The Memory Palace Page 15

  ‘I can’t strike a woman!’ croaked Gifford. ‘Someone, help me please!’

  As Wentworth pulled her off the minister, she saw that the battle had spread. Gifford’s men had found clubs. Arthur narrowly missed her with the fiery end of a log he had pulled from the edge of the blaze.

  ‘Go back to High House!’ Wentworth shouted at her. ‘Run! Find your horse.’

  When she ran at Gifford again, Wentworth grabbed her arm. ‘We don’t know what other violence they mean to do. I won’t have you harmed, do you hear?’ He gave her arm a little shake.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked. ‘You must help me!’ She turned to the fire.

  ‘Your cat is long dead. You can do nothing for it. Now, I order you to put yourself out of harm’s way!’ He looked away, assessing the battle. She saw that he wanted to join it, that she was holding him back.

  ‘Come, madam,’ said Rachel. ‘This is no place for either of us now.’

  ‘I go! I go!’ She pulled her arm from Wentworth’s grip. Saw him exchange glances with her maid as if she were a stubborn brat.

  ‘As soon as the child is born, I swear I will learn to fight like a man! Then you won’t be able to dismiss me so easily!’

  ‘You landed a few blows all the same,’ Rachel said as she led her away. ‘I vow you split his lip.’

  Zeal stomped across the field, crushing Gifford’s face beneath every step. She sucked her bleeding knuckle. The God who prompted such vicious cruelty could never be her God.

  ‘Gifford is the deceiver in our midst!’ she cried. ‘It’s he who sees darkness as light!’

  Behind her a scream cut across the ugly shouting around the fire.

  She turned in sudden terror. ‘Was that Master Wentworth’s voice? I must go back…’

  Rachel seized her sleeve. ‘Master Wentworth can look after himself better than most, madam. All I fear is facing him if I don’t get you back to High House. Our horses are just over there.’

  Zeal paced their chamber, reliving her attack on Gifford, hearing the shrieks of the burning cat and seeing the frantic shadow trying to break out of its wicker coffin.

  My poor little beast! She wanted to weep but was dried up by the heat of her rage.

  How could anyone wittingly cause such terror and pain to another living creature?

  ‘For the good of my soul!’ he said.

  My soul is not worth it. Any soul bought at the price of such meanness and cruelty is tarnished beyond redemption.

  She pushed open the window to listen, but May Common was too distant for the sounds of battle to carry. A faint smell of smoke, however, had already drifted up Sir Richard’s valley.

  I will never attend another of his services, she thought. No matter what fines or sanctions he imposes. I can’t listen to that man pretend to speak for God. Even to be seen sitting in his church would make me the worst sort of hypocrite.

  ‘What news?’ she demanded of Rachel when her maid came into the chamber with a soothing posset, which Zeal had not ordered.

  ‘A rout! A rout!’

  Zeal rushed to the window an hour later to see the returning warriors marching noisily up the valley towards High House. She ran down to meet them at Sir Richard’s front door.

  ‘Refreshment for the troops!’ shouted Wentworth. Sir Richard’s chief house groom rushed away to oblige.

  ‘Your poor beast is avenged,’ Wentworth told Zeal.

  ‘You should have seen them run!’ Arthur agreed. ‘But then we had us a real general.’ He nodded towards Wentworth, who was now congratulating the men. ‘Master John left us all in good hands, eh?’

  Having seen that her husband was uninjured, Zeal slipped back up to their chamber, relieved but unable to share the general high spirits. She also felt that she should perhaps have reproved Arthur for over-familiarity but she did not have the heart to dampen his jubilation at the Hawkridge victory.

  ‘That settled them! They seem to have misplaced their flaming swords.’ Philip had entered without knocking and still blazed with the heat of battle. His square jaw ploughed great furrows in the air, his feet thumped the floor. He took off his sword belt and slung it on its hook, then sat on the bed and began to pull off his boots. When she did not reply, he looked up.

  He has decided to sleep here, she thought. For the first time since our wedding night.

