Читать книгу: «The Lady Tree»

CHRISTIE DICKASON

The Lady Tree

FOR MARJORIE, MY MOTHER,

WHO MADE THE FIRST GARDEN IN MY LIFE

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Part One

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Part Two

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Part Three

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading

Author’s Note

About the Author

By the Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

Prologue

Majestic Wealth is the holiest of our gods.

Juvenal.

AMSTERDAM, FEBRUARY 1636

The room glinted with brass and gold but smelled of damp wool, nutmeg, cloves, sewage and burning fat. In the dim yellow light of thirty tallow candles held aloft by gilt fantasies of mermaids and dolphins, three men waited in uneasy silence. The Englishman, who looked pastel, insubstantial and overfrilled beside the two black-clad Dutchmen, peered down from an open window into the cavern of shadow beneath the massive bow of a moored ship. Although he stood in a house on dry land, the dark rim of the window seemed to shift. The floor tilted. The fat tree-trunks of the ship’s masts, tops far up out of sight in the night sky, swayed almost imperceptibly, not quite close enough to touch. He swallowed against the ghost of nausea that tickled his stomach unpleasantly.

Ships rubbed and shouldered each other for dock space as far as he could see to either side. The small red eye of a watchman’s lantern etched a slow path through the black, gently heaving thickets of spars and rigging.

I should have refused to come, he thought. Made them send someone weighty enough to decide such things.

But he knew that he had been sent precisely because he was unremarkable. The men who made the decisions paid men like himself to take the risk of looking like an ass. He shifted aching shoulders inside his doublet and cursed the damp.

Anyway, he couldn’t afford to refuse a commission.

The house stood on a dock on the Amstel River. The moored ships creaked and scraped. A far-away sailor shouted to another. On the dock just below the window the shadow of a dog nosing among the stacked bales, barrels, and coiled ropes suddenly erupted into a frenzy of barking. The three men inside the room lifted their heads.

In another room of the house, a bad-tempered viol was groaning and complaining again and again through the same four phrases of a French dance tune. The barking stopped.

‘Not yet.’ Vrel, one of the two Dutchmen and the owner of the house, settled his bulk back into his carved and gilded chair. He sat squarely at the end of a long heavy table as if he expected a dish of roast meat to be set in front of him, but diamond and ruby rings flashed uneasily in the candlelight as his short, strong fingers opened and closed over the lions’ masks of the arm ends.

Simeon Timmons, the Englishman, now eyed his host. An agent had to be civil to everyone, but Timmons was struggling with Cornelius Vrel.

A mannerless frog in black silk and fine wool stolen from the English, or near enough stolen, thought Timmons viciously. Hunkered down here smugly among his gold plates and drinking cups, his Toledo blades, Venetian candle-holders, and Turkish rugs that covered every flat surface like a plague of multi-coloured moss. Stinking of the spices that had made him rich.

His stomach contracted with a pain like hunger. How he lusted to be such a frog!

Timmons lived to serve other men’s wealth. As a third son with two healthy older brothers between him and the family money and lands, he had to live on his wits. He fed and supped on envy and hope to sustain himself in the hard but necessary work of being civil at all costs. Even to former enemies who now smiled and allowed you to admire booty pirated from English ships. No matter that Dutch and English merchantmen were at this moment blowing each other out of the East Indian seas for the sake of cinnamon and cloves. No matter an uncle massacred by the Dutch at Amboyna thirteen years before. Civil and smiling, Timmons made a career trotting to and fro like a market pony, laden with information, propositions, money, documents, promises or silver spoons.

The third man in the room asked a question in Dutch.

Timmons turned to study him with carefully neutral eyes. Named Blanket or Banquet or some such Dutch torturing of vowels, in his late fifties, a little older than Vrel, a head taller but half the weight. As they waited, he had been strolling aimlessly around the room.

Busy coveting the Chinese porcelain and gilt plates, thought Timmons. He heard the anxiety now in the man’s voice and wished he could understand the question.

Vrel replied in a voice as chilly as the night air. Blanket (or Banquet) sank his skinny neck and long head back into his shell of black merino and Brussels lace. He turned away to study a set of golden spice scales.

Whatever it is, thought Timmons, Vrel is firmly in control. He shivered. His fine, light-brown hair lay damply clumped against his narrow head. His long thin face slid unchecked down sagging light-brown moustaches and a small pointed beard. A newly-fashionable flat collar drooped limply over narrow shoulders which were betrayed by the new, unpadded style of English doublet. His lace tie, lace cuffs and lace boot tops had all lost their starch in the damp sea air. A more confident man would not have left his wool cloak at his lodgings in the name of fashion.

An ecstasy of barking erupted on the dock.

Vrel was already on his feet. ‘He’s here. Follow my lead, Blankaart!’ he ordered. ‘Listen to me very carefully. Don’t let your enthusiasms run away with my money …!’

A commotion mounted the stairs outside the room. On the dock, the dog still barked.

The newcomer blew into the room like a storm at sea, brushing aside the servant who had brought him up, bellowing words of greeting, his wide hat and cloak flapping, the soft barbs of a scarlet feather in his hat quivering like a virgin’s knees. Timmons took a step back towards the safety of the wall.

‘Mynheer Vrel…Cornelius!’ The man clasped Vrel’s large hand with one even larger. He slapped at Vrel’s upper arm, rustled his lace cuffs, shook his beard and flashed white, white teeth. ‘If you ever want to deal in secret again, roast that dog!’

Vrel pulled himself out of the maelstrom. ‘Have you left a man on watch?’

‘Who do you think is being eaten down there now?’ The newcomer focused on Timmons the suddenly still eye of the genial storm. ‘… And is this your speculatory Englishman?’

Timmons stiffened at the tone and cursed the ugly, unintelligible foreign words.

‘A mere envoy from the English merchants, chasing after the Dutch lead as always,’ said Vrel. ‘He won’t say how much they can afford to invest.’ He switched to English. ‘Mr Simeon Timmons, this is Mynheer Justus Coymans.’

Coymans raised his wide-brimmed hat to the Englishman and switched to English also. ‘Mynheer Timmons. You’re a man of genius to come to Holland at this time to do business!’

‘To see if there is any business here worth doing,’ said Timmons, more stiffly than he intended. He stayed well out of Coymans’s reach.

‘No fear,’ said Coymans. ‘There’s no business like it in the world. Forget the Caribes and the Indies! I shall make you as rich as your English king would like to be.’

Timmons’s long face sketched a polite smile below its waterline of moustache. ‘As I’m not privy to his Majesty’s ambitions,’ he said, ‘that tells me nothing.’

‘Rich enough to build a fleet of new ships to wipe the Spanish off the seas,’ said Coymans cheerfully. ‘And the Dutch.’ His teeth showed in the candlelight; his eyes were hidden by the shadow of his hat.

‘Amen to the Spanish.’ Timmons hesitated. But there was now altogether too much self-satisfaction in the room. He could not resist the lightest of slaps. ‘But I believe that our two countries are supposed to be at peace.’

