The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  Burn the thing without reading it, she told herself. Deny your curiosity for once. She examined the wax seal closely. It bore no identifying imprint. She broke the seal.

  Whore, the fruit of your sin is rotten and shall perish like all other wickedness.

  Wentworth came running at her cry.

  ‘Not a subtle mind,’ he said, turning the letter in his hand. His tone was light but the skin of his face had drawn tight against his skull.

  ‘It must be Gifford!’ insisted Zeal. ‘Disguising his hand.’

  ‘Perhaps. Though, as with that other letter, I would have expected a little more from his comprehensive knowledge of Scripture. A somewhat fuller orotundity of abuse.’ He scratched his chin. ‘Would you consider moving back to High House?’

  ‘From fear?’

  He raised a hand against the force of her scorn. ‘I fear only for the life of the writer of that letter, if you should ever find him…or her.’

  ‘You think the writer may be mad, and dangerous.’

  ‘It’s possible,’ he admitted.

  ‘I’m too busy to leave Hawkridge.’

  That night, he came to her chamber in his night shirt and sleeveless gown. ‘With your permission, I mean to sleep here every night.’ He hung his sword belt beside the bed before taking off his gown.

  ‘I don’t need a guard,’ she said.

  ‘Need or not, you shall have one until I can teach you to defend yourself, as you once asked me to do.’ He turned his back firmly and drew up the quilt.

  When she woke in the night, as she always did now, she counted his soft snores until she slept again. In spite of her defiance, she found his bulk beside her profoundly comforting.

  37

  ‘We cannot permit such things!’ said Lamb. He had returned the previous night, four days after the letter, restored to his old gleeful self and bringing with him a Monsieur Dauzat, who would advise on the manufacture of glass, free of charge against the right to sell a share of the eventual product. Now, just after breakfast, Lamb staggered under a large model of the main staircase. ‘After dinner, I will go cut off Gifford’s writing hand. Then perhaps move on to other parts of his anatomy.’

  Zeal tried to smile, as she knew he intended. ‘Philip doubts that it’s Doctor Gifford.’ She picked up her knitting. She had begun afresh on the scarlet stocking.

  ‘Who could be more likely?’

  Zeal shrugged. ‘It’s only words.’ But she knew Lamb was not fooled.

  He pushed the toy staircase across the floor to her chair and squeezed his buttocks onto the narrow bottom step, a giant fitting himself to a miniature human world. With his knees bumping his chin, he put on a miserable, yearning face. He was so close that she could smell his orange blossom, musk and fresh air.

  ‘You do look ridiculous.’

  ‘We both love you to distraction, you know. Philip and I.’

  She smiled in polite dismissal. ‘Philip rescued me. That’s not the same as love. He’s merely proud of my continued existence.’

  ‘He feels more than that. I watch him when he looks at you.’

  ‘We tend to like those who are indebted to us more than we like those to whom we are indebted.’

  ‘Poor old Philip.’

  ‘Don’t mistake me. I’m most grateful.’

  ‘But gratitude doesn’t go very far in bed, does it?’

  Zeal flushed and tried to think how to answer. She saw that she had knitted two stitches together by accident and threw down her needles in irritation.

  ‘It should be me who lusts after you.’ Lamb prised his buttocks out the step and stood. He spread his arms and turned in a circle, displaying his broad chest and narrow hips. ‘Young, beautiful as Narcissus…but not half so vain.’ He tossed her a wicked glance over his shoulder, a fallen strand of golden hair concealing his left eye. ‘I expect I could, you know…in a pinch.’

  ‘Lamb!’ Dear Lord, I hope Philip has gone fishing! she thought. Lamb’s renewed high spirits had a dangerously uncontrolled edge.

  He raised a quelling hand. ‘We bachelors have a duty to flirt with married women. I will not be derelict. First, Mistress Wentworth, I shall carry you off to the site of our glass furnace-to-be, where Dauzat’s new English assistants are pretending not to understand his sign language but threaten to skewer him every time he tries to give an order in French.’