  ‘My poor darling! I’m sorry about your cat.’ He stood and embraced her. ‘I was once even jealous of the unfortunate beast. At least we saw them off and did some serious chastising of our own. I hope we might have quenched a little of that man’s lethal fervour.’

  She felt the delight still in him. ‘You were a soldier again.’

  His chest bucked against her cheek as he gave a snort of laughter. ‘More like a common brawler, but my fists still knew what to do.’ He released her in order to pace the room to use up unexpended force. ‘May I lie here tonight?’ The question was mere formality.

  He will talk freely tonight, she thought suddenly. He will want to relate other battles.

  He climbed into bed in his shirt and under-drawers.

  But when they sat side by side in Sir Richard’s great bed, he said, ‘Other memories also stir, I’m afraid.’

  She looked away from the hummock that had risen under his shirt.

  Wentworth did not pull the coverlet over his erection but contemplated it with his head to one side and his lower lip stuck out.

  ‘Will you touch him? No more than a touch…just once more in my life…for tonight.’

  Reluctantly, she reached out her hand. His penis felt warm and solid through the thin fabric. He is my husband. There’s no sin in it, she told herself. Though it feels like one. She shut her eyes lest she see John there in the room with them.

  Wentworth sighed. ‘Close your fingers for a moment.’ He laid his hand on her thigh and leaned back on his pillows. ‘I could die like this and ask nothing more of Heaven.’

  She did not believe him. The flesh in her grasp trembled and strained. It put her in mind of a dog held fast by a shout but coiled and quivering to spring into a run at the first breath of a command. She knew what both duty and gratitude said she should do, but she could not.

  They sat immobile, trapped in separate silences. At last, he gave her thigh a brisk pat. ‘Time to sleep.’

  She snatched back her hand and drew the coverlet up like a steel breastplate. He would not offer her a chapter of his story tonight after all. Nor would she ask.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘You are welcome, sir.’

  ‘My name is Philip. Now that you’ve touched my cock, perhaps you might care to call me by name.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  He laughed. ‘Well. The babe needs for you to sleep.’

  Sooner than she expected, he began to snore.

  I’m not certain I can manage this, she thought. She felt lonely, as if he had deserted her and left a changeling in his place.

  She slept badly. Woke once, but instantly pretended to be still deeply asleep.

  He still had his back turned, but she had no doubt what he was doing.

  I have driven him to the sin of Onan, she thought. I repay his kindness by endangering his soul. I consented to share his bed to save myself and John’s child. I lie beside him almost naked. I can’t blame him for not holding to his original conditions.

  She curled on her side, which was now the most comfortable position, and wrapped her arms around the small tight fist in her belly. At least I have a time of grace. He is unlikely to press any further until the child is born. She lay rigid until he sighed and lay down again to sleep. She remembered that foxy smell, like a horse chestnut in bloom.

  The triumph of the Hawkridge faction collapsed the next morning. The boy who fed the hens found Doctor Bowler behind the hencoop, still alive but senseless and bleeding. On questioning, the guards posted on the chapel confessed that they had decided to go home for an hour’s sleep shortly before dawn.

&
nbsp; ‘They must have posted a spy,’ said Sam. ‘To see when we left. We thought everyone had gone home to bed by then.’

  The men moved Bowler’s limp body onto Zeal’s old mattress in the estate office while Arthur rode to Bedgebury for the physician. Meanwhile, Zeal tied a pad of linen onto the still bleeding wound in the parson’s leg and bathed his other cuts and bruises with a decoction of fever-few and mallow. Mistress Margaret began to pound a fresh salve of marigolds, lanolin and honey.

  Zeal wiped a crust of blood from Bowler’s swollen green and purple face. ‘I think his nose may be broken,’ she said. ‘Dear God! Look at his poor hands!’

  ‘Doctor Bowler!’ she called softly to his senseless form. ‘Come back to us. I need you to christen my babe.’

  If I were a man, she thought, I would lie in ambush and slit the throat of the villain who could break the fingers of a musician’s hand.

