Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

Rachel set a small chest at her side. While the maid put another log on the fire and shook out a loose day gown, bodice, petticoats and sleeves, Zeal lifted a book out of the chest. A Good Huswife’s Jewell had been a school text. Beneath it lay Of Domesticall Duties , which Mistress Hazelton had given her on her betrothal. Zeal herself had ordered The Boke of Nurture from a bookseller in St Paul’s as soon as her marriage had been agreed. She had learned all three books by heart. The precepts that governed cheesemaking, distilling, the moral well-being of the servants, the counting of linens and ordering of beer swilled around in her head. Each day she studied a little more. One day she would be sure of it all. As she munched her bread and sipped the ale, she read, closed her eyes, murmured to herself, and read again.

A good wife must not let the serving grooms wipe their hands on the curtains nor permit any man to piss in the fireplaces, Zeal reminded herself. A good wife must set a constant example of industry and piety to the rest of the estate family. She must manage the household spending and prevent waste in the kitchen. She must oversee cleanliness both in the dairy and in the personal linen of her maids. She must obey her husband in all things, and know how to bind a wound. Here in the country, while she needn’t know so much about buying clean water or choosing a freshly caught fish, she must know how to plant lettuces, pickle a cabbage and smoke a pig.

Zeal leaned back and blew out her flushed cheeks. She stood up decisively. She might as well begin carrying out her duties. Not on the curtains. Not in fireplaces. Watch out for moths, mice, dust. Count cheeses, turn linens…no, count linens and turn the cheeses. Her eyes closed with the effort of remembering and her lips moved as if she were at prayer…Dairy, no spitting at table, evening prayers, tinctures, eggs …

How can I count the linens or turn anything, she thought suddenly, until I know where they are?

‘Rachel!’ she called. ‘Please shake out another loose gown, and an older bodice of black wool, with a plain collar and no poxy lace on the sleeves to catch on doorhandles and candlestands!’

She left her maid on her knees among a spewing of wool, buckram, silk and leather from the travelling chests. Outside the antechamber to her room, she heard Mistress Margaret’s voice below, in the hall. Zeal ducked back through her own apartments. She would have to face her predecessor sooner or later, but not yet.

There was no answer behind the door on the far side which led into Harry’s apartments. Zeal entered the empty room to begin her dutiful voyage on the high seas of being a good wife.

Before half an hour had passed, Zeal was having more fun than she had ever had in her life. From the first timid lifting of a coffer lid to examine the linens left at the bottom, she quickly arrived at the intense, wicked pleasure of licensed nosiness. There is no thrill so profound as that of flinging open strange chests, other people’s cupboards, and closed doors. That it was her duty to snoop made the pleasure even greater.

Beyond Harry’s apartment, she found a little parlour above the chapel at the east end of the house. She put her nose over the ledge of the internal window and peered happily down onto brightly-coloured tiles and carved pews. A half-naked female acrobat balanced on one of the pew finials. On others dolphins leaped and cheerful-looking cocks stretched to crow. A monkey in a hat sat on his curled tail. Not a skull or other memento mori in sight.

I knew I liked this place, she thought. Her delight was enhanced by the film of dust on the windowsill.

Mistress Margaret needs my help after all.

She doubled purposefully back through Harry’s rooms and her own into the rest of the main wing.

‘Good morning, my lady.’ A housemaid curtseyed on the landing of the stairs.

‘Isn’t it!’ replied a flushed and happy Zeal.

Zeal grew happier and happier as she pried and poked and peeked her way through a series of other chambers. She buzzed with intent, her earlier fears forgotten.

Her breath came short as she fingered through musty treasures. Combs with hairs still caught in them, wooden teeth, rings without their stones. A squashed straw hat and yellowed silk stockings still humped and bubbled by absent toes. Caps, collars, and an entire silken garden embroidered on a single kid glove in faded chain stitch and French knots.

She sneezed from the dust in the chests and slapped at tiny moths which flew up on dusty grey wings. She would have lavender and wormwood tucked in among the clothes. Mistress Margaret was perhaps a little old to keep track of all the chests and coffers. Zeal’s help might even be welcome.

She lifted out the crumpled muslin tiers of a distiller’s sieve, slashed sleeves still curved to former elbows, the concentric circles of an old-fashioned iron farthingale, its ties still crumpled from the knots that marked the circumference of a once-living waist, perhaps that of a younger Mistress Margaret. Zeal stared at the farthingale. Mistress Margaret must once have been as young as Zeal was now.

In the base of a bench chest she found parts of an old suit of armour, awry as the broken shell of a dried-up beetle. It was like one her grandfather had worn, dented by fighting, a little rusty and dark in feel. Zeal imagined the man who had once worn it. Fierce, fast-moving in spite of the armour’s weight, with intense eyes that glared out through the visor. Rather like Harry’s cousin John. She put her hand into the hinged carapace of one glove and tried to close her fingers around an imagined sword hilt. The metal edges cut into her fingers.

To be such a one, who could wear that! And do those deeds. She felt a little queer and took her hand out again. But her imagined man joined the growing crowd of ghosts and present lives that Zeal pulled from chests and cupboards and clutched to herself. For the first time since her parents had died, she was writing a new history of the world with herself in the centre instead of on an edge.

Beyond a first-floor parlour and pair of sleeping chambers she turned left into the Long Gallery, which made up the entire first floor of the west wing of the house. The gallery would have held eight carriages end to end and was all of golden wood – waxed floor and panelled walls carved with bosses and folds – which creaked conversationally beneath her feet and hands. Sun poured in through windows down the long outer wall and across the south front. The gallery was warm and smelled of honey and beeswax polish.

‘Ahh,’ Zeal said aloud. She lifted her skirts and ran from the door to the window at the far end. The floor reverberated under her feet like a giant drum. Her footsteps echoed back from the panelled walls. She sat for a moment on the wooden seat beneath the window, panting happily.

There was a fireplace in the centre of the long, unwindowed inner wall. Zeal trotted over to it and wrinkled her nose. Sure enough, there was a problem there to be set right. This discovery made her even happier.

John rose early and listened for some time at his open door. Then, ignoring the silk breeches and padded doublet that Arthur had laid out for him, he put on his woollen work breeches, linen shirt and leather jerkin. He breakfasted in his room on a quick mug of ale and a slice of cold meat pie.

Without comment, Arthur folded John’s good clothes and replaced them in a chest. Arthur was twenty-four, fair-haired and freckled. He had been born on an estate near Basingstoke and sent to work as a housegroom at Hawkridge House when he was ten. As boys, he and John had fished, swum, wrestled and talked whenever John visited his uncle’s estate. At eleven, Arthur had shown John the Lady Tree and dared him to put his hand on the meeting of her thighs.