The Lady Tree

‘We are all as shocked as you,’ said Balkwell to Malise. ‘And we regret your monstrous introduction to our Company. As to our business dealings, sir, we examine all propositions calmly and without prejudice. No one here has yet laid a hand on either truth or reason.’

‘Am I the one on trial, then?’ demanded Malise. ‘That man …’ he pointed at George Beester ‘… has as good as accused me of murder when his Satan’s whelp of a nephew has just killed my brother!’ His eyes returned to the slack limbs and oddly angled jaw.

‘The boy must be tried,’ said Balkwell. ‘It needs no examination to conclude …’

‘It was an accident!’ protested George Beester. ‘It was surely an accident. He may have meant to attack – and with good reason – but not to kill!’

‘We have more than enough witnesses to what happened,’ said Balkwell. ‘Intelligent men who have eyes and will report honourably what they saw.’ He turned to Edward Malise. ‘I’m sorry that you feel on trial at such a tragic moment. But the boy has also made a claim against you, and we must deal with it as judiciously as any other matter. Whatever my feelings, I cannot agree with his uncle that the death was an accident. Like you, I saw clear intent in his face. I wish, therefore, to examine why the boy is so enraged against you.’

I killed a man in rage, John thought. I should feel such a mortal sickness of my soul. But he still felt only the rage.

In prison, his newly acquired memory was still sharp as freshly broken glass. Time had had no chance to dull it. Seven years of rubbing and grinding took place in mere days. He lay on his cot, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling, again and again and again. Smoke, roasting meat, the screams of the horses and of his mother. His own hair on fire. Malise’s beak. His father’s groom who had saved him and almost certainly been killed while John slipped away through the bushes to fetch up at the farm. The thrust of his mother’s hands as he flew through the window. They had saved him and died.

John hoped that rehearsing his memories might wear them out, but rage, grief and guilt wore him out first. Rage was the most bearable; he spun it into a case around himself like a silkworm. Then he raged that he had not paid heed in that firelit room to what Edward Malise had said – to the reason his life had been destroyed – instead of staring in a trance at Francis Malise’s shoe soles. Then he sieved the memories again, for a detail, a phrase, a name, anything to give his uncle as evidence against the Malises.

Then he suddenly asked, why? Why did the Malises hate my family so desperately? That ambush had been a desperate act. He found the word ‘vulture’ lodged in his memory. He closed his eyes and saw again the flickering light on Francis Malise’s body, and his brother’s face. More words surfaced like dying fish. John curled tightly on his cot. Had the Nightingales truly been vultures?

After three weeks in prison, it finally occurred to John to become afraid, not of death but of how he would die. The rope – he had once watched friends of a condemned man hang on his feet beneath the Tyburn gibbet to speed the terrible slowness of strangulation. At best, he would be given a gentleman’s way out on the block. He tried to tell himself that he would merely leap cleanly from this life into the next. He would never see the bloody mess and the strange turnip thing that had once held his soul.

He knew he would be judged guilty, because it was the truth. He had killed Francis Malise, in rage.

He knew that men had the right to punish him under temporal law, but he had expected to suffer in spirit as well. On the contrary, he was still glad he had done it. This realization shook him profoundly. At fourteen, he began to suspect that Good and Evil, the works of God and the works of Satan, were not separated after all by a boundary as clearly marked as a river bank. As a child, you were good or you were bad. Usually you knew the difference, and if caught you were punished. If you didn’t know the difference, you had merely failed to understand God’s Will.

Now, at a time when he most needed his childish faith, he was most filled with wretched doubt. He called on God to explain the ambiguity that surrounded His Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ If John felt unrepenting triumph, what about soldiers fighting in the King’s name? And what about the soldiers fighting on the other side? There were long hours of opportunity, as John waited in his prison cell, for a Divine reply. The Lord did not seize the chance.

Is this one of the adult secrets, John wondered. That we walk as uncertainly as blind men? That to believe is merely to prescribe and to hope?

