The Lady Tree

Above John’s head a breeze rippled and lifted the corners of scarlet and yellow curtains flung out to air over the sills of the upper windows of the pink brick house.

John closed his eyes. He hated to think about himself. A man should be master of his mind. Instead, his had mastered him, and he had no time for such weakness.

He flew through the ring of fire, fell like Icarus away from the dreadful heat of the sun.

He squeezed his thoughts smaller and smaller until they shrank to the feel of the cold, friendly nose in his palm.

The fire leaped, closed its claws on his scalp and lit the arc of his fall.

Indignant and terrified, he shaped his palm to the dog’s flat furry skull.

‘What’s wrong with me, eh boy?’ he asked the dog, under his breath. ‘Why has this come back to me now?’

The curly yellow tail scraped twice across the gravel. John looked down, suddenly jealous. I want to live just like you, in a rich web of scents, he thought. To chase rabbits, dig badgers, beg kitchen scraps, lift a hind leg where I like and mount an occasional bitch, with no grief for the past or fear for the future.

He looked back towards the house and caught the two weeding women eyeing him. Everywhere on the estate, that same look in everyone’s eyes – a mix of curiosity, pity and glee – had maddened him ever since the news of his uncle’s death had arrived.

‘Good morning, sir!’

John wrily noted their confusion as they dropped their eyes, but missed the note of affectionate respect.

His uncle, Sir George Beester, had died three months ago, five years after buying a baronetcy from King Charles and eighteen months after the death from dysentery of his only child, James. The news of Sir George’s death reached Hawkridge House three weeks after his burial, along with the news that his heir was now the only son of his only brother, John’s younger cousin Harry. John was unfortunately in the female line.

Harry had inherited everything, as was the practice in order to keep estates intact: the Somerset wool-producing estate, the London house, the business interests, the title of baronet and Hawkridge estate. In two days, Harry’s carriage would roll through the gates and dump into all their lives not only Harry, but his London friends, London servants, London in-laws, and rich new London wife. In two days the real master would arrive to claim his own.

He would take back from John the control over every penny spent. He would decide what work was or was not to be done, and who would do it. He would choose who could live in which cottage and who would use which field. He could turn any person he pleased off the estate, to go and make a living somewhere else if they could.

No one asked me to meddle for the last eleven years, John told himself. It suited me. Now I must accept the truth that Harry can turn me out of my own bed if he likes. He stared at the iron gates through which the alien carriages would roll.

Tuddenham, the estate manager, waved from the top of the long drive that curved down from the brow of the hill between the avenue of beeches. He loped down the hill, bald as a stone and lopsided from an accident with a cart. John crossed his arms and waited, happy to be distracted from both Cousin Harry and the remembered fire.

‘The holes by the gatehouse is filled now, sir,’ said Tuddenham.

‘Keep two men working on the road itself till we can hear their carriages creak,’ said John. ‘Muddy or not, Hampshire roads are better than what I hear of London streets.’

Tuddenham looked with approval at the scraping, pulling, raking and polishing in the forecourt. ‘You’ve got them all on the hop this morning, sir. The fox is nearly at the henhouse door, eh?’ His voice was a touch too hearty.

John bared white teeth, whose full number and colour were a mark of privileged diet, as were his full head of dark acorn-coloured hair and neat, healthy, curling russet beard. ‘And aren’t we all shuffling on our perches!’

Tuddenham slid him a sharp, oblique glance. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

The scarlet and yellow curtains snapped overhead in the silence that followed. Both men looked up. A housemaid leaned dangerously out of an open window to polish the diamond panes of glass. As she rubbed, the top of a blancmange breast quivered in time with her skirts. When she felt the men’s eyes on her, she rubbed harder. The two men glanced at each other and smiled, rescued from awkwardness by the shared perfunctory lust.

‘I must go finish the accounts,’ said John. He gave the dog’s nose a final rub and went reluctantly into the cool shadows of the big house.

The estate audit room at the front of the east wing served as his office. John ignored the accounts on his table. He ran his hand along a whale’s rib that hung on one wood-panelled wall and waited for his spirits to lift. But he stayed rooted in his office tucked behind the housekeeper’s room, within smell of the kitchens, instead of swooping along the bone, through time and space on the steed of his imagination, onto the bloody sea-tossed deck of the ship that had captured the beast. An early flesh-fly buzzed in tight circles near the ceiling.

