Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

Philip Wentworth shook his head again, but this time with wry humour. ‘Caught in my own snare.’ He crossed the room to set their glasses on his worktable, where he stood for several moments with his back to her. ‘Is your condition absolute?’ he asked without turning around. ‘Will you really retract if I don’t agree? Think what that means and take your time in answering.’ He leaned his weight onto his clenched fists and waited.

‘Would you still help me to die, as you first promised?’

‘Yes.’

She shut her eyes. After a long while, she said, ‘It is absolute.’ Watery knees tipped her back into her chair.

‘I was merely a soldier, as I said. Nothing more. But it’s not a world a man wants to share with women.’

‘Master Wentworth,’ she begged, ‘please understand! All my life, the things I did not know and could not expect have always brought me the greatest grief.’

‘You have nothing to fear from me.’

‘That may be, but I have learned to fear ignorance more than I fear death. I can’t bear knowing that I don’t know and waiting for something to happen that I can’t see coming. I can’t bear what I imagine. And that’s the truth.’ She blew out a deep breath. ‘Reasonable or not.’

He turned and studied her with a slightly chilly expression. She saw no trace in either his eyes or bearing of the genial old hermit who had proposed marriage.

How far we have already moved, she thought, even from where we were on the riverbank.

‘I can’t go on living on any other terms.’ She looked at him pleadingly.

‘What if I said that I was lying, up there on the roof? That I had nothing to confess? No other life than the one you see?’

‘I would know that you are lying now.’

This answer seemed to please rather than anger him. He eyed her a moment longer. ‘ Concedo ,’ he said at last. He held his arms out to the side like a defeated swordsman exposing his front to his foe. ‘I accept your terms. You shall have your gift of truth, on our wedding night.’

Scalding relief told her how much she had wanted him to agree.

‘But in return I have one condition of my own.’ He crossed back to the fire. ‘Stand up again so I can see your face in the firelight.’ He took her hand to help her rise. ‘I, for my part, cannot live with uncertainty. You must lay down the sword you have just threatened me with and swear that so long as I live and you are married to me, you will never again threaten to take your own life.’ He held both hands now. ‘Look at me and swear.’

She nodded. ‘Why would I want to?’

‘Swear,’ he repeated.

‘I swear.’

‘So we’re agreed at last?’

Zeal could now only nod wordlessly. The relative simplicity of the choice between life and death was reshaping itself into something more subtle and infinitely more complex.

I should tell him about the seven years, she thought. And that John will be sending for me.

But those complications were beyond her at this moment.

‘I shall speak to Doctor Bowler tomorrow,’ Wentworth said. ‘And seek Sir Richard’s advice on how best to obtain a special licence. I see no need to delay by posting banns if we can avoid it, do you? The sooner we can wed, the better for the babe.’

Rather than make the long walk back to High House at that hour, she made herself a nest among the ledgers and piles of salvage in the Hawkridge Estate office. Then she curled up under a smoky quilt on a feather bed that smelt of wet hen, still trying to comprehend what had just happened.

She did not have to kill herself, after all. She was to be married again. The Hawkridge Hermit had agreed to open himself to her like a gift. For the first time since his proposal that morning, it occurred to her that the balance of power between them might not tilt entirely in his favour. That thought made her like him even better. Nothing he might tell her would make her dislike him now.

She turned onto her side and wrapped her arms tenderly around her belly. John sat at his table in the office – the table she now used – his face serious and intent, acorn-coloured hair falling over one dark, fierce eyebrow. One foot was tucked back under the stool. The other was stretched under the table, showing the long elegant line of his thigh. She lay fondly watching his ghost. For such a gentle, schooled man, he looked deceptively like a pirate. He glanced up and smiled, then bent his head again.

Our child can live, after all, she told him. I no longer have to pretend it isn’t there.

She no longer needed to keep the door of her heart locked against it.

When she looked at the table again, John had gone. But she still felt him in the air around her. In the child.

We shall manage somehow.

She drifted, saw herself waking on a summer morning in bed with John, their babe kicking its feet, as warm and fragrant as a kitten between them. Though of course the child would be older by then. In her dream, Philip Wentworth was the child’s grandfather.

She woke the next morning with a sense of startled well-being. It was all still true. She did not have to die. She was to marry Master Wentworth instead. Soon she could carry John’s child openly and rejoice in its birth. She would rebuild Hawkridge House to help fill the time.

She turned her cheek against the smoky pillow. Only seven years to be survived. With the child, and work, she could bear it now.

The ginger tom that John had given her as a kitten had found her in the night. It now rearranged itself against her feet with a thump of protest at being disturbed. She placated it by wiggling her toes while she tested the steadiness of her new humour. She threw back the covers. The paralysing spell of the last weeks had indeed lifted. Today, she would regain her grip and take command once more.

In her chemise and wrapped in a blanket, she sat at once at the office table and began to write.

Zeal’s Work Book – October 1639

Salvage what we can from ruins, to rebuild with and clear the site

Borrow feather beds and blankets for winter sleeping

Set all maids to weave new blankets

Dry feathers in ovens to make new beds…

She raised her head while she thought what to write next. If John had been there, he would have helped her with the list of tasks for the gardens.

He had left an old coat, hanging on a peg behind the door. Apart from his glove, the quill pen, and a few books and curiosities kept here in the office, all his other belongings had burned in the fire. She got up and put on the coat.

It was made of rough wool from their sheep, dyed brownish black with walnut skins. The sleeves hung down over her hands and the bottom of its skirts fell almost to her ankles. She raised her arm to her nose to sniff the sleeve and caught her breath sharply, then inhaled again. Through the smokiness, she thought she could smell the warm salty sweetness of his body. She ducked her head to sniff inside the coat. A miasma of his being inhabited it with her. She pulled it tightly around her and his child, rolled back the cuffs and began to write again.

Set hedges

Plant spinach, kale, purslain and poppies…

She imagined that he whispered in her ear.

…Set artichokes, strawberries and garlic cloves

Transplant leeks

Salve sheep against the scab…

Wait, she told him. I’ve just remembered something else.

Buy needles for sewing new clothes

Buy 20 ells of fine linen to make Christmas shirts for the women…

She set down the pen. She needed a morning to write it all. But it was a start.

Without Rachel’s help, she did not try to put on the corset she had thrown last night onto the office table. In any case, it was filthy with soot. Still wearing John’s coat, she set off for High House, to reassure Rachel that she had not disappeared for a second time, and to put on her working clothes. Then she would assess the possibilities for salvage.