The Lady Tree

‘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.