The Lady Tree

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

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

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

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

Malise stared into a gooseberry bush.

At last! thought John.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Us?’

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

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

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

‘There’s no point.’

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

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

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

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

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

Malise turned his head and met John’s eyes.

Silence pressed down upon the evening air.

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

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

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

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

‘I am truly sorry …’

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

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

‘Leave it, Samuel!’ said Malise sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sir James Balkwell sent a man to find an officer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Edward Malise raised his head and looked at John.

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

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

‘He meant to kill me.’

John looked into the dark, prey-seeking eyes.

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

‘You killed my parents,’ said John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Seven summers ago,’ repeated Beester.

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

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

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

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