The Memory Palace
Christie Dickason

For Tess, my sister, first playmate and fellow palace builder

‘What House more stately hath there bin. Or can be than is Man?’

George Herbert

The only principles which our intellect draws purely from its own resources are those of mathematics and logic. And so the extension of space must be measured along Mathematic parameters.

– Descartes

Poiesis – the making of something out of nothing

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

PREFACE

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Acknowledgments

Keep Reading

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

Letter from John Nightingale, at Southampton, to Zeal Beester of Hawkridge Estate, near Bedgebury, Hampshire. October 1639.

Sweetest Zeal – My messenger stands with outstretched hand. My ship is spreading its wings. I would tear out my heart and send it if I could. In its place must come mere dogged, struggling words. I want no mistaking. I meant what I said. I will stay true to you. If you now, or ever, regret your own vow to me, I beg you to tell me at once.

Exile is kinder than the block, for leaving can be undone while death cannot. So, farewell forever, England. But our finite parting, though scarcely bearable, must be bridged by passionate hope.

To pay my passage so suddenly, and with my lands and modest fortune now forfeit to the Crown, (I still swear that I am no traitor!) I was forced to sell myself as indentured labour to a M. Etienne Baulk, tobacco farmer on the island of Nevis for the usual term of seven years. Seven years. These are not beyond us to survive – a sea captain and his wife, or a soldier’s family, often endure as much. On release from servitude, I am promised ten pounds – a fair beginning for the fortune I mean to make for us in the West Indies. When I can be sure of a life safe for a woman, I will send for you. I beg you, write to me often. To know that you are there, and love me, will give me strength to do whatever I must to ensure that we can be together again.

Oh, my beloved girl, my other self – though writ in a somewhat smaller hand – keep safe. And keep faith in me, who by the Grace of God, will be your husband—John.

Post scriptum Think of me whenever you see that cursed cat which still has leave to occupy your bed, and remember who gave him to you. I kiss your eyes, and must stop there with my pen but not in my thoughts.

1639

1

Philip Wentworth stepped, unsuspecting, out of the tack room into the quiet grey autumn dawn of the day that would change the rest of his life. A pleasing smell of polished leather and horse clung to his frayed, old-fashioned clothes after his night on a straw mattress among the harnesses and saddles. The world still slept. He stood for a moment listening to the hush. He might have been the only man alive and he liked it that way.

Then a drowsy blackbird sang a single muted note. Another replied. A thrush interrupted. Sparrows disagreed. Suddenly, voices in every tree, every bush, every tall tussock of grass joined the clamour until the air vibrated with their exuberant racket.

He watched the quick flicks of movement. His ear picked out a late chiff-chaff calling its own name, the repeated song of the thrush, the mellow, heart-breaking fluting of a blackbird. Then the churr of a white-throat, and the warbles of robins.

It was a trick he had learned, of paying close attention to every small detail of life. If he gripped hard enough onto the observations and sensations of each moment, he could haul himself hand over hand through the day without having to remember.

He set off across the corner of the stable yard with a sack slung over his shoulder, carrying a fishing pole stout enough to hold a twelve-pound tench. As on every other day, he meant to fish.

At the shadowed dung heap behind the horse barn, he leaned his pole against the dung cart, took up a fork left leaning against the brick wall of the barn and began to turn over the steamy clods. From time to time, his stocky figure leaned forwards to pick out the pale squirming maggots which had been generated (so his reading of Pliny assured him) by the heat in the crumbling clumps of horse shit and straw. He dropped the maggots into a jar half-filled with damp grass cuttings. He straightened to draw in a deep breath.

The silence of the stable yard was thick with the warm smells of animals, fresh hay, dung, the damp iron of the pump by the watering trough, and a sharp yeasty punch to the back of his nose which seeped from the brew house.

But the smell of the iron threatened to stir memories.

Too much like the smell of blood.

He forced his attention onto the feel of the polished wooden handle of the fork, the heft of the dung.

Why, he asked himself as a distraction, are horses so superior to both cattle and pigs in the quality of their excreta? Even though horses eat much the same diet as cows?

A good try. Will it work?

He put three more maggots into the jar. Made himself notice their velvety wriggle between his fingertips.

On the other hand, horses were undeniably superior to cattle in both nature and intelligence. Could there be a positive correlation between elevation of nature and quality of base elimination?

An interesting question, though not one that he could debate with just anyone. There were so many questions to be answered when a man at last began to ask them. Questions also filled the moment. As did books, if approached with care.

He put both hands in the small of his back and stretched impatiently.

Not many men of your years can still sleep well on a tack room floor, he reassured himself.

Liar! You slept badly and your joints ache.

I’m not taking to age with good grace…

Grace. There’s an interesting thought.

Suddenly, without warning, he had arrived at another dangerous moment.

Inside the barn, aroused by his presence, the horses began to stamp and blow loose, flapping sighs.

Listen. Just listen.

In the loft of the hay barn behind him, a groom sneezed. Then he heard the murmur of sleepy voices. From the cow barn came a pained lowing and the first rattle of buckets. A rat scuttled for cover, its claws tapping the cobbles like a quick tiny shower of rain.

Moving swiftly now, he put the jar of maggots into the sack and collected his fishing pole. Beyond the cow barn, an explosion of cackles announced the arrival of breakfast for the hens. He walked fast to escape before anyone who still had not learned better could try to snare him in cheerful conversation. To be certain, he scowled ferociously.

However, he paused outside the gate from the kitchen garden onto the rough turf of the slope between the house and the fishponds. A radiant sliver of hot light glowed above the beech hanger to the east of the house. On the crest of the hanger, sparks of light flashed through the dark, stirring mass of the beeches. As he watched, the rising sun began to lay a flush across the water meadows upstream. Then all the trees on every side suddenly turned unnaturally vivid shades of green, punched with holes of black shadow and touched by red, orange and gold where the chilly nights had begun to bite.

A gift I don’t deserve, he thought. The more poignant because I can’t know how many more such gifts I may get, deserved or not.

He set off again towards the river, frowning and shaking his square, short-cropped head. If a man had to think, he should limit himself to mathematics or fish. The future was no safer than the past. For Philip Wentworth, it was a road down which death advanced at a steady pace. Even the present alarmed him just now.

Lodging here at Hawkridge, where the Scottish war and the wrangling in London between the king and his detractors seemed as distant as Caribbean thunder squalls, he had tried, with mixed success, to become as thoughtless as the frogs on the banks of the fish ponds or the silly, empty-headed hens.

Wouldn’t mind being an old tomcat either, he thought now. Like you, you cocky devil. He watched the sinuous, purposeful explorations of a ginger tom.

Come from sleeping on her bed, have you? Our young mistress Zeal should know better than to woo you away from your proper profession of barn cat.

He imagined lying stretched out on a wall in the sun, filled only with heat and comfort, twitching once in a while in a dream of the hunt. As for the rest of a tom’s business, well. Never mind. But, once. Oh, yes.

Silver-haired, and barrel-chested under his frayed, old-fashioned black coat, he looked a bit like an ancient greying tom. He even had the slightly stiff-legged walk as he followed the track from the house to the river.

This track led first to the lowest of the three fish ponds made two generations earlier by diverting water from the Shir. A plank footbridge crossed the sluice that spilled water from the lowest pond back into the natural flow of the river. Around the banks of the ponds stood an incongruous coven of marble sea nymphs conceived for some great Italian garden. Now they tilted and yearned on their ornate marble plinths on the muddy country banks where they found themselves instead.

The old man laid his hand on the cool bare buttock of the nearest nymph. Psamanthe. Or perhaps Galatea. A pretty thing, either way, cradling her conch shell half-raised to her lips, as if to sip from it, or play it like a horn. Sir Harry, who until recently had owned Hawkridge Estate, may, in his aspirations, have confused this Hampshire backwater with a grand villa in Rome but at least he recognized a pretty woman.

All too well, as it turns out, but that’s none of your affair, you old frog.

He patted the buttock and turned left up the line of ponds to continue the careful, habitual construction of his day.

As he did every morning, he first examined the carp in the top pond. They were grazing on snails among the pots of grass sunk into the clear green water. The largest of the polished golden brown shapes, four of them, each weighing as much as a medium-sized piglet, were being saved for Christmas.

Retracing his steps back downstream, he next eyed the brassy-flanked chub and black-striped perch in the middle pond, where they swam with the senseless placidity of creatures whose every need is met. Until the net and cooking pan.

‘As for you, my friends…’

In the deep water of the third, lowest pond, the long still shadows of pike hung poised in the shadows of lily pads. Fresh water wolves, forced to wait for a careless duckling or reckless frog. Their natural prey in the middle pond taunted them from behind the safety of one sluice gate. Another gate below locked their cage.

He stared down into the water. The pike seemed to him to radiate a silent, waiting rage.

He turned away to head down river. These creatures were the fish man’s affair. He never fished for the captives in any of the ponds.

The burnt ruins of the central hall and west wing of Hawkridge House now lay on his right. The low brick sheds of the basse-court – the dairy, the wash house and the still room – had survived the recent fire, as had the chapel and the east wing to which it was attached.

Thinking selfishly, the damage could have been worse – and he tried to spare himself the discomfort of thinking any other way. He could sleep again in his usual chamber behind the chapel, which he occupied for forty pounds a year, as soon as the inner wall of the east wing was braced against collapse. His books and small number of other possessions were safe, although smoked like hams. The tiny globe of his present world had not been much shaken.

Someone was on the very edge of the chapel roof.

He already knew that his world had just been given a violent shove. Nevertheless, he tried to resist.

He crossed the bridge over the bottom sluice, headed for the track that followed the river downstream to the mill. Then he looked back again at the chapel.

Never look back, he told himself fiercely. Remember where it got Orpheus and Lot, all of them, heathen and otherwise.

Bright hair caught the early morning sun, as vivid as an autumn leaf.

In a flash, he abandoned ground won painfully over nineteen years. He threw down his sack and pole. Turned back. With his black coat jouncing like a loose animal pelt, he began to run.

2

The top of Hawk Ridge began to glow as if the seam that stitched it to the sky had parted to let fire leak through. By then, Zeal had already broken her promise to herself. She had vowed that by dawn she would find the courage to jump off the roof.

As she feared only two things, losing control and ignorance, she found jumping doubly hard. First would come the helpless fall. And no one could ever teach you how the end would feel.

Perhaps my heart will stop before I hit, she thought. The more she imagined falling, the more likely that seemed.

She had spent the night on the chapel roof, arms wrapped around her knees while her thoughts scrabbled and squeaked in panic. Reason, when she could catch hold of it, always hauled her back to the same terrible place. There was no other way.

All I have to do is tilt forwards. Fold my wings and stoop like a hawk into darkness and safety.

But those intolerable seconds of falling had to come first.

She leaned out over the edge of the chapel roof, steadying herself with one hand on the crenellated parapet. Now that she could begin to see them in the growing light, the brick walls and paved walks of the herb garden below her looked far harder than she had imagined during the night. The welcoming pillow of darkness had turned into a hungry mouth full of sharp-cornered teeth.

She observed a quiver of terror, beginning just behind her ears, then shooting down through her throat, chest and belly to crimp the skin on the tops of her knees.

One of my…of this body’s…last sensations, she thought.

She swallowed and felt the pressure of her tongue against the back of her lower teeth, the slight roughness of the teeth and the smooth slippery wall of her lower lip. In a few more moments, all this feeling would end. She could not think where it would go instead. Along with all the other stored-up sensations of her seventeen years. As precious as they were to her, such sensations seemed far too petty for Heaven. About which she was not certain, in any case.

If only it weren’t going to be such a beautiful morning.

I can’t bear to miss it! she thought.

The sun had grown too bright to look at directly. Its light now reached the bottom of the river valley where the house stood. She had seen the Shir rise after a heavy rain until it spread across the water meadows in leaden sheets. Now, it glinted between edgings of willow like a line of dropped coins.

She looked down at what was left of her house.

The fire burned again against her eyelids. During the night and following day while it had been alive, the fire was an overwhelming presence, like God or royalty, hungry, terrifying and beautiful at the same time. They had all seemed so puny and presumptuous in fighting it. Except John, on the roof, possessed, taking chances she could not bear to watch, but did. She had breathed all her strength into him, held him safe with her will. If he had fallen and died, her emptied shell would have crumbled into ash.

‘But I knew you wouldn’t let me fall,’ he told her, when she later reproached him for taking such risks, touching his face, his hair and hands.

Now she tested the texture and resilience of her own cheek, as if storing up memories of herself to take into the darkness. Her fingers explored her lips, testing how they might feel to another hand. Even now, their softness still startled her. Until recently, she had never thought of herself as being fashioned to give delight.

His delight had astonished her so much that once she had even, with curious disbelief, and the door barred, examined her quim in a hand-glass.

It had been hard to look straight at it. She could hardly believe that the little ginger beast, that hairy sea shell, had anything to do with love. She believed even less that the sight of it could give such pleasure.

She stroked the peach fuzz on her upper lip.

Only three weeks ago, she had stood on this same roof, with Hawkridge Estate spread out below her, watching for his return from his own estate at Richmond, near London. Even waiting had been delicious. She had spread her arms to the late afternoon sun, closed her eyes and imagined herself lifting, like thistledown caught in an updraught, so alert and alive in every fibre that she had shivered with delight at the tug of a faint breeze on the hair at her temple.

She shuffled her buttocks a little farther over the edge. Breathed in, to fill herself with the void in advance, so to speak. To join it by degrees, as if such a thing were possible.

Don’t look down. Just do it.

Please, God, don’t let me scream.

As she leaned forwards, a sharp corner of his letter in her bodice prodded her breast.

I’ll read it just once more before I jump.

She unfolded the paper, still warm from her skin.

Sweetest Zeal,…I would tear out my heart and send it if I could…

She rocked in misery. She had shouted at him when he told her, had blamed him for pig-headedness that had brought about this horror. Even without other cause, she deserved to die for that cruelty.

…I meant what I said. I will stay true…

And so will I!

I regret only that I did not make you take me with you, regardless of the dangers. I should have followed secretly and stowed away! I would have worked in the fields beside you.

She held his letter against her face, breathed in the smell of damp paper and the wax seal, imagined that she could also smell a trace of him.

I will be true to my vow, she thought. Faithful until death.

She saw the fine, lean lines of his hand and how the tendons shifted under his skin as he moved the pen. Her fingers searched like a dowser’s wand for the exact places he had touched.

She could not wait seven years. She could not wait even seven months.

She wondered if he would feel the shock in his own sinews, lift his head as if at an unexplained noise.

3

‘It won’t work!’ At the foot of the ladder, Philip Wentworth stood panting and clinging to a rung as if holding himself upright. ‘Did you hear me? It won’t work! Not high enough!’

She closed her eyes. ‘Go away!’

‘I’m coming up.’ Without waiting for her answer, he began to climb the ladder.

Jump now! she warned herself. Or you’ll have to endure another night like last night, all over again. But if she did jump, he would now feel responsible.

She sighed and leaned back. It was beyond belief that the old estate hermit should choose now, of all times, to turn sociable. She heard him stop on the way up to puff and wheeze. Then his head appeared above the parapet. She looked away, pinched with desperate fury. He heaved himself onto the roof and settled beside her on the edge. After a moment, his breathing eased and he gave a little cough.

They sat in silence. The intense greens and yellows of the beech hanger began to bleach in the growing brightness of the sun.

‘So?’ she asked at last. She still could not look at him.

Silently, he tossed a fragment of moss out into the air and watched it fall into the garden below. ‘You’re waiting for argument?’

‘I’m not a fool.’

‘But I understand the pull of the edge. If you’re secretly hoping to be dissuaded, I’m not your man.’

‘Then why did you climb up?’

‘If you wish it, I will, of course, be glad to argue that you’re young, beautiful and much needed on this estate. I will even, if you like, add that the world is precious, that despair is a sin and that taking your own life is a worse one.’ Another clump of moss arched through the air. ‘I’ve always wondered what fool decreed that suicide was a crime to be punished by death.’

She finally turned to look at him. ‘Why come up?’

‘To advise you the best way to do it.’

‘You’ve come to help me kill myself?’

‘You sound outraged.’

She shrugged, then shook her head.

‘Don’t mistake me. Nothing would please me more than to talk you out of dying.’

‘Hah!’ she said with grim triumph.

‘Is there no other way? At seventeen you haven’t begun.’

‘I knew you were lying.’

‘I need to be certain,’ he said quickly. ‘And don’t be a fool! This roof is not high enough for a clean death.’

She leaned. Closed her eyes.

‘Oh, go to the devil, then!’ he said sharply. ‘But I tell you, you will survive! Most likely crippled and helpless as a babe, depending on others to eat, to dress…even to change your soiled clout. I know, I’ve seen it.’

She opened her eyes and looked down. ‘What else do you suggest, then? Must I drown myself in one of the fish ponds? Or impale myself on a hook?’

‘There are other ways.’

‘Believe me, I’ve considered them all.’

‘I very much doubt that.’

‘What can you know, living here…? Forgive me, I’m too desperate to be civil.’

‘I’m not in the least offended.’ He stared at his hands while he opened and closed them five times. ‘I understand, madam, that this is difficult for you. But it is not altogether easy for me.’

‘All it will cost you is words of advice.’

‘But my advice involves confession, you see.’ He fell silent and stared moodily across the valley to the slopes of Hawk Ridge.

She studied him sideways with a surge of curiosity. He had come with the estate, like its fields and trees. A rent-paying, gentleman sojourner, already in residence when she had arrived as a fourteen-year-old bride.

‘I can’t,’ he said suddenly, with decision. ‘Forgive me. But I had sworn never to reveal myself to anyone here.’ He prepared to rise.

‘Even when it concerns her life?’

‘Even then.’

‘But if I am dead, I will have to keep your secret. Your confession will cost you nothing while it will oblige me.’

He sighed and looked at her at last. She saw a profound uneasiness in his eyes. ‘Very well. You prevail.’ He levered himself to his feet.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘With your permission, I would like to continue this discussion at a lower altitude.’

‘If you are toying with me, I shall jump right now.’

Giving her a cool look that made her heart jump against her ribs, he slapped at the back of his long black coat. ‘Don’t threaten me, mistress. I said I’d tell and so I shall.’

He held out a hand to help her rise. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you to go down. And I’d be grateful if you’ll do the same for me. Will you come fishing?’

Zeal followed Wentworth to retrieve his pole and sack from where he had dropped them by the lowest pond. In silence, they crossed the sluice bridge, then followed the muddy track downstream towards the mill.

How did I come to be here? she thought.

‘You don’t want my advice,’ he said at last. ‘You want the advice of my former self.’

She looked sideways at his strong nose and pugnacious chin. Though he was not as tall as John, and was a little stiffened by age, she had to walk fast to keep up with his purposeful strides.