‘Ignore politics! They exist only to serve trade.’ Coymans snatched off his short cloak and tossed it to the servant. ‘Let me show you something more powerful than cannons, more intoxicating than a religious war.’

He seated himself uninvited in Vrel’s chair at the head of the long table. From his pouch he took a linen-wrapped parcel which he placed with a flourish on the rug-covered table in front of him. He raised both hands like a wizard poised to enchant and looked up at Vrel.

‘Cornelius. Voilá! Ecco! Mira! The new Indies here on your own table!’

Timmons winced at the theatrical excess and peered sceptically through the dim yellow light at the dirty little parcel. He felt the budding of ass’s ears begin to prickle at his scalp.

‘The Admiral den Boom,’ said Coymans, and waited for cheers and applause.

Vrel didn’t move closer to the table. ‘How much?’

Coymans flashed his teeth at Timmons. ‘I hope your English clients are more fun to deal with. Cornelius here has no taste for the flourishes that make work into fun. “How much?” he asks. Just like that! Clunk! When I hadn’t even finished telling him the whole wonderful story.’

‘So tell it,’ said Vrel. Coymans was right – he had little patience with whimsy. He went straight for the adding, the subtracting and, most vital of all, the multiplying.

‘My Admiral here is a miracle,’ said Coymans, still including Timmons in the blast of his focus. He dropped his voice to a dramatic stage-whisper. ‘He fathers his own offspring without a mother! Would that we all could…think of the strife it would save mankind!’

He’s going to wink now, thought Timmons with alarmed distaste.

Coymans winked. ‘And I have brought Mynheer Vrel the pater and two sons.’ He leaned forward and hooked his audience more firmly with sharp chilly eyes. ‘One son more than God the Father Himself!’

Then Timmons saw the irony behind the chill and felt an uneasy respect. Here was a performer of far greater range and subtlety than himself.

‘Like a good pimp, I have brought more than asked for but not more than is desired.’

‘You have brought me three Admirals?’ The pitch of Vrel’s low steady voice climbed at least two tones.

Coymans let a beat of silence cut through the candlelight. ‘The only three in the world.’

‘Impossible.’

‘I made sure of it.’ Then Coymans added a few swift sentences in Dutch.

Whatever he said shifted the set of the muscles in Vrel’s face. The merchant walked to the open window and pretended to look out. He was close enough for Timmons to hear how fast and shallow his breathing had become.

‘One thousand florins,’ said Vrel.

Timmons understood that much.

‘Ptsh,’ said Coymans sadly. He drew his knife and cut the leather thongs around the parcel. He laid the knife on the table, then delicately, precisely, unfolded the linen cloth. In its centre lay an irregular egg of dried grass tied with reeds. Coymans cut these bindings. With large-knuckled, reddened fingers he probed the grass, parted it tenderly and pressed it aside. Then he leaned back in his chair.

In spite of himself, Timmons moved closer.

Three onion-like bulbs lay in the grass nest. Each was cased in a papery skin the colour of chestnuts and bearded at its base with a fringe of dried white roots.

Timmons was shocked by how ordinary they looked. Coymans had somehow persuaded him that there really was something wondrous in that packet. Timmons had begun to persuade himself that he wouldn’t have to tell the obvious truth when he returned to London – that the Dutch had gone mad and there was no salvation there for the desperate Englishmen. Now the prickling on his scalp grew more insistent.

One thousand florins for those…onions!

Coymans lifted one bulb out of the nest into the candlelight, his red fingers as gentle as if it were a phoenix’s egg. ‘Ecco! Look there!’ He placed a blunt red finger lightly on two tiny, tooth-shaped bulblets just above the union with the roots. ‘Two more infant Admirals, which will grow to blooming size in three short years. Then there will be five true Admirals, all of the same unadulterated substance. Not a rich man’s original and four cheap copies for hoi polloi. What other commodity can perform this magic?’

When Vrel did not answer, Coymans interrogated Timmons. ‘Can gold multiply its true self? Or a porcelain jar? Or a painting?’

Timmons shook his head in helpless assent.

Vrel collected an arrangement of dolphins and mermaids from a sideboard and carried the extra light to the table. ‘Blankaart!’

Blankaart leaned forward over the table and extended his wrinkled neck out its lace collar. ‘May I?’ He picked the largest bulb from the nest and sniffed it. Then he held it close to the candles, turning it in his fingers. ‘Tulipa,’ he announced at last.

Coymans blew like a surfacing whale. His moustaches heaved upward on the force of his irritated breath. ‘Of course it’s a tulip! I don’t trade in turnips! Vrel, can’t your tame botanist do better than that?’

‘Probably not the common Turkish type,’ continued Blankaart resolutely, with one eye now on Vrel. ‘It’s darker and a little longer from base to nose. But an Admiral den Boom? Hard to say without seeing it in bloom.’

‘It’s more expensive to buy in bloom,’ said Coymans to Vrel. ‘Buy now, in the dry. The advantage will be yours when you sell again.’

‘Blankaart?’ demanded Vrel. ‘What’s your advice?’

‘If you buy now, you must trust your dealer.’ Though Blankaart’s voice was flat, his botanist’s hands cradled and caressed the smooth chestnut-coloured shape.

A bad actor, thought Timmons. No help to Vrel. In all my ignorance, I could serve better than that.

Coymans’s teeth showed briefly in the shadows of his moustaches. ‘A cheat can sell only once. I intend to last in business till I’m old as Methuselah.’

‘I’ll agree a price now but wait till the thing blooms before I pay you,’ said Vrel.

‘Then I’ll sell tomorrow in auction in the collegium, as I am bound to do by law,’ replied Coymans. ‘I’m only risking a private sale because you asked it.’

Vrel made a small nervous swing back toward the window. ‘Add four barrels of nutmegs, and seven bales of wrought silk.’

Coymans laughed. ‘For three? And two offsets? Think what you would have to pay for three bulbs of Semper Augustus! Ten times that. And the flames of the Roman emperor are a tiny candle next to the meteor of our own Dutch sailor!’ He turned to Blankaart. ‘Is that true or not, high priest of things botanical?’

Blankaart swallowed audibly and looked at Vrel. ‘The true Admiral is a very rare bloom…if you can be sure of him. That is the problem. Being sure.’

Vrel sent a dragon’s jet of rage toward his perfidious ally.

‘The Semper Augustus has become a whore with too many masters,’ said Coymans. ‘And too many little bastards. You alone in Holland would rule our Admiral.’

‘I’m not a washerwoman or streetsweeper,’ warned Vrel, ‘who’ll give my life savings to some tavern rogue in exchange for an onion.’

‘And I’m not a Batavian spice farmer who will accept any price you offer just because your company has a big ship with four hundred guns on it.’

There was a pause.

‘Tch,’ said Coymans. His moustaches danced like playing dolphins. His teeth appeared and disappeared. ‘Oh, Vrel …!’

‘You’ve heard my last offer. One thousand florins, the nutmegs, and the silk.’

