Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.

‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.

She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.

She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.

‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’

She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’

Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.

Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.

I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.

Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.

How do I know I can trust him?

She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.

Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.

She turned back, then found that she had to rest.

He was clever to have used the child.

The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.

She took her place at the middle of the long, scrubbed elm table in the Hawkridge bake house kitchen where the small house family most often ate supper following the fire. Even this outbuilding smelled like the inside of the smokehouse, but with a colder, seeping edge. A light dusting of ash from the fire seemed always still to salt the food. She looked at the familiar faces around the table with a stranger’s eye. She might as well have been a Mede or Ethiop dropped by magic carpet.

Since the recent fire, the estate residents had split their lives between Hawkridge House and assorted temporary lodgings. Her nearest neighbour, Sir Richard Balhatchet, had given rooms at High House to Zeal and Mistress Margaret, who was the unmarried aunt of Harry and John. Their two serving women, and Agatha, the chief house maid, and Doctor Bowler the estate parson also slept at High House. Others of the house family, including three house grooms, two kitchen grooms, and John’s former manservant, Arthur, slept where they could in the outbuildings and barns. The large mid-day dinner was served at High House to those not in the fields. Apart from the house family, the rest took supper wherever they found themselves.

Thank the Lord, Master Wentworth never comes to the table, Zeal thought. I could not bear to see him just now.

According to Mistress Margaret, he had never eaten in company since he first took up residence on the estate long before Zeal arrived.

Now, as they sat on borrowed stools along either side of the long table, their voices and laughter, the sound of their chewing, the scrape of stool legs on the stone floor, a dropped knife, all made her flinch.

As Mistress Margaret supervised the passing of rabbit stew, she hummed with grim glee at news that a neighbour (not Sir Richard) had been fined five hundred crowns for ploughing across the boundary of an adjoining estate. ‘He always takes the largest portion at table, too!’ she said. ‘And the last sweetmeat.’

Doctor Bowler paused for a polite beat of silence then ventured, ‘But surely, that is exactly what the king did to John! Boundaries, I mean, not sweetmeats.’

The king meant to cut across John’s land – the very same estate so recently awarded to him for service to the Crown. A great wall was to be built right between John’s new horse barn and his paddock, to enclose a royal hunting park at Richmond, taken from common grazing land and other men’s farms.

‘But the king is the king,’ protested Mistress Margaret. ‘Our dear neighbour is not even a knight.’

‘Do you mean to say that the right to trespass is defined by rank?’ asked Doctor Bowler with a degree of heat uncommon in him. ‘Do you say that John did not have good reason to protest to the king? Did the king have the right to call such reasonable protest “treason”? I expected more support for your nephew’s cause!’ Doctor Bowler turned to Zeal. ‘Are you not proud of him, my lady? He did not creep away with his tail between his legs like so many others who were equally wronged.’

Zeal stared blankly at their animated faces, then realized that they were expecting her to speak.

Mistress Margaret and Zeal’s serving woman, Rachel, exchanged looks.

‘Zeal,’ begged Mistress Margaret, her face mottled pink with emotion. ‘He puts words into my mouth! Why don’t you help me? Our parson has me at an unfair advantage with all his education. We women are never taught the tricks of debate.’

‘Why gild the lily?’ murmured Doctor Bowler. He peered closely at Zeal across the table and changed tack. ‘Isn’t it excellent news, my dear, that Sir Richard plans to give us that wagon load of oak beams from his old barn to help us rebuild the hall and west wing?’

‘Indeed,’ cried Mistress Margaret, diverted into this new turning. ‘We could never afford to buy them! It’s all very well to say that the Lord will provide, but kind neighbours are more certain.’

Doctor Bowler pounced with delight. ‘And who do you think prompted this Christian charity in Sir Richard?’

I must act, one way or another, thought Zeal. And if I can’t decide for myself what to do, I must leave it to chance. Or ask Doctor Bowler’s advice.

‘My lady…?’ The little parson always requested attention as if certain that you had far more important things to do than talk to him.

Zeal forced herself to smile at his anxious face, with its slightly too-close eyes. She sometimes thought of him as an earnest moth. A man of infinite good will and equal fragility, Doctor Bowler should never have taken on the moral burdens of a clergyman.

While Sir George Beester was still alive, Bowler, an Oxford man, had been tutor to the baronet’s two nephews, Harry Beester (who had married Zeal and brought her to Hawkridge) and John Nightingale, the son of Beester’s only sister. His sweet temperament, urgent curiosity and good Latin and Greek made him an excellent tutor for a willing pupil like John but a poor task-master for the likes of Harry. He had survived on an allowance from Sir George, and on small tithes, eggs and milk from estate tenants whom he christened, confirmed, married and buried. When John took over running the estate, which Harry inherited after their uncle’s death, Bowler bent his classical education to the estate accounts. When on the annulment of their marriage Harry deeded the estate to her, Zeal saw no reason for change.