‘You must have guessed that my love affair was broken off.’
She nodded.
‘And I’ve now had such a quarrel with my father!’ He turned into her arms and burst into tears.
She stroked his head where it rested against her waist.
He quivered. ‘Broke off before Christmas,’ said his muffled voice. ‘Whilst you were away. I’m afraid I deserted Hawkridge for a few days. Now his father’s causing terrible trouble. But Ben begged me so prettily…’
In time, she got the tale straight.
‘With those huge dark innocent eyes,’ said Lamb bitterly. ‘But he kept pressing me to show him…things I had done before I met him. He was excited by the thought of danger, of meeting those low, rough types…’ He looked up, testing her response. ‘I told him I had turned over a new leaf because of my love for him, put all that behind me…’ He paused, then began to cry again. ‘I should never have agreed to take him…!’
She continued to stroke his hair. ‘Had you been allowed to see him again?’ she asked carefully.
He shook his head against her waist. ‘But we managed to meet.’
‘Whilst I was away at Christmas?’
After a moment, he said, ‘And once or twice before.’
Ah, she thought, thinking of those sudden, apparently fruitless, trips in search of lead or pigmented earth.
‘I’m a weak swaggering fool…I gave in.’
‘What went wrong?’
‘Matters got out of hand.’ He drew a deep shuddering breath. ‘He lost his nerve. Struggled too hard. By chance one of his eyes was crushed like an egg!’
He felt her stiffen and lifted his head. ‘Now you think that I’m weak and wicked, and deserve to die, just as his father says!’
‘His father’s wrong.’
‘I’ve also ruined your bodice front.’
But she was not to be diverted. ‘What does his father say, apart from blaming you for corrupting his young son, as I’ve no doubt he’s doing?’
‘The man has most likely buggered all his pages since the age of twelve,’ said Lamb. ‘But he means to bring charges against me for the same crime. Treason against Nature, it’s called, when the wrong man is caught at it.’
Zeal swallowed. Her mouth was suddenly dry. Lamb was talking about a capital offence. Like it or not, he was looking down.
And I promised not to let him fall, she thought with despair. ‘Do you need money to defend your case?’
Lamb shook his head. ‘It’s enough just to speak with someone who neither swoons or shouts. But thank you. Father is trying to negotiate with Ben’s father. My chief hope is that neither is any keener than the other to attract public notice.’
‘You must come back to Hawkridge at once!’
‘They will find me there, if they want to.’
‘It feels farther from the abyss.’
‘Zeal, I’m already over the edge.’ He looked at her bleakly.
‘How can you climb back out?’
He shook his head. ‘The chasm is deeper than you can possibly know.’
‘I know the pull of the edge,’ she said. ‘And the seductive ease of giving up.’ She began to circle the little parlour. ‘You do not deserve to die. It would be a terrible waste of your gifts, apart from all else.’ She went back to him and set her hands on his shoulders. ‘What sort of rope would you need?’
‘I told you. There’s none stout enough for me. Only a respectable married man, preferably with a string of children to prove his capacity with a woman would stand a chance in court.’
Zeal swallowed and took her hands away. Her heart began to race. I can’t! she told herself. Or I unravel all my last stubborn hopes for John.
But he has been gone for a year and a half. I have seen his letter to Philip. Glimpsed his real perils. Begin to understand the odds against him.
Philip saved me, with the gift of himself. I may have been saved in order to save Lamb.
She paused in front of the blur of a tapestry, as if studying it. What shall I do? she begged. I feel that you’re still alive, but no longer close. Where are you?
After those first three letters, nothing. Except his conviction that all will be well. Against the threat of Baulk’s lash, or trying to escape recapture and almost certain death.
She clasped her neck with both hands and rocked slightly.
In the side of her eye, Lamb, by the window. Her twin, who had bought her the owl of dark-edged wisdom before they ever met. The brother she had never had, who received her thoughts and gave them outward form. She imagined herself among the friends who hung on his feet, desperate to speed the slow terrible strangulation by the noose. His severed head rolled to stop at her feet, still trying to speak.
