The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  During one week, Philip waited until dusk, and then full darkness, to show her how to work in diminished light.

  One evening, Lamb drew them. ‘For another panel somewhere,’ he said. ‘Though I don’t think I’m likely to forget the sight of the two of you going at each other with cold steel.’

  Sometimes Philip made her practise with Lamb, so that she did not grow too accustomed to his own style.

  After teaching her how to handle a short dagger, Philip showed her how to wrap a blanket or shawl around her left arm, leaving a corner free to snare an attacker’s blade.

  ‘Think always how to cheat,’ he told her, again and again. ‘Never fight fairly. The first and only rule is to stay alive.’

  ‘That sounds like a true adventurer’s rule,’ she once said. She blew a lock of hair out of her face and wiped her forehead with her sleeve.

  He laughed. ‘Yes. And I am an adventurer again. Just for the evening. And you must imagine that from this moment, I am your enemy.’

  ‘There have been times when I needed no imagination,’ she said.

  He smiled and laid down his rapier, beckoning her to the pushed-aside table. ‘Now, let me show you a diagram of a pass in the Spanish style. You will need it…’ Without warning, he was behind her, holding his knife at her throat.

  For a second, she could not move or breathe. She had misjudged him after all. Everything that had happened had been leading her to this sensation of cold steel against her neck. He had played her like a fish for the sport. All of it – marriage, house building, half-told tales. Such drawn-out pursuit was his only true passion in life.

  ‘Remember this moment,’ he said into her ear. ‘There may be other times when it is just as hard to believe in your danger. And it will be real.’ He moved the knife away and tightened his arm to hold her.

  She nodded wordlessly.

  ‘Did I frighten you?’

  She nodded again. She knew he had felt her begin to shake.

  He laid the knife on the table and turned her around.

  ‘I’m sorry, puss.’

  She stamped hard on his foot.

  ‘God’s Balls!’ he yelled.

  ‘That’s for making me doubt you,’ she said, near to tears.

  Philip hopped to a stool and sat heavily. He tried to pull off his boot but winced with the pain. He tried again. Bit his lip. ‘I think one of the bones may be broken.’ With a sharp intake of breath, he began again, very gently, to try to remove his boot.

  ‘Let me help!’ She knelt in front of him and eased the boot down. ‘Forgive me. Please! I didn’t mean to stamp so hard.’

  He set his foot carelessly back down on the floor and took her face in his hands. ‘Kiss me and we’re quits.’

  His lips were firm, warm and brief. He pulled away and looked into her eyes. ‘Remember this moment,’ he said again.

  That night, though she had half-expected him to stay and try to kiss her again, he went fishing as usual and did not return until close to dawn.

  She did not know whether to be relieved or impatient that he was still evading his promised gift of truth.

  Gifford did not write again. However, she saw him twice on his horse on the Silchester track. Each time, he left the track and rode across the high pasture to look down on the progress of the new house.

  Trying to detect the first signs of my theatre, she thought. Perhaps it’s just as well I can’t afford it yet.

  Though she despised the man, she could not disregard him. He seemed to have laid some claim upon her soul that she could not shake off.

  She imagined once that she also saw the horseman who had come to see Philip and killed her child. She shouted for help and set off at once in pursuit, but he disappeared again towards Silchester.

  ‘Mistress?’ Tuddenham was panting from his run from the stable yard.

  ‘I thought…’ she said. ‘But I’m sure it was only Doctor Gifford again!’

  42

  ‘What is it, Philip?’ Zeal asked in alarm. He had slipped in after she was asleep as had become his practice. Now his silhouette sat up in the bed. It was the dark, heavy turn of the night.

  ‘Old pains,’ he said, rubbing his shoulder. ‘Sometimes my body remembers old pains. Imagination punishes now, as reality did then. Nothing more. Go back to sleep.’

  Twice more in what was left of the night, he shouted in his sleep and struck at the bed clothes, causing Zeal to roll in alarm to the farthest edge of the mattress out of range of his blows. The second time, he sat bolt upright.

