The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

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СКАЧАТЬ had been a child of ivory beauty. Even in babyhood his fingers were long and slim, his legs straight and finely-shaped. His skin was smooth at a time when a third of the people were pitted with pox. He read at four and showed early promise in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By five he had proved to be well co-ordinated, good at riding, swordplay and all the other male games which keep thoughtful, intelligent boys from being laughed at by their peers. His grey eyes, at seven, already caused stabs of female anticipation. In short, he was a prince in a kingdom that knew his worth.

      His paternal grandfather, Howard Nightingale, had been young and ambitious when King Henry annexed Catholic lands after the English split with the Church of Rome. Though the son of a London brewer, the grandfather had been well-educated and found a patron to provide three years at Oxford, from where he had emerged with a fair knowledge of law. In exchange for loyal services to several influential Tudor lords, Nightingale was given a confiscated Catholic estate, Tarleton Court near Hatfield. Shortly after, he bought a second once-Catholic estate, Farfields, for a token price and set his family on the ladder to power. John’s parents were still only the middling sort of gentlefolk, but by the time he was born late in their marriage they had prospered enough to buy two more estates.

      They were overwhelmed that their only surviving child should be one such as John. They prayed that he live to manhood, masked their doting with severity (which did not fool their small son in the least), acquired still more land to swell his fortune, and bought him a gentleman’s education to shape him for a life of influence at the court in Whitehall. He would have been a blind saint if, from an early age, he had not been infected by their sense of his destiny. By miracle, he was not a monster.

      Both his own nature and his parents’ good sense guided him toward civil manners and a burning concern for others, who included not only his parents and his nurse, but the house families in the Nightingale estates, his many cousins, the young stable grooms who played with him, his horses, his dogs, a hen with a twisted leg, a papery globe of tiny spiders glued to the tester of his bed, butterflies doomed to short lives, and one particular piglet whose death made him refuse bacon between the ages of four and six.

      In 1617, when he turned seven, the time came to place him out. His father wooed a London lord on the fringes of the Court to take his son into the noble household for polishing into final splendour. The lord agreed. Master and Mistress Nightingale accompanied John to London from Tarleton Court, their chief estate, north of Hatfield. John’s father had business in the city with a tanner who bought hides from him, as well as with an impoverished knight with a small estate to sell. John’s mother seized the chance to visit her wool merchant brother, who was still plain Mr George Beester, in his London house rather than on his distant Somerset manor.

      They set out at dawn. While a horseman could reach London in one long day, their coach needed at least two on the muddy track which served as a road. John hung out of the window until he bit his tongue going over a bad bump. Then he begged a ride on top with the driver and footman.

      A unexpectedly swollen ford cost them three and a half hours by bumpy lane upstream to a place where the coach could cross. John was briefly entertained by his father’s angry and puzzled speculation why some idiot had dammed the river just downstream. But as the party lacked men to tear the dam down, the detour had to be made. They were still at least two hours away from their inn and deep in the shade of a forest of oaks and beech when the sun set. The footman lit the carriage lamps. Bored and hungry, John fell asleep with his head on his nurse’s lap.

      He half-woke to urgent adult voices. The coach rocked violently. The inside lantern swung like a ship’s lamp in a storm. But the coach had stopped rolling.

      ‘Are we there?’ asked John. His mother grabbed his arm as if she meant to tear off his sleeve. John sat up, wide awake.

      A man screamed in the darkness outside the coach. The scream died abruptly. John’s father threw himself against the inside of the coach door.

      ‘Richard! Who is it? What do they want?’ asked his mother.

      His father didn’t seem to hear her. Dimly, in the swinging arcs of lantern light, John saw the continent of his father’s back bunch and quiver under his coat. The coach rocked harder. The darkness outside moved and flickered with orange light. John heard crackling and smelled oily smoke.

      ‘Oh, sweet God!’ cried his nurse.

      His mother whimpered once, like a struck dog.

      His father cried out and fell across John’s legs. A comet blazed through the coach window. Hungry stars spilled onto the crowded, heaped-up yards of gown, cloak, lace and petticoat. The stars bit. Flames ran around the edges of sleeves and spread across skirts. His mother screamed; her hair had caught fire. The coach filled with the smell of burning silk and wool, and seethed like a bag of drowning cats.

      Still screaming, John’s mother hauled him from under his father’s dead weight and thrust him into the air, through the burning hoop of the window like a performing dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames in his hair sketched the arc of his fall against the night.

      John stood so abruptly that he hit his shoulder against the ribcage of the Lady Tree.

      I am ill, he thought. Soul sick.

      He wished that Dr Bowler, the estate parson, were as confident in advising the soul as he was in making music.

      I can’t welcome Harry in this state.

      He shook himself like Cassie, his wolfhound. The world tilted. He put one hand on the tree to steady himself.

      Dizzy and hollow. Diseased in his soul. No way to head into a new, unknown life.

      He lifted his hand from the belly of the tree. He should not have come here. She always unsettled him.

      He slid back down the slope of the beech hanger on last year’s dead leaves, towards the mill pond. Often before this he had found his reason again in that dark water, when he had thought it was lost.

      The mill still slept its winter sleep, locked up around the last season’s chaff and dust. The big wheel dripped, heavy and unmoved by the trickle of the closed-off race. The mill pond above the race, where Bedgebury Brook joined the lethargic Shir, brimmed with melted snows and spring rains not yet needed to grind corn. The surplus tugged at the tips of arching grass blades as it poured downstream through the open sluice.

      John stepped out onto a stony shelf above the pond. Another self looked back up from the dark water. A cloud of early gnats hung and sideslipped just above the surface. To his right the Shir ducked in and out of the trees, back upstream toward the three fish ponds, in slow green bends. Silver teeth of young nettle leaves and dark matte-green lance-heads of burdock grew at his feet. Across the pond, black-trunked willows eased into leaf. The branches of a fallen willow drew v’s on the current. The stream, the pond, the plants, the trees, and his reflection wavered as if John looked through the uneven glass of a window pane.

      A fish leaped. John’s reflection heaved and rippled. He stripped naked, drew a deep breath and dived.

      The icy water, still cold from the winter, peeled him as cleanly as a willow rod. It stripped away thought, leaving a pure white core of muscle and bone. He surfaced, gasped, shook his head like a dog, alive with the shock. Cold eddies caressed his toes in the brown-green depths. Icy liquid fingers squeezed his balls tight into his groin and tugged gently at the dark hairs on his arms and shins.

      He coiled and slid under again. He turned among the fragments of floating leaf and weed, opened his eyes to look up through the faint cold green light СКАЧАТЬ