For a second, Coymans did not move at all. Not a hair, nor ruffle, nor swag, nor fold. Not a moustache. Not a finger. Then he held out his hand. ‘May I have that bulb back?’ he asked Blankaart politely.

Blankaart returned it with treacherous reluctance.

‘How can I raise your value?’ Coymans enquired of the bulb. ‘Tch.’ One moustache arched briefly. He dropped the bulb onto the floor and stamped on it with his boot.

Blankaart gave a strangled yelp of protest.

Coymans stamped again, and ground his sole against the polished wooden floor. He held his boot aloft and peered past it at the white mess on the floor. Then, with his knife, he scraped the rest from the sole of his boot.

‘Only two left in the world now,’ he said cheerfully. ‘And the two infants. We must rethink things a little.’

In the silence, Timmons noticed that the bad-tempered viol had stopped. A nearly-guttered candle on the table sang a high, tiny note. Blankaart coughed.

After a long moment, Coymans pushed the grass nest along the table to Timmons. ‘While our friend thinks, would you like to hold a fortune in your hand? Feel for yourself the weight and texture of true wealth?’

Timmons hesitated.

‘Go on. I trust you.’

Timmons crossed to the table and picked up a bulb. He turned it curiously in his thin hand. He was only an agent, not one of your gentleman enthusiasts, had never handled such a thing before. Smooth and shiny, like satin against his thumb. Hard under its crisp papery skin, with grey scarring around its neck like a hanged man.

It could just as well be an onion, he thought. How can anyone tell?

He had never before in his life thought about tulips, and certainly not in the same way as spices, or coal, or Baltic grain and oak. He weighed it in his palm.

‘Vrel?’ asked Coymans.

Vrel still stared at the juicy pulp on his floor. He was breathing heavily now.

‘Vrel?’ Coymans plucked the last bulb from the grass nest – the one with the two offshoots – and dropped it on the floor. He raised his boot.

‘No!’ cried Blankaart. ‘Please!’ He dropped to his knees and snatched at the tulip bulb. ‘Ough!’ He grunted as Coymans’s boot pinned his hand against the floorboards.

‘Wait!’ Vrel wrapped himself with his thick arms and rocked in an agony of indecision. ‘This house…and its contents.’

‘Not enough.’

Vrel pulled a spark of red fire from a finger of his left hand and dropped it on the table in front of Coymans. Then a chip of ice. ‘Let me think!’ begged Vrel. ‘I was prepared only for one…Only expected to pay…Just give me a moment to think!’ He added a band of gold and a cold tapestry of pearls to the other rings in front of Coymans.

Coymans leaned over and picked the bulb up from the floor. He put it back into the nest, crossed his arms and waited, with his eyes on Vrel’s face.

In the following silence, an extraordinary thing happened to Simeon Timmons. The chestnut-coloured tulip bulb in his palm began to change from the ordinary piece of vegetable matter which a few seconds before he could think of only on a slice of bread. First it grew heavier and heavier in his hand, until it was as heavy as the high stacks of bales on the wharf. Heavy as a ship’s load of barrelled nutmegs and pepper. Heavy as the wood and stone and brick from which men build palaces. As heavy as gold.

The shiny chestnut skin grew translucent. In the heart of the bulb, Timmons saw the growing glow of the ruby ring, the diamond, and the pearls. And deep among all these fires flickered the small glints of greed in the eyes of Cornelius Vrel. In his hand, Timmons held possibility. For the men in London. And for himself, perhaps, at last.

Only a few years earlier, all the riches of the East Indies had been mere possibility. Travellers’ tales. Speculative dreams. Then brave men, with wit, patience and imagination had turned possibility into the reality of ships, spices and empires.

They sent me from London to assess possibilities, thought Timmons. Am I brave enough to tell the Company to forget Baltic grain, Chinese porcelain kraacke-ware, nutmegs and gold? For the possibility I am holding in my hand? For onions?

One

HAWKRIDGE HOUSE, HAMPSHIRE, 1636

May 22, 1636. Sun at last. A sad cold night. Hot bed cucumbers in bud under handglasses. First swallow. Too much to do before Eden opens her gates. The Serpent stirs.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

At fourteen he had been dangerous. At twenty-six, he feared, he had become merely reliable.

John crunched across the gravel forecourt of Hawkridge House in long angry strides, scattering geese and speckled goslings. A yellow cur from the stable yard trotted purposefully after him with its nose stuck to his heavy work boots to read his morning of horse, herb, pigeon and pig.

John stopped abruptly and glared over the high brick forecourt wall. In two days, even reliability would be stripped from him.

‘Heads down, lads,’ muttered a man with a rake.

Fourteen men and women, cottagers and workers on Hawkridge estate, watched him sideways as they weeded, raked and polished.

‘Poor man,’ said a young weeding woman under her breath. She hoiked a plantain rosette out of the gravel of the forecourt with a stubby knife and tossed it into a wooden trug.

‘Poor us,’ said her companion who squatted beside her in a crumple of woollen skirt. She uprooted a hawkbit. ‘He’s family. He’ll be all right.’

The two women waddled their bunched skirts forward like a pair of geese to attack a young colony of Shepherd’s Purse.

‘He’ll see us all right too,’ said the first woman.

‘… if he’s here to do it.’

They twitched their goosetail skirts forward again, eyes still on the dark, curly-haired, bearded storm which had blown itself to a brief stop in the centre of the forecourt. What would the Londoners make, they wondered, of a gentleman with such brown hands and arms, who wore coarse linen shirts rolled to the elbow and a leather jerkin? Each then looked down into her private fears. Change was almost never good.

John’s black brows, as delicate as a woman’s, dived fiercely together over a long, fine but slightly skewed nose. Light grey eyes gave him a wolfish look. A labourer who was oiling the iron forecourt gates turned uphill towards the road to see what had caused that grey-eyed rage, but he pursed his lips, puzzled. Beyond the forecourt wall, the avenue of beeches that curved down from the road to the house rustled peacefully with sea-green early leaf. High up, near the road, a cottager swung his scythe through the long grass, wild campions and meadow cranesbills. A spotted flycatcher dropped from a beech into the grass. Sheep munched.

The yellow cur waited a moment, then sat and pressed its muzzle against the man’s thigh. John’s brown hand stroked absently. The dog brushed the gravel with its tail. It sighed with delight. The man did not usually stand still for so long.

Above John’s head a breeze rippled and lifted the corners of scarlet and yellow curtains flung out to air over the sills of the upper windows of the pink brick house.

John closed his eyes. He hated to think about himself. A man should be master of his mind. Instead, his had mastered him, and he had no time for such weakness.

He flew through the ring of fire, fell like Icarus away from the dreadful heat of the sun.

He squeezed his thoughts smaller and smaller until they shrank to the feel of the cold, friendly nose in his palm.

The fire leaped, closed its claws on his scalp and lit the arc of his fall.

Indignant and terrified, he shaped his palm to the dog’s flat furry skull.

‘What’s wrong with me, eh boy?’ he asked the dog, under his breath. ‘Why has this come back to me now?’

