Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

He felt the chill of his damp shirt-sleeve. He inhaled the night air and slid down to sit on his heels, braced against the tree, a little eased. Memory still flowed through him like the diverted Shir through its cellar pipes.

George Beester gave a great sigh of satisfaction, straightened and turned to Edward Malise. The other men’s voices died like a wave pulling back. Silence curled tightly around John, his uncle and Malise.

Malise shook his head as if dazed. He laid one hand on his brother’s body. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, I can’t get a grasp on this madness …’

‘You stood beside their coach and laughed!’ shouted John in fury. Surely all these wise older men could smell out the acting.

‘When?’ demanded Malise. ‘What coach?’

‘Your men blocked the door so they couldn’t escape, my mother, father and nurse!’

Malise passed a hand across his eyes and drew a long breath. ‘Can someone else take over this insane interrogation? Make sense…perhaps make this young man understand what he has done …’ His eyes met John’s again, briefly. ‘Unless he is possessed. And then he is beyond any help.’

John quivered with fury at the note of forgiving compassion in the man’s voice.

‘He’s not possessed by any devils,’ said George Beester, ‘but by memories no child should have.’ He raised his voice to reach everyone in the room. ‘When my nephew was seven, some of you will remember, my sister and her husband were burned to death in their coach. The boy was with them but survived. In spite of much time and expense, I never discovered their killers. I knew who might have wanted them dead …’ Beester sighed again and studied Malise with gratified certainty. ‘But I had no proof. The boy himself remembered nothing of that night until this evening, when he saw you and your brother.’

‘Your implication is too monstrous and mad for me even to take offence.’

‘Then it should be easy to answer,’ said Beester.

Malise searched the surrounding faces for hostility or support. ‘I swear that I am innocent. I did not kill this boy’s parents, even though some of you must know that I had good reason to hate them, as my family have had for two generations before. The bones of my family were stripped by those vulture Nightingale upstarts. Or do you all choose to forget the plundering barbarities of King Henry? Do you shut his victims out of your thoughts as fast as the Star Chamber was able to forget the meaning of justice?’

‘One barbarity never excuses another,’ said Sir James. ‘Nor do old stories of land disputes and exile answer the boy’s accusation.’ He looked severely at Malise. ‘You should be careful, moreover, how you fling around that word “barbarity”.’

‘No doubt highwaymen killed his parents – it happens often enough. The Malises are being blamed for the guilty conscience of the Nightingales.’

‘Where were you and your brother that summer?’ asked Sir James. ‘August, seven summers ago.’

‘How can I answer that, at a time like this …? But I don’t even need to answer it. I’ve been falsely accused by a shocked and frightened boy, whose brain, as his uncle has just testified, was addled by his tragic experience.’

John opened his mouth but his uncle’s hand closed hard on his wrist.

‘Seven summers ago,’ repeated Beester.

Malise stared into George Beester’s face. ‘It comes back to me now. I remember. My brother and I were both in the Low Countries…serving with a Flemish unit against Spain. We had just engaged the Count de Flores in a pointless skirmish.’

There was a murmur from one or two of the company members. Englishmen serving as mercenaries, in a foreign army. Former soldiers now playing at commerce with their blood money.

Malise felt the quiver of hostility. ‘I will prove this to be true and when I have, I will expect reparation from you. As I trust the justice both of God and man to punish this youth for murdering my brother.’

Malise looked around in the silence and saw the assessing looks. ‘It was seven years ago, and the boy was only seven at the time. Is this how you conduct the business of your company…wrestling truth and reason to the ground on the dusty memory of a fallible child? Sir James …?’ He turned in appeal to Sir James Balkwell.

‘We are all as shocked as you,’ said Balkwell to Malise. ‘And we regret your monstrous introduction to our Company. As to our business dealings, sir, we examine all propositions calmly and without prejudice. No one here has yet laid a hand on either truth or reason.’

‘Am I the one on trial, then?’ demanded Malise. ‘That man …’ he pointed at George Beester ‘… has as good as accused me of murder when his Satan’s whelp of a nephew has just killed my brother!’ His eyes returned to the slack limbs and oddly angled jaw.

‘The boy must be tried,’ said Balkwell. ‘It needs no examination to conclude …’

‘It was an accident!’ protested George Beester. ‘It was surely an accident. He may have meant to attack – and with good reason – but not to kill!’

‘We have more than enough witnesses to what happened,’ said Balkwell. ‘Intelligent men who have eyes and will report honourably what they saw.’ He turned to Edward Malise. ‘I’m sorry that you feel on trial at such a tragic moment. But the boy has also made a claim against you, and we must deal with it as judiciously as any other matter. Whatever my feelings, I cannot agree with his uncle that the death was an accident. Like you, I saw clear intent in his face. I wish, therefore, to examine why the boy is so enraged against you.’

I killed a man in rage, John thought. I should feel such a mortal sickness of my soul. But he still felt only the rage.

In prison, his newly acquired memory was still sharp as freshly broken glass. Time had had no chance to dull it. Seven years of rubbing and grinding took place in mere days. He lay on his cot, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling, again and again and again. Smoke, roasting meat, the screams of the horses and of his mother. His own hair on fire. Malise’s beak. His father’s groom who had saved him and almost certainly been killed while John slipped away through the bushes to fetch up at the farm. The thrust of his mother’s hands as he flew through the window. They had saved him and died.

John hoped that rehearsing his memories might wear them out, but rage, grief and guilt wore him out first. Rage was the most bearable; he spun it into a case around himself like a silkworm. Then he raged that he had not paid heed in that firelit room to what Edward Malise had said – to the reason his life had been destroyed – instead of staring in a trance at Francis Malise’s shoe soles. Then he sieved the memories again, for a detail, a phrase, a name, anything to give his uncle as evidence against the Malises.

Then he suddenly asked, why? Why did the Malises hate my family so desperately? That ambush had been a desperate act. He found the word ‘vulture’ lodged in his memory. He closed his eyes and saw again the flickering light on Francis Malise’s body, and his brother’s face. More words surfaced like dying fish. John curled tightly on his cot. Had the Nightingales truly been vultures?

After three weeks in prison, it finally occurred to John to become afraid, not of death but of how he would die. The rope – he had once watched friends of a condemned man hang on his feet beneath the Tyburn gibbet to speed the terrible slowness of strangulation. At best, he would be given a gentleman’s way out on the block. He tried to tell himself that he would merely leap cleanly from this life into the next. He would never see the bloody mess and the strange turnip thing that had once held his soul.