A Giant Mask of stone for Philip’s Grotto Below, to my own design. Take stone from our own quarry. Trust local masons?
To Master Quoynt, for shaping waterworks and over-seeing the laying of new pipes in grotto, 30 pounds, 12s
Also for shaping of a new passage in Underworld
Ask Master Paroli to paint walls of new passage, according to my own design. Have made a key for him, to secret parts of Underworld
Engage a second theatre artificer to help Cobb with new devices and illusions (if such a man can still be found in London)
Begin at last to move belongings into east wing
With Sir Richard, discuss fining of J. Simms and F. Bull for brawling again with Dauzat’s glaziers
68
Zeal also asked the old knight’s advice on how best to deal with the increasing number of evil rumours about the new house, spread in part by Jonas Stubbs and other workmen dismissed for one reason or another. Lamb’s death had stirred up still more, being seen by some, particularly among Gifford’s congregation, as an act of God, punishing Master Parsley for any number of possible crimes. In addition, Jake Grindley was now suggesting that Jamie had not run away at all, but had either been killed or was a prisoner serving as Doctor Bowler’s slave.
‘We are besieged by the curious,’ she told Sir Richard. ‘They try to creep in and see for themselves the depravities they think to find there.’
‘Fools! All of them!’ Sir Richard stood up. ‘Don’t trouble yourself, my dear. Just go and have a good sleep as I now mean to do.’
Three weeks later, she was forced to take action. One of the things she had most feared happened at last. The charm against the evil eye worn by that inquisitive Bedgebury boy failed to work. After particularly heavy rains, he was found drowned in the new water tank on Hawk Ridge. He had wriggled through the fence and could neither swim nor climb back up the straight sides. Five different people told her of an angry meeting in Bedgebury.
Zeal called together Tuddenham, the smith, her clerk of works, the new master mason, and four tenant farmers whose opinion she respected. They met in Lamb’s former studio in the barn.
‘I am told that a delegation has been formed to visit and confront me about the boy’s death,’ she said. ‘Only their inability to decide exactly what they wish to achieve has delayed them so far.’
‘Don’t fear, madam,’ said Tuddenham. ‘You tried to prevent such a mischance. People will pry, no matter what you say or how much you warn them. Nothing like that house has been seen in all of England, let alone Hampshire.’
‘Invite them all to come have a good gawp, then,’ said the smith curtly. ‘Show them where the boy forced his way through the fence. They’ll see how it happened, easily enough. Let them in here, too, so they can see that illusion is only brushes and paint.’ He looked around for the support of the others. ‘Let them look all they like. Then they’ll have no more excuse to pry. Or anything else. My best tongs were stolen last week.’
‘If you invite them all to come here as your guests,’ said Tuddenham, ‘it might take a little of the wind out of certain persons’ sails.’
‘The parish didn’t celebrate Bonfire and Treason night, last November,’ offered a farmer.
‘And small wonder!’ said the smith.
‘People might like a small bonfire,’ the farmer persevered. ‘And perhaps a little ale.’
‘A celebration so soon after the terrible death of the boy?’ asked Zeal.
‘We all know it was his own fault,’ said Tuddenham. ‘I warned him off more than once. And I’ll say so, too.’
‘A bonfire might be welcome, madam,’ said a second farmer. ‘Lift our spirits out of the winter dark.’
69
Zeal had braced herself. She had had a bonfire built ready for lighting on the grassy slope between the fishponds and the old house, with three roasting pits already aglow nearby. She set up kegs of new ale on trestles in the new forecourt, and jugs of cordials in the hall. The pits held only apples and squash, as she had no sheep to spare. Without Doctor Bowler, there would be no music.
She had announced the occasion as the quickening for the new house, welcoming the parish into the new home of the Hawkridge family, occupied at last. She had locked off her private Underworld. Nevertheless, she quailed at the straggling parade of the curious that crossed the new bridge in the late afternoon and climbed the drive to crowd into the Memory Palace.
