Christie Dickason - The Memory Palace

She put the napkin to her nose and inhaled her own musky smell. Suddenly, as clearly as if he had been there, she smelled the rich warm brew that rose up between their naked bodies after love.

She wiped her eyes with the napkin.

Ranter raised his head.

‘Good dog,’ she whispered.

The great rope of his tail thumped on the damp grass.

She kissed the glove formally, as if it were a bishop’s ring or a sword before battle, and folded the handkerchief around it. With her knife, she cut a long strand of hair from her nape and tied it around the bundle.

The mastiff rumbled like an earthquake and hoisted himself to his feet. Zeal froze. He lumbered to the back wall of the garden, growled again. A violent scuffling announced that whoever had begun to scale the wall had decided urgently against it. The sounds of retreat faded into the night.

She listened for a long time at the back gate. As mistress of Hawkridge Estate, she had the right to walk where she liked, at any time, however odd. The tenant farmers and her own house family, the gardeners, stockmen and grooms should all be clutching at sleep while another day of work rushed at them all too fast. But no one was in his or her right place just now. And boys slipped out to poach fish from the ponds. Unmarried couples, like Rachel and Arthur, sought darkness and solitude under the trees. The bundle she now carried could hang her.

Ranter gave a low reproachful bark when she finally closed the door behind her. ‘Stay, sir!’ she whispered through the wooden grille. ‘Guard my back.’

As she climbed the flank of Hawk Ridge, her feet slipped on the damp, crumbly beech mast and silvery patches of damp moss. Just below the spine of the ridge, in the darkness under the leafy roof, panting from her climb, she reached out to touch one of the dark columns.

He sat under this tree, and I leaned against him, rocked gently on the rise and fall of his breath.

As she began the last steep scramble, the chill of total solitude engulfed her. Here all human fires were quenched. A thick roof of branches shrouded the night sky and blotted out the moon. The air felt thick, as if a great weight pressed down on it. Though the night was almost windless, the trees around her rustled and sighed as if alive.

You enter the Lady’s realm, they murmured.

Nearly blind now, she hauled herself up the last sheer yards, slipping and clutching at branches, into the cavern of darkness cast by the Lady of Hawk Ridge. Hands outstretched, she felt her way towards the ancient beech that had chosen human form. Her hands met damp, cool bark. Found a familiar wide taut hollow, and recognized a curve.

The Lady sprang upwards into the sky, feet first, from a short trunk twenty feet around. Her head and her raised arms remained imprisoned in the trunk, while her sappy fingers twisted into roots deep in the earth under Zeal’s feet. Her body, that of a giant female, was the lowest branch of the old beech, which spread close to the ground, the result of coppicing one hundred years before.

Zeal felt outwards along the damp bark from the hollow of the Lady’s throat until she reached the two large boles of her breasts with their broken stumps of nipples. Though lost now in the darkness, the Lady’s waist, hips and crossed legs curved upwards until her ankles sprouted, ninety feet above the ground, into an angular network of springy twigs. The Lady of Hawk Ridge rose naked and unashamed from the earth with such force and purpose that she seemed to hold its centre in her buried hands.

Zeal had overheard the muttered gossip. The Lady, not Gifford, was Doctor Bowler’s chief rival for souls on the estate. Zeal had admired the little parson for his pragmatic discretion on the subject of the estate oracle. Now she too, like so many others, would let the Lady decide her fate.

As she felt along the giant rib cage, she gave a little ‘hah!’ of terror and snatched back her hand. She had touched something cold, limp and damp.

She stared at the darkness until she thought her eyes would burst. After a time she began to make out a shape against the beech bark. It swam in the darkness but did not move away. Zeal clenched her teeth and forced herself to touch it again.

Wet feathers. Crumpled, wiry claws. A dead bird. Then her fingers found the noose of twine from which it hung and she smelled the whiff of putrefaction. She turned to flee, then reminded herself that she had plucked too many scalded chickens to run from a dead crow or thrush.

She crouched among the Lady’s roots and, with a sharpened yew stick she had carried in her belt, began to dig. Her fingers felt a sharp edge. A folded parchment.

Another desperate petitioner, she thought. Perhaps the one who left the bird. She covered over someone else’s private hope or grief and dug again. She buried her bundle. Then she stood, stretched up her right hand and found the triangle where the Lady’s legs divided. The damp bark under her fingers felt as rough and complicated as her own red-gold bush, though much colder.

‘Lady,’ she whispered. ‘If you can do what they believe…do it for me. I beg you, tell me. What should I do?’

Will I understand if she does answer?

The tree inhaled and exhaled. Zeal heard it clearly.

He is truly gone. Will never touch you again. You will never hear his voice.

‘No!’ Zeal cried aloud. ‘That can’t be!’

I imagined, she told herself. Heard my own fears speaking. The wind.

‘I shall ask three times,’ she told the tree. So as to be sure of what I hear.

Be careful what you ask and how you ask it, she told herself. Remember the stories. Beware of the literal and murderous precision of magical wish-granting!

Her mind leapt from danger to danger.

‘Will I ever see him…’ she asked carefully ‘…alive and not dead?…Don’t answer me yet! I must think.’ She pressed her free hand to her face. Her skin felt hot in spite of the chill under the tree.

‘With all his limbs and senses?’ Though I would love him without.

What other danger have I forgotten?

‘Will he still love me?’

With her hand still on the cleft of the Lady’s legs, she pressed her forehead against the dark, cold bark beside the dead bird.

No reply. What should I make of that?

She was no longer certain what she had heard the first time.

When her pulse had quietened a little, she tried a third and last time.

‘Speak to me now,’ she begged the Lady. I’m ready to listen.

The grove around her was absolutely still. The night held its breath. The tree did not speak.

‘Please, give me a sign, Lady! Shall I marry Wentworth and try to endure for seven years?’

Don’t even think about what might happen then.

‘Or should I kill myself?’

Why should I trust it? she suddenly thought. Why does everyone assume it’s friendly? If so, why does it want dead offerings?

The night still held its breath. Still the tree kept silent. Not a twig or leaf stirred.

Zeal sat, closed her eyes. Fortunate Daphne, she thought. Transformed to a laurel tree. All grief ended…she presumed that trees do not feel grief.

She dug her fingers into the leaf mould, imagined the chill of the ground rising slowly towards her heart, reaching it, slowing its beat until her thoughts darkened and faded into a long dream of leaf fall, rain, nesting birds and slow rot.

She sat upright with a jolt of terror and tried to remember where she was. Who she was. Not a tree. Almost, but not yet. She scrambled up, tripped on petticoats, half-fell when a numbed foot gave way. The darkness and chill pressed on her like water. She could not breathe. This was not mere fancy. She felt the silent presence in the grove, which had refused to help.

I am such a fool, she thought.