CHRISTIE DICKASON

The Lady Tree

FOR MARJORIE, MY MOTHER,

WHO MADE THE FIRST GARDEN IN MY LIFE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part Two

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Part Three

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

Author’s Note

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Prologue

Majestic Wealth is the holiest of our gods.

Juvenal.

AMSTERDAM, FEBRUARY 1636

The room glinted with brass and gold but smelled of damp wool, nutmeg, cloves, sewage and burning fat. In the dim yellow light of thirty tallow candles held aloft by gilt fantasies of mermaids and dolphins, three men waited in uneasy silence. The Englishman, who looked pastel, insubstantial and overfrilled beside the two black-clad Dutchmen, peered down from an open window into the cavern of shadow beneath the massive bow of a moored ship. Although he stood in a house on dry land, the dark rim of the window seemed to shift. The floor tilted. The fat tree-trunks of the ship’s masts, tops far up out of sight in the night sky, swayed almost imperceptibly, not quite close enough to touch. He swallowed against the ghost of nausea that tickled his stomach unpleasantly.

Ships rubbed and shouldered each other for dock space as far as he could see to either side. The small red eye of a watchman’s lantern etched a slow path through the black, gently heaving thickets of spars and rigging.

I should have refused to come, he thought. Made them send someone weighty enough to decide such things.

But he knew that he had been sent precisely because he was unremarkable. The men who made the decisions paid men like himself to take the risk of looking like an ass. He shifted aching shoulders inside his doublet and cursed the damp.

Anyway, he couldn’t afford to refuse a commission.

The house stood on a dock on the Amstel River. The moored ships creaked and scraped. A far-away sailor shouted to another. On the dock just below the window the shadow of a dog nosing among the stacked bales, barrels, and coiled ropes suddenly erupted into a frenzy of barking. The three men inside the room lifted their heads.

In another room of the house, a bad-tempered viol was groaning and complaining again and again through the same four phrases of a French dance tune. The barking stopped.

‘Not yet.’ Vrel, one of the two Dutchmen and the owner of the house, settled his bulk back into his carved and gilded chair. He sat squarely at the end of a long heavy table as if he expected a dish of roast meat to be set in front of him, but diamond and ruby rings flashed uneasily in the candlelight as his short, strong fingers opened and closed over the lions’ masks of the arm ends.

Simeon Timmons, the Englishman, now eyed his host. An agent had to be civil to everyone, but Timmons was struggling with Cornelius Vrel.

A mannerless frog in black silk and fine wool stolen from the English, or near enough stolen, thought Timmons viciously. Hunkered down here smugly among his gold plates and drinking cups, his Toledo blades, Venetian candle-holders, and Turkish rugs that covered every flat surface like a plague of multi-coloured moss. Stinking of the spices that had made him rich.

His stomach contracted with a pain like hunger. How he lusted to be such a frog!

Timmons lived to serve other men’s wealth. As a third son with two healthy older brothers between him and the family money and lands, he had to live on his wits. He fed and supped on envy and hope to sustain himself in the hard but necessary work of being civil at all costs. Even to former enemies who now smiled and allowed you to admire booty pirated from English ships. No matter that Dutch and English merchantmen were at this moment blowing each other out of the East Indian seas for the sake of cinnamon and cloves. No matter an uncle massacred by the Dutch at Amboyna thirteen years before. Civil and smiling, Timmons made a career trotting to and fro like a market pony, laden with information, propositions, money, documents, promises or silver spoons.

The third man in the room asked a question in Dutch.

Timmons turned to study him with carefully neutral eyes. Named Blanket or Banquet or some such Dutch torturing of vowels, in his late fifties, a little older than Vrel, a head taller but half the weight. As they waited, he had been strolling aimlessly around the room.

Busy coveting the Chinese porcelain and gilt plates, thought Timmons. He heard the anxiety now in the man’s voice and wished he could understand the question.

Vrel replied in a voice as chilly as the night air. Blanket (or Banquet) sank his skinny neck and long head back into his shell of black merino and Brussels lace. He turned away to study a set of golden spice scales.

Whatever it is, thought Timmons, Vrel is firmly in control. He shivered. His fine, light-brown hair lay damply clumped against his narrow head. His long thin face slid unchecked down sagging light-brown moustaches and a small pointed beard. A newly-fashionable flat collar drooped limply over narrow shoulders which were betrayed by the new, unpadded style of English doublet. His lace tie, lace cuffs and lace boot tops had all lost their starch in the damp sea air. A more confident man would not have left his wool cloak at his lodgings in the name of fashion.

An ecstasy of barking erupted on the dock.

Vrel was already on his feet. ‘He’s here. Follow my lead, Blankaart!’ he ordered. ‘Listen to me very carefully. Don’t let your enthusiasms run away with my money …!’

A commotion mounted the stairs outside the room. On the dock, the dog still barked.

The newcomer blew into the room like a storm at sea, brushing aside the servant who had brought him up, bellowing words of greeting, his wide hat and cloak flapping, the soft barbs of a scarlet feather in his hat quivering like a virgin’s knees. Timmons took a step back towards the safety of the wall.

‘Mynheer Vrel…Cornelius!’ The man clasped Vrel’s large hand with one even larger. He slapped at Vrel’s upper arm, rustled his lace cuffs, shook his beard and flashed white, white teeth. ‘If you ever want to deal in secret again, roast that dog!’

Vrel pulled himself out of the maelstrom. ‘Have you left a man on watch?’

‘Who do you think is being eaten down there now?’ The newcomer focused on Timmons the suddenly still eye of the genial storm. ‘… And is this your speculatory Englishman?’

Timmons stiffened at the tone and cursed the ugly, unintelligible foreign words.

‘A mere envoy from the English merchants, chasing after the Dutch lead as always,’ said Vrel. ‘He won’t say how much they can afford to invest.’ He switched to English. ‘Mr Simeon Timmons, this is Mynheer Justus Coymans.’

Coymans raised his wide-brimmed hat to the Englishman and switched to English also. ‘Mynheer Timmons. You’re a man of genius to come to Holland at this time to do business!’

‘To see if there is any business here worth doing,’ said Timmons, more stiffly than he intended. He stayed well out of Coymans’s reach.

‘No fear,’ said Coymans. ‘There’s no business like it in the world. Forget the Caribes and the Indies! I shall make you as rich as your English king would like to be.’

Timmons’s long face sketched a polite smile below its waterline of moustache. ‘As I’m not privy to his Majesty’s ambitions,’ he said, ‘that tells me nothing.’

‘Rich enough to build a fleet of new ships to wipe the Spanish off the seas,’ said Coymans cheerfully. ‘And the Dutch.’ His teeth showed in the candlelight; his eyes were hidden by the shadow of his hat.

‘Amen to the Spanish.’ Timmons hesitated. But there was now altogether too much self-satisfaction in the room. He could not resist the lightest of slaps. ‘But I believe that our two countries are supposed to be at peace.’

‘Ignore politics! They exist only to serve trade.’ Coymans snatched off his short cloak and tossed it to the servant. ‘Let me show you something more powerful than cannons, more intoxicating than a religious war.’

He seated himself uninvited in Vrel’s chair at the head of the long table. From his pouch he took a linen-wrapped parcel which he placed with a flourish on the rug-covered table in front of him. He raised both hands like a wizard poised to enchant and looked up at Vrel.

‘Cornelius. Voilá! Ecco! Mira! The new Indies here on your own table!’

Timmons winced at the theatrical excess and peered sceptically through the dim yellow light at the dirty little parcel. He felt the budding of ass’s ears begin to prickle at his scalp.

‘The Admiral den Boom,’ said Coymans, and waited for cheers and applause.

Vrel didn’t move closer to the table. ‘How much?’

Coymans flashed his teeth at Timmons. ‘I hope your English clients are more fun to deal with. Cornelius here has no taste for the flourishes that make work into fun. “How much?” he asks. Just like that! Clunk! When I hadn’t even finished telling him the whole wonderful story.’

‘So tell it,’ said Vrel. Coymans was right – he had little patience with whimsy. He went straight for the adding, the subtracting and, most vital of all, the multiplying.

‘My Admiral here is a miracle,’ said Coymans, still including Timmons in the blast of his focus. He dropped his voice to a dramatic stage-whisper. ‘He fathers his own offspring without a mother! Would that we all could…think of the strife it would save mankind!’

He’s going to wink now, thought Timmons with alarmed distaste.

Coymans winked. ‘And I have brought Mynheer Vrel the pater and two sons.’ He leaned forward and hooked his audience more firmly with sharp chilly eyes. ‘One son more than God the Father Himself!’

Then Timmons saw the irony behind the chill and felt an uneasy respect. Here was a performer of far greater range and subtlety than himself.

‘Like a good pimp, I have brought more than asked for but not more than is desired.’

‘You have brought me three Admirals?’ The pitch of Vrel’s low steady voice climbed at least two tones.

Coymans let a beat of silence cut through the candlelight. ‘The only three in the world.’

‘Impossible.’

‘I made sure of it.’ Then Coymans added a few swift sentences in Dutch.

Whatever he said shifted the set of the muscles in Vrel’s face. The merchant walked to the open window and pretended to look out. He was close enough for Timmons to hear how fast and shallow his breathing had become.

‘One thousand florins,’ said Vrel.

Timmons understood that much.

‘Ptsh,’ said Coymans sadly. He drew his knife and cut the leather thongs around the parcel. He laid the knife on the table, then delicately, precisely, unfolded the linen cloth. In its centre lay an irregular egg of dried grass tied with reeds. Coymans cut these bindings. With large-knuckled, reddened fingers he probed the grass, parted it tenderly and pressed it aside. Then he leaned back in his chair.

In spite of himself, Timmons moved closer.

Three onion-like bulbs lay in the grass nest. Each was cased in a papery skin the colour of chestnuts and bearded at its base with a fringe of dried white roots.

Timmons was shocked by how ordinary they looked. Coymans had somehow persuaded him that there really was something wondrous in that packet. Timmons had begun to persuade himself that he wouldn’t have to tell the obvious truth when he returned to London – that the Dutch had gone mad and there was no salvation there for the desperate Englishmen. Now the prickling on his scalp grew more insistent.

One thousand florins for those…onions!

Coymans lifted one bulb out of the nest into the candlelight, his red fingers as gentle as if it were a phoenix’s egg. ‘Ecco! Look there!’ He placed a blunt red finger lightly on two tiny, tooth-shaped bulblets just above the union with the roots. ‘Two more infant Admirals, which will grow to blooming size in three short years. Then there will be five true Admirals, all of the same unadulterated substance. Not a rich man’s original and four cheap copies for hoi polloi. What other commodity can perform this magic?’

When Vrel did not answer, Coymans interrogated Timmons. ‘Can gold multiply its true self? Or a porcelain jar? Or a painting?’

Timmons shook his head in helpless assent.

Vrel collected an arrangement of dolphins and mermaids from a sideboard and carried the extra light to the table. ‘Blankaart!’

Blankaart leaned forward over the table and extended his wrinkled neck out its lace collar. ‘May I?’ He picked the largest bulb from the nest and sniffed it. Then he held it close to the candles, turning it in his fingers. ‘Tulipa,’ he announced at last.

Coymans blew like a surfacing whale. His moustaches heaved upward on the force of his irritated breath. ‘Of course it’s a tulip! I don’t trade in turnips! Vrel, can’t your tame botanist do better than that?’

‘Probably not the common Turkish type,’ continued Blankaart resolutely, with one eye now on Vrel. ‘It’s darker and a little longer from base to nose. But an Admiral den Boom? Hard to say without seeing it in bloom.’

‘It’s more expensive to buy in bloom,’ said Coymans to Vrel. ‘Buy now, in the dry. The advantage will be yours when you sell again.’

‘Blankaart?’ demanded Vrel. ‘What’s your advice?’

‘If you buy now, you must trust your dealer.’ Though Blankaart’s voice was flat, his botanist’s hands cradled and caressed the smooth chestnut-coloured shape.

A bad actor, thought Timmons. No help to Vrel. In all my ignorance, I could serve better than that.

Coymans’s teeth showed briefly in the shadows of his moustaches. ‘A cheat can sell only once. I intend to last in business till I’m old as Methuselah.’

‘I’ll agree a price now but wait till the thing blooms before I pay you,’ said Vrel.

‘Then I’ll sell tomorrow in auction in the collegium, as I am bound to do by law,’ replied Coymans. ‘I’m only risking a private sale because you asked it.’

Vrel made a small nervous swing back toward the window. ‘Add four barrels of nutmegs, and seven bales of wrought silk.’

Coymans laughed. ‘For three? And two offsets? Think what you would have to pay for three bulbs of Semper Augustus! Ten times that. And the flames of the Roman emperor are a tiny candle next to the meteor of our own Dutch sailor!’ He turned to Blankaart. ‘Is that true or not, high priest of things botanical?’

Blankaart swallowed audibly and looked at Vrel. ‘The true Admiral is a very rare bloom…if you can be sure of him. That is the problem. Being sure.’

Vrel sent a dragon’s jet of rage toward his perfidious ally.

‘The Semper Augustus has become a whore with too many masters,’ said Coymans. ‘And too many little bastards. You alone in Holland would rule our Admiral.’

‘I’m not a washerwoman or streetsweeper,’ warned Vrel, ‘who’ll give my life savings to some tavern rogue in exchange for an onion.’

‘And I’m not a Batavian spice farmer who will accept any price you offer just because your company has a big ship with four hundred guns on it.’

There was a pause.

‘Tch,’ said Coymans. His moustaches danced like playing dolphins. His teeth appeared and disappeared. ‘Oh, Vrel …!’

‘You’ve heard my last offer. One thousand florins, the nutmegs, and the silk.’

For a second, Coymans did not move at all. Not a hair, nor ruffle, nor swag, nor fold. Not a moustache. Not a finger. Then he held out his hand. ‘May I have that bulb back?’ he asked Blankaart politely.

Blankaart returned it with treacherous reluctance.

‘How can I raise your value?’ Coymans enquired of the bulb. ‘Tch.’ One moustache arched briefly. He dropped the bulb onto the floor and stamped on it with his boot.

Blankaart gave a strangled yelp of protest.

Coymans stamped again, and ground his sole against the polished wooden floor. He held his boot aloft and peered past it at the white mess on the floor. Then, with his knife, he scraped the rest from the sole of his boot.

‘Only two left in the world now,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And the two infants. We must rethink things a little.’

In the silence, Timmons noticed that the bad-tempered viol had stopped. A nearly-guttered candle on the table sang a high, tiny note. Blankaart coughed.

After a long moment, Coymans pushed the grass nest along the table to Timmons. ‘While our friend thinks, would you like to hold a fortune in your hand? Feel for yourself the weight and texture of true wealth?’

Timmons hesitated.

‘Go on. I trust you.’

Timmons crossed to the table and picked up a bulb. He turned it curiously in his thin hand. He was only an agent, not one of your gentleman enthusiasts, had never handled such a thing before. Smooth and shiny, like satin against his thumb. Hard under its crisp papery skin, with grey scarring around its neck like a hanged man.

It could just as well be an onion, he thought. How can anyone tell?

He had never before in his life thought about tulips, and certainly not in the same way as spices, or coal, or Baltic grain and oak. He weighed it in his palm.

‘Vrel?’ asked Coymans.

Vrel still stared at the juicy pulp on his floor. He was breathing heavily now.

‘Vrel?’ Coymans plucked the last bulb from the grass nest – the one with the two offshoots – and dropped it on the floor. He raised his boot.

‘No!’ cried Blankaart. ‘Please!’ He dropped to his knees and snatched at the tulip bulb. ‘Ough!’ He grunted as Coymans’s boot pinned his hand against the floorboards.

‘Wait!’ Vrel wrapped himself with his thick arms and rocked in an agony of indecision. ‘This house…and its contents.’

‘Not enough.’

Vrel pulled a spark of red fire from a finger of his left hand and dropped it on the table in front of Coymans. Then a chip of ice. ‘Let me think!’ begged Vrel. ‘I was prepared only for one…Only expected to pay…Just give me a moment to think!’ He added a band of gold and a cold tapestry of pearls to the other rings in front of Coymans.

Coymans leaned over and picked the bulb up from the floor. He put it back into the nest, crossed his arms and waited, with his eyes on Vrel’s face.

In the following silence, an extraordinary thing happened to Simeon Timmons. The chestnut-coloured tulip bulb in his palm began to change from the ordinary piece of vegetable matter which a few seconds before he could think of only on a slice of bread. First it grew heavier and heavier in his hand, until it was as heavy as the high stacks of bales on the wharf. Heavy as a ship’s load of barrelled nutmegs and pepper. Heavy as the wood and stone and brick from which men build palaces. As heavy as gold.

The shiny chestnut skin grew translucent. In the heart of the bulb, Timmons saw the growing glow of the ruby ring, the diamond, and the pearls. And deep among all these fires flickered the small glints of greed in the eyes of Cornelius Vrel. In his hand, Timmons held possibility. For the men in London. And for himself, perhaps, at last.

Only a few years earlier, all the riches of the East Indies had been mere possibility. Travellers’ tales. Speculative dreams. Then brave men, with wit, patience and imagination had turned possibility into the reality of ships, spices and empires.

They sent me from London to assess possibilities, thought Timmons. Am I brave enough to tell the Company to forget Baltic grain, Chinese porcelain kraacke-ware, nutmegs and gold? For the possibility I am holding in my hand? For onions?

One

HAWKRIDGE HOUSE, HAMPSHIRE, 1636

May 22, 1636. Sun at last. A sad cold night. Hot bed cucumbers in bud under handglasses. First swallow. Too much to do before Eden opens her gates. The Serpent stirs.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

At fourteen he had been dangerous. At twenty-six, he feared, he had become merely reliable.

John crunched across the gravel forecourt of Hawkridge House in long angry strides, scattering geese and speckled goslings. A yellow cur from the stable yard trotted purposefully after him with its nose stuck to his heavy work boots to read his morning of horse, herb, pigeon and pig.

John stopped abruptly and glared over the high brick forecourt wall. In two days, even reliability would be stripped from him.

‘Heads down, lads,’ muttered a man with a rake.

Fourteen men and women, cottagers and workers on Hawkridge estate, watched him sideways as they weeded, raked and polished.

‘Poor man,’ said a young weeding woman under her breath. She hoiked a plantain rosette out of the gravel of the forecourt with a stubby knife and tossed it into a wooden trug.

‘Poor us,’ said her companion who squatted beside her in a crumple of woollen skirt. She uprooted a hawkbit. ‘He’s family. He’ll be all right.’

The two women waddled their bunched skirts forward like a pair of geese to attack a young colony of Shepherd’s Purse.

‘He’ll see us all right too,’ said the first woman.

‘… if he’s here to do it.’