She greeted and welcomed. Accepted respects, smiled into a good many stony faces. Moving from group to group, she listened. Good mingled equally with bad.
‘Look! There’s your Abigail, true to life!’ one woman cried in delight, pointing to a plaster frieze of Bowler’s choir of children on one wall of the hall.
‘She’s more than twice the size now,’ said her mother. ‘And isn’t that one Jamie Grindley?’ Their voices dropped too low for Zeal to hear.
She watched a pair of farmers hunched in amused perplexity before a small self-portrait of Lamb painting his own face, looking into the spectators’ eyes as if into a mirror, with the tip of his brush just lifting from the outer corner of his smile.
Still more visitors arrived. They stopped to peer at the mechanical ship at the entrance. Then they gawped up at the bird-filled heavens on the ceiling of the hall. A voluble group shifted and jostled around the brightly coloured picture of Hawkridge Estate at the top of the stairs, where people looked for their own miniature selves in the painted fields, or among the painted outbuildings.
‘I believe that’s my mastiff!’ exclaimed a farmer. ‘Caught him just right. Always scratching himself.’
‘…hens!’
‘All these windows,’ she heard a woman say as she looked about her. ‘They feel like eyes spying on us all. Like the house has eyes.’
‘A devilish house, painted like the face of a harlot.’
Her choices, exposed and judged.
She watched people stare at the gilded and painted leather panels of Philip’s Staircase, then frown in puzzlement at the blank panels at the bottom of the stairs. She watched them search for England on the map on the floor of the entrance hall, treading thoughtlessly over Nevis, picked out in red oxide, terre verte and gold against a lapis lazuli sea.
‘Hell’s own Mouth!’ exclaimed a Bedgebury woman. She jumped back to stand on the greyer seas off the Indian coast and stare as if Satan himself might emerge from the painted floor.
‘…full of marvels!’ Zeal heard someone else say. Then the reply, ‘But not worth killing a child for.’
‘Did you know that Doctor Gifford is here, madam?’
Zeal set the mechanical nightingale into motion to delight a group of children and to try to shake off that last overheard remark. ‘Keep him away from me, I beg you! Feed him. Take him to Aunt Margaret for condolences about his late wife. Or ask Sir Richard to start a debate on who should be the next parish constable.’ Her attention was then distracted by two Bedgebury men standing behind her.
‘Those must be the real trees under there, that we heard tell about,’ said one. ‘Real branches under the plaster. Near enough the real thing but for the colour.’
‘And aren’t those birds up there true to life as well?’
‘And those children, too.’
Then Gifford stood before her in a musty-smelling black coat and thick knitted scarf. He doffed his black hat and stretched his lips at her. ‘I hear that your house is a most curious place, over-filled with colour and vanity.’
She did not even try to smile. ‘I hope you will warn your congregation against tale-mongering and false witness.’
‘Nothing I have seen yet today disproves anything I have heard.’ He left it to her to decide whether the gossip or the house was at fault. ‘You wrote to me yourself, madam, that you meant to build a theatre. But I do not see it. Where is it? Do you not display it with the rest?’
‘Would you have me put these people’s virtue into such jeopardy?’
‘I wish to ins
pect it.’
‘I’m afraid you must be denied the very pomps of the devil,’ Zeal said blandly. ‘My theatre is closed, like all the others.’
Gifford gave her a searching look. ‘Only while you are observed, I fear. I know you, mistress, and your taste for rebellion.’
‘Sir!’ She mustered all her indignation. ‘I have always been direct with you. Why should I begin to deny my actions now?’
‘Nevertheless, I would see it.’
She glanced past him at the three large men from his congregation standing behind him. His wreckers, no doubt. ‘Remember that you are my guest today.’
‘I am also your shepherd.’
Eye to eye, they engaged in a silent struggle. In the end, Zeal shrugged inelegantly and led him out of the house, around the front of the west wing. They descended a short flight of steps in the slope of the hill, to a paved walk running along the side of the new half-cellars under the wing. The three men followed.
