The Memory Palace

‘I very much doubt that.’

‘What can you know, living here…? Forgive me, I’m too desperate to be civil.’

‘I’m not in the least offended.’ He stared at his hands while he opened and closed them five times. ‘I understand, madam, that this is difficult for you. But it is not altogether easy for me.’

‘All it will cost you is words of advice.’

‘But my advice involves confession, you see.’ He fell silent and stared moodily across the valley to the slopes of Hawk Ridge.

She studied him sideways with a surge of curiosity. He had come with the estate, like its fields and trees. A rent-paying, gentleman sojourner, already in residence when she had arrived as a fourteen-year-old bride.

‘I can’t,’ he said suddenly, with decision. ‘Forgive me. But I had sworn never to reveal myself to anyone here.’ He prepared to rise.

‘Even when it concerns her life?’

‘Even then.’

‘But if I am dead, I will have to keep your secret. Your confession will cost you nothing while it will oblige me.’

He sighed and looked at her at last. She saw a profound uneasiness in his eyes. ‘Very well. You prevail.’ He levered himself to his feet.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘With your permission, I would like to continue this discussion at a lower altitude.’

‘If you are toying with me, I shall jump right now.’

Giving her a cool look that made her heart jump against her ribs, he slapped at the back of his long black coat. ‘Don’t threaten me, mistress. I said I’d tell and so I shall.’

He held out a hand to help her rise. ‘I’ll hold the ladder for you to go down. And I’d be grateful if you’ll do the same for me. Will you come fishing?’

Zeal followed Wentworth to retrieve his pole and sack from where he had dropped them by the lowest pond. In silence, they crossed the sluice bridge, then followed the muddy track downstream towards the mill.

How did I come to be here? she thought.

‘You don’t want my advice,’ he said at last. ‘You want the advice of my former self.’

She looked sideways at his strong nose and pugnacious chin. Though he was not as tall as John, and was a little stiffened by age, she had to walk fast to keep up with his purposeful strides.

‘And what was that?’ she asked.

‘An adventurer, you might say.’

‘I thought you were going to say you had been an executioner, or a footpad, or a murderer.’

‘Who told you that an adventurer is not all those things?’

‘Do you have a gun?’

He gave her an amused look. ‘Can’t shake you loose from the main point, can I? Yes, I have a gun. Most likely rusted solid among my nightshirts and stockings. I also have a dagger, a Spanish rapier, a dented buckler, an old-fashioned broad sword, and a poison ring bought in Italy. You can take your pick of ’em.’

He plunged off the track down a narrow, nettle-lined path along the very edge of the bank. They passed a hectic narrow rush where the river first stretched over hidden rocks like pulled sugar candy, then crashed into turmoil.

He is toying with me, she thought as she slipped on the mud and yanked her skirts free of the bushes.

Around a smooth elbow of a bend, the Shir widened into a polished pool rimmed with rushes and weed.

She stopped to untangle her hair from an overhanging branch. ‘What is a dangerous adventurer doing here at Hawkridge pretending to be a fisherman?’

‘I take exception to your saying that I pretend to be a fisherman…here we are.’ He stopped and peered down into the water.

Though he lived in her house, as many solitary people lodged in houses not their own, she had never before had opportunity to observe him. When not out fishing, he kept to his own two small rooms. He ate alone and refused all invitations to join the house family in the hall. He never came to prayers in the chapel. From time to time, he had shared a pipe in the gardens after supper with John and Doctor Bowler, the estate parson. Infrequently, he visited their neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet at High House, where Zeal and some of her house family had been lodging since the fire. But Zeal had never met him there. She had had to feed her curiosity with distant glimpses of his still figure by the edge of one piece of water or another.

He was at least sixty years old. Still a large man. Thick through the chest, but the shins beneath his stockings were pared down to sinew and bone. The rest of him between neck and knee was hidden under his bulky old-fashioned coat. The coat itself was tailored from fine wool and silk but had worn as smooth and green as a horsefly’s tail on the collars and cuffs.

A dangerous old man, she thought with interest. He must not think that I trust him or his promises. He won’t outwit me, whatever he might intend. I can’t let him.

She rubbed at the welts of nettle stings that had sprung up on the backs of her hands. ‘How must I die, then?’

Wentworth leaned his pole against a waterside oak and studied the undulating scales of light on the greenish surface. He gave a small grunt of satisfaction. Then he threw a handful of maggots into the water and returned to sit on the exposed roots of the oak. ‘We must wait till they recover from our arrival and start to feed again. Please sit down. You’ll frighten the fish.’

She continued to stand. ‘Were you also a hangman? And a highway man?’

