps, could be melted again and recast. Very little window glass had survived.
‘We must find a way of making those windows of yours,’ Lamb had declared early in the New Year. He had set off at once to visit an estate in Warwickshire whose owner had tried to build his own glass furnaces.
During the dark winter evenings, Lamb had calculated quantities of building stuffs and necessaries from his own plans and the model of the house. Bent shoulder-to-shoulder in the wavering yellow light focussed by Wentworth’s candlestick, he and Zeal had drawn up tentative lists. They had invited written tenders for supplying glass, tiles, slates, and additional timber and stone to supplement what Wentworth could beg or the estate could provide. When those tasks were done, Zeal continued to describe her vision of the details of her house, and Lamb captured her words and thoughts in nets of quick, inky lines. Together, they had taken back from the craftsmen the control of the building.
By March, amber oak planks, sawn under cover, were seasoning in stacks. Casual labour, hired by the day from the parish poorhouse, had dug, and cast up to weather, great mountains of brick clay from a deposit on the edge of Far Beeches estate.
After discussions with Wentworth, Master Wilde of Far Beeches made a proposal that allowed Zeal to proceed with building for a few months at least. Not only would he buy the meadow with access to the river, he agreed to advance her the cost
of building an oven on the site in April or May. He too needed bricks, to repair walls of his own.
Philip had undertaken to discover whether or not they would need a licence to rebuild. Of an evening, Zeal and Lamb, sometimes joined by Wentworth, would walk about the building site, discussing urgent matters like drains or where to build the encampments for the builders who would begin once warmer weather arrived.
Zeal ached to get on. So much preparation was needed before a house could begin to grow. She had imagined something more like a seed, which heaved up the soil, broke through, then uncurled upwards driven by its own internal force. Instead, three and a half months after Quoynt’s first blast, she still gazed down into muddy trenches where the first heavy foundations now lurked damply, like teeth broken off below the gum.
‘Winter always stops work,’ Lamb reassured her. ‘Later, you’ll be grateful to have had time to ponder. By May, it will be all “Where exactly do you want this, madam?” and “You’ll never fit those stairs in there!” and “This main beam went and split on us. What do you want us to do now?”’
Though she had not yet heard that he was safely arrived on Nevis, she wrote again to John, in the care of the tobacco planter, his master for the next seven years, whose name he had given in his first letter. She told him about starting the new house, but not who was helping her. She filled two pages with bridges, brick ovens, and the number of new lambs, without mentioning either the baby or her marriage. She avoided all topics that might even suggest them. She knew how dangerous the spaces between words could be. John would be as quick to read what she had left unsaid, as she had been to spy his peril in the words ‘…whatever protection that kinship may offer me.’
When they could look into each other’s eyes, and grip hands, and hear the tone of each other’s voices, they would put it all right again.
31
March 1640
‘I must go to Basingstoke! It’s the Quarter Day.’ Trying to climb out of his bed, Philip collapsed onto the floor beside it.
‘You’re not going anywhere while your ague is on you.’ Zeal called Rachel to help lift Philip back onto the bed. He was as hot as an ember and his eyes were bright.
‘It comes. It goes,’ he said. ‘Don’t concern yourself…Go saddle my horse, sir.’
Rachel looked at Zeal for guidance. Zeal gave her head a tiny shake and gestured for Rachel to go. She thought it best not to tell Philip that he had already missed Quarter Day, which had been the day before.
‘I’ll dress now,’ said Philip. ‘Must be there by noon!’
‘In a moment, in a moment.’ Whatever he wanted to do would have to wait. ‘Drink this first, my husband.’ She held the cup to his mouth. ‘Why don’t you sleep a little, to rest for the journey?’
He stiffened and looked at her in alarm. ‘Journey? Where must I go? Never again! No journeys! The ship must sail without me.’
‘Indeed, it shall.’ She wiped his cheeks and neck with a cool wet cloth, then the insides of his wrists. ‘You shall stay here with me.’
He seemed content with that, if a little uncertain who she might be.
When he had cooled and fallen asleep, she left Philip with one of the young house grooms standing watch.
‘Send for me if the fever rises again,’ she told the boy. ‘And do not, no matter how he curses you, let him go out into this grey chilly day! I will be down at the old house with Tuddenham.’
Though her new house was still only foundations in a muddy hole in the ground, Zeal already imagined the painted fruitages and flowerages of wall cloths, and the subjects of the painted screens of oiled silk she would set in the big windows to stop winter draughts. She would set Philip’s Christmas map, already traced, squared up and enlarged for transfer by Lamb, onto the floor of her new entrance hall. Made of inlaid stone or tiles, if she somehow found the money. But otherwise, painted wood would serve very well, and seemed far more likely.
She wondered where Lamb had gone, on yet another of his excursions after information or materials.
She tested possible names for the house, knowing that the right one already existed. It merely waited to be revealed, as distinct and unmistakable as a hen’s egg discovered in a pile of straw.
