The Memory Palace Read online

  Now that she had agreed to marry him, she had difficulty in looking straight at him. From quick uneasy glances, she saw he had a scar on the edge of his slightly box-like jaw, and deep lines from nostril to mouth. And a strong nose with a square tip, where two paler points sat just under the skin. Grey hairs curled from the open neck of his shirt. His wool stockings were wrinkled, his feet shoved into soft, scuffed leather house slippers. She smelled wormwood against moths and a faint alcoholic mist when he exhaled.

  The firelight coiled at the bottom of her glass. She did not know whether or not she had responded to his toast.

  For forty pounds a year, Wentworth occupied this small parlour and an equally small sleeping chamber beyond. He lived frugally, without a manservant. Through the far door, she saw the dark shape of a narrow bed, with curtains on plain square-sectioned posts. She had seen these rooms only once before, with his permission, when she first took stock of her new realm. Wentworth had otherwise forbidden all entrance to his rooms, except twice a year to clean.

  His floor now seemed to slant. The corners of the room were not quite true. Thirty feet beyond his door, the corridor leading from the back stairs to what had been the front of the house dived suddenly downwards and opened onto the night.

  ‘What if the rest of the corridor gives way?’

  ‘I’m not going to retract my offer,’ he said.

  She nodded mutely.

  ‘Drink a little,’ he said. ‘It’s no small thing we propose to do. But not so great as I suspect it feels to you just now. Drink a little. Steady yourself.’ He drank. ‘It helps me to sleep.’

  Her chin jerked up. ‘Before I lose my courage altogether, I must speak honestly…’ In spite of herself, she looked at the bed. ‘You might yet want to withdraw.’

  He smiled and waited.

  ‘You said this morning that you hoped only for friendship. But you might have said that just to win me round. So that we have no misunderstanding, I must make it clear that I cannot love you.’

  ‘How many marriages insist on love?’ He poured himself more wine. ‘I might, in time, aspire to your affection. Does that terrify you? As for the rest…’ He nodded over his shoulder at the bed. ‘I’ve put all that behind me.’

  Their eyes met briefly. She sighed.

  ‘I want you to be certain,’ he said.

  ‘I do have one other condition.’

  Wentworth looked at her sharply, then raised his eyebrows in good-humoured question.

  ‘I know I have no right to impose any conditions at all…’

  ‘It has never been your unassuming meekness for which I admired you.’

  She blinked at the idea that he had admired her at all, then plunged onwards. ‘I must know who you are.’

  The good humour vanished. His face set into thin, tight lines. ‘I said I used to be a soldier. Is that not enough?’

  ‘No. I need to know if Philip Wentworth is your true name. Will I truly be Mistress Wentworth, or should my name be something else? What sort of adventurer were you? Why did you bury yourself here?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I beg the truth from you as a wedding gift.’

  ‘I can’t give it.’

  ‘I swear that nothing you tell me will change my mind about the marriage, but you must see that I need to know more of the man I will be living with.’

  ‘Live with the man I am now. That other one has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘It was only the promise of making his acquaintance that got me down from the roof.’

  Wentworth closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead.

  ‘Can’t you see that the more you refuse, the more necessary it becomes for you to tell me?’ She stood up and handed him her empty glass. ‘Otherwise I retract my acceptance. How can I pledge myself, even in friendship, to a man so vile that he can’t confess what he has done even to his own wife? If you can’t tell me more, then you should never have confessed anything at all!’

  Philip Wentworth shook his head again, but this time with wry humour. ‘Caught in my own snare.’ He crossed the room to set their glasses on his worktable, where he stood for several moments with his back to her. ‘Is your condition absolute?’ he asked without turning around. ‘Will you really retract if I don’t agree? Think what that means and take your time in answering.’ He leaned his weight onto his clenched fists and waited.

  ‘Would you still help me to die, as you first promised?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She shut her eyes. After a long while, she said, ‘It is absolute.’ Watery knees tipped her back into her chair.

  ‘I was merely a soldier, as I said. Nothing more. But it’s not a world a man wants to share with women.’

  ‘Master Wentworth,’ she begged, ‘please understand! All my life, the things I did not know and could not expect have always brought me the greatest grief.’

  ‘You have nothing to fear from me.’

  ‘That may be, but I have learned to fear ignorance more than I fear death. I can’t bear knowing that I don’t know and waiting for something to happen that I can’t see coming. I can’t bear what I imagine. And that’s the truth.’ She blew out a deep breath. ‘Reasonable or not.’

  He turned and studied her with a slightly chilly expression. She saw no trace in either his eyes or bearing of the genial old hermit who had proposed marriage.

  How far we have already moved, she thought, even from where we were on the riverbank.

  ‘I can’t go on living on any other terms.’ She looked at him pleadingly.

  ‘What if I said that I was lying, up there on the roof? That I had nothing to confess? No other life than the one you see?’

  ‘I would know that you are lying now.’

