The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  ‘It seems clear to me,’ said John, stepping forward, ‘that you are his confederate in raising a hanging mob in defiance of the courts. A court may find it just as clear that you share his guilt for murder.’

  Gifford swivelled his eyes onto this new speaker. ‘I…uh…!’ A look of terror and confusion now twisted his face. ‘I…’ He stared at Zeal in appalled surmise. Closed his eyes. ‘I…I…’

  ‘Something ails him!’ said Zeal in alarm. ‘He’s never been at such a loss for words.’

  Wild-eyed, Gifford nodded. He toppled and crashed to the floor, sending up a cloud of plaster dust.

  She knelt beside him. ‘Doctor Gifford, can you understand what I say?’

  At the sound of her voice, he held his hands up to her in terrified appeal.

  ‘Can you answer me?’

  ‘I…’ He made a gesture of despair.

  Zeal stood up. ‘You must take him home and send at once to Basingstoke for a surgeon,’ she told his followers.

  Everyone trouped back down to the hall as Gifford’s men carried him away.

  ‘Hardly a fulsome retraction,’ said John when the door at last closed on Gifford and his wreckers. ‘But retribution was astoundingly swift.’

  ‘The Sword of God snapped,’ Zeal said absently. She wanted only to study John’s face. She thought that he seemed as uncertain with her as she was with him.

  ‘An apoplexy!’ announced Mistress Margaret. ‘I’ve seen one before. Caused by an excess of blood. A boiling choler.’ She surveyed the wreckage left in the hall. ‘However will we get all this clean again?’

  ‘We all need refreshment,’ Zeal told her. ‘Take Rachel to help you. Bring it to my small parlour.’ That room, decorated only with painted leather panels had not been touched. ‘And see whether any of our gallant defenders are still on duty and in equal need.’

  At last she was left alone with John and his small family.

  With the charges of murder dismissed there now remained only the explaining of two husbands when she had sworn to be true.

  And the woman and child.

  I have no right to question anything he may have done, but I fear it will kill me all the same, she thought. He should have shot me when he fired his gun.

  ‘Thank you for your timely arrival,’ she said.

  ‘Not what either of us expected or planned, I don’t imagine.’

  The child woke from sleep, tied against the woman’s back in her shawl, and began to grizzle, as if more upset by the tense silence than by all the shouting and crashing that had gone before. When John lifted her out of the shawl, she grabbed his beard and thrust her copper face and shining black hair into the curve of his neck.

  Where I once rested my head in the illusion of total safety, Zeal thought.

  ‘My daughter,’ he said. ‘Two and a half years old.’

  Zeal nodded. Then she smiled brightly at the woman, who had retreated against the wall as if she wished to escape through it. ‘And is this your wife?’ With her hands extended in welcome, she pressed herself onto the blade of the woman’s dark-eyed stare.

  ‘Tesora’s nurse,’ said John. ‘The mother died.’

  The woman hid her hands behind her, as if terrified of Zeal’s touch.

  Zeal nodded again, tried to smile. ‘Welcome, mistress. I hope we can offer hospitality of a better quality than your welcome.’

  The woman glanced at John, who translated Zeal’s words.

  She wondered if he had heard the sudden joy in her voice at the news of another woman’s death. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to John.

  ‘She deserved a better fate.’ He turned his head and kissed the child’s hair. ‘I try to atone.’

  Zeal could not think what to say next.

  81

  Between dawn and end of morning milking, Zeal washed herself out with tears, beat herself on the rocks, and flung herself over the bushes to dry.

  She had found a room for John, the child and the nurse all together, as the little girl would not be separated from either adult. John took the bed, the little girl slept in a hammock he slung between two heavy chairs, and the nurse had a pallet under the hammock.

  There had been at first a difficulty in finding food not too strange for the child, but an apple and piece of bread sufficed in the end. Zeal left them speaking together in their shared alien tongue.

  This cannot be the way our journey ends! Zeal thought as she lay listening to the already busy day outside her window. She felt bleached clean of the events of the past night. A cloud of blankness hovered over her thoughts, threatening to close in like fog.