The curly yellow tail scraped twice across the gravel. John looked down, suddenly jealous. I want to live just like you, in a rich web of scents, he thought. To chase rabbits, dig badgers, beg kitchen scraps, lift a hind leg where I like and mount an occasional bitch, with no grief for the past or fear for the future.

He looked back towards the house and caught the two weeding women eyeing him. Everywhere on the estate, that same look in everyone’s eyes – a mix of curiosity, pity and glee – had maddened him ever since the news of his uncle’s death had arrived.

‘Good morning, sir!’

John wrily noted their confusion as they dropped their eyes, but missed the note of affectionate respect.

His uncle, Sir George Beester, had died three months ago, five years after buying a baronetcy from King Charles and eighteen months after the death from dysentery of his only child, James. The news of Sir George’s death reached Hawkridge House three weeks after his burial, along with the news that his heir was now the only son of his only brother, John’s younger cousin Harry. John was unfortunately in the female line.

Harry had inherited everything, as was the practice in order to keep estates intact: the Somerset wool-producing estate, the London house, the business interests, the title of baronet and Hawkridge estate. In two days, Harry’s carriage would roll through the gates and dump into all their lives not only Harry, but his London friends, London servants, London in-laws, and rich new London wife. In two days the real master would arrive to claim his own.

He would take back from John the control over every penny spent. He would decide what work was or was not to be done, and who would do it. He would choose who could live in which cottage and who would use which field. He could turn any person he pleased off the estate, to go and make a living somewhere else if they could.

No one asked me to meddle for the last eleven years, John told himself. It suited me. Now I must accept the truth that Harry can turn me out of my own bed if he likes. He stared at the iron gates through which the alien carriages would roll.

Tuddenham, the estate manager, waved from the top of the long drive that curved down from the brow of the hill between the avenue of beeches. He loped down the hill, bald as a stone and lopsided from an accident with a cart. John crossed his arms and waited, happy to be distracted from both Cousin Harry and the remembered fire.

‘The holes by the gatehouse is filled now, sir,’ said Tuddenham.

‘Keep two men working on the road itself till we can hear their carriages creak,’ said John. ‘Muddy or not, Hampshire roads are better than what I hear of London streets.’

Tuddenham looked with approval at the scraping, pulling, raking and polishing in the forecourt. ‘You’ve got them all on the hop this morning, sir. The fox is nearly at the henhouse door, eh?’ His voice was a touch too hearty.

John bared white teeth, whose full number and colour were a mark of privileged diet, as were his full head of dark acorn-coloured hair and neat, healthy, curling russet beard. ‘And aren’t we all shuffling on our perches!’

Tuddenham slid him a sharp, oblique glance. ‘You’ll stay, won’t you, sir?’

‘I don’t know.’

The scarlet and yellow curtains snapped overhead in the silence that followed. Both men looked up. A housemaid leaned dangerously out of an open window to polish the diamond panes of glass. As she rubbed, the top of a blancmange breast quivered in time with her skirts. When she felt the men’s eyes on her, she rubbed harder. The two men glanced at each other and smiled, rescued from awkwardness by the shared perfunctory lust.

‘I must go finish the accounts,’ said John. He gave the dog’s nose a final rub and went reluctantly into the cool shadows of the big house.

The estate audit room at the front of the east wing served as his office. John ignored the accounts on his table. He ran his hand along a whale’s rib that hung on one wood-panelled wall and waited for his spirits to lift. But he stayed rooted in his office tucked behind the housekeeper’s room, within smell of the kitchens, instead of swooping along the bone, through time and space on the steed of his imagination, onto the bloody sea-tossed deck of the ship that had captured the beast. An early flesh-fly buzzed in tight circles near the ceiling.

He turned next for comfort to the coffers that held his books, but his teachers and friends, Pliny, Columella, Cato, Varro and Virgil, lay unbeckoning in their caskets, as mute as the dead men that they really were.

John grew frightened. He did not recognize this state of being.

He opened the drawers of his collection, on which he spent every minute he could spare from estate work. He gazed with rising panic at lizard bones, rare seeds (among them a plum-stone carved with the Passion of Christ), green and scarlet beaks, three strange fishes turned to stone, eighty-six labelled eggs, a dried elephant’s pizzle, shell creatures, and minerals that looked like toadstools. A few weeks ago, these had shimmered with import, like sun on the horizon of the sea. Now they lay slack in their drawers, as dull as the eye of a dead trout. Not even his oddities stirred him.

With his forefinger, he stroked his strand of fleece from a borometz. He had pursued the creature for uncounted joyful hours through the multi-layered ambiguities of the classical authorities – a plant-animal, a sheep that grew on a tulip stem and died when it had grazed a full circle. The crinkled wool looked very like the tufts snagged by bushes from his own sheep. He knew now that he had never believed.

He closed the drawer and stepped to the window, desolate. Once, with the passion and joy of secret vice, he had arranged, listed and described, in meticulous categories, drawer by drawer. For eleven years his hungry mind had chewed on these fragments of the forbidden world and been almost satisfied. He had never imagined that this passion might abandon him so abruptly.

He pressed his forefinger hard against a spike of a swollen blow-fish on the windowsill. His blood ran as slowly as chilled grease.

Lord, don’t let this strange, fearful torpor be envy of Harry, he begged. Send me a more dignified demon to wrestle. The fly circled his head.

He pushed open the window and sniffed the medicinal tang of rosemary and thyme, sweetened by the citrus tinge of freshly clipped box. From his bedchamber above the office, he could clearly see the entire labyrinthine perfection of the Knot Garden which had been his first mark on the estate, made eleven years ago.

Harry will find more than I did when I skulked here to hide as a fourteen-year-old outlaw. Immaculate brick walls instead of rotting wattles, woodpiles stacked neatly as carpets, a herd of sheep with the new short-staple fleece, and new gardens in which (however temporarily) Nature’s rush to disorder has been checked. Even the cabbages in the Field Garden grow as neatly as French knots in a lady’s embroidery.

His chest felt tight. He circled the room and alighted at his table again. He fingered the lists that had shaped the last weeks. The black lines through each task were crossing off the rest of his life. Little remained to be done.

Even his Aunt Margaret’s chaotic domestic kingdom was reasonably in order. Feather mattresses were laid over the straw in the guest beds, and the grooms in the horse barn had extra rugs. Each time John passed the kitchen, some new panic there was breeding still more meat pies, braided cakes and vats of brawn. Sixty smoked hams hung from spikes beside twenty-eight flitches of bacon. Fifty hens were at this moment losing their heads and four pigs dangled nose-down dripping into pails in the butchery shed.

He picked up the accounts. Under them lay a letter from his cousin. John put the accounts down again, on top of the letter. He stirred his ink and began to cross out items on his aunt’s latest provision list with fierce blobbed lines.

Ten pounds of nutmegs. Done! Two hundredweight of sugar. Too expensive – use honey instead! Cinnamon…He threw down the pen and ran his hands through his hair.

Fear.

He swallowed. His demon was not Envy. It was Fear.