His uncle had bought John lodging in a room among the debtors of the Fleet Prison instead of a cell below ground. He also dropped the coins of his own suspicion into the pockets of gossip and influence. Sir James Balkwell had not been alone in feeling that John’s accusation might be true. He and the others were easier in their minds when there seemed to be no hurry to bring the boy to trial.

‘Bogus Englishmen as well as murderers,’ George Beester said of the Malises wherever an ear would listen. ‘Catholics…French name. Whipped off to the Netherlands in King Henry’s time and now they’re slinking back again, encouraged by the marvel of a French Catholic queen on the throne of England and protected by her papist cronies.’

A successful, self-made man, Beester understood the close connection between principles and pockets and had the means to make this connection work for his nephew’s cause. Even so, though he found many sympathetic ears, his efforts were not enough.

He visited the prison six weeks after John’s arrest. John scrambled up from his cot.

‘They’re going to try you next week,’ said Beester. The majority of those honourable men who witnessed Francis Malise’s death have agreed, however reluctantly, that you intended harm. The plea of accident has been rejected. And Edward Malise is pressing his case among the Catholic faction that has the Queen’s ear. It’s her word against the other side’s reluctance to act.’

Beester settled on a little stool and spread his legs wide to balance his bulk. ‘I don’t think I can save you in court unless we can find a strong enough case ourselves to bring against Malise. One last time – try to remember more! Even one detail…a name called out…livery.’

John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying…Uncle, did the Malises have any right on their side?’

‘Has the Devil been pissing in your brain?’ George Beester flushed. ‘You ignorant, evil young …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a fair question for a boy in your position.’ He studied his sturdy knees. ‘They had no right, only what they pretended was a reason. And Malise was canny enough to admit that straight off. His grandfather chose the wrong side, against King Henry while your own grandfather did not. The Malises tried every means to win their lands back. Your father had won a final lawsuit four months before he died.’

‘Lands,’ said John in wonder. ‘My parents’ lives for lands?’

‘The Malises claimed injustice and persecution.’

‘In a way, they were right.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The courts ruled that they were not. And that is the truth, as it stands, on this earth. The Malises are murderers. No law, Divine or temporal, gave them the right to play executioner.’

‘I killed Francis Malise.’

‘But with more right. And I still say it was an accident. And I have support on both counts. That’s why you must not come to trial! Morally, your guilt is still a little slippery. All those official words and papers will set events rock solid. The logical sentence will be required. I must do something before then.’

‘I did kill him.’

Beester leaned forward. ‘Swear to me again that you saw Edward Malise beside my sister’s coach!’

‘I swear,’ said John. ‘By anything you like.’

His uncle studied the boy’s eyes. Then he grunted. ‘All right. There’s no more to say. They won’t have you as well.’ He stood and rearranged the layers of his clothing for leavetaking. Beester saw no point yet in telling the boy that all four Nightingale estates, including Tarleton Court, had been confiscated by Crown agents to be held pending the verdict.

‘If those two were guilty,’ said Beester, ‘then it may yet be proved. And what a shame, then, if you were already dead.’

He crossed to the unlocked door. ‘Do you still keep handy that knife I gave you?’

John nodded.

‘If rumour gets out that I’m trying to delay your trial, Malise or a helpful crony might just see fit to play God’s role again. There aren’t enough guards here. Take care.’

The heavy wooden door of the cell scraped across the floor. John woke. He listened. Heard the tiny barking of a far-away dog. Inside the cell, cloth rasped on cloth. The darkness was tight with the silence of held breath. John felt rather than saw the change in the darkness where the door would be. Someone had opened his door. He slid his right hand under the cotton bolster onto the handle of his uncle’s dagger.

He waited, straining to hear over the clamour of his body.

Cloth scratched across cloth again, in the darkness near the door. Agile as an adder, John slid sideways off the bed. On the ice-cold floor, he listened again. Over the thumping of his heart, he heard a roughly drawn breath, and another. The intruder needed air badly and could keep quiet no longer.

How many were there?

Silently, John coiled himself near the foot of the bed. If he attacked now, he would have the brief advantage of surprise. He shifted his grip on the handle of the knife. The sound of breathing had not moved away from the door.

