Nicola Cornick - The Phantom Tree

One day, when I had tired of my lessons with the chaplain, who was even more tedious than usual, I asked permission to visit the privy and rather than return to the schoolroom went instead out into the garden and through the orchard gate into the forest. It was high summer, hot and heavy. The closeness of the air made me want to sleep. I followed a track through the dreamy woods, until I came to the top of hill where another of the old oaks grew, the Duke’s Vaunt, named for my uncle Protector Somerset, who had liked to hunt here. From there the view was wide out across the treetops and down to the cottages below, where a number of youths and maids cavorted naked in the pond, their shrieks of excitement and pleasure floating up to me. What I saw of their sport made me feel even hotter and I plunged back into the woods feeling that I was spying. Instead, I found a warm clearing used by the charcoal burners for one of their kilns. The sun cut through the trees and the wild raspberries grew and I sat down to eat some. They were sweet and burst on my tongue like sunshine and I ate too many, greedy for them, until my tummy ached.

I must have fallen asleep after that, although I don’t remember. I do remember waking because it was sudden and frightening and there was a pain in my head that felt like a shout.

‘ Cat! Wake up! ’

It was Darrell.

‘ Danger to you. Run. Hide… ’

I didn’t question. Already I could hear it, the clash of steel on steel, brutal, closer by the second. I dived through brambles, cowering behind the widespread roots of a nearby tree, shaking.

They had reached the clearing. There were only two men, for all the noise and fury, but they fought with a ruthless intensity that was terrifying. I watched through the veil of bracken and nettle. The light glanced off the sword blades in a run of fire. The crack of metal on metal bounced off the trees. It was not like anything I had seen before; I’d seen men fight, in practice, as a game, even in earnest when blood ran too hot, but it had not been like this. These men were dressed strangely and their swords were like none I had ever known.

The conflict was as brief as it was brutal. The shorter and stockier of the two men was lighter on his feet than his bulk might have suggested. He parried a blow aimed for his neck and counter-attacked, dancing forward on the balls of his feet, beneath the guard of his opponent to slide his blade between his ribs.

Blood spurted. The stench of it made me want to retch. I had seen wounds before. I had even seen death in my short life. It was ever present in the pecked corpses that hung from the gibbets at crossroads to the beggars dying in the filth of the gutter. It stalked childbirth and shadowed every step we all took. It had taken both my parents before I was a year old. Yet to witness such violence in death was still unusual for me.

The murderer looked around quick, furtive, and then dragged the body roughly towards the kiln. As I heard the crack of bones, I stuffed my hand into my mouth, biting down on my knuckles to crush my screams. He was trying to push the corpse into the furnace, which glowed with the sullen light of old burning, but the body would not fit. Finally, with much cursing under his breath, he managed to wedge it inside. Grey smoke belched suddenly from the open roof. Soon, I knew, it would start to smell of burning flesh.

Despite my attempts to keep still and quiet I must have made a sound. I was shaking, my hand pressed to my mouth to keep the sickness down. The murderer’s head came up. He turned slowly, like a hunting dog scenting the air. I saw his face clearly then, the lank hair darkened with sweat and his narrowed blue eyes. He withdrew his sword from the corpse, cleaning it with great deliberation on the grass. Then he took a step towards my hiding place and I flattened myself even closer to the roots like a cowering mouse. There was no sound but the slam of my heart against my ribs as I waited for him to find me. I could feel Darrell with me. He was afraid also, but there was anger in him too, and frustration, and despair. His feelings seemed to sweep through mine, merging with them, flowing like a tide. Any moment now I knew we would be discovered.

The ground vibrated the same way it had when I had seen the apparition of the woman on horseback only this time the noise was louder, the vibrations more intense. The man’s head snapped around. His breath hissed in on a fierce whisper.

‘King’s men!’

He ran.

The air was full of noise now, the thunder of hooves raising dust from the track. I saw the flash of men through the trees, cavalry, with buff coats and crimson sashes, a whole column of them. I waited until they had gone and the world had turned quiet and then I waited some more. I could not have moved had I wished it. I was paralysed with terror and confusion.

Stiffly, I stood and stretched, feeling the tension slowly leach from my body leaving me exhausted. Darrell had gone. I felt light-headed, as though my mind was empty.

King’s men…

Yet we had a queen now, Elizabeth, and before her another queen. There were no king’s men in England any more and had not been for more than a decade.

I walked home very slowly along the track. It didn’t occur to me that the riders might return. I made no attempt to hide. The forest was in one of its silent moods when it felt as though nothing lived, nothing moved in it. I felt dizzy and drained of emotion. I placed one foot in front of the other and thus I got back to Wolf Hall.

‘You imagined it, lovey,’ Liz said later. I was lying on my bed and she was stroking my hair, soothing me, as though I were still a child. ‘Doubtless you were asleep and dreaming. Raspberries can give you nightmares.’

All the raspberries had given me was an ache in my stomach. However, I said nothing. When I had arrived back at Wolf Hall I realised for the first time that my skirts were in shreds and that there were leaves in my hair and dirt on my face. I had had to come up with some explanation and I thought it best to stick as closely to the truth as I could. So I said that I had witnessed a fight in the woods and seen a troop of soldiers, and had run from them in terror.

I had not, however, foreseen the consequences of my words. There was uproar. The foresters were called out and word was sent to raise the villagers to arms. The whole of Savernake was scoured for these intruders who threatened the Queen’s peace.

I knew they would not find them. I knew they had not been from our time. Like the nightmare vision of the galloping horse and its headless rider they were apparitions from another present, one that I could not explain, but no less dangerous for all that. Such spirits would have been sufficient, indeed, to set Dame Margery off crossing herself and muttering against the devil but fortunately she was occupied in making sure that there were sufficient provisions for the men hunting my ghosts.

‘There are no soldiers,’ one of the foresters groused as they came in late in the afternoon, hot, angry, spoiling for a fight. ‘The maid imagined it all. The kilns are all cold and there is no body of a dead man half burned.’

I was in disgrace. I did not care as I wanted to be alone to talk to Darrell, but when I tried to find him he was not there. My call to him echoed emptily through my mind with no reply. Perhaps he thought I would nag him with questions, for there were so many things I wanted to ask; how had he known I was in trouble, had he seen what I had seen? Disconsolate, I put my head down on my pillow and closed my eyes.

Thank you. I sent the message to him anyway and felt the faintest of acknowledgements, so brief it was like a flutter across my mind, yet as warm as an embrace the same. I had the sense not to ask for more. I smiled and fell asleep