The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  ‘“Such persons”!’ Roger leapt to his feet again. ‘“Such persons”? He means by that his own son! And “turn them out”! He never wrote that!’

  His wife lifted her head from her hands.

  ‘The imprint of two witnesses say that he did.’

  ‘Then his wits were gone. Or that trollop twisted his thoughts against me. To speak so coldly of his own begotten flesh and blood!’

  ‘I don’t understand…’ Zeal said. A jolt of intimation froze her tongue even before Wentworth could.

  ‘Oh, don’t you, madam?’ He stood over her. ‘I’m certain you understand far better than any of the rest of us!’

  ‘Then we’re all mired in ignorance,’ she said hotly.

  ‘Sir Richard!’ Roger turned to appeal to their host. ‘Witness how she insists on her deceit!’

  ‘Sir!’ Zeal rose to her feet.

  ‘“…such persons as presently inhabit my houses…” He means to say my own house! Where my mother lived all her married life, and where I was raised and have lived in full and proper expectation that it would be mine.’

  ‘What house?’ demanded Zeal.

  ‘Your house?’ asked Sir Richard. ‘Have you the title in law?’

  ‘Morally! In God’s law…!’

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU ALL TALKING ABOUT?’ When she had their attention at last, Zeal sat down again.

  ‘Your late husband’s property, I believe,’ said Sir Richard gently. He pressed his right temple with the heel of his hand. ‘I wish you would all let this young gentleman on my left get on with it.’

  ‘Are you saying that my father proposes to give this woman the right to turn me out of my own house?’

  ‘In law, unless you have the deed, it’s not your house.’ Sir Richard gestured to his manservant to bring glasses and claret. ‘Calm and civility. The only way forward.’ He looked at the young lawyer encouragingly.

  ‘Did he truly leave all to this deceitful little trull?’ demanded Wentworth.

  ‘No. He has left you an allowance…Let me find my place again.’

  ‘Why is there such uproar?’ asked Zeal. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t throw you out of your house, even if it were mine…’

  ‘How generous! How saintly! You scheming trollop, you female crocodile…!’

  ‘SIR!’ Now Balhatchet was on his feet. ‘I will not…! Not in this house! Just shut your mouth or I will cuff you round the ears.’

  ‘Did you say, “houses”?’ Zeal asked the lawyer. ‘How many?’

  ‘Four!’ Wentworth said tightly. ‘And a London lodging house. And two shops. As if you didn’t know.’

  ‘I did not! Your father lived modestly on Hawkridge Estate. As quiet as an ancient hermit. Why should any of us imagine that he owned four houses? And a London lodgings, and shops?’

  ‘Claim what you will, I know that you played on my father’s spite towards me…’

  ‘I didn’t know you existed!’

  ‘…and trapped him into a false marriage. It’s easily done with old men once their pricks start to droop. Pantaloons! I shall set about at once to have this will declared false, the product of deceit and cold calculation.’

  Zeal caught the lawyer’s eye. ‘What is the total worth of my husband’s estate?’ Her voice trembled slightly.

  He sifted through the papers in his hand. ‘You will have to examine these inventories in detail, madam, to calculate precisely. And they must all be proved. But the total will be considerable.’ He rose and gave her a sheaf of documents. ‘The houses have tenancies and land. One has a lavender farm. And there are also docks near Norwich which bring good mooring fees, and some rights to customs farmering. And two tracts of forest, producing timber.’

  Timber. She felt the intimation of a landslide of understanding.

  She glanced at the first inventory, which was fixed to the seal on the deed with silken threads. From one of the houses. Her mind stumbled and slid across lists of acreage, outbuildings, carts, doors, windows, locks, shelves and other carpenter’s work. She lifted the top sheet and saw joint stools, tables, silver spoons, half-headed beds, trundle beds, fullheaded jointed beds, table carpets, wall-curtains. Feather beds, quilts, sheets. Washing tubs, copper water cisterns, latten bed warmers, leather fire buckets and pierced steel lanterns.

  ‘Has he left me anything at all?’ asked Wentworth.

  ‘There is a letter here for you.’ The lawyer passed it via Sir Richard. ‘And the allowance, of course.’