He pulled Harry’s letter from under the accounts. The fire dream had returned, for the first time in many years, the night that the letter arrived. Blotched and smeared, scrawled from edge to edge in a schoolboy hand, the letter looked harmless enough, like Harry.

… I beg you, dear coz, to prepar me a triumf worthy of a new Cesar (yore littel cozin and former play mate) who hardly knows himself yet in his new elavashun but likes it WELL ENOUGH.

I will bring my new wyf (more anon) and, alas, a stern senater of Rome (her unkel and gardian, with his wyf) Who would like to pluck off my laural wreeth. But better, I will also bring a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you, coz, in making his visit …

John re-read the last sentence twice. A cold weight settled in the bottom of his stomach. He ran his eyes blindly over the rest.

… need decent lodging for 8 grooms, 2 women, 6 coach horses, 4 cart ox…new shirts payed by me to all the estate…Guest mattresses please be dry and free of mice…silver piss pots if possible for guests …

He smoothed the letter on the table. Surely he had been forgotten in Whitehall by now. He was exaggerating his own importance. But Fear tightened its armlock.

His hand stroked the corner of his chin where a scar interrupted the neat beard.

‘… a deer new frend who carrys wate with our French Qween and has a very speshul purpose to you …’

Harry means nothing by that. He’s a self-absorbed cheerful fool, not a traitor. I seek a false importance, John told himself. To make up for the fact that when Harry arrives, I will become who I really am – no one at all.

He kicked away his stool and left the office. Fear slid at his heels after him.

The wood-panelled corridor smelled of cheeses and spilled cider. John passed the open door of the housekeeper’s sitting-room and office that guarded the entrance to the locked storeroom. The centre of his aunt’s untidy web was empty. His Aunt Margaret, unmarried and a tough, dry-fibred weed of a woman surrounded by a halo of fluff, was elsewhere leading her house staff in a concerto of rising panic. John heard her voice faintly through the open windows.

‘Agatha! Agatha, where in Heaven’s…here, take this corner!’

Beyond the housekeeper’s room lay the kitchen. As John entered, a twelve-year-old housegroom who was counting candles nodded with moving lips, still counting. John turned right, through the long, narrow scullery and smock-room, and stepped out into a narrow, brick-paved alley. From beyond a brick wall at the left end of the alley, the dog yard in the basse-court echoed with yaps. Straight ahead, across the alley and through an arch lay his gardens, where man could constantly repeat the perfection of beginnings.

The herbier came first, built in the elbow where the chapel met the house, handy for the kitchen pots and for the still-room in the basse-court at the back of the house. A south-facing wall trapped the sun, to develop the herbal essences and ripen the grapes on the knotted Muscadine vine pinned to the wall.

The woody herbs in the long strip beds had been clipped that morning. John inhaled the brutal scent of bruised rue and the resin of the rosemary which he permitted, as a fond indulgence, to sprawl across the paved walk like a woman’s skirts. He tried to admire the naked, weedless dirt between the demure ranks of infant borages and clary.

I have been forgotten in London.

This likely truth did not cheer him as much as it should. He bent and pulled up a minute speedwell, then passed through a second arch into the Knot Garden.

He had reclaimed this square of earth from bramble and breeding rabbits and it still, though not today, gave him stabs of pleasure which he tried to see as satisfaction with honest labour, not wicked pride. Box entwined with germander outlined a four-cornered device of interlocking squares. Within these living walls, sharp-cornered as newly-planed wood, sat thymes, lavender cotton, wood strawberries and auriculas, which would cover the earth in full summer and delight all his senses.

The device itself was framed by a square of brick herringbone walks. Outside these walks lay a further square of four long beds in which grew John’s fragile darlings, his objects of study and his roses.

Not a leaf out of place. Not an unruly twig to nip. John plunged onward into the New Garden.

Where the Knot Garden was for contemplation, the New Garden filled bellies. It was nearly a hundred paces end to end and walled with brick to the height of eleven feet, with a low double brick fruiting wall as its long axis. That morning two gardeners were ridging the cucumbers in a hot bed made of horse-dung, built by John according to the Roman model. Eight weeding women sidled on their haunches along rows of feathery carrots and blunt young cabbages. Four more, under the eye of Cope the chief gardener, tended newly sprouted beans and lettuces. Birds perched in lines on the wall tops, waiting to swoop on the beetles and grubs so kindly being turned up for them.

My hortus conclusus, thought John, as Cope hailed him. Where I emulate the closed Garden that God built around all that he valued, to shut out the wilderness. In two more days, my Eden must open her gates.

‘… finches,’ Cope was saying.

‘Hire more boys to drive them off,’ John heard a distant self reply. ‘We’ll need all our fruit with this plague of guests.’

The two men walked a moment in silence. Cope stooped and pulled an early radish. He rubbed it clean against his leather apron, then gave it to John to taste.

John bent his senses to the peppery crunch and the prickle of hairy cloth-like leaves, but was distracted by the anxiety in Cope’s eyes.

‘An excellent radish, Cope. And the gardens are as ready as imperfect Nature can ever be. My cousin will be pleased.’

‘And you, sir?’ Cope was Cope junior, about John’s age and new to his responsibilities, trained by his father who had died that winter. John filled him with terror relieved by moments of shared satisfaction.

‘Adam’s own Paradise was never finer,’ said John. He tossed the radish leaves into a trug and fled before he was tempted to add that his opinion no longer mattered.

The three fishponds lay in a line behind the house, parallel to its length. They were fed from the western end by the slow, brown Shir which flowed lazily through them, gathered energy at the weir, slid a little faster toward the mill pond and then pounded along the race. John had diverted a channel from above the ponds through the cellar of the house to provide storage for wine and food that was cool on the hottest summer day. And though John’s tidying grip had loosened around the ponds, Nature still served man obediently with carp, pike, freshwater eels, rushes and willow withes.

The spring ducklings were already half-grown and the colour of dead rushes. A drake flapped on tiptoe along the surface of the middle pond, then lurched suddenly into the air. The accompanying clamour in the reeds died to an absent-minded murmur. John reached the bottom pond, crossed the narrow plank of the weir bridge and marched up the slope of Hawk Ridge into the precise grid of the orchard he had made.

Bees plunged in and out of the mud and wicker skeps John had set among the trees. The medlars were already blown. The Swan’s Egg pears had set. The buds of the later pears and apples were still tight and pink as toe-tips on the angled grey spurs. John emerged from the trunks of Great Russetings and Billiborues onto the grassy crest and looked back down at the house. In the grass at his feet, a runaway hen peered anxiously over the rim of an abandoned bucket where she had laid secret eggs.

Hawkridge House sat low in the valley, astride the buried stream, a modest H-shaped hall of pink brick, with a fine stone porch in the centre of the cross bar and a small crenellated chapel crouched on the north-east corner. She had been built with her head down just after King Henry died, when too many noble rumps were aiming at the same time for the English throne.

I do not aspire, the house seemed to say. I am one of the blessed meek.

The house and her estate had remained unraped while ambition and politics had burned greater manors and lopped overweening heads elsewhere.