  This answer seemed to please rather than anger him. He eyed her a moment longer. ‘Concedo,’ he said at last. He held his arms out to the side like a defeated swordsman exposing his front to his foe. ‘I accept your terms. You shall have your gift of truth, on our wedding night.’

  Scalding relief told her how much she had wanted him to agree.

  ‘But in return I have one condition of my own.’ He crossed back to the fire. ‘Stand up again so I can see your face in the firelight.’ He took her hand to help her rise. ‘I, for my part, cannot live with uncertainty. You must lay down the sword you have just threatened me with and swear that so long as I live and you are married to me, you will never again threaten to take your own life.’ He held both hands now. ‘Look at me and swear.’

  She nodded. ‘Why would I want to?’

  ‘Swear,’ he repeated.

  ‘I swear.’

  ‘So we’re agreed at last?’

  Zeal could now only nod wordlessly. The relative simplicity of the choice between life and death was reshaping itself into something more subtle and infinitely more complex.

  I should tell him about the seven years, she thought. And that John will be sending for me.

  But those complications were beyond her at this moment.

  ‘I shall speak to Doctor Bowler tomorrow,’ Wentworth said. ‘And seek Sir Richard’s advice on how best to obtain a special licence. I see no need to delay by posting banns if we can avoid it, do you? The sooner we can wed, the better for the babe.’

  Rather than make the long walk back to High House at that hour, she made herself a nest among the ledgers and piles of salvage in the Hawkridge Estate office. Then she curled up under a smoky quilt on a feather bed that smelt of wet hen, still trying to comprehend what had just happened.

  She did not have to kill herself, after all. She was to be married again. The Hawkridge Hermit had agreed to open himself to her like a gift. For the first time since his proposal that morning, it occurred to her that the balance of power between them might not tilt entirely in his favour. That thought made her like him even better. Nothing he might tell her would make her dislike him now.

  She turned onto her side and wrapped her arms tenderly around her belly. John sat at his table in the of
fice – the table she now used – his face serious and intent, acorn-coloured hair falling over one dark, fierce eyebrow. One foot was tucked back under the stool. The other was stretched under the table, showing the long elegant line of his thigh. She lay fondly watching his ghost. For such a gentle, schooled man, he looked deceptively like a pirate. He glanced up and smiled, then bent his head again.

  Our child can live, after all, she told him. I no longer have to pretend it isn’t there.

  She no longer needed to keep the door of her heart locked against it.

  When she looked at the table again, John had gone. But she still felt him in the air around her. In the child.

  We shall manage somehow.

  She drifted, saw herself waking on a summer morning in bed with John, their babe kicking its feet, as warm and fragrant as a kitten between them. Though of course the child would be older by then. In her dream, Philip Wentworth was the child’s grandfather.

  She woke the next morning with a sense of startled well-being. It was all still true. She did not have to die. She was to marry Master Wentworth instead. Soon she could carry John’s child openly and rejoice in its birth. She would rebuild Hawkridge House to help fill the time.

  She turned her cheek against the smoky pillow. Only seven years to be survived. With the child, and work, she could bear it now.

  The ginger tom that John had given her as a kitten had found her in the night. It now rearranged itself against her feet with a thump of protest at being disturbed. She placated it by wiggling her toes while she tested the steadiness of her new humour. She threw back the covers. The paralysing spell of the last weeks had indeed lifted. Today, she would regain her grip and take command once more.

  In her chemise and wrapped in a blanket, she sat at once at the office table and began to write.

  Zeal’s Work Book – October 1639

  Salvage what we can from ruins, to rebuild with and clear the site

  Borrow feather beds and blankets for winter sleeping

  Set all maids to weave new blankets

  Dry feathers in ovens to make new beds…

  She raised her head while she thought what to write next. If John had been there, he would have helped her with the list of tasks for the gardens.

  He had left an old coat, hanging on a peg behind the door. Apart from his glove, the quill pen, and a few books and curiosities kept here in the office, all his other belongings had burned in the fire. She got up and put on the coat.

  It was made of rough wool from their sheep, dyed brownish black with walnut skins. The sleeves hung down over her hands and the bottom of its skirts fell almost to her ankles. She raised her arm to her nose to sniff the sleeve and caught her breath sharply, then inhaled again. Through the smokiness, she thought she could smell the warm salty sweetness of his body. She ducked her head to sniff inside the coat. A miasma of his being inhabited it with her. She pulled it tightly around her and his child, rolled back the cuffs and began to write again.

  Set hedges

  Plant spinach, kale, purslain and poppies…

  She imagined that he whispered in her ear.

  …Set artichokes, strawberries and garlic cloves

  Transplant leeks

  Salve sheep against the scab…

  Wait, she told him. I’ve just remembered something else.

  Buy needles for sewing new clothes

  Buy 20 ells of fine linen to make Christmas shirts for the women…

  She set down the pen. She needed a morning to write it all. But it was a start.

  Without Rachel’s help, she did not try to put on the corset she had thrown last night onto the office table. In any case, it was filthy with soot. Still wearing John’s coat, she set off for High House, to reassure Rachel that she had not disappeared for a second time, and to put on her working clothes. Then she would assess the possibilities for salvage.

