The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  Shortly after her marriage to Lamb, another anonymous letter had been shoved under the lodge door, addressed in the same writing as the others. She had almost been expecting it. Neither she nor Lamb needed to let its words into their heads. She left it lying on a window ledge for two days. Then she put it in the fire, unopened. As it flared, she felt a small sense of victory. If she burned them all, from now on, sooner or later the writer must grow weary and leave her alone.

  She had to lift her head again when a foraging army unit made the first raid.

  58

  The king’s quartermaster gave her a list.

  ‘You can’t take all this,’ Zeal protested. ‘We’ll have nothing left to feed ourselves this winter!’

  ‘Bring it, or we’ll forage for it.’

  Sickened, she took him to Tuddenham and handed over the list. ‘What we don’t have, we don’t have,’ she said. The steward nodded without meeting her eye, but she was certain that he understood. What they had was what could be seen. It did not include the sheep on the far side of Hawkridge, nor the hens in a second run, built upstream above the falls, in a clearing above the water meadows. Nor the bales of wool in the loft above her chamber, which she was keeping under her own eyes. However, it did include the forty loaves that Mistress Margaret had just baked, twenty bags of flour and the yeast sponge.

  Zeal made a second list while the carts were loaded.

  ‘I need a receipt,’ she said, as the last two bleating sheep were heaved onto a cart. Two bullocks jittered on their tethers at the tail of another. The four carriage horses had already been led away up the drive.

  The quartermaster laughed. ‘What good will a receipt do you? I don’t give receipts.’

  ‘I want a receipt,’ she repeated. ‘For the estate accounts. And because I refuse to believe that the king is a thief. I’m certain that once he has restored civil order, he will want to make good his debts.’ She held out her own list. ‘Please see that this is correct. And then, sign it.’

  The man scratched his ear, shifted his weight, then decided to humour her.

  When the soldiers had gone, Zeal went to the bake house and stood looking at the empty shelves, which had recently held forty loaves of bread.

  ‘Have they gone?’ asked Mistress Margaret, peering through the door.

  Zeal nodded. ‘The bread is nothing. We could bake again. But they left nothing for us to bake with, either.’ She sat heavily on a stool. ‘I must go ask Mistress Wilde if she can spare a little yeast. And Sir Richard’s steward might give us some flour until we can mill more of our own. Unless his has all been taken too.’

  Mistress Margaret hobbled into the kitchen. ‘Close your eyes.’

  ‘Another one who likes surprises,’ said Zeal. ‘I would like some comfortable certainties.’ But she obeyed.

  ‘Smell!’ ordered Mistress Margaret.

  Zeal inhaled the scent of raw yeast and opened her eyes.

  Mistress Margaret beamed and managed to look crafty at the same time. ‘If they take flour, they take the yeast. As soon as I saw them coming, I took half the sponge under my shawl and hid it along the track to High House.’

  Survival is the sum of such small victories, thought Zeal. Then she trudged on through the rest of the autumn, until Christmas, when everything changed again.

  59

  In mid-December, Sir Richard had returned in a gloomy mood from London, where Parliament had now been sitting for just over a year.

  ‘Stay away from the place,’ he warned Zeal and Lamb. ‘No more visits to the theatre. Not even you, young man. It’s a bad place to be just now. Armed bands roaming everywhere. Mobs. Saw some of those fine caballeros, who claim to ride for the king, charge at a group of unarmed men and women, just for shouting abuse. And that’s all I care to say.’

  ‘At least those fine caballeros don’t tear down paintings and smash statues and the organs in churches,’ Lamb muttered under his breath.

  Sir Richard also brought word from Lamb’s father that Neame’s case against him had been delayed by the political confusion.

  ‘Thereby extending my exile.’

  To Zeal’s ears, Lamb spoke in earnest.

  Over Christmas dinner at High House, after much wine, Sir Richard’s tongue loosened enough for him to allow that in November he had joined in a fierce debate in Parliament.

  ‘I merely asked the man if he meant to curb the king or bring him down, and he tore off my scarf in rage.’ He drained his glass and held it out for more. ‘So I grabbed him by the hair, an insult that he could not return.’ He ran a hand over his glowing bare dome.

  Zeal’s mind seized onto the words ‘…bring him down…’

  ‘Whatever was the cause of such terrible rage?’ asked Mistress Margaret.

  ‘Pym!’ exclaimed Sir Richard, as if the name were an expletive. ‘Hampden, Holles, Strode and Hazelrig!’

  ‘Friends or foes?’ Zeal asked, suddenly uncertain what those words might mean.

  Sir Richard glared. ‘The curs wanted to try the queen for treason as a Catholic!’

  ‘And did they prevail?’

  Sir Richard laughed darkly. ‘Someone shouted “gunpowder!” and all those brave ministers of Parliament trampled each other in their rush to escape. But at least we guaranteed that we meet! The king can no longer play his old trick of holding us at bay.’

  Zeal stopped trying to work out where the old knight stood in his loyalties. She kept repeating to herself, his earlier words ‘…bring him down.’ She had not thought until now that the king might ever fall.

