Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

‘My men will start at once, should finish tomorrow. Then I’ll not trouble you again.’

Zeal lowered her voice to avoid being heard by the boy who passed them on his way to the dovecote in the paddock. ‘This estate is all I have left. You’ve taken enough.’

‘On the contrary, I believe I’ve been most generous. I rescued you from that Hackney hencoop, didn’t I? Turned you from a dowdy little smock of a schoolgirl into a fashionable lady.’ He pursed his lips in triumph at this wounding shot.

I’ve only myself to blame, she thought. Killing him now won’t change that fact, however much satisfaction it would give me.

She turned away and walked along the bank.

‘I spent nothing that wasn’t legally mine,’ Harry called after her. ‘Mine in good faith, as your husband. At the time.’

She shook her head and kept walking away. He followed.

‘You were happy enough to collude!’ His voice quivered with emotion. ‘I know how things stood between you and my cousin!’

‘Never!’ She turned on him. ‘Never while it still suited you to admit to being my husband! And you know it!’

‘I know nothing of the sort.’

They stood poised in murderous silence.

Harry recovered first. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ he said loftily. ‘Couldn’t care less. We’re nothing to each other now, any more than we ever were. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?’ He swung away from her towards the front of the house. ‘Fox! Pickford! Here!’

To Zeal, he added, ‘You perjured yourself just as I did. If you try to cause me trouble, I vow you’ll come off the worse.’

Two of the carters arrived through an arch in the yew hedge at the west end of the house, near the top pond. Behind this hedge, John had planted a maze the previous summer. Both hedge and infant maze, though badly scorched, promised survival with a pale green frosting of the past summer’s growth.

‘Take Neptune first,’ Harry told the men.

‘I forbid it,’ said Zeal.

The men exchanged startled glances. Then one looked into the distance, while the other studied his stockings.

A shilling-sized spot of red flared on each of Harry’s cheeks. ‘Carry on,’ he said. He took Zeal by the arm and led her aside. ‘Go read the deeds, if you’ve forgotten what they say.’

‘I know what they say,’ she said loudly. She yanked her arm free. ‘And if you touch me again, I will kill you.’ He was right. In law, she could not stop him. If only he had taken them at once and not left them to become part of her life.

Arms crossed, she perched on the corner of Amphritite’s plinth and summoned up her most chilling basilisk eye, though she felt more like weeping.

With wary glances at Zeal, the two carters circled the statue of Nereus. They tested the mud at the base of the plinth with the heels of their boots. They sucked their teeth, shook their heads.

Zeal felt a twinge of hope. Nereus was eight feet tall and made of solid marble. He might choose to stay.

‘Seven of you should be able to manage,’ Harry said impatiently.

The one who turned out to be Fox went to fetch reinforcements.

Zeal followed him through the arch in the hedge. ‘Don’t trample the maze!’ she called sharply.

He soon returned, with thick coiled rope and a heavy wooden pulley block, stepping carefully across the low maze walls. Behind him came a youth with a younger version of the same face, carrying a second rope and block. The youthful Fox chose to follow the paths of the maze. He approached, then suddenly veered away. He circled, turned again and at last emerged with a triumphant grin, released back into the unmeasured world. Behind him, three more men staggered under the weight of the long canvas-wrapped poles. After a brief conference, they elected, like the elder Fox, to play colossus and bestride the complexities in their path. One of them lost his balance and trod on a young box.

‘Take care!’ cried Zeal.

The men’s burden proved to be three stout wooden poles, each as long as a May Pole, wrapped in a canvas sling large enough to lift a horse.

Several children and dogs followed the carters from the forecourt. Some ran the path of the maze, others, like the dogs, leapt over the walls. A dairymaid came up the track from the mill, where she had no doubt gone to hide a basket of cheeses.

With one eye on their audience and a touch of swagger, the carters threaded one of the ropes through the pulleys and tested that it ran freely. Then they linked the three poles together at one end, and hoisted the linked end into the air. Their audience gave a gratifying ‘ahhhh,’ as a great spindly tripod rose above the head of Nereus and settled its feet in the mud.

The carters next spread the canvas sling on the ground beside the statue. Then they tied the pulley rope to Nereus’s thick bearded neck. They secured the second rope like a belt around his dolphin’s belly. Fox set four men on the taut ropes.

‘Now.’

His son thrust a large jemmy under the plinth and dropped his weight onto the iron bar. The crowbar slipped in the soft mud of the bank. Young Fox grunted, fell against the dolphin’s nose and swore.

‘Take care not to chip him!’ cried Sir Harry.

The old sea king did not budge.

‘Perhaps he’s not a movable after all!’ called Zeal.

‘He will yield to our machines, madam,’ said the elder Fox. ‘You can raise siege cannon with these sheer legs. A statue such as this is nothing.’

‘What are they doing?’ called Doctor Bowler in alarm, from the far side of the middle pond, book under his arm and a leaf in his fringe of hair.

‘Giving us a lesson in how to raise cannon,’ Zeal replied across the water.

The audience continued to gather. Four women of the house family, their hands busy with knitting needles or the quick rise-and-fall of drop spindles. More children. A tenant farmer and his son leaned over the hedge of the Roman Field. Ducks, never known to be sensitive to the moment, gathered on the water below the struggle and quacked to be fed. Even the cat watched from a neat hunch on the edge of the still house roof.

Young Fox sucked his bleeding knuckles.

‘Bring on a grown man!’ shouted one of the onlookers. The young carter gave him an evil look.

Under his breath Harry asked Zeal, ‘Can’t you find useful employ for these idlers elsewhere?’

‘What could be more useful than a chance to observe and learn from London men at work?’ Zeal replied sweetly.

Pickford took the crowbar. Young Fox was set on the end of the restraining rope. But after several more attempts, Nereus still stood unmoved.

‘Fetch a shovel,’ said Pickford.

‘If to labour is indeed to pray,’ observed Doctor Bowler, now crossed over the sluice bridge to join the crowd, ‘these must be the most devout men in England.’

Suddenly, Wentworth’s voice asked quietly in Zeal’s ear, ‘Can Harry do this?’

‘He has the right.’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘But I’m happy to say that whether he can still seems to be in question.’ She looked over her shoulder at Wentworth. ‘You left your fishing for this?’

‘You might need me.’

She did not look at him again but felt him still standing at her back. His words made her feel odd and needed thinking about at some other time.

After a short break for dinner, which they took from their bundles on the carts, the carters dug away the mud from under the forecourt side of the plinth. Five men pushed. At last, Nereus consented to give way, as reluctantly as a deep-rooted tooth. Slowed by the two ropes, he tilted ponderously onto his side in the centre of the sling, with his head hanging over one long edge and his feet over the other.

‘Don’t break the dolphin’s nose!’ shouted Harry.