They twitched their goosetail skirts forward again, eyes still on the dark, curly-haired, bearded storm which had blown itself to a brief stop in the centre of the forecourt. What would the Londoners make, they wondered, of a gentleman with such brown hands and arms, who wore coarse linen shirts rolled to the elbow and a leather jerkin? Each then looked down into her private fears. Change was almost never good.

John’s black brows, as delicate as a woman’s, dived fiercely together over a long, fine but slightly skewed nose. Light grey eyes gave him a wolfish look. A labourer who was oiling the iron forecourt gates turned uphill towards the road to see what had caused that grey-eyed rage, but he pursed his lips, puzzled. Beyond the forecourt wall, the avenue of beeches that curved down from the road to the house rustled peacefully with sea-green early leaf. High up, near the road, a cottager swung his scythe through the long grass, wild campions and meadow cranesbills. A spotted flycatcher dropped from a beech into the grass. Sheep munched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Good morning, sir!’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I don’t know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been forgotten in London.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘… finches,’ Cope was saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A bee rattled in the grass near his feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I must be ill!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John shivered.

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

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

Then to her taunt, she added temptation.

Ask. Ask.

He flew through the ring of fire like a trained dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames jumped, clamped their claws into his scalp and rode him in a bright arc to the ground.

John had been a child of ivory beauty. Even in babyhood his fingers were long and slim, his legs straight and finely-shaped. His skin was smooth at a time when a third of the people were pitted with pox. He read at four and showed early promise in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By five he had proved to be well co-ordinated, good at riding, swordplay and all the other male games which keep thoughtful, intelligent boys from being laughed at by their peers. His grey eyes, at seven, already caused stabs of female anticipation. In short, he was a prince in a kingdom that knew his worth.

His paternal grandfather, Howard Nightingale, had been young and ambitious when King Henry annexed Catholic lands after the English split with the Church of Rome. Though the son of a London brewer, the grandfather had been well-educated and found a patron to provide three years at Oxford, from where he had emerged with a fair knowledge of law. In exchange for loyal services to several influential Tudor lords, Nightingale was given a confiscated Catholic estate, Tarleton Court near Hatfield. Shortly after, he bought a second once-Catholic estate, Farfields, for a token price and set his family on the ladder to power. John’s parents were still only the middling sort of gentlefolk, but by the time he was born late in their marriage they had prospered enough to buy two more estates.

They were overwhelmed that their only surviving child should be one such as John. They prayed that he live to manhood, masked their doting with severity (which did not fool their small son in the least), acquired still more land to swell his fortune, and bought him a gentleman’s education to shape him for a life of influence at the court in Whitehall. He would have been a blind saint if, from an early age, he had not been infected by their sense of his destiny. By miracle, he was not a monster.

Both his own nature and his parents’ good sense guided him toward civil manners and a burning concern for others, who included not only his parents and his nurse, but the house families in the Nightingale estates, his many cousins, the young stable grooms who played with him, his horses, his dogs, a hen with a twisted leg, a papery globe of tiny spiders glued to the tester of his bed, butterflies doomed to short lives, and one particular piglet whose death made him refuse bacon between the ages of four and six.

In 1617, when he turned seven, the time came to place him out. His father wooed a London lord on the fringes of the Court to take his son into the noble household for polishing into final splendour. The lord agreed. Master and Mistress Nightingale accompanied John to London from Tarleton Court, their chief estate, north of Hatfield. John’s father had business in the city with a tanner who bought hides from him, as well as with an impoverished knight with a small estate to sell. John’s mother seized the chance to visit her wool merchant brother, who was still plain Mr George Beester, in his London house rather than on his distant Somerset manor.

They set out at dawn. While a horseman could reach London in one long day, their coach needed at least two on the muddy track which served as a road. John hung out of the window until he bit his tongue going over a bad bump. Then he begged a ride on top with the driver and footman.

A unexpectedly swollen ford cost them three and a half hours by bumpy lane upstream to a place where the coach could cross. John was briefly entertained by his father’s angry and puzzled speculation why some idiot had dammed the river just downstream. But as the party lacked men to tear the dam down, the detour had to be made. They were still at least two hours away from their inn and deep in the shade of a forest of oaks and beech when the sun set. The footman lit the carriage lamps. Bored and hungry, John fell asleep with his head on his nurse’s lap.

He half-woke to urgent adult voices. The coach rocked violently. The inside lantern swung like a ship’s lamp in a storm. But the coach had stopped rolling.

‘Are we there?’ asked John. His mother grabbed his arm as if she meant to tear off his sleeve. John sat up, wide awake.

A man screamed in the darkness outside the coach. The scream died abruptly. John’s father threw himself against the inside of the coach door.

‘Richard! Who is it? What do they want?’ asked his mother.

His father didn’t seem to hear her. Dimly, in the swinging arcs of lantern light, John saw the continent of his father’s back bunch and quiver under his coat. The coach rocked harder. The darkness outside moved and flickered with orange light. John heard crackling and smelled oily smoke.

‘Oh, sweet God!’ cried his nurse.

His mother whimpered once, like a struck dog.

His father cried out and fell across John’s legs. A comet blazed through the coach window. Hungry stars spilled onto the crowded, heaped-up yards of gown, cloak, lace and petticoat. The stars bit. Flames ran around the edges of sleeves and spread across skirts. His mother screamed; her hair had caught fire. The coach filled with the smell of burning silk and wool, and seethed like a bag of drowning cats.

Still screaming, John’s mother hauled him from under his father’s dead weight and thrust him into the air, through the burning hoop of the window like a performing dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames in his hair sketched the arc of his fall against the night.

John stood so abruptly that he hit his shoulder against the ribcage of the Lady Tree.

I am ill, he thought. Soul sick.

He wished that Dr Bowler, the estate parson, were as confident in advising the soul as he was in making music.

I can’t welcome Harry in this state.

He shook himself like Cassie, his wolfhound. The world tilted. He put one hand on the tree to steady himself.

Dizzy and hollow. Diseased in his soul. No way to head into a new, unknown life.

He lifted his hand from the belly of the tree. He should not have come here. She always unsettled him.

He slid back down the slope of the beech hanger on last year’s dead leaves, towards the mill pond. Often before this he had found his reason again in that dark water, when he had thought it was lost.

The mill still slept its winter sleep, locked up around the last season’s chaff and dust. The big wheel dripped, heavy and unmoved by the trickle of the closed-off race. The mill pond above the race, where Bedgebury Brook joined the lethargic Shir, brimmed with melted snows and spring rains not yet needed to grind corn. The surplus tugged at the tips of arching grass blades as it poured downstream through the open sluice.

John stepped out onto a stony shelf above the pond. Another self looked back up from the dark water. A cloud of early gnats hung and sideslipped just above the surface. To his right the Shir ducked in and out of the trees, back upstream toward the three fish ponds, in slow green bends. Silver teeth of young nettle leaves and dark matte-green lance-heads of burdock grew at his feet. Across the pond, black-trunked willows eased into leaf. The branches of a fallen willow drew v’s on the current. The stream, the pond, the plants, the trees, and his reflection wavered as if John looked through the uneven glass of a window pane.

A fish leaped. John’s reflection heaved and rippled. He stripped naked, drew a deep breath and dived.

The icy water, still cold from the winter, peeled him as cleanly as a willow rod. It stripped away thought, leaving a pure white core of muscle and bone. He surfaced, gasped, shook his head like a dog, alive with the shock. Cold eddies caressed his toes in the brown-green depths. Icy liquid fingers squeezed his balls tight into his groin and tugged gently at the dark hairs on his arms and shins.

He coiled and slid under again. He turned among the fragments of floating leaf and weed, opened his eyes to look up through the faint cold green light to the silver underside of the water, his eyelashes heavy with bubbles. He knifed deeper. Let himself drift upwards through the layers of warm and cold water until he burst through the silver into the air.

The air flowed freely into the crevices around his heart. He took a deep breath and felt his weight lighten. He pulled himself back below the surface and swam until the water threw him up again.

One foot touched ground. He stood and scooped the water in cupped hands over his head. When the last drop curved behind his left ear and fell from his lobe, he scooped again. Then again. His skin quivered under each delicate, chilly blow. He shook his head, opened his eyes and saw the woman standing on the far bank.

Cat. His former weeding woman, now married to the cooper. Who had deserted his garden and bed for a lean-to attached to the cooperage in the village. The gnat swarm sideslipped between them. Her shape quivered.

‘Good day, Cat.’

‘John.’ She moved from the bushes that hid the mouth of the path onto the ledge beside his heap of clothes. ‘I had forgotten how long and lean you look. Sleek as an otter with your curls plastered back. I thought I’d always remember, but it goes so fast.’

‘And there’s another to remember now instead.’

She smiled. Neither of them moved. John stood naked in the green-brown water up to his chest. The woman, in a dirty brown wool work skirt, unlaced bodice and linen shirt, looked down as she rerolled one sleeve to her elbow. Finally she nodded equably. ‘That’s so.’

‘Is all well?’ He hadn’t seen her since the wedding. He didn’t know whether he had avoided her, or she him.

‘More than well.’ She made no move to leave.

John began to feel foolish. He was too fragile, just now, for games. He looked at his clothes. Cat followed the direction of his glance.

‘No need to feel modest with me,’ she said, but her eyes grew suddenly uncertain.

A shiver of possibility rippled over John’s skin. He swam two slow strokes back across the pond towards Cat and his clothes. Then he stopped and looked at her again.

‘Oh, John,’ she said. ‘I followed you here. A married woman. Isn’t that wicked?’

‘Only if you leave me now.’

Cat stepped back off the ledge. ‘This way,’ she said, ‘along here.’ She picked her way around the pond edge, over kingcups and mud to a thicket of yellow-green willows. She parted their curtain with her hands and vanished like a player from a stage.

John waded from the pond, shedding water like a ship in a storm and slipped after her into the green haze. A sudden lustful hope nearly blinded him. Cat stood by the leaning trunk of a mature tree, thick-trunked herself but still graceful. He had seen her dark blond hair, now caught back in a cap from her square-cornered face, drifting as loose as the willow fronds on the water. His gut lurched and his member stiffened.

‘You say things are more than well with your cooper,’ he said thickly.

‘And I mean them to stay that way.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘We’re a good solid match. But I’ve thought of you…and how sudden I married. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.’

‘Did you follow me just to apologize?’ Lust teetered towards humiliated rage. She had flushed him into the open only to leave him there.

‘No. I thought you’d not object to one last time.’

He couldn’t speak. His mouth dried. His pulse drummed in his ears. In his strange ill state, he had misjudged her. He had forgotten her inability to toy with what she saw as the truth. At times her solid directness had weighed him down when he had wanted apostrophes, trills and flourishes in their passion. Now she held him in place.

She offered her mouth for him to kiss, then leaned back in his arms. He sank his face into the warm curve of her neck. She smelled strong but sweet, like his herbs.

‘I wanted to see,’ she said dreamily, ‘how it is, just once, when we don’t fear making a little bastard. I mean one last time, don’t mistake me.’

‘No,’ he promised, with his muzzle in the cup above her collarbone.

They had seldom mistaken each other, which was why he had liked as well as desired her even when he hankered for something more.

Cat broke back out of his embrace and lifted the hem of her skirt. ‘Here, let me dry you a little.’

‘Come back!’ He slid his wet arms under the petticoats, feeling for her warm skin. ‘Oh, sweet Heaven, you’re so warm, and I’m so cold!’

‘Not for long.’ She rubbed his bare chest and then his thighs. ‘You are a fool to swim so early.’

He grinned suddenly. The wolf eyes gleamed. ‘But look what it brought me!’ He felt suddenly easy with her again, as he had for two and a half steady years before she married the village cooper, when he had watched her crouched near him in the gardens intent on slaughtering infant weeds and only half-aware of his eyes. He slid his hand into her bush. ‘No fool, Cat. Not at all.’

She hissed between her teeth, blinked, then smiled into his eyes. She pulled her low-cut bodice from her shoulders and eased her brown nipples up into the reach of his mouth and fingers. He pressed her back and down. She twisted away.

‘Not on the ground. I can’t carry all those witnesses on my back and sleeves and hair. Here. Come over here.’

She leaned forward with her hands on a willow trunk, her skirts and petticoats bunched across her back. He thrust himself home between her magnificent haunches.

A familiar place he thought he had lost. Warm, friendly, familiar.

‘Oh, God!’ she said, muffling her voice. ‘Oh yes.’ She pressed her forehead against the tree’s bark. ‘Oh yes!’

Never to leave, never to leave. Warm, deep, dark, and infinitely friendly. He was all right again. Solid. There.

Need pushed him too fast. Sooner than he wanted, than he meant, he muffled a shout, sighed from his toe-tips and laid his head between her shoulder-blades. Their ribs heaved in unison. Pond water dripped from the ends of his hair onto her bare brown skin.

‘I would have liked a longer farewell feast,’ he finally said. ‘A Roman banquet of courses.’ He leaned his hands on the tree, with an arm on either side of her.

She turned to face him, her back now against the tree. ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve never been one before.’ With her thumb, she wiped water from his black brows. ‘A good hearty tup, my love. More than enough, and right for now.’

She was a good-natured woman, even though she would not have said no if John had offered more, back when she had not had an offer from the cooper, a kind man of her own estate in life, with a skill which would always be needed by civilized man.

She stretched her handsome face up and kissed him. ‘’Twill do me nicely. We’re neither of us love-sick idiots.’

At that moment John was not so sure. His spasm had eased his fear, but not the yearning in his bones. The woman in his arms was generous. Her generosity moved him towards words he knew he might regret.

She held out the front of her dress and tucked her teats back into their nest. Then she ran her hands along his arms. ‘You’re bumpy as a plucked hen. I’d hate to be the death of you from ague. You’d best go get dry and clothed.’ One finger stroked his cold, limp member. ‘And find some other way of keeping that warm.’

‘None better than you,’ he said.

‘Words to warm me to my grave.’ She ducked under his arm and began to shake down her layers of linen and wool.

He plucked a grey-green willow-leaf dagger from the front of her thick, wavy hair.

‘We’ll still smile when we meet?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’ He drew the leaf down the ridge of her nose, then handed it to her like a rose. He watched her think. Then she decided not to say more. John was relieved. He was not angry at her marriage; he understood her necessity. He himself was not a fit husband for anyone. He was grateful to her for two and a half years of ease and delight. And yet, something coiled deep in his gut was best left undisturbed.

Cat ducked her head suddenly in the ghost of a curtsey. Gathering her ease around her like a cloak in cold weather, she turned away through the willows, back along the muddy bank. John parted the willows to look after her. He would miss watching those haunches shift their weight from foot to foot as she advanced, crouching, along a row of carrots or borage. When she disappeared he felt hollow again. Another line drawn through his life.

He began to tug his clothes back on over damp, sticky skin. At least the madness was gone. Between them the cold water and Cat had flushed it out even if they had not truly eased him. As he hauled at his boots, John decided that although he was still not his former self he should be able to throw his new demon in a worthy fall or two.

On the way back upstream towards the fish ponds, he paused to listen to the voices of the water – treble gurgles, alto murmurs and a low pounding bass pulse in the shadows of the bend.

‘Gone, gone,’ said the water. ‘On. On.’

The pale wolf eyes stared at a patch of froth which struggled for ever above the same stone to race upstream.

I have found my reason only to lose it again, he thought. He could not shake off a troubling fancy that he had just been paid an ambiguous bribe by the Lady Tree.

Two

May 23, 1636. Water horsetail in bloom. 2nd swallow. Apple buds relaxed, about to blow, very late. A second dry day. I hide in small things.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

‘I don’t know how Harry can ask it of us!’ Aunt Margaret wailed. She yanked her skirt hem from the closed door of the housekeeper’s office, where it had caught. Stiffened hip joints gave her small figure the rolling walk of a sailor.

John looked out of his aunt’s window into the immaculate forecourt. The geese had got in again and left grey-green droppings. If only he could freeze all living things until Harry Beester and his Londoners had arrived tomorrow.

‘All those extra grooms and maids and Lord knows who else! We should have slaughtered another dozen pigs last autumn!’

Her fingers moved even more intently than they usually did, constantly checking the location and solidity of things – her belt, her slightly weak chin, her skirt, her keys.

‘Your brother was still alive last autumn,’ said John with careful mildness. ‘No one could have known. Least of all Harry.’

In his head he tested the words ‘Sir Harry’.

Mistress Margaret shifted the mess of papers on her table. She shook her fluffy silver head grimly and frowned past the end of her generous nose at unavoidable disaster. Her fingers found her handkerchief in her left sleeve and assessed its lace trim. ‘We can’t bake enough pies for so many in that little oven. Agatha Stookey’s taken hysterical on me. Sukie Tanner’s about to drop her whelp and is no use to me in the kitchen, and there aren’t enough silver ewers for the guest chambers and …’ Her nose twitched, her small lower lip tucked itself even more tightly behind the upper one, and she burst into tears.

Before John could invent words of comfort, she steered abruptly into the true heart of her panic. ‘What will I do if our new lady turns me out?’ she wept. ‘George left me nothing to live on…a few pound a year for clothing …! Do you think he made it clear to Harry that I’ve nowhere else to go?’

John could not comfort her without lying. He did not know how the new Lady Beester from London would arrange things for her predecessor. He felt a quick spasm of guilt at his earlier self-concern.

He knew how little of her own his aunt had. Since reaching his majority he had paid out on behalf of his uncle the various annuities incumbent on the estate, including his own modest one. After Sir George died, John had carried on paying without waiting for legalities to be sorted out. His aunt, never married, was a tough, wiry little creature, but inclined to come adrift at the edges. She wouldn’t survive anywhere but here, where she had lived and more than earned her keep, unofficially, for the last thirty years.

‘I can’t imagine that warm-hearted Harry would let her do such a thing,’ said John. Harry could, however, do as he liked.

‘Harry’s such a fool!’ Aunt Margaret wailed and buried her face in her handkerchief. ‘Always has been. Anyone can turn him.’ Over the top of the handkerchief a suddenly malevolent grey Beester eye found John’s. ‘She might make him turn you out too! And where could you go? Carrying the mark of Cain as you do? I know what happened, even if the rest don’t. You’ve nowhere safe to go, except abroad with all those foreigners! Worse off than I am, poor lamb. We must stick together, John. We must help each other!’

John closed his fists tightly around cold fingertips. ‘Have faith in Harry. He may be a fool, but he’s a good-natured one.’

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ muttered Mistress Margaret.

‘We must pray for the best, then. Do our duty and trust in the just reward. And who knows? Harry may have changed for the better. He seems to have made a sensible marriage.’

‘You’re too good, John. No matter what they say you’ve done. You should have had Hawkridge House…Harry hasn’t visited in years …’

‘There’s no question of “should”,’ said John between his teeth. ‘After Cousin James, Harry is your brother’s heir.’

