The Lady Tree

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.