The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

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СКАЧАТЬ the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

      My aunt is right. I must leave at once. I won’t let myself be arrested again. And to kill Malise here on Hawkridge Estate would be a shameful way to repay my uncle and his heirs. I’d spoil poor old Harry’s chances at Court for ever.

      He imagined going back to his chamber now and packing. Stealing away to Mill Meadow, saddling his horse and riding away.

      In which direction? he asked himself. How do I choose?

      He stood a little longer without moving. Malise had known him but said nothing. Why?

      He’s either playing with me or needs something. I should have paid more attention to what Hazelton was trying to say.

      I won’t run tonight, he decided a little later. I’m too tired, and there’s too much to arrange. Unless I want to live as a vagabond outlaw, I must arrange my flight a little. If Malise hasn’t raised the alarm yet, he may wait a little longer.

      He was past thinking.

      He laid his hand on the Lady Tree in farewell. You outlasted me after all, he thought.

      Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

      I’d be a fool, thought John suddenly, to abandon everything before I know what Malise wants.

Four

      May 25, 1636. Mild and still. No dew. Turtle doves back in beech hanger. Apples in full blow at last.

      Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

      Zeal woke cautiously, like a small animal sniffing the air outside its burrow. She kept her eyes closed. In her experience there was seldom anything on the other side of her eyelids to hurry out to greet. She drew a resigned, waking breath. Then she sniffed again in drowsy surprise. The linen sheet and feather-filled quilt which covered her to her eyebrows smelled of sunlight. A small, surprising goodness to credit to the day’s account.

      She stretched slim, naked limbs. Her eyes opened abruptly. Instead of plunging off the sudden edges of her narrow London school trestle bed, her fingers and toes, though spread as far as she could reach, lay still cradled in the softness of a vast featherbed.

      She propped herself on her elbows, breathing quickly. She was on the deck of a ship-sized bed, in full sail across a strange sea of polished wooden floor. The bed hangings, flapped and draped, half-hid a distant horizon of diamond-paned windows. The morning sun had transformed last night’s cavern of darkness and wavering shadows. The brown coverlet was really faded red silk. The hangings were rich midnight blue. By torch- and firelight the night before, she had not seen the fat bulges and gadrooning of the four bedposts, or the dusty tapestry above the fireplace of Hercules holding the giant Antaeus in the air above his head. The bulgy bedposts made Zeal think of plump women’s legs wearing tight garters. Zeal imagined the legs beginning to dance.

      Oh, yes! She breathed out a happy sigh.

      A new, unexplored world. Another Indies, a new Virginia coast. At times in the past, she had felt exhausted by the need to learn yet another new terrain. But this one was different.

      She heard an odd, distant, wavering noise which she would investigate later.

      My own room for ever and ever! she thought. At last. This is it. She flung herself back onto her pillows to recover from the enormity of the idea. I shall wake up like this every morning from now on. No more shifting. I have finally begun the rest of my life.

      Her new husband Harry lay in the next chamber in his own bed, where she meant him to stay for quite some time.

      ‘Husband,’ she repeated quietly to the embroidered blue silk of the canopy. ‘Husband.’ Testing it. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and shook her head in pleased disbelief. What a difference that word made. She was exactly the same girl as before, but because she had a husband her life had changed around her more than she could yet imagine. People already treated her differently.

      ‘My lady.’

      Firmly, she set aside the memory of Mistress Margaret’s tight eyes and bared teeth. And of Harry’s glares across the dinner table.

      I did it! she thought fiercely. I did it. Somehow, in spite of my uncle…I wanted it hard enough…All I had to do was want something hard enough and not care whether it was correct, or dutiful, or virtuous.

      A spasm of anxiety curled her onto her side.

      Selfish and wilful as it is, I mustn’t care what my uncle and aunt think!

      For fourteen years she had tried to please by being good, but had found that she could never be good enough, nor be good in all the different ways different people wanted. She had been dutiful and loving to her parents, but they had deserted her when she was eight for the superior joys of Heaven. She had then tried to please the assorted relatives who took her in. (An allowance from her inherited estate more than covered the expense of feeding and boarding her.)

      She soon grew confused. No sooner had she figured out the rules in one household (both spoken and unspoken) than she was shifted to another where she had to begin again. One aunt (on the Puritan side of the family) had valued quiet, self-effacing children, another (a socially ambitious beauty) preferred spirit. One uncle insisted on prayers four times a day, while another ranted against self-congratulating piety and self-serving humbug. Several cousins had taunted her for being thin and pinched and ugly, while her cousin Chloe, whom she thought quite beautiful, was jealous of Zeal’s red-gold wiry hair, blue eyes and fine pale skin.

      As for Mistress Hazelton…Zeal curled a little tighter. Mistress Hazelton watched her with a curious little distant smile, no matter what she did. In the four years since her uncle Samuel Hazelton had bought her wardship, Zeal had tried not to worry about what she might be doing wrong, and not to see that Mistress Hazelton pinched her lips every time she spoke to her.

      Her uncle only made things worse when he defended her. He let his wife see that he was amused by Zeal’s desire to learn Latin and by her questions about his business affairs (which were also her business affairs, as he had bought the use of her fortune along with her wardship). By the time, two years ago, that her uncle sent her to the boarding school in Hackney to improve her deportment, dancing and needlework, Zeal was worn out by trying.

      I have anchored myself at last, she thought. When I have made myself the mistress, I will be able to choose my own way to be good or bad. Whether this place is good or bad, I shall make the best of it with a whole heart.

      Outside the diamond-paned windows, the pale green tops of trees caught the morning sun. She uncurled and stretched again. The worn linen sheets slid smoothly against her skin. She spread her small pink toes like a cat stretching its paws and turned her head in the yielding welcome of the feather pillows. She now recognized the odd noise outside. It was the constant faint bleating of sheep.

      Lady Beester. What a fuss everyone made about a title. It had even clamped a muzzle on Mistress Hazelton, for all her pious lip-curling at the lewd antics of the gentry. Again, Zeal smiled at the underside of the blue silk tester of her bed. What mattered was that Sir Harry Beester was her Harry.

      He had appeared like a miracle, a very gentil parfait knight, and rescued her from the baying pack СКАЧАТЬ