She stood up experimentally. Limped two steps. Painful but possible. ‘I’d best go tell Master Wentworth what a delightful visitor he missed. You carry on with the tally.’
With honour satisfied all around, she set off up the long drive. Feeling Tuddenham’s eyes on her back she tried not to limp.
I hope I did the right thing, she thought. Philip is too ill to deal with a man like that. I can’t imagine what he wants with him even when well.
Nevertheless, her curiosity was aroused. If the former Philip had such associates, it was small wonder he decided to hide himself away and fish.
I’ve let him off his stories for too long. Distracted by the house, by Lamb, by exhaustion, and the growing child.
She decided to go to High House rather than the lodge. Philip would be sleeping now, and she wanted to report this stranger to Sir Richard.
A little uneasily, she recalled the stranger’s mention of a missed meeting and Philip’s urgent need to get to Basingstoke. On the track to High House, she stopped with a stitch in her side. While she waited for it to ease, she hauled up her skirts to examine a bruise that had begun to throb from knee to hip.
I shall tell Philip that it was an accident, if he notices anything wrong. Whatever’s between them, there’s enough bad feeling already.
The stitch grew worse, so she sat down in the grass. She also felt giddy.
After a short rest, she set off again. The ground was very cold.
Strong jaws closed around the base of her belly. Her hair prickled. Cold washed through her. When the jaws loosened again, she leaned forward, bracing her good hand against her knee, trying to regain her breath. She waited, heart thumping, but the pain did not return.
She limped a few more steps up the hill. All seemed well again. The skin still felt a little tight across her belly, but no wonder.
All will be well, she told herself. I must not allow that man any power over my body or my thoughts. Beyond her rage, he also filled her with unease.
He never came. When I get to High House, I will ask for some thyme water to wash him away. A man like that might very likely write poisonous letters. Or rather, someone like him who knows me enough to imagine that he has cause
Or that she has cause, Zeal reminded herself. We don’t know that the letter writer is a man.
She stopped to rest again. Her eyes searched for a bright omen to replace the memory of the man on horseback. A single magpie dropped to the ground on the track ahead. The sharply defined black and white of its feathers seemed to belong to some other image, not the soft assembly of rusty greens around it.
She looked away. She could choose not to believe in omens, but the single bird still made her feel askew.
Half-way up the hill above the spring where she had made her wedding wish, she sat on an outcrop of reddish rock to rest her foot and calm her mind. The musicians had praised God in the field below her. The odd disorientation which had followed the fire wrapped itself around her again. High House seemed very far away. She decided to sit for a while where she was, cold ground or not. She cupped her hand over her belly and imagined that the child was sleeping. Best not to move and wake it. Perhaps Rachel could bring her dinner here.
The jaws closed again.
Suddenly, she knew that she should not walk the rest of the way up the hill and down past the lake to High House. That all might not be well.
‘Rachel!’ she screamed.
She pulled her knees up. Held her legs with her hands and tried to breathe. The cramp hit again, harder than before.
It’s now, she thought. Too soon. Here in the pasture.
‘Rachel!’ she called again. ‘Tuddenham!’
Wait! she ordered the child.
She could not draw enough breath to call again. When she tried, her voice came out in a frayed ribbon of sound. She felt as undone and shapeless as pond water without banks or dam. She became pain itself. Tried to hold the child and herself together, but pain invaded the space inside her body. It was crowding the child out.
She and the child both dissolved in the pain. Her reason turned to mist, lifted, blew away.
She fought the pain. Held. Held. Felt her grip begin to slip. Could not hold the child. With despair, she felt it slip away from her. She clawed up her skirts, lest they smother the baby. A boy, smeared with blood and a sheer white wax.
Voices. Hands. Rachel, thank the Lord. And a man. He shouldn’t be here. Seeing me like this.
‘Let me…’ said a woman.
‘I have him!’ Zeal seized up her son. He could almost fit into one of her hands. ‘Tie and cut the cord! At once!’
