Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

The Nightingales’ coachman lay dead on the ground, his cut throat spreading a black pool across the orange-lit ground.

‘Ralph! It’s Cookson …’ John started to say.

The groom clapped an urgent hand over the boy’s mouth. ‘He’s past help, Master John. Let’s get you away while they’re still busy!’

The coach lurched sideways and settled unevenly like a dying stag still trying to stand. Three of the horses, loose at last, darted and whinnied, dragging the men who clung to their leathers. The bay had fallen out of sight and was still.

In the confusion of logs and bodies, a face suddenly stood out brightly in a shudder of firelight. The head was turned to the side. The brow, cheekbone and chin of Edward Malise glowed hot orange. His single visible eye was alight with a terrible glee. Then he turned suddenly, the eye caught by movement in the brush. He seemed to look straight at John.

‘Run, Master John!’ whispered Ralph. He shoved the boy deeper into a thicket and drew his dagger.

‘We missed a brace of them,’ said the smoky voice. ‘Over there!’

Three of the men beside the coach drew their swords and turned to black silhouettes against the flames as they moved towards the groom.

‘Run! To London. To your uncle. For the love of God, run!’

It was told for months, until a new excitement made fresher telling, how a singed, dazed and smoky boy wearing ashy tatters of silken clothes had staggered into a cottage on an estate six miles from the ambush, announced that he was Master John Nightingale of Tarleton Court and demanded to be taken to his uncle George Beester in London to tell him that the Devil had killed his father and mother. He had then sat down in a large, carved chair-of-grace and fallen soundly asleep as suddenly as if struck by a magic spell.

‘My dear Edward,’ said Harry, ‘let me begin to make it up to you at once. Food and drink are waiting for you inside.’ He shot John a disappointed, reproving glance. No help there. His cousin John needed a good shaking up and brushing off before he could be trusted in elevated company. Harry felt the chill of imminent disaster. His joy when Malise had agreed to visit Hawkridge House had drowned his common sense.

I should have come down here first, to make certain the place does me credit! Please God, at least let supper be worthy!

John stood like a man who had just been clubbed. Upright but unbalanced, a sawn tree just before it falls.

‘Shall I take the coach round?’

John looked up blankly at a strange face above yellow livery.

Harry had betrayed him to Malise.

‘Sir?’

‘What do you want?’

‘The coach…where, sir?’

John frowned in confusion. The coach had burned so fast. Pitch-covered roof and dried wood frame. He had begged the screams to stop. And then the meaning of the silence had shrivelled him into a tight, cold ball of ice.

‘Sir?’

John looked up again. A London voice and curious eyes.

Malise’s coach was here in the forecourt. The Serpent had arrived at Hawkridge House. But the Serpent had been in Eden from the start. Must get a grip on myself, thought John. Deal first with Malise’s coach. Then deal with Harry…And then Malise.

‘Through that gateway,’ said John. ‘Someone in the stable yard will help you…Down, boy!’ he called to the yellow cur that danced among the fetlocks. The heavy wooden coach swayed and jolted through the gate to the stable yard, the cur trotting behind.

Oh, Harry! thought John. Harry! Harry! Harry! This is worse than all the rest. He held onto one of the stone eagles with both hands and waited for the sensation of falling to pass.

‘There you are!’ said Harry reproachfully, emerging onto the porch. ‘Why didn’t you come in? Sir Richard and I more than had our hands full. Our aunt veers from gawping to squawking…Old Doctor Bowler’s no better than he ever was, is he? Still goes red as a cock’s comb when you so much as look at him…used to make me want to climb under the pew, the way he darted at his sermons like a panic-stricken mouse. What the Hazeltons and Malise make of him, I hate to think!’

Harry mistook his cousin’s unnatural stillness beside the eagle for contemplation. ‘It hasn’t changed since I last visited,’ he said. He surveyed the forecourt from the top of the steps. ‘More’s the pity. Not like the two of us, eh? Lord, how long ago was it? Remember riding these eagles? Not changed one bit. Still, being so far from London …’ He put one arm around John’s shoulders, but quickly dropped it again. He might as well have embraced the eagle. ‘You must show me my new property before dinner. I want to learn the worst. There’s just time for a quick look. My guests mustn’t see that I’m as ignorant as they are.’

John turned a cold assessing eye on this stranger from London whom he must call ‘Sir’, who rode a coach instead of a modest cob, sweated in silks instead of wool and glowed moistly with nervous ownership.

‘A good-natured fool,’ John had assured Aunt Margaret. But loyal. Or so Harry had seemed, many years before.

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ she had replied.

‘John?’ asked Harry uncertainly. He was puzzled and a little alarmed by John’s gaze. He looked suddenly shy.

I see no guilt in those blue eyes, thought John, just the ghost of the younger cousin I so often pulled away from the consequences of his own silliness. Or has he learned guile along with the names of good tailors and hatmakers?

‘I’ll show you, if you like. Do you want to start with business or pleasure?’

Harry lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pleasure first, of course, coz. I never have it any other way.’

A touch over-hearty, John noted grimly. ‘Get back to work,’ he shouted at three grooms who were grinning through the stable-yard gate.

John led the way down the steps onto the rolled gravel of the forecourt. ‘I had the chapel newly roofed last year; the bills are in the accounts I have waiting for you …’ He looked up at the square gap teeth of the chapel’s crenellations at the east end of the house.

‘Oh, coz,’ said Harry. ‘Is this what you call pleasure?’

It is for me, thought John. But he said, ‘Only a taste of Purgatory on the way to Paradise. I’m afraid I just have a business habit of mind.’

‘That’s splendid, John,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a habit I must study now that I’m a man of means. But later!’

Before Malise, John would have smiled. Now he stared bleakly at his younger cousin.

They turned right through a small gate out of the forecourt into an allée of pleached hornbeams that faced each other along the west wing like a long set of country dancers. Harry assumed the abstracted enthusiasm of a man at an exhibition, hands clasped behind his back, chin leading. His blue eyes filled with memories and calculations. He nodded graciously at two awe-struck sheepmen beyond the wall.

I’m certain that Malise didn’t recognize me, thought John as they walked. Is it possible?

‘My fields?’ Harry stepped carefully over some green-black goose turds and stopped to survey the green slope beyond the outer row of hornbeams and a low stone wall. ‘They haven’t been sold off?’

He had time to prepare himself for our meeting, decided John. He pretended strangeness in front of Harry.

‘My fields?’ repeated Harry, a little more loudly.

Sheep grazing in Roman Field below the beech avenue raised their heads at the sound of his voice. The afternoon sun glowed pink through their pricked ears.

John finally heard. ‘Yes. The nearest, here across the wall is the Roman…Roman coins were dug up there years ago. Beyond that lies King’s, and then our water meadows, there behind the beech ridge and along the Shir. Two years ago, as you will see in the estate accounts, I bought more good grazing from the Winching estate when the widow died. Hawkridge now runs from Winching Hanger across the road, that way…’ He pointed back up the hill past the top of the drive. ‘All the way past Pig Acre to that second wood there, on that hill above Bedgebury Brook. The limit that way is the field you can just see below the east end of Hawk Ridge, called the Far.’