‘I was a plain soldier,’ he said, with an edge of irritation in his voice. ‘Will that satisfy you? And my first concern is pain…’ He held up a warning hand and jerked his chin towards the water. ‘Expostulate if you must, but sotto voce… Those bent on dying imagine only the end of suffering but ignore the anguish of the road to oblivion. Believe me, the soul clings on by its fingernails. I’ve seen men live for days after a battle when you could barely recognize them as human.’

‘Master Wentworth, don’t imagine you can frighten me. I think you’re trying to change my mind after all!’

‘As a friend, how could I not? Quiet, I beg you!’ he hissed.

‘You gave me your word!’

After a moment, he replaced the jar in his sack and stood to face her. ‘Well then. The truth. I admit that it pains me to see a lovely young creature determined to throw her life away. Nevertheless, I accept your decision.’ He collected his pole again. ‘Therefore, we must find you the kindliest way. Shall we go back? I’m no longer of a mind to fish.’

Zeal’s heart began to race. She felt suddenly more terrified even than on the roof. Then, she had at least known what she meant to do.

They walked in silence until they regained the sluice at the bottom of the fish ponds and had scrambled up the shallow bank to the edge of the lowest pond. For a moment, they gazed up the length of the three ponds and their fringe of sea nymphs.

‘They do look absurd here, but I love them,’ said Zeal.

The statues stood mostly upright, though some of the plinths had begun to tilt in the mud of the banks. At the top of the highest pond, Nereus, the father of the nymphs, leaned forward as if trying to show his dolphin something in the water.

‘I thought Harry was mad when all those carts arrived from London, but they’ve settled in like the rustics they originally were.’ Zeal stroked the marble thigh of the nymph Panope, then smiled when she spied a hen’s nest between the marble feet. ‘I imagine they’re happy to be back where they belong. I would be.’

She turned her head to see Wentworth watching her. With the morning sun behind him, the grey stubble on his chin glistened. Dried oak bark and pieces of leaf had stuck to his ancient coat.

‘You’re not ready to die,’ he said. ‘You overflow with life. You can’t deceive me.’

‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘I have reasoned it through, again and again. You won’t change my mind. Don’t make it even harder for me.’

‘Why are you so set?’

‘That’s not your concern. But it’s my only reasonable choice.’

‘I’m offering a dreadful service. You owe me the truth.’ He bent to pick a large grub from the grass at his feet and tossed it onto the pond.

In silence, she watched the spreading circles, then the violent spasm on the surface as a pike struck.

He cursed under his breath. ‘You will love again, you know! Even if John Nightingale is never able to return.’

‘Don’t presume!’

‘Grant my age some small advantage! Please believe me – love comes and goes without apparent reason. You think you will never love again. Then it strikes…’

‘You’re wrong to think…’

‘Your heart was a desert and then it bloomed. And now you fear the rain will never fall again. Is that why you despair?’

‘How dare you!’

‘Forgive me,’ he said at once. ‘But I do not understand your rush to self-destruction. Nightingale may come back…in spite of what I said…Men have been pardoned before, exiles have returned home. They have even survived sea voyages, as I myself can testify. The man’s ship has scarcely cleared Southampton. Why not defer despair for a year or two?’

Zeal backed away from this unexpected outburst of passion. She hugged herself tightly. ‘I can’t afford to wait.’

‘You’re pregnant.’

‘How do you know? Is it so clear to see?’

‘You just told me.’ He threw another grub into the pond. ‘Is it Harry’s or John’s?’

‘John’s.’

‘Does he know?’

‘When he left, I wasn’t sure.’

Wentworth studied the water for some time. ‘Could it not possibly be husband Harry’s?’

‘Never! By my own testimony!’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘I didn’t see the danger then.’ She laid both hands on her belly. ‘Like a fool, I swore falsely, as Harry asked me. I lied under oath and swore that I was still a virgin, that the marriage was never consummated. And Harry was judged never to have been my true husband.’

‘Ah,’ Wentworth said. ‘I see. I wondered at the ease of the annulment.’

‘So, whoever is deemed to be its father, the babe is still a bastard. It can never inherit this estate nor anything else. What sort of life could it have? A beggar! And it’s my fault, for lying! I should never have agreed!’

Wentworth raised a hand to try to calm her.

‘As for me…a criminal either way.’ She shivered. ‘Either perjurer or fornicator, no escape. And our parish minister is violent against all odious depravity…unlike our own forgiving Doctor Bowler. Doctor Gifford will want to see me naked at the back of a cart.’

‘I don’t think…’

‘But I have thought! Again and again. Carefully, reasonably. Can you see a sworn virgin turned unwed mother trying to act as the mistress of an estate? Always assuming that the estate is not made forfeit! But I can’t kill John’s child secretly and still live myself. I can’t have the child and survive the consequences. Death is the only reasonable way!’

‘I have a kindlier way.’

