Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

The yellow cur waited a moment, then sat and pressed its muzzle against the man’s thigh. John’s brown hand stroked absently. The dog brushed the gravel with its tail. It sighed with delight. The man did not usually stand still for so long.

Above John’s head a breeze rippled and lifted the corners of scarlet and yellow curtains flung out to air over the sills of the upper windows of the pink brick house.

John closed his eyes. He hated to think about himself. A man should be master of his mind. Instead, his had mastered him, and he had no time for such weakness.

He flew through the ring of fire, fell like Icarus away from the dreadful heat of the sun.

He squeezed his thoughts smaller and smaller until they shrank to the feel of the cold, friendly nose in his palm.

The fire leaped, closed its claws on his scalp and lit the arc of his fall.

Indignant and terrified, he shaped his palm to the dog’s flat furry skull.

‘What’s wrong with me, eh boy?’ he asked the dog, under his breath. ‘Why has this come back to me now?’

The curly yellow tail scraped twice across the gravel. John looked down, suddenly jealous. I want to live just like you, in a rich web of scents, he thought. To chase rabbits, dig badgers, beg kitchen scraps, lift a hind leg where I like and mount an occasional bitch, with no grief for the past or fear for the future.

He looked back towards the house and caught the two weeding women eyeing him. Everywhere on the estate, that same look in everyone’s eyes – a mix of curiosity, pity and glee – had maddened him ever since the news of his uncle’s death had arrived.

‘Good morning, sir!’

John wrily noted their confusion as they dropped their eyes, but missed the note of affectionate respect.

His uncle, Sir George Beester, had died three months ago, five years after buying a baronetcy from King Charles and eighteen months after the death from dysentery of his only child, James. The news of Sir George’s death reached Hawkridge House three weeks after his burial, along with the news that his heir was now the only son of his only brother, John’s younger cousin Harry. John was unfortunately in the female line.

Harry had inherited everything, as was the practice in order to keep estates intact: the Somerset wool-producing estate, the London house, the business interests, the title of baronet and Hawkridge estate. In two days, Harry’s carriage would roll through the gates and dump into all their lives not only Harry, but his London friends, London servants, London in-laws, and rich new London wife. In two days the real master would arrive to claim his own.

He would take back from John the control over every penny spent. He would decide what work was or was not to be done, and who would do it. He would choose who could live in which cottage and who would use which field. He could turn any person he pleased off the estate, to go and make a living somewhere else if they could.

No one asked me to meddle for the last eleven years, John told himself. It suited me. Now I must accept the truth that Harry can turn me out of my own bed if he likes. He stared at the iron gates through which the alien carriages would roll.

Tuddenham, the estate manager, waved from the top of the long drive that curved down from the brow of the hill between the avenue of beeches. He loped down the hill, bald as a stone and lopsided from an accident with a cart. John crossed his arms and waited, happy to be distracted from both Cousin Harry and the remembered fire.

‘The holes by the gatehouse is filled now, sir,’ said Tuddenham.

‘Keep two men working on the road itself till we can hear their carriages creak,’ said John. ‘Muddy or not, Hampshire roads are better than what I hear of London streets.’

Tuddenham looked with approval at the scraping, pulling, raking and polishing in the forecourt. ‘You’ve got them all on the hop this morning, sir. The fox is nearly at the henhouse door, eh?’ His voice was a touch too hearty.

John bared white teeth, whose full number and colour were a mark of privileged diet, as were his full head of dark acorn-coloured hair and neat, healthy, curling russet beard. ‘And aren’t we all shuffling on our perches!’

Tuddenham slid him a sharp, oblique glance. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

The scarlet and yellow curtains snapped overhead in the silence that followed. Both men looked up. A housemaid leaned dangerously out of an open window to polish the diamond panes of glass. As she rubbed, the top of a blancmange breast quivered in time with her skirts. When she felt the men’s eyes on her, she rubbed harder. The two men glanced at each other and smiled, rescued from awkwardness by the shared perfunctory lust.

‘I must go finish the accounts,’ said John. He gave the dog’s nose a final rub and went reluctantly into the cool shadows of the big house.

The estate audit room at the front of the east wing served as his office. John ignored the accounts on his table. He ran his hand along a whale’s rib that hung on one wood-panelled wall and waited for his spirits to lift. But he stayed rooted in his office tucked behind the housekeeper’s room, within smell of the kitchens, instead of swooping along the bone, through time and space on the steed of his imagination, onto the bloody sea-tossed deck of the ship that had captured the beast. An early flesh-fly buzzed in tight circles near the ceiling.

He turned next for comfort to the coffers that held his books, but his teachers and friends, Pliny, Columella, Cato, Varro and Virgil, lay unbeckoning in their caskets, as mute as the dead men that they really were.

John grew frightened. He did not recognize this state of being.

He opened the drawers of his collection, on which he spent every minute he could spare from estate work. He gazed with rising panic at lizard bones, rare seeds (among them a plum-stone carved with the Passion of Christ), green and scarlet beaks, three strange fishes turned to stone, eighty-six labelled eggs, a dried elephant’s pizzle, shell creatures, and minerals that looked like toadstools. A few weeks ago, these had shimmered with import, like sun on the horizon of the sea. Now they lay slack in their drawers, as dull as the eye of a dead trout. Not even his oddities stirred him.

With his forefinger, he stroked his strand of fleece from a borometz. He had pursued the creature for uncounted joyful hours through the multi-layered ambiguities of the classical authorities – a plant-animal, a sheep that grew on a tulip stem and died when it had grazed a full circle. The crinkled wool looked very like the tufts snagged by bushes from his own sheep. He knew now that he had never believed.

He closed the drawer and stepped to the window, desolate. Once, with the passion and joy of secret vice, he had arranged, listed and described, in meticulous categories, drawer by drawer. For eleven years his hungry mind had chewed on these fragments of the forbidden world and been almost satisfied. He had never imagined that this passion might abandon him so abruptly.

He pressed his forefinger hard against a spike of a swollen blow-fish on the windowsill. His blood ran as slowly as chilled grease.

Lord, don’t let this strange, fearful torpor be envy of Harry, he begged. Send me a more dignified demon to wrestle. The fly circled his head.

He pushed open the window and sniffed the medicinal tang of rosemary and thyme, sweetened by the citrus tinge of freshly clipped box. From his bedchamber above the office, he could clearly see the entire labyrinthine perfection of the Knot Garden which had been his first mark on the estate, made eleven years ago.

Harry will find more than I did when I skulked here to hide as a fourteen-year-old outlaw. Immaculate brick walls instead of rotting wattles, woodpiles stacked neatly as carpets, a herd of sheep with the new short-staple fleece, and new gardens in which (however temporarily) Nature’s rush to disorder has been checked. Even the cabbages in the Field Garden grow as neatly as French knots in a lady’s embroidery.