John looked down at the single storey of the basse-court. Stillroom, dairy, dog yard, laundry, schoolroom, storage sheds, around a paved yard. Behind this fruitful jumble, the north front of the house rose like a smooth tawny forehead. Sun glinted on her leads and warmed the rosy brick of her dormers and crenellations.

Mine for eleven years, in truth if not in law. The womb of my invention, chief object of my will, the only true measure of my life on this earth. For the last eleven years I have hidden in her safe embrace.

John loved her as if she were a woman. Now he was preparing her for another man.

He stamped down on his jealous rage, but felt a new wash of fear. A void opened. There was nothing left for him to do. He could not see himself three days from now.

A bee rattled in the grass near his feet.

Even Nature rules against me, he thought. Take bees, a model of loyalty to the common good. When their kings become too numerous, they reluctantly destroy them.

He walked on, across the crest of Hawk Ridge, down through the hazel copses that gave game birds cover and up the steeper slope of the beech hanger.

Among the beeches stood the Lady Tree. Like her sisters, she was grey-trunked and copper-clawed now in the late spring. Pale sea-green leaflets were just twisting clear of their translucent claws. Like her sisters, she had been coppiced a hundred or so years before, her leading shoot cut out for firewood or a fence pole by an assart-holder or poaching peasant. Their side branches had grown into similar goblets around empty centres. Unlike her sisters, she was more than a tree.

I should cut her down, thought John as he always did. She’s too disturbing to be part of God’s design. But who on this estate would do it?

One of her branches had grown, not up but out, at the height of John’s hip, into a naked woman.

She was a little larger than life-size, stretched full length half on her side, shameless as if she waited for her lover. Her head and arms were hidden inside the trunk from which her two armpits arched. The armpits led to two breasts, tightly nippled with broken branch stumps. A ribcage, then a rounded belly and perfect navel. A bulging mound of Venus, then two voluptuous thighs began to curve gently upward. Above the thighs, stretched two slim calves. These elongated themselves, divided like a mermaid’s tail, divided again, then again into arching, springy branches as regular as lace.

She feigned sleep, one eye open to see what the man was up to. Yet another visitor. So many this spring. Never so many before.

She shook her amber claws, as pointed as frost, from which the pale green leaves already escaped.

Do I bless or curse? she asked, as she asked all visitors. Take your chance. I’m as sure as life, no more, no less. I make no false promises, but my roots reach far beneath your feet. Plant your deepest desires between the knobby curves, under my moss, and see what grows. Take a chance.

The earth between her roots was pocked with fresh mounds. John counted seventeen. A garden of fears and desires. He knelt and dug. He found a slip of parchment tied with hair, a prayer in misspelled Latin – Deliver Us from Evil.

He sat back on his heels and let out a shaky breath. Amen.

In other years he had found phials of menstrual blood and other vital fluids, names, pieces of silver, knife blades. His eyes traced her armpits, her breasts, her belly, her sex, and followed her legs upward. A fresh rowan wreath hung around one of her knees like a loose garter. High on the main trunk above her invisible head, someone had skewered a thrush.

I wonder if Dr Bowler knows who his real rival is on the estate, thought John.

So, she said to the man. You have finally realized that I am stronger than that garden of yours down there, that so-called little paradise behind her brick walls. Her space is full of silent battles. She is eaten up by her enemies. So small, so insignificant, so thorough, they eat holes in her walls and undermine her paths. She is dying from within. Take a chance with me!

Defiantly, he placed his left hand on the meeting of her thighs, to prove what or to whom, he was not sure. When Harry comes and I’m kicking my heels (if indeed I’m still welcome) I’ll draw her for my collection. An oddity.

Her bark was as firm as bone, and delicately rough like a woman’s fur. The pointed shadow under his fingers shook desire loose from its lashings at the back of his mind. He remembered the white, quivering flesh of the maid on the high windowsill.

It has been so long! he thought suddenly. Months without a woman, ever since my weeding woman Cat married her cooper and moved from the house to the village.

He leaned his forehead against the grey trunk. Lord help me! he thought. Not this as well.

Lust had found the crack in his wall that both fear and envy had missed. The flood broke through. His knees weakened. His throat felt swollen. His skin grew cold and damp. Fear and appetite tumbled together. Reason and good intent spun away downstream like dead leaves. He squeezed himself down onto his boot heels among the roots of the tree and pressed his back against her trunk.

I must be ill!

He thrust his hands into the leaf mould. His head fell back against the grey bark.

Lord, are you listening? I do not envy my cousin! I will not! I have had more than most men. I am grateful.

Nevertheless there was that other ghostly man with a different name, whom John had last known when he was fourteen.

I don’t know what he might have been today.

Dark emptiness scoured his gut. He felt as hollow as a bee tree, as fragile as a dried snakeskin. A breeze slid into his open collar, stroked his brown neck and teased the ends of his hair. The tree shook her mermaid tail gently above his head.

Spare me from envy. Absit invidia. Let there be no ill will. Ill will is unreasonable, and I have made myself into a reasonable man.

The tree lifted her branches on the back of the breeze and let them fall again.

John shivered.

I thought I was brave. But I am afraid, Lady. I fear. I fear and I want. Oh, how I want my own lands again. My own name. A reason for my life!

Once, rustled the Lady Tree. Once you had it all. Once. Once.

Then to her taunt, she added temptation.

Ask. Ask.

He flew through the ring of fire like a trained dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames jumped, clamped their claws into his scalp and rode him in a bright arc to the ground.

John 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 to the silver underside of the water, his eyelashes heavy with bubbles. He knifed deeper. Let himself drift upwards through the layers of warm and cold water until he burst through the silver into the air.

The air flowed freely into the crevices around his heart. He took a deep breath and felt his weight lighten. He pulled himself back below the surface and swam until the water threw him up again.

One foot touched ground. He stood and scooped the water in cupped hands over his head. When the last drop curved behind his left ear and fell from his lobe, he scooped again. Then again. His skin quivered under each delicate, chilly blow. He shook his head, opened his eyes and saw the woman standing on the far bank.

Cat. His former weeding woman, now married to the cooper. Who had deserted his garden and bed for a lean-to attached to the cooperage in the village. The gnat swarm sideslipped between them. Her shape quivered.

‘Good day, Cat.’

‘John.’ She moved from the bushes that hid the mouth of the path onto the ledge beside his heap of clothes. ‘I had forgotten how long and lean you look. Sleek as an otter with your curls plastered back. I thought I’d always remember, but it goes so fast.’

‘And there’s another to remember now instead.’

She smiled. Neither of them moved. John stood naked in the green-brown water up to his chest. The woman, in a dirty brown wool work skirt, unlaced bodice and linen shirt, looked down as she rerolled one sleeve to her elbow. Finally she nodded equably. ‘That’s so.’

‘Is all well?’ He hadn’t seen her since the wedding. He didn’t know whether he had avoided her, or she him.

‘More than well.’ She made no move to leave.

John began to feel foolish. He was too fragile, just now, for games. He looked at his clothes. Cat followed the direction of his glance.