‘Harry will despise the place,’ said Aunt Margaret. ‘He’ll visit once and run straight back to his precious London …’

‘Then we’ll all go on just as before, contented as larks.’ John fled into the audit office, away from her quavering voice and spiked briar thoughts.

He turned all his attention to the delicate task of re-carving the point of a quill pen from his table. He split the point unevenly, cursed, and began again.

‘John …!’ The voice of Dr Bowler wavered in through the open window. The old parson stood on the gravel of the forecourt. ‘Can I have a word? Do you have a minute…I won’t need long. It’s just that I’m having a little trouble …’ Bowler’s high white bald forehead gleamed in the sun. His slightly-close-together eyes were even more anxious than before a sermon. ‘I know you’re busy …’

‘Come round,’ said John. ‘I’m doing nothing important.’ He threw knife and quill violently down on the table.

It’s like before a storm, he thought. All the livestock have the jitters. Including me.

Bowler was usually an ally. He had been John’s tutor and was now his chief drinking companion in the evenings. But since the news of Harry’s coming, Bowler had become morose and silent. He had stopped playing his viol and could no longer be tracked through the house or the gardens by his constant cheerful bumble-bee humming of hymns and glees.

The parson was better at music than religion. He had an authority with his flock when he mustered them into choirs which deserted him entirely when he was asked for moral certitude. John’s request for a full musical consort for Harry’s arrival should have excited Bowler into a melodious frenzy.

Instead he hid away in his small apartment of rooms behind the chapel, where he leafed wanly through sheaves of musical scores. He chose tunes, then rejected them. Picked others, rehearsed them twice with his musical conscripts and gave up in despair.

‘John!’ exclaimed Bowler in a tone of discovery as he edged through the office door. ‘I’m so glad I found you. You know that we’ve been practising ever since you told me…Do you think Harry…Sir Harry, that is…expects us to be note perfect?’

‘Perfection’s not possible in this world. Just catch the spirit.’

‘He’ll have changed,’ said Bowler, ‘since I taught him. Not that I taught him for long, nor very much, I’m afraid.’ He sighed. ‘He was never…not like you …’ His voice trailed away. His worried eyes crouched close together like small animals seeking comfort.

He opened a coffer of books and peered in. Many of the volumes were his gifts to John.

‘A requiem, John. That’s what I will be conducting. A requiem.’

‘What nonsense!’ bellowed John, suddenly beside himself. He wanted to kick his table. Bowler never moved in straight lines. That was why he could never string together a coherent sermon nor teach Greek grammar. ‘What utter nonsense! Who’s dead?’

‘Coherence,’ said Bowler.

‘What?’

‘It’s a requiem for coherence.’ The old man held firm with dignity against his former pupil’s outburst. ‘You know I have trouble with my grip at the best of times. I’m afraid, John. I’m getting too old …’

John pulled himself back to order. Bowler had taken the wind out of him. What he felt for his old tutor was as close to love as anything he felt for anyone, including his fondness for his aunt.

‘Do you think Harry…Sir Harry…will appoint another parson? Although that wasn’t what I meant by coherence…I wouldn’t presume to hymn my own demise. Although I don’t know what I would do without the tithes.’

‘I’ll do my best to see that he doesn’t appoint another,’ said John. ‘But I can’t read even my own future.’

‘It’s like waiting for death,’ said Bowler. ‘Supposed to be all right if you’ve done the right things, but you never really know. The Greater Power either tosses you up one way or chucks you down the other. I dare say one manages either way, but I must say I find the waiting most unsteadying.’

‘If there is justice, Doctor Bowler, you will be one of the chosen.’

Bowler demurred, modest but also amused. ‘You haven’t had much to compare me with. But you’re kind, John.’ He seemed to feel better than he had when he arrived. ‘I suppose I should go visit Sukie Tanner, though she’s quite unrepentant about this child of hers…child-to-be, that is. At least my dutiful stone won’t be the first one cast at the poor girl.’

After Bowler had left, John paced tight circles, aped by the fly still there from the day before.

He still felt as fragile as a shed snake skin. He could not contain everyone else’s fears.

‘… the mark of Cain,’ his aunt had reminded him.

If they had hanged me after all, I think I would have felt like this the night before.

Dr Bowler had left the book coffer open. John lifted out a volume of Virgil’s pastoral poems and opened it at random.

Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt.

Et tibi satis …

Fortunate old man, so your land will still be yours. And it’s enough for you…

His eyes leaped away and onward.

Fortunate senex, hinc inter flumina nota …

Happy old man! You will stay here, between the rivers you know so well …

He slammed the heavy leather covers shut. Traitors everywhere, disguised as former friends! Columella, Cato, Varro, Pliny…He did not trust himself to test any of the others either, in his present mood. He replaced the Eclogues and spun around to the end window that looked out onto the forecourt. The geese had gone, but their route was clearly marked. John’s left hand touched the left corner of his jaw where the skin puckered over the bone.

Let the storm break! Thunder, lightning, hail – whatever wrath the Heavens may thunder down tomorrow. Lord, just end this waiting!

May 24, 1636. A cold sour night but sun again today. Soil in the Far still too wet to sow beans. Do I end with unsown beans?

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

There was still no movement on the road. John shifted his body unhappily inside its carapace of stiffened and padded pale-blue silk. (Harry had sent the doublet and new, narrower trunks from London, to be sure that John looked like the cousin of a rising baronet.) Two immaculate white cuffs of Brussels lace fell over the tops of his green kidskin boots. Two more half-hid his brown hands, which were half-raw with scrubbing. He looked more elegant than he felt. Even in baggy work clothes, his physical outline was naturally precise. With the curly acorn-coloured hair trimmed and the right corner of his neat beard shaved to match the bare scars of the left corner, he looked very much at home in clothes that he wore only under duress.

From the small stone entrance porch, John surveyed the players in Harry’s requested triumphal masque. He saw ominous portents of comedy.

Below him in the forecourt, Dr Bowler sat on a stool in his best black coat, viol against his ear, picking with irritation at one of the strings. A glass of cider leaned dangerously in the gravel at his feet. A distant sheep was bleating a half-tone higher than the string. Three estate workers, washed, brushed and polished, lounged against the pair of stone eagles that flanked the porch, with their wooden pipes under their arms – descant, alto and bass. The cooper’s drum lay abandoned on the gravel; he had no doubt gone in search of his bride Cat.

John stared at the drum. She’d have had me, he thought with a renewed jolt of loss. I should have taken her and not worried what a bad bargain it made for her.

Mistress Margaret darted out of the doorway onto the stone porch. She was trussed, painted and frizzed for a court ball, but a line of sweat glistened on her wrinkled upper lip, her stiff, pleated muslin ruff was askew and she had lost one of her garnet earrings. ‘Anything?’

‘Not yet,’ said John.

‘The mutton will dry out if they don’t come soon!’ She darted away again in a rustling of rose silk and muslin. ‘Agatha! Agatha!’ John heard her cries fade away through the main chamber.

A welcoming feast (perhaps now a little overdone) waited in the Great Chamber. Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate, and Sir Richard Balhatchet, who had been Knight of the Shire before Parliament was dissolved, both attended, suitably dressed, in the Long Gallery with yet another bottle of the estate’s best ale.

John glanced back at the cooper’s drum. You did the right thing, man. Don’t add to the weight already on your conscience.

He went down the three steps from the stone porch, across the gravel forecourt to the off-centre gate. He ached to yank open the scratchy collar of Harry’s lace-trimmed shirt and to haul at the excess cloth bunched in his crotch, but too many eyes were on him.

‘He should be the one,’ said the descant player to the alto, as John walked away. ‘Not that London cousin.’

Dr Bowler squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and focused his entire being on tuning his string.

All the estate residents were ranged under the beeches along both sides of the drive – the tenant cottagers and their families, the housed labourers (mainly unmarried) and the poorhouse elders. The men stood or sat uneasily in their best Sabbath clothes, which included the new shirts Harry had ordered. At the sight of John they jumped to attention, hands and caps raised high in over-eager greeting.

‘Morning, sir! Good morning! A nice dry day for it, sir!’ Their eyes weighed his unusual elegance, probed his face, and slid away.

They half-want a cockfight, thought John with clarity. My mettle and spurs are being sized up.

The women and girls eyed him over knitting or mending.

‘Oh, you do look fine, sir!’ called one of the older, bolder ones. Not like a stable groom today. But handsome either way.

‘That Cat was a fool,’ a young, unmarried woman muttered. ‘He’s not set on a gentlewoman. I’d have played him better. Had him fast enough.’

‘And where would you be after today, then?’ asked a friend.

‘I wouldn’t care!’

Among the fragrant green swags of ivy and lavender hung on the gate were tucked white and green bunches of sweet woodruff as delicate as silk French knots, against the plague which already festered in London again this summer.

John smiled to himself, a little grimly. A small gesture made by the helpless in the face of the uncontrollable.

He strolled back toward the porch. He felt numb.

Harry, thought John, come now! I can’t take any more waiting! We’re all as ready as we will ever be. Our bodies have exhausted themselves to make up for the shortcomings of our hearts and souls.

‘Still nothing?’ called Aunt Margaret breathlessly from the porch door. As she squinted past John, she tapped her handkerchief with great delicacy against her upper lip. ‘Disaster, John! We can’t find the new barrels of ale, the ones from Sir Richard …! They’re not in the cellar! Help me, John!’

‘I’ll look in the basse-court,’ said John with resignation.

The missing ale was not in the basse-court, the buttery, the stable yard, or the stream-cooled cellar. Unable to force himself to look further, John placated his aunt with fourteen bottles of Flemish wine which he had meant to save for a later occasion. He lifted a spider’s web from the pleats of his lace cuff and dusted the left side of his padded silk breeches.

Then he went into the stable yard. He stood quietly for a moment in the warm, dust-filled air of the horse-and-hay barn. Constellations of bright motes swarmed in a shaft of sunlight that cut low through the open door across the cobbled floor. His own cob and Aunt Margaret’s mare, along with all twenty draught animals, had been turned into Mill Meadow. The stalls were clean, their floors covered with fresh straw. The iron manger cribs held hay, and buckets of corn stood ready for the London animals. When John came into the barn, two sparrows flew out of the nearest bucket onto a beam above his head to wait until he had left again.

The coach house next to the horse-and-hay barn stood wide open and empty. The estate’s heavy old wooden coach had been hauled to the side of the cow barn, complete with two nesting hens, to give cover for the coaches of Harry and one of his guests. Two stable boys pumped water into the horse trough with the intense purpose of fire fighters at a blaze.

John left the stable yard through the gardens and went around the chapel into the basse-court. In the dog yard he leaned into the pen of a pregnant deerhound bitch. She lifted her head and licked his fingers.

‘Oh, Cassie! Cassie, you silly, sloppy beast! I’m not your master now. We must all learn new manners.’ He held her head in both hands. They gazed into each other’s eyes. ‘Can’t you see into our future as your namesake could?’

She thumped her massive tail against the side of the pen and tried to jump up to place her paws on his chest. He pushed her gently down and turned away.

He left the basse-court, heading for the orchard. The damp grass darkened his new kidskin boots like spilled ink. At the crest of Hawk Ridge, the hen still cowered in her bucket. John lifted her gently to count the chicks.

Six. Carefully, he removed the bad egg which had not hatched and laid it in the grass away from the nest. The apples were in full blow at last. He laid a hand on one of the wicker bee skeps set among the trees. It vibrated with life.

He looked down through the blossom at the basse-court frozen in unlikely tidiness, the walled gardens suspended in temporary order. Life-in-waiting, a state only briefly possible to sustain. The fish ponds glinted like polished pewter plates. A flotilla of ducks drifted out of the reeds, full of faint inconsequential gossip. From the water meadows to the right came the constant, ragged bleating of sheep.

I can’t bear it! John thought suddenly. His throat felt as if he had swallowed a hot coal. I can’t accept! Harry and his new wife won’t love you as I do.

He heard shouts, faint and far away, from the gatehouse beyond the top of the beech avenue. The bell on the brewhouse tower began to clang as it did for meals, festivals and prayers. The back of a dark, lumbering tortoise hauled itself over the crest of a far hill and sank again into the trees. John gathered himself like an actor pushed onto the stage or a criminal shoved at the steps of the scaffold. It had to be done. He yanked at the fabric bunched in his crotch, shook out his cuffs and stalked down the hill toward the house, stiff with a curious mixture of terror, excitement and rage.

Can I call him ‘Sir Harry’ without laughing? he wondered in the midst of his panic. A scrappy young cousin who arrived in my life as a poor second to a litter of staghounds when I was four! John picked his way between the grey-green turds which an escaped goose had left on the stone path of the hornbeam allée at the end of the west wing.

And what will his rich London woman be like? Do I still remember how to talk to a lady?

When clean, the carriage would have been burnished and studded with brass and copper, but after two and a half days on the road from London it was thickly frosted with mud. The horses were splattered to the chest, the mounted grooms to their knees. But the estate residents, freed from waiting, played their part undeterred. The mud-caked tortoise heaved and swayed down the drive through cheers and showers of posies. Boys fell from the trees like shaken nuts and capered alongside. The five musicians in the forecourt clutched their instruments in damp hands.

The carriage rolled through the forecourt gate onto the relative flatness of the pounded gravel. Four yellow posies revolved, stuck to the mud, two on its front right wheel, two on the back. The carriage stopped.

Dr Bowler raised his bow with an authority he never showed in the pulpit. The cooper rattled a drumroll. The parson swayed like a tree in a blast of wind, then launched into a galliard, followed in lurching panic by the descant, alto and bass.

Sir Harry’s flushed face appeared at the coach window. A housegroom leaped forward to open the door at the same time as Harry’s own footman. The assembled house staff cheered on cue. A tossed posy hit the groom. More cheers from the top of the drive signalled the approach of a second coach.

As Sir Harry bent forward through the coach door and stepped to the ground, Dr Bowler switched to a march. Sir Harry raised his arms in greeting to the assembled crowd, provoking a second cheer from the housemaids and grooms. Sir Harry, the new master of Hawkridge House, had arrived at last and he was magnificent.

Caesar to the hilt, thought John. He had grown tall, long-legged and wide-shouldered. No longer the scrappy young cousin. The jolt of surprise was a little unpleasant.

‘Oh, isn’t he fine!’ cried a maid.

Harry’s blond hair curled to his ivory ear lobes, his horizontal moustache gleamed with pomade. His cleft chin was clean-shaven. A lace collar as large as a shawl set off his pink, square-cornered handsome face with soft dark-pink mouth and long-lashed blue eyes. His nose was a little short to have been Caesar’s, but it was straight, with nostrils which seemed permanently flared in eager questioning of a rose, a lady’s nape or a new soup.

Wide butterfly leathers flapped on his boots. An embroidered silk garden grew on his pea-green doublet, which also boasted slashed sleeves with satin linings, triple cuffs and enough lace to have bloodied the fingers of all the grandmothers of Bruges. He was like nothing they had ever seen before at Hawkridge House, and he was theirs. His staff cheered one last time with even more fervour than before. John quivered with a spasm of betrayal.

Then he stepped forward.

‘My dearest cousin!’ cried Harry with determination.

‘Welcome …’ John swallowed. ‘Welcome, Sir Harry.’ He bowed.

There! I said it, he thought. A little stiffly, but it’s out.

‘Thank you, John,’ said Harry. ‘It’s good to be home.’ His eyes flicked away from John’s.

John wondered if he had seen fear in Harry’s eyes.

Then Harry took a deep breath and with a rush of his usual boisterous enthusiasm flung his arms around John, and squeezed him hard.

‘Can you believe it, cousin?’ He breathed a hot, happy gust into John’s ear. ‘Sir Bloody Harry? Me?’

Washed by suddenly remembered warmth, John pounded his cousin on the shoulders, relieved that the words now came easily. ‘Who better, coz? Who better? And you look every inch a conqueror!’

‘And you, John. And you. Quite splendid! Almost a courtier. Though the waist could be a little higher…Not at all like the rustic pose of your letters.’

If Harry also felt a twinge of unpleasant surprise, thought John, he hid it graciously.

They parted. Sir Harry moved on to Aunt Margaret’s curtsey.

‘You’ve grown, Harry,’ she said, dry-mouthed and too flustered for protocol.

‘Older, wiser and much richer, Mistress Margaret.’ Harry grinned wickedly.

A crowd of estate workers jostled at the forecourt gate, pushing each other aside for a better view of the new master.

The cooper rattled a finale; the music died. John presented the vicar, who had once been tutor to them both.

‘Doctor Bowler!’ cried Harry. ‘Enchanted to see you again. All the more so now that I’ve escaped your rod at last. A charming country tune, that was!’ He clasped the hand that still held the bow.

As John opened his mouth to introduce the maids and grooms of the house family, something moved in the door of Harry’s coach.

A thin child leaned out, pale with chalk powder, a smear of red across her small mouth. Her wiry red-gold hair curled around her face and was caught up in a knot at the back of her head in the latest London fashion. Below the stylish frizz and a pair of pearl and diamond ear-drops, her neck glowed bright purple, right up to the edge of the rouge and powder mask. She hauled at her green silk skirts, levered them through the door and jumped to the ground, spurning the hand of the groom.

John saw a flash of two thin ankles in knitted silk stockings. The ties and swags of her dress jounced and settled around two mouse-sized slippers of embroidered dark green kidskin. She twitched her stiffened stomacher back into place. In the startled silence that followed her sudden descent, she stood by the coach glaring at the ground, stiff-armed, with fists pressed against the front of her green silk skirt.

What is Harry doing with that sulky child?

Instantly, John answered himself. He was startled and appalled. Distracted by meeting Harry, he had forgotten the new wife.

The crowd at the gate edged into the forecourt.

Harry looked as startled as John felt. He extended a hasty hand. ‘Mistress, come meet my cousin, John…Graffham…who has tended things here so well for me, as I can already see.’

Obediently, she scraped her skirts across the gravel to stand beside Harry with eyes lowered under eyelids as smooth as washed pebbles. The red smear remained set in an unfriendly pinch.

‘This is Mistress Zeal…Lady Beester…my wife.’ Though Harry met John’s eyes squarely, his lashes beat a tattoo against the tops of his pink cheeks.

‘Welcome, my lady,’ said John. He bowed, then took the small, uncertainly extended, barely unclenched hand. It felt no more substantial than a dove’s foot and was ice cold. ‘Hawkridge House has been in a lather these last weeks, trying to make itself worthy to be your new home.’

The sulky eyelids lifted briefly. John saw grey-green eyes filled with panic. Then the lids dropped again. John released the cold hand and stared down at the top of her red-blond hair. Coppery tendrils at her temples clashed with the violent purple colouring her neck and small flat ears. Her white-painted face was still marked by the fierce dash of compressed, red lips. The nails of the hand were chewed short.

