Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

His chest felt tight. He circled the room and alighted at his table again. He fingered the lists that had shaped the last weeks. The black lines through each task were crossing off the rest of his life. Little remained to be done.

Even his Aunt Margaret’s chaotic domestic kingdom was reasonably in order. Feather mattresses were laid over the straw in the guest beds, and the grooms in the horse barn had extra rugs. Each time John passed the kitchen, some new panic there was breeding still more meat pies, braided cakes and vats of brawn. Sixty smoked hams hung from spikes beside twenty-eight flitches of bacon. Fifty hens were at this moment losing their heads and four pigs dangled nose-down dripping into pails in the butchery shed.

He picked up the accounts. Under them lay a letter from his cousin. John put the accounts down again, on top of the letter. He stirred his ink and began to cross out items on his aunt’s latest provision list with fierce blobbed lines.

Ten pounds of nutmegs. Done! Two hundredweight of sugar. Too expensive – use honey instead! Cinnamon…He threw down the pen and ran his hands through his hair.

Fear.

He swallowed. His demon was not Envy. It was Fear.

He pulled Harry’s letter from under the accounts. The fire dream had returned, for the first time in many years, the night that the letter arrived. Blotched and smeared, scrawled from edge to edge in a schoolboy hand, the letter looked harmless enough, like Harry.

… I beg you, dear coz, to prepar me a triumf worthy of a new Cesar (yore littel cozin and former play mate) who hardly knows himself yet in his new elavashun but likes it WELL ENOUGH.

I will bring my new wyf (more anon) and, alas, a stern senater of Rome (her unkel and gardian, with his wyf) Who would like to pluck off my laural wreeth. But better, I will also bring a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you, coz, in making his visit …

John re-read the last sentence twice. A cold weight settled in the bottom of his stomach. He ran his eyes blindly over the rest.

… need decent lodging for 8 grooms, 2 women, 6 coach horses, 4 cart ox…new shirts payed by me to all the estate…Guest mattresses please be dry and free of mice…silver piss pots if possible for guests …

He smoothed the letter on the table. Surely he had been forgotten in Whitehall by now. He was exaggerating his own importance. But Fear tightened its armlock.

His hand stroked the corner of his chin where a scar interrupted the neat beard.

‘… a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you …’

Harry means nothing by that. He’s a self-absorbed cheerful fool, not a traitor. I seek a false importance, John told himself. To make up for the fact that when Harry arrives, I will become who I really am – no one at all.

He kicked away his stool and left the office. Fear slid at his heels after him.

The wood-panelled corridor smelled of cheeses and spilled cider. John passed the open door of the housekeeper’s sitting-room and office that guarded the entrance to the locked storeroom. The centre of his aunt’s untidy web was empty. His Aunt Margaret, unmarried and a tough, dry-fibred weed of a woman surrounded by a halo of fluff, was elsewhere leading her house staff in a concerto of rising panic. John heard her voice faintly through the open windows.

‘Agatha! Agatha, where in Heaven’s…here, take this corner!’

Beyond the housekeeper’s room lay the kitchen. As John entered, a twelve-year-old housegroom who was counting candles nodded with moving lips, still counting. John turned right, through the long, narrow scullery and smock-room, and stepped out into a narrow, brick-paved alley. From beyond a brick wall at the left end of the alley, the dog yard in the basse-court echoed with yaps. Straight ahead, across the alley and through an arch lay his gardens, where man could constantly repeat the perfection of beginnings.

The herbier came first, built in the elbow where the chapel met the house, handy for the kitchen pots and for the still-room in the basse-court at the back of the house. A south-facing wall trapped the sun, to develop the herbal essences and ripen the grapes on the knotted Muscadine vine pinned to the wall.

The woody herbs in the long strip beds had been clipped that morning. John inhaled the brutal scent of bruised rue and the resin of the rosemary which he permitted, as a fond indulgence, to sprawl across the paved walk like a woman’s skirts. He tried to admire the naked, weedless dirt between the demure ranks of infant borages and clary.

I have been forgotten in London.

This likely truth did not cheer him as much as it should. He bent and pulled up a minute speedwell, then passed through a second arch into the Knot Garden.

He had reclaimed this square of earth from bramble and breeding rabbits and it still, though not today, gave him stabs of pleasure which he tried to see as satisfaction with honest labour, not wicked pride. Box entwined with germander outlined a four-cornered device of interlocking squares. Within these living walls, sharp-cornered as newly-planed wood, sat thymes, lavender cotton, wood strawberries and auriculas, which would cover the earth in full summer and delight all his senses.

The device itself was framed by a square of brick herringbone walks. Outside these walks lay a further square of four long beds in which grew John’s fragile darlings, his objects of study and his roses.

Not a leaf out of place. Not an unruly twig to nip. John plunged onward into the New Garden.

Where the Knot Garden was for contemplation, the New Garden filled bellies. It was nearly a hundred paces end to end and walled with brick to the height of eleven feet, with a low double brick fruiting wall as its long axis. That morning two gardeners were ridging the cucumbers in a hot bed made of horse-dung, built by John according to the Roman model. Eight weeding women sidled on their haunches along rows of feathery carrots and blunt young cabbages. Four more, under the eye of Cope the chief gardener, tended newly sprouted beans and lettuces. Birds perched in lines on the wall tops, waiting to swoop on the beetles and grubs so kindly being turned up for them.

My hortus conclusus , thought John, as Cope hailed him. Where I emulate the closed Garden that God built around all that he valued, to shut out the wilderness. In two more days, my Eden must open her gates.

‘… finches,’ Cope was saying.

‘Hire more boys to drive them off,’ John heard a distant self reply. ‘We’ll need all our fruit with this plague of guests.’

The two men walked a moment in silence. Cope stooped and pulled an early radish. He rubbed it clean against his leather apron, then gave it to John to taste.

John bent his senses to the peppery crunch and the prickle of hairy cloth-like leaves, but was distracted by the anxiety in Cope’s eyes.

‘An excellent radish, Cope. And the gardens are as ready as imperfect Nature can ever be. My cousin will be pleased.’

‘And you, sir?’ Cope was Cope junior, about John’s age and new to his responsibilities, trained by his father who had died that winter. John filled him with terror relieved by moments of shared satisfaction.

‘Adam’s own Paradise was never finer,’ said John. He tossed the radish leaves into a trug and fled before he was tempted to add that his opinion no longer mattered.

The three fishponds lay in a line behind the house, parallel to its length. They were fed from the western end by the slow, brown Shir which flowed lazily through them, gathered energy at the weir, slid a little faster toward the mill pond and then pounded along the race. John had diverted a channel from above the ponds through the cellar of the house to provide storage for wine and food that was cool on the hottest summer day. And though John’s tidying grip had loosened around the ponds, Nature still served man obediently with carp, pike, freshwater eels, rushes and willow withes.