  She wanted to leap up from the table and run home to Hawkridge to look with fresh eyes. She had to be certain that she had not, from hopelessness, lost track of her earlier purpose in making the Memory Palace, that of leaving traces of her journey from one self to another.

  Lamb is right. I must create a labyrinth, with a single path leading from start to finish, with no risk that the pilgrim will lose his way, if he chooses to proceed.

  Slowly, she warned herself. Don’t jump ahead of the facts. But at that moment, Zeal declared firmly and irrevocably for Parliament, even if some of its members tore down pictures and destroyed church organs.

  Perhaps, if Pym, Hampden, Holles, Strode and Hazelrig have their way, she might not have to wait seven years after all.

  I don’t suppose I’m the first to turn traitor to my king from love, she thought.

  That night she saw John again. Underwater, smiling and mouthing at her.

  Why have you left me for so long? she asked him. Why have you not answered my letters? Have you somehow learned of Philip and Lamb? Please come back!

  She could not hear him, nor make him understand her, but she clearly saw his long naked limbs languidly carving the water. Enamelled orange and blue fish swam around him. She reached for his hand to try to pull him out. He was too deep. Then she rose, or else he sank. The distance between their hands grew greater and greater.

  ‘Swim!’ she screamed. ‘Swim this way! Catch hold of my hand.’

  He smiled and sank out of sight. When she woke, she was sobbing.

  Zeal and Lamb now pressed the builders to work even faster, leaving the delights of the theatre and the Underworld, for the moment, in order to finish the domestic wing and sleeping quarters. Zeal used the unfinished parts of the new Underworld cellars as temporary storage for food, ale and wool, disguised by random piles of brick and timber. She also wanted time to consider what further changes she might make to the house, knowing that John might perhaps return after all, to read her map.

  She kept one dark thought locked away in a chest. She did not even let herself look at the chest. But inside it, crouched the terrible, inadmissible possibility that Lamb might still be tried and executed.

  If John returns, and still wants me, she told herself, I shall simply run away with him as if I weren’t married at all. Who in Barbados or Nevis would ever know?

  1642

  60

  Sir Richard came back
again unexpectedly early in January 1642 to set up his falconnet so that its range of fire covered the drive from the main road to High House. When Arthur brought Zeal this astonishing news, she visited at once.

  ‘War has begun in the London streets,’ said Sir Richard, who was in a large closet off the courtroom, making an inventory of the High House armoury. ‘The king invaded Parliament and tried to arrest some of the Members. They escaped but you can’t imagine the furore. You should have heard the shouts of “Traitor!” directed at the king himself!’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘On my way home, I was almost scalded by a pot of boiling water meant for some of the king’s soldiers. There are barricades across the streets. And cannon.’

  He frowned at a stook of muskets and sat down on a stool to wipe his face. ‘I do wish Philip was still here.’ He looked at Zeal. ‘Oh, my dear, I fear I must raise a company of men.’

  ‘To fight on which side?’

  Sir Richard tugged his handkerchief by the corners. ‘It challenges a man’s ingenuity to try to stay a loyal Englishman.’ He twirled the kerchief into a rope, then untwirled it again. ‘I think it must be for Parliament until the king comes to his senses.’

  Perhaps because of this war, the court in London at its Easter sitting threw out Master Neame’s charges against Lamb.

  ‘Free to return to London, at last!’ Lamb smiled at Zeal’s expression. ‘Don’t worry, sis, I won’t desert you before the house is done.’

  61

  On the 22 August 1642, King Charles raised his standard at Nottingham against Parliamentary forces.

  ‘He’s been badly advised!’ cried Mistress Margaret when the news eventually reached them weeks later. ‘War against his own people! It’s that French queen of his. Send her back to France, I say!’

  Sir Richard, when they saw him, which was now seldom, had begun to look thinner and pinched in the face. ‘Oh, madam,’ he said on this occasion, having, in fact, been the source of the news. ‘I would it were so simple.’

  ‘Where do you stand now?’ Zeal asked him bluntly.

  Sir Richard pulled his side-whiskers. ‘With Mistress Margaret on the matter of advisors, at least. Many of the Parliament forces want only to rescue the king from those Catholic traitors who have misled him…as good as abducted him, I’m told. But we’ll soon have him safely back, you’ll see. Before Christmas if only we had better generals.’

  Gifford now attacked the king openly in his sermons, as an enemy of England and the English people. The death of his wife from a canker seemed not to soften him but to increase his rage.

  Before he next left for London, Sir Richard gave Zeal the key to the High House armoury, kept in a large closet off the courtroom.

  ‘Not much left in it,’ he said. ‘A few old pikes and half a dozen muskets. But you never know.’

  Zeal looked at the floor and prayed for Sir Richard and his friends to fail still in their rescue plans.

