Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

‘I’m sorry,’ she said when safely on the ground, clutching stolen blossom, aware that she wore only her petticoats.

‘They’re your trees,’ he said. ‘Harry’s, anyway.’ After a moment, he added, ‘Trees ask to be climbed.’

For the next two years, they tried to pretend that look had never happened.

She pressed her forehead against the bark of a branch and felt his hand encircling her ankle again. Then it came to her how she could decide. She would not trust her life or death to the pettiness of a farthing, but Chance could take more noble forms than a plucked daisy or a tossed coin.

She climbed down and went to the estate office. In the thick dusk, she felt along the top of the mantle piece until her fingers found what they wanted. John’s glove, dusted with ash, like everything else.

I will accept the answer, she vowed. Life, or death. Either way.

She went to sit beside Nereus on the bank of the upper pond, to wait until she was alone. She found the old sea god’s company comforting. Like her, he could never have expected to end up at Hawkridge, and she was sure that he was equally content to be here. A white dove sat on the head of the nearest nymph, who also wore a wilted daisy chain around her neck. Her sister just beyond still had a fishing line tied to her wrist.

‘I don’t suppose any of you knows what I should do,’ she said. ‘Never mind. I mean to ask elsewhere.’

The estate workers and house family usually collapsed soon after supper, worn out by the battle to keep up with daily chores, while also salvaging whatever they could from the house, restoring what they could recover and remaking or rebuilding the rest. Meanwhile the advance of autumn brought its own burdens of digging, cutting, picking, binding, threshing, butchering, salting and preserving.

When she passed the bake house on the way to the ponds, Rachel and Agatha had nearly finished clearing supper, with the help of the kitchen grooms. The two women stood side by side in the last of the dusk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, scrubbing the last of the spoons and cups with fistfuls of green horsetail pulled in the water meadows.

The two kitchen grooms came out to the ponds with the dry ends of bread and hard-baked dough trenchers they all had to use until the cooper could make more wooden plates. These, in their turn had replaced the pewter plates Sir Harry had taken when he left Hawkridge for London. The grooms threw the bread onto the middle pond and disappeared downstream towards the mill where they were nested.

While she waited impatiently for all the others to go to bed, Zeal stared up into the sky. A faint glow in the haze showed where the moon was trying to press through the clouds.

Six ducks splashed down and jostled each other aside to get at the bread. With obscure pleasure, Zeal watched a female snatch a crust from under the jabbing beaks of two battling drakes. The mêlée reminded her of a gang of drakes she had once seen pile onto a single duck and drown her in their eagerness to tread her.

A carp slapped the water with its tail. Sheep bleated raggedly in unending querulous complaint. Frogs had begun to sort themselves into soprano, alto and bass. In the still air, the voice of a house groom carried clearly from the stable yard, headed at last for bed in the loft of the hay barn. She heard Rachel and Agatha set off with Mistress Margaret and her maid on the long walk to High House.

The moon pressed harder against the restraining clouds. In the final luminous glow as dusk slid into true night, straight lines wavered and the black humps of bushes breathed. The nymphs around the ponds stirred and reached out their hands to her. She felt their concern, and a pull, as if they invited her into sisterhood.

If only I could turn to stone and stay here with you, she told them.

In the remains of the house, Doctor Bowler began to play his fiddle in the dark, in the chapel antechamber. His tune was fierce, incautiously pagan, and totally suited to her present purpose.

When Zeal unlocked the gate into the kitchen garden, next to the orchard, Ranter, the night mastiff on patrol, pushed his huge head into the front of her skirt and swung his ropelike tail.

She heard Arthur’s laugh. A door slammed. Somewhere, closer in the darkness, a hen muttered to itself. With Ranter bumping and huffing at her heels, Zeal walked slowly between the rectangles of the raised vegetable beds.

Moonlight, triumphant at last, began to pick out the fruit trees espaliered to low internal walls. Late pumpkins and gourds, which should already have been harvested, gleamed like huge jewels against the dark earth of the beds. The blade of a forgotten weeding knife sparked in the grass. Absently, she picked it up.

Until John had unlocked her heart, she had imagined no love greater than that she felt for this place – house, gardens, fields and hills, its people, its sheep, even the ducks.

She looked back. Had the whole house been standing, she could have been seen from one of the upper windows. Even so, she stepped into the deep shadow of the garden wall. Doctor Bowler might smile forgivingly on sinners, but Doctor Gifford had a keen nose for sulphur and a personal mission to save souls. Unlike Bowler, he would not turn a blind eye. Gifford would never doubt that she meant to practise witchcraft.

Ranter gave her a final friendly shove and settled under a gooseberry bush.

She unfolded the pale ghost of a linen handkerchief onto the ground. With the point of her own knife, which always hung at her belt, she pricked the end of her left thumb. She had not pried, exactly, but her curiosity had always set off in hot pursuit after rumour. From all that she had been able to overhear and otherwise learn from her books and the talk of the women, she should have marked her charm with her monthly flow. She made a dark smudge on the linen with her thumb.

She sat back on her heels in the heap of her skirts. The moon looked cold and dead, like a bleached bone. At least it was waxing. Always sow your seeds in a waxing moon. Don’t try to conjure hope under a dying one.

She turned her head sharply at a falling leaf. The air in the garden was so still that she heard snail tongues rasping at the leaves of the cabbages and late beans. Even the distant sheep and ducks were temporarily silent. Then Ranter, who had also raised his head, gave a gusty sigh and flopped his dewlaps down onto his forepaws again.

Reassured by his indifference, she spat on the napkin. Then she lifted her pleated linen collar to dig under her armpit with the handkerchief. With a glance at Ranter’s tranquil shadow, she reached up under her skirts and wiped the napkin between her legs.

She took John’s glove from her bodice and held it to her face. She inhaled his scent beneath the salty tang of the leather. Felt his body heat and hard smooth muscles. Almost saw him. Then the details wavered and blurred.

I should have fed my eyes in our last moments together, she thought. Committed him to memory, inch by inch and hair by hair, instead of shouting at him in rage for abandoning me. I dared to be angry with him when he was going off to be little more than a slave.

The harder she tried to see him, the more he eluded her.

She put her hand into the void left by his and bent her fingers to fit the curves and bumps that he had shaped. Then she laid her hand in his glove against her right breast.

She looked down at the dark leather against the pale wool of her bodice. As a very young girl, she had imagined that such a touch would feel wicked. Instead, when it finally came, she had felt a deep peacefulness, as if a tightly-wound spring had loosened inside her. She had been waiting without knowing it, for his hand to arrive exactly there.