The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  ‘Have you minded so much?’

  It broke her heart. Philip so humble. So reduced in his own eyes. She felt a rush of protective tenderness. ‘How can I mind when I love you?’

  The bed clothes rustled as he turned onto his side to face her. ‘Do you?’ He had returned to his dry familiar tone.

  Don’t let the silence grow! she warned herself. Not with ears like his tuned to the void between every heartbeat. Just speak and trust your heart to guide your tongue.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I…’

  ‘Don’t lie, Zeal. Please. I could not endure kindness.’

  ‘Should I love you less because you are kind to me?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘But I am kind from love. I don’t love from kindness. That difference can’t escape your quick mind.’

  ‘Sir, when you first asked me to marry you, did you ever think we would be lying together in the dark speaking of love?’

  ‘Indeed not.’

  ‘No more did I. And yet here we are, somehow arrived. I have never pretended not to love John. And yet I feel happy here with you. It gives me pleasure to lie with you. That may trouble my conscience but it does not change my feelings.’

  ‘How cleverly you avoid perjuring yourself while you still protect my amour propre.’

  ‘So ask me again direct.’

  ‘Do you love me, wife?’

  ‘Yes.’ And it was true enough to slip out without discomfort.

  ‘Oh, Zeal, my dearest girl!’ He pulled her to him and drew the coverlet up. ‘Even I know enough to rest content with that.’

  She lay warmly against his chest, with his arms tight around her and his heart drumming under her ear. I do love him, she thought with surprise. If not as I loved John.

  In recompense for this last thought, she reached up and laid her hand on Philip’s cheek.

  A complex man, with cruel edges, but always kind to me. And so generous with what he has. We are good friends, as he promised. And lovers.

  She felt wrapped not only in his arms but in their hours of passionate planning, his surprises of building stuffs, his willingness to ask favours on her behalf. And to tell her, however reluctantly, truths about himself that he had shared with no one else.

  ‘You are so very warm,’ he said into her hair. He stroked her face, then let his hand settle on her breast. She pressed forward into the cup of his palm.

  He pulled up her night dress.

  What else can I give him in return? she asked herself. She opened her legs and placed her arms around his neck.

  He sighed as he entered her.

  I owe him all I can give. I wish to give him this. I do. Open, heart.

  She closed her eyes.

  ‘Zeal, Zeal…’ he whispered. He groaned and shuddered.

  He drew a hideous whooping breath. Coughed. His full weight fell onto her. His chin struck her head like a club.

  She lay pinned under him, dizzy, barely able to breathe. ‘Philip?’

  She knew. She had known it since she saw the silhouette of his feet against the hangings.

  She felt herself clamping onto her rock, closing down, becoming absent so that when realization arrived, it would find no one there to inform. As she had closed down at the age of six when she interrupted low, intense adult voices, belonging to strangers, standing in their London house where her parents should have been waiting, arms open, to greet her after their return from the Low Countries.

  His right arm twitched.

  ‘Philip!’ she whispered eagerly. But his block-like head still pinned down her hair. She tried to draw breath, but his weight crushed her lungs.

  Cold horror gave her the strength to heave him off. She yanked her damp night dress from under him. Then she smelled urine.

  ‘Don’t do this! No, no, no, Philip!’ She shook her head. ‘Don’t you dare! I won’t let you!’

  She scrambled off the bed, lit the candle from the banked fire and took it back to the bed. He had rolled onto his back when she heaved him off and was staring at her so intensely that she thought for an instant he was still alive. His penis lay limply across his bare thigh.

  I should have stopped you! I felt something askew. I think I knew! Why didn’t I stop you?

  I killed him.

  She pulled down his night shirt, then made herself touch his cheek. Still warm. He still felt like Philip. Dry and warm. Grey stubble glinting on his jaw.

  She bent her cheek close to his mouth, then set her ear over his heart. The silence in his chest nearly undid her but she closed her eyes and let the wave roll over her.