‘No need to feel modest with me,’ she said, but her eyes grew suddenly uncertain.

A shiver of possibility rippled over John’s skin. He swam two slow strokes back across the pond towards Cat and his clothes. Then he stopped and looked at her again.

‘Oh, John,’ she said. ‘I followed you here. A married woman. Isn’t that wicked?’

‘Only if you leave me now.’

Cat stepped back off the ledge. ‘This way,’ she said, ‘along here.’ She picked her way around the pond edge, over kingcups and mud to a thicket of yellow-green willows. She parted their curtain with her hands and vanished like a player from a stage.

John waded from the pond, shedding water like a ship in a storm and slipped after her into the green haze. A sudden lustful hope nearly blinded him. Cat stood by the leaning trunk of a mature tree, thick-trunked herself but still graceful. He had seen her dark blond hair, now caught back in a cap from her square-cornered face, drifting as loose as the willow fronds on the water. His gut lurched and his member stiffened.

‘You say things are more than well with your cooper,’ he said thickly.

‘And I mean them to stay that way.’ She looked him in the eye. ‘We’re a good solid match. But I’ve thought of you…and how sudden I married. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.’

‘Did you follow me just to apologize?’ Lust teetered towards humiliated rage. She had flushed him into the open only to leave him there.

‘No. I thought you’d not object to one last time.’

He couldn’t speak. His mouth dried. His pulse drummed in his ears. In his strange ill state, he had misjudged her. He had forgotten her inability to toy with what she saw as the truth. At times her solid directness had weighed him down when he had wanted apostrophes, trills and flourishes in their passion. Now she held him in place.

She offered her mouth for him to kiss, then leaned back in his arms. He sank his face into the warm curve of her neck. She smelled strong but sweet, like his herbs.

‘I wanted to see,’ she said dreamily, ‘how it is, just once, when we don’t fear making a little bastard. I mean one last time, don’t mistake me.’

‘No,’ he promised, with his muzzle in the cup above her collarbone.

They had seldom mistaken each other, which was why he had liked as well as desired her even when he hankered for something more.

Cat broke back out of his embrace and lifted the hem of her skirt. ‘Here, let me dry you a little.’

‘Come back!’ He slid his wet arms under the petticoats, feeling for her warm skin. ‘Oh, sweet Heaven, you’re so warm, and I’m so cold!’

‘Not for long.’ She rubbed his bare chest and then his thighs. ‘You are a fool to swim so early.’

He grinned suddenly. The wolf eyes gleamed. ‘But look what it brought me!’ He felt suddenly easy with her again, as he had for two and a half steady years before she married the village cooper, when he had watched her crouched near him in the gardens intent on slaughtering infant weeds and only half-aware of his eyes. He slid his hand into her bush. ‘No fool, Cat. Not at all.’

She hissed between her teeth, blinked, then smiled into his eyes. She pulled her low-cut bodice from her shoulders and eased her brown nipples up into the reach of his mouth and fingers. He pressed her back and down. She twisted away.

‘Not on the ground. I can’t carry all those witnesses on my back and sleeves and hair. Here. Come over here.’

She leaned forward with her hands on a willow trunk, her skirts and petticoats bunched across her back. He thrust himself home between her magnificent haunches.

A familiar place he thought he had lost. Warm, friendly, familiar.

‘Oh, God!’ she said, muffling her voice. ‘Oh yes.’ She pressed her forehead against the tree’s bark. ‘Oh yes!’

Never to leave, never to leave. Warm, deep, dark, and infinitely friendly. He was all right again. Solid. There.

Need pushed him too fast. Sooner than he wanted, than he meant, he muffled a shout, sighed from his toe-tips and laid his head between her shoulder-blades. Their ribs heaved in unison. Pond water dripped from the ends of his hair onto her bare brown skin.

‘I would have liked a longer farewell feast,’ he finally said. ‘A Roman banquet of courses.’ He leaned his hands on the tree, with an arm on either side of her.

She turned to face him, her back now against the tree. ‘Don’t be a fool. You’ve never been one before.’ With her thumb, she wiped water from his black brows. ‘A good hearty tup, my love. More than enough, and right for now.’

She was a good-natured woman, even though she would not have said no if John had offered more, back when she had not had an offer from the cooper, a kind man of her own estate in life, with a skill which would always be needed by civilized man.

She stretched her handsome face up and kissed him. ‘’Twill do me nicely. We’re neither of us love-sick idiots.’

At that moment John was not so sure. His spasm had eased his fear, but not the yearning in his bones. The woman in his arms was generous. Her generosity moved him towards words he knew he might regret.

She held out the front of her dress and tucked her teats back into their nest. Then she ran her hands along his arms. ‘You’re bumpy as a plucked hen. I’d hate to be the death of you from ague. You’d best go get dry and clothed.’ One finger stroked his cold, limp member. ‘And find some other way of keeping that warm.’

‘None better than you,’ he said.

‘Words to warm me to my grave.’ She ducked under his arm and began to shake down her layers of linen and wool.

He plucked a grey-green willow-leaf dagger from the front of her thick, wavy hair.

‘We’ll still smile when we meet?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’ He drew the leaf down the ridge of her nose, then handed it to her like a rose. He watched her think. Then she decided not to say more. John was relieved. He was not angry at her marriage; he understood her necessity. He himself was not a fit husband for anyone. He was grateful to her for two and a half years of ease and delight. And yet, something coiled deep in his gut was best left undisturbed.

Cat ducked her head suddenly in the ghost of a curtsey. Gathering her ease around her like a cloak in cold weather, she turned away through the willows, back along the muddy bank. John parted the willows to look after her. He would miss watching those haunches shift their weight from foot to foot as she advanced, crouching, along a row of carrots or borage. When she disappeared he felt hollow again. Another line drawn through his life.

He began to tug his clothes back on over damp, sticky skin. At least the madness was gone. Between them the cold water and Cat had flushed it out even if they had not truly eased him. As he hauled at his boots, John decided that although he was still not his former self he should be able to throw his new demon in a worthy fall or two.

On the way back upstream towards the fish ponds, he paused to listen to the voices of the water – treble gurgles, alto murmurs and a low pounding bass pulse in the shadows of the bend.

‘Gone, gone,’ said the water. ‘On. On.’

The pale wolf eyes stared at a patch of froth which struggled for ever above the same stone to race upstream.

I have found my reason only to lose it again, he thought. He could not shake off a troubling fancy that he had just been paid an ambiguous bribe by the Lady Tree.

Two

May 23, 1636. Water horsetail in bloom. 2nd swallow. Apple buds relaxed, about to blow, very late. A second dry day. I hide in small things.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

‘I don’t know how Harry can ask it of us!’ Aunt Margaret wailed. She yanked her skirt hem from the closed door of the housekeeper’s office, where it had caught. Stiffened hip joints gave her small figure the rolling walk of a sailor.

John looked out of his aunt’s window into the immaculate forecourt. The geese had got in again and left grey-green droppings. If only he could freeze all living things until Harry Beester and his Londoners had arrived tomorrow.

