The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  Examiner and Roger Wentworth, gentleman, of Hunden Hall, nr. Guildford, Surrey

  Examiner:…Did stepmother and father ever quarrel?

  R. Wentworth: Who knows what goes on behind closed doors? Do not call her my stepmother.

  Examiner: You assert that this young woman seduced your father, then caused his death by witchcraft in order to steal his fortune. (Examiner’s Note: the soundness of Captain Wentworth’s will, which excluded plaintiff, being already proved and not an issue in this case. Likewise, Mistress Wentworth, now Parsley, was judged fit to inherit.) In evidence, you offer the death of Sir Harry Beester, as a previous murder by witchcraft. Was a charge not made against your stepmother at the time and struck down nolle prosequi? (Clerk’s Note: records of that case attached.)

  R. Wentworth: But she has now killed again. Making three. Sir Harry, my father and Master Parsley. Three husbands! Surely even the dimmest wit can see that the death of three husbands goes beyond unfortunate coincidence!

  Examiner: Coincidence does not prove cause. Can you offer good reason for your claim?

  R. Wentworth: Her greed.

  Examiner: What was her gain by Sir Harry Beester’s death? (Examiner’s Note: that marriage voided, joint consent, by decree a vinculo matrimonii. Deed of gift made to Mistress Parsley in settlement. Accused had no further interest in Sir Harry’s estate at the time of his death.)

  R. Wentworth: Why don’t you ask her?

  Examiner: I mean to. And how did she profit by Master Parsley’s death? Her fortune being as great as, or greater than, his.

  R. Wentworth: My father’s fortune, not hers. Amazed that you need such assistance in understanding simple facts. She’s no fool, to let her reasons appear so baldly a second and third time. But when has greed ever had limits? I have intelligence of her wanton and wicked extravagance in building her so-called ‘palace’.

  Examiner: Has your intelligencer brought evidence of murder, however?

  R. Wentworth: She defies her minister in all his counsel. She has built a theatre when all theatres are ordered closed. She consorts with foreign Catholics and offers them haven in the guise of workmen. She is accused by an honest man of abducting his son. Another boy died on her estate. If you take close look, I vow you’ll find she had as good reason to kill Master Parsley as she had to kill my father. Such a woman may do anything.

  Examiner: A close look is indeed my intent. I ask again, have you evidence of murder itself? Can you, for example, produce the footpads you say she hired to kill Master Parsley?

  R. Wentworth: Ask your constables to find them. I’m a country gentleman. The lowlife of Southwark is outside my experience.

  Examiner: But you say that it is within Mistress Parsley’s experience, as country gentlewoman?

  Examiner and Sir Richard Balhatchet, Magistrate and MP, of High House, nr. Bedgebury, Hampshire

  Examiner: Good to see you again, Sir Richard.

  Sir Richard: And you, you oily old courtier! (A line is drawn through this exchange.)

  Examiner: Sir Richard, in deposition you reject both charges. Why?

  Sir Richard: Because Philip Wentworth was old, in failing health, and in love with his juicy young wife. No need for murder or witchcraft to explain his death in her bed.

  Examiner: Did it occur to you to refer the witchcraft charge to church court?

  Sir Richard: It did not.

  Examiner: I’ve just been informed that a boy died on her estate.

  Sir Richard: Accident! The pup broke in where he had no right to be and drowned himself. What’s it to do with this case, anyway?

  Examiner: Are you not swayed by friendship with this young woman? A close neighbour, I believe, and longtime guest at High House.

  Sir Richard: My dear James, I was acquainted with Philip Wentworth for seventeen…no, I make it sixteen years, before I ever met the girl. And in all that time, that son of his took his allowance readily enough but never came near, not even when his father was ill…Philip suffered from a recurring ague. Contracted in…place escapes me. She, on the other hand, looked after him tenderly once she took him in hand. Warmed his last year. Turned him from an unsociable old hermit into a happy old man. Son never made a squeak till he learned he wouldn’t inherit. Now he won’t rest till he proves her guilty of some charge to make the estate fall back to him. I see human greed and jealousy in this case, and neither of them is hers. That man’s wasting our time with his bile. If I were you, I’d put him on charge, not her. And you can refer that case to any court you like.

  Examiner: Thank you, Sir Richard, I will keep your advice in mind.

  Examiner and Doctor Praise-God Gifford, minister, Parish of Bedgebury

  Gifford:…She is immoral, lewd and lost. She delights in outrage and rejects all good counsel. Nevertheless, in my estimation, she is not a murderer. She is too given to an unbridled excess of life…

  Examiner and Rachel Whitefoot, serving woman, of Hawkridge Estate, nr. Bedgebury, Hampshire

  Examiner: Don’t you think the coincidence of numbers does begin to strain reason?

  R. Whitefoot: Sir?

  Examiner: Does it never seem strange to you that your mistress has lost three husbands?

  R. Whitefoot: I know that more often it’s the husband who loses three wives. But I doubt, all the same, that she’s alone in this misfortune.