‘And what was that?’ she asked.

‘An adventurer, you might say.’

‘I thought you were going to say you had been an executioner, or a footpad, or a murderer.’

‘Who told you that an adventurer is not all those things?’

‘Do you have a gun?’

He gave her an amused look. ‘Can’t shake you loose from the main point, can I? Yes, I have a gun. Most likely rusted solid among my nightshirts and stockings. I also have a dagger, a Spanish rapier, a dented buckler, an old-fashioned broad sword, and a poison ring bought in Italy. You can take your pick of ’em.’

He plunged off the track down a narrow, nettle-lined path along the very edge of the bank. They passed a hectic narrow rush where the river first stretched over hidden rocks like pulled sugar candy, then crashed into turmoil.

He is toying with me, she thought as she slipped on the mud and yanked her skirts free of the bushes.

Around a smooth elbow of a bend, the Shir widened into a polished pool rimmed with rushes and weed.

She stopped to untangle her hair from an overhanging branch. ‘What is a dangerous adventurer doing here at Hawkridge pretending to be a fisherman?’

‘I take exception to your saying that I pretend to be a fisherman…here we are.’ He stopped and peered down into the water.

Though he lived in her house, as many solitary people lodged in houses not their own, she had never before had opportunity to observe him. When not out fishing, he kept to his own two small rooms. He ate alone and refused all invitations to join the house family in the hall. He never came to prayers in the chapel. From time to time, he had shared a pipe in the gardens after supper with John and Doctor Bowler, the estate parson. Infrequently, he visited their neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet at High House, where Zeal and some of her house family had been lodging since the fire. But Zeal had never met him there. She had had to feed her curiosity with distant glimpses of his still figure by the edge of one piece of water or another.

He was at least sixty years old. Still a large man. Thick through the chest, but the shins beneath his stockings were pared down to sinew and bone. The rest of him between neck and knee was hidden under his bulky old-fashioned coat. The coat itself was tailored from fine wool and silk but had worn as smooth and green as a horsefly’s tail on the collars and cuffs.

A dangerous old man, she thought with interest. He must not think that I trust him or his promises. He won’t outwit me, whatever he might intend. I can’t let him.

She rubbed at the welts of nettle stings that had sprung up on the backs of her hands. ‘How must I die, then?’

Wentworth leaned his pole against a waterside oak and studied the undulating scales of light on the greenish surface. He gave a small grunt of satisfaction. Then he threw a handful of maggots into the water and returned to sit on the exposed roots of the oak. ‘We must wait till they recover from our arrival and start to feed again. Please sit down. You’ll frighten the fish.’

She continued to stand. ‘Were you also a hangman? And a highway man?’

‘I was a plain soldier,’ he said, with an edge of irritation in his voice. ‘Will that satisfy you? And my first concern is pain…’ He held up a warning hand and jerked his chin towards the water. ‘Expostulate if you must, but sotto voce… Those bent on dying imagine only the end of suffering but ignore the anguish of the road to oblivion. Believe me, the soul clings on by its fingernails. I’ve seen men live for days after a battle when you could barely recognize them as human.’

‘Master Wentworth, don’t imagine you can frighten me. I think you’re trying to change my mind after all!’

‘As a friend, how could I not? Quiet, I beg you!’ he hissed.

‘You gave me your word!’

After a moment, he replaced the jar in his sack and stood to face her. ‘Well then. The truth. I admit that it pains me to see a lovely young creature determined to throw her life away. Nevertheless, I accept your decision.’ He collected his pole again. ‘Therefore, we must find you the kindliest way. Shall we go back? I’m no longer of a mind to fish.’

Zeal’s heart began to race. She felt suddenly more terrified even than on the roof. Then, she had at least known what she meant to do.

They walked in silence until they regained the sluice at the bottom of the fish ponds and had scrambled up the shallow bank to the edge of the lowest pond. For a moment, they gazed up the length of the three ponds and their fringe of sea nymphs.

‘They do look absurd here, but I love them,’ said Zeal.

The statues stood mostly upright, though some of the plinths had begun to tilt in the mud of the banks. At the top of the highest pond, Nereus, the father of the nymphs, leaned forward as if trying to show his dolphin something in the water.

‘I thought Harry was mad when all those carts arrived from London, but they’ve settled in like the rustics they originally were.’ Zeal stroked the marble thigh of the nymph Panope, then smiled when she spied a hen’s nest between the marble feet. ‘I imagine they’re happy to be back where they belong. I would be.’

She turned her head to see Wentworth watching her. With the morning sun behind him, the grey stubble on his chin glistened. Dried oak bark and pieces of leaf had stuck to his ancient coat.

‘You’re not ready to die,’ he said. ‘You overflow with life. You can’t deceive me.’

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I have reasoned it through, again and again. You won’t change my mind. Don’t make it even harder for me.’

‘Why are you so set?’

‘That’s not your concern. But it’s my only reasonable choice.’

‘I’m offering a dreadful service. You owe me the truth.’ He bent to pick a large grub from the grass at his feet and tossed it onto the pond.

In silence, she watched the spreading circles, then the violent spasm on the surface as a pike struck.

He cursed under his breath. ‘You will love again, you know! Even if John Nightingale is never able to return.’

‘Don’t presume!’

‘Grant my age some small advantage! Please believe me – love comes and goes without apparent reason. You think you will never love again. Then it strikes…’

‘You’re wrong to think…’

‘Your heart was a desert and then it bloomed. And now you fear the rain will never fall again. Is that why you despair?’

‘How dare you!’

‘Forgive me,’ he said at once. ‘But I do not understand your rush to self-destruction. Nightingale may come back…in spite of what I said…Men have been pardoned before, exiles have returned home. They have even survived sea voyages, as I myself can testify. The man’s ship has scarcely cleared Southampton. Why not defer despair for a year or two?’

Zeal backed away from this unexpected outburst of passion. She hugged herself tightly. ‘I can’t afford to wait.’

‘You’re pregnant.’

‘How do you know? Is it so clear to see?’

‘You just told me.’ He threw another grub into the pond. ‘Is it Harry’s or John’s?’

‘John’s.’

‘Does he know?’

‘When he left, I wasn’t sure.’

Wentworth studied the water for some time. ‘Could it not possibly be husband Harry’s?’

‘Never! By my own testimony!’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I didn’t see the danger then.’ She laid both hands on her belly. ‘Like a fool, I swore falsely, as Harry asked me. I lied under oath and swore that I was still a virgin, that the marriage was never consummated. And Harry was judged never to have been my true husband.’

‘Ah,’ Wentworth said. ‘I see. I wondered at the ease of the annulment.’

‘So, whoever is deemed to be its father, the babe is still a bastard. It can never inherit this estate nor anything else. What sort of life could it have? A beggar! And it’s my fault, for lying! I should never have agreed!’

Wentworth raised a hand to try to calm her.

‘As for me…a criminal either way.’ She shivered. ‘Either perjurer or fornicator, no escape. And our parish minister is violent against all odious depravity…unlike our own forgiving Doctor Bowler. Doctor Gifford will want to see me naked at the back of a cart.’

‘I don’t think…’

‘But I have thought! Again and again. Carefully, reasonably. Can you see a sworn virgin turned unwed mother trying to act as the mistress of an estate? Always assuming that the estate is not made forfeit! But I can’t kill John’s child secretly and still live myself. I can’t have the child and survive the consequences. Death is the only reasonable way!’

‘I have a kindlier way.’

She waited, eyes closed, as if he had offered to deliver the fatal blow himself.

‘Marry me.’

4

‘There you are!’ Rachel, a ripe twenty-four, had acquired Zeal as her mistress while the latter was still a Hackney schoolgirl and did not intend to change her manner just because the girl now owned an estate in some godforsaken corner of Hampshire. ‘I left your tray on your bed back at High House. Did you want me to do something with this?’

‘Not yet!’ Zeal snatched back the letter she had left to be sent to John after her death.

‘Your skirt hem is covered in mud.’ Rachel did not quite dare to ask where she had been so early. However, Zeal felt curious eyes on her back as they trudged up the track that led to High House.

‘We both have wet feet now,’ observed Rachel.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Zeal had said.

Wentworth flinched. ‘Is it my age?’

She shook her head.

‘The only ridicule I fear is yours,’ he said. ‘I meant the form of marriage only. Please don’t fear that there’s any need for love. Warm friendship, perhaps, in time.’

‘No.’

‘Is it my modest circumstances, then?’

‘At least you can offer me a set of fine fishing rods. All I would bring you in jointure are a bastard, ridicule, a burned-out house and a few sheep. It’s a fine gesture, but I can’t accept.’

‘Don’t mistake me, Zeal. I’m not a man for fine gestures. I’m old and lonely. You would do me a great favour.’

She stepped back and collided with the nymph. ‘You know very well which way the favour lies. To marry a woman with a bastard in her belly, abandoned by both husband and lover…you won’t survive the laughter.’

‘Laughter has never concerned me so long as I get what I want.’

Their glances collided for the length of a heartbeat.

‘Master Wentworth, only three weeks ago, I vowed to stay true to John Nightingale.’

‘A vow won’t help him if you’re dead.’

She did not reply.

‘I hate to think that death is preferable to a few years of my company,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to marry any more than I want to die. I’ve never seen a man so content with his own company.’

‘I want the child.’

She caught her breath.

‘I’ve no children who are alive to me,’ he said. ‘I’d be proud to claim Nightingale’s pup as my own. Until he wants it back, of course.’ He shouldered his rod. ‘In the name of the man you love, consider my proposal. Save his child. Life need not change much. Take time to reflect. I won’t retract my offer. You will find me at Pot Pool, below the mill.’

Zeal had not meant to go back to High House, but now that Rachel had intercepted her, she could not think what else to do. She had used up all her will on the chapel roof during the night. The two women paused for breath on the brow of the grassy ridge that separated the two estates.

‘Winter’s coming.’ Rachel gazed back across the ruined house at the bright slaps of colour on Hawk Ridge.

‘I need to sit down,’ said Zeal.

‘Madam! Think of your skirts,’ cried Rachel, too late.

After breakfast, Zeal rode her mare back to Hawkridge. While she waited in the office for her estate steward, Tuddenham, to finish in the stables, she picked up a stack of sooty papers, then set it down again. The old lethargy sucked at her again.

Wentworth offers a way out. Take it.

But I vowed to stay true to John. I believe that excludes marriage to someone else.

But this would be merely the form of marriage. An arrangement.

A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.

‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.

She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.

She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.

‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’

She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’

Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.

Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.

I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.

Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.

How do I know I can trust him?

She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.

Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.

She turned back, then found that she had to rest.

He was clever to have used the child.

The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.

5

She took her place at the middle of the long, scrubbed elm table in the Hawkridge bake house kitchen where the small house family most often ate supper following the fire. Even this outbuilding smelled like the inside of the smokehouse, but with a colder, seeping edge. A light dusting of ash from the fire seemed always still to salt the food. She looked at the familiar faces around the table with a stranger’s eye. She might as well have been a Mede or Ethiop dropped by magic carpet.

Since the recent fire, the estate residents had split their lives between Hawkridge House and assorted temporary lodgings. Her nearest neighbour, Sir Richard Balhatchet, had given rooms at High House to Zeal and Mistress Margaret, who was the unmarried aunt of Harry and John. Their two serving women, and Agatha, the chief house maid, and Doctor Bowler the estate parson also slept at High House. Others of the house family, including three house grooms, two kitchen grooms, and John’s former manservant, Arthur, slept where they could in the outbuildings and barns. The large mid-day dinner was served at High House to those not in the fields. Apart from the house family, the rest took supper wherever they found themselves.

Thank the Lord, Master Wentworth never comes to the table, Zeal thought. I could not bear to see him just now.

According to Mistress Margaret, he had never eaten in company since he first took up residence on the estate long before Zeal arrived.

Now, as they sat on borrowed stools along either side of the long table, their voices and laughter, the sound of their chewing, the scrape of stool legs on the stone floor, a dropped knife, all made her flinch.

As Mistress Margaret supervised the passing of rabbit stew, she hummed with grim glee at news that a neighbour (not Sir Richard) had been fined five hundred crowns for ploughing across the boundary of an adjoining estate. ‘He always takes the largest portion at table, too!’ she said. ‘And the last sweetmeat.’

Doctor Bowler paused for a polite beat of silence then ventured, ‘But surely, that is exactly what the king did to John! Boundaries, I mean, not sweetmeats.’

The king meant to cut across John’s land – the very same estate so recently awarded to him for service to the Crown. A great wall was to be built right between John’s new horse barn and his paddock, to enclose a royal hunting park at Richmond, taken from common grazing land and other men’s farms.

‘But the king is the king,’ protested Mistress Margaret. ‘Our dear neighbour is not even a knight.’

‘Do you mean to say that the right to trespass is defined by rank?’ asked Doctor Bowler with a degree of heat uncommon in him. ‘Do you say that John did not have good reason to protest to the king? Did the king have the right to call such reasonable protest “treason”? I expected more support for your nephew’s cause!’ Doctor Bowler turned to Zeal. ‘Are you not proud of him, my lady? He did not creep away with his tail between his legs like so many others who were equally wronged.’

Zeal stared blankly at their animated faces, then realized that they were expecting her to speak.

Mistress Margaret and Zeal’s serving woman, Rachel, exchanged looks.

‘Zeal,’ begged Mistress Margaret, her face mottled pink with emotion. ‘He puts words into my mouth! Why don’t you help me? Our parson has me at an unfair advantage with all his education. We women are never taught the tricks of debate.’

‘Why gild the lily?’ murmured Doctor Bowler. He peered closely at Zeal across the table and changed tack. ‘Isn’t it excellent news, my dear, that Sir Richard plans to give us that wagon load of oak beams from his old barn to help us rebuild the hall and west wing?’

‘Indeed,’ cried Mistress Margaret, diverted into this new turning. ‘We could never afford to buy them! It’s all very well to say that the Lord will provide, but kind neighbours are more certain.’

Doctor Bowler pounced with delight. ‘And who do you think prompted this Christian charity in Sir Richard?’

I must act, one way or another, thought Zeal. And if I can’t decide for myself what to do, I must leave it to chance. Or ask Doctor Bowler’s advice.

‘My lady…?’ The little parson always requested attention as if certain that you had far more important things to do than talk to him.

Zeal forced herself to smile at his anxious face, with its slightly too-close eyes. She sometimes thought of him as an earnest moth. A man of infinite good will and equal fragility, Doctor Bowler should never have taken on the moral burdens of a clergyman.

While Sir George Beester was still alive, Bowler, an Oxford man, had been tutor to the baronet’s two nephews, Harry Beester (who had married Zeal and brought her to Hawkridge) and John Nightingale, the son of Beester’s only sister. His sweet temperament, urgent curiosity and good Latin and Greek made him an excellent tutor for a willing pupil like John but a poor task-master for the likes of Harry. He had survived on an allowance from Sir George, and on small tithes, eggs and milk from estate tenants whom he christened, confirmed, married and buried. When John took over running the estate, which Harry inherited after their uncle’s death, Bowler bent his classical education to the estate accounts. When on the annulment of their marriage Harry deeded the estate to her, Zeal saw no reason for change.

‘When you have a moment,’ Bowler said now, ‘if such a time should ever arrive, I would be grateful for your thoughts about the Fifth of November.’

‘The Fifth of November?’ She gazed at him blankly.

A flush slowly rose all the way to the top of his shiny bald head. ‘The bonfire. Bonfire and Treason Night. It seems a little…After what happened. In any case, I’ve heard some…’

‘Of course. We’ll speak whenever you like.’ She could never consult Bowler. His own helplessness would cause him too much pain.

‘Troublemakers!’ said Mistress Margaret briskly. ‘It’s the young men.’

‘Some older heads agree with them,’ protested Doctor Bowler. ‘Doctor Gifford for one. Then we also have to consider the bells.’

Zeal looked at them both as if they were speaking an alien tongue.

With revulsion, she eyed the rabbit stew in front of her, smooth white flesh to which adhered a blob of shiny, mucilaginous pork fat. She swallowed against her rising gorge and smiled brightly in the direction of Doctor Bowler’s voice.

‘Does anyone have a coin I could borrow?’ she asked.

When supper finally ended, she put on her wool cloak and took Doctor Bowler’s farthing to the solitude of the orchard. The quincunx of trees shifted before her eyes, one moment apparent disorder, the next a harmony of straight lines.

‘Good evening, to you, madam.’ An estate worker intercepted her cheerfully. ‘Can I have a word about moving the piglets?’

In the dusky shadows under the trees, she was free at last of all those eyes.

She felt out of control, as if bits of her might fly off without warning. It was a new experience. The world had given way, in the past, more than once. It was the nature of the world to give way. But she herself had always survived, clamped down like a limpet to the best piece of rock she could find at the given time.

She threw the farthing in the air, caught it, covered it with her other hand. Then she put it back into her hanging pouch without looking.

She sat in the grass and leaned back against a tree, trying one last time to think straight. She felt as if she were already a ghost, out of place in the living world. Her hands moved in her lap like small restless animals.

She had already been Harry’s wife when she first met John. If John should find her married again, neither of them would survive it, she was certain.

But Wentworth was an old man. Anything might happen in seven years.

She stopped, appalled at her own wickedness. If she did accept him, she must not ever let herself wish for his death. He was a good man, to make such an offer.

Even though he did trick me down from the roof.

He was also taciturn, solitary, obsessed with fishing, spent most of his days on the water and his evenings alone in his chamber. He disappeared during feast days and celebrations, when work eased enough for people to take fresh note of each other in their unfamiliar clothes and exchange glances of startled rediscovery as they passed each other in a dance. He ate and walked alone. He was less present in her life, in fact, than the cat.

His offer was all the more surprising because she felt that he avoided her even more than he did the others. It was perfectly reasonable for a man of his age to find an inexperienced chit like her to be of little interest. Her guardian, of much the same age as Wentworth, had no more than tolerated her, and he had had the use of her fortune.

Wentworth’s generosity deserved better than she could ever give him in return.

She began to pace the diagonal aisles between the trees. Fallen pears squelched under her shoes, releasing little gusts of fermentation.

He offers a solution just as reasonable as death. And kinder to everyone.

But marry him? Marry anyone but John?

No, she thought. She tried to imagine Wentworth in a nightshirt, in her chamber, without his flapping black coat, but her thoughts started to slither like a pig on ice.

She made another turn of the orchard. Plucked a leaf from overhead, shredded and dropped it.

Try once more to reason it through.

Have the child and expose herself as either blaspheming perjurer or fornicator? Impossible.

The parish minister was a fierce Scot named Praise-God Gifford, who brought the unforgiving spirit of Calvin with him to England when he had trotted south with his clergyman father in 1604, after Elizabeth died, at the heels of the Scottish king who had come to rule England. As he grew older Gifford added a moral ferocity all his own.

