The Memory Palace Read online

  ‘We are ordered by Doctor Gifford to burn the pope.’ Doctor Bowler held a letter between the tips of his fingers, as if it were the very end of a lighted candle. ‘And I must read out a prayer he has written, at our service on Gunpowder and Treason Day. I have prayed for guidance before troubling you, but find that I cannot judge the broader…’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Let me see it.’ As she took Gifford’s letter, Zeal noted that his writing did not resemble that of the anonymous letter.

  ‘There seems to me…’ said Bowler, ‘…well, a smell of…at least, I would feel uneasy speaking such words…’

  ‘You are right to resist,’ exclaimed Zeal. ‘This is treason! An open attack on the queen for adhering to the Church of Rome! And here, here, he prays to protect Parliament from all rebellion against the good of the people, even if the rebels should be royal. As if the king could rebel against his own people!’

  In neither religion nor political belief did Bedgebury parish, any more than the rest of England, fall neatly into opposing halves like a sawn log. The fault lines more nearly resembled the crazed cracking of smashed ice or shattered window glass. There might have seemed to be a rough correlation between religion and politics. The majority of Puritans were Londoners, most often merchants, tradesmen and apprentices. A majority of courtiers were Anglicans. Yet there were Puritan noblemen and Arminian cobblers, just as there were Parliamentarian earls and farmers who were loyal king’s men.

  In Bonfire and Treason Day, James, that most pragmatic of kings, had given his subjects what they needed – a secular and somewhat ambiguous holiday. As both king and Parliament had been spared, Royalists and parliamentarians, Anglicans and Puritans could all celebrate with a clear conscience. Gifford, like many others, exploited this ambiguity to his own ends. In this case, he cited the church wardens and parish vestry as his authority.

  ‘I am on the rack,’ said Bowler. ‘Also received from Winchester a new prayer written by the Archbishop Laud…makes a special point of the sin of rebellion against the Crown…D’you think he had got wind of Gifford’s message?’

  ‘May I see the archbishop’s prayer?’

  While Bowler went to fetch it, Zeal studied Gifford’s handwriting again. The minister’s small tight script marched in precise straight lines across the page, interrupted by occasional florid capitals. She tried to judge whether this same hand could possibly have made those mad, slashing characters of the anonymous letter.

  ‘I see that Parliament sits safely in both prayers,’ she said when she had read the archbishop’s text. ‘His reverence would have us rejoice that it was preserved along with the king.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I won’t be dragged into other men’s quarrels. Read neither. Merely offer the usual thanks – the king’s life preserved, etcetera.’

  Bowler looked deeply unhappy. ‘I would not wish to provoke any further…in the circumstances…’

  ‘Don’t fear,’ she said. ‘I doubt that the archbishop will trouble himself to send spies. As for Doctor Gifford, he’s in the wrong this time. I can’t think how he dares to write such dangerous poison. In any case, we’ve already routed his would-be Myrmidons once. And furthermore,’ Zeal added, ‘Sir Richard, with his usual generosity is paying again this year for both the pealing in our chapel and your sermon. He will join us. Even Gifford can’t force you to preach treason in front of a magistrate who is also a minister of parliament.’

  Bowler nodded without conviction. ‘Do we dare have hymns?’

  ‘Most certainly! I never feel reverent until I’ve heard you and Jamie send up your voices to delight the ear of God.’

  Bowler gave a shaky sigh, but speculation already misted his eyes. ‘And should I prepare music for dancing at the fire? You know Gifford’s views…’

  ‘That man doesn’t speak for England and he most certainly does not speak for me. Let him try to prevent two parishes from taking their traditional exercise and delight! In any case, Bonfire and Treason Night is not a church festival. We are ordered by statute to celebrate. It would be high treason not to dance!’

  She read both prayers again and sighed. ‘As for burning the pope…I believe that our neighbours, the Wildes, were formerly Catholics. Peace and good fellowship will not be served by such naming of the enemy.’ She held up the two prayers. ‘With these weighty stones grinding on each other, we must try to stay from between them.’