  Examiner: Did your mistress ever quarrel with her first husband?

  R. Whitefoot: Not that I heard.

  Examiner: What of their witnessed quarrel beside the pond, just before he died?

  R. Whitefoot: You must mean Sir Harry. But he was never her husband. And I thought everyone already agreed she never killed him. If you’re asking about her first proper husband, she never raised her voice to Master Wentworth, nor he to her. I was against the match at first, because of their difference in years, but soon saw how they loved each other.

  Examiner: What of Master Parsley?

  R. Whitefoot: He and she were like twins, joined in all their ventures. They could debate all night about the shape of a fireplace, but that was shared passion, not rage.

  Examiner: You make her sound like a paragon of female forbearance.

  R. Whitefoot: She’s a good-natured creature, if that’s what you mean.

  Examiner: We know what she gained from Master Wentworth’s death. What do you think she gained by the death of Master Parsley?

  R. Whitefoot: Loneliness, sir.

  71

  ‘Hey, nolle, nolle, nolle,’ sang Sir Richard. ‘All of you sing!’ He beamed along his table at his dinner guests. ‘With a hey, and a nolle… What ails you? You won’t even be called for examination. You must celebrate!’

  Zeal and Mistress Margaret exchanged uneasy glances. To their knowledge he had so far drunk only one glass of wine.

  ‘Will Wentworth rest content now, do you think?’ Zeal asked. ‘With the court’s judgement against him?’

  ‘Got no choice.’ Sir Richard shook his head fervently. ‘No choice, however much he may shout and rave. Unless you oblige him by killing someone in truth. You won’t do that, will you, my dear? Otherwise, he’s holed below the waterline. Holly, nolly!’ He waved to a serving groom. ‘He’s sunk and drunk, in a dead man’s trunk! Who wants some oporto and prosequi?’

  ‘I knew she’d never be found guilty!’ said Mistress Margaret.

  ‘A toast to Justice!’ Master Wilde raised his glass.

  We need Doctor Bowler back again, Zeal thought. To lift our spirits with his music. While smiling back at her host and his other guests, she wondered briefly whether the little parson was regaining the use of his left hand.

  And I would so like news of Jamie.

  But the heart of her disquiet sat in his chair-of-grace at the centre of the table, now frowning into his wineglass as if he had spied a drowned fly. ‘The man’s barmy! Barmy in the army!’ he said with dark relish.

  She had believed he would always be there, an amiable shield who knew how the cards wer
e dealt in the greater world.

  There will soon be no one left, she thought. The higher ranks have fallen. After Sir Richard, I will be left in command.

  After the judgement, Zeal began to think about death. Not in the desperate fearful way she had confronted it on the chapel roof, but more as a friendly darkness, a dark cape under whose hem she could slip and hide. Having at last mellowed enough to accept help in ordering her world, from both Philip and Lamb, she told herself now that she had been right all along.

  If I had not grown accustomed to that luxury, I would not miss it so much now.

  In other words, she was profoundly lonely.

  Death took on the aspect of a companion who was always there, not insistent on joining her but waiting patiently just outside the door until called. And while she did not yet feel impelled to call and lift that cloak hem, she did have a small chamber built into the walls of the west wing above the theatre, stealing more space by turning a small retiring room into a corridor.

  She hired still more Italian workmen, who would soon depart again and take the secret with them. The new chamber could not be reached directly from the public part of the house. Indeed, anyone walking among the sleeping chambers and private parlours on the upper floors would not know that it existed. The only entrance was through her private mappa mundi of the Underworld. If John neither returned nor sent for her, the room was to be the last memory in her story.

  The floor was square, eight feet to a side. She had a door made thick enough to stop all sound. And because they represented a future she did not yet know, she left the plaster walls bare, apart from John’s coat, hung on a peg.

  My Last Resort, she called it privately.

  There remained the problem of the lock.

  She must be able to lock out the world and its unreasoning hatred. She also needed a lock with which the final turning was the leap from the roof.

  At first she thought she might have a lock devised that closed forever once the mechanism had engaged. To test this possibility, she pretended that she had entered the room for the last time. She swung the great door closed. Even without a lock and with a strong rope handle in place for the moment, she felt a rush of overwhelming terror and hauled the door open again.

  She had imagined John, returned after all. She had not heard him. Did not know he was there. Had locked herself inside to die while he bloodied his hands trying to tear down the door.

  She wrote of her dilemma to Lamb’s Italian locksmith in Florence. Some weeks later, he replied. She had challenged his genius, but he had triumphed in the end. The solution required not just a lock but a much larger mechanism. However, it would be much more costly.

  ‘I can arrange so that you cannot open from within, once the mechanism is set. One can open easily from the outside but only if knowing the trick. When entering, therefore, you must ensure that you always disarm or you will be trapped inside…’

  His price translated to forty-six English pounds, plus the cost of shipping it to England, so long as she took full responsibility after the arrival at the London docks.