She’s no more than twelve, thought John. And young for that. Too young to change nests yet. He knew all about nest-changing. He felt a rush of pity toward a young animal harnessed too soon.

‘Madam!’ said Harry sharply. ‘Come meet your new household. Mistress Margaret Beester, my aunt …’

The panic flashed at John again. The girl let out a shaky sigh, picked up her skirt, and moved forward up onto the porch into the icy blast of Mistress Margaret’s basilisk gaze and crocodile smile.

‘How was your journey, my lady?’ asked Margaret. Her eyes took inventory as fiercely as a bailiff. Her upper lip glistened unwiped, and her remaining earring trembled with her emotion.

The new Lady Beester inhaled, looked at the twenty or so faces, including Harry’s, that attended her reply and closed her mouth again.

John was distracted by the arrival into the forecourt of a second carriage as muddy as the first.

‘I hope, my lady, that you will approve of my efforts,’ he heard Aunt Margaret say as she took the new mistress in charge. ‘This is Agatha Stookey, the chief housemaid…Roger Corry, housegroom …’

John turned his back on the stammering curtseys and blushing bows.

The second coach stopped behind Harry’s, drawing twelve estate workers and eight goggling boys in its wake.

‘Sir Harry! Is this your stern Roman senator?’ called John.

‘Oh, Lord!’ cried Harry in dismay. He reappeared on the porch. ‘Where’s Doctor Bowler! Why isn’t there music? Where is everyone?’

The parson leaped back to his stool and snatched up his viol. The pipers dived for their pipes. The cooper, however, stayed where he was, bent over a wheel on the offside of Harry’s coach.

‘Where’s Aunt Margaret?’ begged Harry. ‘And the house staff…They were just here!’

The parson began the galliard for the second time, minus the drum.

‘You can’t possibly expect my niece to make that journey more than once a year,’ complained Samuel Hazelton, a lean sixty-year-old in Puritan black with a complexion like tree bark. He shook and brushed himself with a great rustling of silks and travelling wool. ‘We left Edward mired down just outside Windsor. He took a horse and went to dine with a friend in Eton while his men dig his coach out…How can so much mud get inside?’ He beat with his hand at the end of a black silk jacket sleeve. ‘Mistress …’ He turned back to reel in beside him the square-cornered woman, also wearing black silk, who had just descended from the coach. She waved aside a posy offered by one of the weeding women.

‘Samuel Hazelton, my wife’s uncle and former guardian,’ explained Harry, sotto voce. ‘And his wife, Mistress Hazelton.’

‘All the way from Rome,’ murmured John. He dropped back as Harry moved forward in welcome.

Even as he bowed stiffly to Sir Harry, Hazelton’s eyes moved swiftly, taking stock of house and men. He already knew Harry’s worth as a husband to his niece. He had still to determine the soundness of his own social and political investment in letting the young cockerel marry her.

Mistress Hazelton’s eyes were glazed. She had been sick from the motion of the coach.

‘Mistress Hazelton, Master Hazelton, my cousin Mister John Graffham.’ Harry pushed John forward with the air of offering a plate of sweetmeats.

‘Mr Graffham! I have looked forward most eagerly to meeting you,’ said Hazelton. The stock-taking eyes examined John.

A sharp-eyed pirate’s face coupled to a forced mildness of manner, thought Hazelton with interest and surprise. A pirate pretending to be a monk. A broken nose and woman’s brows…it’s the face of a licentious Corinthian, not a simple country Corin. Not over-eager to please like his cousin. He’s assessing me. Looks good for what needs doing.

John stiffened under Hazelton’s open appraisal. There’s more here than mere manners. What has Harry told these strangers?

Don’t panic, man, he then told himself. The man called you Graffham, not Nightingale.

‘Your reputation as a botanical enthusiast spreads farther than you may realize,’ said Hazelton.

John achieved a social smile. John Graffham, enthusiast of Botany and student of Agriculture, had nothing to hide.

‘A good friend, Sir George Tupper, is an enthusiast like yourself,’ said Hazelton. ‘He tells me that you have written excellent advice on replicating certain bushes, or some such thing…I don’t know a fig myself about the domain of Flora …’

‘I am flattered to be so much talked about,’ said John. He was, in fact, shocked. ‘But I’m merely a countryman who observes what lies around him.’

‘More than that, coz!’ exclaimed Harry, pinkly eager and delighted that his introduction was going so well.

‘A man in tune with the preoccupations of his time,’ said Hazelton. ‘A fortunate thing to be. We must speak further.’

Mistress Hazelton looked past John into the house.

Two large muddy carts pulled by equally muddy oxen heaved into the forecourt. Behind the carts trudged Harry’s hunter, ridden by yet another groom. Two dogs and five boys bounded alongside.

‘If you will excuse me,’ said John, ‘I’ll see them into the stable yard.’

‘Until later, then,’ said Hazelton.

Thoughtfully, John watched Harry lead his new family into his new domain, heralded by the fourth repeat of the vicar’s march.

There’s probably nothing to fear from Hazelton, he decided. If the dear friend who carries weight at court is no more danger than that Puritan guardian of the little wife, I can leave the past alone after all. Do what needs doing now, and learn what Harry plans for my future.

Harry had brought seven waiting men and two pages. Hazelton five men and one page. Lady Beester and Mrs Hazelton had two women each. The carters made four more. Even without the servants who accompanied the ‘dear friend’s’ coach which was yet to arrive from its mud puddle outside Windsor, they were already four over the expected number.

‘We’ll have to use the Lower Gallery as a dormitory for the men servants,’ John told Aunt Margaret under his breath. ‘Lay them out like flitches of bacon.’

‘I’ll wring his knightly neck!’ she said. ‘I’m happy to say that Agatha has agreed to let Mrs Hazelton’s waiting woman share her bed.’

‘Oy! Another coach!’ shouted one of the cottager boys from his perch in the beech avenue. ‘A coach! A coach!’ The cry passed down the drive.

The bell began to clang again.

John was on his way back to the house after seeing to the supply carts and settling the eight visiting coach horses. ‘Go fetch Sir Harry,’ he ordered a groom. ‘And Mistress Margaret.’

‘Where is everyone?’ asked Harry a moment later. ‘Damn! Have all the cottagers left? Where’s Bowler? I don’t pay him just to sit there and drink my ale and debate whether or not we have the right to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the stiff-necked Scots.’ He searched the forecourt with anxious eyes. ‘Don’t we even have the bloody pipes?’

Aunt Margaret’s pale damp face arrived in the door, framed in limp white curls. ‘If you want your guests to dine, you must really let me get on with things,’ she announced in despair. ‘… Sir Harry,’ she added in quick afterthought.

‘Does it matter so much if you welcome your dear friend without your armies behind you?’ asked John.

Harry pulled his lips back in a nervous grimace. He straightened the front of his flower-garden doublet and bent to flick at the ruffled garters that decorated his shapely knees. ‘This is one with influence, John. The one I must woo. The one in the Queen’s eye. The one I really wanted all this for!’ His voice was plaintive as a disappointed child’s.

John counted another five serving men as the last invading coach rolled into the forecourt. Four more coach horses and two mounts.

‘I must alert the stable boys,’ he said, ‘or we’ll have a shambles in the yard.’

Harry clutched John’s sleeve. ‘Don’t leave me now, cousin!’

The footman leaped down and opened the door. The circular top of a feathered hat appeared, followed by the shoulders of a red coat. The man straightened and stepped to the ground.

‘I hope, Sir Harry, that your cellar and kitchen can make up for that appalling journey.’ Edward Malise removed his hat and ran his fingers through his heavy straight black hair. The falcon-nosed face was sulky and tired. ‘I’m bruised from nape to heel and dusty as a church.’

Harry’s hand pushed on John’s elbow. John did not move. As he stared at the newcomer, the hair lifted on the back of his neck and on his arms under the sleeves of his new shirt.

‘It will be a pleasure to try to console you, Edward,’ said Harry uncertainly. He glanced at his cousin in covert bewilderment. What on earth was wrong with him?

John’s lips tightened across his teeth. His breath shortened, and his muscles coiled themselves like springs on his bones. His fingers became knives.

‘My dear Edward, this is the cousin we discussed.’ Harry’s distant voice was nearly drowned by the pounding in John’s ears. ‘John Graffham…Master Edward Malise.’

John braced himself for Malise’s gasp of recognition. His hands felt themselves already closing around Malise’s throat.

But the dark eyes passed over him. ‘Delighted,’ Malise said wearily. ‘Our botanist. Sir Harry has sung your praises, sir. We shall talk more later when I have recovered.’

Confused and unbelieving, John licked dry lips. He bowed curtly, sucked in a deep breath. Made the thick dry lump of his tongue shape words. Malise seemed not to know him, but he would never forget Edward Malise.

Seven-year-old John flew through the ring of fiery tongues, out of the coach window, like Icarus falling away from the dreadful heat of the sun. He trailed flames like a comet, wrapped in his own screams and the smell of burning wool and hair.

His face smashed into the dirt and stones. He felt hands drag him away from the coach and beat out the flames on his hair and clothes. He clawed back toward the burning coach and his parents trapped inside. His mother was a shadow dressed in flames, a burning goddess with fiery hair. She screamed and screamed. Hands pulled at his coat, dragged him away into the darkness.

He saw men’s legs on the far side of the coach, and logs braced against the door, to hold it closed. The four coach horses shrieked and reared in their harness. The offside bay twisted and bucked, its foreleg tangled in the logs of the roadblock. A man darted and dodged through the black smoke, trying to cut the horses free. Others, stippled by flames then blurred by smoke, jammed the far-side coach door closed with logs.

‘Mother!’ His scream was lost in the furore of terrified horses, shouting, and flames.

The hands hauled at John’s jacket.

‘Please, Master John!’ begged the voice in his ear. ‘Before they take notice of us …!’

The silk-padded upholstery, heavy dried-wood frame and pitch-covered roof of the coach burned fast. The screams stopped. In this new silence, the flames cracked loudly. Sparks drifted up into an orange-lit canopy of blackening leaves. The men around the coach dropped back. Now on his feet, John followed the Nightingale groom through the brush towards the road beyond the coach.

‘There’s justice done,’ grated a smoky voice from the group beside the coach. ‘A just death to thieves and plunderers, and the courts and King be damned!’

The Nightingales’ coachman lay dead on the ground, his cut throat spreading a black pool across the orange-lit ground.

‘Ralph! It’s Cookson …’ John started to say.

The groom clapped an urgent hand over the boy’s mouth. ‘He’s past help, Master John. Let’s get you away while they’re still busy!’

The coach lurched sideways and settled unevenly like a dying stag still trying to stand. Three of the horses, loose at last, darted and whinnied, dragging the men who clung to their leathers. The bay had fallen out of sight and was still.

In the confusion of logs and bodies, a face suddenly stood out brightly in a shudder of firelight. The head was turned to the side. The brow, cheekbone and chin of Edward Malise glowed hot orange. His single visible eye was alight with a terrible glee. Then he turned suddenly, the eye caught by movement in the brush. He seemed to look straight at John.

‘Run, Master John!’ whispered Ralph. He shoved the boy deeper into a thicket and drew his dagger.

‘We missed a brace of them,’ said the smoky voice. ‘Over there!’

Three of the men beside the coach drew their swords and turned to black silhouettes against the flames as they moved towards the groom.

‘Run! To London. To your uncle. For the love of God, run!’

It was told for months, until a new excitement made fresher telling, how a singed, dazed and smoky boy wearing ashy tatters of silken clothes had staggered into a cottage on an estate six miles from the ambush, announced that he was Master John Nightingale of Tarleton Court and demanded to be taken to his uncle George Beester in London to tell him that the Devil had killed his father and mother. He had then sat down in a large, carved chair-of-grace and fallen soundly asleep as suddenly as if struck by a magic spell.

‘My dear Edward,’ said Harry, ‘let me begin to make it up to you at once. Food and drink are waiting for you inside.’ He shot John a disappointed, reproving glance. No help there. His cousin John needed a good shaking up and brushing off before he could be trusted in elevated company. Harry felt the chill of imminent disaster. His joy when Malise had agreed to visit Hawkridge House had drowned his common sense.

I should have come down here first, to make certain the place does me credit! Please God, at least let supper be worthy!

John stood like a man who had just been clubbed. Upright but unbalanced, a sawn tree just before it falls.

‘Shall I take the coach round?’

John looked up blankly at a strange face above yellow livery.

Harry had betrayed him to Malise.

‘Sir?’

‘What do you want?’

‘The coach…where, sir?’

John frowned in confusion. The coach had burned so fast. Pitch-covered roof and dried wood frame. He had begged the screams to stop. And then the meaning of the silence had shrivelled him into a tight, cold ball of ice.

‘Sir?’

John looked up again. A London voice and curious eyes.

Malise’s coach was here in the forecourt. The Serpent had arrived at Hawkridge House. But the Serpent had been in Eden from the start. Must get a grip on myself, thought John. Deal first with Malise’s coach. Then deal with Harry…And then Malise.

‘Through that gateway,’ said John. ‘Someone in the stable yard will help you…Down, boy!’ he called to the yellow cur that danced among the fetlocks. The heavy wooden coach swayed and jolted through the gate to the stable yard, the cur trotting behind.

Oh, Harry! thought John. Harry! Harry! Harry! This is worse than all the rest. He held onto one of the stone eagles with both hands and waited for the sensation of falling to pass.

‘There you are!’ said Harry reproachfully, emerging onto the porch. ‘Why didn’t you come in? Sir Richard and I more than had our hands full. Our aunt veers from gawping to squawking…Old Doctor Bowler’s no better than he ever was, is he? Still goes red as a cock’s comb when you so much as look at him…used to make me want to climb under the pew, the way he darted at his sermons like a panic-stricken mouse. What the Hazeltons and Malise make of him, I hate to think!’

Harry mistook his cousin’s unnatural stillness beside the eagle for contemplation. ‘It hasn’t changed since I last visited,’ he said. He surveyed the forecourt from the top of the steps. ‘More’s the pity. Not like the two of us, eh? Lord, how long ago was it? Remember riding these eagles? Not changed one bit. Still, being so far from London …’ He put one arm around John’s shoulders, but quickly dropped it again. He might as well have embraced the eagle. ‘You must show me my new property before dinner. I want to learn the worst. There’s just time for a quick look. My guests mustn’t see that I’m as ignorant as they are.’

John turned a cold assessing eye on this stranger from London whom he must call ‘Sir’, who rode a coach instead of a modest cob, sweated in silks instead of wool and glowed moistly with nervous ownership.

‘A good-natured fool,’ John had assured Aunt Margaret. But loyal. Or so Harry had seemed, many years before.

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ she had replied.

‘John?’ asked Harry uncertainly. He was puzzled and a little alarmed by John’s gaze. He looked suddenly shy.

I see no guilt in those blue eyes, thought John, just the ghost of the younger cousin I so often pulled away from the consequences of his own silliness. Or has he learned guile along with the names of good tailors and hatmakers?

‘I’ll show you, if you like. Do you want to start with business or pleasure?’

Harry lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pleasure first, of course, coz. I never have it any other way.’

A touch over-hearty, John noted grimly. ‘Get back to work,’ he shouted at three grooms who were grinning through the stable-yard gate.

John led the way down the steps onto the rolled gravel of the forecourt. ‘I had the chapel newly roofed last year; the bills are in the accounts I have waiting for you …’ He looked up at the square gap teeth of the chapel’s crenellations at the east end of the house.

‘Oh, coz,’ said Harry. ‘Is this what you call pleasure?’

It is for me, thought John. But he said, ‘Only a taste of Purgatory on the way to Paradise. I’m afraid I just have a business habit of mind.’

‘That’s splendid, John,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a habit I must study now that I’m a man of means. But later!’

Before Malise, John would have smiled. Now he stared bleakly at his younger cousin.

They turned right through a small gate out of the forecourt into an allée of pleached hornbeams that faced each other along the west wing like a long set of country dancers. Harry assumed the abstracted enthusiasm of a man at an exhibition, hands clasped behind his back, chin leading. His blue eyes filled with memories and calculations. He nodded graciously at two awe-struck sheepmen beyond the wall.

I’m certain that Malise didn’t recognize me, thought John as they walked. Is it possible?

‘My fields?’ Harry stepped carefully over some green-black goose turds and stopped to survey the green slope beyond the outer row of hornbeams and a low stone wall. ‘They haven’t been sold off?’

He had time to prepare himself for our meeting, decided John. He pretended strangeness in front of Harry.

‘My fields?’ repeated Harry, a little more loudly.

Sheep grazing in Roman Field below the beech avenue raised their heads at the sound of his voice. The afternoon sun glowed pink through their pricked ears.

John finally heard. ‘Yes. The nearest, here across the wall is the Roman…Roman coins were dug up there years ago. Beyond that lies King’s, and then our water meadows, there behind the beech ridge and along the Shir. Two years ago, as you will see in the estate accounts, I bought more good grazing from the Winching estate when the widow died. Hawkridge now runs from Winching Hanger across the road, that way…’ He pointed back up the hill past the top of the drive. ‘All the way past Pig Acre to that second wood there, on that hill above Bedgebury Brook. The limit that way is the field you can just see below the east end of Hawk Ridge, called the Far.’

He counted the sheep that munched down toward the water meadows. The ewe pregnant with late twins was not eating but lay awkwardly on the ground. As he watched, she rose then lay down again. He must send someone to see to her.

But it’s not my job now to think like that. One way or another, this life was now over. But he would not go back to prison. He would never surrender to the rope or block.

They reached the far end of the hornbeam allée and passed through a gap in a shoulder-high yew hedge into a flat empty green kept tightly shorn by grazing geese, a quiet green room enclosed by high, dark-green aromatic walls.

‘The bowling lawn.’

‘Bowling,’ said Harry dully. ‘Not much in favour now in London. I must do something with this.’

A blue and white cat slipped onto the green from under the hedge, froze when it saw the two men, flattened its ears and streaked under the hedge towards the fields.

Water glinted through a gap in the yew hedge. Harry crossed the bowling lawn in long-legged strides.

‘This is better!’ he cried.

From the north-west comer of the house they now looked along the north front and over the basse-court. A little farther on, the river Shir slid like oil over a small weir into the highest of the three fish ponds, dug before any man or woman on the estate could remember.

‘Now here …’ Harry said, ‘I see possibility! We make these ponds into one long lake, the full width of the house. Try to imagine, coz, if you can…statues. And water jets. A bronze of Nereus, just there below the weir.’ He looked around for his cousin, faltered slightly at John’s set face but surged onward. ‘Conjoin the ponds and there’s room for all his fifty sea-nymph daughters around the edge!’

John lifted his eyes beyond the ponds to the smooth swell of hillcrest that rose from the orchard blossom like the naked shoulder of a woman from her smock. He had swallowed a brand from the kitchen fire.

This time, I must kill Edward Malise, he thought fiercely.