  Zeal’s queasiness suddenly stopped troubling her. As she had determined, she wrote at last to John, a cheerful evasive letter, brimming with detail of their daily life and plans for rebuilding, but short on substance. The only truth she trusted to survive the long journey to reach him was how she missed him and feared for his safety. A little lightened, though still uneasy in conscience, she waited for his reply.

  With renewed fervour, she now threw herself into the preparations for the Bonfire and Treason festival. It came at a good time, when the weather was often still very fine, before the darkness and cold of winter. And because it was a secular holiday, it escaped the restrictions on drinking and dancing which dampened the festivals of the church calendar.

  The bonfire itself offered a good way to get rid of the last of the rubbish from the old house. Men and youths from Bedgebury and all outlying estates constructed it on the May Common, where the May pole had stood before Gifford ordered it taken down six years earlier. Half-burnt furniture, charred curtains, the surviving corners of blackened carpets, and the old front door all joined the heap, along with hedge trimmings saved and dried for the night, old fence palings, musty straw, and enough good logs to make a firm foundation for the rest. Many other households threw on their own combustibles. Groups of people could often be seen admiring the swelling pile and discussing how it might improve it.

  Zeal set Mistress Margaret to making soothing unguents for burns, as every year some young fool singed his breeches trying to leap the fire, or a firework shot off in the wrong direction, or hot fat from the roasting pit spat into the face of a cook.

  Doctor Bowler walked about deaf and unseeing, humming fragments of tunes. He practised dance tunes to be sure of remembering every note and re-strung his bow to ready it for hours of vigorous play.

  Half-grown children taught the smallest ones, too young to have attended the last year’s bonfire, to do the Shepherd’s Hey and Strip the Willow. In the bake house kitchen, Aunt Margaret and Agatha oversaw the making of pickles and kept salted meat back from the autumn preserving. Hawkridge would also contribute two hogs heads of ale, and two sheep, which grazed under appraising eyes, in ignorance of their starring role to come.

  The Archbishop of London might not send spies to Hampshire, but Zeal noticed three Bedgebury faces in the Hawkridge chapel on the morning of 5 November.

  Wentworth noted them as well. She saw him lower his chin and stare at the intruders briefly. Through most of the service, he sat with his lower lip slightly stuck out and his brows pulled together. He was tardy in his responses and mumbled almost as an afterthought. Twice Zeal had to point out their place in the prayer book.

  As they sat behind her, Zeal could not see whether or not the visitors joined in singing the hymns. They made no disturbance during Bowler’s service, however. Nor did they seem to object to the anthem sung by Bowler’s choir, with Jamie’s sublime descant floating above them all. After the service, they left quietly, but Zeal felt uneasy nevertheless as she watched them go.

  That afternoon, she went to the office to rest for a few moments, as she had more and more often begun to feel the need. She touched John’s coat, then lay on her smoky pallet and looked for the cat, which should have been hunched asleep in the window. Her growing need to sit down, or even recline, had delighted the cat as much as it irritated her, as if she did it solely to oblige the creature with a lap.

  I intend to dance tonight, she told herself. By Christmas, the child will show and no one will allow me. She suddenly remembered the firm warmth of Wentworth’s hands on her waist when they had danced toget
her at the wedding.

  Who would have thought he would be so nimble? I wonder what other skills he is hiding. Even though I’m so tired every night, I must make him continue his tale. He entertained me well enough on our wedding night but told me almost nothing of what I want to know. And now he uses the child as an excuse to put me off.

  When she woke, the cat had still not come to sit on her feet. She looked briefly in the gardens at its favourite perches, and the spot by the upper pond.

  It must have gone to the barns for a mouse, or to the paddock for a young dove. There was no time to look further as she had to ride to High House to dress for the evening.

  Zeal sat happily on a barrel on May Common and fanned her scarlet face. Sweat, beer and smoke perfumed the night air, which was otherwise clear and cool enough to make people happy to stand by the fire. She was startled by her own unexpected sense of well-being.

  A perfect evening, she thought. God is smiling on us. He agrees with the king that men must have time for joy as well as work. I’m sure that John would agree too.