He turned next for comfort to the coffers that held his books, but his teachers and friends, Pliny, Columella, Cato, Varro and Virgil, lay unbeckoning in their caskets, as mute as the dead men that they really were.

John grew frightened. He did not recognize this state of being.

He opened the drawers of his collection, on which he spent every minute he could spare from estate work. He gazed with rising panic at lizard bones, rare seeds (among them a plum-stone carved with the Passion of Christ), green and scarlet beaks, three strange fishes turned to stone, eighty-six labelled eggs, a dried elephant’s pizzle, shell creatures, and minerals that looked like toadstools. A few weeks ago, these had shimmered with import, like sun on the horizon of the sea. Now they lay slack in their drawers, as dull as the eye of a dead trout. Not even his oddities stirred him.

With his forefinger, he stroked his strand of fleece from a borometz. He had pursued the creature for uncounted joyful hours through the multi-layered ambiguities of the classical authorities – a plant-animal, a sheep that grew on a tulip stem and died when it had grazed a full circle. The crinkled wool looked very like the tufts snagged by bushes from his own sheep. He knew now that he had never believed.

He closed the drawer and stepped to the window, desolate. Once, with the passion and joy of secret vice, he had arranged, listed and described, in meticulous categories, drawer by drawer. For eleven years his hungry mind had chewed on these fragments of the forbidden world and been almost satisfied. He had never imagined that this passion might abandon him so abruptly.

He pressed his forefinger hard against a spike of a swollen blow-fish on the windowsill. His blood ran as slowly as chilled grease.

Lord, don’t let this strange, fearful torpor be envy of Harry, he begged. Send me a more dignified demon to wrestle. The fly circled his head.

He pushed open the window and sniffed the medicinal tang of rosemary and thyme, sweetened by the citrus tinge of freshly clipped box. From his bedchamber above the office, he could clearly see the entire labyrinthine perfection of the Knot Garden which had been his first mark on the estate, made eleven years ago.

Harry will find more than I did when I skulked here to hide as a fourteen-year-old outlaw. Immaculate brick walls instead of rotting wattles, woodpiles stacked neatly as carpets, a herd of sheep with the new short-staple fleece, and new gardens in which (however temporarily) Nature’s rush to disorder has been checked. Even the cabbages in the Field Garden grow as neatly as French knots in a lady’s embroidery.

His chest felt tight. He circled the room and alighted at his table again. He fingered the lists that had shaped the last weeks. The black lines through each task were crossing off the rest of his life. Little remained to be done.

Even his Aunt Margaret’s chaotic domestic kingdom was reasonably in order. Feather mattresses were laid over the straw in the guest beds, and the grooms in the horse barn had extra rugs. Each time John passed the kitchen, some new panic there was breeding still more meat pies, braided cakes and vats of brawn. Sixty smoked hams hung from spikes beside twenty-eight flitches of bacon. Fifty hens were at this moment losing their heads and four pigs dangled nose-down dripping into pails in the butchery shed.

He picked up the accounts. Under them lay a letter from his cousin. John put the accounts down again, on top of the letter. He stirred his ink and began to cross out items on his aunt’s latest provision list with fierce blobbed lines.

Ten pounds of nutmegs. Done! Two hundredweight of sugar. Too expensive – use honey instead! Cinnamon…He threw down the pen and ran his hands through his hair.

Fear.

He swallowed. His demon was not Envy. It was Fear.

He pulled Harry’s letter from under the accounts. The fire dream had returned, for the first time in many years, the night that the letter arrived. Blotched and smeared, scrawled from edge to edge in a schoolboy hand, the letter looked harmless enough, like Harry.

… I beg you, dear coz, to prepar me a triumf worthy of a new Cesar (yore littel cozin and former play mate) who hardly knows himself yet in his new elavashun but likes it WELL ENOUGH.

