Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

‘When you have a moment,’ Bowler said now, ‘if such a time should ever arrive, I would be grateful for your thoughts about the Fifth of November.’

‘The Fifth of November?’ She gazed at him blankly.

A flush slowly rose all the way to the top of his shiny bald head. ‘The bonfire. Bonfire and Treason Night. It seems a little…After what happened. In any case, I’ve heard some…’

‘Of course. We’ll speak whenever you like.’ She could never consult Bowler. His own helplessness would cause him too much pain.

‘Troublemakers!’ said Mistress Margaret briskly. ‘It’s the young men.’

‘Some older heads agree with them,’ protested Doctor Bowler. ‘Doctor Gifford for one. Then we also have to consider the bells.’

Zeal looked at them both as if they were speaking an alien tongue.

With revulsion, she eyed the rabbit stew in front of her, smooth white flesh to which adhered a blob of shiny, mucilaginous pork fat. She swallowed against her rising gorge and smiled brightly in the direction of Doctor Bowler’s voice.

‘Does anyone have a coin I could borrow?’ she asked.

When supper finally ended, she put on her wool cloak and took Doctor Bowler’s farthing to the solitude of the orchard. The quincunx of trees shifted before her eyes, one moment apparent disorder, the next a harmony of straight lines.

‘Good evening, to you, madam.’ An estate worker intercepted her cheerfully. ‘Can I have a word about moving the piglets?’

In the dusky shadows under the trees, she was free at last of all those eyes.

She felt out of control, as if bits of her might fly off without warning. It was a new experience. The world had given way, in the past, more than once. It was the nature of the world to give way. But she herself had always survived, clamped down like a limpet to the best piece of rock she could find at the given time.

She threw the farthing in the air, caught it, covered it with her other hand. Then she put it back into her hanging pouch without looking.

She sat in the grass and leaned back against a tree, trying one last time to think straight. She felt as if she were already a ghost, out of place in the living world. Her hands moved in her lap like small restless animals.

She had already been Harry’s wife when she first met John. If John should find her married again, neither of them would survive it, she was certain.

But Wentworth was an old man. Anything might happen in seven years.

She stopped, appalled at her own wickedness. If she did accept him, she must not ever let herself wish for his death. He was a good man, to make such an offer.

Even though he did trick me down from the roof.

He was also taciturn, solitary, obsessed with fishing, spent most of his days on the water and his evenings alone in his chamber. He disappeared during feast days and celebrations, when work eased enough for people to take fresh note of each other in their unfamiliar clothes and exchange glances of startled rediscovery as they passed each other in a dance. He ate and walked alone. He was less present in her life, in fact, than the cat.

His offer was all the more surprising because she felt that he avoided her even more than he did the others. It was perfectly reasonable for a man of his age to find an inexperienced chit like her to be of little interest. Her guardian, of much the same age as Wentworth, had no more than tolerated her, and he had had the use of her fortune.

Wentworth’s generosity deserved better than she could ever give him in return.

She began to pace the diagonal aisles between the trees. Fallen pears squelched under her shoes, releasing little gusts of fermentation.

He offers a solution just as reasonable as death. And kinder to everyone.

But marry him? Marry anyone but John?

No, she thought. She tried to imagine Wentworth in a nightshirt, in her chamber, without his flapping black coat, but her thoughts started to slither like a pig on ice.

She made another turn of the orchard. Plucked a leaf from overhead, shredded and dropped it.

Try once more to reason it through.

Have the child and expose herself as either blaspheming perjurer or fornicator? Impossible.

The parish minister was a fierce Scot named Praise-God Gifford, who brought the unforgiving spirit of Calvin with him to England when he had trotted south with his clergyman father in 1604, after Elizabeth died, at the heels of the Scottish king who had come to rule England. As he grew older Gifford added a moral ferocity all his own.

She feared that she could not trust her standing as a landowner to protect her from him, even if she somehow escaped the civil law. He would want to make an example of her all the more, she who stood above her people like the sun and should lead them into light, educating through her own peerless example. She had seen one poor girl – not from Hawkridge, thank the Lord – stripped naked in front of all the parish council and have her hands tied to the tail of a cart. Then she was whipped all the way from the Bedgebury market square to the May Common. As the lash laid bloody lines across the girl’s skin, Zeal had seen the eager faces of some of the watching men. The girl had later drowned both herself and her babe.

The brilliant light of the day had now softened into a lavender haze that promised a warm night. In the distance, a few cows complained that they had not yet been milked. The orchard smelled richly damp and sweet, with a prickling of rot.

If I died, I would so miss this place, she thought. She began a circuit of the high brick walls, noting the ripeness of espaliered apricots and cherries. She picked and ate a sweet black cherry and spat out the stone.

Try to hide the child?

Others had succeeded in that deceit, she knew. Fine ladies who put on loose-bodied gowns and paid a married woman to unlace her stomacher and pad her petticoats, then produce the babe as her own.

Not here on this estate. Rachel already knew the truth from washing Zeal’s linen. Though she would never tell, others might guess as she had done. Secrets here were as safe as pond ice in May, and now that they lived hugger-mugger on top of each other since the fire, any such sleight of hand stood even less chance of success.

‘If your mind’s not set that way,’ Rachel had said, ‘you know as well as I that not all babies that get planted need to be born.’

When Zeal did not reply, Rachel had folded the petticoat and pressed it flat with both hands.

‘Could you do it?’ Zeal finally asked.

‘Perhaps I have.’ Rachel met Zeal’s eyes defiantly. ‘Better than a public flogging, I daresay you’ll agree. But you won’t have to fear that, madam. You’re a lady.’

‘Would you take that risk, with Doctor Gifford?’

If I kill John’s child, I might as well kill myself at the same time.

She reached the far wall of the orchard and turned to look back at the chapel roof.

But life had carried her on past that point, with a push from Philip Wentworth. Not knowing quite how it came about, she had fallen out of love with that flight into darkness.

People really do wring their hands, she thought, suddenly noticing that her own were turning and twisting together against her apron.

You are feeble, she told herself. Take a grip!

She climbed up into the nearest apple tree. No one can see me now, she thought, as the shadowy leaves closed around her. At the centre, near the trunk was like a secret house. An abandoned nest sat close above her head.

How lucky the birds are, she thought. She and John had first looked at each other properly, soon after she arrived, when he had caught her up an apple tree in her bare feet and mistaken her for one of the estate girls.

She smiled, shut her eyes, and remembered the warmth of his hand closing around her bare ankle, and the shock of their unguarded recognition. She had slipped and showered down leaves in catching herself, while he stood looking up at her with an expression both startled and benign.