  ‘God forgive us!’ he said. Then he groaned and curled tightly onto his side again.

  ‘Philip?’ she whispered. ‘Sir? Are you ill?’

  When he did not answer, she stroked the back of his neck.

  He sighed deeply but did not protest, so she continued to stroke his neck and the back of his head until his breathing settled into sleep again.

  ‘Your sleep was disturbed last night,’ she said. ‘I nearly feared for my life.’

  The next evening, after supper in the lodge parlour, he had laid out the makings of a fishing fly on the table. Feathers, silk thread, a small horn box of shining hooks of different sizes gleamed on his table, set near the open window to catch the last of the sun.

  Though she spoke lightly, he glanced up in alarm. ‘I didn’t hurt you? What did I do?’ When she told him, he looked troubled. ‘I would not leave the comfort of your bed for all the world.’

  ‘Nor need you. You did no more than beat at the blankets,’ she protested.

  ‘I have heard of men who have strangled their wives while asleep, dreaming that they are old enemies…’

  ‘Perhaps if you unburdened yourself while awake, your sleep would be less filled with dangerous dreams.’

  ‘Are you pursuing my tales again to fill your blank panels?’

  She looked firmly back. ‘If the tales are where your troubled spirits arise. You spoke, half-asleep, of remembered pain.’

  ‘I will not make your sleep as disturbed as mine, however ingeniously you tempt me.’

  That night he slept in his old nest in the tack room.

  ‘I’m too old for all the sword play,’ he said the next evening. ‘You must practise more with Lamb. And our valiant Trained Band would do best, in any case, to concentrate on becoming marksmen.’

  ‘It’s not age.’ She had found him hunched over his table of flies, kneading his left shoulder with his other hand. ‘You’re stiff from the chill of the riverbank and the lack of a proper bed! Shall I rub on an embrocation?’

  While she fetched the salve, Philip untied his collar and shirt strings and pulled off his shirt. ‘Joints and muscles refuse to forget anything they have suffered.’ He glanced up at her under his brows. ‘The stiffness of age is nothing more than an accumulation of memories.’

  She began to rub the sticky paste onto his back. She had never before seen him without his shirt. His shoulders were broad and the muscles still firm under his dry skin. Though stocky, he carried no excess flesh. ‘Like the memory of being carried like slaughtered pigs under those poles?’ She felt him go still.

  She rubbed in silence for a time. At last the knots in his flesh began to soften under her fingers. ‘I don’t understand,’ she finally said, ‘why you still punish yourself so with silence. What did you do?’

  ‘That’s better!’ he said. ‘Thank you.’ He reached over his shoulder briefly to capture one of her hands. Then he shrugged his shirt back on. When he turned back to the table, she pulled up a stool opposite him.

  ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

  She shook her head. ‘Never.’

  ‘How alike we are, after all.’ He began to split the tip of a pheasant’s tail feather with his knife. He shaped the feather and laid it against the shank of a hook. Intently, he studied it, with his head tilted to one side. When he spoke, there was a tremor in his deep voice.

  ‘A priest approached our small group of prisoners. He studied us in turn, looking eac
h man in the eye, earnestly and for a long time.’

  Zeal nodded as if he had merely offered an observation on the fine evening.

  ‘At times, he stroked or prodded us, for all the world like a man about to purchase a horse, or a slave. He was civil, almost tender in his examination, but when he looked into my face, the hair stood up on my arms.’ He tried to secure the beginning of his thread, dropped it. Began again.

  ‘I tried to meet his eye bravely but could not. At the time, I feared that such cowardice might mark me out for death – for they were fierce people and valued courage. How wrong I was!’

  Philip’s hands began to shake so hard that he could not finish tying his fly. He set down the hook. ‘And yet…’ He gazed into the past with blank eyes.

  At last! thought Zeal.