  She was a tiny bit drunk, and ecstatic from dancing. Content now just to watch. Everyone so transported, sweating, happy. Arthur swung past, grinning like a benign demon with Rachel in his arms. Bowler on fiddle, Sam on his drum, a pipe. An unfamiliar taborer from Far Beeches. All those neat feet, one minute spinning in tiny compact self-contained worlds, then, at signal from the music, launching into a joyous charge across the earth. They cantered, jounced. The dancers became a single creature with one mind. Like birds in flight they wheeled, interlocking paths, miraculously always missing. Never colliding. Always arriving, again and again, at fresh beginnings.

  ‘Country pleasures!’ called Sir Richard as he passed her again clutching Mistress Wilde.

  Zeal saw hope in the dance. You lose your partner, she thought. Go seeking, experience the miracle of finding him again. Move on and with every new partner, play out the same miracle of racing geometry. Shatter. Regroup, order, laughing panic and once more, the blissful resolution into order – your first partner, a double line, an arch of arms, a circle of red, fire-lit faces, beaming, frowning in concentration. They were together, fitting, teetering together through the universe trusting their safe place in the shape of the dance. Their faces gleamed in the firelight.

  ‘Madam, you’d best not dance any more!’ Rachel was carried away again.

  Zeal loved them all. The feel of their hard-working hands, toughened like her own. The smell of their sweat, their excitement. John’s people. Her people. Her creatures. Her family.

  How lucky I am, after all.

  Only a few weeks before, she had determined to kill herself. Now she rested her hands on her tight rounded belly and blessed Philip Wentworth, even though he had disappeared soon after they arrived at May Common and she had not danced with him after all.

  A few people watched the dancing with pinched lips and whispers. Some had voiced disappointment that no effigy was to be burnt.

  ‘A small tithe for our parson! Drink for the new bell ropes!’ Sam, the smith, now stood at the ale barrels, shouting like a fair ground hawker, having lent his drum to someone else. Tuddenham, with red nose and eyes like an eager squirrel served the beer and collected the pennies.

  Suddenly Bowler’s fiddle squawked discordantly. His bow hand dropped to his side. The music stopped.

  Zeal stood up, frowning. The dance crumbled back into single beings, a little dazed by their transformation.

  ‘Lechery and idleness!’ Gifford cut through the crowd like Moses come down from the mountain. A tight group of his male parishioners followed close behind. ‘You overheat your loins and stir up obscenity!’

  ‘And I thought we were enjoying ourselves!’ cried a man’s voice.

  Gifford spied his target. ‘Doctor Bowler! Playing a fiddle to encourage wantonness!’

  ‘Don’t he do it well?’ shouted a woman.

  Bowler lowered his instrument and stood at bay.

  ‘Oh, my fallen children!’ Gifford sounded close to tears. ‘I grieve for you all!’ Then he saw Zeal. ‘And you, Mistress Wentworth, what example do you set with your lewd cavorting?’

  ‘I obey the king by celebrating, Doctor. I, for one, am not turned rebel against the Crown.’

  ‘Do you imagine that a temporal injunction is your line of scarlet thread which shall preserve you from the Lord’s vengeance?’

  ‘God can not possibly hate joy as much as you would have it seem!’ cried Zeal. ‘Where is the sin in simple pleasures?’

  ‘You are wilfully blind, madam! Or already lost beyond all hope. How can you encourage those under your authority to give themselves to such vain, frivolous wasting of their precious souls? Cavorting like beasts, stirring lasciviousness.’

  He turned next on Tuddenham and the smith. ‘As for you, remember how Christ served the moneychangers in the Temple! How dare you claim to serve your Lord with drunkenness and venality?’

  ‘“Shall mortal man be more just than God?”’ asked Bowler, tremulous but defiant.

  ‘Give me that devil’s instrument! Onto the fire with it, where it belongs!’ Gifford reached for the fiddle.

  Bowler bared his teeth and kicked at Gifford’s shins while holding his fiddle at arm’s length. Gifford seized the instrument in both hands. Doctor Bowler sank his teeth into the minister’s wrist.

