‘You know I meant nothing of the sort!’
He came to the table and set his large hands over hers, which she had bunched into fists. ‘I do know what you meant. And I did want to tell you…I wanted, in my weakness, to show you something of my other life, which was more than tying flies and smoking by the fire.’ He picked up one fist and kissed it. ‘I wanted you to see me as more than I am now. As a venturer, a soldier. I fear that my vanity could not resist letting you know how much I am changed.’
‘I like you as you are.’
‘Ah, but just think how you might have loved the soldier!’
She avoided his eyes as he continued to hold her hands, but felt her face grow hot. ‘Is our battle over?’ she finally asked. ‘I hate quarrelling with you.’
‘“Battle”?’ He smiled. ‘That’s another of those words, like “cruelty”, which put on false domestic clothes.’ He looked down. ‘Do you still want to hit me?’
She quickly unclenched her fists. ‘You can’t abandon yourself on your knees in the jungle.’
‘I can and shall. Good night, my dearest girl.’ He did not try to kiss her again.
When he had gone, Rachel came down from her loft wearing the blank face of someone trying to pretend she has not overheard everything. ‘Would you like a posset to help you sleep, madam?’
After Rachel had left again, Zeal lay fuming and turning in the dark. She had recognized finality in his tone. It had taken the loss of her child to shake his tongue loose again after the false start on their wedding night. What would it take to shake it loose again now?
Yet, I’m certain that he wants to tell me, almost as much as I want to hear.
She got out of bed again, pulled on thick woollen stockings and returned to stand at the window.
I’m worse off than I was before Philip started his tales, she thought. With my head now full of beautiful nightmares, John feels farther away even than before.
The sky had just begun to lighten to a thick grey. The long track up from the lake was empty. At its lowest point, it disappeared into a low-lying mist, out of which poked the top of Sir Richard’s pavilion. Though the scene had a half-bewitched air, it felt solid and true compared to cities of gold.
But cities of gold already felt far more solid and true in her mind than an Antilles tobacco farm.
I am doing as Philip said – accommodating his wonders into what I think I know.
She tried to imagine John walking up out of the mist now, like Philip with his fish.
Write to me! she begged him. Let me know you are alive. Show me where you will be for the next six and a half years. I need images. I need your words sitting solidly on the page, even when I know how far short words fall from the truth. The cord that bound us in the air has snapped. The spider’s web of my imagination is stretching beyond its strength.
She tried to think how to tell him that his child, about whom he had not known, was now dead.
I have waited too long to begin the telling.
As if on a secret signal, the birds began their pre-dawn clamour, like an entire village shouting all at once. She did not feel tired. She had slept too much in the past three days. Her heart was numb but her thoughts circled restlessly.
She took Philip’s map from her cupboard, pausing absently for a moment over her small coffer, which seemed subtly out of place. Then she carried the map to the table and lit a fresh candle from the stub of the old.
The world, laid out like a ragged pelt, centred on the Caribbean, with the mouth of Hell near one edge, just off the Indian coast. And there was Nevis. A tiny inconsequential blob of ochre and green, floating on a lapis lazuli sea, in the belly of the island chain that curved from its sea horse head at Hispaniola to the tiny tail bones dangling below Barbados, near the Guyana coast.
She touched Nevis. John is here. So far as I know.
I will make Philip show me where he saw his city, she resolved. He can’t deny me that. Otherwise, his adventures and John’s will grow more and more jumbled in my head.
When the map was painted on her new hall floor, she would stand on the island of Nevis and imagine John. Then stand on that other spot and imagine the younger Philip, the soldier and adventurer, who had tried to be satisfied with smuggled tobacco and plundered cargoes. Each man in his place. Two separate places, not one.
A shutter quivered in its frame.
John?
She listened, poised as tautly as if she had called into a dark cave, and waited for an echo to say that something other than a void lay before her.
She felt no reply. Not even her own stubborn hope, busily explaining away the emptiness she felt.