She waited, eyes closed, as if he had offered to deliver the fatal blow himself.

‘Marry me.’

4

‘There you are!’ Rachel, a ripe twenty-four, had acquired Zeal as her mistress while the latter was still a Hackney schoolgirl and did not intend to change her manner just because the girl now owned an estate in some godforsaken corner of Hampshire. ‘I left your tray on your bed back at High House. Did you want me to do something with this?’

‘Not yet!’ Zeal snatched back the letter she had left to be sent to John after her death.

‘Your skirt hem is covered in mud.’ Rachel did not quite dare to ask where she had been so early. However, Zeal felt curious eyes on her back as they trudged up the track that led to High House.

‘We both have wet feet now,’ observed Rachel.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Zeal had said.

Wentworth flinched. ‘Is it my age?’

She shook her head.

‘The only ridicule I fear is yours,’ he said. ‘I meant the form of marriage only. Please don’t fear that there’s any need for love. Warm friendship, perhaps, in time.’

‘No.’

‘Is it my modest circumstances, then?’

‘At least you can offer me a set of fine fishing rods. All I would bring you in jointure are a bastard, ridicule, a burned-out house and a few sheep. It’s a fine gesture, but I can’t accept.’

‘Don’t mistake me, Zeal. I’m not a man for fine gestures. I’m old and lonely. You would do me a great favour.’

She stepped back and collided with the nymph. ‘You know very well which way the favour lies. To marry a woman with a bastard in her belly, abandoned by both husband and lover…you won’t survive the laughter.’

‘Laughter has never concerned me so long as I get what I want.’

Their glances collided for the length of a heartbeat.

‘Master Wentworth, only three weeks ago, I vowed to stay true to John Nightingale.’

‘A vow won’t help him if you’re dead.’

She did not reply.

‘I hate to think that death is preferable to a few years of my company,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to marry any more than I want to die. I’ve never seen a man so content with his own company.’

‘I want the child.’

She caught her breath.

‘I’ve no children who are alive to me,’ he said. ‘I’d be proud to claim Nightingale’s pup as my own. Until he wants it back, of course.’ He shouldered his rod. ‘In the name of the man you love, consider my proposal. Save his child. Life need not change much. Take time to reflect. I won’t retract my offer. You will find me at Pot Pool, below the mill.’

Zeal had not meant to go back to High House, but now that Rachel had intercepted her, she could not think what else to do. She had used up all her will on the chapel roof during the night. The two women paused for breath on the brow of the grassy ridge that separated the two estates.

‘Winter’s coming.’ Rachel gazed back across the ruined house at the bright slaps of colour on Hawk Ridge.

‘I need to sit down,’ said Zeal.

‘Madam! Think of your skirts,’ cried Rachel, too late.

After breakfast, Zeal rode her mare back to Hawkridge. While she waited in the office for her estate steward, Tuddenham, to finish in the stables, she picked up a stack of sooty papers, then set it down again. The old lethargy sucked at her again.

Wentworth offers a way out. Take it.

But I vowed to stay true to John. I believe that excludes marriage to someone else.

But this would be merely the form of marriage. An arrangement.

A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.

‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.

She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.

She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.

‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’

She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’

Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.

Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.

I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.

Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.

How do I know I can trust him?

She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.

Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.

She turned back, then found that she had to rest.

He was clever to have used the child.

The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.

5

She took her place at the middle of the long, scrubbed elm table in the Hawkridge bake house kitchen where the small house family most often ate supper following the fire. Even this outbuilding smelled like the inside of the smokehouse, but with a colder, seeping edge. A light dusting of ash from the fire seemed always still to salt the food. She looked at the familiar faces around the table with a stranger’s eye. She might as well have been a Mede or Ethiop dropped by magic carpet.

Since the recent fire, the estate residents had split their lives between Hawkridge House and assorted temporary lodgings. Her nearest neighbour, Sir Richard Balhatchet, had given rooms at High House to Zeal and Mistress Margaret, who was the unmarried aunt of Harry and John. Their two serving women, and Agatha, the chief house maid, and Doctor Bowler the estate parson also slept at High House. Others of the house family, including three house grooms, two kitchen grooms, and John’s former manservant, Arthur, slept where they could in the outbuildings and barns. The large mid-day dinner was served at High House to those not in the fields. Apart from the house family, the rest took supper wherever they found themselves.

Thank the Lord, Master Wentworth never comes to the table, Zeal thought. I could not bear to see him just now.

According to Mistress Margaret, he had never eaten in company since he first took up residence on the estate long before Zeal arrived.

Now, as they sat on borrowed stools along either side of the long table, their voices and laughter, the sound of their chewing, the scrape of stool legs on the stone floor, a dropped knife, all made her flinch.