He was the temperature of her own skin. Too small. A miniature baby. Webs between his fingers. Long little legs…Oh, John!
She wrapped him in her scarf. His tiny mouth was no larger than the opening of a snail’s shell. With a finger as huge and unwieldy as a tree trunk, she felt for a blockage in his throat as she had once seen a midwife do. She put her face on his and breathed into his nose and mouth.
‘Madam, it’s no use…’
She gave her son her breath gently, as if puffing away a tiny gnat. His chest rose and fell under her hand. She breathed for him again. Then again.
‘Madam, he’s not for this world.’
‘LET ME!’ cried Zeal, as fierce as a cat that thinks you will take away its bird.
Then she had to stop while the child’s treacherous nest also slipped from her body.
‘Madam, permit me!’ Rachel, panting hard from her run to and from the hillside spring, held her cupped hands above the child’s head. ‘What will you call him?’ She spilled a few drops of water from her hands. ‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit…’
‘George,’ said Zeal. ‘For his great-uncle, who built Hawkridge.’ She bent her head again to her son’s damp face, only dimly aware of others around her, who waited while she blew into his lungs again and again. When he began to grow cold in spite of her scarf, she stopped at last. She let hands lift her from the ground and carry her, with her son still in her arms.
Once in High House, she asked for water and a soft cloth.
‘Lady, you should be abed,’ said Sir Richard’s chief housemaid. ‘Let me help you there. Rachel can look after the babe now.’
‘Bring me water!’
The other two women looked at each other. Rachel shrugged and left the room.
‘Come, mistress.’
‘We’re quite well here.’ Zeal sat on the floor and leaned against the chair behind her. She felt that the floor was safer than the chair, in case she dropped him.
Someone brought a charcoal brazier and set it beside her.
I will learn his face, before it’s too late. I didn’t learn his father’s face. I must press him into my memory before they take him from me forever. I think he’s a little like John. His long legs. There’s something in the set of the eyes.
She held him against her. A part of her still insisted that she could warm him again.
When Rachel returned with a basin of fresh water, Zeal washed her son’s face, removing the waxy coating and smears of blood. His nose was narrower than the tip of her little finger. She washed the black hair that stuck to his head like wet down, then the new leaves of his eyebrows. She kissed his small forehead, then shuddered at the chill under her lips.
Then she began to wash his body, with long tender strokes along his arms and legs, and across his rounded belly. She stopped to study his minute penis and generous balls. She saw him as a man, as tall as his father, though with black hair instead of dark russet.
Don’t be a fool. Many babies are born with black hair and lose it later.
She washed his genitals, his infinitesimally small toes. Then she began again with his face and hair.
‘Please heat another basin of water.’
‘Surely the poor creature is clean enough now,’ said Rachel. ‘Let me help with the winding. Then we’ll put you to bed again, where you should be right now
!’
Zeal’s hands lightly enclosed the baby’s frail ribs. ‘The water’s too cold.’
At that point, both Lamb and the midwife arrived.
‘You’ve no business here!’ said Rachel sharply.
Lamb ignored her and sank to his knees beside Zeal on the floor, bringing the smell of cold air and the outdoors with him on his clothes. She lifted her hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall again.
Lamb laid his palm on the baby’s forehead. ‘The skull has the same shape as his father’s.’
She gave him a startled, questioning look.
Lamb winked. ‘If one can’t speak the truth in the face of death, when else?’ He took off his hat and set it on the floor. After a moment, he observed, ‘He is turning a strange but rather beautiful colour, like soiled ivory.’
‘Sir!’ Rachel stood at his shoulder. ‘Please, leave. We have things to do. My lady should be in bed, not catching chills in a wet gown on the floor!’
‘May I paint him?’ asked Lamb. He reached out. When Zeal did not object, he gently took the body from her arms. ‘Who’d have thought so small a thing could so resemble an entire person? I can see how he would have looked when grown. Do let me paint him.’