  I’m not ready. There has been too much.

  But, ready or not, he was back.

  Not dead. Come back to her. With all his limbs and senses, as far as she could see.

  But does he still love me? He would have returned to Hawkridge in any case. I cannot assume he has come for me.

  At the least, I’m farther on than I was that dreadful night at the Lady Tree.

  Take this impossible situation by the scruff of the neck, she told herself. Shake it until it yields, one way or the other. Whether happy or tragic, resolve it! Don’t lose your grip now.

  She got out of bed and went as far as his door. She imagined him lying warm and tousled among the sheets, breathing quietly, one bare arm bent above his head. It’s too soon, she thought. They still need to sleep. She returned to her own chamber.

  When Rachel brought her morning ale a half an hour later, however, she took her mug with her and knocked on his door.

  He emerged with a finger to his lips. ‘She’s still asleep. A late night for her, last night. And the travel back to England was tiring.’

  ‘Do you hate me?’

  He looked shocked. ‘I would say that you have more cause to hate me.’

  ‘You accept all my protestations of innocence without question?’

  ‘Of course.’ He smiled a familiar smile. ‘Or, rather, my understanding of the word “innocence” has broadened.’

  ‘Poor “dogged struggling words”.’ She looked away from his mouth.

  He was barefoot. His feet were very brown. He had already trimmed his beard. ‘That doesn’t mean that I’m not filled with questions. As you must be.’

  Zeal felt a humming in her bones. Not quite a trembling, more like the beginning of an ague, but not unpleasant. ‘You need breakfast.’

  ‘Among much else,’ he agreed. ‘Such as the belief that I’m back.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I don’t know where “back” is yet.’

  ‘No.’

  He took her hand, turned it over, ran his thumb across her palm. ‘I often feared I was inventing you.’

  The line traced by his thumb was a trickle of cool water. She stared at the thin scar that circled the base of his thumb. Then she saw how rough from work her hand was and wanted to pull it back and hide it under her apron. ‘Did you think of me when you were with her mother?’

  He released her hand. ‘Are we ready for this conversation yet?’

  ‘No, but I would like to rehearse it a little.’

  ‘Give me time to arrive first!’

  ‘So long as you steer for the right port.’

  To her surprise, he laughed. ‘Land, ho!’ He took her hand again and kissed it quickly. ‘Oh, blessed, familiar cussedness! She was far less contrary than you. A house slave on the tobacco plantation. She helped me to escape. And I never loved her. I’m not proud of it. But I do love our daughter, beyond my life. Is that enough for now?’

  Zeal swallowed and nodded. She had asked for it.

  After breakfast, which John took in his own room with the child, Zeal walked with him about the upper, public part of the Memory Palace, playing hostess to his guest to buy them both time. Aware of the exact distance between her shoulder and his, she stopped on the broad steps of the great staircase by the painted and gilded wall panels of Philip’s story. She saw now that all of the many miniature Philips were far too cl
ean and finely dressed, if judged by John’s appearance.

  She looked at him sideways. ‘He married me to save our child – yours and mine.’ She heard John’s intake of breath. ‘Lamb brought an Italian painter here to help execute this memorial for me. The narrative ascends one side and descends on the other.’

  ‘A grand memorial, and at the very heart of the house,’ he said neutrally. She saw him glance at the blank panels at the bottom of the stairs.

  Together they walked down the stairs, studying the images of a golden city that surrounded a great gilded pyramid beside a lake of silver leaf. Near the top of the stairs, a golden god accepted the gift of a cabin boy’s heart. A few steps further down, following the story backwards, the same naked golden god washed in the silver lake and fell through a dark hole in the glittering surface. In the panel below that, he rode a palanquin carried on the shoulders of eight tiny men. Then came an endless procession of figures in jaguar skins and tall, feathered head-dresses marching towards the silver lake, carrying slivers of spears and playing reed pipes the size of apple pips.

