She rose, put on her shoes and a heavy cloak over her smock. Rachel snored gently at the top of the stairs. Zeal let herself out into the night.
As she had half-expected, the tack room was empty. She looked down at Philip’s nest of blankets. An empty glass stood on the floor beside his straw-filled pallet. Both rods leaned against the wall. He had not taken his sack. She sniffed the glass. Malmsey.
I may have provoked him into releasing demons better kept in chains. Thought only of what I want, not what is best for him.
She would have worried less if he had taken one of his rods.
He was not by the fishponds. She crossed the sluice bridge and searched downstream, already knowing that he would not be there without a rod. She walked as far as the millpond, just to see that the surface stretched flat and silver in the moonlight. Even with the bright moonlight, she knew she could easily miss a man who did not want to be found. Or who had fallen and lay in shadow. An apoplexy could take a man of any age.
Why didn’t I insist on going with him?
She searched the orchard and gardens. Then she hurried back to the herb garden below the chapel roof, feeling foolish for the surge in her pulse. But, of course, he was not there, neither above nor below.
I don’t know where else he goes when he disappears, she thought. In truth, I still know almost nothing about him, except for a few tales and a liking for fish.
He went to Basingstoke four times a year, though she did not know why. He had another self who borrowed fiddles from strangers in inns and kept old friends who were siege engineers or owed him favours or had unneeded barns.
It wasn’t much.
Lamb was right. I think he loves me. Otherwise, he would never have trusted me so far.
The thought made him suddenly so precious that she began to run upstream towards a pool he seemed to favour. She had to find him, before melancholy and evil memories could pull him down.
Her hair caught on an overhanging tree. As she pulled free, she looked sideways into the river, in case he had fallen and struck his head and now lay drowning in a few inches of water.
She saw a shadow hunched under a tree on the opposite bank. ‘Philip?’
Then the branches lifted in the wind and the shape became a stump again.
When she had retraced her steps back downstream from the pool, she did what she should have done as soon as she saw that he was gone.
But the horse she had given him still stood in its stall, swaying slightly in sleep. The stable grooms and house grooms snored in the loft. Back on the bank of the pike pond, she tried again to think where he might have gone.
I have almost no map of him at all, she thought. After living together on this estate for three years and as man and wife for almost a year. She felt intensely angry with herself.
I did not pay him proper attention. Just as I let John go without memorizing him properly. Distracted then by anger and grief. Distracted from Philip now by this grand project of mine, which he has embraced with such generosity of spirit. And by my preoccupation with a lost love.
A sudden thought sent her back up to the lodge.
‘Philip?’
When there was no reply from his chamber, she went in. She hesitated only a moment before opening the chest where he kept his unworn clothes. The pistol was still there.
At the door of the lodge, she looked across at the new house, but the rising walls and heaped building stuffs made the site impossible to read, even in the moonlight. She crossed the new bridge above the ponds, and climbed the slope of Hawk Ridge. She searched the strange city of stacked bricks, wheelbarrows, spoil heaps not yet cleared. Like an ancient ruined city, but growing instead of crumbling. The first pieces of two pale columns for the portico lay side by side on the part of the levelled fair standing which would become the main hall when money could be found to build it. Philip was sitting on one of the columns, staring back down into the valley in the direction of the lodge.
‘Thank the Lord!’ she cried.
‘What is it, puss?’ His hair and one shoulder were silver in the moonlight.
‘I feared…’ She sat beside him, still panting from her uphill run.
He sounded amused. ‘Why? I’m in no danger. As you can see.’
She began to cry with relief.
‘Hey, hey. What’s this?’ He laid his hand on her cheek.
‘I don’t want you to have those dreams alone. I know that you’d never hurt me, not even in sleep.’
He went very still, with his hand resting against her cheek. Then he stood and laid his cloak on the ground between the two columns.
43
After that night, making love always reminded Zeal of the smell of fresh mortar and earth. He had pulled her down with him into the sheltered gap, out of the wind and reach of prying eyes. Later, in the lodge, she fell asleep in his arms, feeling like a tiny precious kernel wrapped in a thick protective husk.
The next morning, he wanted to make love to her again, directly out of sleep. Still half-asleep, she acquiesced. But without her terror and the moonlight, she felt distant from the act. She did not recognize this intense man who laboured above and in her. This time, John was watching them. She had no excuse she could offer him. This was not rape. On the contrary. She had gone in search of Philip when he had fled from her.
When Philip rolled off her, she laid her arm across her eyes.
‘My sweetest love,’ he murmured. He stroked the bare skin of her belly. Even with John watching in her imagination, she shivered with pleasure. Then she moved away and felt Philip’s sudden silence.
When he rose and began to dress, she could not meet his eyes. She stole glances at his strong sturdy body, his elegant ankles, the great sack of his testicles, and wondered how she could ever have thought of him as an old man, old enough to be content with mere friendship in marriage.
He gave her a slightly chilly look as he stood tying his collar strings.
She wanted to call him back to the bed, to make up for the hurt she knew she had just done him.
