Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

‘Please excuse me,’ said John. He bowed and slipped out through a small gate in the side wall.

Harry watched him go in astonishment. ‘What’s wrong with my cousin?’

Hazelton’s rage spilled onto Harry. ‘You mistook him, Sir Harry. Wasted my time and Master Malise’s with this junket down here.’

‘What has he done?’ cried Harry. ‘How do you mean, “wasted”?’

‘He won’t even to listen to our proposal!’

‘He must !” Harry looked ready to burst into tears. ‘It’s so perfect!’

‘Nothing is, in this world,’ said Hazelton with fury. ‘But I had hoped for something better than this! I’m going back to the house. With luck, I can stop the unpacking in time to save restuffing it all. I’ll set off back to London first thing in the morning. Malise can do as he likes.’

‘But we’re to dine with Sir Richard tomorrow! And there’s the hunting…Your time won’t be wasted. I’ve planned so much …!’

Hazelton turned brusquely to Malise. ‘If that idiot Graffham won’t do it, we’re almost out of time to find someone else!’

‘Let me try,’ begged Harry. ‘I’m sure I can talk him round!’

‘You were sure of him before,’ said Hazelton.

‘I think,’ said Malise carefully, ‘that perhaps I should speak with him.’

‘John?’ Harry laid his ear against his cousin’s door. ‘John? Are you there?’ He opened the door onto a dark, empty room. ‘He’s not here,’ he said over his shoulder to Edward Malise.

‘Clearly not. Where does he keep his sword?’

‘I don’t know.’ It seemed an odd question. After a second, Harry shuffled cautiously into the shadows of John’s room. ‘It’s here. On a peg, with his belt.’

‘Then he hasn’t left the estate,’ said Malise. ‘I’ll try him again in the morning.’ He leaned through the door and peered around the darkened room.

‘Shall I send a man to look for him in the barns?’ asked Harry. ‘Maybe he’s not back yet from whatever he does at night.’

‘I’ll find him in the morning. He can’t hide for ever.’

‘You must forgive his bad manners,’ said Harry in anguished apology. ‘Cut off from decent society for so many years. But he has a good heart and a good brain. You’ll respect him once you get to know him, Edward, I promise you.’ Harry began to feel angry now. He shouldn’t need to apologize for something which was really nothing to do with him. Some things really were going to have to change and his cousin had better get used to the idea! Starting with the right way to treat guests!

John stripped off his blue silk suit, climbed naked into the enclosing shadows of his fourposter bed and drew the curtains against the world. He lay stiffly against his pillows, listening to his man Arthur settle the bedchamber for the night. Suddenly, he leaned over and threw the bed curtain open again.

‘Arthur. My leather jerkin and the woollen breeches.’

He climbed anyhow into his clothes, thrust on his heavy boots. When Arthur had gone back to his pallet on the antechamber floor, John let himself through a small wooden door into the narrow passage within the wall. The passage, barely wide enough for his shoulders, led down a thread of staircase into the basse-court at the corner of the Hall Place below the dining chamber. John did not want to meet anyone at all.

From the basse-court , he saw a flickering light move through the dining chamber toward Dr Bowler’s tiny apartments behind the chapel. His aunt’s windows on the first floor glowed.

The hens are still restless, John thought. In spite of their amiable-seeming fox.

He unbolted the gate at the back of the dog yard and flung himself out into the night.

Through the taste of blood in his mouth from his broken nose, John smelled the burning wood and tar of the coach. An orange-lit circle blackened and spread on the leaves overhead. He choked on the vile smell of charred meat.

He found himself panting on the crest of Hawk Ridge. As he looked down at the house, Aunt Margaret’s window went dark. Dr Bowler’s bedroom window was hidden by the chapel. The house was so changed that he hardly knew what he was looking at. Behind the dark windows of the east tower lay the face he had seen lit by the flames of the burning coach.

When he finally woke, a day and a half after the startled farmer had delivered him to his uncle, his mind had been washed clean as a pebble in a stream.

‘The Devil stole your memory,’ his Uncle George later told him. ‘There was a smell of sulphur on you when that farmer brought you to me.’

John had remembered only a headache that lasted for weeks, and the sharp, jagged edges of broken teeth.

‘How many men were there?’ his uncle had begged. ‘How were they dressed? Were they vagabonds? Highwaymen? Soldiers?’

The boy seemed not to have heard the questions. He had stared out through the diamond window pane at the wavering lines of the world beyond, his mind filled with the blurred shadow of a bird on the sill outside.

‘Colours, John? Livery? Badges?’ Solid in his chair, holding tight to the arms, George Beester (still plain mister) had reminded his nephew of a painting he had seen of King Henry. He watched his uncle’s soft, fish-like ellipse of a mouth open and close above a square jaw.

‘John? Did you hear a name called out? Titles? Anything Frenchified? Were any of them gentlemen? I must have evidence!’

The seven-year-old John squirmed on his stool and shook his head. The answers his uncle wanted so badly jostled and seethed behind a locked gate in his mind. If he let one memory through, the rest would swarm behind. He would never be safe again. Inside the dark canopy of his bed, they would eat up all his other thoughts. They would hunt him into the daylight, throw a net of darkness over his head and entangle him for ever.

‘Where’s Lobb?’ he asked brightly. ‘May I go now? I want to find Lobb.’

George Beester sighed and released him to search for the dog.

For the orphaned heir to the Nightingale estates, there followed a constant shifting of households and a long succession of different beds. A few months on his own Tarleton estate, visits to his other three houses. A few months with his Uncle George at Hawkridge. A summer on another of his estates. Two months with an aunt in London. He remembered chiefly the pain of leaving cousins and newly-befriended pets.

In spite of adult prayers and a few charms cast in private by one particular aunt, he had hidden in blankness for the next seven years. His parents had left him, been set upon and killed in some terrible, unspecified way. He did not remember exactly how and no one was anxious to tell him. He had to make a new life without them, on the four estates that were now his and on sojourns with uncles, aunts, cousins, tutors and friends.

He paced the crest of Hawk Ridge toward the water meadows.

Memory had sparked before dying again. In his own kitchen at Tarleton Court, when he was ten, a kitchen groom had thrown a dead rat onto the fire.

‘To the Devil with him,’ the man had said, before he thought.

John had been alerted by the uneasy eyes the man then turned on him. The man’s quiver of embarrassment stood John’s hair on end. John and the groom locked eyes.

The rat’s fur flared as quickly as lightning. The flesh blistered, sizzled, blackened and drew back from the bones. The rat writhed as its sinews shrank and hardened in the fury of the heat.

‘That’s that!’ said the servant with false heartiness. ‘You’d hardly know, it was so quick.’ He hooked a charred log-end from the side of the hearth into the central blaze. The ashy form of the rat crumpled as if it were hollow. It was gone except for the shriek of small sharp white teeth that rolled away to lodge against the leg of an iron trivet.