  She raised her hand to close his eyes but could not bring herself to touch them while he still seemed to look out of them. They did not waver, but she now saw that they did not quite look at her. When she looked directly at him, her horror ebbed. She laid her hand on his forehead as if he were a sick child.

  It had happened. There was nothing she could do to change it.

  ‘In the morning, I will no doubt feel the truth of it. Right now, I just feel peculiar. Very still.’

  She climbed back up onto the bed beside him and pulled the covers over them both.

  He was still Philip and yet he wasn’t. She smoothed his hair. Touched his fleshy ear lobe. Soon, she would call for help. Wake Lamb. Send for Sir Richard. Start up all that attend a death. Move him onward, into being a corpse. Begin the process that would hide him from her first in a coffin, then under the earth, and leave her standing on top of it. Stuck up there on the crust while he fell farther and farther away from her, into a place stranger and more unknown than any of the places he had conjured up for her to imagine.

  For the moment, however, she felt him merely suspended, and herself with him, falling from one life into another, not yet entirely gone from the first nor yet arrived at the second.

  She placed his hand against her cheek and sat with her eyes closed, rocking gently.

  I should call Sir Richard, she thought. How very convenient to have a magistrate as one’s neighbour. Then she remembered that Parliament was still sitting and Sir Richard was in London.

  Philip’s flesh cooled slowly against hers like water in a bath. She arranged him with his legs straight and his arms at his side, so that he might stiffen into a dignified posture. Then she lay beside him propped up on one elbow to keep watch.

  ‘I prefer the Italian design for the new fireplace,’ she told him. ‘That last one Lamb found. I hope you don’t mind. And if Dauzat can’t make us enough window panes, perhaps I should send to Norwich, after all. We could ship it by carriage to save the carters’ fees. I can ride my horse in the meantime…we hardly ever use the carriage, and the glass might just survive such a journey.’

  When she opened her eyes, the sky was pale grey, and she saw that she lay beside a dead man.

  By supper, she was in a rage at him.

  How dare you? She glared at the sunken face of the stranger he had left in his place, now laid out on the dining table at High House. How dare you leave me?

  ‘Where has she gone?’ Lamb interrupted Rachel as she was banking the bake house fires. ‘I can’t find her anywhere.’

  ‘I think she went fishing. At least, she took one of his rods and his sack.’

  Lamb found her below the mill. He watched but did not approach her. She was sitting on the bank of the river, holding the rod, staring into the water.

  Zeal saw Lamb. She turned her head just enough to put him out of sight. When she looked again, he had gone.

  All clear, she said. Just the two of us now. Where are you?

  Tiny splashes marked fishy attacks on the minced cheese she had thrown. There was no bait on her line.

  A seed pod popped near her elbow. Upstream and downstream, the dark, cold water chatted and gurgled. The surface in front of her swirled in a long whispering curve. Dried nettle stalks rasped at each other in each slight movement of the air. A thin glassy fringe of ice hung above the water on shadowed stretches of the bank.

  Where are you
? she asked again. I know you must be here on the river. After so many years, you must have left a substantial ghost. Just whisper something. Tug on the line. As you know, I won’t give up, so you might as well speak to me now. You hadn’t finished your stories. You must have something more to say.

  As indeed he did, but he would tell it by other means.

  46

  The sky declined to act as an oracle for the day. As Zeal rode to High House for the reading of Philip’s will three weeks after his death, she looked up at the grey veil above her head. It hung damply but glowed nevertheless with a hint of possible sunlight to come. Dried grass bent under the weight of a light frost. Seed heads stuck to the fetlocks of her horse and strands of cleavers fringed the hem of her gown.

  She pulled up her horse on the ridge above Sir Richard’s lake, remembering the double line of children, and her own blind walk through the same meadow.

  When she threw Rachel’s silver pin into the spring and made her wedding wish, a chilly lump of flesh had ticked in her chest in place of her heart.

  Her horse dropped its head and pulled at the grass.

  I believe that my wish came true. To my astonishment and past my deserving. I was loved. And in the end the old soldier trusted me and let me comfort him.