  ‘After Philip first told me his tales, I tried to capture the reality I believed they showed me.’ She spread her arms. ‘And here they are, where all the world can see them and be entertained, as I think he meant to entertain me.’

  They reached the beginning of the story, the beast with the head of a jaguar and the feet and genitals of a man, followed by toy ships being driven ashore by a storm.

  ‘I urged him on.’ She took a deep breath, not looking at John. ‘To tell me about the world I believed you occupied. Thinking that if I could imagine that world, and capture it in images, then I could imagine myself there with you. And you would not grow strange to me.’

  ‘I fear that you will be disappointed. My tale lacks all glory. These are wonderful fables you show here, but fables all the same. I mean no offence.’

  She looked back at the small painted figure that stood ankle-deep in a shallow stream, staring directly into the eyes of a jaguar crouched to drink. ‘I learnt later how to decipher Philip’s version of the truth.’

  ‘And do I see your conclusions anywhere here?’ He glanced again at the blank panels across the staircase, where the end stood opposite the beginning. ‘Or were you too kind?’

  She looked into his eyes for the first time that morning. ‘My private thoughts on all matters are elsewhere.’

  ‘Do you mean to show me? To help me to steer for that port.’

  ‘You might hate and despise what you see.’

  ‘So might you, when you know more of me and what I have become in order to survive.’

  She nodded wordlessly.

  ‘We’re alike in that, then.’ He touched her shoulder, then retreated. ‘Both of us, afraid.’

  They descended the last three steps into the hall in silence.

  ‘Zeal, did you love him?’

  She knew whom he meant. ‘I believe that question belongs in the conversation you don’t yet wish to have,’ she said lightly. ‘Let me show you how Lamb and I entertained ourselves. I did love Lamb, as it happens, but as a brother.’ She led him to the little mechanical ship set into an alcove in the wall by the main door.

  ‘Turn that crank,’ she said. ‘This was our first attempt to trap the past in motion. We grew more subtle with experience.’

  John turned the little handle and laughed aloud when a tiny replica of himself jerked out of a dockside shed and up the tiny tongue of gangplank onto the ship.

  She watched his eyes as the anchor chain wound itself around the capstan and the sails hoisted themselves, spurred on by the waving arms of tiny sailors set about the deck and glued to the rigging. Whatever else had happened to him, he had not lost his capacity for delight.

  ‘And now this one.’ She pointed.

  John turned the second handle. The ship pulled slowly away from the dock, jerking and squeaking along a track hidden behind two rows of heaving painted waves. As the vessel slowly departed through a slot in the wall like an actor reluctant to leave the stage, the miniature John stiffly waved one arm at a tiny red-haired woman left behind on top of the hill that formed the backdrop to the harbour.

  He sighed deeply and turned to her. ‘Zeal. How far apart are we?’

  She led him onto the map. ‘That tiny spot is Nevis. Go stand there.’

  With his brows only slightly raised, he obeyed. ‘Will you now stand on Hawkridge?’

  ‘No.’ She crossed oceans with a few strides. ‘My place was here.’ After kicking aside a shard of plaster rubble, she stepped onto the island near the coast of India.

  ‘The mouth of hell,’ he said quietly. ‘Did it swallow you?’

  ‘That will be for you to say.’

  ‘And is the private world of your thoughts a map of hell itself?’

  ‘Nothing so straightforward.’

  ‘Like life, then. For both of us.’ He pointed at one of the ruined friezes. ‘What traces were represented there? I was too distracted last night…’

  ‘The children of Hawkridge, making a joyful noise unto the Lord.’ Hymen on the lake had been smashed with the children.

  John opened his mouth to ask another question, but closed it again.

  Zeal seemed fascinated by the ruined walls. ‘I want you to be clear about my intent in making all this.’ She gestured at the walls, the house itself. ‘It has some bearing on what happens to us next.

