The Lady Tree

All those people expect me to tell them what to do.

She remembered Mistress Margaret’s pinhole pupils and tight lips as she had welcomed Zeal to Hawkridge House.

She knows the house, knows exactly what to do and say here, and she’ll be waiting for my mistakes.

Zeal lifted the lid of the carved oak coffer. It was nearly empty except for some linen scraps. No clothes. Goose-pimples prickled her forearms, standing the fine gold down on end.

Do I have a maid to dress me here or do I dress myself, as at the school?

At the Hazeltons’ her woman Rachel had slept on a truckle bed in her room. Here she was alone. She dropped the lid of the coffer.

Has everyone already breakfasted? Do they eat in the dining chamber or their own rooms? How can I go call Rachel when I’m stark naked?

She put her left foot on top of her right.

I’m cold. And Mistress Margaret hates me. And I irritated Harry at dinner last night, our first in our new home.

She had felt skewered by glares at the table – Harry’s, Mistress Margaret’s and her aunt’s. There had been nowhere safe to look. Not even at Harry’s cousin, John Graffham, who had seemed so friendly when the coaches first arrived but then ignored her all through dinner.

She wrapped her arms across her full pink-nippled breasts. Both feet were now numb.

How did I think last night that I could manage all these people? I shall pay for my presumption. I’ll be punished for insisting on my own way. I’ll never figure out what is right and wrong here. I’ll never learn to run this place. Harry will be furious. His cousin will pity me. I’ll be miserable for the rest of my life.

She climbed back up onto the bed, pulled the quilt tightly up around her neck and stared into the folds of the hangings at the end of the bed. She would not cry! Her predicament was no one’s fault but her own. As so often before in her short life, she allowed herself a last brief moment of respite before she began to deal with whatever evil that life, the Good Lord and her own deserving might serve up next.

Her door opened.

‘Where would you like to breakfast, madam?’

Zeal was unreasonably pleased to see her maid Rachel, an over-pious young woman of twenty-six selected by Mistress Hazelton. This morning, the sulky, pock-marked Rachel was Zeal’s key to the newest set of unfamiliar rules. She could ask Rachel to bring what she could not find herself. Make her carry the weight of uncertainty. Zeal made her first decision as mistress of Hawkridge House.

‘I shall eat here,’ Zeal said firmly. ‘I like this room. Don’t you like this place, Rachel?’

Being in a strange house seemed to make Rachel, too, feel a greater warmth toward a familiar face. ‘It’s not as bad as I feared, madam.’

A little later, in smock, high-waisted jacket, stockings and mules, Zeal settled by the window with her bread, ale and cheese. She was feeling better. As Rachel helped her dress, Zeal had reminded herself that every new move had brought that same moment of helpless terror. Each time she shifted households she had wanted to die for the first day or two. Each time, she had pulled herself together and made the best of what was on offer. She had chosen this place and had no one but herself to blame if she failed here. She had Mistress Hazelton’s household as a model. She had prepared herself by months of study. She would ride this panic into calm as she had ridden the other panics.

Rachel set a small chest at her side. While the maid put another log on the fire and shook out a loose day gown, bodice, petticoats and sleeves, Zeal lifted a book out of the chest. A Good Huswife’s Jewell had been a school text. Beneath it lay Of Domesticall Duties, which Mistress Hazelton had given her on her betrothal. Zeal herself had ordered The Boke of Nurture from a bookseller in St Paul’s as soon as her marriage had been agreed. She had learned all three books by heart. The precepts that governed cheesemaking, distilling, the moral well-being of the servants, the counting of linens and ordering of beer swilled around in her head. Each day she studied a little more. One day she would be sure of it all. As she munched her bread and sipped the ale, she read, closed her eyes, murmured to herself, and read again.

A good wife must not let the serving grooms wipe their hands on the curtains nor permit any man to piss in the fireplaces, Zeal reminded herself. A good wife must set a constant example of industry and piety to the rest of the estate family. She must manage the household spending and prevent waste in the kitchen. She must oversee cleanliness both in the dairy and in the personal linen of her maids. She must obey her husband in all things, and know how to bind a wound. Here in the country, while she needn’t know so much about buying clean water or choosing a freshly caught fish, she must know how to plant lettuces, pickle a cabbage and smoke a pig.