  ‘They broke into his room through the chapel,’ Wentworth reported. ‘His fiddle is gone.’ He stood silently while the women worked on the injured man, until Bowler groaned and fluttered his eyelids.

  Sam and several of the other men wanted to set off for Bedgebury at once to retaliate.

  ‘Don’t be fools!’ said Wentworth. ‘How do you know who did it? Will you try to thrash the entire village? We shall find a better way.’

  At dinner that day, Sir Richard shocked Zeal by ordering her to apologize to Gifford.

  ‘But you know what he did!’ she protested.

  ‘And however much it grieves you, it was not against any law. Whereas, it seems that you pulled a tuft of hair out of his scalp and cut his lip so that he can hardly speak. He wishes to charge you with assault.’

  ‘That’s absurd! What of the attack on Doctor Bowler?’

  ‘There’s no proof at the moment that Gifford had anything to do with it.’

  ‘This is madness,’ said Zeal.

  ‘But true, alas. He will withdraw the charge if you apologize.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘I do recommend that you agree.’

  ‘I cannot believe that you support him, Sir Richard.’

  ‘I’d cheerfully whip him out of the parish, but I must also uphold the law. Which also involves trying to find Bowler’s assailants. Apologize, my dear, and save us all a great deal of trouble.’

  What happened next soon joined the body of local legend that quickly grew up around the Battle of the Bonfire.

  No one heard what was said between the two men. But it became known across at least five parishes that, the next morning, Philip Wentworth marched into Gifford’s church and up the aisle in the middle of a sermon, which the minister was valiantly delivering through swollen lips. Without a word to the startled congregation, Wentworth took the minister’s arm, hauled him into the vestry, and locked the door. The members of the congregation who felt bound to defend their minister had first pounded on the door, then fetched an axe and swords, but the door had opened again before they could force it.

  To their amazement, rather than stirring them to string up his visitor, Gifford assured his flock that all was well and that the wrath of God would strike any man, woman or child who violated the new and absolute peace he had just sworn to uphold. Furthermore, he meant to impose a severe penance on those who had taken part in the war of the night before last. And he ordered anyone who had so much as lifted a finger against the Hawkridge parson to deliver himself up at once to the parish constable. Privately, he withdrew the charge of assault against Mistress Wentworth.

  Wentworth refused to tell anyone, even Zeal, what he had said to Gifford behind the vestry door. He allowed only that it had to do with a bishop, treason and Gifford’s testicles.

  In spite of a constant drenching November rain, Philip then disappeared for the next four days, as if he had exhausted all strength to deal with his fellows. He also sent word that he would sleep in the tack room again, to stay on guard at Hawkridge House in case Gifford had doubted his word. Though he had once again put himself out of reach of her curiosity, Zeal was relieved on another count. Fearing a renewed attack on the chapel, Bowler had refused to obey her order to leave Hawkridge again for the safety of High House.

  ‘Doctor Gifford wanted our chapel razed along with the other churches!’ he protested.

  As she did not wish to upset the little parson any further, and Philip would now be within earshot, she left Bowler in his old chamber behind the chapel, staring at his bandaged left hand. He seemed not to notice that the Hawkridge family began to attend prayers at High House.

  After two more days, spent looking out of the window, and falling over the other people kept within by the rain, or else plodding through the downpour to Hawkridge, Zeal decided that she, too, would move back to her own estate. The little lodge at the top of the Hawkridge drive had a large central chamber, which could serve as a parlour, two sleeping chambers, one for her and one for Wentworth if he wished, and a comfortable loft for Rachel.

  It would mean finding other lodgings among her tenants and labourers for the house women who had been sleeping there. But though Sir Richard had been extremely kind, she knew that so many extra people strained his modest household. When the coming winter kept them indoors for weeks at a time, they would all be tempted to murder.

  Zeal also wanted to be near Doctor Bowler, who had to be fed like a baby and still needed opium syrup for the pain. She felt very far from all her people sleeping in the estate outbuildings. In any case, the half-hour walk between High House and Hawkridge had begun to tire her, even without the rain. And, though she still rode her little mare, Rachel fretted that she would endanger the child.