I will bring my new wyf (more anon) and, alas, a stern senater of Rome (her unkel and gardian, with his wyf) Who would like to pluck off my laural wreeth. But better, I will also bring a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you, coz, in making his visit …

John re-read the last sentence twice. A cold weight settled in the bottom of his stomach. He ran his eyes blindly over the rest.

… need decent lodging for 8 grooms, 2 women, 6 coach horses, 4 cart ox…new shirts payed by me to all the estate…Guest mattresses please be dry and free of mice…silver piss pots if possible for guests …

He smoothed the letter on the table. Surely he had been forgotten in Whitehall by now. He was exaggerating his own importance. But Fear tightened its armlock.

His hand stroked the corner of his chin where a scar interrupted the neat beard.

‘… a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you …’

Harry means nothing by that. He’s a self-absorbed cheerful fool, not a traitor. I seek a false importance, John told himself. To make up for the fact that when Harry arrives, I will become who I really am – no one at all.

He kicked away his stool and left the office. Fear slid at his heels after him.

The wood-panelled corridor smelled of cheeses and spilled cider. John passed the open door of the housekeeper’s sitting-room and office that guarded the entrance to the locked storeroom. The centre of his aunt’s untidy web was empty. His Aunt Margaret, unmarried and a tough, dry-fibred weed of a woman surrounded by a halo of fluff, was elsewhere leading her house staff in a concerto of rising panic. John heard her voice faintly through the open windows.

‘Agatha! Agatha, where in Heaven’s…here, take this corner!’

Beyond the housekeeper’s room lay the kitchen. As John entered, a twelve-year-old housegroom who was counting candles nodded with moving lips, still counting. John turned right, through the long, narrow scullery and smock-room, and stepped out into a narrow, brick-paved alley. From beyond a brick wall at the left end of the alley, the dog yard in the basse-court echoed with yaps. Straight ahead, across the alley and through an arch lay his gardens, where man could constantly repeat the perfection of beginnings.

The herbier came first, built in the elbow where the chapel met the house, handy for the kitchen pots and for the still-room in the basse-court at the back of the house. A south-facing wall trapped the sun, to develop the herbal essences and ripen the grapes on the knotted Muscadine vine pinned to the wall.

The woody herbs in the long strip beds had been clipped that morning. John inhaled the brutal scent of bruised rue and the resin of the rosemary which he permitted, as a fond indulgence, to sprawl across the paved walk like a woman’s skirts. He tried to admire the naked, weedless dirt between the demure ranks of infant borages and clary.

I have been forgotten in London.

This likely truth did not cheer him as much as it should. He bent and pulled up a minute speedwell, then passed through a second arch into the Knot Garden.

He had reclaimed this square of earth from bramble and breeding rabbits and it still, though not today, gave him stabs of pleasure which he tried to see as satisfaction with honest labour, not wicked pride. Box entwined with germander outlined a four-cornered device of interlocking squares. Within these living walls, sharp-cornered as newly-planed wood, sat thymes, lavender cotton, wood strawberries and auriculas, which would cover the earth in full summer and delight all his senses.

The device itself was framed by a square of brick herringbone walks. Outside these walks lay a further square of four long beds in which grew John’s fragile darlings, his objects of study and his roses.

Not a leaf out of place. Not an unruly twig to nip. John plunged onward into the New Garden.

Where the Knot Garden was for contemplation, the New Garden filled bellies. It was nearly a hundred paces end to end and walled with brick to the height of eleven feet, with a low double brick fruiting wall as its long axis. That morning two gardeners were ridging the cucumbers in a hot bed made of horse-dung, built by John according to the Roman model. Eight weeding women sidled on their haunches along rows of feathery carrots and blunt young cabbages. Four more, under the eye of Cope the chief gardener, tended newly sprouted beans and lettuces. Birds perched in lines on the wall tops, waiting to swoop on the beetles and grubs so kindly being turned up for them.

My hortus conclusus, thought John, as Cope hailed him. Where I emulate the closed Garden that God built around all that he valued, to shut out the wilderness. In two more days, my Eden must open her gates.

‘… finches,’ Cope was saying.

‘Hire more boys to drive them off,’ John heard a distant self reply. ‘We’ll need all our fruit with this plague of guests.’

The two men walked a moment in silence. Cope stooped and pulled an early radish. He rubbed it clean against his leather apron, then gave it to John to taste.