  She looked for John, seated in the meadow, waiting for her. She wanted to ask his forgiveness for this grief over another man and needed to see understanding in his face.

  She pressed her hand against her mouth and squeezed her eyes tight shut.

  Women love men for the power they give us over them as much as for the power they imagine they must exercise over us, she thought. Dear, wily double man.

  She looked across the lake at High House with dread. He was already slipping from her, pushed away by images of his coffin and burial, by images of dust and decay. Today would push him farther with papers and legal language. With a lawyer’s face, black gown and smell of musty wool.

  Sir Richard was waiting at the front door of High House.

  ‘Need to speak, my dear.’ Whatever it was clearly made him uncomfortable. ‘Now, if you don’t mind.’

  Startled by his uncharacteristic abruptness, she handed her reins to his groom, climbed the shallow stone steps and followed him into his small parlour at the front of the house, just off the hall.

  Sir Richard glanced up at the ceiling with what could only be described as alarm. ‘Still don’t believe that Philip…In any case, instructions from him about his estate…’

  He thinks he has bad news for me, she thought. If he only knew how low my expectations are, what my real reasons were for the marriage. And how much Philip has already given me.

  ‘Had to send word to…a gentleman he named.’ Sir Richard pressed two fingers against his temple and rubbed. ‘Roger Henry Wentworth.’ He waited in unhappy expectation for her response.

  ‘And who is this Roger Henry Wentworth?’

  ‘His son,’ said Sir Richard.

  ‘His son?’ She felt she had walked into a tree that was not there a moment before. ‘But Philip said he had no…’

  ‘No children who are alive to me,’ was what he had said, in fact.

  ‘Did he tell you he had a son?’

  ‘Not a squeak.’ Balhatchet raised his head and listened to the sound of feet marching back and forth overhead. ‘Then, he didn’t say he did not, neither. And the man is here.’

  ‘His son,’ Zeal repeated, numbly.

  ‘I had to offer him lodging last night, of course. And his wife.’

  Zeal at last noticed the pacing feet. And heard raised voices. Now she began to understand Sir Richard’s wretchedness. ‘And is he very angry with us for not calling him to Philip’s deathbed? Did you explain how unexpected his father’s death was? And that I did not know enough to send for him?’

  ‘I don’t believe that’s what is agitating him…God’s Teeth! I think he’s coming downstairs!’

  The parlour door flew open. This time she saw that he resembled Philip. A little taller, a little leaner, but Roger Wentworth had the same beaked, slightly fleshy nose, the same square jaw. His father’s pugnacity and edge were now distorted into quivering rage.

  Her mouth fell open. How did I not see it then? she asked herself. My step-son. She had to look away from his angry face while she fought to control her voice.

  ‘It was you!’ he exclaimed. ‘The wife!’

  ‘If you’ll allow me, mistress,’ said Sir Richard, ‘I would like to introduce Master Roger Wentworth.’ His voice, however, made it clear that he liked it not at all.

  His hat. The sun in my eyes. But even so, I should have recognized his father’s bass voice. The man on the horse.

  ‘I suspected as much at the time,’ he said.

  She stared at this almost-Philip, this terrible distortion. I’ve lost something of great value, she thought, if this is what is left behind.

  The muscles in her face began to jump.

  Did Philip know that his son killed our child? And from what he just said, did it knowingly.

  Roger Wentworth turned and left the room again.

  Together, Zeal and Sir Richard watched him march back up the oak staircase. After a moment, they heard voices overhead again.

  ‘He can’t hope to inherit Hawkridge Estate, can he?’ she asked, suddenly cold from scalp to toenails. ‘As Philip’s son? He’ll be disappointed.’

  Unless I misunderstood those documents Philip was so keen to have me sign before the marriage.

  ‘I have the deed of gift, secure!’ she said.

  Unless I misjudged Philip, as I misjudged Harry.