‘The entrance to my theatre.’ Zeal gestured politely at a high arch set into the wall. The arch was solidly bricked up.
Gifford drew a sharp breath. ‘Must you always flout me?’
‘On the contrary, I would have spared you this frustration. But you insisted on visiting my theatre, which I assured you was closed.’
‘Is there no other entrance?’ Gifford asked suspiciously. He jiggled on his toes in irritation. ‘How did the workmen go in and out?’
‘At the other end of the house is a small door giving access for matters like clearing out the pits of the jakes. Hardly the way to introduce either players or audience.’
‘There’s no other door inside the house?’
‘No door,’ Zeal assured him with absolute honesty and a mendacious heart. As Gifford did not ask about any other style of entrance, she felt no need to tell him how one might still go into the Underworld where the theatre stood.
Though off-balance, Gifford would not give up the attack. ‘What of the sinful waste? Have you not entombed a fortune in labour and stuffs behind that door?’
‘Do you have spies among my workmen?’
‘Not I!’
But she had broken his gaze. ‘Who is watching, if not you?’
‘People talk, madam, as you well know.’ He waved his followers away and leaned close to Zeal to speak in confidence. ‘I will hazard that today you hoped to satisfy gossip with the food of what you see as the truth.’
She looked away, lips pinched. His face was far too close to her own. She could see every curling rusty wire of his eyebrows, smell the damp wool of his black suit. She clasped her hands tightly together on her best lace apron lest she give him a violent shove.
‘I see that I hit home. But I fear that you may have misjudged, just as all who see dark as light are blind to their own error. Others will see more clearly.’
She gazed up the river valley towards the setting sun. She had overheard some of those others and felt too weary to fight him today. ‘Doctor Gifford, why will you not leave me in peace to face my own damnation?’
His nostrils flared. ‘Because, madam, not one sparrow is forgotten before God, and you are my least sparrow.’
She walked away, down the steps into the new forecourt and then on down the drive to the new bridge. On the bridge, she stepped up into Lamb’s little pavilion, which he had persuaded her to build.
‘Suitable for elevated reflection,’ he had said, and been childishly pleased by his own word play.
Standing at the rail in the pavilion, she looked down at the dark water breaking against the pilings of the bridge. Imagined Gifford floating out of sight downstream, his mouth twisting with inaudible words. Then she dropped a number of his parishioners in after him. The owners of the pinched lips and narrowed eyes. And Jake Grindley, who had not come today, though his wife had touched Zeal’s sleeve in greeting.
That’s how much I mean to let you all trouble me, she thought.
A gust of fragrant smoke blew towards her from the roasting pits by the ponds. The babble of voices was as cheerful as she could have asked. She reminded herself of people’s delight at recognizing themselves in the pictures, woven into the fabric of the estate’s past. But she still heard the mutter, ‘Not worth killing a child for!’
She looked up at the house. Lamb’s four columns marched across the front, pale and elegant in the last of the light. His speaking in figures. His mathematics of proportion given form in Purbeck stone as he had wanted, at last. Her life journey arrested in moments along the way, however misleading. And beneath that outward show, lay her secret Underworld, which told the truth, meant to be read by John alone.
Shadowed figures strolled in the portico. A single figure stood alone in the dusk, looking down into the valley.
Though it proved to be only the Wilde’s dairyman, she felt a catch under her heart at the sight of him. What will I do when the house is quite finished? she asked herself. How will I survive then?
The wood of the bridge resonated with trotting hoof beats.
She ran to meet the rider with the new hope that had infected her at the onset of war. But it was Sir Richard.
‘Back from London so soon? Though I’m delighted to see you any time. Will you come up and have some…’
He cut across her. ‘Stay here. We need to speak apart.’ He began to dismount. By the time he had swung his leg over and eased his bulk slowly down from the saddle, his groom had dismounted and was at his side to steady the final quick slide.
