Christie Dickason - The Lady Tree

The spring ducklings were already half-grown and the colour of dead rushes. A drake flapped on tiptoe along the surface of the middle pond, then lurched suddenly into the air. The accompanying clamour in the reeds died to an absent-minded murmur. John reached the bottom pond, crossed the narrow plank of the weir bridge and marched up the slope of Hawk Ridge into the precise grid of the orchard he had made.

Bees plunged in and out of the mud and wicker skeps John had set among the trees. The medlars were already blown. The Swan’s Egg pears had set. The buds of the later pears and apples were still tight and pink as toe-tips on the angled grey spurs. John emerged from the trunks of Great Russetings and Billiborues onto the grassy crest and looked back down at the house. In the grass at his feet, a runaway hen peered anxiously over the rim of an abandoned bucket where she had laid secret eggs.

Hawkridge House sat low in the valley, astride the buried stream, a modest H-shaped hall of pink brick, with a fine stone porch in the centre of the cross bar and a small crenellated chapel crouched on the north-east corner. She had been built with her head down just after King Henry died, when too many noble rumps were aiming at the same time for the English throne.

I do not aspire, the house seemed to say. I am one of the blessed meek.

The house and her estate had remained unraped while ambition and politics had burned greater manors and lopped overweening heads elsewhere.

John looked down at the single storey of the basse-court. Stillroom, dairy, dog yard, laundry, schoolroom, storage sheds, around a paved yard. Behind this fruitful jumble, the north front of the house rose like a smooth tawny forehead. Sun glinted on her leads and warmed the rosy brick of her dormers and crenellations.

Mine for eleven years, in truth if not in law. The womb of my invention, chief object of my will, the only true measure of my life on this earth. For the last eleven years I have hidden in her safe embrace.

John loved her as if she were a woman. Now he was preparing her for another man.

He stamped down on his jealous rage, but felt a new wash of fear. A void opened. There was nothing left for him to do. He could not see himself three days from now.

A bee rattled in the grass near his feet.

Even Nature rules against me, he thought. Take bees, a model of loyalty to the common good. When their kings become too numerous, they reluctantly destroy them.

He walked on, across the crest of Hawk Ridge, down through the hazel copses that gave game birds cover and up the steeper slope of the beech hanger.

Among the beeches stood the Lady Tree. Like her sisters, she was grey-trunked and copper-clawed now in the late spring. Pale sea-green leaflets were just twisting clear of their translucent claws. Like her sisters, she had been coppiced a hundred or so years before, her leading shoot cut out for firewood or a fence pole by an assart-holder or poaching peasant. Their side branches had grown into similar goblets around empty centres. Unlike her sisters, she was more than a tree.

I should cut her down, thought John as he always did. She’s too disturbing to be part of God’s design. But who on this estate would do it?

One of her branches had grown, not up but out, at the height of John’s hip, into a naked woman.

She was a little larger than life-size, stretched full length half on her side, shameless as if she waited for her lover. Her head and arms were hidden inside the trunk from which her two armpits arched. The armpits led to two breasts, tightly nippled with broken branch stumps. A ribcage, then a rounded belly and perfect navel. A bulging mound of Venus, then two voluptuous thighs began to curve gently upward. Above the thighs, stretched two slim calves. These elongated themselves, divided like a mermaid’s tail, divided again, then again into arching, springy branches as regular as lace.

She feigned sleep, one eye open to see what the man was up to. Yet another visitor. So many this spring. Never so many before.

She shook her amber claws, as pointed as frost, from which the pale green leaves already escaped.

Do I bless or curse? she asked, as she asked all visitors. Take your chance. I’m as sure as life, no more, no less. I make no false promises, but my roots reach far beneath your feet. Plant your deepest desires between the knobby curves, under my moss, and see what grows. Take a chance.

The earth between her roots was pocked with fresh mounds. John counted seventeen. A garden of fears and desires. He knelt and dug. He found a slip of parchment tied with hair, a prayer in misspelled Latin – Deliver Us from Evil.

He sat back on his heels and let out a shaky breath. Amen.

In other years he had found phials of menstrual blood and other vital fluids, names, pieces of silver, knife blades. His eyes traced her armpits, her breasts, her belly, her sex, and followed her legs upward. A fresh rowan wreath hung around one of her knees like a loose garter. High on the main trunk above her invisible head, someone had skewered a thrush.

I wonder if Dr Bowler knows who his real rival is on the estate, thought John.

So, she said to the man. You have finally realized that I am stronger than that garden of yours down there, that so-called little paradise behind her brick walls. Her space is full of silent battles. She is eaten up by her enemies. So small, so insignificant, so thorough, they eat holes in her walls and undermine her paths. She is dying from within. Take a chance with me!

Defiantly, he placed his left hand on the meeting of her thighs, to prove what or to whom, he was not sure. When Harry comes and I’m kicking my heels (if indeed I’m still welcome) I’ll draw her for my collection. An oddity.

Her bark was as firm as bone, and delicately rough like a woman’s fur. The pointed shadow under his fingers shook desire loose from its lashings at the back of his mind. He remembered the white, quivering flesh of the maid on the high windowsill.

It has been so long! he thought suddenly. Months without a woman, ever since my weeding woman Cat married her cooper and moved from the house to the village.

He leaned his forehead against the grey trunk. Lord help me! he thought. Not this as well.

Lust had found the crack in his wall that both fear and envy had missed. The flood broke through. His knees weakened. His throat felt swollen. His skin grew cold and damp. Fear and appetite tumbled together. Reason and good intent spun away downstream like dead leaves. He squeezed himself down onto his boot heels among the roots of the tree and pressed his back against her trunk.

I must be ill!

He thrust his hands into the leaf mould. His head fell back against the grey bark.

Lord, are you listening? I do not envy my cousin! I will not! I have had more than most men. I am grateful.

Nevertheless there was that other ghostly man with a different name, whom John had last known when he was fourteen.

I don’t know what he might have been today.

Dark emptiness scoured his gut. He felt as hollow as a bee tree, as fragile as a dried snakeskin. A breeze slid into his open collar, stroked his brown neck and teased the ends of his hair. The tree shook her mermaid tail gently above his head.

Spare me from envy. Absit invidia. Let there be no ill will. Ill will is unreasonable, and I have made myself into a reasonable man.

The tree lifted her branches on the back of the breeze and let them fall again.

John shivered.

I thought I was brave. But I am afraid, Lady. I fear. I fear and I want. Oh, how I want my own lands again. My own name. A reason for my life!

Once, rustled the Lady Tree. Once you had it all. Once. Once.

Then to her taunt, she added temptation.