  8

  She left her mare grazing nearby. Then she picked up her skirts and stepped through the charred brick doorway into what was left of Hawkridge House. The remains of the oak door looked like a crust of burnt toast.

  The cat had refused to follow her and now sat outside on a piece of broken masonry in the pose of a heraldic beast, watching her with courteous disbelief.

  Tuddenham had warned her that there might still, even three weeks later, be pockets of hot coals in the rubble. Crunching over the lumpy black landscape that had been the hall, she imagined that the soles of her shoes were growing hot, that her petticoats flared into flames and transformed her into a burning flower.w

  Her foot crushed what might once have been a stool leg. She stared down at the glistening black fragments, then at a puddle of dark oily water. Then at the jagged rim of a charred wall.

  Here I once lovingly rubbed honey-scented beeswax onto the wooden panelling, she thought. Only three weeks ago.

  In spite of her revived spirits, the blackened wreckage made her feel light-headed and queasy. She was not alone. Everyone on the estate still walked a little uncertainly, as if drunk or ill. They forgot simple things, would break off whatever they were doing and go to stand and stare at what was left of the house. They told each other the same stories again and again. How Master John had stamped out embers on the precipitous bake house roof. How fish had been carried up from the ponds in the fire-fighters’ pails and fried by accident. How the children had brought rain by singing hymns, though not in time to save the great hall or long gallery. They compared how many inches of hair and beard had been singed off. They debated how the fire had started – which chimney might have held a bird’s nest, which fire might have bred lethal sparks as so often happened, or whether malice, even, might have played a part. They wept suddenly without warning over trivial losses.

  Near her right foot, a carved oak rosette fallen from the great staircase gleamed with buried fires like a crow’s back. It looked solid, perfectly intact, but she knew that at the lightest touch, it would crumble to dust. For a moment, she froze, afraid to move. She felt that her whole life lay lost under this black, unfamiliar ruin. The shapes of the last three years, of her marriage to Harry, were fragile shells of ash.

  The stairs and the dog-gate had burned. The upper landing hung like a black flap from the slanted floor of the upper hall. Her charred marriage bed had crashed through the floor into the back parlour, where it seemed to struggle to rise to its feet like a cow, hindquarters first. The massive headboard tilted. Black ribbons of the costly hangings that had so gratified Harry fluttered gently in the open air.

  She could see past it right through the back wall of the house to the nymphs around the ponds. The cat now crouched in the grass studying the charred remains of a fish.

  She looked back at the bed. Heard the hollow chomping of her mare, children shouting, cooing from the dovecote, the thump and slosh of a churn. A woman laughed loudly in the bake house. A creamy dove landed on the shoulder of one of the nymphs.

  My life is not in ruins at all, she thought suddenly. Only my life with Harry has burned. All I have lost, in the end, is this house. Harry’s house. The rest remains. So long as I am patient and steadfast. The child. John, who loves me. My people. My estate. Even the tribe of magnificent water spirits who so kindly look after three very ordinary fish ponds for me.

  She took three crunching steps. Then she jumped and landed hard with both feet. Crunch, crunch. She walked to the bed and kicked it. A half-burned foot-post shivered into a shower of black chunks. She kicked again. Shattered the footboard. Stamped the fragments into dust. Burying Harry and his lies and his disdain for all her efforts to please him. She yanked down the shreds of the hangings in one succulent, gratifying rip.

  So much for his ruinous extravagance!

  She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely. Clear it all away and build a new house. Her own house, not Harry’s.

  Then she spied a gleam, pulled a diamond of unbroken glass from under a dusty black skeletal bench. She spat on it and rubbed with her thumb. When she
held it up to the sky, a hot coin of sunlight fell on her cheek.

  I will have such light in my new house, she thought. My house, which I shall build. Not Harry’s. With great windows so that even on the darkest days we will be able to see clearly. Mistress Margaret will not need her spectacles except to sew.

  With black hands and smuts on her face, she imagined the God-like act of creation. Ex nihilo. She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely, knock down everything but the chapel and fashion her own place on earth exactly as she wanted it, where she wanted it. A prodigy house, shaped by her own imagining, as some men built houses in the shape of their initials, or of a cross as witness to their faith.

  She gazed at Hawk Ridge, rising beyond the fishponds and the Shir. All would be fit and in just proportion, echoing the vaster proportions of God’s universe. Glass, brick, stone, timber, both seasoned and green. Tall, wide-eyed windows to let in the sun and scour away shadows. Generous fireplaces to heat every room, moulded fire-backs, drainpipes like young trees, friezes as rich in incident as ballads on subjects of her choosing. Lintels, columns, door panels, handles, the iron butterflies of hinges, nails. She was as ignorant as a pig about all of these, but she would learn. After all, the fourteen-year-old schoolgirl had learned to run an estate. Unexpectedly she had arrived on the safe, joyful solid ground of intense purpose.