‘What’s all that?’ asked Harry, pointing at the jumble of brick buildings and walls that jostled against the back of the house.

‘That?’ John stared as if unravelling the well-known corners and jogs for the first time. ‘… The basse-court yard …’

Two hens scratched in the arch of the gate which opened onto the ponds from the yard between the dairy house and a storage shed.

Not so fast, John then decided. It may be possible that he didn’t recognize me. I may have time to think what’s best to do. But how, dear God, do I deal with my cousin?

‘Come with me!’ Harry ordered. He strode along the bank of the pond, to get a more central view of the basse-court and the north face. ‘Oh, John! This is quite wonderful! I can see exactly …’ He pulled John round by the arm to face his vision. ‘We’ll knock all those old buildings down. Make a new ornamental lawn between the house and the ponds…Can’t you see it? Grass from there to there!’ He threw his arms wide like a bishop gathering his flock in a spiritual embrace. ‘Not Hatfield perhaps …’ Harry laughed with the pure pleasure of his vision. ‘But the best in Hampshire!’

In the eleven years since Malise and I last met, thought John, I have changed from boy to man and sprouted a beard. From fourteen to twenty-five. He was already twenty-seven then. Perhaps he really doesn’t know me!

‘Then …!’ Harry pulled again at John’s sleeve and pointed at the house. ‘Leave aside all those little sheds and things. Try to imagine a portico centred between the wings in place of that old-fashioned porch.’

There was no reply.

‘John? What do you think of my idea of a Greek portico in place of that old porch?’

John focused on his cousin again. ‘No portico, Harry,’ he said quietly.

‘The first on a private house,’ insisted Harry. ‘A portico in the new classical style, like the Queen’s banqueting house just built in Greenwich. I shall build the first in Hampshire. The King himself might come to admire it. Oh, coz, we shall have such fun putting this place right!’

‘No,’ said John in a voice like a scythe.

Harry faltered and dropped in mid-flight. ‘What’s wrong?’ He licked his pink lips and swallowed. The long-lashed blue eyes blinked, and looked away. ‘No, I know.’ Then, ‘Please don’t look at me like that! It makes me feel five years old.’ Harry frowned across the ponds as John had done earlier. He squared his shoulders. ‘Very well. I owe you honesty, though I had hoped it would not need to be said.’

John did not breathe.

‘I want you to stay here,’ Harry said thickly. ‘Did you think that I can’t see how much you do…have done? I need you to stay.’ He cleared his throat and hauled an uncertain smile onto his face. ‘Cousin, with my ideas, your organizing and my wife’s money, we shall have more fun than you can imagine!’ He waited for John’s gratitude and relief.

‘Harry, who does your dear friend Edward Malise think I am?’

‘What?’ Harry looked startled, then defensive, then a little sulky, the way he had used to look when Dr Bowler asked him to conjugate a Latin verb. ‘What do you mean? The same as everyone else, I suppose…You’re my cousin who has been running my estate.’

‘And my name?’

‘Your name?’ Harry now looked angry, as if John were unfair to ask him something he didn’t know but might have remembered if John hadn’t worried him by asking about it.

John waited.

‘Whoosh.’ Harry shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. It’s John Graffham. Or have I got that wrong too?’

John walked to the edge of the pond. A grey and white feather bounced gently on the ripples behind a swimming duck. If Malise did not know him, then why was he here?

‘John?’ Harry felt that both his explanation and invitation had been handsome enough to merit a better response. I won’t wheedle or apologize any more, he told himself. My cousin will just have to accept the new order and his place in it.

Eleven years ago, Harry was only nine, thought John. And no doubt as self-absorbed as he is now.

Harry cleared his throat and said firmly, ‘Nothing will change that really matters.’ He nodded toward the basse-court, ‘I’m sure you can find somewhere else on the estate for all that!’

‘I can always chop down the orchard to make room,’ said John.

‘You’re not serious.’

Hot rage suddenly swelled in John’s chest and throat, and banged in his temples. ‘That “old-fashioned” porch suits the house!’ He thrust his fists together behind his back. ‘It’s the nose it was born with,’ he shouted. ‘Why cut it off and try to make a duck’s bill grow instead?’

Harry stepped back in alarm. He’s mad, he thought, with sudden clarity. After all these years of sequestration down here. To get so hot over something like this. Mad, of course! This place would drive me mad!

‘Why change what needs no changing?’ John clamped his teeth down on his anger.

Stop this! he ordered himself. It helps nothing.

‘You ride in like one of the Four Horsemen,’ he bellowed, ‘swinging your blade, mowing down everything in your path …!’

‘John!’ Harry’s alarm grew. He glanced toward the house. Perhaps he should call for help.

‘And the worst of it is, I believe that you may not even know what you’ve done!’

They stood, both breathing hard, staring at each other, equally afraid of the next moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ said John.

Harry breathed out. This was the old John again. ‘It’s already forgotten.’ He felt the rich joy of magnanimity. He nodded. Tm sorry too, if I’ve upset you in any way. I remember you were kind to me when I was small. I would hate to repay you badly.’

Only with Malise, thought John, suddenly exhausted. This scene has nearly turned comical.

Gossipy quacks from the reeds near their feet wandered inconsequentially through their silence.

Harry took a deep breath. ‘I’m not as much of a fool as I suspect you may think me. Please don’t be offended, but being hidden away down here has kept you unworldly. I’ve learned things in the last few years that you can’t know. Will you hear me?’

Let him talk, John told himself. If he’s guilty, he’ll betray himself; he can’t help it. ‘Teach me. Make me worldly.’ And he turned away towards the weir bridge below the bottom pond.

Harry followed. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Eleven years steadily, and childhood sojourns before that.’

‘It’s very pleasant, I’m sure,’ said Harry. ‘But a man can rust here.’

‘Yes,’ agreed John. ‘I’m sure he can.’

‘In London…in the real world …’ Harry was still wary of his cousin’s strange temper. John had always been quick to flare and quick to forgive, he seemed to remember, but it was a great many years since they had last played together. And even then Harry remembered John mainly as reliable for piggy-back rides and rescues, not closely observed beyond his uses.

When John did not growl or start to shout again, Harry continued.

‘I now live in the larger world, coz, where power and influence stretch wider than the limits of a single estate, a single parish, or even a whole county. You have no idea how much appearances matter out there! The way things look is how men believe them to be. And what men believe becomes the truth. I mean to be rich and influential before I die.’

He fell into stride beside John.

‘I must begin by being seen at all,’ said Harry.

‘Is that why you married that little girl, so her money would make you visible?’

Two precise, round, pink spots bloomed on Harry’s fair cheeks and one in the centre of his forehead. ‘Isn’t a rich wife every man’s ambition? Don’t fault me for it. You should congratulate me.’ He walked two steps. ‘Your own future depends on her wealth!’

John raised a neutral enquiring eye.

‘You know as well as I,’ said Harry, ‘that our uncle left a title that needed renewing, some run-down houses, great bundles of land and almost nothing to live on! And I can see already that this place won’t produce enough to feed a fasting saint.’

‘We manage, but then we have no worldly ambition to be seen. Quite the contrary. How old is she?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘She looks younger.’

‘Not too young to wed, just young to bed. I’ll entertain myself elsewhere while I wait.’ Harry’s blue eyes slithered toward John. ‘It’s only contract marriage, coz. Take off that episcopal face. I merely tied her fortune up safe on contract before some other aspiring esquire did. Hazelton has to make the best of it, and me!’

His good humour reasserted itself at this triumphant thought. ‘Do me justice, coz. Her uncle had his own favourites. How do you think I snatched her from under their noses?’

John shook his head.

‘She wasn’t afraid of me! I wooed as if she were little cousin Fal…told tales, sang her songs, and generally made an ass of myself. I swore love and passion too, and all the things she expected to hear, but it was kindness that won the day. I even promised her I won’t insist on my bed rights until she’s ready. I could see that she was afraid of the others…enter Big Brother Harry! All games, jokes and an occasional careful tickle.’

‘You relieve my mind,’ said John. ‘Tarquin is not come to Hawkridge House. I hope you mean to go on kindly.’

Harry missed the irony and swelled to the allusion. ‘I owe her the kindness. Her wealth is my philosopher’s stone. With it, and my new lands, the base metal of Harry Beester, plain gentleman, will be transmogrified into Sir Harry Beester, man of note!’ He listened happily like a bad actor to the echoes of his own voice.

One corner of John’s mouth lifted in spite of himself. Harry had not changed. Only his size, clothes and moustaches.

They crossed the weir bridge at the bottom of the lowest pond and continued back along the far shore, at the foot of the orchard slope.

‘You’re still thinking what a fool I am,’ said Harry. ‘You have that distant adult look. But I really have learned something worth knowing.’ He stopped and reached out to grasp John’s arm and full attention. ‘Men’s eyes used to pass through me, John. I was an inconvenient mist between themselves and more important things. You can’t imagine how it feels when you don’t really exist.’

John looked away.

‘But after Cousin James dried up with dysentery and left me as Uncle George’s sole heir …’ Harry shook his head and smiled at the thought. ‘Men began to see me. I’m there now, filling up a real space. Their gaze warms me as if the sun had come out. I like it, John. I like it so very, very much! And I will not let myself decay back! I couldn’t bear it!’

He held out his arms to the house across the pond. ‘This estate is my new dignity. With your help, my wife’s money, and the changes I imagine, it will become my glory!’

Even as a small boy, John had not needed his mother’s admonition to look after Harry – Harry had so obviously needed looking after. John had never been able to stay angry long with such cheerful self-satisfaction. Even now, he almost envied it. Surely not a traitor, merely a fool. This conclusion made him very happy.

‘Oh, Harry,’ he said. ‘My dear cousin.’

‘Pax, then?’

John shook his head helplessly. If Harry had betrayed, he didn’t know it.

‘So we’re agreed.’ Harry considered a cementing embrace but decided instead to lead briskly onward beside the pond. ‘After we dine, I’ll show you the Dutch pattern books for houses and gardens that I brought from London. The Classical orders are explained – Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Fireplaces and lintels, pilasters and friezes. All there for us to harvest for our own use…Those geese do get everywhere, don’t they?’

John absolved his cousin and steadied himself for supper with Edward Malise. In any case, you can’t kill a man over a dining table, he told himself wryly. Not with ladies present.

‘For God’s sake, John, don’t desert me as you did this afternoon,’ whispered Harry when they met in the New Parlour an hour later. ‘I need your help! Do what you can with Mistress Hazelton, and don’t let Sir Richard drink any more!’

Sir Harry ushered his guests into the large dining chamber at the back of the house which had once been the Great Hall. A tiny knife jabbed his stomach. He would have killed to be in the corner seat of some safely distant tavern with a quart of ale in his hand. In the last hour while being brushed off for dinner, he had become less and less sure whether to claim Hawkridge and its residents as his own or to reserve the right of distance from any possible disasters.

First there had been John’s strange behaviour by the ponds. Then the realities of mended and faded curtains and hangings. He had spied a dog’s marrowbone in the entrance hall and chased a cat from his bed. The pisspot in his own bedchamber, though spotless, was only plain white porcelain. The chapel was smaller than he remembered. (And the female acrobats and monkeys carved on the stalls lost charm when seen through the eyes of Puritan house-guests.)

Sir Henry Bedgebury could wait no longer and had left on urgent business. His aunt was nearly weeping because it was closer to supper time than dinner and claiming that the mutton was overdone. And there was some other palaver about missing ale.

Harry needed to become angry, to belch out his nervousness in justified irritation.

‘John!’ hissed his aunt. She beckoned from the door of the buttery.

John stepped into the small chamber.

Aunt Margaret closed the door and locked it. Her bunch of keys clattered in her shaking hands. ‘That’s the brother isn’t it…that man who came last?’ Her whole being quivered with panic.

‘Yes.’ John laid the admission down like a heavy load.

‘What will you do now?’

‘Dine.’

Aunt Margaret twisted knotted fingers together against her lace apron. Her eyes opened wide like a terrified rabbit. ‘How can you joke? He’ll have you arrested again. You have to get away! How could Harry bring him here? I told you he couldn’t be trusted any more …!’

‘Aunt!’ John laid his hand on her arm the way he would soothe a frightened dog or horse. ‘Malise may not recognize me.’

‘Then why is he here?’

‘That’s what I must learn.’

‘How can I serve him dinner? And sit there as if nothing’s wrong? And what if he does recognize you? How can you possibly …?’ Her right hand tried to pull the fingers off her left.

‘Darling aunt, listen to me!’ He took both of her hands in his. ‘Are you listening?’

Mistress Margaret nodded distractedly.

‘You saved my life once before, when the soldiers came looking for me, eleven years ago. I need you to do it again. I need you to be just as calm and wily now as you were then. Pretend I really am John Graffham, an inconsequential by-blow nephew who washed up on your doorstep. Worry only about the sauces and the joint. Show Harry that he hasn’t inherited a lower circle of Hell. I need you to forget that you are a good, virtuous woman. You must lie your head off…deceive so well that you believe it yourself.’

Mistress Margaret gave a quivery sigh. ‘These things get more difficult…Of course, I’ll try. But John …’

‘Our guests are waiting for your incomparable meat pies. To battle, my Boadicea of the pots! Distract the enemy with titbits. Feed him into harmless, full-bellied sleep.’ He took the keys, unlocked the door, and pushed his aunt towards the dining chamber.

‘Be seated,’ cried Harry to his guests.

Mistress Hazelton frowned at a carved wooden pilaster set into the wall, from which a bare-breasted nymph offered passers-by an overflowing basket of fruit.

Harry noted her frown. The little knife stabbed again just above his navel.

The dining chamber at the back of the house, however, offered no excuse to purge Harry’s emotional wind. The diamond window panes glistened in the late afternoon sun. On every window ledge, John had set blue and white Turkish ceramic pots of late white tulips. Their faint, sweet, green scent twined itself into the smoke of apple logs and rosemary branches that burned in the great plastered brick fireplace to cover the smell of must and mice. One of Harry’s own London hounds snuffled and twitched before the fire as if it had always slept there. Harry quivered like dried grass and watched his guests for the direction of their breeze.

At least, he thought, Hazelton seems so far to approve of Cousin John, in spite of my cousin’s odd humour. Can’t tell what Malise thinks. Please God, let it work. Let them see that I can offer something in my own right. That they must reckon with my advice in the future.

Edward Malise looked out of one window. Samuel Hazelton gazed appraisingly out of another across the yard and outbuildings of the basse-court towards the swell of the orchard ridge beyond. The trees were carved in high relief by the slanting rays of the sun.

‘It’s a poor view now,’ said Harry. He winced at the row of churns airing outside the dairy room and at a hen balanced on one leg in the middle of the courtyard to scratch itself. ‘But I’ll soon put that right. You must imagine the sweep of a lawn where that jumble of a courtyard is now, and a lake beyond! Please do come sit down.’

‘It’s not a bad view,’ said Hazelton pleasantly. ‘A scene of good husbandry and industry. In your circumstances, Sir Harry, not to be dismissed.’

All three Londoners gave John a quick look.

John’s stomach tightened with renewed alarm. What was that about? he wondered. I feel the hunt is on but don’t know from which thicket the hounds will appear.

Harry flushed.

‘But there’s nothing wrong either in wanting to put things right,’ said Hazelton, making peace again.

Harry took John’s former chair in the centre of the table. He ached for a gilt Venetian candlestick and Italian glasses, but he could not fault his aunt’s muster of the resources she had.

The long, heavy oak table, pulled out from the wall into the middle of the room, smelled sweetly of beeswax. The wood of the carved oak stools gleamed, and their faded red and green needlepoint cushions were brushed clean of dog and cat hair. (Harry pined for chairs but supposed that he was grateful to be spared the humiliation of benches.) The linen tablecloth was sunbleached to an irreproachable white. The pewter plates and cups shone like water on a bright day. Mistress Margaret had even found, somewhere, a silver spoon to set at each place.

Soon, thought Harry, when cousin John has carried out his task for us…Then I will buy silver plates, Venetian glasses with spiral stems and lugs, and the French forks they are now using in Whitehall.

Harry called for his knife case and that of his wife, which was a very expensive wedding gift from himself. He hoped that Malise, sitting across from her, would notice the fine Spanish workmanship of both leather and steel.

‘Welcome,’ said Harry. He raised his glass. ‘To the renewed life of Hawkridge House.’

The food, though plain, was plentiful and appetizing: glazed meat pies, the troubling joint of mutton (not ruined by the delay at all), a ham, a platter of spit-roasted doves and woodcock, a deep brown, pungent fricassee of rabbit. There was an excellent chicken cullis served as soup, flavoured with ginger and rose water, and some not-bad wine that his cousin had managed to find.

(‘Do we deny Sir Richard?’ Harry had whispered frantically to John in the parlour. ‘Or else risk offending the Puritanical conscience of the Hazeltons? Though I think I may once have seen Master H. take a glass of claret.’)

Harry’s guests set to with appetite. The three housegrooms and two kitchen maids served without splashing gravy or stepping on toes. So, although his aunt’s spoon rattled against her plate with every bite, Harry had to turn his discomfort elsewhere for relief.

His wife drew his nervous eye. She sat hunched and silent beside his cousin John, across the table from Edward Malise. Since arriving, she had spoken seven words. Harry had counted every one.

He opened his mouth to force her to speak. Then he closed it again. Best not to call attention to her. For the first time since getting her in his sights at the boarding school in Hackney, he wondered whether the advantage of her money would make up for the hobble of her gaucherie.

Zeal Beester was more content than she looked. After her parents died of the plague when she was eight, though her money kept her fed and housed, she had grown used to being dismissed as a social creature. It often seemed easier, if not more pleasant, to accept dismissal than to struggle for notice. Relegated to silence, she at least had time to think.

She studied the company from under the washed pebble eyelids. What were the rules here? Who had to be flattered and who really held the power? Who might become a friend?

She noted that Harry’s ease had slipped. On one hand, she was disappointed in her husband’s shaky grasp on his new role. On the other, that same look of anxious bewilderment on his handsome face had made her decide to marry him. It was as if, without meaning to, he had trusted her with a secret.

‘More wine, my lady?’

The young groom stared at her with wide brown eyes.

That’s me, Zeal thought in astonishment. She nodded. As she sipped, she eyed Mistress Margaret Beester, her husband’s unmarried aunt who seemed to serve as housekeeper. And who bared her teeth at Zeal when she meant to smile.

She hates me, thought Zeal. Wishes I’d never come.

She was used to that, too. In cousins forced to share their beds with her when she suddenly arrived, in girls already at school with alliances firmly made. Zeal looked at Mistress Hazelton. In aunts whose own children had all died and who couldn’t forgive the ones that lived when no one wanted them.

Zeal pushed a piece of mutton around her plate with her knife.