‘Where would you have me sleep tonight?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know!’ She stared at him as if he might help her find the answer.
He stepped into his trousers and buckled his belt. She watched his hands, which had so recently stroked her.
If he goes, he will not come back.
He pulled on his stockings, then his boots.
Zeal watched him, paralysed.
He held up his black coat and slapped at the hem, to dislodge a strand of dry grass.
He is what I have, she thought. John is dead. He has not replied to my letters, even to say that he arrived safely on Nevis. He will never come back. The tree told me but I refused to hear. I am clinging to my love for a ghost.
She imagined the door closing behind Philip, being left alone in the silence of the lodge.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Please lie here! I don’t want to have my dreams alone, either.’
He stopped with one arm half into its sleeve. Then he removed the coat again and stood holding it uncertainly. He had pinched his lips so tightly that she thought he was still angry. Then he leaned over and kissed her gravely, without urgency, a ceremonial kiss. He kissed her as she had kissed John’s glove.
Don’t think even that, she told herself. She put her arms around Philip’s neck to seal their new pact. The arrangement had ended, the marriage begun.
44
Philip knew that the letter had come. He had met the messenger by chance on the high road and brought the letter to Zeal. He read her as easily as he had recognized the handwriting.
‘We hear at last.’ He put the letter into her shaky outstretched hand. ‘It came on the Constellation, docked in Portsmouth.’
One whole year (as far as Philip knew) since John had last written his second and last letter from Hispaniola, still on the way to Nevis. Why, in God’s Name, did this one have to come now?
John is alive!
She knew that
she should offer to show the letter to Philip. He had the right to know what another man had written to her. He was her husband. His warmth and smell lingered among her sheets. The feel of his naked body was crisp in her mind. With her eyes closed, she could still see him clearly while John had grown blurred, like one of Lamb’s ideal forms, with the small flaws and complexities smoothed out.
She thanked Philip and put John’s letter into her apron pocket.
Perversely, Philip did not fish that day but instead found tasks around the house site. He tied flies. Wrote at his table. In desperation, Zeal escaped along the Silchester track, looking back to be sure he did not follow her. She found her outcrop of rocks among the sheep, her place and John’s, near the crest of Hawk Ridge above the new house. She set her back against it.
The letter was stained and spotted with damp. She touched it with the tip of her tongue. It tasted of salt. Having fretted to be alone to read it, she now sat with it unopened in her lap. She took a deep breath, as if about to jump from the roof.
My Sweet Love, Today I became an angel. If you remember how we imagined ourselves to be birds as we sat on Hawk Ridge, then you will begin to understand. But this transformation leapt far beyond the cage of our imagining.
I began with a most ordinary act. That is to say, I swam…
She suddenly saw him clearly again, poised to dive, taut and lean, as intense and eager as a young boy, his toes curled on the lip of the bank, his acorn-coloured hair already sleek against his head, with water tracing a rivulet down the side of his throat. The world had narrowed in his thoughts to the arc of his flight.
…pretending to want merely to cool myself while we lay at anchor off Nevis, waiting for the wind to shift so we could enter the harbour. In truth, a wavering dream teased me through the bright sharp facets of the surface and drew me down…Poor, striving words, my limping ambassadors. If only you had been there to become an angel with me, I could lie against you now, feeling the echo of my strange new temper in your heartbeat, and know that we need not speak.
I will try. Imagine, not the chilly layered greenness of our millpond but water as clear as fine window glass and as warm as blood, so that when I lowered myself off the ship’s ladder, I could not feel where my body’s envelope ended and the water began. I became limitless, a part of the sea itself. I ceased to exist, or rather, the tiny spark that still knew itself to be me floated amongst the other tiny particles that cast a haze here and there in the water, like dust motes hanging in a sunbeam.
I had imagined silence under the sea, and for a few moments I heard only the thundering in my own ears. Then suddenly, I heard a racket like a market fair. The sea throbbed with sound, with taps, clatters, squeaks, grunts, and an odd snapping sound like a thousand of my aunt all clicking their tongues at once in disapproval.
The water was so clear that I imagined I flew weightless in the air, amongst the other creatures that filled this strange liquid sky. They wheeled about me in flocks and schools, approached and fled. After being lost for some time in general wonder, I began to note the separate, distinct treasures. Our old sojourner fisherman, Master Wentworth, would never have recognized such creatures as mere fish…
‘Old!’ thought Philip when he, in turn, later read the letter in secret, after breaking into her coffer again. Well, young man, I may have a surprise for you.
…These were living jewels (wrote John). Silver, gold, obsidian black, emerald, ruby, amethyst. Sea stars pricked with ivory knots. Rainbow crabs, lacy sea fans, corals as tall as trees, which proved to be the source of my aunt’s admonitions. Sea urchins minced on purple needle tips. Other creatures grew like flowers, thrusting out their petals to feed then clamping shut again as tight as buttons. Every surface wore some treasure. Even the dark crevices and shadowy caverns were lit by the bright glassy eyes of eels.
