The Lady Tree

‘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.