  She wrote back at once commissioning him to proceed. If she understood the man correctly, she might be saved after she had closed the door for the last time, but only by someone able to look beyond appearances and understand how truth might lie hidden within deception like the seed inside an apple.

  To balance the lock, as an earnest that hope had not yet entirely died, she leaned against the wall of her secret room the painting of her child, which Lamb had finished at last shortly before he was killed. In fact, it was a triple portrait showing Zeal with John, imaginatively aged from the double portrait with Harry, and the child. Lamb had chosen in the end to paint the baby in Zeal’s arms, just as he had drawn him while she was refusing to give him up, but with rosy cheeks and open questing eyes, like those of both his parents. The baby reached up to touch Zeal’s cheek. Only very close examination showed a tiny wing budding from one dimpled shoulder. In the upper right corner, a flock of fully-fledged infants stretched down their hands in welcome.

  72

  Letter from Zeal Parsley to John Nightingale

  ‘John. My Sweet Love, where are you? (Zeal wrote the same night she commissioned the lock.) If only I could feel your breath on my cheek, or touch your hair, I might not go mad. I move my limbs with effort. Some other hollow creature goes about the daily business of the estate. I know that you must have died, for my own soul feels dead, and if you were still on this earth, I believe I would sense some faint humming in my bones. I have made a final refuge for myself, if you should never come nor send for me…

  I know that we loved, but can no longer remember how it felt.

  Yet I cannot give way. Doctor Bowler is gone to Venice with Jamie Grindley. Your aunt limps bravely but is losing strength. Sir Richard is returned to cheerful infancy. Only I remain. I am almost done with my sustaining project. My house. My mappa mundi nears completion. The Memory Palace. Conceived when I still hoped that you might return to follow the rich traces I have left for you. To read the journey I have made…To find me again…Yet I myself do not yet know where I go. I cannot see the track ahead. I hear wolves among the trees.

  She covered the writing with savage inky strokes to cage that indulgent self-pity behind bars of ink. She crumpled the letter and threw it on the fire.

  73

  Letter from John Nightingale, addressed to Zeal Beester, of Hawkridge Estate, near Basingstoke, November 1643.

  Dearest Love, if you still exist,

  I think of you all the time. Not quite all – not while I’m doing things I would rather you did not know of. Things I fear you will not forgive. If we ever meet again, you must feel free to ask and I will try to confess…I begin to think I have invented you to keep myself steady and am in danger of writing as if the real Zeal (if she exists) will never read my words. Write to me. Reassure me that my words and actions will have consequence.

  What is taking place in England? The rumours that reach me are too terrifying to contemplate. I imagine the worst. Have you had soldiers billeted on you at Hawkridge? Which way does Sir Richard lean? Has there been fighting near you? Is my aunt well? Arthur? Write. I must know that you are still alive. I am no longer employed as I was – you will understand what I mean. As I move about a great deal, a letter may take some time to reach me but if you send to The Dovecote, Tortuga, care of a villain by the name of Bouton, your letter may…

  Let me not pretend. A letter will never reach me. There’s no man in the Dovecote I trust not to use a letter to wipe his arse. I may not live to collect it.

  I imagine your rape. Your hair is a beacon. I know now what groups of men will do. I imagine your death. Fighting in London. Scarborough. Banbury. Hull. England seems dissolved into madness.

  The skin of your breasts is as velvety as the muzzle of a horse, or a moth’s wing. Or the tender belly of a mouse. You smell of honey and rosewater. Also, at times, of yeast or sun-warmed grass. As for your bush…

  You will never see this, so I may write what I like before I burn it.

  A confession. In England’s disorders, I spy a kernel of shameful selfish joy. If the king should fall, I can come home…

  74

  ‘We’ve nothing left to take!’ Zeal tried to close the office door on the quartermaster who stood on the gravel of the old forecourt. ‘No food. No men.’ She glanced in dismay at his half-empty wagon. ‘Your lot have taken everything already! Go away! Leave us in peace!’ She had been collecting papers to move to the new office in the domestic wing of the Memory Palace.

  ‘Are you Mistress Parsley?’

  With resigned despair, she held out her hand. ‘Let me see the list. I’ll tell you what we have.’

  ‘You misunderstand,’ he said. ‘I’m delivering. You’re fortunate that London’s in Parliament’s hands. The king’s dainty caballeros might have taken a fancy to what’s in it.’

  Curiously, she watched two of his men lift down a large parcel las
hed into a canvas coat. It appeared to have been opened and carelessly re-packed.

  The quartermaster asked for her signature on his bill. Then the wagon lumbered away again, towards the Parliamentary garrison at Southampton. The soldiers’ route had pointed them past Hawkridge on their way southwest from London, and a quick-witted shipping clerk at the London docks had seized the chance to save a cartage fee.

  ‘From Italy,’ Zeal told the curious crowd which quickly gathered. ‘Or so he said.’

  The thick padding inside the canvas proved to be lengths of brightly striped silk smelling of fish, which they unwrapped like bandages. Then came folded panels of creamy Venetian lace.