  She was a hunter. She could see her prey clearly. Not John, not the odd double man who had begun to plague her, who was both John and Philip. Just Philip. With a sword at his side, not a fishing rod. Leading a body of armed men, not sitting alone at the water’s edge. The man her husband had once been.

  ‘Death might have been better than to have lived and be forced to remember.’ He sank into thought.

  Zeal picked up the bobbin of green silk and wound it slowly. She held herself still, became as invisible as a partridge in the bracken, lest she startle him out of the past.

  ‘The youngest had to suffer,’ he said suddenly. ‘The priest pointed at last to the youngest of our party – James Dunne, son of our dead captain and nephew of Sir John Whitfield, one of the company of investors who had financed this expedition. Only nineteen years of age, with eyes as blue as yours, and golden hair bleached almost silver by the sun, like young Jamie, in fact. When the finger pointed at him, he stared boldly back but blanched white, knowing he had drawn the fatal lot…“God will send you to roast in Hell!” Those were his words as he was dragged away.’

  Philip stared down at the table in silence. Zeal’s fingers moved steadily round and round the bobbin of silk though the thread had ended long before.

  Philip placed the four flies he had already tied in a line on the tabletop. ‘Our golden boy…’ He moved each fly in turn a fraction to the left, then moved them back again distractedly. ‘I would like to say that I wanted to offer myself in the boy’s place. But terror and desperation had paralysed my will. I could not act as I knew I should!’

  She forgot to pretend to wind the silk.

  ‘They took him away and killed him.’ He inhaled. ‘Cut out his heart, that is to say, while he still lived – as the French buccaneers were said to do with their prisoners.’ His words raced to get to the end. ‘Then they butchered him as if he had been a calf, cooked the choicest morsels over a fire and fed them to their weakened god. To restore his strength with that of the youngest and strongest of their captives, taken from a race which had so often vanquished them. When the king again sat up and showed that he had regained his strength, they offered us some left-over morsels to eat.’ He arranged the eyes of the hooks in a precise straight line. ‘It goes without saying that I refused as civilly as I could.’

  She swallowed. ‘Did all your men refuse?’

  Philip cleared his throat. ‘I feared that the savages would then fall on us in rage, but it seemed that they offered only from civility. To show that they bore us no particular ill will, apart from the purpose poor James had served. But when we declined to restore our own sadly-reduced strength, they themselves ate with gusto all that they had offered us.’

  She watched in silence while he pushed the flies about on the table, making and unmaking various patterns.

  He flicked a glance at her face. ‘I sank low enough to thank God that my hair was black and not gold. And, as I have already said far too much, I will confess one last thing that haunts me more than all else – he smelled, to our starving nostrils, very like a joint of roast pork.’

  Zeal drew a sharp breath. Small wonder he never came to the feasts of roasted meats. Nor ate meat of any kind.

  ‘Not a glorious tale, is it? And telling old Whitfield…!’ He looked up defiantly. ‘Am I very changed in your eyes?’

  ‘My imagination now holds things I had never thought possible…’ she began carefully.

  ‘Nor wished to!’ He slammed his hands flat on the table. ‘You asked me for a poisoned gift.’

  ‘Let me speak, sir. I thank you for trusting me so far. But you should know that I had lost the old Master Philip Wentworth, the quiet fisherman, long before tonight.’

  ‘Have I shocked you?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Do you despise me?’

  Zeal blinked in surprise. ‘Because you underwent such terrible adventures? My dearest husband, I admire you all the more! To have survived such a thing! The horror was not of your making!’

  Philip closed his eyes tightly. For a moment, she feared he might be about to weep.

  ‘Sir!’ She laid her hand on one of his. It was cold. ‘My darling Philip, don’t you understand how your candour moves me? To know that you might have felt such fear, at least for a moment, makes you a little more…’ She chose her words delicately. ‘…sets you a little less high above me, a little more within reach of what my heart knows. Even so, I’m sure that I might have died of terror alone.’