As Mistress Margaret supervised the passing of rabbit stew, she hummed with grim glee at news that a neighbour (not Sir Richard) had been fined five hundred crowns for ploughing across the boundary of an adjoining estate. ‘He always takes the largest portion at table, too!’ she said. ‘And the last sweetmeat.’

Doctor Bowler paused for a polite beat of silence then ventured, ‘But surely, that is exactly what the king did to John! Boundaries, I mean, not sweetmeats.’

The king meant to cut across John’s land – the very same estate so recently awarded to him for service to the Crown. A great wall was to be built right between John’s new horse barn and his paddock, to enclose a royal hunting park at Richmond, taken from common grazing land and other men’s farms.

‘But the king is the king,’ protested Mistress Margaret. ‘Our dear neighbour is not even a knight.’

‘Do you mean to say that the right to trespass is defined by rank?’ asked Doctor Bowler with a degree of heat uncommon in him. ‘Do you say that John did not have good reason to protest to the king? Did the king have the right to call such reasonable protest “treason”? I expected more support for your nephew’s cause!’ Doctor Bowler turned to Zeal. ‘Are you not proud of him, my lady? He did not creep away with his tail between his legs like so many others who were equally wronged.’

Zeal stared blankly at their animated faces, then realized that they were expecting her to speak.

Mistress Margaret and Zeal’s serving woman, Rachel, exchanged looks.

‘Zeal,’ begged Mistress Margaret, her face mottled pink with emotion. ‘He puts words into my mouth! Why don’t you help me? Our parson has me at an unfair advantage with all his education. We women are never taught the tricks of debate.’

‘Why gild the lily?’ murmured Doctor Bowler. He peered closely at Zeal across the table and changed tack. ‘Isn’t it excellent news, my dear, that Sir Richard plans to give us that wagon load of oak beams from his old barn to help us rebuild the hall and west wing?’

‘Indeed,’ cried Mistress Margaret, diverted into this new turning. ‘We could never afford to buy them! It’s all very well to say that the Lord will provide, but kind neighbours are more certain.’

Doctor Bowler pounced with delight. ‘And who do you think prompted this Christian charity in Sir Richard?’

I must act, one way or another, thought Zeal. And if I can’t decide for myself what to do, I must leave it to chance. Or ask Doctor Bowler’s advice.

‘My lady…?’ The little parson always requested attention as if certain that you had far more important things to do than talk to him.

Zeal forced herself to smile at his anxious face, with its slightly too-close eyes. She sometimes thought of him as an earnest moth. A man of infinite good will and equal fragility, Doctor Bowler should never have taken on the moral burdens of a clergyman.

While Sir George Beester was still alive, Bowler, an Oxford man, had been tutor to the baronet’s two nephews, Harry Beester (who had married Zeal and brought her to Hawkridge) and John Nightingale, the son of Beester’s only sister. His sweet temperament, urgent curiosity and good Latin and Greek made him an excellent tutor for a willing pupil like John but a poor task-master for the likes of Harry. He had survived on an allowance from Sir George, and on small tithes, eggs and milk from estate tenants whom he christened, confirmed, married and buried. When John took over running the estate, which Harry inherited after their uncle’s death, Bowler bent his classical education to the estate accounts. When on the annulment of their marriage Harry deeded the estate to her, Zeal saw no reason for change.

‘When you have a moment,’ Bowler said now, ‘if such a time should ever arrive, I would be grateful for your thoughts about the Fifth of November.’

‘The Fifth of November?’ She gazed at him blankly.

A flush slowly rose all the way to the top of his shiny bald head. ‘The bonfire. Bonfire and Treason Night. It seems a little…After what happened. In any case, I’ve heard some…’

‘Of course. We’ll speak whenever you like.’ She could never consult Bowler. His own helplessness would cause him too much pain.

‘Troublemakers!’ said Mistress Margaret briskly. ‘It’s the young men.’

‘Some older heads agree with them,’ protested Doctor Bowler. ‘Doctor Gifford for one. Then we also have to consider the bells.’

Zeal looked at them both as if they were speaking an alien tongue.

With revulsion, she eyed the rabbit stew in front of her, smooth white flesh to which adhered a blob of shiny, mucilaginous pork fat. She swallowed against her rising gorge and smiled brightly in the direction of Doctor Bowler’s voice.

‘Does anyone have a coin I could borrow?’ she asked.

When supper finally ended, she put on her wool cloak and took Doctor Bowler’s farthing to the solitude of the orchard. The quincunx of trees shifted before her eyes, one moment apparent disorder, the next a harmony of straight lines.

‘Good evening, to you, madam.’ An estate worker intercepted her cheerfully. ‘Can I have a word about moving the piglets?’

In the dusky shadows under the trees, she was free at last of all those eyes.