Rachel exclaimed in horror. ‘Let her bury the poor thing and get on with mourning!’
‘How do you propose to represent him?’ asked Zeal from within the cold calm that followed her washing of the corpse. She observed in herself the deep-planted seed of a scream.
‘Madam, don’t let him.’
‘I don’t know yet,’ said Lamb. ‘A putto would be too obvious…perhaps as the infant Eros. The solution will come to me as I make the drawings. We must make a place for your son in your house as well as in the churchyard.’
‘At the centre,’ Zeal said. ‘And also paint a miniature for me to take to show his…’ She caught herself.
‘Just as well the weather’s turned cool,’ Rachel muttered to Mistress Judd, the midwife. ‘What shall we do about telling poor Master Wentworth? Anyone would think this young puppy is the father!’
‘Give me my child again.’
Lamb glanced sideways at Zeal who had remained motionless since he took the baby. ‘Not yet, my muse. If you let these good women settle you in bed, I’ll give him back. Then I’ll draw you both. You think you’ll never forget, but in my experience, we hide such things away as fast as we can.’
‘Wickedness!’ cried Mistress Judd.
‘My work here is to help capture truth,’ replied Lamb. ‘Most often, I chase visible truth after it has fled and have to make do with the greater, invisible truths instead.’ He laid the baby on the foot of Sir Richard’s great bed.
While Lamb went in search of pencil and paper, Zeal allowed the two women to strip off her wet and bloody gown, then wrap her in blankets in the bed. There, she cradled her child while Lamb drew and drew, until she finally slept.
‘How did this happen? Who let it happen?’ Philip raged at the far end of the chamber. ‘He said that I missed him in Basingstoke? Are you absolutely certain?’ He had come from Hawkridge wearing only a cloak over his night shirt and sleeveless gown.
‘Not so loud, sir!’ said Rachel. ‘You’ll wake her.’
‘Why are you out of bed?’ Zeal asked groggily. ‘Is your fever gone?’
‘Tell me!’ Philip’s voice cut like broken glass.
‘You’d best ask Tuddenham.’ Rachel crossed to the bed with a mug in her hand. ‘And you, mistress, drink this down.’
‘Where is my baby?’ She was just testing.
‘Our son,’ said Philip. ‘Oh, my poor, dear girl.’
Zeal thought that he seemed truly stricken. ‘You married me for nothing, after all.’ She watched him curiously, still too numb to feel anything much. How can he be mourning John’s son? That’s for me to do. She knew what lay waiting to ambush her. Not yet. Can’t start that now. Will die. Later.
She woke in the night to see Philip asleep in the chair beside her bed with a candle burning on the chest beside him and a blanket wrapped around his legs. His eyes opened as she stirred.
‘You’re ill yourself. Go back to bed,’ she told him.
‘The fever is past.’
‘All for nothing.’ She laid her hands on her flat empty belly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why? I wouldn’t have missed Gifford’s face when he saw the musicians in the meadow, for anything.’
She woke again near dawn, with the same awful plunge from warm sleep into knowledge. Wentworth was still there. When he saw that she was awake, he took her hand and rubbed it absently, as if trying to warm her.
‘Please don’t miss your early fishing on my account.’
He nodded. ‘I’ll go when those hordes of women descend again.’
The next morning, she clutched at her numbness while still climbing up from sleep. She clung to it, wrapped it around her like a thick cloak against icy winds. Clarity almost grabbed her once. Then she drank the potion Rachel held to her mouth and sank back into woolly calm again.
When she next woke, the light told her that it was afternoon. This time, Lamb sat by the bed, sketching her while she slept.
‘You should have asked my permission,’ she said crossly.
‘Ingrate! Look how lovely you were in sleep.’ He showed her several drawings.
‘What of the others?’ She dared not say the word ‘baby’.
‘I will show you when I am satisfied. Go back to sleep.’
As she lacked the strength to argue, she lay with her eyes closed to satisfy him.