  She almost forgave the cost to Hawkridge of the king’s war, in the continued loss of precious food and supplies to both foraging armies. Even more disastrously, the men and boys were taken to fight. She had enough money to survive the time it would take to replace food and supplies, but had no one to do the work. By September 1642, Hawkridge had lost two house grooms, two kitchen grooms, four shepherds, two cowmen, one stable boy, both of the under-gardeners (one of whom had also served as fish man) and Tuddenham’s son, Will, who was being groomed by his father to take over as steward of the estate. Bedgebury village and the Wildes at Far Beeches fared just as badly. Sir Richard had already mustered all his own able-bodied men.

  That’s my single consolation for John’s absence, thought Zeal. If he were here, he would be called to fight.

  Those who escaped mustering did so only for a reason. The head shepherd was fifty-four and losing the strength in his left side. The smith was rejected for lacking two fingers. The head joiner, likewise, had the traditional carpenter’s short ration of digits. The Hawkridge mason, Jonas Stubbs, swore that he could not see beyond the reach of his short muscular arm. But Arthur was taken, to fight for Parliament, and for a time, Zeal feared that she might as well have lost Rachel as well, through distraction.

  Work on the new house slowed to half pace, even with the hiring of more foreign labour. She lacked men to keep watch over the workings at night to deter the curious. Only Dauzat and his enlarged army of Huguenot glaziers marched steadfastly forward. By September, they had set glass in all windows on the first two floors of the east domestic wing. Freed from his furnace by Zeal’s purchase of a quantity of Norfolk glass, Dauzat also busied himself like an alchemist with experimental brews of silver and of mercury salts to use for making mirror glass.

  Lamb drove the remaining masons, joiners, plasterers, tilers and white smiths to close in and make habitable the domestic wing, with its several sleeping chambers, a first floor parlour, numerous places of easement including Sir John Harington’s Ajax incarnate, the kitchens, and the domestic offices. Sir Richard, and others, had already given beds to the needy for two and a half years. Over-crowding did not grow easier to bear with time.

  ‘We must be accommodated in the new house by Christmas!’ said Zeal. ‘Another winter like the last two and everyone will go mad.’

  Before living again in her own house, she had to replace the house grooms, Geoffrey and Peter, and the two kitchen grooms, as well as the laundry maid who had married an alien mason and moved all the way to Windsor. While not needed to help look after a large house, Agatha had gone to a niece in Portsmouth. She had written in July to say that her niece’s husband had joined the king’s forces, and that she herself would stay on in Portsmouth until the latest child was born.

  Meanwhile, sheep developed scab, hay rotted uncut, the mill turned only part-time, holes in hedges expanded, and all the autumn sowings and transplantings were late. In the absence of the men, women had to turn their hands to unaccustomed work.

  Then, even for his enhanced wages, Jonas Stubbs refused flatly to work any longer with Lamb, whom he accused of insulting him, or with any of the increased number of Italians, Flemings and French who now crowded the workmen’s encampment and stirred up alien smells from their cooking pots. After negotiating bitterly with Zeal, he left with what he was owed but no more.

  It’s just as well that I’m replacing muscle with engines in my theatre, Zeal thought. There will be no one left to operate the mechanisms.

  She imagined how it would ease her problems if she could discuss them with John, as she had done when he was helping to run the estate. Lamb was distracted by the house and the need to replace mustered workmen. Often he did not hear her when she spoke to him.

  Then he made a trip to Southampton in search of a particularly fine sort of sailcloth. When he returned empty-handed but in the dangerously high spirits that she remembered from their visit to London, she told him, ‘You’re mad!’

  When he merely laughed and did not ask her what she meant, she knew she had guessed right.

  62

  Zeal’s Work Book – September 1642

  For the training up of new maids

  House maids:

  Shake feather beds and air them against dampness, each day

  Note stitching on same and make good all that is loose or undone

  Shake all table carpets, some each day

  Strew green herbs on floors (tansy, mint, balm, fennel) and rub well all over floor with hard brush. When dry, sweep off greens and rub well with polishing brush. Each morning do some part of floors as they grow dirty exceedingly fast

  Each day, remove all grease blots with fuller’s earth, as you find them

  Every Saturday, whisk all window curtains and bed hangings

  Every Friday, brush all places dust might settle with goose wing or soft brush. Not forgetting above the doors. Brush picture frames, but not the paintings

  Each Wednesday, help laundry maid to fold linens

  Each morning, sweep down soot when fires have been li
t

  Each morning, empty pots in all places of easement, into slops bucket and give this to under-gardener. Keep mop in cupboard with pot and use warm water to wash pots clean

  Sweep attics three times a week

  To church each Sunday. Thereafter tend to own affairs

  Kitchen maids:

  Keep the fires small until needed. Guard against taking of embers except by cook

  Help with baking on Wednesday and Saturday

  Scour cooking pots well with sand or horsetail

  Keep great cistern full from pump in yard

  Fill hog pails with leavings from table…

  Zeal or Mistress Margaret would have to read these lists out to the new women. She made two notes before they slipped her mind:

  Also, dairymaid to help with milking until new cowman is found

  All women to help in gardens and fields when not needed elsewhere

  It’s all impossible, Zeal thought. I allowed for everything but war. And for Lamb. She had a sense of unravelling and could not hook up the running stitch again.