The Memory Palace Read online

  Then it occurred to her to wonder what part Master Wentworth might want to play.

  He won’t want to do all that talking, she decided. To all those joiners and masons and painters and glaziers. He’ll most likely be content to carry on fishing and leave it to me. She could almost love him just for keeping her alive to arrive in this moment.

  The cat was back on its plinth, now curled as if asleep but green eyes watched her above the curve of its tail as she carried the glass windowpane across the rubble and laid it carefully on the grass. A watery shape rippled in its depths as her hand moved over it, like an oracle in a well.

  When three boys raced towards her down the curve of the drive, Zeal raised her head without premonition or alarm.

  9

  ‘Horses coming, mistress!’ Tuddenham’s son, Will, spoke for the three of them. ‘And ox carts.’ All three boys pointed back up the drive towards the high road.

  John has returned! Zeal thought, against reason, with a surge of suffocating joy. He never sailed! Doctor Bowler’s prayers have been answered. The Lady Tree exerted her influence after all.

  How will I tell Wentworth?

  ‘Four carts…’ ‘No, three!’ ‘Four!’

  Why would John have carts?

  ‘Empty ones,’ said one of the boys. ‘And lots of men.’

  ‘Are they soldiers?’ she asked in alarm. ‘Wearing insignia?’

  The boys stared at each other in excited disagreement. Soldiers? Yes, no. But one of the gentlemen on horseback could have been an officer.

  Best prepare for soldiers with requisition orders. And it won’t matter which sort they are, they’ll take, either way. Mustering and provisioning on the way north to fight the Scots, or come back without pay, hungry and filled with rage.

  Rachel, her maid, appeared at the forecourt gate, which led to the bake house and stable block. ‘Madam, did you know…?’

  Dogs began to bark.

  ‘We must hide the food,’ said Zeal.

  She sent the two house grooms, Geoffrey and Peter, both just old enough for mustering, off to hide in the woods. They reeled away under the weight of six flitches of bacon each. Rachel and the dairywoman began to pack eggs and cheeses into baskets. Tuddenham sent half a dozen children to try to catch and hide the best laying hens. The horses had already been turned out into the Far. The beer would have to look after itself.

  She sniffed her sleeve, which smelled of smoke like everything else. Her hands, and most likely face, were black with soot.

  The first ox cart creaked out of the tunnel of beeches that lined the drive, followed by three more. All were ominously empty except for a half dozen small bundles, some tools, and what seemed to be long poles wrapped in canvas. Seven men, including the drivers. All strangers. Two muskets between them, but no pikes or swords that she could see. Nor armour, nor regimental badges.

  Bailiffs, come to enforce the king’s levies? They’ll not find much worth taking.

  Last out of the trees rode two horsemen, a richly dressed gentleman and his manservant. The gentleman kicked his mount forward and passed the first cart as it entered the forecourt.

  Zeal knew this man far too well.

  ‘He’s back, madam,’ Tuddenham announced glumly, as he arrived at her side. From his tone, he would have preferred soldiers.

  The horseman peered down from his saddle with a near-comical mix of defiance and unease. His blue eyes slid away from hers.

  Who else, in these circumstances, would leave his hat on and forget to dismount? ‘Harry!’ she said, sick with desolation.

  ‘Madam.’

  Sir Harry Beester, John’s cousin and the former master of Hawkridge Estate. Zeal’s former husband, or rather, husband who had never been.

  So much for throwing off the past.

  At fourteen, an orphaned heiress still sequestered at boarding school and with no experience of men, she had found Harry Beester’s cheerful self-satisfaction to be charming. She had even imagined that some of his self-esteem might infect her and make up her lack of it. With a free heart she gave in to his ardent wooing. She chose his puppy-like youth and sunny good looks over the rather alarming, paunchy maturity of the two suitors urged on her by her guardian. Her formidable will, as much as Harry’s inheriting and reconfirming of his uncle’s title of baronet, along with a London house and two small country estates, had induced her guardian to overlook the young man’s lack of both cash and mercantile connections. It was not Harry’s fault that, in her inexperience, she had imagined that his stupidity would make him biddable.