Harry’s cousin John, who sat on her right, just might be a friend, unless he turned out to be Harry’s rival and enemy. He clearly had been in charge before Harry. He had tried to make her feel welcome. She was sorry she had been too tongue-tied to let him know that she was grateful for his kindness.

She glanced at his preoccupied profile. Handsome, but not as beautiful as Harry. Harry was gold, his cousin steel. Or perhaps copper, because of the colour of his hair. A strange, mysterious man. He seemed upset about something. Wound up tight, as silent as she was. She wondered what would happen when he came unwound.

He glanced at her suddenly. Zeal blushed and looked away. He had a look that you had to let in. It didn’t just rest on the surface like a look from Mistress Hazelton or that Malise man across the table.

As for the shy old parson – he acted even more frightened than she felt.

I think I can manage this crew, thought Zeal. Particularly when the Hazeltons and Edward Malise go away again.

Samuel Hazelton cleared his throat. ‘Excellently fresh pie. In London they’re so often tainted by overlong keeping.’

‘Et un très bon vin,’ said Malise civilly. He swirled his glass and drank again.

‘Oui,’ agreed Mistress Hazelton. She glared at Zeal as if the girl had missed a cue.

‘Thank you,’ said Harry, deeply grateful for any crumbs of reassurance.

Then Harry heard only the sound of chewing. Where, oh where is the easy London wit? he raged in despair. How Malise must be suffering after all his suppers at court! Harry now glared at wife, cousin and aunt.

My wife is hiding in her mutton. My aunt may be able to provide a decent meal but should stay in the kitchen where she doesn’t have to talk to proper gentlefolk. And as for John! Useless! All he can do is stare into his wine, mute as a stone!

‘… The Common Book of Prayer,’ ventured Dr Bowler timidly from the far end of the table. ‘What is your opinion, Master Hazelton? I mean, in Scotland …? To send English soldiers? I mean, do we English have the right …?’ He retreated, blushing into the depths of his wine cup while Hazelton sought a diplomatic reply.

‘Too serious and too military a subject for the ladies,’ said Harry reprovingly.

‘And too expensive! The Crown’ll cry for another tax!’ Sir Richard Balhatchet, Harry’s neighbour, grown graciously drunk as fast as possible, began a discourse on the iniquities of the King’s endless new taxes as if there were still a Parliament and he were still a member of it.

As Balhatchet spoke, Samuel Hazelton assessed the serving men’s clothes, the wine, the Delft charger on the mantelpiece, the Turkish rugs on the wooden floor, the two life-size portraits of a man and woman, one at either end of the room, with daisy-eye faces in the centres of white ruffs as large and stiff as cartwheels. ‘You must mend that road,’ he said suddenly.

‘As soon as possible!’ agreed Harry. ‘I had no idea it was so bad!’

Sir Richard was diverted onto his second favourite subject – the lack of good ferries and fords. ‘It’s all right for you Londoners who can travel by river.’

‘I’m not so sure,’ said Malise. ‘An acquaintance of mine rolled off a barge only last week, into the Thames above Windsor, coach, coachmen, grooms, pillows, curtains and all.’

‘I am grateful,’ said Mistress Hazelton, ‘that to get to our own country house we have to travel no farther than Hackney.’

There was another silence.

John looked across the table at Malise trapped between Mistress Margaret’s pale, watery terror and Mistress Hazelton’s black, blunt displeasure. Malise had the smooth, short, rounded forehead and curved beak of a falcon.

The man’s eyes met his. John held the eyes with a thrill of expectation, but Malise looked away with a small puzzled frown. Then he resumed his faintly bored civilities to the women on either side.

John’s throat had closed against his food. He finally managed to wash down a bite of rabbit fricassee with wine. He did not believe that even Edward Malise, for all his lies, could hide recognition.

‘I beg your pardon, Sir Richard?’ John had not heard the question. He missed its repetition as he concentrated on placing his wine cup steadily back on the table.

‘I said, I never knew you were such a scholar and enthusiast, Mr Graffham!’ bellowed Sir Richard. ‘Letters in Latin to all those Flemish and Netherlandish chaps, Hazelton here tells me. A dark horse after all these years!’ He addressed the table at large. ‘A hard-working fellow – more than’s right or good for him. Always up to his elbows in muck when I see him, or on his belly with his eyeball up a cowslip! Who’d have thought all that Latin and Greek! How did you come to be such a botanical scholar, sir?’ His red-rimmed eyes were slightly accusing.

‘Under the benevolent rod of our own Doctor Bowler,’ said John.

‘A natural instinct for scholarship. Ab incunabilis…from the cradle,’ mumbled Dr Bowler, both pleased and appalled by suddenly becoming the centre of attention again. ‘A privilege and a pleasure…I offered only the discipline. The appetite for learning is his own …’ He dropped a piece of bread into his lap and fumbled after it.

‘Are you any one sort of enthusiast, Mr Graffham?’ asked Malise suddenly. ‘Of roses? Vines?’

Hazelton leaned forward into the conversation.

‘I study all that grows on this estate,’ said John.

Malise studied him now.

‘Are you an enthusiast, sir?’ John asked levelly. Still no flicker of recognition. But the man was digging deep into his mind, under the casual talk.

‘Not in the least.’

‘Nor I,’ said Hazelton. ‘A mere merchant…crops of cargo and specie for me. But talk of petals and broken colour and blooming seasons has grown most amazingly fashionable among my London friends.’

‘Like Sir George and his roses,’ said Harry eagerly.

‘Ah, yes, Sir George – a fellow shareholder in the South Java Trading Company,’ explained Hazelton, ‘who called your reputation to our attention. He claims to ignore anything that grows lower than his knees. Stiff joints, he says. Mr Graffham, can you look lower than your knees?’

‘Nothing in God’s creation is beneath interest,’ said John lightly. ‘Even below my knees.’

‘Amen,’ said Hazelton. He glanced at Malise.

‘I would like to retire and recover from that appalling journey,’ announced Mistress Hazelton suddenly. She pushed away a plate with a half-eaten quince cake.

Hazelton finished his silent conference with Malise. ‘And I,’ he declared, ‘would like to take a little air. Sir Harry? A gentlemen’s stroll? Malise?’

His giving of orders was subtly done. Dr Bowler blushed at the omission of his name.

‘Splendid!’ cried Harry. ‘John, you lead the way to the gardens, and I’ll explain our plans for the lawn and portico!’

John was sure that Hazelton had a different purpose.

‘Forgive me,’ said Sir Richard, levering his bulk up over his feet, ‘if I take to my horse while the sun’s up.’ He leaned over the table, braced on his knuckles and puffing in triumph.

‘Why not stay the night, Sir Richard, I beg you,’ said Harry.

Aunt Margaret gave John a quick, horrified look.

‘Be a pleasure, young Harry,’ said Sir Richard. ‘A true pleasure. But needs must. Duty. Y’know. In the morning. No, best if off I go!’ He pushed himself upright and balanced uncertainly.

They rustled and scraped and bowed and murmured as they rose and the women took their leave. At the last moment, one of the serving men spat on the floor behind Mistress Hazelton’s chair. For one moment, Mistress Margaret forgot Edward Malise and planned a murder of her own.

‘I’ll join you in the gardens,’ said Harry. ‘When I have seen Sir Richard safely off. I leave you till then in my cousin’s care.’

‘I don’t know why,’ muttered Mrs Hazelton to her husband, ‘I really don’t know why we paid to school her! She sat there like a turnip…didn’t take the chance when Master Malise spoke in French. I told you it was a waste of time to send her to Paris with Lady Chase. No one would ever guess what she has cost to educate!’

‘With her own money,’ said Hazelton.

‘Which could have had other uses.’

‘It has, mistress. It has,’ said Hazelton. ‘And lack of charity makes your face unbecomingly red.’

John led them out of the main door, across the forecourt and into the Knot Garden. Along one wall the white tulips glowed in the dusk. Against the opposite wall the red tulips punched soft dark holes in the evening light. Hazelton sniffed the air, which was faintly perfumed with honey. There was also a not-unpleasant undernote of dung newly ridged along the lines of germander and box.

‘How it refreshes the soul to contemplate the works of God,’ said Hazelton. He strolled beside John; Malise walked behind. ‘The city is now almost entirely the work of man.’

‘You might detect the hand of man even here,’ said John amiably.

‘Yes,’ said Hazelton, sniffing the air again. ‘But only as Adam was the first gardener in God’s Paradise.’

They circled the central device in silence. John wished he had Malise in view.

‘Perhaps you can answer a question I have often asked,’ said John. ‘Does vegetation in Paradise, whether on earth or elsewhere, show the same natural rage for disorder that I find here in Hampshire?’

Hazelton glanced at John to check his tone. ‘All disorder is unnatural. Divine order is the natural state. Here in Hampshire you wrestle with the corruption of Man’s Fall.’

‘Do you mean to say that slugs and caterpillars might respond to increased piety and prayer?’

This glance from Hazelton was longer and held a glint of amusement. ‘I suspect that they’re susceptible to good works.’ He raised his voice. ‘Edward, are not Mr Graffham’s tulips very fine?’

Come to your point, man! thought John. ‘I ordered them from Leyden. It’s now possible to write to dealers in the Netherlands for their bulbs and fruit trees.’

‘Have you been to the Low Countries?’

John shook his head. ‘But I mean to go before I die. I hear that they have fields of flowers as we have meadow grass.’

Hazelton actually smiled. ‘I may be able to help.’

They passed under a gated arch into the New Garden, where the central walk was lined by chest-high fruiting walls. The pale green fish skeletons of espaliered peaches and apricots were not yet in full leaf. At the far end of the fruiting walls, the two night-watch mastiffs, Bellman and Ranter, raised large heads and rumbled in their throats.

John whistled. The mastiffs wagged ox-sized tails. Then John finally allowed himself to turn to look at Malise.

Malise stood braced in the arch that led from the Knot Garden as if he had just stumbled and caught himself. John’s nape bristled.

‘Now, Mr Graffham,’ said Hazelton. ‘I’m not a man to tie conversation into diplomatic knots, nor, I suspect, are you. Please sit down.’

Hazelton settled his black folds and pleats on a wooden bench. John sat beside him, trying to listen.

Malise stared into a gooseberry bush.

At last! thought John.

‘Master Malise and I have descended on your cousin like the Egyptian plagues before he has even had time to sleep in his new bed because we need to speak with you urgently. You must go to the Netherlands for us.’

John kept his eyes on Malise. He barely heard Hazelton’s extraordinary command.

‘Your two tracts on fruit-growing,’ went on Hazelton, ‘have given you a modest but solid reputation in the circle of botanical enthusiasts which seems to be growing daily. That stiff-kneed friend I mentioned at supper, Sir George Tupper, has recommended your reputed good sense, education and energy.’

John wasted no words on modest demurral. Any minute, Malise would lift his head.

‘And your cousin, of course, chimed an eager echo,’ said Hazelton. ‘Will you help us?’

‘Us?’

‘The South Java Trading Company – members include myself, Master Malise, Sir George, as it happens, and several others whom I doubt you know. And Sir Harry, of course …’

‘I’m sorry,’ said John. ‘I can’t help you.’ He stood up.

‘Have the courtesy to let me finish, sir!’

‘There’s no point.’

Hazelton inhaled sharply. His thin dry face turned dark red above his white collar. He was seldom dismissed so abruptly.

Edward Malise raised his head. He listened, but did not turn around.

‘Please forgive any offence my refusal gives,’ said John. ‘But I am not your man.’

Hazelton steadied himself. ‘I misjudged you, sir. A man of sense would at least hear me out. I haven’t given you any reason yet for refusal.’

‘None that you know.’ John was still watching Edward Malise.

Malise turned his head and met John’s eyes.

Silence pressed down upon the evening air.

The waiting had ended. Now would come Malise’s denunciation, his call for armed men, his summons to Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate. But Malise’s teeth stayed clamped tight against his tongue.

Hazelton shifted on his bench. He had suddenly ceased to exist, and he did not like it any more than he liked to be refused. He had had three surprises today, which was unsettling for a man who understood how both God and the world ticked. This cousin had been a pleasant surprise. An educated villain suited their purpose perfectly.

But then came the villain’s impertinent refusal. And now, it seemed, there was bad feeling between Edward Malise and a man he had pretended not to know. The non-existent Hazelton looked from one pair of eyes to the other. Worse than mere bad feeling. Graffham and Malise would clearly be happy to slit each other’s throats. Hazelton had stubbed his toe on two mysteries. In business, mysteries were usually expensive.

At last, Hazelton broke the silence. ‘We have no time for niceties,’ he said. ‘Mr Graffham, tell me what stops you so absolute before you even know what we want.’

‘I am truly sorry …’

‘Hear me out or say why not! I would have expected more manners from you!’

‘I hope that you are gentleman enough not to insist on pressing an impossible case.’

‘Leave it, Samuel!’ said Malise sharply.

Hazelton stood up. His face turned puce. Twenty years of money-making, silk nightgowns, a large town-house in London, and a deciding voice in the Court of Committees of a royally chartered trading company had not yet hardened him to an insolent command from a man who fancied himself a social better.

‘There you are!’ cried Harry from the archway into the Knot Garden, before Hazelton could think how to reply. ‘Sir Richard’s safely off, and I’ve ordered pipes laid out in the parlour. Just before I left London, I managed to buy some of the new Virginia tobacco …’

‘Please excuse me,’ said John. He bowed and slipped out through a small gate in the side wall.

Harry watched him go in astonishment. ‘What’s wrong with my cousin?’

Hazelton’s rage spilled onto Harry. ‘You mistook him, Sir Harry. Wasted my time and Master Malise’s with this junket down here.’

‘What has he done?’ cried Harry. ‘How do you mean, “wasted”?’

‘He won’t even to listen to our proposal!’

‘He must!” Harry looked ready to burst into tears. ‘It’s so perfect!’

‘Nothing is, in this world,’ said Hazelton with fury. ‘But I had hoped for something better than this! I’m going back to the house. With luck, I can stop the unpacking in time to save restuffing it all. I’ll set off back to London first thing in the morning. Malise can do as he likes.’

‘But we’re to dine with Sir Richard tomorrow! And there’s the hunting…Your time won’t be wasted. I’ve planned so much …!’

Hazelton turned brusquely to Malise. ‘If that idiot Graffham won’t do it, we’re almost out of time to find someone else!’

‘Let me try,’ begged Harry. ‘I’m sure I can talk him round!’

‘You were sure of him before,’ said Hazelton.

‘I think,’ said Malise carefully, ‘that perhaps I should speak with him.’

‘John?’ Harry laid his ear against his cousin’s door. ‘John? Are you there?’ He opened the door onto a dark, empty room. ‘He’s not here,’ he said over his shoulder to Edward Malise.

‘Clearly not. Where does he keep his sword?’

‘I don’t know.’ It seemed an odd question. After a second, Harry shuffled cautiously into the shadows of John’s room. ‘It’s here. On a peg, with his belt.’

‘Then he hasn’t left the estate,’ said Malise. ‘I’ll try him again in the morning.’ He leaned through the door and peered around the darkened room.

‘Shall I send a man to look for him in the barns?’ asked Harry. ‘Maybe he’s not back yet from whatever he does at night.’

‘I’ll find him in the morning. He can’t hide for ever.’

‘You must forgive his bad manners,’ said Harry in anguished apology. ‘Cut off from decent society for so many years. But he has a good heart and a good brain. You’ll respect him once you get to know him, Edward, I promise you.’ Harry began to feel angry now. He shouldn’t need to apologize for something which was really nothing to do with him. Some things really were going to have to change and his cousin had better get used to the idea! Starting with the right way to treat guests!

Three

John stripped off his blue silk suit, climbed naked into the enclosing shadows of his fourposter bed and drew the curtains against the world. He lay stiffly against his pillows, listening to his man Arthur settle the bedchamber for the night. Suddenly, he leaned over and threw the bed curtain open again.

‘Arthur. My leather jerkin and the woollen breeches.’

He climbed anyhow into his clothes, thrust on his heavy boots. When Arthur had gone back to his pallet on the antechamber floor, John let himself through a small wooden door into the narrow passage within the wall. The passage, barely wide enough for his shoulders, led down a thread of staircase into the basse-court at the corner of the Hall Place below the dining chamber. John did not want to meet anyone at all.

From the basse-court, he saw a flickering light move through the dining chamber toward Dr Bowler’s tiny apartments behind the chapel. His aunt’s windows on the first floor glowed.

The hens are still restless, John thought. In spite of their amiable-seeming fox.

He unbolted the gate at the back of the dog yard and flung himself out into the night.

Through the taste of blood in his mouth from his broken nose, John smelled the burning wood and tar of the coach. An orange-lit circle blackened and spread on the leaves overhead. He choked on the vile smell of charred meat.

He found himself panting on the crest of Hawk Ridge. As he looked down at the house, Aunt Margaret’s window went dark. Dr Bowler’s bedroom window was hidden by the chapel. The house was so changed that he hardly knew what he was looking at. Behind the dark windows of the east tower lay the face he had seen lit by the flames of the burning coach.

When he finally woke, a day and a half after the startled farmer had delivered him to his uncle, his mind had been washed clean as a pebble in a stream.

‘The Devil stole your memory,’ his Uncle George later told him. ‘There was a smell of sulphur on you when that farmer brought you to me.’

John had remembered only a headache that lasted for weeks, and the sharp, jagged edges of broken teeth.

‘How many men were there?’ his uncle had begged. ‘How were they dressed? Were they vagabonds? Highwaymen? Soldiers?’

The boy seemed not to have heard the questions. He had stared out through the diamond window pane at the wavering lines of the world beyond, his mind filled with the blurred shadow of a bird on the sill outside.

‘Colours, John? Livery? Badges?’ Solid in his chair, holding tight to the arms, George Beester (still plain mister) had reminded his nephew of a painting he had seen of King Henry. He watched his uncle’s soft, fish-like ellipse of a mouth open and close above a square jaw.

‘John? Did you hear a name called out? Titles? Anything Frenchified? Were any of them gentlemen? I must have evidence!’

The seven-year-old John squirmed on his stool and shook his head. The answers his uncle wanted so badly jostled and seethed behind a locked gate in his mind. If he let one memory through, the rest would swarm behind. He would never be safe again. Inside the dark canopy of his bed, they would eat up all his other thoughts. They would hunt him into the daylight, throw a net of darkness over his head and entangle him for ever.

‘Where’s Lobb?’ he asked brightly. ‘May I go now? I want to find Lobb.’

George Beester sighed and released him to search for the dog.

For the orphaned heir to the Nightingale estates, there followed a constant shifting of households and a long succession of different beds. A few months on his own Tarleton estate, visits to his other three houses. A few months with his Uncle George at Hawkridge. A summer on another of his estates. Two months with an aunt in London. He remembered chiefly the pain of leaving cousins and newly-befriended pets.