  Wentworth broke the seal.

  The room was absolutely silent while he read. Zeal watched the enraged purple of his cheeks fade to grey.

  ‘Will you read it to us?’ asked the lawyer.

  Wentworth threw the letter onto the table and stared down at it. ‘He has always disdained me. Taken all I valued most. What more harm can he do?’

  Balhatchet leaned forward and pulled the letter to him.

  ‘Sir,’ read Sir Richard. ‘As you showed no kindness when I would have set aside our differences and given you all, I took it back again to be administered by a gentler, more generous heart than yours. When I turned to you for forgiveness and for respite in which I hoped to heal my soul, you would have turned me out, sold my estates for your own profit. I thank God only that you betrayed yourself before I placed my final seal on the instruments of my own self-destruction.

  ‘Your hot temper and greedy self-concern so disgusted me that I looked into my soul for the causative taint in my own blood. Having found enough there to dislike myself even more than I dislike you, I set out to do penance in a life of simplicity and denial. This intended mortification, however, has failed to serve my intent. Instead, it brought me true peace beyond my deserving and, finally a joy I thought I had long left behind.

  ‘When you disobeyed my orders and pursued me to Hawkridge, you did damage beyond your comprehension, compassion being absent from your soul. You also killed all last temptation to relent, which had been prompted in me by the remnants of paternal feeling…’

  ‘Hah!’ said Wentworth under his breath.

  ’…I willingly grant you one gift: the chance from which I was fortunate enough to benefit – to honour my wife, as young as she is, and to learn to husband your soul according to her example. You owe her a measureless penance, which I fear she will be too kind to extract.’

  ‘It can’t be,’ said Zeal quietly.

  Wentworth lifted his head. ‘She admits the truth at last.’

  ‘Take care, my dear,’ said Sir Richard. ‘I see what you mean. I knew your Philip too, but today I must listen with legal ears. So, I do not think that you meant to say, in absolute fact, that the letter is not properly written in Philip Wentworth’s hand.’

  ‘May I see it?’

  Sir Richard passed it to her.

  ‘Looking with legal eyes,’ she said at last, ‘this is his own hand.’

  ‘There is a letter for you, as well, madam,’ said the lawyer.

  ‘A serpent for her, too!’ exclaimed Wentworth. ‘Read it to us, madam.’

  Zeal broke Philip’s seal and unfolded the paper. ‘Oh,’ she said faintly after a moment. ‘I don’t think…’

  She handed the letter to Sir Richard. ‘There’s nothing here of legal import, but look for yourself and reassure Master Wentworth that no deceit is being practised on him.’ She inhaled to steady herself. She refused to weep in front of that detestable simulacrum of a good man. Philip had written only a single line from Ecclesiastes:

  A feast is made for laughter, and wine maketh merry; but money answereth all things.

  ‘What my father has done is against the natural order,’ said Wentworth. ‘In turning against his own child, he has turned traitor to nature.’

  ‘May I beg paper and pen?’ Zeal asked the lawyer.

  ‘Take care what you set down,’ said Sir Richard. ‘I should reflect before I did anything, if I were you. There’s much to consider.’

  ‘Is your name truly Wentworth?’ she asked the son.

&nbs
p; ‘Beyond doubt, madam! What’s your meaning?’ A look of understanding widened his eyes. ‘If you mean to claim that I am not his true son…’

  ‘Will you make a fair copy?’ she asked the lawyer when she had finished writing. ‘Then I will sign it before you.’

  ‘May I just see it before…’

  ‘Don’t fear, Sir Richard.’ She let the old knight read what she had written. ‘You will see that I have merely settled on Master and Mistress Wentworth the right to live in their present house during her life time, so long as she wishes it. But upon her death, he must quit it.’

  One question at least had been answered. She was indeed Mistress Wentworth, not Mistress Something Else.

  ‘Does it give you pleasure to humiliate me further?’ asked Wentworth. ‘You’re not content with robbing me?’

  ‘Roger,’ protested his wife faintly.