‘John?’ His name felt its way through the darkness on an urgent breath. ‘Nephew John, it’s Mistress Beester.’

Now he imagined a thicker darkness near the door.

‘Your aunt…Uncle George’s wife.’

His hand clamped even tighter onto the knife.

‘John, are you there?’

The thicker darkness stirred. It seemed to retreat a step.

‘Aunt Jane?’

‘It was the right door! Thank God! Come at once!’ The whisper was impatient and frightened. ‘Come quickly. Your uncle is waiting in the street…Come!’

John stood with a surge of joy. He took a step and bumped into the table. He hesitated in the darkness. What if she weren’t really there? It would be too terrible if she were a demon testing his soul’s strength. She would vanish, and he would have to rebuild his courage again from scratch.

‘Sweet Heaven, come now!’ Fabric rustled. A cold but solid hand brushed his wrist, fumbled, gripped on.

John dived through the darkness after the hand.

‘Close the door!’ she whispered.

They cut diagonally across a short corridor to a second smaller wooden door. His aunt opened it and ducked into the shaft of a narrow stone staircase with John behind her. Steps spun down, down, down around a pole of stone into a well of darkness. John followed the hissing of his aunt’s hems down the stone treads, his knees jerking in the rhythm of his descent. Slap, slap, shouted his feet. He tried to step more lightly as he followed his aunt’s rustling shadow down into the well. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. The truth began to shake his numbness. Tap, tap. He kept one hand on the spiralling wall to steady himself. The pitted stone bit at his fingertips. The cold damp air had the rotting leather smell of bats. He was escaping. Alive.

A vestibule. A heavy door, slightly ajar. A porch. A passageway. John smelled the stench of offal and sewage as they crossed a bridge over the prison moat and passed through another gate. Then, a street. An unlit coach, and his uncle.

‘In! In!’

Horses’ hooves scraped on stone. Running water sluiced in a shadowed trench. Inside the coach, with the door slammed shut, John threw his arms around his uncle.

‘You’re not clear yet,’ said Beester, patting the broad young shoulders. ‘We must get you out of London tonight.’

‘How did you do it?’ demanded John. ‘How did you unlock the doors and remove the gaolers?’

‘Ahh,’ said George Beester with satisfaction. ‘It’s a venal age.’ He hesitated. He was pleased by his own foresight; he had extracted as much money as possible from the boy’s estates in the twenty-four hours after Francis Malise’s death, before the mill of the Star Chamber began to grind. John had bought his own freedom, at no cost to his uncle. It had been an elegant transaction. However, Beester was not sure that the boy would appreciate this elegance or understand his new estate in life.

‘Are you aware, nephew, that the Star Chamber now holds the deeds to all your estates and assets? Your escape will make them doubly forfeit to the Crown. Your present freedom is the sole residue of your inheritance.’

‘It’s more than enough!’ said John with passion. ‘Thank you! And thank you, aunt!’

‘I’m afraid it’s far from enough,’ replied Beester. ‘As you will learn.’ He studied the shadowy rectangles of darkened windows passing outside the coach. ‘Now I must hide you in a safe burrow somewhere.’

His uncle took him upriver by boat from a dock near London Bridge. John perched in the prow. He watched the sleeping city slide past, then the great dark houses of the Strand, then the jumbled buildings that made up Whitehall. Later, Chelsea village, and much later, the palace at Richmond. Because he was only fourteen, he couldn’t help thinking – now that he had escaped – that he was having the most amazing adventure.

‘This is what life feels like,’ he told himself, as the far, dark banks slid past and distant dogs barked. ‘I am being tested.’ Doubt still slept in his deserted prison cell. In John’s euphoria at leaving behind the terror of the rope and block, he now knew that his clear sight would return. His tale would end as it should, after battles, voyages, and vindications, in his own reclaimed kingdom at the side of a blue-eyed princess.

He leaned against the Lady Tree, too tired to move. He listened for a few moments to the rustle of her mermaid tail above his head. Then he noticed the hedgehog crackling and snuffling in the leaves by his feet, the danger of the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

My aunt is right. I must leave at once. I won’t let myself be arrested again. And to kill Malise here on Hawkridge Estate would be a shameful way to repay my uncle and his heirs. I’d spoil poor old Harry’s chances at Court for ever.