  Before she could protest, he took her hands to pull her from her chair. ‘When you have marvelled at my mastery of foreign tongues, you must then order Rachel to pack for London. I am charged by your husband with raising your spirits. I shall take you riding in Saint James’s Fields, dicing in Southwark, to admire the lions at the Tower and to the theatre.’

  ‘I can’t afford to travel to London, nor to stay in lodgings. Every penny is needed for the house.’ And to pay levies and rates.

  ‘An acquaintance of Philip has room for us. Your husband and I are both agreed and adamant.’

  To Zeal’s amazement, when she saw him that evening, Philip confirmed the excellence of Lamb’s plan. He even seemed eager to send his wife off to London with another man.

  38

  ‘I swear you’re hard to please!’ Continuing high spirits softened Lamb’s irritation. ‘Lord, how I love this place! Even its noise and smells.’

  Zeal hated London. She found the lions at the Tower, which they had just left, to be as bleakly dispirited as any other prisoners. There were too many other horses in St James’s Field to allow a proper gallop. The Southwark gaming inns, where Lamb stood erect and alert like a hound testing the wind, held too many hungry eyes and foul breaths. She refused to be entertained by watching any living creature die, be it cock or bear.

  Zeal did not hate London for its noise and smells, as Lamb had suggested. Hawkridge at slaughter time could almost match the Fleet. And a jakes was a jakes, no matter where you set it. If you could cross a barn yard, you could cross a London street.

  She disliked the city for its uneasiness, for the pockets of anger and sudden bursts of brawling which became battles, from which constables averted their eyes.

  She did not understand the complex fault lines dividing Londoners from each other. The king’s struggle with Parliament was the most easily perceived crack in the earth, but it was far from being the only one. A sense of suppressed violence puzzled and alarmed her. She saw fear in the eyes of women in the markets. Stepping out of the street to avoid a pack of shouting students and apprentices or a purposeful troop of militia, she felt that she stood upstream, studying a current that carried dark, hidden dangerous shapes towards her own clear, comprehensible waters.

  Too many faces reminded her of Doctor Gifford.

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ This was only partly true.

  ‘Let us see what you make of a play,’ said Lamb with determined cheer.

  They crossed London Bridge into Southwark, where he took her to see the King’s Men play in an unroofed, public theatre not far from the bear-baiting pit.

  ‘I should never have chosen a tragedy,’ he said after they had left halfway through. ‘I’m such a fool! Forgive me?’

  ‘It was splendid, truly!’ She wiped her eyes. ‘Too splendid. Too truthful.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a child…’ He put a consoling hand on her shoulder. ‘Shall we stroll by the river instead, then have a splendid supper?’

  She took his velvet-sleeved arm. The Thames, at least was deeply satisfying, most of all at night, when the lanterns of the wherries criss-crossing the black expanse flicked gleams of light across each other’s wakes.

  ‘You’ll be safe from all dangerous truth tomorrow evening,’ he promised. He drew a deep breath. ‘Ah, yes, tomorrow!’

  It was too dark to read his expression. ‘What then?’ she asked, curiosity roused by the fervour of his tone. She also felt a tremor of unease.

  ‘We are to see Bellerophon Nikephoros in a private theatre…in that great house over there, in fact. The middle one. A friend o
f my father.’ He pointed across the Thames at a pale, ghostly shape. ‘It will be improbable nonsense, I predict. No risk of true emotion, anywhere. Not in the performance, at least.’

  Sir George Tupper, Lamb’s father’s friend, was a self-made man who intended to enjoy every privilege that great wealth and a purchased title could bring. These included being able to pay musicians, dancers, actors, singers, designers, poets, and artificers of the most ingenious sorts to astonish and delight himself and his many guests.

  When they first arrived at the house, Zeal thought herself more interested in the lay-out of the terraces along the river, the number of the entrance steps and the grotesque masks set above the windows than in the play to come.

  ‘Not a play at all,’ explained Lamb with a touch of disdain. ‘But a form of masque.’ Nevertheless, he looked eagerly about the audience gathered in the great hall.