Zeal leaned back and blew out her flushed cheeks. She stood up decisively. She might as well begin carrying out her duties. Not on the curtains. Not in fireplaces. Watch out for moths, mice, dust. Count cheeses, turn linens…no, count linens and turn the cheeses. Her eyes closed with the effort of remembering and her lips moved as if she were at prayer…Dairy, no spitting at table, evening prayers, tinctures, eggs …

How can I count the linens or turn anything, she thought suddenly, until I know where they are?

‘Rachel!’ she called. ‘Please shake out another loose gown, and an older bodice of black wool, with a plain collar and no poxy lace on the sleeves to catch on doorhandles and candlestands!’

She left her maid on her knees among a spewing of wool, buckram, silk and leather from the travelling chests. Outside the antechamber to her room, she heard Mistress Margaret’s voice below, in the hall. Zeal ducked back through her own apartments. She would have to face her predecessor sooner or later, but not yet.

There was no answer behind the door on the far side which led into Harry’s apartments. Zeal entered the empty room to begin her dutiful voyage on the high seas of being a good wife.

Before half an hour had passed, Zeal was having more fun than she had ever had in her life. From the first timid lifting of a coffer lid to examine the linens left at the bottom, she quickly arrived at the intense, wicked pleasure of licensed nosiness. There is no thrill so profound as that of flinging open strange chests, other people’s cupboards, and closed doors. That it was her duty to snoop made the pleasure even greater.

Beyond Harry’s apartment, she found a little parlour above the chapel at the east end of the house. She put her nose over the ledge of the internal window and peered happily down onto brightly-coloured tiles and carved pews. A half-naked female acrobat balanced on one of the pew finials. On others dolphins leaped and cheerful-looking cocks stretched to crow. A monkey in a hat sat on his curled tail. Not a skull or other memento mori in sight.

I knew I liked this place, she thought. Her delight was enhanced by the film of dust on the windowsill.

Mistress Margaret needs my help after all.

She doubled purposefully back through Harry’s rooms and her own into the rest of the main wing.

‘Good morning, my lady.’ A housemaid curtseyed on the landing of the stairs.

‘Isn’t it!’ replied a flushed and happy Zeal.

Zeal grew happier and happier as she pried and poked and peeked her way through a series of other chambers. She buzzed with intent, her earlier fears forgotten.

Her breath came short as she fingered through musty treasures. Combs with hairs still caught in them, wooden teeth, rings without their stones. A squashed straw hat and yellowed silk stockings still humped and bubbled by absent toes. Caps, collars, and an entire silken garden embroidered on a single kid glove in faded chain stitch and French knots.

She sneezed from the dust in the chests and slapped at tiny moths which flew up on dusty grey wings. She would have lavender and wormwood tucked in among the clothes. Mistress Margaret was perhaps a little old to keep track of all the chests and coffers. Zeal’s help might even be welcome.

She lifted out the crumpled muslin tiers of a distiller’s sieve, slashed sleeves still curved to former elbows, the concentric circles of an old-fashioned iron farthingale, its ties still crumpled from the knots that marked the circumference of a once-living waist, perhaps that of a younger Mistress Margaret. Zeal stared at the farthingale. Mistress Margaret must once have been as young as Zeal was now.

In the base of a bench chest she found parts of an old suit of armour, awry as the broken shell of a dried-up beetle. It was like one her grandfather had worn, dented by fighting, a little rusty and dark in feel. Zeal imagined the man who had once worn it. Fierce, fast-moving in spite of the armour’s weight, with intense eyes that glared out through the visor. Rather like Harry’s cousin John. She put her hand into the hinged carapace of one glove and tried to close her fingers around an imagined sword hilt. The metal edges cut into her fingers.

To be such a one, who could wear that! And do those deeds. She felt a little queer and took her hand out again. But her imagined man joined the growing crowd of ghosts and present lives that Zeal pulled from chests and cupboards and clutched to herself. For the first time since her parents had died, she was writing a new history of the world with herself in the centre instead of on an edge.

Beyond a first-floor parlour and pair of sleeping chambers she turned left into the Long Gallery, which made up the entire first floor of the west wing of the house. The gallery would have held eight carriages end to end and was all of golden wood – waxed floor and panelled walls carved with bosses and folds – which creaked conversationally beneath her feet and hands. Sun poured in through windows down the long outer wall and across the south front. The gallery was warm and smelled of honey and beeswax polish.

‘Ahh,’ Zeal said aloud. She lifted her skirts and ran from the door to the window at the far end. The floor reverberated under her feet like a giant drum. Her footsteps echoed back from the panelled walls. She sat for a moment on the wooden seat beneath the window, panting happily.