He is what I have.
‘I came to beg you to reconsider our differences over the Memory Palace. And persuade you that theatre might deserve your talents as well as architecture does.’ She stood beside him for some time looking down into the street before she could make herself speak again. ‘Would it help if I married you?’
53
From Zeal’s Work Book – April 1641
For The New Memory Palace:
Master Quoynt to enlarge cellars
Also to make channel to carry water from river above weir to turn an engine wheel
Also to make new holding tank and pipe to house. Required height above house?
Also enlarge receiving lagoon
Also, his advice on small explosions
Build fences around his workings and set guards to warn off gawpers
Timbers to make pipes
A water closet on model of Sir John Harington’s Ajax. A goodly cistern to hold water for discharging, to move impurities away by water
Stone for arched entrance to theatre, from gardens
Remind plasterers to set eyelets in walls for hanging
A Signor Paroli, painter and gilder – engaged by Lamb from Italy, to complete leather panels in great staircase with scenes of Philip’s escape, as first related
And shutters for theatre stage, following Lamb’s designs
Engage 2 Flemish stone carvers, to be chosen by Lamb
Also 3 Italian woodcarvers, to travel with Signor Paroli
Also I assistant to Signor Paroli
22 pounds, 4s. to M. Dauzat, for making mirror glass. Estimated need: 1,500 pieces
Hire assistant to Dauzat who can speak both French and English
Also hire new Clerk of Works
Send to Master Cobb for model of proposed sinking trap (1 inch to 1 foot)
Accept his tender and plans for counterweight system, to work without players
Write again to Master Webb, to say that I no longer lack the services of a surveyor and to thank him for taking trouble to respond to my first letter
54
Back at Hawkridge that spring and summer, Lamb drove himself in a way that alarmed Zeal, who, after a simple witnessed exchange of vows, was now his wife. Marriage had changed nothing in their relationship, except that Lamb moved from High House into Philip’s old chamber in the lodge. After some thought and with Lamb’s permission, Zeal explained the match to Mistress Margaret, Sir Richard and Rachel. As Lamb had said about his horse, those were the only opinions she cared for. She closed her ears to the rest.
For whatever reason, Lamb had capitulated to her new wishes with what seemed to be a whole heart.
‘Men will come to Hawkridge to wonder as they now visit Venice or Rome!’ he said more than once as he proudly showed Zeal yet another set of plans or drawings.
To his own surprise, if not to hers, he seemed to relish the freedom from the mathematical constraints of architecture now allowed to him by the fantasies of theatre design. He thrived on the intricacies of masque and pageant.
‘You were right,’ he told Zeal. ‘I shall easily out-do Master Inigo Jones, the designer of masques, if not Master Jones, the architect. That man hasn’t an original bone in his body. I saw most of his st
age designs in Italy five years ago.’
The tricks of theatre soon escaped the actual theatre in the new west wing and spread through the new cellars. Surprises and illusions also sprang up throughout the house, amongst the memories. A mechanical moving tableau in the hall from Master Cobb replaced the painting of John’s departure. Clockwork birds arrived from Italy, including a nightingale that at last satisfied Zeal. A musical fountain was planned for the forecourt. Lamb conceived a wonderful false sky for the ceiling of the hall, to be filled with clouds and flying birds.
‘And that deception, dear sister-wife, will arise from pure art, not mechanical tricks! And Paroli is just the man to execute it. I know my own limits.’
‘From time to time,’ Zeal agreed dryly. ‘Do you know a man who can also make the birds appear to sing? One can have joyous deception as well as alarming surprises.’
‘Even in your Underworld?’ he asked. ‘For that is what we are now building in those new pits made by Master Quoynt.’