  ‘After the baby died, I told Philip and Lamb I wanted to turn what we were building into a prodigy house. But not a mere memorial to my vanity, like a house in the shape of my initials, nor a cross as evidence of my faith. I wanted a prodigy of memory. To imitate the Greek and Roman orators, who constructed buildings in their fancy to help them remember what to say next. Placing a statue of the emperor at the foot of the steps, for example, to remind the speaker of formal greetings and reverences…’

  ‘But you wished to hold open to memory the past, rather than the future.’

  She gave him a look of startled delight. ‘Exactly so.’

  ‘Did you hope that I might yet return to see it?’ He left Nevis to stroke a wooden sheep in the border below the ruined frieze.

  Some of the clenched tightness left her body. ‘So much took place so quickly. I feared I was losing my way back to what I had been, and would not know how to tell you to follow.’

  ‘So you laid tracks for us both! When will you set me on the trail?’ He pointed back to the staircase. ‘Those travellers’ tales will lead us both astray.’

  ‘I must share the blame for them. I think he told them just to please me.’

  ‘Knowing Philip, I doubt very much that he was so innocent. He would have had his own reasons to sing his siren songs.’

  Zeal felt heat rise up her neck into her face.

  John smiled tightly. ‘Philip Wentworth was not born to a fortune, he acquired it. And he did not do that by letting himself be deceived. You should not trouble yourself on his behalf.’

  ‘He showed me only kindness,’ she said hotly. ‘Whatever the truth proved to be, he showed me only kindness and good will.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that, though not surprised. He also had a decent heart and I owe him much. Nevertheless…’ He turned away to study a pair of wooden cats, who stretched tail-up and nose-to-nose in the place of a classical swag.

  She pinched her lips and stared into a corner of the room. ‘I do know by how much he lied.’

  John tilted his head in ironic belief.

  ‘Philip himself told me. After Philip’s death, though still recording the past, I began afresh, subverting Lamb’s ideal Olympian designs to fit the darker theatre of my own heart. That staircase is also my first memorial to deceit.’

  ‘Ah,’ said John.

  In silence, they looked back up at the progress recorded on the walls of the staircase, then up into the sky above their heads.

  ‘I see public posturing everywhere else here,’ he said. ‘…Of the finest sort, I hastily add.’


  He had lost none of his sharp-eyed quickness either. ‘Yes. You detect the hand of my darling Lamb. For him the posture had to be perfect, but also public, or it had no meaning.’

  ‘Is there nothing of you here at all?’

  ‘Only the will to build, which underpins it all. And a few details of daily life.’

  John crossed the Indian Ocean to take her hand again. ‘Zeal, do you see anything familiar in me?’

  His palms were warm. His long fingers enclosed her whole hand. She felt the ring of his thumb and middle finger around one of her wrists like a hot metal bracelet.

  ‘After almost six years…’ She turned her head away. She had imagined for an instant that she saw something of Philip in his eyes.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I want…I imagine…but how can I know?’ She tried to withdraw her hand in order to think straight.

  ‘Someone has returned,’ she said at last. ‘But he doesn’t look much like the gentle man who left. In those leather breeches, with that great knife stuck in his belt. And a child on his arm.’

  ‘That’s all you see? You terrify me now.’

  ‘I may think I recognize you, but you made one journey and I a very different one. Who can tell where we have each fetched up? You stand there, I here, only inches apart, but for all I know, we’re not in the same place at all.’

  ‘Then show me your private map. I will attempt to draw mine for you. I have always found you before. Tell me what I must do to find you again!’

  ‘You truly want to?’

  ‘Can you doubt it?’

  ‘I can doubt anything now.’

  ‘Show me.’

  She pulled free and crossed to one of the pilasters that marked Lamb’s perfect intervals around the walls of the hall. As she looked back at John’s bewilderment, she pulled the little pin and heard the first whisper of falling sand inside the pilaster. She returned to her former place beside him.

  Above their heads, the nightingale began to sing. A liquid, fluting ‘piooo, pioooo’ growing slowly more intense.

  ‘Look!’ She pointed upwards. ‘One of the details. Now you must try to put yourself into my place.’