  ‘Be still!’ he shouted at her. He turned back to Zeal. ‘I don’t believe he ever married you. My mother was his only wife. Yours was a false marriage! A sham! I know your wanton history, madam! You cannot deceive me. I have sought intelligence!’

  Afterwards, Zeal remembered only that she stood, grew as tall as a tree. Her throat swelled with rage. She feared that she might have roared.

  Wentworth had stepped back. Closed his mouth. Looked away.

  ‘Don’t ever say such a thing to me again.’ She was in control of herself once more. She spoke carefully, remembered to breathe. ‘Thank your wife and my concern for her future comfort that I don’t take back the right I just gave you. But one more word of false marriages, and I will throw you out as your father gave me the power to do!’

  Wentworth’s jaw shook before he could manage to speak. ‘Now I see it! How you mean to entertain yourself in the future! “Oh, sir, you may stay. Oh, no, sir! I’ve changed my mind. You must go.” Well, madam, I will not tolerate life on such terms, subject to the whims of a…!’

  ‘Please!’ cried his wife.

  ‘I fear you must either learn to tolerate it, sir, or live elsewhere,’ said Sir Richard.

  ‘No,’ said Wentworth. ‘I won’t learn to tolerate it. I shall take it to court!’

  ‘Sir! I am the court.’

  ‘Then I shall find another that is not so clearly skewed in favour of my enemy. You are small fry, Sir Richard. I intend to see you, madam, at the quarterly assizes.’

  ‘What can he do?’ Zeal asked Sir Richard later. He had asked her to stay to dinner and now they sat together in his small parlour. ‘Can there be any question about the will?’

  ‘Tight as a drum. And the allowance will work against him. Shows that Philip hadn’t lost his wits and merely forgotten him. He might have tried that…’ The old knight paused. His natural ruddiness darkened several shades. ‘There’s no question he could raise about the marriage, is there?’ He avoided Zeal’s eyes. ‘Consummation, and all that?’

  Zeal smiled. ‘No. No question like that about the marriage.’

  Forgive me for misjudging you, she told Philip. I thought that male pride alone urged you to insist on my bed and on the charade of blood on the wedding sheets.

  ‘Then I can’t think what charge he can make stick,’ said Sir Richard.

  Zeal interlaced her fingers into a small solid structure on her lap.

  How many more surprises do you have for me? she asked Philip silently. Her mind was too full to consider the question now, but sooner or later, she knew the landslide would bury her.

  ‘Do you swear you did not know his true estate?’ she asked Sir Richard.

  ‘I trust that I would remember if Philip had told me.’

  ‘Nor the crime for which he so clearly tormented himself?’

  Sir Richard shook his head.

  She unlaced her hands, stood up and took her leave. There was another whom she must question.

  She found Lamb among the fragrant amber stacks of oak planks by the plantation saw pit. Wet sawdust made a soft acrid carpet under her feet.

  ‘Did you know?’

  47

  Lamb did not bother to pretend ignorance. ‘He swore me to secrecy as condition of my employ…’

  ‘Your employ?’

  ‘I am truly sorry…’

  ‘He employed you?’

  ‘The favour was also true. I did need to escape London.’

  ‘What were your wages, that let me imagine friendship?’

  ‘The friendship was not imagined!’

  ‘How do I know? How do I know to believe anything? The source of those gifts of timber seems clear enough now. May I hazard, too, that Quoynt was not a beggar grateful for a warm bed? Did Dauzat truly settle for a share of the glass? What about that barn Philip claimed to have been given? And all those supposed favours? Where else was I blind?’

  Lamb looked away. A flush dawned above the rim of his collar.

  ‘Even Bowler’s second fiddle! I wager it was bought, not borrowed at all!’

  ‘Bowler did not know.’

  ‘You made a fool of me,’ she said. ‘The pair of you. But Philip most of all.’

  ‘From love. He did it from love.’

  ‘So you say.’

  Behind them, a sawyer bent down towards his partner in the bottom of the saw pit. The saw rasped through the log set across the pit. The sawyer straightened to haul up his end of the eight-foot saw again. She took Lamb by the sleeve and pulled him out of earshot.

  ‘What else don’t I know?’