John bent his senses to the peppery crunch and the prickle of hairy cloth-like leaves, but was distracted by the anxiety in Cope’s eyes.

‘An excellent radish, Cope. And the gardens are as ready as imperfect Nature can ever be. My cousin will be pleased.’

‘And you, sir?’ Cope was Cope junior, about John’s age and new to his responsibilities, trained by his father who had died that winter. John filled him with terror relieved by moments of shared satisfaction.

‘Adam’s own Paradise was never finer,’ said John. He tossed the radish leaves into a trug and fled before he was tempted to add that his opinion no longer mattered.

The three fishponds lay in a line behind the house, parallel to its length. They were fed from the western end by the slow, brown Shir which flowed lazily through them, gathered energy at the weir, slid a little faster toward the mill pond and then pounded along the race. John had diverted a channel from above the ponds through the cellar of the house to provide storage for wine and food that was cool on the hottest summer day. And though John’s tidying grip had loosened around the ponds, Nature still served man obediently with carp, pike, freshwater eels, rushes and willow withes.

The spring ducklings were already half-grown and the colour of dead rushes. A drake flapped on tiptoe along the surface of the middle pond, then lurched suddenly into the air. The accompanying clamour in the reeds died to an absent-minded murmur. John reached the bottom pond, crossed the narrow plank of the weir bridge and marched up the slope of Hawk Ridge into the precise grid of the orchard he had made.

Bees plunged in and out of the mud and wicker skeps John had set among the trees. The medlars were already blown. The Swan’s Egg pears had set. The buds of the later pears and apples were still tight and pink as toe-tips on the angled grey spurs. John emerged from the trunks of Great Russetings and Billiborues onto the grassy crest and looked back down at the house. In the grass at his feet, a runaway hen peered anxiously over the rim of an abandoned bucket where she had laid secret eggs.

Hawkridge House sat low in the valley, astride the buried stream, a modest H-shaped hall of pink brick, with a fine stone porch in the centre of the cross bar and a small crenellated chapel crouched on the north-east corner. She had been built with her head down just after King Henry died, when too many noble rumps were aiming at the same time for the English throne.

I do not aspire, the house seemed to say. I am one of the blessed meek.

The house and her estate had remained unraped while ambition and politics had burned greater manors and lopped overweening heads elsewhere.

John looked down at the single storey of the basse-court. Stillroom, dairy, dog yard, laundry, schoolroom, storage sheds, around a paved yard. Behind this fruitful jumble, the north front of the house rose like a smooth tawny forehead. Sun glinted on her leads and warmed the rosy brick of her dormers and crenellations.

Mine for eleven years, in truth if not in law. The womb of my invention, chief object of my will, the only true measure of my life on this earth. For the last eleven years I have hidden in her safe embrace.

John loved her as if she were a woman. Now he was preparing her for another man.

He stamped down on his jealous rage, but felt a new wash of fear. A void opened. There was nothing left for him to do. He could not see himself three days from now.

A bee rattled in the grass near his feet.

Even Nature rules against me, he thought. Take bees, a model of loyalty to the common good. When their kings become too numerous, they reluctantly destroy them.

He walked on, across the crest of Hawk Ridge, down through the hazel copses that gave game birds cover and up the steeper slope of the beech hanger.

Among the beeches stood the Lady Tree. Like her sisters, she was grey-trunked and copper-clawed now in the late spring. Pale sea-green leaflets were just twisting clear of their translucent claws. Like her sisters, she had been coppiced a hundred or so years before, her leading shoot cut out for firewood or a fence pole by an assart-holder or poaching peasant. Their side branches had grown into similar goblets around empty centres. Unlike her sisters, she was more than a tree.

I should cut her down, thought John as he always did. She’s too disturbing to be part of God’s design. But who on this estate would do it?

One of her branches had grown, not up but out, at the height of John’s hip, into a naked woman.