He imagined going back to his chamber now and packing. Stealing away to Mill Meadow, saddling his horse and riding away.

In which direction? he asked himself. How do I choose?

He stood a little longer without moving. Malise had known him but said nothing. Why?

He’s either playing with me or needs something. I should have paid more attention to what Hazelton was trying to say.

I won’t run tonight, he decided a little later. I’m too tired, and there’s too much to arrange. Unless I want to live as a vagabond outlaw, I must arrange my flight a little. If Malise hasn’t raised the alarm yet, he may wait a little longer.

He was past thinking.

He laid his hand on the Lady Tree in farewell. You outlasted me after all, he thought.

Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

I’d be a fool, thought John suddenly, to abandon everything before I know what Malise wants.

Four

May 25, 1636. Mild and still. No dew. Turtle doves back in beech hanger. Apples in full blow at last.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

Zeal woke cautiously, like a small animal sniffing the air outside its burrow. She kept her eyes closed. In her experience there was seldom anything on the other side of her eyelids to hurry out to greet. She drew a resigned, waking breath. Then she sniffed again in drowsy surprise. The linen sheet and feather-filled quilt which covered her to her eyebrows smelled of sunlight. A small, surprising goodness to credit to the day’s account.

She stretched slim, naked limbs. Her eyes opened abruptly. Instead of plunging off the sudden edges of her narrow London school trestle bed, her fingers and toes, though spread as far as she could reach, lay still cradled in the softness of a vast featherbed.

She propped herself on her elbows, breathing quickly. She was on the deck of a ship-sized bed, in full sail across a strange sea of polished wooden floor. The bed hangings, flapped and draped, half-hid a distant horizon of diamond-paned windows. The morning sun had transformed last night’s cavern of darkness and wavering shadows. The brown coverlet was really faded red silk. The hangings were rich midnight blue. By torch- and firelight the night before, she had not seen the fat bulges and gadrooning of the four bedposts, or the dusty tapestry above the fireplace of Hercules holding the giant Antaeus in the air above his head. The bulgy bedposts made Zeal think of plump women’s legs wearing tight garters. Zeal imagined the legs beginning to dance.

Oh, yes! She breathed out a happy sigh.

A new, unexplored world. Another Indies, a new Virginia coast. At times in the past, she had felt exhausted by the need to learn yet another new terrain. But this one was different.

She heard an odd, distant, wavering noise which she would investigate later.

My own room for ever and ever! she thought. At last. This is it. She flung herself back onto her pillows to recover from the enormity of the idea. I shall wake up like this every morning from now on. No more shifting. I have finally begun the rest of my life.

Her new husband Harry lay in the next chamber in his own bed, where she meant him to stay for quite some time.

‘Husband,’ she repeated quietly to the embroidered blue silk of the canopy. ‘Husband.’ Testing it. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook her head in pleased disbelief. What a difference that word made. She was exactly the same girl as before, but because she had a husband her life had changed around her more than she could yet imagine. People already treated her differently.

‘My lady.’

Firmly, she set aside the memory of Mistress Margaret’s tight eyes and bared teeth. And of Harry’s glares across the dinner table.

I did it! she thought fiercely. I did it. Somehow, in spite of my uncle…I wanted it hard enough…All I had to do was want something hard enough and not care whether it was correct, or dutiful, or virtuous.

A spasm of anxiety curled her onto her side.

Selfish and wilful as it is, I mustn’t care what my uncle and aunt think!

For fourteen years she had tried to please by being good, but had found that she could never be good enough, nor be good in all the different ways different people wanted. She had been dutiful and loving to her parents, but they had deserted her when she was eight for the superior joys of Heaven. She had then tried to please the assorted relatives who took her in. (An allowance from her inherited estate more than covered the expense of feeding and boarding her.)