  How ignorant and wilful I was, she thought, looking up at him now, watching undisguised thought cross his handsome pink and white face. First, that she should have called him ‘Sir Harry’. Then, that it probably wasn’t worth making the point. Might, in fact, be dangerous.

  To your dignity, my dear Harry, if to nothing else.

  Tuddenham stared at his former master’s costume in open disbelief.

  To journey from London on horseback, Sir Harry had worn a deeply slashed crimson silk-velvet doublet over a fine linen shirt. In spite of the October chill, his boot hose were of silk, not wool, and topped with pale waves of Brussels lace (matching that on his soft falling-collar) which foamed around the hems of peach silk leg-of-mutton breeches. A black furlined cloak swung nonchalantly over one shoulder. More lace edged his gloves. A single pearl hung from his left ear and two long crimson foxtail plumes bounced behind his wide-brimmed felt hat. Though cape, trousers and lace were all spattered with mud, and though the plumes had begun to clump damply, Zeal read the intended message clearly. In spite of herself, she wished she had had time at least to wash.

  ‘Is this just a friendly greeting in passing?’ Zeal asked, ‘or should we send to Sir Richard to set another plate?’

  At last Sir Harry swung down from his horse and handed the reins to his new manservant. He glanced sideways at the ruined house, then averted his eyes. ‘I have food and lodgings back at Ufton Wharf. Don’t mean to stay long.’

  ‘I didn’t imagine that you were yearning for the rustic wilderness again.’

  I chose this man of my own free will, she thought with amazement.

  ‘I won’t pretend,’ he said. ‘London suits me best.’

  ‘And Lady Alice?’ She had not meant to ask.

  Sir Harry beamed. ‘Splendid. Splendid woman. Thank you.’ Then he caught himself and blushed.

  ‘I’m sure she deserves you,’ said Zeal.

  Harry cleared his throat and looked around him. ‘Tuddenham still serving you well?’

  Zeal detected the hope that Tuddenham might not be. ‘He’s a splendid fellow!’ She resisted the temptation to turn and catch the steward’s eye.

  ‘Good, good.’ Sir Harry glanced around him once more.

  ‘Harry,’ said Zeal. ‘Why have you come?’ She might consider him a fool, and he might be just the least bit frightened of her, but he had already proved that he could be dangerous.

  Mistress Margaret came from the bake house with a mug of beer, crossing the forecourt with the painfully stiffened gait that made her roll like a sailor. ‘I suppose you’ll want to rinse the dust from your mouth. Nothing fine, not like London. Take it or leave it, this is all we’ve got.’

  Harry took the beer but eyed his aunt around the glass.

  Curious faces began to fill the arch that led from the stable yard. ‘Morning, sir,’ called two or three voices.

  ‘Can we walk apart?’ he muttered to Zeal. ‘I’d have thought they all need to be hard at work somewhere.’

  ‘Anywhere in particular you’d care to go?’ she asked. ‘For old times’ sake?’

  He shook his head impatiently.

  She led him through the trampled ruins of John’s knot garden and around the chapel at the east end of the house. They walked in silence except for the sound of his boots crunching on the cinders still covering the ground until they reached the grassy slope above the fish ponds.

  ‘I’ve come fo
r the statues,’ said Harry abruptly.

  ‘No!’

  ‘They’re movables, you should know. My movables. Neptune and all his daughters.’

  ‘You mean Nereus! And you can’t take them. Not now!’

  ‘I’m afraid I can.’

  ‘But you deeded this estate to me. As the price of my warbling to your tune so you could go stalk your precious Lady Alice. You’ve had all my money. The estate is now mine.’

  ‘You’re welcome to the land and the house – or what’s left of it. And the barns, sties and so on. The carts and ploughs…hardly need those in London. I even let you keep the animals, though I could have sold them all if my mood had been less kind.’

  Or less frantic for your freedom to chase another, richer wife, she thought.

  ‘But the movables were mine. And I count the statues as movables! In any case, you don’t need them. What use do you have down here…’ His sweeping hand brushed away the fields, the beech hanger, the ponds, the ruined house. ‘…for art?’

  ‘As much as any Londoner.’