She was a little larger than life-size, stretched full length half on her side, shameless as if she waited for her lover. Her head and arms were hidden inside the trunk from which her two armpits arched. The armpits led to two breasts, tightly nippled with broken branch stumps. A ribcage, then a rounded belly and perfect navel. A bulging mound of Venus, then two voluptuous thighs began to curve gently upward. Above the thighs, stretched two slim calves. These elongated themselves, divided like a mermaid’s tail, divided again, then again into arching, springy branches as regular as lace.

She feigned sleep, one eye open to see what the man was up to. Yet another visitor. So many this spring. Never so many before.

She shook her amber claws, as pointed as frost, from which the pale green leaves already escaped.

Do I bless or curse? she asked, as she asked all visitors. Take your chance. I’m as sure as life, no more, no less. I make no false promises, but my roots reach far beneath your feet. Plant your deepest desires between the knobby curves, under my moss, and see what grows. Take a chance.

The earth between her roots was pocked with fresh mounds. John counted seventeen. A garden of fears and desires. He knelt and dug. He found a slip of parchment tied with hair, a prayer in misspelled Latin – Deliver Us from Evil.

He sat back on his heels and let out a shaky breath. Amen.

In other years he had found phials of menstrual blood and other vital fluids, names, pieces of silver, knife blades. His eyes traced her armpits, her breasts, her belly, her sex, and followed her legs upward. A fresh rowan wreath hung around one of her knees like a loose garter. High on the main trunk above her invisible head, someone had skewered a thrush.

I wonder if Dr Bowler knows who his real rival is on the estate, thought John.

So, she said to the man. You have finally realized that I am stronger than that garden of yours down there, that so-called little paradise behind her brick walls. Her space is full of silent battles. She is eaten up by her enemies. So small, so insignificant, so thorough, they eat holes in her walls and undermine her paths. She is dying from within. Take a chance with me!

Defiantly, he placed his left hand on the meeting of her thighs, to prove what or to whom, he was not sure. When Harry comes and I’m kicking my heels (if indeed I’m still welcome) I’ll draw her for my collection. An oddity.

Her bark was as firm as bone, and delicately rough like a woman’s fur. The pointed shadow under his fingers shook desire loose from its lashings at the back of his mind. He remembered the white, quivering flesh of the maid on the high windowsill.

It has been so long! he thought suddenly. Months without a woman, ever since my weeding woman Cat married her cooper and moved from the house to the village.

He leaned his forehead against the grey trunk. Lord help me! he thought. Not this as well.

Lust had found the crack in his wall that both fear and envy had missed. The flood broke through. His knees weakened. His throat felt swollen. His skin grew cold and damp. Fear and appetite tumbled together. Reason and good intent spun away downstream like dead leaves. He squeezed himself down onto his boot heels among the roots of the tree and pressed his back against her trunk.

I must be ill!

He thrust his hands into the leaf mould. His head fell back against the grey bark.

Lord, are you listening? I do not envy my cousin! I will not! I have had more than most men. I am grateful.

Nevertheless there was that other ghostly man with a different name, whom John had last known when he was fourteen.

I don’t know what he might have been today.

Dark emptiness scoured his gut. He felt as hollow as a bee tree, as fragile as a dried snakeskin. A breeze slid into his open collar, stroked his brown neck and teased the ends of his hair. The tree shook her mermaid tail gently above his head.

Spare me from envy. Absit invidia. Let there be no ill will. Ill will is unreasonable, and I have made myself into a reasonable man.

The tree lifted her branches on the back of the breeze and let them fall again.

John shivered.

I thought I was brave. But I am afraid, Lady. I fear. I fear and I want. Oh, how I want my own lands again. My own name. A reason for my life!

Once, rustled the Lady Tree. Once you had it all. Once. Once.

Then to her taunt, she added temptation.

Ask. Ask.

He flew through the ring of fire like a trained dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames jumped, clamped their claws into his scalp and rode him in a bright arc to the ground.

John had been a child of ivory beauty. Even in babyhood his fingers were long and slim, his legs straight and finely-shaped. His skin was smooth at a time when a third of the people were pitted with pox. He read at four and showed early promise in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By five he had proved to be well co-ordinated, good at riding, swordplay and all the other male games which keep thoughtful, intelligent boys from being laughed at by their peers. His grey eyes, at seven, already caused stabs of female anticipation. In short, he was a prince in a kingdom that knew his worth.