  Philip shook his head ruefully, as if he had not heard her. ‘As soon as we returned, Whitfield insisted that we mount another expedition and go back to wipe out the murderers of his nephew. And Candish, my fellow survivor, was hot to go back and dredge that lake for golden baubles.’

  ‘But how did you escape?’

  He looked at her for a moment. ‘More easily than you might imagine. After the sacrifice, our captors held a feast, at which they drank a great deal of some potent alcoholic brew. Even our guards drank, then slept. We helped each other slip our bonds, crept away and reached our ship the following day.’

  Zeal could see the straggling line of men, sliding through the jungle, looking always over their shoulders for pursuit and listening for that unearthly cough. ‘I can’t think how you ended up here!’

  ‘I wanted no more adventures. Never. I don’t know if either Whitfield or Candish achieved his aim. I renounced the treasures that drove men to adventure. Lightened myself of worldly goods. Left London, determined to stay out of the way of excitements of all sorts.’

  He began again to tie the fly, which he had abandoned at the beginning of his story. His whole bearing had lightened now that he was on easier terrain.

  ‘And became a sojourner at Hawkridge?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Because you believed that no more adventure was ever likely to befall you here?’

  He smiled thinly. ‘Only that of encountering a bewitching young woman, and persuading her not to fling herself from a tower.’

  ‘Did this place seem so abysmally safe?’ Zeal insisted.

  ‘It seemed a good place to think. And to lead a life where I could do no more harm.’

  ‘What harm?’

  ‘Oh, my dear child…!’ he began.

  ‘You returned safely…’

  ‘Half-dead and without my men…’

  ‘But with reports of treasure?’

  ‘Enough to spur the investors off again.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  Philip stared at her for a long time. ‘Don’t you now see how impossible it was for Nightingale to take you with him, even if he had not been bound in indenture? Even if you are not fragile?’

  ‘I understand why it would seem that way to a man.’

  He gave her the fly so that she, with her keener eyes, could whip down the end of the winding thread. ‘Arguing my rival’s cause again. My wits are failing me, for sure.’

  She took the fly to the window to catch the last of the light. She held it up, pretending attention, hearing only the word ‘rival’. She felt him still watching her, as if he had given her a gift and she had not yet even turned it over in her hand.

  What do I say if he
asks whether I love him?

  Neither spoke while she bent her mind to whipping down the end of the thread.

  She gave him the finished fly.

  ‘Young eyes!’ he sighed. ‘Perfectly done!’

  She did see him differently now. The horror of his tale had lodged like a lump in her throat. But where some men might have used such accounts to try to thrill a woman, Philip had held back, to protect her. She quite liked this other man who blurred his familiar outline and gleamed at times from his eyes, although this other man also made her a little uncomfortable. The map of his heart was too strange. The darkness she glimpsed was too profound. And his vitality, which reanimated Philip’s strong old limbs, echoed John’s in an unsettling way. Philip might jest about John as his rival. This other man meant it. And something in her responded in startled surprise – if only to a shadow of the past.

  ‘Beautifully done,’ said Philip again.

  It was an odd thought, that her husband might be her lover’s rival.

  ‘Will you sleep here with me tonight?’ she asked.

  He gave her a startled look.

  The surmise she saw in his eyes made her redden. ‘You should not sleep on the floor.’ She looked away. He had mistaken her meaning. She meant only to comfort him.

  ‘The tack room again, all the same. But first I may go onto the river.’

  ‘May I come with you? You have always wanted to teach me to fish.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not tonight, my sweet. Of late, I have been starved of solitude.’

  She could not sleep. The moon sent a disturbing light into the corners of the room. The beeches of the avenue whispered loudly in sudden gusts of wind. From time to time a bittern boomed. A bird rustled in the lodge eaves. A pair of foxes screamed. Ranter gave a single interrogative bark from the gardens. The night outside felt lively and inhabited while the room where she lay awake was cold and still.

  In the stillness she saw Jamie, his golden hair bleached almost silver, being led away by the priest. She heard his dying scream, a high pure, dreadful music.