  Lamb rubbed his nose vigorously and looked her in the eye. ‘You know that Philip did not confide in anyone unnecessarily.’

  ‘And you were more necessary than I?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool! I already knew him…though not well,’ he added hastily. ‘My father knew him. Philip wanted to please you and to ease your life enough to risk exposure after all those years in hiding. Swearing me to secrecy was a small matter against that risk.’

  ‘I feel such a fool!’ she said again. Suddenly, everything was put in question. ‘He didn’t also pay Sir Richard for his old barn? I could not bear it!’

  ‘That was a true gift,’ Lamb assured her. Then he heard the knowledge he had revealed and grimaced in mock agony.

  She turned an icy eye on him. ‘I think that you and I must explore the full extent of Philip’s need to confide.’

  Later that evening, she sat wrapped in her cloak on the steps of the lodge looking across the valley at the brick walls which had risen that summer and autumn from the hole in the side of Hawk Ridge. Winter rain and freezing weather had again stopped work until spring.

  What of the brick oven and Master Wilde’s advance payment of the building costs? she asked herself. Did he truly buy that meadow? Or did he collude with Philip too?

  Can’t ask him without exposing my own pitiful ignorance.

  And those ships’ timbers? And that friendly barge owner who transported sand for such an amiable fee? The Record of Works told her only what had been spent, not where the money had come from.

  She heard footsteps from the drive above the lodge.

  ‘It’s you,’ she said coldly.

  Lamb sat beside her, forcing her to shuffle sideways or else find herself sitting closer than she wished just then.

  ‘Are you still enraged with me, darling sis? You should know that I mean to drown myself if you don’t relent. I need a good excuse to drown myself. My only difficulty will be deciding whether the carp or the pike will best harmonize with my attire.’

  ‘Go to Hell, Lamb!’

  He sighed. ‘Implacable harpy.’

  ‘I killed him, you know.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I did. I should have stopped him. Instead, I led him on.’

  ‘No one led Philip Wentworth anywhere,’ Lamb said firmly. ‘I didn’t know him as well as you seem to fear, but I’m certain of that, at least. I never saw a man who by doing so little could have so many people running around doing exactly as he wished.’

  ‘Including me?’

 
Wisely, Lamb kept quiet.

  After a moment she said, ‘He saved my life.’

  ‘Then why are you so angry with him? He also left you a wealthy woman. You can do as you like now, with your house. You can afford your theatre at last.’

  ‘Yes. I must think further about that,’ she said grimly. ‘As you say, the possibilities for imagination are much increased.’ After a moment she asked, ‘Did you also know his son?’

  ‘You can be sure at least that Roger most likely deserved his harsh treatment at Philip’s hands.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Met him once. I was told to be kind because his mother had died. He was eleven. I was six. Let him ride my horse and he lamed it. Then he told my father I did it, and I got a beating.’

  ‘Didn’t you tell your father the truth?’

  Lamb shrugged. ‘My horse knew. And that was the only opinion I cared for.’

  ‘You must know more of him.’

  ‘Didn’t want to.’ Lamb returned to diplomatic silence while they gazed across the valley. A small figure appeared among the low walls.

  ‘Oh!’ Zeal put her hands to her mouth. ‘My eyes are deceived by distance. It’s only a boy. For a moment, I thought that was Philip! He used to prowl the site of an evening.’ She looked up as if studying the weather. ‘I can’t trust even my eyes. I don’t know if I know anything, any more.’

  The day Philip was buried, Zeal had gone into his chamber and sat on his bed, hugging a linen shirt that he had left lying on his stool.

  Philip?

  She sat very still, waiting, with his shirt against her face.

  I’m sorry my eyes were closed when you left me.

  The room was dark, and cold without his fire burning in the grate. Mice rustled behind the panelling. Outside, a loose gate bumped its post in a small surge of wind. Inside, the air was so still that she heard her own breathing and the tiny rearrangements of her clothes.

  He was not there.

  Nevertheless, she forbade Mistress Margaret to have the chamber cleaned.

  After talking with Lamb on the day the will was read, she went into Philip’s chamber to uncover his secrets, if she could. She entered like a thief.