I’m losing you. And how, given what has already happened, will you even begin to find me again after six and a half more years? I may no longer know myself.
If she ever believed that she had lost him forever and that they would never find each other again, she knew that she would simply sit waiting for death to come in his place. She laid her hand on the terrible new flatness of her belly, still soft from stretching around her child. She was suddenly in a panic to trap and hold who she was and what she knew at that moment.
She ran back to the cupboard and rummaged for Lamb’s sketches of the child. She had seen her son for such a short time that she already distrusted her memory of his face.
The drawing was not there. Instead, she found Lamb’s sketch of the old Hawkridge House, before the fire, which he had made one February evening from her description, for possible use in a medallion or decorative panel. She remembered insisting that the tendrils of some ivy had grown to the right and not the left. Lamb replied that it looked better as he had drawn it and therefore he better served the greater truth of the beauty she remembered. A small detail in any case. She had shrugged in unhappy agreement.
I was right to insist, she thought now. This drawing already falsifies the past. It was a tiny lie, but a lie all the same. Lamb must redraw this truthfully, as it was. I must have him record everything that I can remember, exactly as it was. Any house can hold the lives of the classical gods and ancient heroes. Mine will hold our own lives steady – mine, John’s, Philip’s – true in every detail, good and bad, including even Doctor Gifford.
It may be too late for some of the past. But I must begin to leave footprints. Then I, at least, can track myself back and remember the journey and who I was when I made it.
She studied the drawing of the old house, with the slope of Hawk Ridge rising smoothly behind it. No raw rock or spoil heaps.
And I will record each new change while it is fresh, leaving blank space for the future to fill. I must leave a clear track through time. I will make Lamb finish painting the baby’s portrait, to show one day to John. The picture will tell him better than my words.
It came to her. The straw shifted and revealed the egg. Clear and unmistakable. The name of the new house.
The Memory Palace.
Feeling suddenly lighter, she slept.
36
‘Like the ancient orators,’ she explained to Lamb the next day. ‘Who built houses in their minds, and placed imaginary objects in them, to remind themselves, as they walked through, of what must come next. But I want to place reminders of the past.’
Lamb was not happy, but he humoured her for a time.
At the end of March, as her first step in recording truth, Zeal moved her son’s coffin. In spite of raised eyebrows and gossip, she had him set in the Beester vault beside the chapel, with his great uncle and namesake, Sir George Beester, who had built Hawkridge House.
She heard the whispers that the child had no right to lie there. And the other whispers insisting that it did, and how did she think she could get away with such brazenness, and whatever did poor old Master Wentworth make of it all?
She did not care. She set her son’s plaque defiantly: ‘George Alexander Wentworth, natus et renatus est, 26 Martius 1640.’ John’s son. Born and reborn. Taken from this earth and blessed in the next. Baptised w
ith water from a pagan spring by a serving woman whose intent was surely enough to please God. Zeal was certain of that much and did not care a fig for the rest.
A sodden March gave way to an unseasonably hot April. The trees leapt into leaf. Zeal and Philip moved back into the lodge. She slowly recovered her strength though not her former fierce purpose towards the house. She thought of little but the child, nodded in distracted approval at the new brick oven, which Lamb had had fired while she was ill, and at the levelled ground stacked with seasoning bricks. All about the estate, the new house had begun to lie in pregnant heaps of its separate parts, waiting to be assembled into the whole. She was content, now, to leave that assembling to others.
She wanted only to direct Lamb in his new recording of her footprints. Hour after hour, she hung over his shoulder while he drew what she described. Her own childhood. John and Harry as boys at Hawkridge. Her own arrival on the estate as Harry’s wife. The baby. Philip’s tales, so far. As a start.
While she was still weak, Lamb obliged her without question. He sat with her and drew every moment when he was not needed at the building site. His hand became the extension of her thoughts. He re-drew Hawkridge House with the ivy growing in the right direction. For Jonas Stubbs, who would carve the mantles and for the smith, who would forge the fire-backs, he re-designed his original fireplaces, with real people in place of gods and the kitchen garden bounty instead of pineapples and pomegranates. He rubbed out basilisks in favour of pike.