In spite of adult prayers and a few charms cast in private by one particular aunt, he had hidden in blankness for the next seven years. His parents had left him, been set upon and killed in some terrible, unspecified way. He did not remember exactly how and no one was anxious to tell him. He had to make a new life without them, on the four estates that were now his and on sojourns with uncles, aunts, cousins, tutors and friends.

He paced the crest of Hawk Ridge toward the water meadows.

Memory had sparked before dying again. In his own kitchen at Tarleton Court, when he was ten, a kitchen groom had thrown a dead rat onto the fire.

‘To the Devil with him,’ the man had said, before he thought.

John had been alerted by the uneasy eyes the man then turned on him. The man’s quiver of embarrassment stood John’s hair on end. John and the groom locked eyes.

The rat’s fur flared as quickly as lightning. The flesh blistered, sizzled, blackened and drew back from the bones. The rat writhed as its sinews shrank and hardened in the fury of the heat.

‘That’s that!’ said the servant with false heartiness. ‘You’d hardly know, it was so quick.’ He hooked a charred log-end from the side of the hearth into the central blaze. The ashy form of the rat crumpled as if it were hollow. It was gone except for the shriek of small sharp white teeth that rolled away to lodge against the leg of an iron trivet.

‘Master John,’ said the groom. ‘Would you like a swig of the new cider? It’s better than last season’s. What do you think?’

John read correctly the attempt to distract him. He thought he would be sick. Then he saw that this was only an approximate idea. More precisely, he was a brittle shell around nothing, not even sickness. He was nothing, except for the swelling pressure of his eyeballs against the bony rings of their sockets.

If he touches me, I will crumble like the rat, John thought. His mind stopped there.

‘I’m fine. Jack. Fine,’ he said. ‘Why are you fussing?’

Then, eleven years ago, when he was fourteen, memory had returned in a firelit room in a private London house. His uncle George Beester took John to a meeting of the directors of the South Java Trading Company. Beester greeted colleagues and introduced his wealthy nephew who might one day join them. There were a dozen men in the room. Then two newcomers arrived late.

In low voices, the men who knew explained to the men who did not. New investors. Francis and Edward Malise, from an old Catholic family which had survived King Henry by fleeing to the Netherlands. However, as the Malises were stubborn Catholics, the king had, by self-elected right, taken most of their money and all their lands. The Malise estates were sold or distributed to deserving supporters of Henry’s expedient split from the Church of Rome. (One or two men had looked at John.) The parents had died abroad. Then, under James, the two Malise sons returned to England and crept slowly back into wealth and position. The new French queen of James’s son Charles was said (by low voices into close-held ears) to be oiling their way upward, as she did for any man who could speak her alien tongue and was willing to make the sign of the Cross.

‘A little over-concerned with being seen at court,’ muttered Mr Henry Porter, owner of coastal ships that carried sea coal and dried cod.

Sir James Balkwell, owner of a large part of Buckinghamshire and local magistrate, replied, ‘Who cares if a man cuts his hair long or short so long as he has money to invest?’

As he plunged through the meadows up towards the road, John startled sleepy sheep into bleating flight. At the top of the hill, he leaned his arms on a wall and lowered his head onto the hard damp stone.

The Malise brothers were wrapped in an expensively fashionable softness of lace and curling hair which contradicted their sharp-boned, beaked faces and dark, hungry eyes. They were as alike as a pair of hunting falcons.

The brothers set off a glimmer of fear in John, as faint as distant lightning in a summer sky. He stared, hunched into himself like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk.

The newcomers turned sharp eyes on the assembled men. They were quiet in manner but shuffled a little on the perch, lifting and settling their feathers. They moved around the room, accepting introductions. Then they paused before the fireplace. Edward, the younger brother, turned his head to Sir James Balkwell. Firelight flickered on bones of his nose and cheek. Sir James said something. Edward Malise showed his teeth in a laugh and changed John’s life for the second time.

Memory flared white-hot. John saw the things his uncle had begged him in vain to recall. He saw Edward Malise laugh in the orange light of the burning coach. His mother writhed in the brightness of her burning clothes. His father fell dead across his legs. John flew through the burning window frame. His hair flared. His heart was a red-hot coal. His arms and legs were flames.

He shrieked like a demon and flung himself through the bodies of the other men, across the room, shooting flames like thunderbolts, at that orange-lit, gleeful, beaked face of the Devil.

He knocked a cup of wine through the air and sent blood-red rain showering onto the hems of jackets and lace boot tops. A sheaf of papers fell from startled hands. The twin falcon faces snapped around. For a suspended moment, the time of an indrawn breath or the fall of an executioner’s axe, John blazed across the room in the stillness of the men’s disbelief and his own absolute intent.

The red-hot knives of his fingers seared Edward Malise’s laughing face. Then the elder brother, Francis, seized him from behind. John twisted in the man’s arms. The matching falcon face glared into his, contorted with effort, teeth bared. John tried to breathe, but the man’s arms crushed his lungs. He wrenched free and, with all his force, knocked the face away. Francis Malise staggered two steps backward, then toppled. John sucked in air like a drowning man and threw himself once again at Edward.

Francis Malise’s feet danced back another two steps, trying to catch up with his shoulders and head. His head smashed against the stone floor with the succulent thud of an overripe gourd. His lungs whooped like a collapsing bladder.

John didn’t see him fall. He screamed and clawed at the four men who tried to pull him off the other brother. Then slowly the stillness in the room chilled his fury. He looked where all the men were looking. Francis Malise lay on the stone flags, arms thrown wide at his sides, mouth ajar, jaw a little askew. All eyes in the room watched a small damp patch spread darkly out from his groin across the front of his pale blue silk and wool breeches.

John buried himself deep in the shadow of the Lady Tree. He leaned against her trunk and embraced her for steadiness. He had become a helpless conduit for the past.

The silence in the firelit room had continued for five more breaths, then everyone had shouted at once.

‘Francis!’ screamed Edward Malise. He jerked free of restraining hands and flung himself down beside his brother’s body. ‘Fetch a surgeon!’

Henry Porter lifted the head and examined the back of the skull. A man called Witty knelt to place his ear on Francis Malise’s chest although the stained trousers had already announced death. ‘It’s too late.’

Sir James Balkwell sent a man to find an officer.

John stared down at the man on the floor. His anger alone had done that, without knife or sword or club. He had never dreamed he had such power. Now everyone shouted at him.

He looked blindly into their faces. His uncle pushed him across the room, down into a chair. From there, John could see only the soles of the dead man’s shoes and a foreshortened peninsula of kneecap, ribcage, crooked jaw and nostrils.

Dead. He had done that. He had wanted to burn both of them to death in the heat of his rage. He had not thought that he had the power to succeed.

His uncle’s face interposed itself intently between John and the foreshortened dead man. ‘Why, John? Can you remember now? Was he the one?’

‘Satan was shining from his eyes,’ said another voice.

All the fire had left John. He shivered. He felt cold, and very young, and confused, burned to ash by his own fire. He had been right to keep memory behind the gate. Now, if he could only force it back again, the man on the floor might sit up again and demand that John be merely beaten.

Edward Malise raised his head and looked at John.

‘Tell me!’ his Uncle George begged. ‘Why did you attack him?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill him,’ said another voice.

‘He meant to kill me.’

John looked into the dark, prey-seeking eyes.

‘He meant to kill me,’ said Edward Malise. ‘You all saw him!’

‘You killed my parents,’ said John.

John wept against the smooth grey bark. He shuddered and clung to the Lady Tree. He wept as he had not wept before.

So much loss, he thought. Mother! Father! The pain of loss! I can’t bear it!

A hedgehog rustled unnoticed among the leaves. Later, a fox trotted past, unworried by the still figure that embraced the tree. The gamy smell of the fox pulled John back into the present night.

He felt the chill of his damp shirt-sleeve. He inhaled the night air and slid down to sit on his heels, braced against the tree, a little eased. Memory still flowed through him like the diverted Shir through its cellar pipes.

George Beester gave a great sigh of satisfaction, straightened and turned to Edward Malise. The other men’s voices died like a wave pulling back. Silence curled tightly around John, his uncle and Malise.

Malise shook his head as if dazed. He laid one hand on his brother’s body. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, I can’t get a grasp on this madness …’

‘You stood beside their coach and laughed!’ shouted John in fury. Surely all these wise older men could smell out the acting.

‘When?’ demanded Malise. ‘What coach?’

‘Your men blocked the door so they couldn’t escape, my mother, father and nurse!’

Malise passed a hand across his eyes and drew a long breath. ‘Can someone else take over this insane interrogation? Make sense…perhaps make this young man understand what he has done …’ His eyes met John’s again, briefly. ‘Unless he is possessed. And then he is beyond any help.’

John quivered with fury at the note of forgiving compassion in the man’s voice.

‘He’s not possessed by any devils,’ said George Beester, ‘but by memories no child should have.’ He raised his voice to reach everyone in the room. ‘When my nephew was seven, some of you will remember, my sister and her husband were burned to death in their coach. The boy was with them but survived. In spite of much time and expense, I never discovered their killers. I knew who might have wanted them dead …’ Beester sighed again and studied Malise with gratified certainty. ‘But I had no proof. The boy himself remembered nothing of that night until this evening, when he saw you and your brother.’

‘Your implication is too monstrous and mad for me even to take offence.’

‘Then it should be easy to answer,’ said Beester.

Malise searched the surrounding faces for hostility or support. ‘I swear that I am innocent. I did not kill this boy’s parents, even though some of you must know that I had good reason to hate them, as my family have had for two generations before. The bones of my family were stripped by those vulture Nightingale upstarts. Or do you all choose to forget the plundering barbarities of King Henry? Do you shut his victims out of your thoughts as fast as the Star Chamber was able to forget the meaning of justice?’

‘One barbarity never excuses another,’ said Sir James. ‘Nor do old stories of land disputes and exile answer the boy’s accusation.’ He looked severely at Malise. ‘You should be careful, moreover, how you fling around that word “barbarity”.’

‘No doubt highwaymen killed his parents – it happens often enough. The Malises are being blamed for the guilty conscience of the Nightingales.’

‘Where were you and your brother that summer?’ asked Sir James. ‘August, seven summers ago.’

‘How can I answer that, at a time like this …? But I don’t even need to answer it. I’ve been falsely accused by a shocked and frightened boy, whose brain, as his uncle has just testified, was addled by his tragic experience.’

John opened his mouth but his uncle’s hand closed hard on his wrist.

‘Seven summers ago,’ repeated Beester.

Malise stared into George Beester’s face. ‘It comes back to me now. I remember. My brother and I were both in the Low Countries…serving with a Flemish unit against Spain. We had just engaged the Count de Flores in a pointless skirmish.’

There was a murmur from one or two of the company members. Englishmen serving as mercenaries, in a foreign army. Former soldiers now playing at commerce with their blood money.

Malise felt the quiver of hostility. ‘I will prove this to be true and when I have, I will expect reparation from you. As I trust the justice both of God and man to punish this youth for murdering my brother.’

Malise looked around in the silence and saw the assessing looks. ‘It was seven years ago, and the boy was only seven at the time. Is this how you conduct the business of your company…wrestling truth and reason to the ground on the dusty memory of a fallible child? Sir James …?’ He turned in appeal to Sir James Balkwell.

‘We are all as shocked as you,’ said Balkwell to Malise. ‘And we regret your monstrous introduction to our Company. As to our business dealings, sir, we examine all propositions calmly and without prejudice. No one here has yet laid a hand on either truth or reason.’

‘Am I the one on trial, then?’ demanded Malise. ‘That man …’ he pointed at George Beester ‘… has as good as accused me of murder when his Satan’s whelp of a nephew has just killed my brother!’ His eyes returned to the slack limbs and oddly angled jaw.

‘The boy must be tried,’ said Balkwell. ‘It needs no examination to conclude …’

‘It was an accident!’ protested George Beester. ‘It was surely an accident. He may have meant to attack – and with good reason – but not to kill!’

‘We have more than enough witnesses to what happened,’ said Balkwell. ‘Intelligent men who have eyes and will report honourably what they saw.’ He turned to Edward Malise. ‘I’m sorry that you feel on trial at such a tragic moment. But the boy has also made a claim against you, and we must deal with it as judiciously as any other matter. Whatever my feelings, I cannot agree with his uncle that the death was an accident. Like you, I saw clear intent in his face. I wish, therefore, to examine why the boy is so enraged against you.’

I killed a man in rage, John thought. I should feel such a mortal sickness of my soul. But he still felt only the rage.

In prison, his newly acquired memory was still sharp as freshly broken glass. Time had had no chance to dull it. Seven years of rubbing and grinding took place in mere days. He lay on his cot, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling, again and again and again. Smoke, roasting meat, the screams of the horses and of his mother. His own hair on fire. Malise’s beak. His father’s groom who had saved him and almost certainly been killed while John slipped away through the bushes to fetch up at the farm. The thrust of his mother’s hands as he flew through the window. They had saved him and died.

John hoped that rehearsing his memories might wear them out, but rage, grief and guilt wore him out first. Rage was the most bearable; he spun it into a case around himself like a silkworm. Then he raged that he had not paid heed in that firelit room to what Edward Malise had said – to the reason his life had been destroyed – instead of staring in a trance at Francis Malise’s shoe soles. Then he sieved the memories again, for a detail, a phrase, a name, anything to give his uncle as evidence against the Malises.

Then he suddenly asked, why? Why did the Malises hate my family so desperately? That ambush had been a desperate act. He found the word ‘vulture’ lodged in his memory. He closed his eyes and saw again the flickering light on Francis Malise’s body, and his brother’s face. More words surfaced like dying fish. John curled tightly on his cot. Had the Nightingales truly been vultures?

After three weeks in prison, it finally occurred to John to become afraid, not of death but of how he would die. The rope – he had once watched friends of a condemned man hang on his feet beneath the Tyburn gibbet to speed the terrible slowness of strangulation. At best, he would be given a gentleman’s way out on the block. He tried to tell himself that he would merely leap cleanly from this life into the next. He would never see the bloody mess and the strange turnip thing that had once held his soul.

He knew he would be judged guilty, because it was the truth. He had killed Francis Malise, in rage.

He knew that men had the right to punish him under temporal law, but he had expected to suffer in spirit as well. On the contrary, he was still glad he had done it. This realization shook him profoundly. At fourteen, he began to suspect that Good and Evil, the works of God and the works of Satan, were not separated after all by a boundary as clearly marked as a river bank. As a child, you were good or you were bad. Usually you knew the difference, and if caught you were punished. If you didn’t know the difference, you had merely failed to understand God’s Will.

Now, at a time when he most needed his childish faith, he was most filled with wretched doubt. He called on God to explain the ambiguity that surrounded His Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ If John felt unrepenting triumph, what about soldiers fighting in the King’s name? And what about the soldiers fighting on the other side? There were long hours of opportunity, as John waited in his prison cell, for a Divine reply. The Lord did not seize the chance.

Is this one of the adult secrets, John wondered. That we walk as uncertainly as blind men? That to believe is merely to prescribe and to hope?

His uncle had bought John lodging in a room among the debtors of the Fleet Prison instead of a cell below ground. He also dropped the coins of his own suspicion into the pockets of gossip and influence. Sir James Balkwell had not been alone in feeling that John’s accusation might be true. He and the others were easier in their minds when there seemed to be no hurry to bring the boy to trial.

‘Bogus Englishmen as well as murderers,’ George Beester said of the Malises wherever an ear would listen. ‘Catholics…French name. Whipped off to the Netherlands in King Henry’s time and now they’re slinking back again, encouraged by the marvel of a French Catholic queen on the throne of England and protected by her papist cronies.’

A successful, self-made man, Beester understood the close connection between principles and pockets and had the means to make this connection work for his nephew’s cause. Even so, though he found many sympathetic ears, his efforts were not enough.

He visited the prison six weeks after John’s arrest. John scrambled up from his cot.

‘They’re going to try you next week,’ said Beester. The majority of those honourable men who witnessed Francis Malise’s death have agreed, however reluctantly, that you intended harm. The plea of accident has been rejected. And Edward Malise is pressing his case among the Catholic faction that has the Queen’s ear. It’s her word against the other side’s reluctance to act.’

Beester settled on a little stool and spread his legs wide to balance his bulk. ‘I don’t think I can save you in court unless we can find a strong enough case ourselves to bring against Malise. One last time – try to remember more! Even one detail…a name called out…livery.’

John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying…Uncle, did the Malises have any right on their side?’

‘Has the Devil been pissing in your brain?’ George Beester flushed. ‘You ignorant, evil young …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a fair question for a boy in your position.’ He studied his sturdy knees. ‘They had no right, only what they pretended was a reason. And Malise was canny enough to admit that straight off. His grandfather chose the wrong side, against King Henry while your own grandfather did not. The Malises tried every means to win their lands back. Your father had won a final lawsuit four months before he died.’

‘Lands,’ said John in wonder. ‘My parents’ lives for lands?’

‘The Malises claimed injustice and persecution.’

‘In a way, they were right.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The courts ruled that they were not. And that is the truth, as it stands, on this earth. The Malises are murderers. No law, Divine or temporal, gave them the right to play executioner.’

‘I killed Francis Malise.’

‘But with more right. And I still say it was an accident. And I have support on both counts. That’s why you must not come to trial! Morally, your guilt is still a little slippery. All those official words and papers will set events rock solid. The logical sentence will be required. I must do something before then.’

‘I did kill him.’

Beester leaned forward. ‘Swear to me again that you saw Edward Malise beside my sister’s coach!’

‘I swear,’ said John. ‘By anything you like.’

His uncle studied the boy’s eyes. Then he grunted. ‘All right. There’s no more to say. They won’t have you as well.’ He stood and rearranged the layers of his clothing for leavetaking. Beester saw no point yet in telling the boy that all four Nightingale estates, including Tarleton Court, had been confiscated by Crown agents to be held pending the verdict.

‘If those two were guilty,’ said Beester, ‘then it may yet be proved. And what a shame, then, if you were already dead.’

He crossed to the unlocked door. ‘Do you still keep handy that knife I gave you?’

John nodded.

‘If rumour gets out that I’m trying to delay your trial, Malise or a helpful crony might just see fit to play God’s role again. There aren’t enough guards here. Take care.’

The heavy wooden door of the cell scraped across the floor. John woke. He listened. Heard the tiny barking of a far-away dog. Inside the cell, cloth rasped on cloth. The darkness was tight with the silence of held breath. John felt rather than saw the change in the darkness where the door would be. Someone had opened his door. He slid his right hand under the cotton bolster onto the handle of his uncle’s dagger.

He waited, straining to hear over the clamour of his body.

Cloth scratched across cloth again, in the darkness near the door. Agile as an adder, John slid sideways off the bed. On the ice-cold floor, he listened again. Over the thumping of his heart, he heard a roughly drawn breath, and another. The intruder needed air badly and could keep quiet no longer.