  Zeal thought that he became suddenly downcast, but the performance began before she could ask why.

  During the opening dance by various ladies of Sir George’s acquaintance, all magnificently costumed as nymphs, she settled back on her chair in the fog of civet, rose-water, wormwood, sheep’s grease and sweat that rose from the fashionably-dressed bodies around her. Lamb had been right. There seemed little risk of true emotion tonight.

  The pastoral screen behind the nymphs parted to show the gardens of the Palace of Corinth. The king’s wife entered with her women and trilled about her love for the hero, Bellerophon. Bitterly, she told how he had rejected her advances, and how she meant to be revenged.

  Zeal was just reflecting uneasily on the subject of repulsed love, when the scene suddenly split again. She sat up and cried ‘Ahhh!’ with the other spectators when the gardens vanished as if by magic. In their place stood the interior of the palace, the king already sitting elevated on a huge and ornate golden throne amid columns and receding corridors, all illuminated by the jewelled lights of candles shining through bottles of brightly coloured waters.

  Could I do the same with coloured waters at home? Zeal wondered, while the queen, with a most innocent look, told her husband that Bellerophon had made advances to her. When the king wrongly punished the hero by sending him to try to kill the Chimera, Zeal forgot coloured water and sat forward to see how they would represent that terrible monster, half-lion, half-goat, with a serpent for its tail.

  But first, the throne room with its columns and corridors and jewelled lights suddenly seemed to sink out of sight. A cloud passed over the scene and lifted to reveal a thick wood filled with singing sprites, and a soothsayer’s cave where the hero came to seek advice. With a great crash of music, the Goddess Athena appeared in a cloud of smoke and gave the hero a golden bridle. With another crash, she vanished just as suddenly.

  Zeal clasped her hands against her mouth.

  The woods at once transformed to a terrible rocky desert, with a dark jagged mountain touching the heavens at the back of the scene. Before Zeal could catch her breath, the hero entered carrying the bridle, and a huge white winged horse flew down out of the sky. The hero caught the horse, mounted it. Together they flew up again and vanished.

  She felt weak with excitement and was grateful for the group of rustics who now began to sing of their terror at the monster that lived in the dark mountain and ravaged their land.

  ‘A chance to catch our breath,’ she whispered to Lamb.

  He did not hear her. He was exchanging looks with a striking dark-haired youth who stood at one side of the audience, a late arrival, wearing silver cut-velvet and a single pearl earring. The youth left. Before the end of the first chorus, Lamb excused himself.

  A chill invaded Zeal’s wonder. I must get Lamb safely back to Hawkridge, she thought, without precise reason but a sense of understanding nevertheless. Then the performance distracted her again, with what she had been waiting for.

  A band of demons dressed in fur and leaves attacked the rustics. Amid thunderclaps and lightning flashes, the mountain cracked open. A fiery cavern gaped. With a clunk and grinding of machinery soon drowned by more thunderclaps, a huge mechanical monster burst forth amid more clouds of smoke, casting out streams of fire from each of its three heads. The Chimera, at last. It snapped its jaws and turned its heads.

  A woman screamed, though whether in terror or delight was impossible to tell.

  The Chimera’s eyes glowed like hot coals. It took a grinding step, then another. The lion head roared and belched out fire. The goat jabbed with its horns. Weaving from side to side, the serpent spat sparks like a stream of venom at the audience. More women screamed. It was impossible that a mere machine should seem so alive.

  As the beast advanced, the demons roared about the stage, waving fire clubs and scattering more sparks.

  Zeal sat straight upright, her mouth a little open.

  From the heavens, hero and winged horse arrived. They glided down on a long diagonal and landed with hardly a jolt.

  Their fight with the monster filled the theatre with so much smoke that Zeal’s eyes watered but she yearned forward, as if in prayer, breathing only in small incidental gasps.

  All lies, of course, but with such an appearance of truth. And Lamb was wrong about the absence of emotion. She began to feel, without yet being able to put her thoughts into words, that he had brought her here for a larger purpose than mere distraction from grief. The intense wonder that filled her was surely as real as any other truth. It was a vital part of the truth.

