Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

A vestibule. A heavy door, slightly ajar. A porch. A passageway. John smelled the stench of offal and sewage as they crossed a bridge over the prison moat and passed through another gate. Then, a street. An unlit coach, and his uncle.

‘In! In!’

Horses’ hooves scraped on stone. Running water sluiced in a shadowed trench. Inside the coach, with the door slammed shut, John threw his arms around his uncle.

‘You’re not clear yet,’ said Beester, patting the broad young shoulders. ‘We must get you out of London tonight.’

‘How did you do it?’ demanded John. ‘How did you unlock the doors and remove the gaolers?’

‘Ahh,’ said George Beester with satisfaction. ‘It’s a venal age.’ He hesitated. He was pleased by his own foresight; he had extracted as much money as possible from the boy’s estates in the twenty-four hours after Francis Malise’s death, before the mill of the Star Chamber began to grind. John had bought his own freedom, at no cost to his uncle. It had been an elegant transaction. However, Beester was not sure that the boy would appreciate this elegance or understand his new estate in life.

‘Are you aware, nephew, that the Star Chamber now holds the deeds to all your estates and assets? Your escape will make them doubly forfeit to the Crown. Your present freedom is the sole residue of your inheritance.’

‘It’s more than enough!’ said John with passion. ‘Thank you! And thank you, aunt!’

‘I’m afraid it’s far from enough,’ replied Beester. ‘As you will learn.’ He studied the shadowy rectangles of darkened windows passing outside the coach. ‘Now I must hide you in a safe burrow somewhere.’

His uncle took him upriver by boat from a dock near London Bridge. John perched in the prow. He watched the sleeping city slide past, then the great dark houses of the Strand, then the jumbled buildings that made up Whitehall. Later, Chelsea village, and much later, the palace at Richmond. Because he was only fourteen, he couldn’t help thinking – now that he had escaped – that he was having the most amazing adventure.

‘This is what life feels like,’ he told himself, as the far, dark banks slid past and distant dogs barked. ‘I am being tested.’ Doubt still slept in his deserted prison cell. In John’s euphoria at leaving behind the terror of the rope and block, he now knew that his clear sight would return. His tale would end as it should, after battles, voyages, and vindications, in his own reclaimed kingdom at the side of a blue-eyed princess.

He leaned against the Lady Tree, too tired to move. He listened for a few moments to the rustle of her mermaid tail above his head. Then he noticed the hedgehog crackling and snuffling in the leaves by his feet, the danger of the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

My aunt is right. I must leave at once. I won’t let myself be arrested again. And to kill Malise here on Hawkridge Estate would be a shameful way to repay my uncle and his heirs. I’d spoil poor old Harry’s chances at Court for ever.

He imagined going back to his chamber now and packing. Stealing away to Mill Meadow, saddling his horse and riding away.

In which direction? he asked himself. How do I choose?

He stood a little longer without moving. Malise had known him but said nothing. Why?

He’s either playing with me or needs something. I should have paid more attention to what Hazelton was trying to say.

I won’t run tonight, he decided a little later. I’m too tired, and there’s too much to arrange. Unless I want to live as a vagabond outlaw, I must arrange my flight a little. If Malise hasn’t raised the alarm yet, he may wait a little longer.

He was past thinking.

He laid his hand on the Lady Tree in farewell. You outlasted me after all, he thought.

Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

I’d be a fool, thought John suddenly, to abandon everything before I know what Malise wants.

May 25, 1636. Mild and still. No dew. Turtle doves back in beech hanger. Apples in full blow at last.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

Zeal woke cautiously, like a small animal sniffing the air outside its burrow. She kept her eyes closed. In her experience there was seldom anything on the other side of her eyelids to hurry out to greet. She drew a resigned, waking breath. Then she sniffed again in drowsy surprise. The linen sheet and feather-filled quilt which covered her to her eyebrows smelled of sunlight. A small, surprising goodness to credit to the day’s account.

She stretched slim, naked limbs. Her eyes opened abruptly. Instead of plunging off the sudden edges of her narrow London school trestle bed, her fingers and toes, though spread as far as she could reach, lay still cradled in the softness of a vast featherbed.

She propped herself on her elbows, breathing quickly. She was on the deck of a ship-sized bed, in full sail across a strange sea of polished wooden floor. The bed hangings, flapped and draped, half-hid a distant horizon of diamond-paned windows. The morning sun had transformed last night’s cavern of darkness and wavering shadows. The brown coverlet was really faded red silk. The hangings were rich midnight blue. By torch- and firelight the night before, she had not seen the fat bulges and gadrooning of the four bedposts, or the dusty tapestry above the fireplace of Hercules holding the giant Antaeus in the air above his head. The bulgy bedposts made Zeal think of plump women’s legs wearing tight garters. Zeal imagined the legs beginning to dance.

Oh, yes! She breathed out a happy sigh.

A new, unexplored world. Another Indies, a new Virginia coast. At times in the past, she had felt exhausted by the need to learn yet another new terrain. But this one was different.

She heard an odd, distant, wavering noise which she would investigate later.

My own room for ever and ever! she thought. At last. This is it. She flung herself back onto her pillows to recover from the enormity of the idea. I shall wake up like this every morning from now on. No more shifting. I have finally begun the rest of my life.

Her new husband Harry lay in the next chamber in his own bed, where she meant him to stay for quite some time.

‘Husband,’ she repeated quietly to the embroidered blue silk of the canopy. ‘Husband.’ Testing it. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook her head in pleased disbelief. What a difference that word made. She was exactly the same girl as before, but because she had a husband her life had changed around her more than she could yet imagine. People already treated her differently.

‘My lady.’

Firmly, she set aside the memory of Mistress Margaret’s tight eyes and bared teeth. And of Harry’s glares across the dinner table.

I did it! she thought fiercely. I did it. Somehow, in spite of my uncle…I wanted it hard enough…All I had to do was want something hard enough and not care whether it was correct, or dutiful, or virtuous.

A spasm of anxiety curled her onto her side.

Selfish and wilful as it is, I mustn’t care what my uncle and aunt think!

For fourteen years she had tried to please by being good, but had found that she could never be good enough, nor be good in all the different ways different people wanted. She had been dutiful and loving to her parents, but they had deserted her when she was eight for the superior joys of Heaven. She had then tried to please the assorted relatives who took her in. (An allowance from her inherited estate more than covered the expense of feeding and boarding her.)

She soon grew confused. No sooner had she figured out the rules in one household (both spoken and unspoken) than she was shifted to another where she had to begin again. One aunt (on the Puritan side of the family) had valued quiet, self-effacing children, another (a socially ambitious beauty) preferred spirit. One uncle insisted on prayers four times a day, while another ranted against self-congratulating piety and self-serving humbug. Several cousins had taunted her for being thin and pinched and ugly, while her cousin Chloe, whom she thought quite beautiful, was jealous of Zeal’s red-gold wiry hair, blue eyes and fine pale skin.