  Gifford yelped and staggered back.

  ‘Doctor Gifford!’ Zeal shouted across the growing hubbub. ‘You are welcome to join us but you may not stay to spoil another festival for me!’

  ‘I’m bleeding!’ exclaimed Gifford. ‘He’s a mad dog!’

  ‘Which will it be?’ asked Zeal.

  ‘Madam, unspeakable torment awaits you unless you let me guide you to the light.’

  ‘I have light enough, sir. This fire will do me nicely.’

  ‘Yes!’ Gifford pounced as if she had suddenly spoken his cue. ‘Your pagan fire. I see that you do not burn a figure of the pope as I ordered. Are you dainty on that point? Does your Doctor Bowler perhaps nurse a secret reverence for Babylon?’

  ‘I ordered that there should be no pope on our fire. I see nothing godly in miming death and baying with frustration that we can’t burn the real man.’

  ‘I smell rebellion,’ said Gifford. ‘And rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft…’

  ‘You are the rebel, sir, not I! With your treasonous prayer! In your place, I would guard my tongue and hope to keep my head in place.’

  Gifford took this defiance with a smile. ‘You threaten me with puny temporal power, but I wield the sword of Eternity. I will have this fire be as the fire of the Lord and burn away all sin, as it will destroy all enemies of England, even the mightiest…as it will consume all followers of the Antichrist!’

  He waved his followers forwards.

  Four of them carried a straw and wicker effigy of a man dressed in a loose robe of tattered silk. A paper mitre dangled by one edge from his head. As his bearers advanced, he quivered in their hands and gave out a faint scrabbling sound.

  ‘Throw the Antichrist into the flames.’

  There were scattered cheers as the straw and wicker figure was pitched onto the top of the pyre. Some faces looked at Zeal with dismay. But all eyes turned back to the fire as crackling flames seized the tips of the straw and turned them to glowing orange wires. The silk robe caught. The figure stood in an envelope of fire.

  It gave an unearthly shriek. The wicker head jerked. A shadow writhed inside it.

  Several women in the crowd screamed. The crowd gaped. A few applauded the verisimilitude.

  The figure shrieked again, a high-pitched desperate yowl, unidentifiable as man, demon or beast. The figure twitched and fell onto its face in the centre of the flames.

  ‘There’s something alive in there!’ shouted Zeal.

  Another wail of terror and pain pinched her heart and lungs in a cold vice.

  Then two or three voices shouted, ‘Death to England’s enemies!’
r />   ‘What have you done?’ screamed Zeal. The heat was as solid and impassable as a wall.

  The wail stopped abruptly. The flames snapped and roared around the silence where the scream had been.

  Zeal saw Gifford watching her with a twist of satisfaction on his lips. She was trembling.

  ‘Do you object to the execution of our enemies, madam?’

  ‘What creature did you put into the effigy?’ Now she smelled burning fur.

  ‘Your creature, madam. A beast that is grown familiar enough, I hear, to share your bed. A witch’s familiar. I fear that Satan is made all too welcome at Hawkridge.’

  Three men tried to pull her off him.

  ‘God hates you!’ she yelled at him as she beat at his head with her fists. She would kill him. ‘You are the evil in our parish! Wicked man! Wicked, wicked, cruel man!’

  ‘Fetch Master Wentworth!’ someone shouted over the growing mêlée. ‘Where’s Wentworth?’

  The repulsed Bedgebury myrmidons had returned to the attack and found eager opponents.

  ‘Mistress! Leave him!’ Arthur hauled at her shoulders.

  The minister’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction and fear. ‘That creature would have seduced you!’ he cried. ‘Even if you did not yet know it as a familiar, it would have seduced you! It perished for the good of your soul.’

  Beating at the source where the words poured out, she cut her knuckle against his teeth.

  Gifford raised his forearm against her blows. ‘I will not let you be damned, mistress!’

  ‘Zeal! Let him go!’ Wentworth’s urgent voice reached her at last. Zeal saw that she had fastened one hand in Gifford’s rusty hair and the other on his collar, with which she was trying to choke him.