Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

Only with Malise, thought John, suddenly exhausted. This scene has nearly turned comical.

Gossipy quacks from the reeds near their feet wandered inconsequentially through their silence.

Harry took a deep breath. ‘I’m not as much of a fool as I suspect you may think me. Please don’t be offended, but being hidden away down here has kept you unworldly. I’ve learned things in the last few years that you can’t know. Will you hear me?’

Let him talk, John told himself. If he’s guilty, he’ll betray himself; he can’t help it. ‘Teach me. Make me worldly.’ And he turned away towards the weir bridge below the bottom pond.

Harry followed. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Eleven years steadily, and childhood sojourns before that.’

‘It’s very pleasant, I’m sure,’ said Harry. ‘But a man can rust here.’

‘Yes,’ agreed John. ‘I’m sure he can.’

‘In London…in the real world …’ Harry was still wary of his cousin’s strange temper. John had always been quick to flare and quick to forgive, he seemed to remember, but it was a great many years since they had last played together. And even then Harry remembered John mainly as reliable for piggy-back rides and rescues, not closely observed beyond his uses.

When John did not growl or start to shout again, Harry continued.

‘I now live in the larger world, coz, where power and influence stretch wider than the limits of a single estate, a single parish, or even a whole county. You have no idea how much appearances matter out there! The way things look is how men believe them to be. And what men believe becomes the truth. I mean to be rich and influential before I die.’

He fell into stride beside John.

‘I must begin by being seen at all,’ said Harry.

‘Is that why you married that little girl, so her money would make you visible?’

Two precise, round, pink spots bloomed on Harry’s fair cheeks and one in the centre of his forehead. ‘Isn’t a rich wife every man’s ambition? Don’t fault me for it. You should congratulate me.’ He walked two steps. ‘Your own future depends on her wealth!’

John raised a neutral enquiring eye.

‘You know as well as I,’ said Harry, ‘that our uncle left a title that needed renewing, some run-down houses, great bundles of land and almost nothing to live on! And I can see already that this place won’t produce enough to feed a fasting saint.’

‘We manage, but then we have no worldly ambition to be seen. Quite the contrary. How old is she?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘She looks younger.’

‘Not too young to wed, just young to bed. I’ll entertain myself elsewhere while I wait.’ Harry’s blue eyes slithered toward John. ‘It’s only contract marriage, coz. Take off that episcopal face. I merely tied her fortune up safe on contract before some other aspiring esquire did. Hazelton has to make the best of it, and me!’

His good humour reasserted itself at this triumphant thought. ‘Do me justice, coz. Her uncle had his own favourites. How do you think I snatched her from under their noses?’

John shook his head.

‘She wasn’t afraid of me! I wooed as if she were little cousin Fal…told tales, sang her songs, and generally made an ass of myself. I swore love and passion too, and all the things she expected to hear, but it was kindness that won the day. I even promised her I won’t insist on my bed rights until she’s ready. I could see that she was afraid of the others…enter Big Brother Harry! All games, jokes and an occasional careful tickle.’

‘You relieve my mind,’ said John. ‘Tarquin is not come to Hawkridge House. I hope you mean to go on kindly.’

Harry missed the irony and swelled to the allusion. ‘I owe her the kindness. Her wealth is my philosopher’s stone. With it, and my new lands, the base metal of Harry Beester, plain gentleman, will be transmogrified into Sir Harry Beester, man of note!’ He listened happily like a bad actor to the echoes of his own voice.

One corner of John’s mouth lifted in spite of himself. Harry had not changed. Only his size, clothes and moustaches.

They crossed the weir bridge at the bottom of the lowest pond and continued back along the far shore, at the foot of the orchard slope.

‘You’re still thinking what a fool I am,’ said Harry. ‘You have that distant adult look. But I really have learned something worth knowing.’ He stopped and reached out to grasp John’s arm and full attention. ‘Men’s eyes used to pass through me, John. I was an inconvenient mist between themselves and more important things. You can’t imagine how it feels when you don’t really exist.’

John looked away.

‘But after Cousin James dried up with dysentery and left me as Uncle George’s sole heir …’ Harry shook his head and smiled at the thought. ‘Men began to see me. I’m there now, filling up a real space. Their gaze warms me as if the sun had come out. I like it, John. I like it so very, very much! And I will not let myself decay back! I couldn’t bear it!’

He held out his arms to the house across the pond. ‘This estate is my new dignity. With your help, my wife’s money, and the changes I imagine, it will become my glory!’

Even as a small boy, John had not needed his mother’s admonition to look after Harry – Harry had so obviously needed looking after. John had never been able to stay angry long with such cheerful self-satisfaction. Even now, he almost envied it. Surely not a traitor, merely a fool. This conclusion made him very happy.

‘Oh, Harry,’ he said. ‘My dear cousin.’

‘Pax, then?’

John shook his head helplessly. If Harry had betrayed, he didn’t know it.

‘So we’re agreed.’ Harry considered a cementing embrace but decided instead to lead briskly onward beside the pond. ‘After we dine, I’ll show you the Dutch pattern books for houses and gardens that I brought from London. The Classical orders are explained – Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Fireplaces and lintels, pilasters and friezes. All there for us to harvest for our own use…Those geese do get everywhere, don’t they?’

John absolved his cousin and steadied himself for supper with Edward Malise. In any case, you can’t kill a man over a dining table, he told himself wryly. Not with ladies present.

‘For God’s sake, John, don’t desert me as you did this afternoon,’ whispered Harry when they met in the New Parlour an hour later. ‘I need your help! Do what you can with Mistress Hazelton, and don’t let Sir Richard drink any more!’

Sir Harry ushered his guests into the large dining chamber at the back of the house which had once been the Great Hall. A tiny knife jabbed his stomach. He would have killed to be in the corner seat of some safely distant tavern with a quart of ale in his hand. In the last hour while being brushed off for dinner, he had become less and less sure whether to claim Hawkridge and its residents as his own or to reserve the right of distance from any possible disasters.

First there had been John’s strange behaviour by the ponds. Then the realities of mended and faded curtains and hangings. He had spied a dog’s marrowbone in the entrance hall and chased a cat from his bed. The pisspot in his own bedchamber, though spotless, was only plain white porcelain. The chapel was smaller than he remembered. (And the female acrobats and monkeys carved on the stalls lost charm when seen through the eyes of Puritan house-guests.)

Sir Henry Bedgebury could wait no longer and had left on urgent business. His aunt was nearly weeping because it was closer to supper time than dinner and claiming that the mutton was overdone. And there was some other palaver about missing ale.

Harry needed to become angry, to belch out his nervousness in justified irritation.