  ‘Whatever he might hope, he brought a lawyer,’ said Sir Richard with considerable edge. ‘To be certain that I deal properly with the will.’

  ‘I suppose I must be an unpleasant complication.’

  ‘A lawyer!’ snorted Sir Richard. ‘To ensure honesty!’

  Wentworth’s lawyer was much younger than Zeal had expected, given the weight of his responsibility. He had only recently qualified, he explained when summoned by Sir Richard for brutal questioning. Had known Roger Wentworth at university. Yes, Wentworth was older. Had been sent down, then returned some years later. He himself was here as a favour to Roger. Who was a hard man to stop when his mind was set. Here, the lawyer tried, without success, for collusion with his alarming host.

  ‘Too bad old Forwyth died,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Best legal man I ever knew. Never knew him to be anyone’s tame puppy.’

  The young lawyer blushed and toyed with the minced egg that Sir Richard had insisted he consume to fortify himself.

  They gathered in the small courtroom at the back of High House where Sir Richard dealt with parish cases. It had its own entrance so that those on court business need not enter the house. The small holding cell just beneath the courtroom saw few occupants except an occasional vagrant taken in the parish before removal to Winchester, or the odd violent drunk being kept away from wife and family till he sobered up again.

  To Zeal, who had never seen the courtroom, it seemed very plain to be a seat of justice, even at parish level. Undecorated stone surrounded the door. The walls were flat panelled. The windows held clear glass. Only the county arms above the door and a flag beside it told her that she was not in a stone storage barn.

  Sir Richard took his chair behind a square oak table, with a manservant standing by to fetch fresh ink or pens. The lawyer set his writing chest on the end of the table to Sir Richard’s left. Wentworth, Zeal and Wentworth’s wife sat on stools facing the table.

  The woman had taken her introduction to Zeal with no apparent emotion except curiosity.

  She’s not happy, Zeal thought, glancing at her now. And who can blame her? At a less distressing time, she might have studied more closely Mistress Wentworth’s fashionable highwaisted jacket, plucked hairline and heeled shoes.

  Sir Richard rumbled through a formal explanation of why they were there and skipped briskly through the opening sentences of the will. ‘All
the usual assurances, sound mind and so on…’

  ‘Sir…’ interjected the lawyer.

  ‘You can see for yourself when I’ve done. Ah, here we come to the meat…’ He bent his round white-fringed head more closely to the document. ‘I’ll be damned!’ He read on, as if alone in the room. He chuckled.

  He’s having one of his lapses, thought Zeal unhappily.

  ‘Sir!’ said the lawyer firmly. ‘Might you wish to share the reason for your amusement?’

  Sir Richard handed him the will, leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. ‘I beg you, share away!’

  The lawyer read aloud:

  ‘…I will firstly that my wife, Mistress Zeal Elizabeth Wentworth, shall keep and use my tools so long as she doth use my trade…’

  ‘My father was a gentleman!’ Roger interrupted. ‘He had no trade!’

  Zeal smiled. ‘He means his fishing rods. It was a jest between us. He was convinced that their use led to a special state of grace, from which he feared I fell short.’

  Roger shrugged and glanced at the lawyer. ‘Continue.’

  ‘All other chattels, properties, bullion and coin, loan deeds, livestock, holdings of any kind and all other estates of all sorts, without restraints of any kind in addition to all jointures settled by either of us on the other at the time of our marriage, I also leave entirely to my wife…’

  ‘No!’ Roger Wentworth knocked over his stool as he rose. ‘Let me…!’ He tried to seize the document. His wife bent her head onto her hands.

  ‘Surely it does not matter,’ said Zeal. ‘It’s only words.’

  ‘The lawyer slapped his hand down on the will. ‘Please sit down, sir. I will not continue otherwise.’

  Roger picked up his stool. ‘The will is false.’

  ‘She may…You, his wife, that is,’ explained the lawyer, looking at Zeal. ‘…She may, at her will and best judgement allow such persons as presently inhabit my houses, to remain as tenants or she may turn them out to find other…’