She feared that she could not trust her standing as a landowner to protect her from him, even if she somehow escaped the civil law. He would want to make an example of her all the more, she who stood above her people like the sun and should lead them into light, educating through her own peerless example. She had seen one poor girl – not from Hawkridge, thank the Lord – stripped naked in front of all the parish council and have her hands tied to the tail of a cart. Then she was whipped all the way from the Bedgebury market square to the May Common. As the lash laid bloody lines across the girl’s skin, Zeal had seen the eager faces of some of the watching men. The girl had later drowned both herself and her babe.

The brilliant light of the day had now softened into a lavender haze that promised a warm night. In the distance, a few cows complained that they had not yet been milked. The orchard smelled richly damp and sweet, with a prickling of rot.

If I died, I would so miss this place, she thought. She began a circuit of the high brick walls, noting the ripeness of espaliered apricots and cherries. She picked and ate a sweet black cherry and spat out the stone.

Try to hide the child?

Others had succeeded in that deceit, she knew. Fine ladies who put on loose-bodied gowns and paid a married woman to unlace her stomacher and pad her petticoats, then produce the babe as her own.

Not here on this estate. Rachel already knew the truth from washing Zeal’s linen. Though she would never tell, others might guess as she had done. Secrets here were as safe as pond ice in May, and now that they lived hugger-mugger on top of each other since the fire, any such sleight of hand stood even less chance of success.

‘If your mind’s not set that way,’ Rachel had said, ‘you know as well as I that not all babies that get planted need to be born.’

When Zeal did not reply, Rachel had folded the petticoat and pressed it flat with both hands.

‘Could you do it?’ Zeal finally asked.

‘Perhaps I have.’ Rachel met Zeal’s eyes defiantly. ‘Better than a public flogging, I daresay you’ll agree. But you won’t have to fear that, madam. You’re a lady.’

‘Would you take that risk, with Doctor Gifford?’

If I kill John’s child, I might as well kill myself at the same time.

She reached the far wall of the orchard and turned to look back at the chapel roof.

But life had carried her on past that point, with a push from Philip Wentworth. Not knowing quite how it came about, she had fallen out of love with that flight into darkness.

People really do wring their hands, she thought, suddenly noticing that her own were turning and twisting together against her apron.

You are feeble, she told herself. Take a grip!

She climbed up into the nearest apple tree. No one can see me now, she thought, as the shadowy leaves closed around her. At the centre, near the trunk was like a secret house. An abandoned nest sat close above her head.

How lucky the birds are, she thought. She and John had first looked at each other properly, soon after she arrived, when he had caught her up an apple tree in her bare feet and mistaken her for one of the estate girls.

She smiled, shut her eyes, and remembered the warmth of his hand closing around her bare ankle, and the shock of their unguarded recognition. She had slipped and showered down leaves in catching herself, while he stood looking up at her with an expression both startled and benign.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said when safely on the ground, clutching stolen blossom, aware that she wore only her petticoats.

‘They’re your trees,’ he said. ‘Harry’s, anyway.’ After a moment, he added, ‘Trees ask to be climbed.’

For the next two years, they tried to pretend that look had never happened.

She pressed her forehead against the bark of a branch and felt his hand encircling her ankle again. Then it came to her how she could decide. She would not trust her life or death to the pettiness of a farthing, but Chance could take more noble forms than a plucked daisy or a tossed coin.

She climbed down and went to the estate office. In the thick dusk, she felt along the top of the mantle piece until her fingers found what they wanted. John’s glove, dusted with ash, like everything else.

I will accept the answer, she vowed. Life, or death. Either way.

She went to sit beside Nereus on the bank of the upper pond, to wait until she was alone. She found the old sea god’s company comforting. Like her, he could never have expected to end up at Hawkridge, and she was sure that he was equally content to be here. A white dove sat on the head of the nearest nymph, who also wore a wilted daisy chain around her neck. Her sister just beyond still had a fishing line tied to her wrist.

‘I don’t suppose any of you knows what I should do,’ she said. ‘Never mind. I mean to ask elsewhere.’

The estate workers and house family usually collapsed soon after supper, worn out by the battle to keep up with daily chores, while also salvaging whatever they could from the house, restoring what they could recover and remaking or rebuilding the rest. Meanwhile the advance of autumn brought its own burdens of digging, cutting, picking, binding, threshing, butchering, salting and preserving.

When she passed the bake house on the way to the ponds, Rachel and Agatha had nearly finished clearing supper, with the help of the kitchen grooms. The two women stood side by side in the last of the dusk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, scrubbing the last of the spoons and cups with fistfuls of green horsetail pulled in the water meadows.

The two kitchen grooms came out to the ponds with the dry ends of bread and hard-baked dough trenchers they all had to use until the cooper could make more wooden plates. These, in their turn had replaced the pewter plates Sir Harry had taken when he left Hawkridge for London. The grooms threw the bread onto the middle pond and disappeared downstream towards the mill where they were nested.

While she waited impatiently for all the others to go to bed, Zeal stared up into the sky. A faint glow in the haze showed where the moon was trying to press through the clouds.

Six ducks splashed down and jostled each other aside to get at the bread. With obscure pleasure, Zeal watched a female snatch a crust from under the jabbing beaks of two battling drakes. The mêlée reminded her of a gang of drakes she had once seen pile onto a single duck and drown her in their eagerness to tread her.

A carp slapped the water with its tail. Sheep bleated raggedly in unending querulous complaint. Frogs had begun to sort themselves into soprano, alto and bass. In the still air, the voice of a house groom carried clearly from the stable yard, headed at last for bed in the loft of the hay barn. She heard Rachel and Agatha set off with Mistress Margaret and her maid on the long walk to High House.

The moon pressed harder against the restraining clouds. In the final luminous glow as dusk slid into true night, straight lines wavered and the black humps of bushes breathed. The nymphs around the ponds stirred and reached out their hands to her. She felt their concern, and a pull, as if they invited her into sisterhood.

If only I could turn to stone and stay here with you, she told them.

In the remains of the house, Doctor Bowler began to play his fiddle in the dark, in the chapel antechamber. His tune was fierce, incautiously pagan, and totally suited to her present purpose.

6

When Zeal unlocked the gate into the kitchen garden, next to the orchard, Ranter, the night mastiff on patrol, pushed his huge head into the front of her skirt and swung his ropelike tail.

She heard Arthur’s laugh. A door slammed. Somewhere, closer in the darkness, a hen muttered to itself. With Ranter bumping and huffing at her heels, Zeal walked slowly between the rectangles of the raised vegetable beds.

Moonlight, triumphant at last, began to pick out the fruit trees espaliered to low internal walls. Late pumpkins and gourds, which should already have been harvested, gleamed like huge jewels against the dark earth of the beds. The blade of a forgotten weeding knife sparked in the grass. Absently, she picked it up.

Until John had unlocked her heart, she had imagined no love greater than that she felt for this place – house, gardens, fields and hills, its people, its sheep, even the ducks.

She looked back. Had the whole house been standing, she could have been seen from one of the upper windows. Even so, she stepped into the deep shadow of the garden wall. Doctor Bowler might smile forgivingly on sinners, but Doctor Gifford had a keen nose for sulphur and a personal mission to save souls. Unlike Bowler, he would not turn a blind eye. Gifford would never doubt that she meant to practise witchcraft.

Ranter gave her a final friendly shove and settled under a gooseberry bush.

She unfolded the pale ghost of a linen handkerchief onto the ground. With the point of her own knife, which always hung at her belt, she pricked the end of her left thumb. She had not pried, exactly, but her curiosity had always set off in hot pursuit after rumour. From all that she had been able to overhear and otherwise learn from her books and the talk of the women, she should have marked her charm with her monthly flow. She made a dark smudge on the linen with her thumb.

She sat back on her heels in the heap of her skirts. The moon looked cold and dead, like a bleached bone. At least it was waxing. Always sow your seeds in a waxing moon. Don’t try to conjure hope under a dying one.

She turned her head sharply at a falling leaf. The air in the garden was so still that she heard snail tongues rasping at the leaves of the cabbages and late beans. Even the distant sheep and ducks were temporarily silent. Then Ranter, who had also raised his head, gave a gusty sigh and flopped his dewlaps down onto his forepaws again.

Reassured by his indifference, she spat on the napkin. Then she lifted her pleated linen collar to dig under her armpit with the handkerchief. With a glance at Ranter’s tranquil shadow, she reached up under her skirts and wiped the napkin between her legs.

She took John’s glove from her bodice and held it to her face. She inhaled his scent beneath the salty tang of the leather. Felt his body heat and hard smooth muscles. Almost saw him. Then the details wavered and blurred.

I should have fed my eyes in our last moments together, she thought. Committed him to memory, inch by inch and hair by hair, instead of shouting at him in rage for abandoning me. I dared to be angry with him when he was going off to be little more than a slave.

The harder she tried to see him, the more he eluded her.

She put her hand into the void left by his and bent her fingers to fit the curves and bumps that he had shaped. Then she laid her hand in his glove against her right breast.

She looked down at the dark leather against the pale wool of her bodice. As a very young girl, she had imagined that such a touch would feel wicked. Instead, when it finally came, she had felt a deep peacefulness, as if a tightly-wound spring had loosened inside her. She had been waiting without knowing it, for his hand to arrive exactly there.

She put the napkin to her nose and inhaled her own musky smell. Suddenly, as clearly as if he had been there, she smelled the rich warm brew that rose up between their naked bodies after love.

She wiped her eyes with the napkin.

Ranter raised his head.

‘Good dog,’ she whispered.

The great rope of his tail thumped on the damp grass.

She kissed the glove formally, as if it were a bishop’s ring or a sword before battle, and folded the handkerchief around it. With her knife, she cut a long strand of hair from her nape and tied it around the bundle.

The mastiff rumbled like an earthquake and hoisted himself to his feet. Zeal froze. He lumbered to the back wall of the garden, growled again. A violent scuffling announced that whoever had begun to scale the wall had decided urgently against it. The sounds of retreat faded into the night.

She listened for a long time at the back gate. As mistress of Hawkridge Estate, she had the right to walk where she liked, at any time, however odd. The tenant farmers and her own house family, the gardeners, stockmen and grooms should all be clutching at sleep while another day of work rushed at them all too fast. But no one was in his or her right place just now. And boys slipped out to poach fish from the ponds. Unmarried couples, like Rachel and Arthur, sought darkness and solitude under the trees. The bundle she now carried could hang her.

Ranter gave a low reproachful bark when she finally closed the door behind her. ‘Stay, sir!’ she whispered through the wooden grille. ‘Guard my back.’

As she climbed the flank of Hawk Ridge, her feet slipped on the damp, crumbly beech mast and silvery patches of damp moss. Just below the spine of the ridge, in the darkness under the leafy roof, panting from her climb, she reached out to touch one of the dark columns.

He sat under this tree, and I leaned against him, rocked gently on the rise and fall of his breath.

As she began the last steep scramble, the chill of total solitude engulfed her. Here all human fires were quenched. A thick roof of branches shrouded the night sky and blotted out the moon. The air felt thick, as if a great weight pressed down on it. Though the night was almost windless, the trees around her rustled and sighed as if alive.

You enter the Lady’s realm, they murmured.

Nearly blind now, she hauled herself up the last sheer yards, slipping and clutching at branches, into the cavern of darkness cast by the Lady of Hawk Ridge. Hands outstretched, she felt her way towards the ancient beech that had chosen human form. Her hands met damp, cool bark. Found a familiar wide taut hollow, and recognized a curve.

The Lady sprang upwards into the sky, feet first, from a short trunk twenty feet around. Her head and her raised arms remained imprisoned in the trunk, while her sappy fingers twisted into roots deep in the earth under Zeal’s feet. Her body, that of a giant female, was the lowest branch of the old beech, which spread close to the ground, the result of coppicing one hundred years before.

Zeal felt outwards along the damp bark from the hollow of the Lady’s throat until she reached the two large boles of her breasts with their broken stumps of nipples. Though lost now in the darkness, the Lady’s waist, hips and crossed legs curved upwards until her ankles sprouted, ninety feet above the ground, into an angular network of springy twigs. The Lady of Hawk Ridge rose naked and unashamed from the earth with such force and purpose that she seemed to hold its centre in her buried hands.

Zeal had overheard the muttered gossip. The Lady, not Gifford, was Doctor Bowler’s chief rival for souls on the estate. Zeal had admired the little parson for his pragmatic discretion on the subject of the estate oracle. Now she too, like so many others, would let the Lady decide her fate.

As she felt along the giant rib cage, she gave a little ‘hah!’ of terror and snatched back her hand. She had touched something cold, limp and damp.

She stared at the darkness until she thought her eyes would burst. After a time she began to make out a shape against the beech bark. It swam in the darkness but did not move away. Zeal clenched her teeth and forced herself to touch it again.

Wet feathers. Crumpled, wiry claws. A dead bird. Then her fingers found the noose of twine from which it hung and she smelled the whiff of putrefaction. She turned to flee, then reminded herself that she had plucked too many scalded chickens to run from a dead crow or thrush.

She crouched among the Lady’s roots and, with a sharpened yew stick she had carried in her belt, began to dig. Her fingers felt a sharp edge. A folded parchment.

Another desperate petitioner, she thought. Perhaps the one who left the bird. She covered over someone else’s private hope or grief and dug again. She buried her bundle. Then she stood, stretched up her right hand and found the triangle where the Lady’s legs divided. The damp bark under her fingers felt as rough and complicated as her own red-gold bush, though much colder.

‘Lady,’ she whispered. ‘If you can do what they believe…do it for me. I beg you, tell me. What should I do?’

Will I understand if she does answer?

The tree inhaled and exhaled. Zeal heard it clearly.

He is truly gone. Will never touch you again. You will never hear his voice.

‘No!’ Zeal cried aloud. ‘That can’t be!’

I imagined, she told herself. Heard my own fears speaking. The wind.

‘I shall ask three times,’ she told the tree. So as to be sure of what I hear.

Be careful what you ask and how you ask it, she told herself. Remember the stories. Beware of the literal and murderous precision of magical wish-granting!

Her mind leapt from danger to danger.

‘Will I ever see him…’ she asked carefully ‘…alive and not dead?…Don’t answer me yet! I must think.’ She pressed her free hand to her face. Her skin felt hot in spite of the chill under the tree.

‘With all his limbs and senses?’ Though I would love him without.

What other danger have I forgotten?

‘Will he still love me?’

With her hand still on the cleft of the Lady’s legs, she pressed her forehead against the dark, cold bark beside the dead bird.

No reply. What should I make of that?

She was no longer certain what she had heard the first time.

When her pulse had quietened a little, she tried a third and last time.

‘Speak to me now,’ she begged the Lady. I’m ready to listen.

The grove around her was absolutely still. The night held its breath. The tree did not speak.

‘Please, give me a sign, Lady! Shall I marry Wentworth and try to endure for seven years?’

Don’t even think about what might happen then.

‘Or should I kill myself?’

Why should I trust it? she suddenly thought. Why does everyone assume it’s friendly? If so, why does it want dead offerings?

The night still held its breath. Still the tree kept silent. Not a twig or leaf stirred.

Zeal sat, closed her eyes. Fortunate Daphne, she thought. Transformed to a laurel tree. All grief ended…she presumed that trees do not feel grief.

She dug her fingers into the leaf mould, imagined the chill of the ground rising slowly towards her heart, reaching it, slowing its beat until her thoughts darkened and faded into a long dream of leaf fall, rain, nesting birds and slow rot.

She sat upright with a jolt of terror and tried to remember where she was. Who she was. Not a tree. Almost, but not yet. She scrambled up, tripped on petticoats, half-fell when a numbed foot gave way. The darkness and chill pressed on her like water. She could not breathe. This was not mere fancy. She felt the silent presence in the grove, which had refused to help.

I am such a fool, she thought.

In a growing rage at the Lady, at herself, she slid and stumbled back down the slope away from the tree. Back in the clear moonlight of the kitchen garden, Ranter still waited just inside the gate.

‘Nature does not trouble itself with our petty human affairs!’ she told him, with ferocity. ‘And why should it care? Why should I expect anything, even Chance, to relieve me of my decision? I shall have to make up my own mind, after all!’

She could not bear to go back to High House, to be among all those breathing bodies, the snores, the night time farts and cries, to be attacked by the miasma of other people’s dreams. She stalked down river to the mill, where she climbed out on the narrow platform that led to the great wooden wheel. She glared down briefly into the water while moss dripped near her head and pale leaves slid into the current of the race and dived beneath her feet.

Ask nothing of anyone. I’ve always known that.

She had to keep moving lest she start to take root again.

Upstream, where the suck of the race did not disturb it, the surface of the millpond looked cold and as hard as metal.

Though the tree had stayed silent the night now seemed filled with advice. As she crossed the sluice bridge at the bottom of the ponds, the leaping water burbled, ‘Build a little, build, build, build.’

‘Dieeee!’ cried a sheep.

‘Build, build a little,’ insisted the water below the sluice.

‘Yes,’ whispered the trees on the riverbanks.

‘Wait, wait, wait!’ instructed a pair of antiphonal frogs.

Her blood pounded in her head. She could tolerate indecision no longer, felt ablaze with furious purpose, though she could not yet say what it was. She wanted to tear through the milky membranes of the night, sweep away the clouds. Propelled by a horror of that quiescent stillness in the beech grove, not knowing what she would say, and without thought for the hour, she headed for the tack room to find Philip Wentworth.

7

‘One moment!’ The heavy door muffled his voice. There was the thud of a chest lid. Zeal imagined she felt the remains of the east wing tremble. The door opened so suddenly that he nearly caught her with her ear against it.

He was still arranging his coat. His shirt collar was caught up on one side, the ties still undone. His eyes widened when he saw her.

‘I think I’ve come to say, yes.’

He cleared his throat. ‘Think?’ He smoothed his silver hair with his hand.

‘May I come in?’

He stepped back and left the door standing open behind her.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘I looked for you in the tack room. If you won’t stay at High House, you should sleep in the tack room until that wall is braced. The back staircase shook under my feet just now.’

‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’ He finished tying up his shirt.

‘You won. Aren’t you pleased?’ Her eyes darted around his little room. A chilly breeze blew from the corridor onto her back. ‘Or didn’t you expect me to accept? Do you want to retract your offer, after all?’

He took her elbow and sat her on a back stool in front of the low fire. ‘Stop talking for a moment.’ He took a glass from his cabinet, blew into it, then poured wine from a jug which stood on the table behind her.

She turned in her chair. He had been working. Papers lay higgledy-piggledy. A pewter mug, a dirty wineglass and a pair of spectacles sat among the papers. A sempster’s candle stand, fitted with a lens set vertically, focussed the light of the flame.