They still clashed from time to time, but carefully. Lamb was resolved, for instance, that in her Underworld of deception, which had grown beyond the limits of the original theatre, she must make a labyrinth, a single twisting path that arrived inevitably at its goal. Zeal insisted on a true maze, full of misleading turns and dead ends.
‘Mazes are out of fashion among the cognoscenti,’ he said. ‘When life is so disordered, where is the pleasure or entertainment in yet more wilful misdirection and confusion?’
‘In the satisfaction of reflecting truthfully the plight of the human soul,’ she retorted.
‘You must include a little hope! We must believe that one foot placed in front of the other will get us there in the end.’
Rather than deny him the possibility of hope, she agreed to consider further before making a final decision.
In late May, Lamb’s father sent word that his negotiations had failed. Master Neame, Ben’s father, had decided to press charges after all.
Lamb began to draw every day and into the nights, using Philip’s candle stand. He designed sliding shutters for her theatre. Profiles for the posts in her new interior maze or labyrinth, whichever it proved to be. Designs for further painted leather panels in the great staircase. Corbels, arches, cupboards. Banisters, shelves for the new kitchens. Window latches, mirror frames. Paroli and his assistant even painted panels pretending to be windows with cats or flowers on their ledges, or mimicking half-open doors, for the attics, to cheer the grooms and maids who would one day sleep there.
Lamb had friezes made for the hall and corridors. For both speed and verisimilitude, he had the plasterers experiment with real tree branches as a base for moulding the relief of a plaster forest, which would one day grow in the new entrance hall.
He designed a small pavilion for the new bridge across the Shir. ‘A place for elevated reflections,’ he said. ‘In which to recover from your fiendish house.’
He also made drawings for figures to set around the ponds. He sent to Italy for engravings. But none of these possibilities seemed right to Zeal.
‘It’s like trying to replace a lost lover or child,’ she said, pushing aside a set of The Muses. ‘Everything else is a poor substitute.’
The Muses had been taken from her. How had John felt, she wondered, when the king took back the land he had given, the first land John had ever owned, after so many years of serving others.
She frowned briefly at a pride of fantastical beasts, then pushed them aside as well.
But, unlike her, John had earned his land. His reward for multiplying the king’s money by a successful venture in tulip bulbs in the Low Countries. And with the land, he had earned and then lost the right to be called a gentleman. Far worse than losing mere statues.
Slowly, she began to turn over a set of exotic figures from distant lands, a Moor, an East Indian princess. She paused at an engraving labelled ‘The West Indies – a Native Carib Woman’. A half-naked female figure with long flowing hair, her skin delicately cross-hatched to show that she should be carved from dark stone.
She’s strange but beautiful all the same, Zeal thought uneasily.
‘How does it feel to love John Nightingale?’ asked Lamb, with one of his accurate sideways leaps that delighted Zeal. ‘Tell me how true love feels.’
Zeal thought for a long time. ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘It felt easy.’
I used the past tense, she thought unhappily. It doesn’t feel easy now.
‘Then I was up to something else,’ said Lamb.
Their eyes met briefly in the unspoken fear that time might be short.
The arrival of Paroli, with his assistant and the three Italian Catholic woodcarvers had provoked Jonas Stubbs into resigning as master mason.
‘Hiring England’s enemies! This is an ungodly house you’re building! And I’m not alone in thinking so,’ he told Zeal. ‘Old Sir George…’ He shook his head. ‘Not even Master John would have tolerated…’
Although increased wages for Stubbs and his team of masons overcame their moral and political objections, the episode left Zeal uneasy. ‘I should have foreseen such difficulties,’ she told Lamb.
When Francis Quoynt had returned in May, he and his explosions had attracted almost as many onlookers as on his earlier visit. The parish was soon divided on what was thought to be happening and what was thought of it. Stubbs and his men no doubt contributed their own opinions. Zeal’s guards often had to see off those determined to invade the building site to see for themselves.