  ‘You should be riding in a chair, madam! I beg you.’

  ‘And what excuse could I give for such feebleness?’ Zeal replied. ‘I haven’t been married long enough. I can’t possibly announce the child for at least another fortnight.’

  The move would also relieve her from the constant scrutiny of so many eyes. Though she had taken to wearing a sleeveless coat, as if against the autumn chill, the lodge would offer more privacy than High House.

  When she next saw Wentworth, he agreed at once with her plan. ‘The tack room floor is hard on my old bones.’

  Zeal gave him a sideways look. His talk of advanced years no longer deceived her.

  He watched her counting eggs she hoped to sell at market to help pay for the new house.

  ‘Three dozen and five,’ she said.

  ‘In any case, we will need the tack room to house a poor fellow I met in an inn near Basingstoke.’ He looked at her expectantly, with his eyebrows raised, waiting for her question.

  In an inn near Basingstoke? Zeal lost count of the eggs. He goes to Basingstoke at times when we all imagine him to be fishing somewhere on the river?

  ‘Why are we housing another poor fellow when we have so many of our own?’ she asked carefully.

  ‘I think he might prove useful.’ Wentworth picked up an egg and turned it in his hand. ‘He’s a discharged soldier. Reduced to begging for his meals. All he needs is a warm bed and better rations than he had with the king in Scotland.’

  ‘How much longer can you contrive to string out the suspense?’ she asked. ‘Holding back information is clearly an unfortunate trait of yours.’

  Philip Wentworth grinned. ‘He’s a former sapper, once a siege engineer in the Low Countries. We began by discussing the mining of the walls at Breda and arrived quite naturally at the nature of Hampshire rock.’ He placed the egg to complete a half-dozen in the bottom of her wooden box. ‘The weather is clearing at last. If we give him a rough plan of the shape and size of what you want, my Master Quoynt can level the site and begin to blast out the cellars. Clearing rock will give our young men something better to do with themselves than go to war with Bedgebury.’

  As she sifted sawdust around the first layer of eggs in the wooden box, Zeal reflected that her taciturn husband seemed surprisingly happy to talk to strangers. It would not surprise her if the wily old man
had not overheard the soldier talking and mounted a direct assault. She had begun to feel that things seldom happened to her new husband by chance.

  22

  Francis Quoynt arrived with assorted pieces of baggage on 13 November, barely noticed in the furore over Doctor Bowler. A thin quiet man, he had stayed out of the way in the tack room when he was not wandering purposefully on the slope of Hawk Ridge. Once he set to work a few days later, however, no one could miss his presence.

  The cream jumped in the skimming trough. Dust fell from roofs. The explosive thud bounced back and forth between the ridges like thunder and set the estate dogs barking on their chains. A flight of white doves burst up from the paddock, followed by a panic of ducks from the ponds. The sheep bolted to the farthest ends of their fields. In the horse barn, the grooms held onto halters and talked to their charges. The dairy herd had been moved that morning into the Far, down river below the mill where the sound would be muffled by distance and trees.

  ‘Begun at last!’ Zeal hugged herself. All around her, voices cheered. Across the valley the cloud of dust and debris was just beginning to settle back onto the southern slope of Hawk Ridge. ‘It looks as I imagine war.’

  ‘With reason,’ replied Wentworth. ‘Master Quoynt is as gifted at bringing down a wall as he is at preparing to raise one.’

  She stood bundled in a thick shawl outside the lodge beside Wentworth. Bowler sat nearby wrapped in blankets on a chair, guarding a line of estate children who had been warned by Wentworth under threat of a thrashing to stay put. All work on the estate had paused. Spectators crowded the near banks of the fishponds. Zeal could see the tiny figures of some of the younger men, from Bedgebury, High House and Far Beeches as well as Hawkridge, courting danger on the ridge above the site of the new house. The sky was filled with wheeling, crying black birds, crows, thrushes and sparrows. From the beech hanger came the harsh protest of pheasants and jays.