‘Tell me again,’ he said.

‘I said, yes.’

He gave her the glass of wine. He had rolled back his cuffs from strong broad hands flecked with age spots. Then he refilled his own glass. He pulled out a second back stool from the wall and sat on the other side of the fire. He raised his glass. ‘To friendly union, then.’ The greying bristle of his chin glistened in the firelight.

Now that she had agreed to marry him, she had difficulty in looking straight at him. From quick uneasy glances, she saw he had a scar on the edge of his slightly box-like jaw, and deep lines from nostril to mouth. And a strong nose with a square tip, where two paler points sat just under the skin. Grey hairs curled from the open neck of his shirt. His wool stockings were wrinkled, his feet shoved into soft, scuffed leather house slippers. She smelled wormwood against moths and a faint alcoholic mist when he exhaled.

The firelight coiled at the bottom of her glass. She did not know whether or not she had responded to his toast.

For forty pounds a year, Wentworth occupied this small parlour and an equally small sleeping chamber beyond. He lived frugally, without a manservant. Through the far door, she saw the dark shape of a narrow bed, with curtains on plain square-sectioned posts. She had seen these rooms only once before, with his permission, when she first took stock of her new realm. Wentworth had otherwise forbidden all entrance to his rooms, except twice a year to clean.

His floor now seemed to slant. The corners of the room were not quite true. Thirty feet beyond his door, the corridor leading from the back stairs to what had been the front of the house dived suddenly downwards and opened onto the night.

‘What if the rest of the corridor gives way?’

‘I’m not going to retract my offer,’ he said.

She nodded mutely.

‘Drink a little,’ he said. ‘It’s no small thing we propose to do. But not so great as I suspect it feels to you just now. Drink a little. Steady yourself.’ He drank. ‘It helps me to sleep.’

Her chin jerked up. ‘Before I lose my courage altogether, I must speak honestly…’ In spite of herself, she looked at the bed. ‘You might yet want to withdraw.’

He smiled and waited.

‘You said this morning that you hoped only for friendship. But you might have said that just to win me round. So that we have no misunderstanding, I must make it clear that I cannot love you.’

‘How many marriages insist on love?’ He poured himself more wine. ‘I might, in time, aspire to your affection. Does that terrify you? As for the rest…’ He nodded over his shoulder at the bed. ‘I’ve put all that behind me.’

Their eyes met briefly. She sighed.

‘I want you to be certain,’ he said.

‘I do have one other condition.’

Wentworth looked at her sharply, then raised his eyebrows in good-humoured question.

‘I know I have no right to impose any conditions at all…’

‘It has never been your unassuming meekness for which I admired you.’

She blinked at the idea that he had admired her at all, then plunged onwards. ‘I must know who you are.’

The good humour vanished. His face set into thin, tight lines. ‘I said I used to be a soldier. Is that not enough?’

‘No. I need to know if Philip Wentworth is your true name. Will I truly be Mistress Wentworth, or should my name be something else? What sort of adventurer were you? Why did you bury yourself here?’

He shook his head.

‘I beg the truth from you as a wedding gift.’

‘I can’t give it.’

‘I swear that nothing you tell me will change my mind about the marriage, but you must see that I need to know more of the man I will be living with.’

‘Live with the man I am now. That other one has nothing to do with you.’

‘It was only the promise of making his acquaintance that got me down from the roof.’

Wentworth closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

‘Can’t you see that the more you refuse, the more necessary it becomes for you to tell me?’ She stood up and handed him her empty glass. ‘Otherwise I retract my acceptance. How can I pledge myself, even in friendship, to a man so vile that he can’t confess what he has done even to his own wife? If you can’t tell me more, then you should never have confessed anything at all!’

Philip Wentworth shook his head again, but this time with wry humour. ‘Caught in my own snare.’ He crossed the room to set their glasses on his worktable, where he stood for several moments with his back to her. ‘Is your condition absolute?’ he asked without turning around. ‘Will you really retract if I don’t agree? Think what that means and take your time in answering.’ He leaned his weight onto his clenched fists and waited.

‘Would you still help me to die, as you first promised?’

‘Yes.’

She shut her eyes. After a long while, she said, ‘It is absolute.’ Watery knees tipped her back into her chair.

‘I was merely a soldier, as I said. Nothing more. But it’s not a world a man wants to share with women.’

‘Master Wentworth,’ she begged, ‘please understand! All my life, the things I did not know and could not expect have always brought me the greatest grief.’

‘You have nothing to fear from me.’

‘That may be, but I have learned to fear ignorance more than I fear death. I can’t bear knowing that I don’t know and waiting for something to happen that I can’t see coming. I can’t bear what I imagine. And that’s the truth.’ She blew out a deep breath. ‘Reasonable or not.’

He turned and studied her with a slightly chilly expression. She saw no trace in either his eyes or bearing of the genial old hermit who had proposed marriage.

How far we have already moved, she thought, even from where we were on the riverbank.

‘I can’t go on living on any other terms.’ She looked at him pleadingly.

‘What if I said that I was lying, up there on the roof? That I had nothing to confess? No other life than the one you see?’

‘I would know that you are lying now.’

This answer seemed to please rather than anger him. He eyed her a moment longer. ‘Concedo,’ he said at last. He held his arms out to the side like a defeated swordsman exposing his front to his foe. ‘I accept your terms. You shall have your gift of truth, on our wedding night.’

Scalding relief told her how much she had wanted him to agree.

‘But in return I have one condition of my own.’ He crossed back to the fire. ‘Stand up again so I can see your face in the firelight.’ He took her hand to help her rise. ‘I, for my part, cannot live with uncertainty. You must lay down the sword you have just threatened me with and swear that so long as I live and you are married to me, you will never again threaten to take your own life.’ He held both hands now. ‘Look at me and swear.’

She nodded. ‘Why would I want to?’

‘Swear,’ he repeated.

‘I swear.’

‘So we’re agreed at last?’

Zeal could now only nod wordlessly. The relative simplicity of the choice between life and death was reshaping itself into something more subtle and infinitely more complex.

I should tell him about the seven years, she thought. And that John will be sending for me.

But those complications were beyond her at this moment.

‘I shall speak to Doctor Bowler tomorrow,’ Wentworth said. ‘And seek Sir Richard’s advice on how best to obtain a special licence. I see no need to delay by posting banns if we can avoid it, do you? The sooner we can wed, the better for the babe.’

Rather than make the long walk back to High House at that hour, she made herself a nest among the ledgers and piles of salvage in the Hawkridge Estate office. Then she curled up under a smoky quilt on a feather bed that smelt of wet hen, still trying to comprehend what had just happened.

She did not have to kill herself, after all. She was to be married again. The Hawkridge Hermit had agreed to open himself to her like a gift. For the first time since his proposal that morning, it occurred to her that the balance of power between them might not tilt entirely in his favour. That thought made her like him even better. Nothing he might tell her would make her dislike him now.

She turned onto her side and wrapped her arms tenderly around her belly. John sat at his table in the office – the table she now used – his face serious and intent, acorn-coloured hair falling over one dark, fierce eyebrow. One foot was tucked back under the stool. The other was stretched under the table, showing the long elegant line of his thigh. She lay fondly watching his ghost. For such a gentle, schooled man, he looked deceptively like a pirate. He glanced up and smiled, then bent his head again.

Our child can live, after all, she told him. I no longer have to pretend it isn’t there.

She no longer needed to keep the door of her heart locked against it.

When she looked at the table again, John had gone. But she still felt him in the air around her. In the child.

We shall manage somehow.

She drifted, saw herself waking on a summer morning in bed with John, their babe kicking its feet, as warm and fragrant as a kitten between them. Though of course the child would be older by then. In her dream, Philip Wentworth was the child’s grandfather.

She woke the next morning with a sense of startled well-being. It was all still true. She did not have to die. She was to marry Master Wentworth instead. Soon she could carry John’s child openly and rejoice in its birth. She would rebuild Hawkridge House to help fill the time.

She turned her cheek against the smoky pillow. Only seven years to be survived. With the child, and work, she could bear it now.

The ginger tom that John had given her as a kitten had found her in the night. It now rearranged itself against her feet with a thump of protest at being disturbed. She placated it by wiggling her toes while she tested the steadiness of her new humour. She threw back the covers. The paralysing spell of the last weeks had indeed lifted. Today, she would regain her grip and take command once more.

In her chemise and wrapped in a blanket, she sat at once at the office table and began to write.

Zeal’s Work Book – October 1639

Salvage what we can from ruins, to rebuild with and clear the site

Borrow feather beds and blankets for winter sleeping

Set all maids to weave new blankets

Dry feathers in ovens to make new beds…

She raised her head while she thought what to write next. If John had been there, he would have helped her with the list of tasks for the gardens.

He had left an old coat, hanging on a peg behind the door. Apart from his glove, the quill pen, and a few books and curiosities kept here in the office, all his other belongings had burned in the fire. She got up and put on the coat.

It was made of rough wool from their sheep, dyed brownish black with walnut skins. The sleeves hung down over her hands and the bottom of its skirts fell almost to her ankles. She raised her arm to her nose to sniff the sleeve and caught her breath sharply, then inhaled again. Through the smokiness, she thought she could smell the warm salty sweetness of his body. She ducked her head to sniff inside the coat. A miasma of his being inhabited it with her. She pulled it tightly around her and his child, rolled back the cuffs and began to write again.

Set hedges

Plant spinach, kale, purslain and poppies…

She imagined that he whispered in her ear.

…Set artichokes, strawberries and garlic cloves

Transplant leeks

Salve sheep against the scab…

Wait, she told him. I’ve just remembered something else.

Buy needles for sewing new clothes

Buy 20 ells of fine linen to make Christmas shirts for the women…

She set down the pen. She needed a morning to write it all. But it was a start.

Without Rachel’s help, she did not try to put on the corset she had thrown last night onto the office table. In any case, it was filthy with soot. Still wearing John’s coat, she set off for High House, to reassure Rachel that she had not disappeared for a second time, and to put on her working clothes. Then she would assess the possibilities for salvage.

8

She left her mare grazing nearby. Then she picked up her skirts and stepped through the charred brick doorway into what was left of Hawkridge House. The remains of the oak door looked like a crust of burnt toast.

The cat had refused to follow her and now sat outside on a piece of broken masonry in the pose of a heraldic beast, watching her with courteous disbelief.

Tuddenham had warned her that there might still, even three weeks later, be pockets of hot coals in the rubble. Crunching over the lumpy black landscape that had been the hall, she imagined that the soles of her shoes were growing hot, that her petticoats flared into flames and transformed her into a burning flower.w

Her foot crushed what might once have been a stool leg. She stared down at the glistening black fragments, then at a puddle of dark oily water. Then at the jagged rim of a charred wall.

Here I once lovingly rubbed honey-scented beeswax onto the wooden panelling, she thought. Only three weeks ago.

In spite of her revived spirits, the blackened wreckage made her feel light-headed and queasy. She was not alone. Everyone on the estate still walked a little uncertainly, as if drunk or ill. They forgot simple things, would break off whatever they were doing and go to stand and stare at what was left of the house. They told each other the same stories again and again. How Master John had stamped out embers on the precipitous bake house roof. How fish had been carried up from the ponds in the fire-fighters’ pails and fried by accident. How the children had brought rain by singing hymns, though not in time to save the great hall or long gallery. They compared how many inches of hair and beard had been singed off. They debated how the fire had started – which chimney might have held a bird’s nest, which fire might have bred lethal sparks as so often happened, or whether malice, even, might have played a part. They wept suddenly without warning over trivial losses.

Near her right foot, a carved oak rosette fallen from the great staircase gleamed with buried fires like a crow’s back. It looked solid, perfectly intact, but she knew that at the lightest touch, it would crumble to dust. For a moment, she froze, afraid to move. She felt that her whole life lay lost under this black, unfamiliar ruin. The shapes of the last three years, of her marriage to Harry, were fragile shells of ash.

The stairs and the dog-gate had burned. The upper landing hung like a black flap from the slanted floor of the upper hall. Her charred marriage bed had crashed through the floor into the back parlour, where it seemed to struggle to rise to its feet like a cow, hindquarters first. The massive headboard tilted. Black ribbons of the costly hangings that had so gratified Harry fluttered gently in the open air.

She could see past it right through the back wall of the house to the nymphs around the ponds. The cat now crouched in the grass studying the charred remains of a fish.

She looked back at the bed. Heard the hollow chomping of her mare, children shouting, cooing from the dovecote, the thump and slosh of a churn. A woman laughed loudly in the bake house. A creamy dove landed on the shoulder of one of the nymphs.

My life is not in ruins at all, she thought suddenly. Only my life with Harry has burned. All I have lost, in the end, is this house. Harry’s house. The rest remains. So long as I am patient and steadfast. The child. John, who loves me. My people. My estate. Even the tribe of magnificent water spirits who so kindly look after three very ordinary fish ponds for me.

She took three crunching steps. Then she jumped and landed hard with both feet. Crunch, crunch. She walked to the bed and kicked it. A half-burned foot-post shivered into a shower of black chunks. She kicked again. Shattered the footboard. Stamped the fragments into dust. Burying Harry and his lies and his disdain for all her efforts to please him. She yanked down the shreds of the hangings in one succulent, gratifying rip.

So much for his ruinous extravagance!

She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely. Clear it all away and build a new house. Her own house, not Harry’s.

Then she spied a gleam, pulled a diamond of unbroken glass from under a dusty black skeletal bench. She spat on it and rubbed with her thumb. When she held it up to the sky, a hot coin of sunlight fell on her cheek.

I will have such light in my new house, she thought. My house, which I shall build. Not Harry’s. With great windows so that even on the darkest days we will be able to see clearly. Mistress Margaret will not need her spectacles except to sew.

With black hands and smuts on her face, she imagined the God-like act of creation. Ex nihilo. She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely, knock down everything but the chapel and fashion her own place on earth exactly as she wanted it, where she wanted it. A prodigy house, shaped by her own imagining, as some men built houses in the shape of their initials, or of a cross as witness to their faith.

She gazed at Hawk Ridge, rising beyond the fishponds and the Shir. All would be fit and in just proportion, echoing the vaster proportions of God’s universe. Glass, brick, stone, timber, both seasoned and green. Tall, wide-eyed windows to let in the sun and scour away shadows. Generous fireplaces to heat every room, moulded fire-backs, drainpipes like young trees, friezes as rich in incident as ballads on subjects of her choosing. Lintels, columns, door panels, handles, the iron butterflies of hinges, nails. She was as ignorant as a pig about all of these, but she would learn. After all, the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl had learned to run an estate. Unexpectedly she had arrived on the safe, joyful solid ground of intense purpose.

Then it occurred to her to wonder what part Master Wentworth might want to play.

He won’t want to do all that talking, she decided. To all those joiners and masons and painters and glaziers. He’ll most likely be content to carry on fishing and leave it to me. She could almost love him just for keeping her alive to arrive in this moment.

The cat was back on its plinth, now curled as if asleep but green eyes watched her above the curve of its tail as she carried the glass windowpane across the rubble and laid it carefully on the grass. A watery shape rippled in its depths as her hand moved over it, like an oracle in a well.

When three boys raced towards her down the curve of the drive, Zeal raised her head without premonition or alarm.

9

‘Horses coming, mistress!’ Tuddenham’s son, Will, spoke for the three of them. ‘And ox carts.’ All three boys pointed back up the drive towards the high road.

John has returned! Zeal thought, against reason, with a surge of suffocating joy. He never sailed! Doctor Bowler’s prayers have been answered. The Lady Tree exerted her influence after all.

How will I tell Wentworth?

‘Four carts…’ ‘No, three!’ ‘Four!’

Why would John have carts?

‘Empty ones,’ said one of the boys. ‘And lots of men.’

‘Are they soldiers?’ she asked in alarm. ‘Wearing insignia?’

The boys stared at each other in excited disagreement. Soldiers? Yes, no. But one of the gentlemen on horseback could have been an officer.

Best prepare for soldiers with requisition orders. And it won’t matter which sort they are, they’ll take, either way. Mustering and provisioning on the way north to fight the Scots, or come back without pay, hungry and filled with rage.

Rachel, her maid, appeared at the forecourt gate, which led to the bake house and stable block. ‘Madam, did you know…?’

Dogs began to bark.

‘We must hide the food,’ said Zeal.

She sent the two house grooms, Geoffrey and Peter, both just old enough for mustering, off to hide in the woods. They reeled away under the weight of six flitches of bacon each. Rachel and the dairywoman began to pack eggs and cheeses into baskets. Tuddenham sent half a dozen children to try to catch and hide the best laying hens. The horses had already been turned out into the Far. The beer would have to look after itself.

She sniffed her sleeve, which smelled of smoke like everything else. Her hands, and most likely face, were black with soot.

The first ox cart creaked out of the tunnel of beeches that lined the drive, followed by three more. All were ominously empty except for a half dozen small bundles, some tools, and what seemed to be long poles wrapped in canvas. Seven men, including the drivers. All strangers. Two muskets between them, but no pikes or swords that she could see. Nor armour, nor regimental badges.

Bailiffs, come to enforce the king’s levies? They’ll not find much worth taking.

Last out of the trees rode two horsemen, a richly dressed gentleman and his manservant. The gentleman kicked his mount forward and passed the first cart as it entered the forecourt.

Zeal knew this man far too well.

‘He’s back, madam,’ Tuddenham announced glumly, as he arrived at her side. From his tone, he would have preferred soldiers.

The horseman peered down from his saddle with a near-comical mix of defiance and unease. His blue eyes slid away from hers.

Who else, in these circumstances, would leave his hat on and forget to dismount? ‘Harry!’ she said, sick with desolation.

‘Madam.’

Sir Harry Beester, John’s cousin and the former master of Hawkridge Estate. Zeal’s former husband, or rather, husband who had never been.

So much for throwing off the past.

At fourteen, an orphaned heiress still sequestered at boarding school and with no experience of men, she had found Harry Beester’s cheerful self-satisfaction to be charming. She had even imagined that some of his self-esteem might infect her and make up her lack of it. With a free heart she gave in to his ardent wooing. She chose his puppy-like youth and sunny good looks over the rather alarming, paunchy maturity of the two suitors urged on her by her guardian. Her formidable will, as much as Harry’s inheriting and reconfirming of his uncle’s title of baronet, along with a London house and two small country estates, had induced her guardian to overlook the young man’s lack of both cash and mercantile connections. It was not Harry’s fault that, in her inexperience, she had imagined that his stupidity would make him biddable.

How ignorant and wilful I was, she thought, looking up at him now, watching undisguised thought cross his handsome pink and white face. First, that she should have called him ‘Sir Harry’. Then, that it probably wasn’t worth making the point. Might, in fact, be dangerous.