‘You will permit me to keep the acanthus leaves on my columns, I hope? Oak leaves would not be the same.’ Though he seemed to jest, there was suppressed unhappiness in his tone.
She still felt too weak to let herself hear it. Working with Lamb, together with the pressures of spring, kept her just far enough ahead of her thoughts for life to be almost bearable.
Hens escaped their run, intent on making private nests. Cows dropped their calves. The sowing of pease and beans began in the fields. At the edges of the fields, young nettles and the tightly curled croziers of ferns waited to be picked.
In the kitchen garden, she oversaw the sowing of lettuces, gillyflowers, carrots, pumpkins, leeks, garlic and melons, the transplanting of autumn kale, and the setting of cauliflower in the hot manure beds. Orange pot marigolds bloomed a little ahead of their season, to be picked for soothing salves. Purple saffron crocuses began to drop their precious red-gold dust. Sea-green asparagus sprouts raced to shoot upwards into feathery, inedible bloom.
Then Philip found her in the garden one afternoon, holding a trug filled with violets for preserving in sugar, in helpless tears at so much unchecked life. He led her at once to the distractions of Lamb’s studio, now moved from High House into one of the Hawkridge barns.
As the walls of the Memory Palace rose into sight at last, Lamb began to paint the panels that would eventually adorn them. To record Zeal’s childhood, the death of her parents, her life with guardians, school and marriage to Harry, he painted plaster panels in muted tones of distemper, to resemble a faded tapestry. She meant for this series to line the upper hallway that led to her suite of chambers. Its final panel would be Lamb’s picture of Hawkridge House, but in full, rich colour, unlike the others. Reds, ochres, blues and greens.
‘For that’s how wonderfully life seemed changed to me when I came here,’ she said. ‘That picture must stand at the top of the stairs.’
He made stretched leather panels for Philip’s stories, to render in oil paints and gilding. These would replace the Olympian scenes on either side of the new main staircase, in spite of Philip’s protests.
‘Real gold for the golden god,’ Lamb said. ‘Gold for the treasures. Silver leaf for the lake.’
‘And half of the panels left blank for what he has yet to tell me.’ She eyed Lamb one evening. ‘Do you know what happened to him?’
‘Philip is my father’s friend. I rarely saw him.’
‘But you must have overheard something?’
He gripped a loose corner of a panel in a pair of tongs and pulled taut a faint dip in the leather. Then he reached for a hammer. ‘As a boy I cared only for my paints, my dog and my horse. I thought all adults extremely dull.’
She huffed in frustration. ‘Did you ever see his first wife?’
Lamb shook his head, his lips now clamped tightly on five nails. When he had banged them all into the side of the frame, he ran his hand across the leather. ‘I know only that she was often indisposed. Suffered woefully from the mothers and feared to leave their house in Guildford. She never came to London.’
He once had a house in Guildford, Zeal thought. A crumb, but something at least.
Wentworth looked amused when she warned him of the blank panels. ‘So few?’ he asked.
Lamb also began a series of portraits of the estate residents, painted in watercolour on vellum stuck down onto card, the size of a man’s palm, to be set into roundels above doors and windows. He worked on all these scenes at once, painting by daylight, preparing his grounds by candlelight.
He had not yet decided how to paint the child.
‘I think I may go mad!’ Lamb laid down his brush with a contained passion. While Zeal watched, he had been applying a green oily stain to what would become jungle on one of the leather panels. ‘I have never lived for so long in the country. I sometimes feel…’ He picked up his brush again and stirred it viciously in a mug of turpentine. ‘And those workmen and their questions! Half the time, if they only stopped to think…As a master mason, your Jonas Stubbs lacks a grip on the broader view. And I’ve too much to do now, with all this painting, to be overseeing the likes of him and Todd!’
