Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

‘Master John,’ said the groom. ‘Would you like a swig of the new cider? It’s better than last season’s. What do you think?’

John read correctly the attempt to distract him. He thought he would be sick. Then he saw that this was only an approximate idea. More precisely, he was a brittle shell around nothing, not even sickness. He was nothing, except for the swelling pressure of his eyeballs against the bony rings of their sockets.

If he touches me, I will crumble like the rat, John thought. His mind stopped there.

‘I’m fine. Jack. Fine,’ he said. ‘Why are you fussing?’

Then, eleven years ago, when he was fourteen, memory had returned in a firelit room in a private London house. His uncle George Beester took John to a meeting of the directors of the South Java Trading Company. Beester greeted colleagues and introduced his wealthy nephew who might one day join them. There were a dozen men in the room. Then two newcomers arrived late.

In low voices, the men who knew explained to the men who did not. New investors. Francis and Edward Malise, from an old Catholic family which had survived King Henry by fleeing to the Netherlands. However, as the Malises were stubborn Catholics, the king had, by self-elected right, taken most of their money and all their lands. The Malise estates were sold or distributed to deserving supporters of Henry’s expedient split from the Church of Rome. (One or two men had looked at John.) The parents had died abroad. Then, under James, the two Malise sons returned to England and crept slowly back into wealth and position. The new French queen of James’s son Charles was said (by low voices into close-held ears) to be oiling their way upward, as she did for any man who could speak her alien tongue and was willing to make the sign of the Cross.

‘A little over-concerned with being seen at court,’ muttered Mr Henry Porter, owner of coastal ships that carried sea coal and dried cod.

Sir James Balkwell, owner of a large part of Buckinghamshire and local magistrate, replied, ‘Who cares if a man cuts his hair long or short so long as he has money to invest?’

As he plunged through the meadows up towards the road, John startled sleepy sheep into bleating flight. At the top of the hill, he leaned his arms on a wall and lowered his head onto the hard damp stone.

The Malise brothers were wrapped in an expensively fashionable softness of lace and curling hair which contradicted their sharp-boned, beaked faces and dark, hungry eyes. They were as alike as a pair of hunting falcons.

The brothers set off a glimmer of fear in John, as faint as distant lightning in a summer sky. He stared, hunched into himself like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk.

The newcomers turned sharp eyes on the assembled men. They were quiet in manner but shuffled a little on the perch, lifting and settling their feathers. They moved around the room, accepting introductions. Then they paused before the fireplace. Edward, the younger brother, turned his head to Sir James Balkwell. Firelight flickered on bones of his nose and cheek. Sir James said something. Edward Malise showed his teeth in a laugh and changed John’s life for the second time.

Memory flared white-hot. John saw the things his uncle had begged him in vain to recall. He saw Edward Malise laugh in the orange light of the burning coach. His mother writhed in the brightness of her burning clothes. His father fell dead across his legs. John flew through the burning window frame. His hair flared. His heart was a red-hot coal. His arms and legs were flames.

He shrieked like a demon and flung himself through the bodies of the other men, across the room, shooting flames like thunderbolts, at that orange-lit, gleeful, beaked face of the Devil.

He knocked a cup of wine through the air and sent blood-red rain showering onto the hems of jackets and lace boot tops. A sheaf of papers fell from startled hands. The twin falcon faces snapped around. For a suspended moment, the time of an indrawn breath or the fall of an executioner’s axe, John blazed across the room in the stillness of the men’s disbelief and his own absolute intent.

The red-hot knives of his fingers seared Edward Malise’s laughing face. Then the elder brother, Francis, seized him from behind. John twisted in the man’s arms. The matching falcon face glared into his, contorted with effort, teeth bared. John tried to breathe, but the man’s arms crushed his lungs. He wrenched free and, with all his force, knocked the face away. Francis Malise staggered two steps backward, then toppled. John sucked in air like a drowning man and threw himself once again at Edward.

Francis Malise’s feet danced back another two steps, trying to catch up with his shoulders and head. His head smashed against the stone floor with the succulent thud of an overripe gourd. His lungs whooped like a collapsing bladder.

John didn’t see him fall. He screamed and clawed at the four men who tried to pull him off the other brother. Then slowly the stillness in the room chilled his fury. He looked where all the men were looking. Francis Malise lay on the stone flags, arms thrown wide at his sides, mouth ajar, jaw a little askew. All eyes in the room watched a small damp patch spread darkly out from his groin across the front of his pale blue silk and wool breeches.

John buried himself deep in the shadow of the Lady Tree. He leaned against her trunk and embraced her for steadiness. He had become a helpless conduit for the past.

The silence in the firelit room had continued for five more breaths, then everyone had shouted at once.

‘Francis!’ screamed Edward Malise. He jerked free of restraining hands and flung himself down beside his brother’s body. ‘Fetch a surgeon!’

Henry Porter lifted the head and examined the back of the skull. A man called Witty knelt to place his ear on Francis Malise’s chest although the stained trousers had already announced death. ‘It’s too late.’

Sir James Balkwell sent a man to find an officer.

John stared down at the man on the floor. His anger alone had done that, without knife or sword or club. He had never dreamed he had such power. Now everyone shouted at him.

He looked blindly into their faces. His uncle pushed him across the room, down into a chair. From there, John could see only the soles of the dead man’s shoes and a foreshortened peninsula of kneecap, ribcage, crooked jaw and nostrils.

Dead. He had done that. He had wanted to burn both of them to death in the heat of his rage. He had not thought that he had the power to succeed.

His uncle’s face interposed itself intently between John and the foreshortened dead man. ‘Why, John? Can you remember now? Was he the one?’

‘Satan was shining from his eyes,’ said another voice.

All the fire had left John. He shivered. He felt cold, and very young, and confused, burned to ash by his own fire. He had been right to keep memory behind the gate. Now, if he could only force it back again, the man on the floor might sit up again and demand that John be merely beaten.

Edward Malise raised his head and looked at John.

‘Tell me!’ his Uncle George begged. ‘Why did you attack him?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill him,’ said another voice.

‘He meant to kill me .’

John looked into the dark, prey-seeking eyes.

‘He meant to kill me,’ said Edward Malise. ‘You all saw him!’

‘You killed my parents,’ said John.

John wept against the smooth grey bark. He shuddered and clung to the Lady Tree. He wept as he had not wept before.

So much loss, he thought. Mother! Father! The pain of loss! I can’t bear it!

A hedgehog rustled unnoticed among the leaves. Later, a fox trotted past, unworried by the still figure that embraced the tree. The gamy smell of the fox pulled John back into the present night.