  He sniffed in derision. ‘Debate is pointless. I bought those figures and I’m taking them back. A wedding gift for Lady Alice, as a matter of fact.’

  They reached the edge of the middle pond.

  ‘Ha!’ Harry pointed. ‘Case proved! Finest Italian marble, bought from a friend of the king’s own agent, and you use them as nesting boxes or to anchor fishing lines!’

  Indeed, the line was still tied to Amphritite’s wrist, while a duck now squatted on the nest Zeal had seen the day before between the feet of another nymph.

  ‘Perhaps they find it peaceful here,’ said Zeal. A shivery rage in her chest had begun to make it hard to breathe. ‘Perhaps these ponds are more like their original home than a London courtyard surrounded by stench and noise.’

  Arrived at the top pond, Harry stood with his head on one side and hands on hips beneath his open silk coat. ‘You misunderstand. They’re intended for Lady Alice’s Bedfordshire estate. They’ll have a garden worthy of them there.’

  The old sea god, Nereus, seemed to list even farther forward than yesterday; his dolphin peered even more closely into the depths.

  ‘My men will start at once, should finish tomorrow. Then I’ll not trouble you again.’

  Zeal lowered her voice to avoid being heard by the boy who passed them on his way to the dovecote in the paddock. ‘This estate is all I have left. You’ve taken enough.’

  ‘On the contrary, I believe I’ve been most generous. I rescued you from that Hackney hencoop, didn’t I? Turned you from a dowdy little smock of a schoolgirl into a fashionable lady.’ He pursed his lips in triumph at this wounding shot.

  I’ve only myself to blame, she thought. Killing him now won’t change that fact, however much satisfaction it would give me.

  She turned away and walked along the bank.

  ‘I spent nothing that wasn’t legally mine,’ Harry called after her. ‘Mine in good faith, as your husband. At the time.’

  She shook her head and kept walking away. He followed.

  ‘You were happy enough to collude!’ His voice quivered with emotion. ‘I know how things stood between you and my cousin!’

  ‘Never!’ She turned on him. ‘Never while it still suited you to admit to being my husband! And you know it!’

  ‘I know nothing of the sort.’

  They stood poised in murderous silence.

  Harry recovered first. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ he said loftily. ‘Couldn’t care less. We’re nothing to each other now, any more than we ever were. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?’ He swung away from her towards the front of the house. ‘Fox! Pickford! Here!’

  To Zeal, he added, ‘You perjured yourself just as I did. If you try to cause me trouble, I vow you’ll come off the worse.’

  Two of the carters arrived through an arch in the yew hedge at the west end of the house, near the top pond. Behind this hedge, John had planted a maze the previous summer. Both hedge and infant maze, though badly scorched, promised survival with a pale green frosting of the past summer’s growth.

  ‘Take Neptune first,’ Harry told the men.

  ‘I forbid it,’ said Zeal.

  The men exchanged startled glances. Then one looked into the distance, while the other studied his stockings.

  A shilling-sized spot of red flared on each of Harry’s cheeks. ‘Carry on,’ he said. He took Zeal by the arm and led her aside. ‘Go read the deeds, if you’ve forgotten what they say.’

  ‘I know what they say,’ she said loudly. She yanked her arm free. ‘And if you touch me again, I will kill you.’ He was right. In law, she could not stop him. If only he had taken them at once and not left them to become part of her life.

  Arms crossed, she perched on the corner of Amphritite’s plinth and summoned up her most chilling basilisk eye, though she felt more like weeping.

  With wary glances at Zeal, the two carters circled the statue of Nereus. They tested the mud at the base of the plinth with the heels of their boots. They sucked their teeth, shook their heads.

  Zeal felt a twinge of hope. Nereus was eight feet tall and made of solid marble. He might choose to stay.

  ‘Seven of you should be able to manage,’ Harry said impatiently.

  The one who turned out to be Fox went to fetch reinforcements.

  Zeal followed him through the arch in the hedge. ‘Don’t trample the maze!’ she called sharply.