She soon grew confused. No sooner had she figured out the rules in one household (both spoken and unspoken) than she was shifted to another where she had to begin again. One aunt (on the Puritan side of the family) had valued quiet, self-effacing children, another (a socially ambitious beauty) preferred spirit. One uncle insisted on prayers four times a day, while another ranted against self-congratulating piety and self-serving humbug. Several cousins had taunted her for being thin and pinched and ugly, while her cousin Chloe, whom she thought quite beautiful, was jealous of Zeal’s red-gold wiry hair, blue eyes and fine pale skin.

As for Mistress Hazelton…Zeal curled a little tighter. Mistress Hazelton watched her with a curious little distant smile, no matter what she did. In the four years since her uncle Samuel Hazelton had bought her wardship, Zeal had tried not to worry about what she might be doing wrong, and not to see that Mistress Hazelton pinched her lips every time she spoke to her.

Her uncle only made things worse when he defended her. He let his wife see that he was amused by Zeal’s desire to learn Latin and by her questions about his business affairs (which were also her business affairs, as he had bought the use of her fortune along with her wardship). By the time, two years ago, that her uncle sent her to the boarding school in Hackney to improve her deportment, dancing and needlework, Zeal was worn out by trying.

I have anchored myself at last, she thought. When I have made myself the mistress, I will be able to choose my own way to be good or bad. Whether this place is good or bad, I shall make the best of it with a whole heart.

Outside the diamond-paned windows, the pale green tops of trees caught the morning sun. She uncurled and stretched again. The worn linen sheets slid smoothly against her skin. She spread her small pink toes like a cat stretching its paws and turned her head in the yielding welcome of the feather pillows. She now recognized the odd noise outside. It was the constant faint bleating of sheep.

Lady Beester. What a fuss everyone made about a title. It had even clamped a muzzle on Mistress Hazelton, for all her pious lip-curling at the lewd antics of the gentry. Again, Zeal smiled at the underside of the blue silk tester of her bed. What mattered was that Sir Harry Beester was her Harry.

He had appeared like a miracle, a very gentil parfait knight, and rescued her from the baying pack that had sniffed after her moderate fortune. Tall, handsome Harry, golden as Apollo, and kind. A little simple at times, but after six and a half years of being parcelled about, Zeal gave kindness its full weight in assaying the human soul.

Harry was also amusing. Though already twenty-two, he sometimes seemed her own age or younger. He did not scorn practical jokes or an occasional nostalgic game of hide-and-seek. He had never stuck his hand down her bodice to tweak her nipples, nor shoved his tongue into her mouth as other suitors had done. Most important of all, he had said that he quite understood how much having a child frightened her. He was in no rush for an heir. They could leave all that business until she was ready. He had sworn it in a solemn oath to her. In spite of her uncle’s dark objections that Harry was a fortune-hunter like all the others, Zeal felt she had made a good trade for her money.

She lay in the shadows of the huge bed, breathing softly, warm with a child’s first adult taste of the power of its own will. Harry would never regret his bargain either. She would be the most useful wife a man could want. She knew that he was disappointed in her as a social ornament, but she would startle him by how well she would manage Hawkridge House.

She eyed the unfamiliar objects of her chosen world and prepared to annex them. The pewter basin and jug on the table. A mirror. The end of a heavy carved oak coffer. The faded velvet-covered cushions on the bench fixed below the nearest window. The silvery-green trees outside.

She heard voices outside her windows as well as the bleating sheep. Her inventory of her new world suddenly leaped in length. Her peaceful warmth faded.

If I am going to be such a useful wife, I’d better make a start, she thought wryly.

She pushed down the quilted coverlet, slid across the acre of linen and lowered herself to the floor. Shivering, she looked around for a smock or robe. Her breath made a faint cloud in the chilly air. The rooms on the north side of the house were never warm in the morning until June.

Naked and on bare feet, she crossed to the window and peeked out. The paths of busy dairymaids, washing women, dogs, grooms, and chickens already criss-crossed the basse-court yard below. Harry’s cousin John strode purposefully across one corner of the courtyard, head down like a dog on an exciting scent. Mistress Margaret’s voice called through an open window.

A cold lump formed in Zeal’s stomach. The weight of her new world landed hard on her chest. She put her right foot on top of her left, to try to warm it.