To your dignity, my dear Harry, if to nothing else.

Tuddenham stared at his former master’s costume in open disbelief.

To journey from London on horseback, Sir Harry had worn a deeply slashed crimson silk-velvet doublet over a fine linen shirt. In spite of the October chill, his boot hose were of silk, not wool, and topped with pale waves of Brussels lace (matching that on his soft falling-collar) which foamed around the hems of peach silk leg-of-mutton breeches. A black furlined cloak swung nonchalantly over one shoulder. More lace edged his gloves. A single pearl hung from his left ear and two long crimson foxtail plumes bounced behind his wide-brimmed felt hat. Though cape, trousers and lace were all spattered with mud, and though the plumes had begun to clump damply, Zeal read the intended message clearly. In spite of herself, she wished she had had time at least to wash.

‘Is this just a friendly greeting in passing?’ Zeal asked, ‘or should we send to Sir Richard to set another plate?’

At last Sir Harry swung down from his horse and handed the reins to his new manservant. He glanced sideways at the ruined house, then averted his eyes. ‘I have food and lodgings back at Ufton Wharf. Don’t mean to stay long.’

‘I didn’t imagine that you were yearning for the rustic wilderness again.’

I chose this man of my own free will, she thought with amazement.

‘I won’t pretend,’ he said. ‘London suits me best.’

‘And Lady Alice?’ She had not meant to ask.

Sir Harry beamed. ‘Splendid. Splendid woman. Thank you.’ Then he caught himself and blushed.

‘I’m sure she deserves you,’ said Zeal.

Harry cleared his throat and looked around him. ‘Tuddenham still serving you well?’

Zeal detected the hope that Tuddenham might not be. ‘He’s a splendid fellow!’ She resisted the temptation to turn and catch the steward’s eye.

‘Good, good.’ Sir Harry glanced around him once more.

‘Harry,’ said Zeal. ‘Why have you come?’ She might consider him a fool, and he might be just the least bit frightened of her, but he had already proved that he could be dangerous.

Mistress Margaret came from the bake house with a mug of beer, crossing the forecourt with the painfully stiffened gait that made her roll like a sailor. ‘I suppose you’ll want to rinse the dust from your mouth. Nothing fine, not like London. Take it or leave it, this is all we’ve got.’

Harry took the beer but eyed his aunt around the glass.

Curious faces began to fill the arch that led from the stable yard. ‘Morning, sir,’ called two or three voices.

‘Can we walk apart?’ he muttered to Zeal. ‘I’d have thought they all need to be hard at work somewhere.’

‘Anywhere in particular you’d care to go?’ she asked. ‘For old times’ sake?’

He shook his head impatiently.

She led him through the trampled ruins of John’s knot garden and around the chapel at the east end of the house. They walked in silence except for the sound of his boots crunching on the cinders still covering the ground until they reached the grassy slope above the fish ponds.

‘I’ve come for the statues,’ said Harry abruptly.

‘No!’

‘They’re movables, you should know. My movables. Neptune and all his daughters.’

‘You mean Nereus! And you can’t take them. Not now!’

‘I’m afraid I can.’

‘But you deeded this estate to me. As the price of my warbling to your tune so you could go stalk your precious Lady Alice. You’ve had all my money. The estate is now mine.’

‘You’re welcome to the land and the house – or what’s left of it. And the barns, sties and so on. The carts and ploughs…hardly need those in London. I even let you keep the animals, though I could have sold them all if my mood had been less kind.’

Or less frantic for your freedom to chase another, richer wife, she thought.

‘But the movables were mine. And I count the statues as movables! In any case, you don’t need them. What use do you have down here…’ His sweeping hand brushed away the fields, the beech hanger, the ponds, the ruined house. ‘…for art?’

‘As much as any Londoner.’

He sniffed in derision. ‘Debate is pointless. I bought those figures and I’m taking them back. A wedding gift for Lady Alice, as a matter of fact.’

They reached the edge of the middle pond.

‘Ha!’ Harry pointed. ‘Case proved! Finest Italian marble, bought from a friend of the king’s own agent, and you use them as nesting boxes or to anchor fishing lines!’

Indeed, the line was still tied to Amphritite’s wrist, while a duck now squatted on the nest Zeal had seen the day before between the feet of another nymph.

‘Perhaps they find it peaceful here,’ said Zeal. A shivery rage in her chest had begun to make it hard to breathe. ‘Perhaps these ponds are more like their original home than a London courtyard surrounded by stench and noise.’

Arrived at the top pond, Harry stood with his head on one side and hands on hips beneath his open silk coat. ‘You misunderstand. They’re intended for Lady Alice’s Bedfordshire estate. They’ll have a garden worthy of them there.’

The old sea god, Nereus, seemed to list even farther forward than yesterday; his dolphin peered even more closely into the depths.

‘My men will start at once, should finish tomorrow. Then I’ll not trouble you again.’

Zeal lowered her voice to avoid being heard by the boy who passed them on his way to the dovecote in the paddock. ‘This estate is all I have left. You’ve taken enough.’

‘On the contrary, I believe I’ve been most generous. I rescued you from that Hackney hencoop, didn’t I? Turned you from a dowdy little smock of a schoolgirl into a fashionable lady.’ He pursed his lips in triumph at this wounding shot.

I’ve only myself to blame, she thought. Killing him now won’t change that fact, however much satisfaction it would give me.

She turned away and walked along the bank.

‘I spent nothing that wasn’t legally mine,’ Harry called after her. ‘Mine in good faith, as your husband. At the time.’

She shook her head and kept walking away. He followed.

‘You were happy enough to collude!’ His voice quivered with emotion. ‘I know how things stood between you and my cousin!’

‘Never!’ She turned on him. ‘Never while it still suited you to admit to being my husband! And you know it!’

‘I know nothing of the sort.’

They stood poised in murderous silence.

Harry recovered first. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ he said loftily. ‘Couldn’t care less. We’re nothing to each other now, any more than we ever were. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?’ He swung away from her towards the front of the house. ‘Fox! Pickford! Here!’

To Zeal, he added, ‘You perjured yourself just as I did. If you try to cause me trouble, I vow you’ll come off the worse.’

Two of the carters arrived through an arch in the yew hedge at the west end of the house, near the top pond. Behind this hedge, John had planted a maze the previous summer. Both hedge and infant maze, though badly scorched, promised survival with a pale green frosting of the past summer’s growth.

‘Take Neptune first,’ Harry told the men.

‘I forbid it,’ said Zeal.

The men exchanged startled glances. Then one looked into the distance, while the other studied his stockings.

A shilling-sized spot of red flared on each of Harry’s cheeks. ‘Carry on,’ he said. He took Zeal by the arm and led her aside. ‘Go read the deeds, if you’ve forgotten what they say.’

‘I know what they say,’ she said loudly. She yanked her arm free. ‘And if you touch me again, I will kill you.’ He was right. In law, she could not stop him. If only he had taken them at once and not left them to become part of her life.

Arms crossed, she perched on the corner of Amphritite’s plinth and summoned up her most chilling basilisk eye, though she felt more like weeping.

With wary glances at Zeal, the two carters circled the statue of Nereus. They tested the mud at the base of the plinth with the heels of their boots. They sucked their teeth, shook their heads.

Zeal felt a twinge of hope. Nereus was eight feet tall and made of solid marble. He might choose to stay.

‘Seven of you should be able to manage,’ Harry said impatiently.

The one who turned out to be Fox went to fetch reinforcements.

Zeal followed him through the arch in the hedge. ‘Don’t trample the maze!’ she called sharply.

He soon returned, with thick coiled rope and a heavy wooden pulley block, stepping carefully across the low maze walls. Behind him came a youth with a younger version of the same face, carrying a second rope and block. The youthful Fox chose to follow the paths of the maze. He approached, then suddenly veered away. He circled, turned again and at last emerged with a triumphant grin, released back into the unmeasured world. Behind him, three more men staggered under the weight of the long canvas-wrapped poles. After a brief conference, they elected, like the elder Fox, to play colossus and bestride the complexities in their path. One of them lost his balance and trod on a young box.

‘Take care!’ cried Zeal.

The men’s burden proved to be three stout wooden poles, each as long as a May Pole, wrapped in a canvas sling large enough to lift a horse.

Several children and dogs followed the carters from the forecourt. Some ran the path of the maze, others, like the dogs, leapt over the walls. A dairymaid came up the track from the mill, where she had no doubt gone to hide a basket of cheeses.

With one eye on their audience and a touch of swagger, the carters threaded one of the ropes through the pulleys and tested that it ran freely. Then they linked the three poles together at one end, and hoisted the linked end into the air. Their audience gave a gratifying ‘ahhhh,’ as a great spindly tripod rose above the head of Nereus and settled its feet in the mud.

The carters next spread the canvas sling on the ground beside the statue. Then they tied the pulley rope to Nereus’s thick bearded neck. They secured the second rope like a belt around his dolphin’s belly. Fox set four men on the taut ropes.

‘Now.’

His son thrust a large jemmy under the plinth and dropped his weight onto the iron bar. The crowbar slipped in the soft mud of the bank. Young Fox grunted, fell against the dolphin’s nose and swore.

‘Take care not to chip him!’ cried Sir Harry.

The old sea king did not budge.

‘Perhaps he’s not a movable after all!’ called Zeal.

‘He will yield to our machines, madam,’ said the elder Fox. ‘You can raise siege cannon with these sheer legs. A statue such as this is nothing.’

‘What are they doing?’ called Doctor Bowler in alarm, from the far side of the middle pond, book under his arm and a leaf in his fringe of hair.

‘Giving us a lesson in how to raise cannon,’ Zeal replied across the water.

The audience continued to gather. Four women of the house family, their hands busy with knitting needles or the quick rise-and-fall of drop spindles. More children. A tenant farmer and his son leaned over the hedge of the Roman Field. Ducks, never known to be sensitive to the moment, gathered on the water below the struggle and quacked to be fed. Even the cat watched from a neat hunch on the edge of the still house roof.

Young Fox sucked his bleeding knuckles.

‘Bring on a grown man!’ shouted one of the onlookers. The young carter gave him an evil look.

Under his breath Harry asked Zeal, ‘Can’t you find useful employ for these idlers elsewhere?’

‘What could be more useful than a chance to observe and learn from London men at work?’ Zeal replied sweetly.

Pickford took the crowbar. Young Fox was set on the end of the restraining rope. But after several more attempts, Nereus still stood unmoved.

‘Fetch a shovel,’ said Pickford.

‘If to labour is indeed to pray,’ observed Doctor Bowler, now crossed over the sluice bridge to join the crowd, ‘these must be the most devout men in England.’

Suddenly, Wentworth’s voice asked quietly in Zeal’s ear, ‘Can Harry do this?’

‘He has the right.’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘But I’m happy to say that whether he can still seems to be in question.’ She looked over her shoulder at Wentworth. ‘You left your fishing for this?’

‘You might need me.’

She did not look at him again but felt him still standing at her back. His words made her feel odd and needed thinking about at some other time.

After a short break for dinner, which they took from their bundles on the carts, the carters dug away the mud from under the forecourt side of the plinth. Five men pushed. At last, Nereus consented to give way, as reluctantly as a deep-rooted tooth. Slowed by the two ropes, he tilted ponderously onto his side in the centre of the sling, with his head hanging over one long edge and his feet over the other.

‘Don’t break the dolphin’s nose!’ shouted Harry.

‘He looks just like a sausage pasty,’ said one of the boys. The rest of the on-lookers, fewer in number than before dinner, seemed torn between groans and a natural instinct to cheer.

‘Now fill the hole you’ve made in the bank,’ said Zeal. ‘I recall no mention anywhere of a legal right to dig holes.’

Harry ignored her, but Pickford gave the shovel to young Fox.

‘Now back one of the carts down here to the pond,’ ordered Harry.

‘How?’ Zeal stood up from the corner of Amphritite’s plinth, where she had stayed on guard during the dinner break.

From the arch in the hedge, Fox and Harry contemplated the maze. Then Fox set off towards the forecourt, traversing the maze with exaggerated care. A few moments later he reappeared with a measuring rod, which he held against the opening in the hedge.

‘We can’t get a cart down to the pond in any case, sir. It’s too wide to pass through this arch.’

‘Then cut down the hedge.’

‘That right is not given in the deed,’ said Zeal.

Harry turned to the estate manager. ‘Tuddenham, bring us that bill you had earlier, and three others, and an axe. The hedge is already ruined. And no one has mazes any longer, in any case.’

‘Tuddenham, please do nothing of the sort.’ To Harry, she added, ‘I have a maze.’

The watchers shifted in anticipation of new drama.

With an oath, Harry seized the nearest boy by the arm. ‘Come, my lad. You show us where the things are kept!’ He dragged the boy towards the stable yard, with carters hopping over the maze walls behind him.

Wentworth cleared his throat.

Zeal called a second boy and sent him to fetch her neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet. ‘Beg him to make the greatest possible haste. For our part, we must hold them off until he arrives.’

Wentworth touched her arm. ‘Do you recall what you asked me yesterday morning?’

She and he arrived back on the pond bank just as Harry’s men returned with four billhooks and an axe. When Harry gave the order to attack the hedge, Zeal produced Wentworth’s pistol from the folds of her skirts.

‘Shit!’ said Pickford under his breath.

Harry was the only one to laugh. ‘She won’t shoot,’ he told his men. ‘Carry on.’

There was a long uneasy silence. Zeal leaned against Amphritite and braced her arm, which had begun to tremble under the weight of the gun. She aimed first at Fox. Then at his son. Then at Pickford.

Pickford scratched his neck and sat down. The others looked from her to Harry and back again. They laid down their billhooks.

Zeal watched Harry eye the tools as if considering even the gross impropriety of taking up one himself.

‘The law is on my side, madam,’ said Harry. ‘I shall call for a constable if you don’t let us proceed.’

‘Better than that, I’ve already sent for a magistrate.’

After examining the deed, which Zeal kept in a casket in the estate office, Sir Richard was forced to agree that Sir Harry did indeed have the right to remove the statues. But, on the other hand, Sir Richard also had to agree with Zeal that Harry could not cut down either hedge or maze.

‘That’s absurd!’ Sir Harry reached over Sir Richard’s shoulder to take the deed for a closer look. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ He threw his arms to the Heavens in protest.

‘Mind the candlestick on the mantle,’ Zeal said quietly.

‘This is a madhouse!’

‘Let me see that deed again.’ Sir Richard frowned at the document as if it would yield something it had failed to say before. Zeal wondered if the old knight had simply forgotten what it said. His once-keen mind had seemed to lose its edge quite suddenly, early that past summer, and his memory had begun to misplace things.

‘Most definitely can’t cut the hedge,’ said Sir Richard.

‘Then how am I to take possession of what is lawfully mine?’ demanded Harry. ‘Perhaps Doctor Bowler would care to pray for a miracle…should be easier to move hedges than mountains.’

They trooped out of the estate office back into the forecourt, where the carters, Wentworth, Bowler, Mistress Margaret and the others waited with faces ranging from expectant to glum.

‘Legal niceties!’ said Sir Harry bitterly. ‘All law and no justice!’ To Fox, he said, ‘You’re going to have to figure out how to get the statues without going through there.’

Sir Richard lowered his massive head and glared at Harry through his eyebrows. The carters examined the entrance to the paddock to the west of the maze garden.

‘Can’t get a wagon through over here, either.’

Beyond the paddock, stretching up to the high road, lay the hedge of the Roman field, reinforced with stones and willow hurdles set to try to stem the constant leaking of sheep. The stable yard and walled garden blocked access around the eastern end of the house.

‘I’m taking those statues, and I don’t care how!’ said Harry. ‘I’ll stay until someone works it out.’

‘An ox without a cart could reach the ponds through the paddock.’

Heads turned towards this unexpected voice. Harry looked startled, as if he had not known the man could speak at all. Indeed, given Wentworth’s absence from table during Harry’s short time on the estate, perhaps he had never before heard the older man utter. ‘You can’t drag a statue across the ground like a plough.’ Nevertheless, Harry eyed Wentworth with hope.

‘The Indians of the New World shift blocks of stone twenty times greater than that statue, without even horses, let alone oxen or carts.’

‘Pray, enlighten us,’ said Harry.

Though she was curious to hear Wentworth’s solution, Zeal went to see Sir Richard off on his horse.

‘A word in your ear, young mistress,’ the old knight murmured as he prepared to mount. ‘Keep an eye on that Fox man. Wanted me to have you arrested for threatening him with a gun. I told him not to be a fool, that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. What a business!’

When Zeal returned, the carters were prising planks from sides of two of the carts.

‘I’ve no doubt, sir, that you’ll pay me to replace the sides of my carts,’ Fox said to Sir Harry.

‘I’ll pay you if you ever manage to do the job you’re contracted to do.’

‘Four will be enough,’ Wentworth told the men. The reclusive fisherman had assumed authority with apparent ease. The carters obeyed him without question.

‘Imagine him knowing about things like New World Indians,’ said one of the knitters. ‘Or talking so much,’ said another.

As he gave orders, Zeal observed her future husband with increasing interest and surmise. I must ask him more about those Indians. She was looking forward to his wedding gift of truth even if she avoided thinking about any of the rest of it.

On Wentworth’s instruction, the carters led one of the draught oxen through the paddock. Then they laid the four cart planks on the ground, end to end in pairs, beside the recumbent statue.

‘You haul him up…’ Fox pointed at the two men on the pulley rope. ‘…then you lot over there swing him over the planks, crosswise, mind. Then you…’ he pointed at the first pair again ‘…let him down again, nice and easy. Ready?’

The men settled their feet and drew deep breaths.

‘Heave!’ cried Fox.

Nereus did not wish to be heaved. Instead, his weight drove the feet of the poles down into the mud. The harder the men tried to lift, the deeper they drove the poles into the ground.

‘I did say,’ said Pickford. ‘Straight off. Soon as I saw all this mud.’

‘God’s Teeth and Toenails!’ cried Sir Harry.

‘I’ve never had such trouble, ever before!’ exclaimed Fox. His scowl included Zeal in the trouble. ‘The thing acts as if it’s been cursed!’

Doctor Bowler began to sing quietly as if to himself.

The sun was sinking, orange as a pumpkin beyond the water meadows.

‘“To labour is the lot of Man below,”’ sang Doctor Bowler. ‘“When God gave us life, he gave us woe.”’

‘Put something flat under the feet,’ said Fox. ‘Is there anything about that we can use?’ He looked around for Wentworth, who had seemed to be the only sensible authority, but Wentworth had gone.