  Her elation did not ebb even when a spark from one of the fire clubs set alight the breeches of a spectator seated on the side of the stage.

  When the play was over, Lamb still had not returned.

  ‘Has he deserted you, then, for a darker pair of eyes? He won’t have gone far.’ With his long nose and crinkled hair, her host, Sir George Tupper, looked disconcertingly like one of her Wiltshire Horns. ‘Did our performance please you?’

  ‘I must have a theatre!’

  ‘You liked it so much?’ His broad smile made the end of his nose dip. ‘Then come see how our magic is performed.’

  At first, she thought that he had skilfully fobbed off an awkward guest. But after two questions, she saw that the man to whom Sir George had consigned her was the very one who had devised and built the wonders she ached to comprehend. For his part, Master Cobb, like any man with a passion, kept discovering more and more to show and tell to a new admirer of his skills.

  ‘The thunder’s simple, mistress,’ Cobb said in answer to her eager questions. ‘Just cannon balls rolling up and down this wooden trough. See, you can tilt it yourself, easy. But the lightning, now. That needs this metal case here, see, for setting the charge. The fire clubs? You pack the powder down into the end here…Take care! Hold it well away!’

  ‘There you are!’ Lamb exclaimed brightly, with the faintest hint of reproach, as Zeal rose up through the floor on the Goddess’s trap. ‘Are you ready to sup at my favourite Southwark inn?’

  Zeal nodded. Her head was full of sliding shutters, powder charges, windlasses, pulleys and levers. Not to forget that cunning use of a mirror.

  ‘If you would be content to travel back with Rachel and the groom, I think I shall stay on in London for a few days,’ Lamb told her in the Red Hen, whose patrons would have kept Gifford on his knees for the rest of his days. ‘Some urgent business has come up…my father…’ He cut his roast mutton with great care. ‘And, alas, one of us must go back to look after the building.’

  ‘He’s handsome,’ Zeal said, coming back to the present with a bump. She felt sudden loneliness and a sense of exclusion. ‘Like a fallen angel. And I don’t mean your father. I don’t mind what you do, Lamb, but don’t lie to me.’

  He put down his knife. ‘Well then, I’m in love, dearest sister. As I never thought to be. In the purest love.’ He looked at her helplessly, more like the man-child she had thought him when they first met than the competent young man who designed houses, oversaw builders and conjured airy thought into tangible fo
rm.

  ‘Is he in the purest love, too?’ I’ve known all along, she thought. Or almost known. And of course, Philip knew.

  ‘He…Ben, that is…is a coquette.’

  She recognized that sweet, tell-tale relishing of a name on the tongue.

  ‘…“he’s afraid”…the usual folderol. And he’s only seventeen, still unworldly. But surely, I could not feel such warmth between us if he didn’t share…Oh, yes, I believe he loves me too. Or will come to it, given the chance. After all, he agreed to meet me again tonight. Oh, sister mine, I am transformed!’ He took her hands. ‘It’s such joy to tell you!’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Master Benjamin Neame. His father owns ships. My sweetest Ben. We met the last time I came to London.’

  She extracted her hands. ‘But were you acquainted before?’

  ‘Yes. But only to speak.’

  And then Lamb’s father bundled him off to Philip in Hampshire.

  It was Zeal’s turn to cut her meat with unusual care. ‘Be careful.’

  But Lamb had that odd, slightly ruffled radiance of someone already far beyond reach of warnings.

  Zeal set off with Rachel the following morning, still fired by what she had seen in Sir George’s theatre, but also concerned for Lamb.

  Lamb did not return to Hawkridge for another three weeks. At his first supper back, he sat on his stool with the thump of a man in a vile temper.

  ‘What happened to your face?’ Zeal asked in alarm. ‘How did you come by those terrible bruises?’

  ‘No one should travel alone these days,’ said Mistress Margaret. ‘Between footpads and soldiers and vagrant rogues who would kill you for your handkerchief…’