How many were there?

Silently, John coiled himself near the foot of the bed. If he attacked now, he would have the brief advantage of surprise. He shifted his grip on the handle of the knife. The sound of breathing had not moved away from the door.

‘John?’ His name felt its way through the darkness on an urgent breath. ‘Nephew John, it’s Mistress Beester.’

Now he imagined a thicker darkness near the door.

‘Your aunt…Uncle George’s wife.’

His hand clamped even tighter onto the knife.

‘John, are you there?’

The thicker darkness stirred. It seemed to retreat a step.

‘Aunt Jane?’

‘It was the right door! Thank God! Come at once!’ The whisper was impatient and frightened. ‘Come quickly. Your uncle is waiting in the street…Come!’

John stood with a surge of joy. He took a step and bumped into the table. He hesitated in the darkness. What if she weren’t really there? It would be too terrible if she were a demon testing his soul’s strength. She would vanish, and he would have to rebuild his courage again from scratch.

‘Sweet Heaven, come now!’ Fabric rustled. A cold but solid hand brushed his wrist, fumbled, gripped on.

John dived through the darkness after the hand.

‘Close the door!’ she whispered.

They cut diagonally across a short corridor to a second smaller wooden door. His aunt opened it and ducked into the shaft of a narrow stone staircase with John behind her. Steps spun down, down, down around a pole of stone into a well of darkness. John followed the hissing of his aunt’s hems down the stone treads, his knees jerking in the rhythm of his descent. Slap, slap, shouted his feet. He tried to step more lightly as he followed his aunt’s rustling shadow down into the well. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. The truth began to shake his numbness. Tap, tap. He kept one hand on the spiralling wall to steady himself. The pitted stone bit at his fingertips. The cold damp air had the rotting leather smell of bats. He was escaping. Alive.

A vestibule. A heavy door, slightly ajar. A porch. A passageway. John smelled the stench of offal and sewage as they crossed a bridge over the prison moat and passed through another gate. Then, a street. An unlit coach, and his uncle.

‘In! In!’

Horses’ hooves scraped on stone. Running water sluiced in a shadowed trench. Inside the coach, with the door slammed shut, John threw his arms around his uncle.

‘You’re not clear yet,’ said Beester, patting the broad young shoulders. ‘We must get you out of London tonight.’

‘How did you do it?’ demanded John. ‘How did you unlock the doors and remove the gaolers?’

‘Ahh,’ said George Beester with satisfaction. ‘It’s a venal age.’ He hesitated. He was pleased by his own foresight; he had extracted as much money as possible from the boy’s estates in the twenty-four hours after Francis Malise’s death, before the mill of the Star Chamber began to grind. John had bought his own freedom, at no cost to his uncle. It had been an elegant transaction. However, Beester was not sure that the boy would appreciate this elegance or understand his new estate in life.

‘Are you aware, nephew, that the Star Chamber now holds the deeds to all your estates and assets? Your escape will make them doubly forfeit to the Crown. Your present freedom is the sole residue of your inheritance.’

‘It’s more than enough!’ said John with passion. ‘Thank you! And thank you, aunt!’

‘I’m afraid it’s far from enough,’ replied Beester. ‘As you will learn.’ He studied the shadowy rectangles of darkened windows passing outside the coach. ‘Now I must hide you in a safe burrow somewhere.’

His uncle took him upriver by boat from a dock near London Bridge. John perched in the prow. He watched the sleeping city slide past, then the great dark houses of the Strand, then the jumbled buildings that made up Whitehall. Later, Chelsea village, and much later, the palace at Richmond. Because he was only fourteen, he couldn’t help thinking – now that he had escaped – that he was having the most amazing adventure.

‘This is what life feels like,’ he told himself, as the far, dark banks slid past and distant dogs barked. ‘I am being tested.’ Doubt still slept in his deserted prison cell. In John’s euphoria at leaving behind the terror of the rope and block, he now knew that his clear sight would return. His tale would end as it should, after battles, voyages, and vindications, in his own reclaimed kingdom at the side of a blue-eyed princess.

He leaned against the Lady Tree, too tired to move. He listened for a few moments to the rustle of her mermaid tail above his head. Then he noticed the hedgehog crackling and snuffling in the leaves by his feet, the danger of the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

My aunt is right. I must leave at once. I won’t let myself be arrested again. And to kill Malise here on Hawkridge Estate would be a shameful way to repay my uncle and his heirs. I’d spoil poor old Harry’s chances at Court for ever.

He imagined going back to his chamber now and packing. Stealing away to Mill Meadow, saddling his horse and riding away.

In which direction? he asked himself. How do I choose?

He stood a little longer without moving. Malise had known him but said nothing. Why?

He’s either playing with me or needs something. I should have paid more attention to what Hazelton was trying to say.

I won’t run tonight, he decided a little later. I’m too tired, and there’s too much to arrange. Unless I want to live as a vagabond outlaw, I must arrange my flight a little. If Malise hasn’t raised the alarm yet, he may wait a little longer.

He was past thinking.

He laid his hand on the Lady Tree in farewell. You outlasted me after all, he thought.

Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

I’d be a fool, thought John suddenly, to abandon everything before I know what Malise wants.

Four

May 25, 1636. Mild and still. No dew. Turtle doves back in beech hanger. Apples in full blow at last.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

Zeal woke cautiously, like a small animal sniffing the air outside its burrow. She kept her eyes closed. In her experience there was seldom anything on the other side of her eyelids to hurry out to greet. She drew a resigned, waking breath. Then she sniffed again in drowsy surprise. The linen sheet and feather-filled quilt which covered her to her eyebrows smelled of sunlight. A small, surprising goodness to credit to the day’s account.

She stretched slim, naked limbs. Her eyes opened abruptly. Instead of plunging off the sudden edges of her narrow London school trestle bed, her fingers and toes, though spread as far as she could reach, lay still cradled in the softness of a vast featherbed.

She propped herself on her elbows, breathing quickly. She was on the deck of a ship-sized bed, in full sail across a strange sea of polished wooden floor. The bed hangings, flapped and draped, half-hid a distant horizon of diamond-paned windows. The morning sun had transformed last night’s cavern of darkness and wavering shadows. The brown coverlet was really faded red silk. The hangings were rich midnight blue. By torch- and firelight the night before, she had not seen the fat bulges and gadrooning of the four bedposts, or the dusty tapestry above the fireplace of Hercules holding the giant Antaeus in the air above his head. The bulgy bedposts made Zeal think of plump women’s legs wearing tight garters. Zeal imagined the legs beginning to dance.

Oh, yes! She breathed out a happy sigh.

A new, unexplored world. Another Indies, a new Virginia coast. At times in the past, she had felt exhausted by the need to learn yet another new terrain. But this one was different.

She heard an odd, distant, wavering noise which she would investigate later.

My own room for ever and ever! she thought. At last. This is it. She flung herself back onto her pillows to recover from the enormity of the idea. I shall wake up like this every morning from now on. No more shifting. I have finally begun the rest of my life.

Her new husband Harry lay in the next chamber in his own bed, where she meant him to stay for quite some time.

‘Husband,’ she repeated quietly to the embroidered blue silk of the canopy. ‘Husband.’ Testing it. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook her head in pleased disbelief. What a difference that word made. She was exactly the same girl as before, but because she had a husband her life had changed around her more than she could yet imagine. People already treated her differently.

‘My lady.’

Firmly, she set aside the memory of Mistress Margaret’s tight eyes and bared teeth. And of Harry’s glares across the dinner table.

I did it! she thought fiercely. I did it. Somehow, in spite of my uncle…I wanted it hard enough…All I had to do was want something hard enough and not care whether it was correct, or dutiful, or virtuous.

A spasm of anxiety curled her onto her side.

Selfish and wilful as it is, I mustn’t care what my uncle and aunt think!

For fourteen years she had tried to please by being good, but had found that she could never be good enough, nor be good in all the different ways different people wanted. She had been dutiful and loving to her parents, but they had deserted her when she was eight for the superior joys of Heaven. She had then tried to please the assorted relatives who took her in. (An allowance from her inherited estate more than covered the expense of feeding and boarding her.)

She soon grew confused. No sooner had she figured out the rules in one household (both spoken and unspoken) than she was shifted to another where she had to begin again. One aunt (on the Puritan side of the family) had valued quiet, self-effacing children, another (a socially ambitious beauty) preferred spirit. One uncle insisted on prayers four times a day, while another ranted against self-congratulating piety and self-serving humbug. Several cousins had taunted her for being thin and pinched and ugly, while her cousin Chloe, whom she thought quite beautiful, was jealous of Zeal’s red-gold wiry hair, blue eyes and fine pale skin.

As for Mistress Hazelton…Zeal curled a little tighter. Mistress Hazelton watched her with a curious little distant smile, no matter what she did. In the four years since her uncle Samuel Hazelton had bought her wardship, Zeal had tried not to worry about what she might be doing wrong, and not to see that Mistress Hazelton pinched her lips every time she spoke to her.

Her uncle only made things worse when he defended her. He let his wife see that he was amused by Zeal’s desire to learn Latin and by her questions about his business affairs (which were also her business affairs, as he had bought the use of her fortune along with her wardship). By the time, two years ago, that her uncle sent her to the boarding school in Hackney to improve her deportment, dancing and needlework, Zeal was worn out by trying.

I have anchored myself at last, she thought. When I have made myself the mistress, I will be able to choose my own way to be good or bad. Whether this place is good or bad, I shall make the best of it with a whole heart.

Outside the diamond-paned windows, the pale green tops of trees caught the morning sun. She uncurled and stretched again. The worn linen sheets slid smoothly against her skin. She spread her small pink toes like a cat stretching its paws and turned her head in the yielding welcome of the feather pillows. She now recognized the odd noise outside. It was the constant faint bleating of sheep.

Lady Beester. What a fuss everyone made about a title. It had even clamped a muzzle on Mistress Hazelton, for all her pious lip-curling at the lewd antics of the gentry. Again, Zeal smiled at the underside of the blue silk tester of her bed. What mattered was that Sir Harry Beester was her Harry.

He had appeared like a miracle, a very gentil parfait knight, and rescued her from the baying pack that had sniffed after her moderate fortune. Tall, handsome Harry, golden as Apollo, and kind. A little simple at times, but after six and a half years of being parcelled about, Zeal gave kindness its full weight in assaying the human soul.

Harry was also amusing. Though already twenty-two, he sometimes seemed her own age or younger. He did not scorn practical jokes or an occasional nostalgic game of hide-and-seek. He had never stuck his hand down her bodice to tweak her nipples, nor shoved his tongue into her mouth as other suitors had done. Most important of all, he had said that he quite understood how much having a child frightened her. He was in no rush for an heir. They could leave all that business until she was ready. He had sworn it in a solemn oath to her. In spite of her uncle’s dark objections that Harry was a fortune-hunter like all the others, Zeal felt she had made a good trade for her money.

She lay in the shadows of the huge bed, breathing softly, warm with a child’s first adult taste of the power of its own will. Harry would never regret his bargain either. She would be the most useful wife a man could want. She knew that he was disappointed in her as a social ornament, but she would startle him by how well she would manage Hawkridge House.

She eyed the unfamiliar objects of her chosen world and prepared to annex them. The pewter basin and jug on the table. A mirror. The end of a heavy carved oak coffer. The faded velvet-covered cushions on the bench fixed below the nearest window. The silvery-green trees outside.

She heard voices outside her windows as well as the bleating sheep. Her inventory of her new world suddenly leaped in length. Her peaceful warmth faded.

If I am going to be such a useful wife, I’d better make a start, she thought wryly.

She pushed down the quilted coverlet, slid across the acre of linen and lowered herself to the floor. Shivering, she looked around for a smock or robe. Her breath made a faint cloud in the chilly air. The rooms on the north side of the house were never warm in the morning until June.

Naked and on bare feet, she crossed to the window and peeked out. The paths of busy dairymaids, washing women, dogs, grooms, and chickens already criss-crossed the basse-court yard below. Harry’s cousin John strode purposefully across one corner of the courtyard, head down like a dog on an exciting scent. Mistress Margaret’s voice called through an open window.

A cold lump formed in Zeal’s stomach. The weight of her new world landed hard on her chest. She put her right foot on top of her left, to try to warm it.

All those people expect me to tell them what to do.

She remembered Mistress Margaret’s pinhole pupils and tight lips as she had welcomed Zeal to Hawkridge House.

She knows the house, knows exactly what to do and say here, and she’ll be waiting for my mistakes.

Zeal lifted the lid of the carved oak coffer. It was nearly empty except for some linen scraps. No clothes. Goose-pimples prickled her forearms, standing the fine gold down on end.

Do I have a maid to dress me here or do I dress myself, as at the school?

At the Hazeltons’ her woman Rachel had slept on a truckle bed in her room. Here she was alone. She dropped the lid of the coffer.

Has everyone already breakfasted? Do they eat in the dining chamber or their own rooms? How can I go call Rachel when I’m stark naked?

She put her left foot on top of her right.

I’m cold. And Mistress Margaret hates me. And I irritated Harry at dinner last night, our first in our new home.

She had felt skewered by glares at the table – Harry’s, Mistress Margaret’s and her aunt’s. There had been nowhere safe to look. Not even at Harry’s cousin, John Graffham, who had seemed so friendly when the coaches first arrived but then ignored her all through dinner.

She wrapped her arms across her full pink-nippled breasts. Both feet were now numb.

How did I think last night that I could manage all these people? I shall pay for my presumption. I’ll be punished for insisting on my own way. I’ll never figure out what is right and wrong here. I’ll never learn to run this place. Harry will be furious. His cousin will pity me. I’ll be miserable for the rest of my life.

She climbed back up onto the bed, pulled the quilt tightly up around her neck and stared into the folds of the hangings at the end of the bed. She would not cry! Her predicament was no one’s fault but her own. As so often before in her short life, she allowed herself a last brief moment of respite before she began to deal with whatever evil that life, the Good Lord and her own deserving might serve up next.

Her door opened.

‘Where would you like to breakfast, madam?’

Zeal was unreasonably pleased to see her maid Rachel, an over-pious young woman of twenty-six selected by Mistress Hazelton. This morning, the sulky, pock-marked Rachel was Zeal’s key to the newest set of unfamiliar rules. She could ask Rachel to bring what she could not find herself. Make her carry the weight of uncertainty. Zeal made her first decision as mistress of Hawkridge House.

‘I shall eat here,’ Zeal said firmly. ‘I like this room. Don’t you like this place, Rachel?’

Being in a strange house seemed to make Rachel, too, feel a greater warmth toward a familiar face. ‘It’s not as bad as I feared, madam.’

A little later, in smock, high-waisted jacket, stockings and mules, Zeal settled by the window with her bread, ale and cheese. She was feeling better. As Rachel helped her dress, Zeal had reminded herself that every new move had brought that same moment of helpless terror. Each time she shifted households she had wanted to die for the first day or two. Each time, she had pulled herself together and made the best of what was on offer. She had chosen this place and had no one but herself to blame if she failed here. She had Mistress Hazelton’s household as a model. She had prepared herself by months of study. She would ride this panic into calm as she had ridden the other panics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mistress Margaret needs my help after all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When John had suddenly arrived for good at the age of fourteen, Arthur (then twelve), like most of the estate residents who knew John, had been fascinated by the mysterious drama in a far-off place that had changed John’s name from Nightingale to Graffham and sent him into what was eventually understood to be hiding.

When the two boys first met again, Arthur was surly. He didn’t want John to think that he presumed on childhood intimacy. John was preoccupied and seemed distant. They went on for several months with Arthur resentful and over-quick to snatch off his hat, John distracted but feeling yet another loss. Then John began to heal, to talk, to seek Arthur’s opinions, and Arthur lowered his raised hackles.

As John slowly took over running the estate, he called more and more on Arthur’s slightly edgy, challenging help. The two youths relaxed slowly back into respectful companionship without quite regaining the childish ease. In the end, Arthur moved formally from housegroom into the role of John’s man. He gave John loyalty and an honesty that never flattered. In exchange, John stirred up Arthur’s safe and humdrum life. Arthur felt that he never knew exactly what would happen next. He also had the more superficial but gratifying joy of being close to the man at the centre; everyone believed he knew what John thought, even if he didn’t. Their connection was amiable, comfortable and trusting, but it had never been tested.

Now John watched Arthur thoughtfully, considered confiding in him, then decided to wait. He took his leather belt and dagger from the hook on the wall. He let himself through a side door into the little parlour above the chapel where he stood at the window and looked down into the basse-court.

The wet thump and sloshing of churns came from the open door of the dairy room. A boy was dreamily sweeping the brick pavement. A cat lay curled asleep in the sun on top of a barrel. Two washing women side-stepped out of the washroom, heads bent together over the heavy basket of wet linens they were carrying out onto the lawns to bleach in the sun. Nothing indicated the possible arrival of men-at-arms called by Malise.

Well, for certain, John thought wryly, I’ve not faced a day so filled with fascination for many years. I wonder if it will be my last one here. He used his wryness to mask from himself a puzzling sense of failure.

He went down into his office where he collected up a small bundle of papers, a bag of coins, and his pistol, all of which he locked into a cupboard set into the wall. He opened the doors and drawers of his collection, then closed them again. One of Malise’s men was strolling in the forecourt. John watched him for a moment. Then he left the office to sharpen his knife on the whetstone in the lean-to outside the kitchen.

His uncle brought him safely to Hawkridge House and left again at once, a single horseman and groom, seen only by the family of house servants and two stable grooms.

Aunt Margaret had already been resident on the estate for fifteen years and resigned to spinsterhood. At first she had twitched and exclaimed, and cried out that they would all be ruined if John were discovered and retaken there. Then, still muttering disasters, she had applied poultices to his sores and rashes that prison had bred (even an above-ground apartment). She half-drowned him in tisanes, decoctions and nourishing broths. She doused him for lice and fleas. She prayed for him twice a day on her knees in the little chapel, on the tiles of tulips and royal Spanish pomegranates, her head bent between the female acrobat, the monkey, and a cockerel being swallowed by a fish.

‘Poor, poor lamb. Poor doubly bereft little soul. My poor, dear nephew, so fierce, so unfortunate!’

‘I’m well, aunt! I’m well! I don’t need dosing!’

But she pursued him with mint and rosemary, with garlic and willow bark, and with the panic of suddenly acquired responsibility. Like his uncle, she understood better than John how the butterfly must now reverse nature and shrink back into a worm.

Two soldiers arrived a week after John did. They were making polite enquiries. No one who mattered had evidence to link Beester with his nephew’s escape, however much some might suspect it. John saw nothing of his aunt’s performance, of course, as he was hidden in the attics, but he picked up awestruck comments from the servants. The soldiers left later the same day, well-fed and unsuspecting.

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