There was a fireplace in the centre of the long, unwindowed inner wall. Zeal trotted over to it and wrinkled her nose. Sure enough, there was a problem there to be set right. This discovery made her even happier.

John rose early and listened for some time at his open door. Then, ignoring the silk breeches and padded doublet that Arthur had laid out for him, he put on his woollen work breeches, linen shirt and leather jerkin. He breakfasted in his room on a quick mug of ale and a slice of cold meat pie.

Without comment, Arthur folded John’s good clothes and replaced them in a chest. Arthur was twenty-four, fair-haired and freckled. He had been born on an estate near Basingstoke and sent to work as a housegroom at Hawkridge House when he was ten. As boys, he and John had fished, swum, wrestled and talked whenever John visited his uncle’s estate. At eleven, Arthur had shown John the Lady Tree and dared him to put his hand on the meeting of her thighs.

When John had suddenly arrived for good at the age of fourteen, Arthur (then twelve), like most of the estate residents who knew John, had been fascinated by the mysterious drama in a far-off place that had changed John’s name from Nightingale to Graffham and sent him into what was eventually understood to be hiding.

When the two boys first met again, Arthur was surly. He didn’t want John to think that he presumed on childhood intimacy. John was preoccupied and seemed distant. They went on for several months with Arthur resentful and over-quick to snatch off his hat, John distracted but feeling yet another loss. Then John began to heal, to talk, to seek Arthur’s opinions, and Arthur lowered his raised hackles.

As John slowly took over running the estate, he called more and more on Arthur’s slightly edgy, challenging help. The two youths relaxed slowly back into respectful companionship without quite regaining the childish ease. In the end, Arthur moved formally from housegroom into the role of John’s man. He gave John loyalty and an honesty that never flattered. In exchange, John stirred up Arthur’s safe and humdrum life. Arthur felt that he never knew exactly what would happen next. He also had the more superficial but gratifying joy of being close to the man at the centre; everyone believed he knew what John thought, even if he didn’t. Their connection was amiable, comfortable and trusting, but it had never been tested.

Now John watched Arthur thoughtfully, considered confiding in him, then decided to wait. He took his leather belt and dagger from the hook on the wall. He let himself through a side door into the little parlour above the chapel where he stood at the window and looked down into the basse-court.

The wet thump and sloshing of churns came from the open door of the dairy room. A boy was dreamily sweeping the brick pavement. A cat lay curled asleep in the sun on top of a barrel. Two washing women side-stepped out of the washroom, heads bent together over the heavy basket of wet linens they were carrying out onto the lawns to bleach in the sun. Nothing indicated the possible arrival of men-at-arms called by Malise.

Well, for certain, John thought wryly, I’ve not faced a day so filled with fascination for many years. I wonder if it will be my last one here. He used his wryness to mask from himself a puzzling sense of failure.

He went down into his office where he collected up a small bundle of papers, a bag of coins, and his pistol, all of which he locked into a cupboard set into the wall. He opened the doors and drawers of his collection, then closed them again. One of Malise’s men was strolling in the forecourt. John watched him for a moment. Then he left the office to sharpen his knife on the whetstone in the lean-to outside the kitchen.

His uncle brought him safely to Hawkridge House and left again at once, a single horseman and groom, seen only by the family of house servants and two stable grooms.

Aunt Margaret had already been resident on the estate for fifteen years and resigned to spinsterhood. At first she had twitched and exclaimed, and cried out that they would all be ruined if John were discovered and retaken there. Then, still muttering disasters, she had applied poultices to his sores and rashes that prison had bred (even an above-ground apartment). She half-drowned him in tisanes, decoctions and nourishing broths. She doused him for lice and fleas. She prayed for him twice a day on her knees in the little chapel, on the tiles of tulips and royal Spanish pomegranates, her head bent between the female acrobat, the monkey, and a cockerel being swallowed by a fish.

‘Poor, poor lamb. Poor doubly bereft little soul. My poor, dear nephew, so fierce, so unfortunate!’

‘I’m well, aunt! I’m well! I don’t need dosing!’

But she pursued him with mint and rosemary, with garlic and willow bark, and with the panic of suddenly acquired responsibility. Like his uncle, she understood better than John how the butterfly must now reverse nature and shrink back into a worm.

Two soldiers arrived a week after John did. They were making polite enquiries. No one who mattered had evidence to link Beester with his nephew’s escape, however much some might suspect it. John saw nothing of his aunt’s performance, of course, as he was hidden in the attics, but he picked up awestruck comments from the servants. The soldiers left later the same day, well-fed and unsuspecting.

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