‘Leave the wretched thing till tomorrow!’ Harry wiped his face and jammed his tasselled handkerchief back into a slash in his sleeve. ‘We soon won’t be able to see the road back to Ufton Wharf.’ He glared at Zeal. ‘If anything is taken or harmed, I shall have you indicted for theft and wilful damage. In spite of your tame magistrate.’

If I were a man, I could call him out, thought Zeal as she watched Harry ride away up the drive, leaving Nereus abandoned on his sling. Now there’s a grand thought! Rapiers, not guns. Snick, snick, snick. Cut off his buttons. Whisht! Whisht! There go the bows from his shoes! Whisht! And a tassel from his handkerchief! And he’d never touch me. Not even close! With enough people watching such humiliation, I wouldn’t even need to draw blood.

After a quick supper at the long table in the bake house, Zeal slept in the estate office again, to be on the spot in the morning in case Harry arrived early. With John’s coat beside her, she yanked the smoky coverlet up to her chin and imagined setting her grooms on him with clubs. She would borrow Sir Richard Balhatchet’s old falconet, which he had recently had cleaned and made fit to fire.

Then she heard again the danger in Harry’s voice when he warned her against opposing him. He might be a fool, but he was a fool with powerful friends and infinite self-esteem.

Why do I care so much? she asked herself. They’re only stone!

Her feet were now cold. She crawled to the end of the makeshift bed and tucked the coverlet in again, then banged her head ferociously back into the pillow. She still did not know how to deal with the hole where a piece of her life had been excised and then declared officially never to have existed.

‘We must find a way out!’ Harry had said one night on one of his rare and brief returns from London. He wore a grim but shifty look that told her he had already decided how to get his way.

‘From our marriage?’ She dared not hope that he meant to set her free. ‘But you need an Act of Parliament to be granted a divorce!’

‘Don’t be a fool! Do you confuse me with old King Harry? I don’t have that much influence yet.’

‘But given another wife, with grander connections, you mean to get it?’ she taunted him. ‘Lady Alice, whose fortune you have not yet spent.’

But, oh, how she had snapped at his bait!

The fleck of decency in Harry’s soul, which Zeal had once mistaken for a far larger portion, was the cause, ironically, of her fall into the crime of perjury. Harry had a mutually advantageous plan. If she would collude to dissolve their marriage, he would give her Hawkridge Estate.

She rolled onto her side, then onto her back again. The ash still in the coverlet made her sneeze.

Their bargain gave him the freedom to trade Hawkridge for Covent Garden and to pursue London heiresses with larger fortunes than Zeal had ever had. It left her free to love Harry’s cousin, John Nightingale.

She turned her head to look at John’s stool and table. Then she reached out to touch the smooth polished dent at the base of one of the stool legs where he had always rested the heel of his right foot.

She would have sworn to anything.

She had sworn under oath that she had been younger than the legal age of fourteen when she and Harry were betrothed, which could well have been true. She also lied and swore that the marriage had never been consummated – for, who but Harry and she could ever prove otherwise? Particularly as the lack of issue was commonly taken as sufficient proof in such cases. Zeal’s guardian, who, by her marriage, lost all interest in either her or her fortune (now squandered by Harry, in any case), had been happy to testify that she had married against his wishes, as indeed she had. In the end, there had been almost excessive grounds for voiding the marriage and rewriting two years of her life.

As always, her head began to throb at this point. Now came the part she could consider only sideways.

Annulment meant that the marriage had never been. Therefore, if, as it had been ruled, Harry had never been her legal husband, then he had never had the right to spend her fortune. He had, nevertheless, gone through it all (and, of course, he really had been her husband all along).

Almost worse, she had never been Lady Beester, no matter what she had believed at the time. She had not had the legal right to fall in love with Hawkridge, nor to delight in its gardens or the charming irregularity of its outline or the ornate chimneys, the unexpected hens’ nests, the dusty cupboards full of other people’s lives. She had had no right to feel full and warm, as she moved about the house, her house now, aflame with domestic purpose.

Orphaned at six, she lived thereafter with relatives, with guardians or at boarding school. At Harry’s Hawkridge, she thought she had finally found her proper place on earth. She still felt as if she had missed a step in the stairs and wasn’t at all where she had thought she was, and was sick with the shock and unexpected pain.

Outside the little office window, birds were beginning to shout out their territorial claims. The sky had just begun to lighten. Not much night left. She put one of her pillows over her head to muffle the birds and tried to think how to set about building a new house.

10

Sir Harry and the carriers returned an hour after what would have been sun-up if the sky had not been a chilly grey. The weather, as well as erosion of novelty, led to a thinner audience than the day before. Also, the smokehouse needed tending and there was the autumn ploughing, bread to bake, the butchering of a ewe that had crippled itself, and arranging warm lodgings to see them all through the winter.

The carters brought flat stones to place under the feet of the tripod to keep them from sinking into the mud. But when the ox began to drag Nereus along the track of planks, the dolphin’s nose dug into the ground and acted as a brake.

Once she had grasped the principle of Wentworth’s method, Zeal left the men grunting and puffing in their effort to roll the old god onto his other side. Back in the office, she began to list all the different building parts she had envisioned with such delight the morning before, and the stuffs needed to make them. This morning, however, she found the work tedious.

She had imagined a house built of brick.

Therefore, I know I will need bricks. But will it be less costly to buy them or to hire men from Southampton to enlarge our own kiln? Need…dear Lord…how many thousand? How do I work it out?

I’m not sure I can do this alone, after all, she thought. Do you suppose Master Wentworth knows about houses, as well as about New World Indians?

The carters reached the forecourt. Unable to keep her mind on her great purpose, she went out to watch the final lifting of the old sea god onto the cart. On the firm footing of the forecourt the sheer legs and pulleys worked perfectly. The surrender was easily achieved by only three men.

Amphritite was next. Her fishing line had vanished during the night. As she stood on relatively dry ground, the traitorous nymph, unlike her father, yielded easily to her abductors.

‘We’ll be done by evening, after all.’ Fox sounded greatly cheered.

Zeal returned to the office. Then she had to confer with Mistress Margaret in the bake house kitchen about collecting more urine for soap making. She could not help walking back to the ponds. Unlike her sister, Panope resisted until just before dinner. After dinner, although the carters had begun to get the measure of both subjects and terrain, they shifted only Galatea, Psamanthe and the last three nymphs on the near side of the ponds. Eight more waited on the opposite banks. Harry left in a vile temper for a second night at Ufton Wharf, where the barges were moored, at his expense.

Unhappily, Zeal examined the muddy track that the ox’s hoofs had churned up across the grass of the paddock.

By the third morning, the battle had lost all novelty for the estate residents. Also, a slow, depressing drizzle had begun to seep down from the sky. Wherever she was, however, Zeal could still hear Sir Harry shouting from his shelter under the rear portico, and the curses of his workmen out in the rain. She felt paralysed by his presence. Life on the estate was frozen so long as he was still here. More than anything, she now wanted him gone for good.

The rain stopped in mid-afternoon. A warm clammy wind blew down the river valley and tugged dying leaves from the trees.

‘Only two more to go,’ said Sir Harry as they left for yet another night at Ufton.

Fox said something under his breath.

Mid-morning the next day, shouts and splashing sent her running out to the ponds.

Only one nymph remained – Thetis, mother of heroes and nest guardian. The muddy berm where she stood, at the far end of the pike pond just above the weir, was too narrow to give the feet of the sheer legs a firm base. When the statue finally toppled, the leather loop holding the sling to the lifting rig snapped. She now lay on her back with an arm raised in mute protest, her right hand snapped off at the wrist.

Young Fox was searching among the lily pads, ducking his head under the surface, then lifting it to gasp and splutter.

‘Mind the pike!’ a boy warned. ‘They’ll bite your fingers off! They nearly ate my baby brother’s whole foot!’

‘Farewell at last?’ Zeal asked, in the early afternoon. ‘Or will you be back when you suddenly remember something else you want to give your new bride?’

‘Your manners have not improved with time.’ Harry swung up into his saddle, then leaned back down to her. ‘I have influence in London now, mistress, so don’t challenge me.’ He turned and kicked his horse so savagely that she had to jump back out of the way of its swinging rump. ‘And when you get around to draining the pond, I want that hand!’

Zeal resolved to have the fish man rescue it as soon as Harry had gone.

As his cart passed her, Fox made a sign against the evil eye.

When the last cart had gone, she went to the ponds and scuffed her foot on one of the bare mud patches on the banks. Hawkridge felt deserted. There was too much raw empty air around the ponds.

She watched the fish man groping in the mud of the pike pond.

The duck’s nest lay smashed on the side of the bank.

The day had chilled. The sky was turning a purplish-black.

There’s a storm coming, Zeal thought as she turned back towards the office, carrrying Thetis’ wet marble hand. If Nature weeps for the sorrows of men, the present sky must reflect my desire to give Harry a black eye. Nature was not usually so sympathetic nor obliging, no matter what the philosophers might say.

In her ignorance of what was to come, she found the thought entertaining.

The news reached Hawkridge long after dark. A short time later, Sir Richard came out of the night, looking both irascible and miserable. Zeal went to meet him.

‘Trust him to wreck a man’s sleep!’ he said as he handed over his horse. ‘Well, my dear. What a business! Best get it over and done with.’

Mistress Margaret had long ago gone to bed in Sir Richard’s house. The group which gathered solemnly in the bake house included Zeal, Rachel, Sir Richard, Tuddenham, a man named Herne, who was the current parish constable, another named Comer, who was a parish councilman, and Doctor Gifford, the parish minister. Fox and Pickford stood uneasily to one side, looking at the floor, while Zeal studied them in perplexed astonishment.

Sir Richard had just cleared his throat to begin when Wentworth, with his odd new taste for appearing, entered and set his rod beside the door.

‘What is this I hear?’

‘The self-satisfied pup has gone and got himself killed,’ said Sir Richard.

‘Harry’s dead,’ said Zeal. ‘And these two here say I did it.’

11

‘Smashed his head like it was a ripe melon,’ said Fox. ‘On a rock.’

‘Speak when I ask you.’ Sir Richard flipped his coattail over a stool and sat down at the bake house table. ‘You stand there.’ He waved Fox forward. ‘Now, then.’

Given the late hour, he had decided to hold his preliminary inquiry in the Hawkridge bake house rather than shift the entire company back to his little courtroom at High House. Zeal found a half dozen precious beeswax candles to lend dignity to the background of dough bowls and ovens. The air was warm from the banked fires and fragrant with the scent of the day’s baking. Pale cloth-covered loaves sat in orderly rows on shelves behind Sir Richard’s head.

‘I’m sure we’re all grateful to be brought the news in such unparalleled haste,’ said Sir Richard. ‘But I’m still not certain why you feel the matter is so urgent it can’t wait till morning.’

‘Murder seemed urgent to us, sir,’ said Fox. ‘And Sir Harry was murdered.’

‘By his horse?’ asked Sir Richard. ‘I was told you arrived saying Sir Harry’s horse had thrown him. You’re not under oath yet, but take care.’

‘It threw him because she charmed it.’ With averted eyes, Fox tilted his head at Zeal, who had perched on a stool at the far end of the table.

Sir Richard glanced to his left at Doctor Gifford, fierce-eyed and eager to sit in judgement, even at this hour. He glanced to his right at Geoffrey Comer, who had the misfortune to be the nearest parish councillor, and sighed. ‘When I was dragged from my bed, I expected an urgent legal matter. If this case has any substance at all, the issue is witchcraft, and it should go to the church courts. Or else the whole thing might be a load of buffle.’ He regarded Fox through his eyebrows as he had studied Harry earlier. ‘I hope for your sake that you’re not wasting my time.’ He raised a hand to quell an urgent movement from Doctor Gifford, the minister. ‘You’ll get your turn, sir.’ Sir Richard turned back to Fox. ‘Are you formally accusing our young mistress here of causing Sir Harry’s death by witchcraft?’

Fox hesitated.

Herne, the constable, began to stare at Zeal with an open mouth.

‘Or by any other means?’ asked Sir Richard.

‘More like raising the possibility, sir. We thought you might…’

‘Oh, just the “possibility”…’ Sir Richard rocked back meditatively on his stool then slammed the front legs down again. ‘Why?’

‘Sir?’

‘Why rouse a magistrate, a minister and a parish councillor in order to “raise a possibility”?’

‘Justice, your honour. And also, we’ve already been away from London much longer than we contracted for. So, if we are to be witnesses at the inquest on Sir Harry…’

‘Don’t think for a moment you will be,’ said Sir Richard.

Pickford had been breathing audibly. Now he stepped forward. ‘Please, your honour. That woman threatened to kill Sir Harry. “I’ll kill you,” she said. Everyone heard her. And all the time we were here, she showed herself to be a wild and dangerous woman…’

‘Dear me.’ Sir Richard turned his head to gaze at Zeal. ‘Did you know you were dangerous, my dear?’

She shook her head dumbly. These men and their accusation were absurd. On the other hand, if you were angry enough, perhaps your rage might shape itself into an independent being, a spirit, like a ghost, and act on your behalf without your permission.

I was very angry with Harry. Is it possible that I did somehow will his death?

‘You may laugh, sir,’ said Pickford. ‘But we know she set the evil eye on us when all we did was obey Sir Harry’s orders to remove the statues. Call the others and ask them. We all felt it.’

Zeal rubbed her hand across her mouth. She had no idea that her glares had been so effective.

‘And no one can deny she threatened to shoot us, just for trying to do our job. And us with only a shovel to defend ourselves.’

‘You forget that I was present…Just one moment, Doctor Gifford, I beg you!’

‘She killed him in revenge for him taking the statues back.’ Pickford looked defiant. ‘It’s too much coincidence. Evil eye. She threatened him and then he died. Think about it.’

‘Thank you. I hadn’t planned to.’ Sir Richard scratched his earlobe and studied Zeal’s accusers in silence, until she began to fear that he was having one of his lapses.

Surely these comical men could not make real trouble for her.

‘I’m not clear on one or two points.’ Comer seized the opening, just before Gifford, who was leaning back on his stool, shaking his head in impatient dismay. ‘Was Mistress Zeal present when Sir Harry died?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Was she anywhere nearby?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Did she at any time approach his horse while it was at Hawkridge in order to tamper with it?’

‘Not so far as I know.’

‘But she killed him nevertheless, at a distance, by subverting his horse?’ Sir Richard stepped in again, back in full flow.

‘Such things happen,’ said Fox defiantly. ‘Ask the minister there.’

‘You all are missing the true wickedness,’ said Gifford. ‘If you will but allow me…’

Sir Richard snorted. ‘There was a storm tonight? Yes? While you were on the road?’

‘An uncanny one, sir,’ agreed Fox. ‘Blue sky one minute, lightning and hail the next. Lightning filled the sky like noon. Even our own beasts gave a start and offered to bolt. Not usual lightning. It was yellowish, like sulphur. Not your usual lightning at all. If you follow me.’

‘I detect the Lord’s hand,’ said Doctor Gifford. ‘Sir Harry was struck down like the Canaanites who worshipped heathen idols.’

‘But these fellows don’t seem to be raising the pos-si-bi-li-ty…’ Sir Richard seemed to examine each syllable in turn. ‘…that He had anything to do with it. More like the other one, if anything.’ He turned to Zeal. ‘My dear, how do you plead? Care to throw yourself on the mercy of the court?’

‘I did not have anything to do with Harry’s death,’ Zeal said quietly. ‘We all speak more fiercely than we could ever act. I am sorry that he died…I don’t quite believe it yet, if you must know. And I never meant to shoot anyone. Only to keep Harry and these men from taking the law into their own hands before Sir Richard could arrive and sort things out.’

‘Hnmph!’ Sir Richard nodded with satisfaction.

Comer leaned forward again. ‘But you did threaten to shoot unarmed men? That is an offence in itself.’

‘The gun is rusted solid,’ said Wentworth suddenly from the wall where he had been leaning with crossed arms. ‘I gave it to her. It hasn’t been fired for twenty-three years.’

‘Did she know this?’ asked Comer, who struck Zeal as a reasonable man and surprisingly good-natured, given that he, like Sir Richard had been called from his bed.

‘Of course. I dare say she wouldn’t have touched it otherwise,’ said Wentworth.

Comer and Sir Richard laughed. Zeal bristled but saw the wisdom of keeping quiet.

‘Well, gentlemen.’ Once again Sir Richard looked at his two colleagues. ‘These two don’t want to make a formal accusation. I see no need to clog up the courts with “possibility”. Where are the rest of your number, by the way? They less keen to see justice done?’

‘Went on with the statues to London, sir,’ said Fox. ‘To deliver as ordered. And Sir Harry. But, if you want him back, we can always…’

Sir Richard cut across him. ‘I shall, of course, report this meeting to the inquest, wherever it’s held, but the coroner will undoubtedly conclude what seems clear to me – that Sir Harry died by misadventure – horse startled by lightning and so on. Or maybe, as Doctor Gifford says, he got a clout on the ear from God. If anything changes, I shall let you know. Good night to you all. I’m off back to my bed.’ He levered himself to his feet. ‘As for you two, if I hear of you still in the parish tomorrow morning, I’ll clap you up as vagrants.’

‘There is also the question of our wages,’ said Fox.

‘At last we come to the nub,’ said Sir Richard. He leaned on the table with exaggerated patience. ‘Speak.’

‘We did our part as contracted. Sir Harry hadn’t paid us when he died. The statues came from Hawkridge estate. And then my carts…That gentleman over there ordered them wrecked…’

‘Get out!’ bellowed Sir Richard. ‘Herne! Tuddenham! See them off the estate.’

The two men gave Zeal wide berth as they fled.

‘Londoners!’ exclaimed Sir Richard before the door had quite closed.

‘I must have my turn to speak!’

The trumpet of Gifford’s voice arrested the general surge of rising, adjusting clothes and preparing to leave. Zeal pulled back her hand from pinching out one of the candle flames.

The minister gathered them up with a penetrating gaze as he did his congregation before commencing a sermon, his fierce presence far greater than warranted by his small size. ‘No one has yet named the true wickedness in this case!’ He pointed a knobbed forefinger at Zeal while his eyes probed her soul. ‘Mistress, you may not have murdered Sir Harry, but you still must be chastised for your true crime.’

Zeal inhaled sharply and sat down on her stool again. He has sniffed out the fornication, she thought. Those eyes of his can see that I’m pregnant.

She knew without doubt that her guilt was both infinite and written clearly on her face.

‘She already knows what I will say!’ cried Gifford in triumph. ‘Look at the knowledge in her face!’

‘Knowledge of what?’ she managed to ask.

Gifford shook his head as if in pain at her mendacity. ‘I do not doubt that your former husband was struck down by a righteous God for his prime part in it, but you too must share the blame!’

He knows about the perjury! She felt she might faint.

He knows that the annulment was a fraud. He knows everything.

She gripped the sides of her stool and braced herself upright.