‘Don’t you understand that you could easily be injured?’ Zeal demanded of four Bedgebury boys who had been marched to the lodge for a scolding.
‘Not me,’ said one eleven-year-old. ‘My mother gave me a charm against the evil eye.’
55
Letter from Zeal Parsley to Doctor Bowler, May 1641.
My Dearest Friend, I take great pleasure in telling you that I am building a small theatre in the new house, which is now dubbed the Memory Palace, for reasons which will become clear to you when you return. You shall have a temple dedicated to music and to all the other Muses who make life tolerable in the times of greatest darkness and sorrow. It will be, however, much more than a simple platform for players. You must wait to know more. I, too, can torment with surprises.
Meanwhile, England is become an uneasy place. Though I miss you and your music, I would not have you rush back before you have quenched your thirst for opera and all the other wonders of Venice. I hope only that the wonders are not so great that they will keep you from us forever. You and I can both take a little satisfaction in knowing that Jamie is at last where he belongs. I am pleased that you have found him such a good teacher and that his voice seems not to be breaking. I pass all his news privately to his mother. His father still glares and spits whenever he sees me. Which seems small gratitude for the gift of a freehold farm, but I dare say he does not understand that his son was lost to the soil long before we are supposed to have abducted him.
Have you yet enough money? Your loving friend, Zeal…
She hesitated, then wrote ‘Wentworth’. There would be time enough to explain the complexities surrounding her new married name after Bowler returned.
56
Also in May, Sir George Tupper wrote from London to Zeal, with whom he had continued to correspond as his ally in the battle against the new barbarians.
My Dearest Madam, I can bear to listen only to sombre music, such as Dowland’s ‘Tears’. My own stage is now kept as dark as those of the court. The king signed the death warrant of his chief favourite, Strafford. The man’s head is already off. Whilst I do not mourn him as a friend – he put down the Irish most violently while governor there – this death fills me with foreboding. None of us is safe when a man of note is sacrificed by his sovereign to appease the mob. Though you know how my sympathies lie, I am nonetheless shamed as an Englishman to hear a mob howling for the blood of any woman, even though she be a Catholic and foreign-born. And I am shamed for a
monarch who sees no solution but to hand over a faithful servant to save his wife.
I hope your small theatre continues to progress well, in defiance of London. I visited Master Cobb’s workshop on your behalf and inspected your sinking trap as well as the engine of ingenious displacement. The man is a genius. Italy does not hold finer. When your project is done, I shall beg an invitation to visit and see what you have wrought. If we place not our faith in kings, will poets, players and composers serve instead, do you think?
57
‘Have you a portrait of Nightingale?’ Lamb asked one day in August.
‘Why?’
‘Never you mind. You’ll learn in time.’
Zeal lent him a double portrait of John and Harry, painted when John was fifteen and Harry twelve. In it, Harry, blond and rosy-cheeked, posed as if about to draw his sword. John, taller and darker, stood holding his horse, one hand resting lightly on its muzzle, looking squarely into the painter’s eyes.
‘Take care,’ she said. ‘It’s my only image of him.’
‘I must do you a triple portrait one day. To make your mappa mundi complete.’ He flicked her a glance. ‘Harry, Philip and me.’
‘But I still have you.’
There was a small silence.
‘And so you do, for the moment,’ said Lamb. ‘Though I don’t know why you want me.’
‘Don’t speak like that. I could not bear to lose you too! And you have your master piece to finish.’
That September, John had been gone for two years with no further word. Five more years of unease to be survived. She did not know if that was a short time or eternity. Since Philip died, she had felt more and more that she experienced life as if lit by flashes of lightning. Between these clear, unnaturally sharp glimpses, she trudged forwards through the demands of each day, each like the one before and the one to come, with her head down, looking only at her own feet, trying to stay on her chosen path. She felt a crack opening in her world that she had no power to mend. In spite of what she had said to Lamb, she had begun to fear what she might see if she looked down over the edge.
The Memory Palace Page 32