The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

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      The new Lady Beester inhaled, looked at the twenty or so faces, including Harry’s, that attended her reply and closed her mouth again.

      John was distracted by the arrival into the forecourt of a second carriage as muddy as the first.

      ‘I hope, my lady, that you will approve of my efforts,’ he heard Aunt Margaret say as she took the new mistress in charge. ‘This is Agatha Stookey, the chief housemaid…Roger Corry, housegroom …’

      John turned his back on the stammering curtseys and blushing bows.

      The second coach stopped behind Harry’s, drawing twelve estate workers and eight goggling boys in its wake.

      ‘Sir Harry! Is this your stern Roman senator?’ called John.

      ‘Oh, Lord!’ cried Harry in dismay. He reappeared on the porch. ‘Where’s Doctor Bowler! Why isn’t there music? Where is everyone?’

      The parson leaped back to his stool and snatched up his viol. The pipers dived for their pipes. The cooper, however, stayed where he was, bent over a wheel on the offside of Harry’s coach.

      ‘Where’s Aunt Margaret?’ begged Harry. ‘And the house staff…They were just here!’

      The parson began the galliard for the second time, minus the drum.

      ‘You can’t possibly expect my niece to make that journey more than once a year,’ complained Samuel Hazelton, a lean sixty-year-old in Puritan black with a complexion like tree bark. He shook and brushed himself with a great rustling of silks and travelling wool. ‘We left Edward mired down just outside Windsor. He took a horse and went to dine with a friend in Eton while his men dig his coach out…How can so much mud get inside?’ He beat with his hand at the end of a black silk jacket sleeve. ‘Mistress …’ He turned back to reel in beside him the square-cornered woman, also wearing black silk, who had just descended from the coach. She waved aside a posy offered by one of the weeding women.

      ‘Samuel Hazelton, my wife’s uncle and former guardian,’ explained Harry, sotto voce. ‘And his wife, Mistress Hazelton.’

      ‘All the way from Rome,’ murmured John. He dropped back as Harry moved forward in welcome.

      Even as he bowed stiffly to Sir Harry, Hazelton’s eyes moved swiftly, taking stock of house and men. He already knew Harry’s worth as a husband to his niece. He had still to determine the soundness of his own social and political investment in letting the young cockerel marry her.

      Mistress Hazelton’s eyes were glazed. She had been sick from the motion of the coach.

      ‘Mistress Hazelton, Master Hazelton, my cousin Mister John Graffham.’ Harry pushed John forward with the air of offering a plate of sweetmeats.

      ‘Mr Graffham! I have looked forward most eagerly to meeting you,’ said Hazelton. The stock-taking eyes examined John.

      A sharp-eyed pirate’s face coupled to a forced mildness of manner, thought Hazelton with interest and surprise. A pirate pretending to be a monk. A broken nose and woman’s brows…it’s the face of a licentious Corinthian, not a simple country Corin. Not over-eager to please like his cousin. He’s assessing me. Looks good for what needs doing.

      John stiffened under Hazelton’s open appraisal. There’s more here than mere manners. What has Harry told these strangers?

      Don’t panic, man, he then told himself. The man called you Graffham, not Nightingale.

      ‘Your reputation as a botanical enthusiast spreads farther than you may realize,’ said Hazelton.

      John achieved a social smile. John Graffham, enthusiast of Botany and student of Agriculture, had nothing to hide.

      ‘A good friend, Sir George Tupper, is an enthusiast like yourself,’ said Hazelton. ‘He tells me that you have written excellent advice on replicating certain bushes, or some such thing…I don’t know a fig myself about the domain of Flora …’

      ‘I am flattered to be so much talked about,’ said John. He was, in fact, shocked. ‘But I’m merely a countryman who observes what lies around him.’

      ‘More than that, coz!’ exclaimed Harry, pinkly eager and delighted that his introduction was going so well.

      ‘A man in tune with the preoccupations of his time,’ said Hazelton. ‘A fortunate thing to be. We must speak further.’

      Mistress Hazelton looked past John into the house.

      Two large muddy carts pulled by equally muddy oxen heaved into the forecourt. Behind the carts trudged Harry’s hunter, ridden by yet another groom. Two dogs and five boys bounded alongside.

      ‘If you will excuse me,’ said John, ‘I’ll see them into the stable yard.’

      ‘Until later, then,’ said Hazelton.

      Thoughtfully, John watched Harry lead his new family into his new domain, heralded by the fourth repeat of the vicar’s march.

      There’s probably nothing to fear from Hazelton, he decided. If the dear friend who carries weight at court is no more danger than that Puritan guardian of the little wife, I can leave the past alone after all. Do what needs doing now, and learn what Harry plans for my future.

      Harry had brought seven waiting men and two pages. Hazelton five men and one page. Lady Beester and Mrs Hazelton had two women each. The carters made four more. Even without the servants who accompanied the ‘dear friend’s’ coach which was yet to arrive from its mud puddle outside Windsor, they were already four over the expected number.

      ‘We’ll have to use the Lower Gallery as a dormitory for the men servants,’ John told Aunt Margaret under his breath. ‘Lay them out like flitches of bacon.’

      ‘I’ll wring his knightly neck!’ she said. ‘I’m happy to say that Agatha has agreed to let Mrs Hazelton’s waiting woman share her bed.’

      ‘Oy! Another coach!’ shouted one of the cottager boys from his perch in the beech avenue. ‘A coach! A coach!’ The cry passed down the drive.

      The bell began to clang again.

      John was on his way back to the house after seeing to the supply carts and settling the eight visiting coach horses. ‘Go fetch Sir Harry,’ he ordered a groom. ‘And Mistress Margaret.’

      ‘Where is everyone?’ asked Harry a moment later. ‘Damn! Have all the cottagers left? Where’s Bowler? I don’t pay him just to sit there and drink my ale and debate whether or not we have the right to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the stiff-necked Scots.’ He searched the forecourt with anxious eyes. ‘Don’t we even have the bloody pipes?’

      Aunt Margaret’s pale damp face arrived in the door, framed in limp white curls. ‘If you want your guests to dine, you must really let me get on with things,’ she announced in despair. ‘… Sir Harry,’ she added in quick afterthought.

      ‘Does it matter so much if you welcome your dear friend without your armies behind you?’ asked John.

      Harry pulled his lips back in a nervous grimace. He СКАЧАТЬ