Such were the thoughts with which she now entertained herself through the tedium of salvaging bricks.
‘Hey, you! Girl!’
‘Seven hundred and forty-four,’ said Zeal, scratching another line on her tally sheet. As her pregnancy was now six months advanced, she sat on a stool and settled for keeping score. She did not look at the horseman who had shouted at her.
‘You there, with the paper!’
Zeal glanced up as if at a buzzing fly, then back down at her paper. She rubbed her nose with a cold dirty hand. Lamb had calculated that to build their perfect house they would need at least two hundred thousand bricks, of which they must salvage as many as they could.
Tuddenham turned a brick in his hand, tapped it, then nodded. She made the satisfying diagonal line that marked the achieving of five and pinned down the previous four so they could not escape.
The horseman had come along the track that followed hedgerows from the garrison town of Silchester. They had noticed him as he crested Hawk Ridge, where the wintry yellows and browns were just pricked with pale green. For a moment, he reminded Zeal of the horseman who had gazed down on the workings of the new house before disappearing again. Then they lost him when he dropped down into the water meadows. His horse was wet to the girth.
He rode so close to Zeal that she could smell the damp leather of the saddle and the curdled sweat on his horse. The animal’s breath clouded in the cold air.
‘Philip Wentworth. Is he about?’
Zeal marked off the seven hundred and forty-sixth brick before she looked up. ‘Are you asking me, sir?’ The other men and women who had been helping with the salvage bent to their work with unnatural concentration.
The rider was a tall thin man, a little older than Harry. Perhaps in his early thirties, about John’s age. He seemed to hum with suppressed rage like a hive of bees about to swarm.
‘Who else might I be asking, Mistress Pert?’
Zeal heard Tuddenham give a startled sniff. She cast him a warning glance over her shoulder before standing up from her stool. To be fair to the stranger, she did not look much like the mistress of the estate in her heavy old skirt and a thick scarf around her neck and head, to keep off the dust as well as cold.
‘I’m told he lives at Hawkridge,’ said the horseman. ‘But that doesn’t seem likely, now that I see the place.’
‘Are you a friend?’
The horseman smiled unpleasantly under his wide-brimmed felt hat. ‘I don’t believe I could call him a friend. Not that it’s your business. Just tell me where he can be found, if not here.’
Zeal wiped sooty fingers on her apron and studied the square-jawed face above her. The eyes lay hidden in the shadow of his hat, but she did not like the set of his lower lip.
Philip had enough worry with his ague and raving. He could do without having this evil-tempered creature set on him, one of those who reserve civility for social superiors.
‘If you tell me your name, I’ll see that the message reaches him.’
‘He needs no messages. He knows he left me hanging around like a looby at our agreed time yesterday. But, then, he’s a master of broken promises.’
‘Indeed,’ said Zeal coldly. She dismissed any second thoughts about lying to this creature. ‘Then we’ve nothing more to say to each other.’
‘Who is your master?’ he demanded angrily. ‘I’ll see that he teaches his people to respect a gentleman!’
‘I have no master!’
‘The more’s the pity! He might beat some civility into you.’ His hand tightened on his crop as if he considered doing it himself. ‘Unless he’s the one who fumbled you.’
‘Get off this estate!’ said Zeal quietly.
‘You insolent little trull!’
Zeal drew herself up. She wished she were taller. Her hand found the knife that hung from her belt. ‘If you don’t go, I vow that the owner of this estate will have you driven off!’
He laughed. ‘Old Wentworth would always rather consort with trollops, buggers and licensed thieves than with honest gentlefolk. Trust him to find them even here. Is it true that he married one of them?’
‘Get off this estate!’
He shook his head in mock despair and struck his horse violently with the crop. The startled animal swung round so suddenly that its hindquarters knocked Zeal to the ground. She rolled to escape its hoofs, then scrambled to her feet, winded but filled with fury. He spurred his horse into a canter.
‘Stop him!’ she gasped. She gave chase, intent on pulling him from his horse. Her head thudded with white rage. She would ram his words back down his throat. Haul him up to the lodge and make him apologize to Philip for those ugly words.
But her right ankle gave way under her, as if the bone had turned to water. She stumbled and fell again. She limped to her stool, while two of the young men sprinted up the drive in hopeless pursuit.
‘Are you hurt, madam?’ Tuddenham bent to look at her face.
‘Only my pride,’ she said shortly. She brushed mud and soot from her sleeves and skirt. ‘I was dirty before.’ Her left wrist was hot with pain, while her ankle felt cold. A spike seemed to have been driven into her gut just above the pubic bone. ‘Don’t fret.’
‘All the same…’ Tuddenham was glaring at her with such intense concern that she flushed uncomfortably. She could see him biting back the suggestion that she return to High House to recover from her fall.
The Memory Palace Page 19