  He soon returned, with thick coiled rope and a heavy wooden pulley block, stepping carefully across the low maze walls. Behind him came a youth with a younger version of the same face, carrying a second rope and block. The youthful Fox chose to follow the paths of the maze. He approached, then suddenly veered away. He circled, turned again and at last emerged with a triumphant grin, released back into the unmeasured world. Behind him, three more men staggered under the weight of the long canvas-wrapped poles. After a brief conference, they elected, like the elder Fox, to play colossus and bestride the complexities in their path. One of them lost his balance and trod on a young box.

  ‘Take care!’ cried Zeal.

  The men’s burden proved to be three stout wooden poles, each as long as a May Pole, wrapped in a canvas sling large enough to lift a horse.

  Several children and dogs followed the carters from the forecourt. Some ran the path of the maze, others, like the dogs, leapt over the walls. A dairymaid came up the track from the mill, where she had no doubt gone to hide a basket of cheeses.

  With one eye on their audience and a touch of swagger, the carters threaded one of the ropes through the pulleys and tested that it ran freely. Then they linked the three poles together at one end, and hoisted the linked end into the air. Their audience gave a gratifying ‘ahhhh,’ as a great spindly tripod rose above the head of Nereus and settled its feet in the mud.

  The carters next spread the canvas sling on the ground beside the statue. Then they tied the pulley rope to Nereus’s thick bearded neck. They secured the second rope like a belt around his dolphin’s belly. Fox set four men on the taut ropes.

  ‘Now.’

  His son thrust a large jemmy under the plinth and dropped his weight onto the iron bar. The crowbar slipped in the soft mud of the bank. Young Fox grunted, fell against the dolphin’s nose and swore.

  ‘Take care not to chip him!’ cried Sir Harry.

  The old sea king did not budge.

  ‘Perhaps he’s not a movable after all!’ called Zeal.

  ‘He will yield to our machines, madam,’ said the elder Fox. ‘You can raise siege cannon with these sheer legs. A statue such as this is nothing.’

  ‘What are they doing?’ called Doctor Bowler in alarm, from the far side of the middle pond, book under his arm and a leaf in his fringe of hair.

  ‘Giving us a lesson in how to raise cannon,’ Zeal replied across the water.

  The audience continued to gather. Four women of the house family, their hands busy with knitting needles or th
e quick rise-and-fall of drop spindles. More children. A tenant farmer and his son leaned over the hedge of the Roman Field. Ducks, never known to be sensitive to the moment, gathered on the water below the struggle and quacked to be fed. Even the cat watched from a neat hunch on the edge of the still house roof.

  Young Fox sucked his bleeding knuckles.

  ‘Bring on a grown man!’ shouted one of the onlookers. The young carter gave him an evil look.

  Under his breath Harry asked Zeal, ‘Can’t you find useful employ for these idlers elsewhere?’

  ‘What could be more useful than a chance to observe and learn from London men at work?’ Zeal replied sweetly.

  Pickford took the crowbar. Young Fox was set on the end of the restraining rope. But after several more attempts, Nereus still stood unmoved.

  ‘Fetch a shovel,’ said Pickford.

  ‘If to labour is indeed to pray,’ observed Doctor Bowler, now crossed over the sluice bridge to join the crowd, ‘these must be the most devout men in England.’

  Suddenly, Wentworth’s voice asked quietly in Zeal’s ear, ‘Can Harry do this?’

  ‘He has the right.’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘But I’m happy to say that whether he can still seems to be in question.’ She looked over her shoulder at Wentworth. ‘You left your fishing for this?’

  ‘You might need me.’

  She did not look at him again but felt him still standing at her back. His words made her feel odd and needed thinking about at some other time.

  After a short break for dinner, which they took from their bundles on the carts, the carters dug away the mud from under the forecourt side of the plinth. Five men pushed. At last, Nereus consented to give way, as reluctantly as a deep-rooted tooth. Slowed by the two ropes, he tilted ponderously onto his side in the centre of the sling, with his head hanging over one long edge and his feet over the other.

  ‘Don’t break the dolphin’s nose!’ shouted Harry.

  ‘He looks just like a sausage pasty,’ said one of the boys. The rest of the on-lookers, fewer in number than before dinner, seemed torn between groans and a natural instinct to cheer.