After a while, he set aside his drawings and rubbed her bare feet. For some reason, this made her weep quietly, as if she had sprung a slow leak.
‘What have I done?’ she asked Rachel when her woman brought a savoury custard for her supper.
‘Eat this and go back to sleep. There’s plenty of time to talk later when you’re stronger.’
‘I don’t want to sleep any more,’ she told Philip, who was back in his chair that next night. Her face felt hot and her eyelids tight. She tried to sit up. The room tilted. The door and window frames wavered like reflections in water.
‘I’m under orders to keep you in bed,’ he warned.
She fell back and curled onto her side. She burned. My metal has begun to melt and combine into a new alloy. I am taking a new shape, a deformed lump of lead. John will never know me now.
A rocket exploded behind her eyes but the falling fragments turned to perroquets. She began to climb the rigging, towards a bright blue and red bird, which alighted on the very top of the mast. I can recapture it, she thought, if I take great care, and don’t look down. The swaying mast carried her in a great arc through space. She felt sick. She had never been so frightened in her life, but she had to recapture the perroquet or die. She seemed to climb and fall for days. Sometimes the bird was there. Sometimes it had flown.
‘I have not seen any of the birds, flowers or strange four-legged creatures that fill John’s senses,’ she said aloud when she awoke seven hours later. ‘I know nothing of what is shaping him.’
Philip laid a dry warm hand on her forehead and grunted in approval. ‘Welcome back.’
She looked at him in shock, then remembered that this was her husband. ‘We must undo the marriage!’
‘Why?’
The answer seemed too obvious to need words. ‘Don’t you wish to?’
‘I don’t think we could, even if we did wish,’ he said.
All those clauses and hedges of words had been constructed only as a shelter around the child. But its death did not dissolve the words.
‘You’re trapped,’ she said.
‘As are you.’
‘Don’t you find it intolerable?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘But the reason is gone.’
‘Friendship remains.’
‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. She laid her arm across her eyes. A moment later, she added, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that as it sound
ed. I’m very grateful to you.’
‘But love for friendship is a poor exchange?’
She turned to look at him. ‘You’re as blunt as I am. I haven’t grown accustomed to it yet.’
‘Self-delusion is a waste of life.’
She did not reply. Even bluntness could not support her true thoughts at that moment.
Philip stood up and walked to the window. ‘I’m an old man. That’s your consolation. Mind you, I don’t intend to die on demand.’
‘Please! Don’t say such things! I can’t bear it!’ She drew a shaky breath, then thrust the edge of the coverlet into her mouth to stifle a scream of despair. Then she began to cry.
‘Zeal?’ He walked back to the bed. ‘Damnation!’ he said to himself.
She sucked in long scraping breaths and sobbed them out again. The pressure of tears tried to push her eyes from their sockets. Her cheeks grew wet. Her nose ran. Still, she could not get her breath back. She was drowning in a black sea.
Philip sat on the bed. ‘I didn’t mean to set you off.’
She wiped her face with the coverlet.
‘Why not use your sleeve instead?’ he asked. ‘I expect it’s easier to wash.’ His weight rocked on the mattress. ‘Here’s my handkerchief, if you like. A little used, I’m afraid.’
With eyes swollen shut with weeping, she reached blindly and felt him put the linen square into her hand. She blew her nose. ‘You’re all that’s left,’ she said, with astonishment. Then sobs shook her again.
‘My dearest girl…’
Harry took her innocence and the nymphs. The house burned. John abandoned her. John’s cat died in flames. Her son barely touched the earth before he left again. She was married, but not to the man she loved.
‘What has happened to my child?’
‘We set him in a vault in the chapel while you were ill.’
She said nothing.
Philip patted her shoulder. Then, abruptly, he climbed onto the bed and wrapped his arms around the small quivering hillock she made under the coverlet. For some reason, he began to hum, tunelessly. The vibrations in his chest reached her through the coverlet.
The Memory Palace Page 20