‘When, like Moses, madam, you see that your people worship idols, you must do as he did and take those abominations and burn them in the fire, and grind them into powder and strew that upon the water and make the people drink of it.’

Zeal stared, trying to make sense of his words. Idols? Was I spied at the Lady Tree? Does he want me to chop down the tree?

‘You know what I speak of, madam. Don’t pretend.’ The pointing finger stabbed at her across the width of the table. ‘You have tolerated abomination! As for your parson, I am dismayed that he did not counsel you like a Christian. I hold him, too, responsible.’

‘Doctor Bowler is guilty as well?’ Zeal managed to ask at last.

‘The statues, madam! Graven images! Lewd, naked, heathen idols, standing there for all to see. Sir Harry may have set them up, but I expected you to tear them down as soon as he took his authority away with him.’

‘The statues?’ Zeal swallowed and took a deep breath to hold down a belch of hysterical laughter. ‘This is all about Nereus and the nymphs?’ In spite of her effort at self-control, she hiccuped.

‘“And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up forever and ever and they have no rest day nor night who worship the beast and his image.” Are heathen idols not wickedness enough for my concern?’

‘I did not think of them as idols, Doctor Gifford. Nor, I’m sure, did Sir Harry. They are works of art. Representations of abstract beauty and the wholesome ideas of nature, as given form by the Classical authorities…’

‘“Woe unto them who call evil good, and good evil.”’

Zeal sighed with frustration and looked about for assistance. Sir Richard was studying the ceiling.

‘The only authority you must study is God’s Holy Word,’ added Gifford.

‘Doctor Bowler says that Man creates beauty only to glorify God. He will quote you scripture to prove that God delights in…’

‘Bowler!’ Gifford said in a surge of fury. ‘That false man of God who pollutes your worship with music! And flowers! And all the other vain deceptions of the world! He is not a man of God, merely an obscene…fiddler!’

‘“Make a joyful noise unto the Lord,”’ replied Zeal.

‘I hold Bowler responsible for this young woman’s sins,’ Gifford told Sir Richard and Comer. ‘She is still young and ignorant while he is…’

‘I’ll be responsible for my own sins,’ Zeal interrupted.

‘Madam.’ Gifford collected himself. ‘A masterless woman is always at risk in this wicked world. Under no man’s rod, who knows how she may err? Your own words prove my case. I must keep you under my eye from now on. I shall impose no penance this time, but you and all your people must henceforward attend my church at Bedgebury.’

‘We worship very well here.’

‘I think not. I shall expect you for all services. And all the estate workers.’

‘But that’s impossible! We’re over-busy here, with winter coming, and the house…Your church is half an hour’s walk away. We will do nothing else but traipse back and…’

‘All of you, at all services, including morning prayers.’ Gifford began to button his coat. ‘I won’t let you continue to risk your eternal soul, nor the souls of those who look to you for example. You have no husband or father to guide you. I must therefore take their place.’

‘That’s most decent of you.’ Wentworth spoke for a second time. He sounded entirely sincere. His dusty black coat rustled as he stepped away from the wall. ‘Perhaps a compromise might be found, which would allow for the pressure of work.’

Zeal thought that perhaps the surprise and interest that had greeted his earlier demonstrations of speech were now touched by irritation that the man was putting himself forward out of turn.

‘Have we met?’ Gifford asked coldly. ‘I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you in church.’

‘Don’t be an ass,’ said Sir Richard, who had listened to Gifford with open mouth and raised brows. ‘That’s Master Philip Wentworth, the Hawkridge sojourner. Been in the parish twice as long as you. Full of ingenious ideas. You can thank him for getting rid of those heathen idols we didn’t know enough to grind up into powder.’

‘What is your compromise, Master Wentworth?’ Gifford’s tone softened by a degree.

‘If you abate the schedule of attendance, I will undertake to be this woman’s guide.’ Wentworth crossed to stand behind Zeal’s stool and laid his large square hands on her shoulders. ‘I can vouchsafe for her future behaviour. The ship no longer lacks a rudder. She is to be my wife.’

Zeal sat frozen with the weight of his hands on her shoulders and the heat of his belly against her back.

Sir Richard broke the silence with a violent coughing fit. When Comer had thumped him on the back and offered a handkerchief to mop his eyes, words began to emerge between the splutters. ‘…old dog. Lucky old bastard!’ He straightened. ‘My congratulations!’ He blew his nose. ‘Suppose I’ll have to arrange a bridal chamber at High House then. Can’t have your wedding night in a barn!’

Graciously, if tentatively, Gifford offered his own congratulations. ‘I shall marry you in Bedgebury, it goes without saying.’

Wentworth gave Zeal a warning look. She kept silent while Wentworth and Gifford at last agreed that the Hawkridge attendance at his services in Bedgebury could be limited to one Sunday a month.

‘I would have touched the gun!’ Zeal said tightly to Wentworth when Gifford, Comer and Sir Richard had gone. ‘I would have fired it if I could!’

‘Of course.’ He gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘But never confess anything in the presence of a judge.’

12

‘Tell me the old sot was raving in his cups!’

Zeal was alone in the bake house the next morning blearily eating a slice of cheese with her morning ale when Mistress Margaret arrived breathless and alone, on foot from High House. The sun was barely up. The ovens were still banked.

Mistress Margaret lowered herself onto a stool and wiped her red face with her apron. ‘Tell me you are not going to marry that old man!’

‘You heard this before dawn?’ Zeal picked up a knife. ‘Bread?’

She had not slept.

‘Not dawn. In the middle of the night! Sir Richard was roaring around as drunk as an owl till he keeled over at cockcrow…Give that old loaf to the hens. I’m about to bake more…I haven’t slept since I heard about Harry, and then that other nonsense Sir Richard was spouting.’ Mistress Margaret had loved her nephew John fiercely.

Zeal kept her head down as she began to cube the stale bread. ‘It’s all true.’

Mistress Margaret squeaked like a small rusty hinge. She got up and took the yeast sponge from the oven where it had been rising overnight along with a bowl of water. Still silent, she beat down the puffy yeast mix with a wooden spoon, measured flour by the hand full, mixed all together. Her amethyst ear drops trembled.

Zeal swept the bread cubes and crumbs into the hens’ basket, then stooped to feed the sleeping fire under the first bread oven.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mistress Margaret at last. ‘If you love my nephew as you claim, how can you bolt to the altar before his ship has scarce cleared the horizon?’ She turned the dough out onto the floured tabletop and attacked it with both fists. She pinched her small mouth, then sniffed angrily. ‘I expected better of you, my girl.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Mistress Margaret turned the dough and slapped it, though not as hard as she might have done before the knuckles of her hands had grown swollen and red. She worked for several minutes with her head down. ‘I’m not sure I can live here if Wentworth becomes master. Even if he deigns to permit me. But where can I go? How can you do this to me, at my age?’

Can’t she see what’s before her eyes? Zeal wondered. Even if she’s never carried a child herself? Rachel guessed.

She ached to tell the older woman, but Mistress Margaret had kept a secret just once in her life, and then only when her nephew’s life had depended on it. ‘I won’t let him turn you out, aunt. In any case, our lives won’t change that much. He has no ambitions beyond his fishing. We shall carry on just as before.’

Fiercely, the older woman pressed down on the dough, folded and turned it then pressed down again. The smell of raw yeast began to fill the air. ‘I had thought – at the worst, if it came to it – that you might have to make a business-like marriage to bring in some money to help run and repair the estate. And pay our Crown levies. But all Master Wentworth can settle on you is a bucket of trout! And not even his own trout, at that! Most likely your trout! The old wrinkle-shanks!’ She thumped the dough again and raised her voice. ‘And I don’t care if he hears me!’

She paused as one of the dairymaids staggered in from the cow barn with two full pails. Together the three women lifted the heavy pails to pour the milk into a shallow lead sink rescued from the dairy house, so that the cream could rise to the top for skimming.

‘The churn Mistress Wilde lent us from Far Beeches needs to be scoured and set to dry in the sun,’ Zeal told the maid.

‘Waste!’ muttered Mistress Margaret, pummelling her dough again.

Zeal began to pump the bellows.

‘I like the man well enough, don’t mistake me,’ said Mistress Margaret.

Slap, thump.

‘…As far as I’ve had a chance to know, that is. It’s not that…can you find me the seeds?’

Slap, thump.

‘…but he’s old. And odd.’

Thump!

‘…keeping to himself, forbidding anyone to clean his chamber. He might be a murderer for all we know. Have chests full of severed heads.’ She sliced the dough into six smaller lumps.

Zeal took a lump and began to shape a cob loaf. ‘I like him well enough too.’

‘“Like!” La, la!’ Mistress Margaret stood staring down at her loaf. Then she burst into tears and hobbled out of the bake house.

Before Zeal had shaped her second loaf, Rachel came into the kitchen. Without speaking, she went straight to the second oven and began to work the bellows.

After several minutes, Zeal said into the silence, ‘Yes, it’s all true.’

‘God be praised!’ Rachel’s elbows flapped as if she were a duck trying to lift off a pond. ‘I can save my tears then.’

When Zeal passed him in the forecourt mid-morning, Doctor Bowler wore the expression of a kicked dog and avoided her eyes.

‘Terrible, terrible about Harry,’ he said. Though he did not mention the proposed marriage, she knew by his odd manner that Wentworth had spoken to him as promised.

By the end of morning milking, the rest of Hawkridge estate seemed to have heard the news of both death and marriage, and split into those for the match and those against. John Nightingale had been popular during the fourteen years he had run the estate, first for his uncle and then for his cousin. Wentworth shunned friendship and had often given offence by repulsing well-meant overtures. Few were in favour.

‘They’ll work it out soon enough,’ Rachel told her, having caught Zeal near tears in the still room. ‘But we must get you into a safe berth first.’

Zeal pinched her lips and drew a deep breath. ‘And what do you hear about Sir Harry’s death?’

Rachel peered into a tiered muslin sieve, which was dripping a greenish juice into a crock. ‘Everyone on the estate knows the truth of what happened. Any rumours will soon die.’

Zeal had never before felt out of favour here, even when first proving herself to them as Harry’s new, fourteen-year-old wife. Now the averted eyes and pursed lips hurt her. She hated the way talk stopped whenever she entered a room. She was frightened by the occasional assessing eye that measured her waist. Wentworth was right. They must marry as soon as possible.

That morning, Wentworth abandoned his rod and the river to spend several hours with Sir Richard. Then, he borrowed a horse from Zeal and set off for Winchester.

She watched her betrothed settle into the saddle and gather up the reins. At least I now know that he can ride.

The beech avenue swallowed him.

Perhaps he has gone for good. His proposal was a cruel jest. And he has taken my horse. How can I know differently?

She had planned to write that morning to tell John of her proposed marriage. Now she decided to wait until she knew for certain that Wentworth was coming back. It was best not to tempt fate.

Wentworth returned three days later with an ordinary ecclesiastical licence issued by the diocese, which allowed them to be wed at once, without calling the banns. Though the growing child was the reason for this saving of three weeks, Zeal was grateful that news of the marriage need not be published throughout the parish. The disapproval and curiosity on Hawkridge Estate alone were as much as she could bear. She did not ask how Wentworth had managed to acquire the licence. Nor did she know that both Sir Richard and Master Wilde of Far Beeches had each stood surety for a large sum of money, to guarantee, accurately or not, that Wentworth’s written allegation presented to the archdeacon contained no falsehoods concerning her state of legal spinsterhood.

After one night back, on Michaelmas Day, Wentworth borrowed the horse again, this time to ride to Basingstoke.

‘Surely I must settle a jointure on you, not the other way round,’ Zeal told him unhappily. ‘Do we need a lawyer to ensure your right to my pile of ashes?’

On marriage all her property became his, as it had become Harry’s. She had much less now than then, but nevertheless, if Philip had had a male heir, that heir, not she, would have the right to whatever remained after Philip’s death. Or a creditor of his might attach the estate, or the king might declare it forfeit if Wentworth committed a crime.

From the little he had told her so far, an unknown crime did not seem beyond possibility. These risks were the price of her child’s life.

The lawyer Wentworth brought from Basingstoke was eating toasted bread and cheese at the bake house table while a kitchen groom held another slice on a knifepoint over the fire. The man’s papers and pens waited on Zeal’s table in the estate office.

Wentworth nodded curtly at yet another of the house family who had found an excuse to visit the bake house kitchen. ‘Am I a specimen in a menagerie, that all these people must come peer at me?’

The second dairymaid’s face disappeared from the kitchen door.

‘You’re not often seen. And, by day, this is always a busy place.’

‘Small wonder I prefer the riverbanks!’ He led her to one of the little windows and stooped as if to look out. ‘I will almost certainly die before you,’ he said quietly. ‘I want no one to find anything irregular in our union. For the child’s sake.’ He glared at the kitchen groom, who fled. ‘Also, I want to make secure your absolute title to Hawkridge again after I am gone, not just dower rights or a widow’s annuity.’

She nodded. It was kind of him to think of such things, although she would be leaving Hawkridge in any case, when John sent in seven years for her to go to the West Indies. None of which Wentworth knew. ‘Arrange things as you wish,’ she said, avoiding his eyes.

He scratched the bristle on his chin and smiled. ‘“On my obedient wife, Zeal Wentworth, I settle, herewith, two fishing rods of willow with copper rings, four Brown Queens, two Peacocks and a dozen hooks of the finest Spanish steel.”’

Zeal laughed.

Wentworth looked at first startled and then pleased that he seemed to have amused her.

‘You might find use for my rods, if you’ll allow me to teach you to fish. Then you can leave them to the child…the thought pleases me. I might even leave the cub my books direct.’ He peered through the window again. ‘And here comes Sir Richard at last, to be our witness. I swear he’s making his horse trot on tiptoe to spare his head.’

That image of her neighbour, short, round and undoubtedly sore-headed from his night of drinking, made Zeal laugh again.

Wentworth again looked both startled and pleased.

He’s grown used to amusing only himself, she thought. At the least, I can give him my laughter. I think he really does mean me well.

The lawyer finished the last of his bread and brushed the crumbs from his long white collar as Sir Richard opened the bake house door.

The old knight took off his hat and fanned himself. ‘Oho! The happy couple.’ He mopped his bald head and replaced his hat. His reddened eyes sat in their puffy sockets like specks of grit in two oysters. ‘Don’t know how you’ll take to this news, but Doctor Gifford sent me word that he can make time to marry you Saturday next, if I have no objections as magistrate.’

‘That’s only eight days!’ cried Mistress Margaret, returning with ale for Sir Richard in time to hear. ‘How can we prepare in eight days?’

‘But surely our own Doctor Bowler must marry us!’ Zeal protested. ‘If he’s willing.’

Sir Richard and Wentworth exchanged glances.

‘Doctor Gifford is the parish incumbent and a strong voice in the parish council,’ said Sir Richard. ‘Doctor Bowler merely your estate parson.’

‘All the more reason for him to bless an estate union.’ Zeal folded her arms. ‘I don’t like Gifford. He will be a weight dragging us down. Doesn’t the man know that God resides above? He should lift spirits, not always be tugging them down towards damnation.’

‘I can’t stomach the man,’ said Sir Richard. ‘But it would not be politic to offend either him or the parish vestry.’

‘Why not?’ she demanded.

Sir Richard and Wentworth exchanged another of those maddening male looks.

‘We must give no one any excuse to question the marriage,’ said Wentworth.

Zeal pursed her lips and wound a sleeve ribbon around her finger until the tip looked like a ripe cherry. She tried not to think of the darkness that Gifford would cast over the wedding. The whole venture was already as fragile as a bubble. ‘He must agree at least to marry us here at Hawkridge in our own chapel. I shall tell him so.’

‘Best leave that to me,’ said Sir Richard hastily. ‘I’ve an examination to make in Bedgebury tomorrow in any case.’

The lawyer cleared his throat politely to indicate that he was now ready.

The next Sunday, as negotiated on the night of the inquiry into Sir Harry’s death, Zeal took herself and her household to their monthly service in Bedgebury parish church. Sir Richard, of course, had not been part of the deal and waved them off with too much gusto for Zeal’s liking. Wentworth had never attended prayers and apparently did not mean to begin now.

He’s the blasted rudder after all, Zeal thought crossly as the little procession set off along the track downstream along the river to Bedgebury. But I don’t suppose Gifford is worried about his soul.

Doctor Bowler, however, trudged glumly at her side, still avoiding her eyes. ‘All that sermonizing,’ he said. ‘I won’t be comfortable. And with no hymns or Prayer Book! I shall feel as if I’m talking to a stranger, not my own God.’

‘I wish you were marrying us, not Doctor Gifford,’ said Zeal.

They both huffed and waved their hands to disperse a cloud of late gnats, which hovered in a sunny patch.

‘Will you want wedding music?’ Bowler enquired carefully as the shady tunnel closed round them again.

‘Oh, yes! But I feared to ask.’

‘Because Gifford will disapprove.’ He nodded in understanding of her difficulty.

‘Gifford can’t be allowed to order everything in the parish!’ She glanced at his long, hound’s face. He suffered so when he found himself at odds with anyone. ‘No, I didn’t ask because I know you don’t approve of the match.’

They crossed a little hunting bridge in silence. Then, as they joined the larger track that led from Far Beeches to Bedgebury, Doctor Bowler said, ‘I had thought I might compose an epithalamium.’

Zeal beamed. ‘Dear Doctor Bowler!’

‘But what of Doctor Gifford?’

‘Master Wentworth seems to know how to deal with him. I’m sure that if I say I want your epithalamium, we shall have it.’

They smiled at each other with the delicious relief of truce.

‘Would you also deck the chapel?’ she asked. ‘If Master Wentworth and I are to be united by that dispiriting Scot we can at least cheer ourselves with the sight of ivy and green boughs.’

‘And sheaves of ripe corn,’ said Bowler. ‘And pumpkins. All the bounty that autumnal Nature provides.’

‘Apples.’

‘Grapes and peaches.’ Bowler flushed with excitement. ‘It will give me great pleasure both to decorate and to compose a celebratory piece for you.’ He gazed up into the trees. ‘Seth must re-string his viol so we can march on the firm ground of his continuo.’ He hummed a few notes in an exploratory way. ‘…great pleasure.’ He seemed as relieved as she was at his relenting.

She had heard it said that Bowler failed as a clergyman because he always understood both sides of any question with equal conviction. He could not find it in himself ever to condemn. Anyone who wanted to know exactly where he or she stood in relationship to Heaven and Hell or whether to play shove ha’penny on Sunday, had to attend church in Bedgebury, where Doctor Gifford delighted in firm pronouncements, invited or otherwise.

She smiled sideways at her parson as they trudged onwards towards Bedgebury. He continued to frown and hum, waving his hands from time to time, even voicing a few notes.