She was startled by his uncharacteristic vehemence. I should have seen it coming, she thought. But I was too caught up in my own concerns. ‘What must I do?’
‘Let me hire other workmen. I know an excellent Italian painter who could finish Philip’s panels better than I ever will. And do the gilding, for which I lack the expertise. And we will need a proper sculptor. I’m sure Stubbs is a perfectly good hewer of gate posts and saddle stones, but an acanthus leaf seems to be beyond him.’
She felt as if his other self, stored away for so long in London, had suddenly arrived to take the place of the familiar Hawkridge Lamb. Who was doing too much, driving himself too hard trying to humour her.
‘I wish I could afford the help you need, but in spite of our hours spent over estate accounts, Doctor Bowler and I have not persuaded cash to breed as readily as sheep.’
‘There must be ways to find more money or else you may never have your Memory Palace.’
‘Master Wilde is eager to buy the entire vale where the brick furnace lies,’ she said unhappily. ‘I could reconsider his offer. I’ve already borrowed from Sir Richard to pay the next three months’ wages.’
Lamb finished cleaning his brush and paced the paint-spattered barn floor. ‘You must trust to Providence, sister mine. It has always helped us squeak through before. Can’t think it will stop now.’ He sounded calmer. ‘I hardly dare add that I also think we should build our own glass furnace here. And bring a Huguenot glazier from London to run it for us.’
‘That is impossible! Providence notwithstanding.’
‘I saw it done when I visited that Warwickshire estate in February,’ he insisted. ‘There’s no other way you can have all that glass! Even if you could afford it, it would never survive the journey here by cart from Norfolk.’
‘I can’t afford either a furnace or your Frenchman!’
He glared at her in a fury of frustration. ‘This whole project is mad. I wish I could tell you just how mad it is!’
‘What else?’ she asked. ‘Beyond killing yourself with work. And Stubbs and slow-witted craftsmen?’
He shook his head and held up a pacifying hand. ‘Forgive me. I need to escape. Just a few days. London, perhaps. I might persuade that Huguenot glazier at least to visit, and perhaps advise us without a fee.’
‘He owes you a favour?’ Zeal aske
d with a slight edge.
‘Merely hopes I will put him in the way of patronage.’
She gazed about her at time recaptured and given solid form in oil, tempera and watercolour. All that diversion from his own original intentions and the great care it showed for her. ‘Dearest Lamb, you must go when you like. So long as you promise to return.’
‘To you, always!’ But she saw that he was already flying away from Hawkridge.
Wentworth frowned when she told him.
Then Sir Richard, too, left suddenly for his house in London. After eleven years of ruling without Parliament, the king had recalled it at last. Before leaving, Sir Richard charged Wentworth in his absence to teach all able-bodied men on both estates how to use firearms and gave him the key to the High House armoury. Someone in London had finally noticed the scandalous disarray of most local militia.
‘Do we know at whom they are intended to shoot?’ Wentworth asked.
Even more disturbing was the arrival in the parish of a muster master charged with raising numbers in the county Trained Band. He recruited a half dozen young men from Hawkridge, and took them away for military training.
‘If they aren’t back soon, I shall have to hire labour from Basingstoke or Winchester,’ Zeal told Philip. ‘Stubbs wants to stack up the walls as fast as possible while we still have fine weather.’
‘I can try raising labour from the Winchester poorhouse.’ In Lamb’s absence, Wentworth had involved himself again in the new house. ‘On the bright side, we’ll have fewer fools hanging about the work site, gawping and getting in the way.’
Lamb sent word that he was kept in London longer than he had planned. While he was still away, in the first week of May, on her return from the mill, where she had been called to settle a dispute about the free milling of pig oats, Zeal found another anonymous letter shoved under the lodge door. She took one look at the characters carved onto the paper as if with a knife and thrust it under the squab pillow on her chair. She left it hidden there throughout the afternoon and evening, until she heard Philip moving about in his chamber on the far side of the lodge parlour.
The Memory Palace Page 23