The Lady Tree

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?’