How dare Doctor Gifford dismiss him as a clergyman? Though perhaps an over-forgiving shepherd for wayward sheep, Doctor Bowler gives us rich gifts of the spirit in return for his milk and eggs.

She glanced over her shoulder at the straggling procession behind them.

From among those walkers Bowler had formed a chapel choir of an excellence surprising in such a rural backwater. For this choir, he composed psalms and hymns exactly suited to their voices. From among those same estate residents, he also mustered and tutored a consort of instruments, which included his own fiddle, a double bass viol, a viola da gamba, several pipes, a tabor and the smith’s great drum. He and this crew played for church festivals and for dancing on secular feast days with equal fervour and delight. But Bowler’s unique gift was his voice.

It was high, but not falsetto, nor was it a simulacrum of a woman’s soprano, like the voice of an Italian castrato. Its piercing purity of tone suggested some other instrument than a human voice, an instrument not known on earth, the vibrating of a silver reed blown only in Heaven.

Bowler loved to sing as much as he disliked making judgements. For feverish children, who saw wolves and demons among the bed curtains, he stood diffidently in the sick chamber and sang light into the shadows and smiling faces onto the foot of the bed. He sang a small green grass snake into his pocket and a robin onto the corner of the pillow.

For the dying, he sang stars of light into dusty folds of hangings. He sang the smell of fresh pine and the sweetness of witch hazel blooms. He sang long-vanished faces around the bed. He sang clear still water. He sang rest.

For the others, he sang rising barn walls, candles, leaping flames, magic cups that were always full. Sweet meats and diamonds. Golden arrows for the hunter’s bow. God. He could sing warmth around the heart, lightness beneath the ribs, fizzing in the belly. He could lift the hair on your neck with the sound of hope.

For Zeal, Doctor Bowler’s music would bless her strange, uncomfortable marriage with a joy she saw nowhere else. She did not see that she had just declared war against an unreasoning enemy, with her little parson as both ally and cause.

13

Gifford nodded with gratification when he saw their party arrive in the Bedgebury parish church. Heads turned in the congregation. Some bent together to whisper. Elbows nudged ribs.

Zeal missed the pleasure of singing hymns and had difficulty suppressing yawns during Gifford’s long sermon on the spiritual perils of revolt. She found the undecorated stone walls of the parish church astonishingly plain for a house of God. Otherwise all seemed well enough, until they left.

Doctor Gifford stood in the porch bidding farewell to his sheep. As Zeal and Bowler stepped out into the sunlight, he gave the parson a letter.

‘But I am certain, madam, that you will wish to note the contents.’

Zeal knew instantly that she would not wish any such thing but, mindful of the caution voiced by Wentworth and Sir Richard, she bade the minister a civil farewell.

Bowler clearly shared her premonition about the letter. He fanned himself with it, unopened. He shoved it into his pocket, then took it out again. He studied the outside as if for a hint of what lay within. He sighed.

‘We both know we won’t like whatever’s in it,’ she said. ‘Let’s get it over with.’

Bowler nodded and broke Gifford’s seal. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said after a moment. All colour drained from his cheeks. He held the letter out to her. ‘What are we to do now?’

Doctor Gifford wrote:

…I am gratified to inform you that at the last vestry meeting it was agreed to ban the decadent Roman practice of playing music in church services of any sort, throughout the parish from this date forward. All Psalms are henceforth to be read, not sung. All prayers must be spoken. Any making of music during holy worship (full list of occasions given below for avoidance of confusion) will be deemed a return to the outlawed practices of the Church of Rome. All violations will be punished with fines or other more severe penalties, at the discretion of the vestry council. May God’s hand guide you always, Yours most sincerely, in Christian brotherhood…

‘We ignore it,’ said Zeal. ‘If I don’t have your music to buoy up my spirits, I don’t think I can go through with the wedding at all.’

‘Oh.’ Bowler looked both pleased and alarmed. ‘My dear. Goodness.’ He blushed but bit his lower lip at the same time. Then he looked at her with concern.

‘I’ll pay the fines,’ she said, pretending to misunderstand his real question. ‘I’ll say I ordered the music. Don’t fear. What with summer plague and a war in Scotland, and no parliament and all the new taxes, people have more important matters to worry about than whether I have music at my confounded wedding.’ She folded the letter and stuffed it into her sleeve. ‘Don’t tell anyone else about this yet.’

They turned back onto their own track along the river and walked a silent, thoughtful furlong. Then Bowler began to hum. ‘“Praise Him with timbrel and dance,”’ he sang quietly. ‘“Praise ye the Lord.”’

‘And so we shall!’ She felt lighter for having at last hinted to someone how she really felt about the marriage, in spite of all those approving nods from Reason.

Having been given licence by Zeal, Bowler went to work with fervour. She sometimes wondered whether it was wise to defy Gifford. Then she heard Bowler’s plangent counter-tenor leading the estate children in rehearsal among the trees beyond the ponds. From time to time, the heavy clanging rhythms from the forge gave way to the boom of the smith’s drum. Twice she caught groups of girls practising a dance with garlands.

Mind you, she reassured herself, Gifford’s letter did not forbid dance. She knew that she should warn Sir Richard of all they planned. He must have had a letter too. But what if he said that she must obey it?

Apart from the music, Zeal tried to keep the celebration a modest one. But anticipation wrote its own rules. A rest day for any reason was to be made the most of. The wedding gathered its own momentum in spite of the bride’s half-heartedness. There was much urgent cooking, laundering, and stitching. There were secrets behind closed doors.

Mistress Margaret relented far enough to confer with Sir Richard’s steward about the details of the wedding feast, which was to be held at High House.

‘The weather should still be fine enough for us to dance outdoors,’ she reported. ‘Sir Richard will let us move back into his great hall if it rains.’ The old knight himself began to trap and shoot anything with wings or fur that might be eaten at the feast.

While she had agreed with Wentworth about the special licence, Zeal would have been content merely to exchange promises before witnesses, which was enough to make a legal marriage. However, Wentworth had insisted, for the child’s sake, that they have a church blessing. ‘And more witnesses than any man could ever be accused of bending,’ he said.

Zeal feared that preparations would interfere with the autumn work, already behind schedule. Five pigs remained to be butchered and preserved. The brewing was at a critical stage. They had to make enough soap to replace their entire stock, which had melted in the fire. Sheep waited to move to winter pastures where shelters still needed repair. Cows had to come in for the winter. Their quarters must be prepared and dried bracken laid on the ground. There was hay to cut and get into the barns. Winter lodgings to find for the house family who now camped in the outbuildings. And, of course, the salvage of building stuffs from the old house.

On the other hand, she saw that the wedding was bringing an unforeseen benefit. In spite of any reservations they might have about the match, Bowler, Mistress Margaret and all the others had grown animated again and brimmed with purpose as they had not done since before the fire. Zeal clamped tightly to her rock and let the sea wash over her.

She nearly washed off and drowned the night she saw John leaning against the doorpost of her chamber at High House, smiling at her. Even as she sat bolt upright and opened her mouth to cry out his name, he shook his head and faded.

He’s dead! she thought. His ghost came to tell me that his ship sank. He has drowned like my parents.

The next morning she took up a quill pen to write to him. If she acted as if he still lived, then he did.

She remembered his hand holding a pen. A hand browned by the sun, with a scar wrapped around the base of his thumb. A strong making and building hand. Standing in this same office, she had watched him trim the end of a split quill, locked with him in a shared silence like the breath between two musical notes.

He had felt her gaze, looked up and pinned her like one of his moths. She let herself be studied, wings, antennae and all. Then he smiled ruefully and she had smiled back. Their silent complicity felt like the embrace they had not yet shared and did not imagine would ever be possible.

My dearest love, she now wrote.

She leaned back. Now what? My dearest love, I miss you so painfully that I am to marry someone else in three days’ time.’

She bent her head over the paper again. I…Again she stopped.

How can I write that I bear his child but that it, like me, will soon belong to another man? She could think of no words strong enough to survive that burden. The truth would melt and reform into dreadful smoking lumps like the disasters of an apprentice smith. In any case, she did not yet know exactly where to send a letter.

I will wait until he writes again, from Nevis, she decided. So long as I write before rumour can reach him. I shall use the time thinking what to say.

She pulled a pile of accounts over the letter.

The day before the wedding, she peeped into the chapel and felt an easing at the base of her throat. The colours – the bright leathery red of the oak branches, the golden firework sprays of oats, the deep musty greens of fern and ivy, the polished, sweet-scented russet and gold of apples heaped in baskets – were a soothing draught for her senses.

Things may turn out all right, after all, she thought. So long as I try not to think. Just look and listen and work and care for John’s child. I’ll get through those seven years. John will write again and let me know that he is alive. I will write back in such a way that he will understand and forgive me.

Somehow, she did not ever get around to discussing Gifford’s letter with either Wentworth or Sir Richard. Sir Richard would have mentioned it, if he thought it important, she told herself.

And Gifford won’t dare make a scene in front of Sir Richard. Not once we have all begun.

A harsh observer might have said that, in spite of reason, she wanted to prevent the wedding. She had most certainly misjudged the minister.

14

In the chapel gallery, Bowler’s musical consort struck up a sedate march. Zeal and Wentworth entered under the swag of ivy above the chapel door, with Gifford close behind them. Mistress Margaret, Sir Richard, Rachel, Arthur and other house family followed the minister.

‘No!’ Gifford stopped so suddenly that Mistress Margaret bumped her nose on his back. The minister’s cry held such horror that there was a general pressing forward by those still outside to see what calamity lay within. The music broke off.

Zeal’s precarious calm wobbled. I should have gone ahead and jumped! I’ve always known it. Here comes the confirmation!

Gifford’s eyes widened. ‘“What is this that thou hast done?”’ His face flushed purple. ‘I will not solemnize any union amongst these pagan trappings!’ With the clenched brow of a man struck by an excruciating megrim, he surveyed the ropes of ivy around the pillars, the swags of red oak leaves, the jugs of wheat sheaves and golden oats. His eyes fell on a pair of stuffed cloth figures, each a foot high, propped side by side on the altar among heaped baskets of apples and pears. Zeal and Philip Wentworth, recognizable by his silver hair, black coat and fishing rod, by her red-gold hair. Both dolls wore crowns of plaited wheat, and they were tied together by a golden thread.

‘Idols!’ Gifford whispered in an exhalation aimed at the back pews. His terrier body vibrated with emotion. ‘The props of witchcraft! I am struck dumb with horror!’

‘Not so you’d notice,’ someone said at the back of the crowd, just loudly enough to be heard by all.

The minister’s head swung around, rusty hair bristling. Bland faces looked back at him from the chapel porch. Then Gifford spied the choir of children, dressed in green, standing beyond Bowler near the altar.

‘How dare you?’ he demanded of Bowler. ‘You were warned yet you disobey! Oh, rebellious soul! And you!’ He pointed a shaking finger at the children. ‘You wait to do the devil’s work here! Quake in terror of God’s wrath, for you are lost. You are fallen!’

Two of the younger children burst into tears.

Zeal heard a rustling from the gallery behind them as the string players ducked out of sight.

Ignoring Zeal, Gifford gripped Wentworth’s arm. ‘You will come to Bedgebury to be wed. This place was always a temple of Rome. It should have been destroyed with the others!’ His eyes razed the acrobat, fish and monkey pew finials, smashed the tiled pomegranates in the floor and torched the carved Rood screen to which Doctor Bowler seemed to be clinging.

Wentworth detached his arm from the minister’s grip.

Gifford’s glance fell next onto Zeal’s cat, which was pretending to be asleep on a pew. He looked away quickly. ‘How dare you permit such desecration?’ he demanded again of Doctor Bowler, gesturing at the decorations. ‘What do you think you are doing?’

‘Letting all Nature reflect the general joy,’ the parson replied. He tightened his grip on the wooden arch post.

Wentworth stepped just a little too close to Gifford. ‘I think my betrothed wishes to be blessed here on her own land, among her own people.’ Though Wentworth’s voice was quiet and his bearing restrained, Gifford retreated. Wentworth towered over him by a head, and the older man’s square jaw had set like a pike’s.

‘Too far to walk from your place to High House,’ said Sir Richard, who had been rocking on his feet, watching calmly. ‘Some of our guests are too young. Or too old. Wouldn’t care to do it myself.’

The cat woke and sensibly slipped away.

Gifford circled around Wentworth. He swept the dolls to the floor then upended a basket of apples, which rolled and bounced across the stone floor. ‘There can be no marriage until you clear away these abominations.’

‘But the marriage will take place here?’

Gifford tilted his head toward Zeal and narrowed his eyes as if drilling into her soul. He looked again at Wentworth, then at Sir Richard. ‘Your actions must now reflect the Lord’s admonition to be plain and pure in both thought and deed. Most of all when you are about to enter into the sanctity of marriage. Strip away these vanities. I shall return after dinner. Then I shall decide.’

The crowd parted to let the minister through to the door. With the keen sense of timing that made his sermons so popular with a like-minded congregation, he paused at the threshold. ‘Doctor Bowler, pray come with me. I want a private word.’

‘You may speak with Doctor Bowler when he has finished stripping away these abominations,’ said Zeal hotly. ‘Not before!’

Wentworth set a warning hand under her elbow. ‘Perhaps after the wedding,’ he suggested. ‘…if we are to be ready by early afternoon, as you ask.’

Sir Richard clapped a genial hand on the minister’s shoulder and pushed him out the door. As he went, however, he cast a stern questioning look over his shoulder at Zeal.

Mistress Margaret and Rachel began collecting up the fallen apples into their lace-trimmed aprons.

‘I’m so sorry, Doctor Bowler.’ Zeal tried to smile at the dismayed faces. ‘And all who helped you. It looks exactly as a wedding should. And I shall tell Doctor Gifford that it was I who insisted on music.’

Doctor Bowler waved a hand abstractedly. ‘Never mind. Should have seen it coming. The man’s never been a Solomon with eyes for the virtues of ivory, apes and peacocks. As for music, well…we did know.’

Zeal imagined a glint in the parson’s close-set eyes which agreed with her own furious disappointment. ‘I don’t intend to apologize for wanting to hear your epithalamium.’ She retrieved an apple from behind a pew.

‘It’s all right, my lady. We might manage it yet. And leave the clearing away to us. Which we’d best start at once.’ The parson beckoned to his unhappy choir and retrieved his fiddle from behind the altar. He stared up at the hammer beams of the roof, then down at the tiled floor. ‘Would you know, sir,’ he asked Wentworth for no apparent reason, ‘…does Sir Richard keep a boat on his lake?’

Zeal felt a little as she did when she came down from the chapel roof. Having got to the point of jumping, she feared she could not bring herself to it a second time. After Bowler shooed all but his workers out of the chapel, she stood on a brick path in John’s herb garden, trying to think what to do next. She looked down at her lace-trimmed apron and yellow silk skirt. The cheeses needed turning. But there was not time to change to workaday clothes and then change back again. Sir Richard’s household allowed no interference with their preparations for the wedding feast. Even so, Mistress Margaret had gone back to High House to hover while they awaited Gifford’s return. Rachel and Arthur had stayed in the chapel to help Bowler. Sir Richard had said he would go shooting. Zeal had to do something or she would find herself fleeing over Hawk Ridge and not stopping till she reached York.

‘Come fishing with me,’ said Wentworth.

She suppressed a rush of irritation. Gifford had told Wentworth that the wedding must move to his church in Bedgebury, as if she, the mistress of the estate, had not been standing three feet away.

He is not the master yet. I have a few more hours as my own woman, not a wife.

‘We need not speak,’ he said. ‘Indeed, best if we don’t.’

Who is this old man? she asked herself. Can I truly be about to marry him?

Perhaps Gifford’s refusal was a sign.

Wentworth stood with his hands on his hips. For the first time, she saw that he was wearing a new black coat. ‘The next few hours are time that does not exist. You may do anything with them. Why not fish?’

Raised, urgent voices came from the chapel. Three boys ran out of the door like animated bushes, arms full of boughs, with only their legs exposed.

‘The tranquillity of the riverbank might ease your mind. Come hide with me from all the consternation.’

I dare say, other women have been even unhappier on their wedding days, and lived.

She tugged at her cloak, on which she was sitting, to protect her skirt hem from the damp earth under the willow.

Wentworth stood motionless, some way downstream, planted like the stump of an ancient tree. Every once in a while, his hands moved, making some fine adjustment to the placement of his line.

Why am I so angry with him? she wondered. He didn’t put a foot wrong during all that dreadful scene with Gifford. Indeed, Gifford was afraid of him. Maybe he does keep chests full of severed heads as Mistress Margaret said.

She considered the still, solid figure on the bank. A finger of breeze stirred a strand of his silver hair. Otherwise, he seemed not even to breathe.

What a lather he was in to get away from the chapel, she thought. I suppose I should be flattered that he finds my company tolerable. So long as we don’t speak.

Please, God, let it all be over soon.

When the bake house bell rang at dinnertime, she did not move. Wentworth merely shifted farther down stream.

She shut her eyes. Otherwise, she might see John poised naked on the bank, preparing to dive into the water. Or coming through the trees on fire with urgency to show her the fringed miracle of a double buttercup.

The pealing of the chapel bells woke her. The sun was slanting low through the trees.

‘They’re ready for us.’ Wentworth gripped his wriggling chubb and dislocated its head with a quick jerk. He put the fish into his sack, then helped her to her feet. ‘Back to the fray.’ He shouldered his rod and set off up the riverbank with Zeal trudging behind, her hands upraised like a supplicant so as not to be married while covered in nettle welts.

What am I doing? Philip Wentworth asked himself. How did I let myself get so tangled in other lives after all those careful years?

The most absurd fact was that he wanted to go through with this commedia. He was wilfully, in full knowledge of his risks, putting himself in danger again.

15

To judge by his open relief at the denuded chapel, Gifford had clearly expected more resistance. The reassembled company were fewer in number and subdued. None of the children had returned, and who could blame them? Nor was Doctor Bowler there.

Zeal imagined him seated alone somewhere, gathering the courage to be chastised by the man who had wounded him.

She could not look at Gifford as he married her. A smirk of satisfaction had followed his relief. Now his pale eyes shot forth spears of will to pin her in place while he prescribed marriage as God’s remedy against sin.

If only he knew the worst of it!

She could smell scented sheep’s grease on his hands. When he spoke, his lips stretched and curled like two bristly caterpillars. And how she loathed that mellifluous voice, which belonged by rights to a larger man! Such authoritative cadences, such swelling diapasons and profound rumblings could not possibly emerge from that scrawny body.

He’s a rusty-furred terrier, she decided. Not a large hunting sort but one of the smaller quivering breeds designed to go down rat and rabbit holes. Given to leaping up and yapping at the slightest sound.

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