‘Leave me be!’ Sir Richard waved the youth away irritably. ‘Over-solicitous pup!’ He handed over his reins. Then he stood looking for so long after the two horses as they clopped on across the bridge, that Zeal feared he had lost his thread. She and Mistress Margaret had spoken together not long before, of their growing concern for the old knight, who seemed to lose his thread more and more often.
‘My dear…’ he said at last. He stopped and pulled glumly at his lower lip.
The air twisted about her head. All other movement of the universe stopped with a jolt. ‘John is dead!’ she said.
‘No. Nothing like that.’ Sir Richard looked startled. ‘Haven’t heard a tittle from him. Since…can’t remember when.’
They strolled slowly back across the bridge away from the house.
‘It’s that damnable man!’ he said.
‘Doctor Gifford?’
Sir Richard shook his head vigorously. ‘Not him. That other one!’
‘Jake Grindley?’
‘No!’ he cried impatiently. ‘No…Roger Wentworth! Got him! I’m so sorry, my dear. That creature has made a deposition against you at the Winchester Assizes!’
‘Wentworth? Why? What does he want? I thought you judged that the question of the marriage had been settled beyond doubt.’
‘Not the marriage. He never did get anywhere with that. Worse, I’m afraid.’ Sir Richard looked up at the sky, then tapped his temple. ‘A few plums short in his pudding, that one. Can’t think how Philip got him! Wife probably, you know…while Philip was off junketing around the Caribbean…’
‘What does he charge?’
‘Happens all the time. Some low…’
She caught his sleeve. ‘Sir Richard! Please.’
‘Well…murder, in fact. As it happens…’
‘Harry? But surely you dismissed that charge yourself!’
‘I did. But it wouldn’t stay dismissed, would it?’
‘How can he raise it again?’
‘New charges. Philip died. And then Master Parsley.’
‘You don’t mean to say that he claims I murdered both of them as well as Harry?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
Zeal laughed. ‘This is even more absurd than saying I bewitched Harry’s horse.’
‘And I might as well be blunt and be done – the child, too.’
She stopped laughing. ‘He says that I murdered my own babe?’ She wrapped her arms around herself. ‘Now we know that he is mad.’
They paus
ed at the far end of the bridge.
‘What will happen now?’
Sir Richard pulled at his lower lip again. ‘As it’s a capital offence, the court returned his deposition with an attached writ of a certiorari. That is to say, Wentworth was charged to provide more detailed evidence to support his accusation.’
‘But he won’t find any!’ A capital offence, she thought. That means I die if found guilty.
‘He thinks he did. Seems that he responded with a list of witnesses he says will be certain to expose the truth.’
Is it possible that I am to be punished for my most secret thoughts? she wondered. For my rage towards Harry. For fearing that John might come back and find me married to Philip or Lamb. Even though I didn’t know that I wished them harm.
‘Who are his witnesses?’ she managed to ask. ‘All liars! They must be!’
‘Me for a start.’ Sir Richard snorted. ‘That’s how I know. Just had the summons to appear in Winchester for examination. And your woman.’
‘Rachel? What does he expect her to say against me?’ Then she gripped the railing of the bridge. I did not know Philip, she thought, though I was his wife and shared his bed. How can I presume to know my waiting woman?
She had built an underworld of uncertainty into her house, to represent what she knew to be true.
‘Am I called?’
‘Not until the magistrate is satisfied that you have a charge to answer.’
Did I do anything that might be twisted? Can thoughts I didn’t even know myself to be thinking have taken shape, to testify against me? If nothing is certain, nothing is impossible neither.
70
Winchester, Midsummer Assizes. Extracts from clerk’s verbatim notes for the examinations of witnesses concerning the deaths of Sir Harry Beester, Captain Philip Wentworth, and Master Lambert Parsley (for later transcription into the court records).
The Memory Palace Page 35