I soon acquired swimming companions, small fish of an enamelled blue and orange, which shone as if lit from within. Three hovered just below me. If I turned one way, they followed. If I turned back, they turned back with me. Whenever I was forced to the surface to breathe, I found them waiting when I dived again.
They were friendly, curious and most of all, innocent. Their innocence made me want to weep. They seemed not to conceive what I was, nor what my race might do to them. They were more innocent than the lion and lamb in Eden.
But this was not Eden. You and I both know that place well by repute and would most likely recognize it at once if we should chance to visit. I had entered a new, unforeseen paradise, which did not lack death but was nevertheless without sin.
Like an angel I flew through my new paradise, half-suffocated with exaltation. I soared. I glided and swooped. I hung like a goshawk. I dived, swam to the surface for air and dived again. I was an angel because I inhabited the sublime.
I hardly know how to express the deep, deep calm which began to invade my soul as I glided among these creatures, accepted, sometimes lightly bumped. Even nibbled by some of the smallest fish. A deep calm and ecstasy. I felt a great longing to breathe in, to join them and stay forever. I was so sure of this new wonderful world that I could not believe it would harm me. I felt it offer me its embrace. I knew that to give myself was death, yet I felt no fear.
Not yet, I told it. And devoured it with my eyes. The sea stars, the crabs, the luminous weed. Even when a pair of cruising sharks sent me back to the ship, reason rather than fear propelled me.
Many hours later I am still so full that I spill over onto this page. And unless you can feel a little of the truth behind my over-parted words, you will think me mad when you read what I write next. Even now, dry and returned to my fellows, and without any reason a sensible man could name, I am filled with a deep conviction that all will be well. I do not understand the nature of the manifestation, and I know nothing of what awaits me on Nevis, but nevertheless I believe (like Saint Paul) that we will be together to love each other in freedom and peace.
I have collected shells for you and a dried sea star. Think of me. Pray for me. Wait for me. I send more love and longing than a decent pen should permit…
Zeal moaned softly, pressed the letter to her face, then read again.
Your words have found me, she told him. I am with you, swimming with you like one of those enamelled fish. A spark of light drifting beside your spark.
She laid her hand on her breastbone and felt a deep, slow throb under her palm. She felt his calm, his ecstasy. As she believed he would have felt her death, she now felt his conviction. He had answered that letter she never sent. The one in which she wanted to beg him to tell her everything would be all right.
And I have betrayed you, thought Zeal. After only one year. Philip is my husband and I would not hurt him for the world. What am I to do now?
45
Early November 1640
‘There you are at last!’ She took his hand to draw him into the room. ‘You’re cold!’
‘Too much sitting alone and thinking of the past.’
‘You’ve caught a miasma from the water,’ she said severely.
Philip shrugged.
‘Or a chill from all that sitting on the ground after sunset.’
‘Perhaps.’
Zeal looked at him in alarm. This acquiescence was not like him at all. ‘My dearest Philip, you should try to grow fat like Sir Richard. A good quilt of flesh like his would keep you warm wherever you sit. All fishermen should be fat.’ As she rattled on, she studied him.
He was not listening but stood at the window looking out into the night.
‘Sir, what’s wrong?’ She began to fill a warming pan with coals from the fire.
‘Ranter is too old,’ he said. ‘Far too amiable to keep thieves out of the gardens for much longer. His pup Bellman is nearly full-grown now. You should try him as night watchman.’
‘And is that all that’s troubling you? I expected something weightier…’
‘Ranter is weighty. He’s the size of a small horse!’ He sat wearily on the s
ide of the bed. ‘Remind me to take the chub to Mistress Margaret first thing in the morning. They’ll still do well enough for breakfast tomorrow but make a putrid supper.’ One leg at a time, he swung himself up onto the bed. ‘What progress does Dauzat report with our glass?’
Zeal climbed up beside him and pulled the curtains almost closed, against draughts. ‘And what else troubles you?’
‘Dear child, surely those are enough concerns for one night.’ He reached out an arm and pinched out the candle flame.
They lay side by side in the dark. Zeal watched the shadow of his profile staring up into the canopy of the bed.
‘Oh, Zeal, I feel so cold,’ he said after a long while.
‘Put your feet close to the warming pan and let me rub your hands.’ She sat up and took his left hand in her own. ‘You did stay out too long! You are a fool!’ Her voice was gentler than her words.
After a moment, he reached up and pulled her head down so he could kiss her forehead. ‘The cold was in my bones long before the frost got to them. And your hands are so warm.’
He lay back again and she heard him swallow. The silence grew longer and longer, while she continued to rub his hands. At last, she lay back down and folded her hands on her chest. She could see the silhouette of his feet against the hangings at the end of the bed.
Like a stone figure on a tomb, she thought.
No! She corrected herself urgently. Don’t think that!
‘Zeal?’
She heard intent in his voice and grew alert again, a little annoyed, as if she had been tricked into carelessness and inattention.
The Memory Palace Page 27