‘All those extra grooms and maids and Lord knows who else! We should have slaughtered another dozen pigs last autumn!’

Her fingers moved even more intently than they usually did, constantly checking the location and solidity of things – her belt, her slightly weak chin, her skirt, her keys.

‘Your brother was still alive last autumn,’ said John with careful mildness. ‘No one could have known. Least of all Harry.’

In his head he tested the words ‘Sir Harry’.

Mistress Margaret shifted the mess of papers on her table. She shook her fluffy silver head grimly and frowned past the end of her generous nose at unavoidable disaster. Her fingers found her handkerchief in her left sleeve and assessed its lace trim. ‘We can’t bake enough pies for so many in that little oven. Agatha Stookey’s taken hysterical on me. Sukie Tanner’s about to drop her whelp and is no use to me in the kitchen, and there aren’t enough silver ewers for the guest chambers and …’ Her nose twitched, her small lower lip tucked itself even more tightly behind the upper one, and she burst into tears.

Before John could invent words of comfort, she steered abruptly into the true heart of her panic. ‘What will I do if our new lady turns me out?’ she wept. ‘George left me nothing to live on…a few pound a year for clothing …! Do you think he made it clear to Harry that I’ve nowhere else to go?’

John could not comfort her without lying. He did not know how the new Lady Beester from London would arrange things for her predecessor. He felt a quick spasm of guilt at his earlier self-concern.

He knew how little of her own his aunt had. Since reaching his majority he had paid out on behalf of his uncle the various annuities incumbent on the estate, including his own modest one. After Sir George died, John had carried on paying without waiting for legalities to be sorted out. His aunt, never married, was a tough, wiry little creature, but inclined to come adrift at the edges. She wouldn’t survive anywhere but here, where she had lived and more than earned her keep, unofficially, for the last thirty years.

‘I can’t imagine that warm-hearted Harry would let her do such a thing,’ said John. Harry could, however, do as he liked.

‘Harry’s such a fool!’ Aunt Margaret wailed and buried her face in her handkerchief. ‘Always has been. Anyone can turn him.’ Over the top of the handkerchief a suddenly malevolent grey Beester eye found John’s. ‘She might make him turn you out too! And where could you go? Carrying the mark of Cain as you do? I know what happened, even if the rest don’t. You’ve nowhere safe to go, except abroad with all those foreigners! Worse off than I am, poor lamb. We must stick together, John. We must help each other!’

John closed his fists tightly around cold fingertips. ‘Have faith in Harry. He may be a fool, but he’s a good-natured one.’

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ muttered Mistress Margaret.

‘We must pray for the best, then. Do our duty and trust in the just reward. And who knows? Harry may have changed for the better. He seems to have made a sensible marriage.’

‘You’re too good, John. No matter what they say you’ve done. You should have had Hawkridge House…Harry hasn’t visited in years …’

‘There’s no question of “should”,’ said John between his teeth. ‘After Cousin James, Harry is your brother’s heir.’

‘Harry will despise the place,’ said Aunt Margaret. ‘He’ll visit once and run straight back to his precious London …’

‘Then we’ll all go on just as before, contented as larks.’ John fled into the audit office, away from her quavering voice and spiked briar thoughts.

He turned all his attention to the delicate task of re-carving the point of a quill pen from his table. He split the point unevenly, cursed, and began again.

‘John …!’ The voice of Dr Bowler wavered in through the open window. The old parson stood on the gravel of the forecourt. ‘Can I have a word? Do you have a minute…I won’t need long. It’s just that I’m having a little trouble …’ Bowler’s high white bald forehead gleamed in the sun. His slightly-close-together eyes were even more anxious than before a sermon. ‘I know you’re busy …’

‘Come round,’ said John. ‘I’m doing nothing important.’ He threw knife and quill violently down on the table.

It’s like before a storm, he thought. All the livestock have the jitters. Including me.

Bowler was usually an ally. He had been John’s tutor and was now his chief drinking companion in the evenings. But since the news of Harry’s coming, Bowler had become morose and silent. He had stopped playing his viol and could no longer be tracked through the house or the gardens by his constant cheerful bumble-bee humming of hymns and glees.

The parson was better at music than religion. He had an authority with his flock when he mustered them into choirs which deserted him entirely when he was asked for moral certitude. John’s request for a full musical consort for Harry’s arrival should have excited Bowler into a melodious frenzy.

Instead he hid away in his small apartment of rooms behind the chapel, where he leafed wanly through sheaves of musical scores. He chose tunes, then rejected them. Picked others, rehearsed them twice with his musical conscripts and gave up in despair.

‘John!’ exclaimed Bowler in a tone of discovery as he edged through the office door. ‘I’m so glad I found you. You know that we’ve been practising ever since you told me…Do you think Harry…Sir Harry, that is…expects us to be note perfect?’

‘Perfection’s not possible in this world. Just catch the spirit.’

‘He’ll have changed,’ said Bowler, ‘since I taught him. Not that I taught him for long, nor very much, I’m afraid.’ He sighed. ‘He was never…not like you …’ His voice trailed away. His worried eyes crouched close together like small animals seeking comfort.

He opened a coffer of books and peered in. Many of the volumes were his gifts to John.

‘A requiem, John. That’s what I will be conducting. A requiem.’

‘What nonsense!’ bellowed John, suddenly beside himself. He wanted to kick his table. Bowler never moved in straight lines. That was why he could never string together a coherent sermon nor teach Greek grammar. ‘What utter nonsense! Who’s dead?’

‘Coherence,’ said Bowler.

‘What?’

‘It’s a requiem for coherence.’ The old man held firm with dignity against his former pupil’s outburst. ‘You know I have trouble with my grip at the best of times. I’m afraid, John. I’m getting too old …’

John pulled himself back to order. Bowler had taken the wind out of him. What he felt for his old tutor was as close to love as anything he felt for anyone, including his fondness for his aunt.

‘Do you think Harry…Sir Harry…will appoint another parson? Although that wasn’t what I meant by coherence…I wouldn’t presume to hymn my own demise. Although I don’t know what I would do without the tithes.’

‘I’ll do my best to see that he doesn’t appoint another,’ said John. ‘But I can’t read even my own future.’

‘It’s like waiting for death,’ said Bowler. ‘Supposed to be all right if you’ve done the right things, but you never really know. The Greater Power either tosses you up one way or chucks you down the other. I dare say one manages either way, but I must say I find the waiting most unsteadying.’

‘If there is justice, Doctor Bowler, you will be one of the chosen.’

Bowler demurred, modest but also amused. ‘You haven’t had much to compare me with. But you’re kind, John.’ He seemed to feel better than he had when he arrived. ‘I suppose I should go visit Sukie Tanner, though she’s quite unrepentant about this child of hers…child-to-be, that is. At least my dutiful stone won’t be the first one cast at the poor girl.’

After Bowler had left, John paced tight circles, aped by the fly still there from the day before.

He still felt as fragile as a shed snake skin. He could not contain everyone else’s fears.

‘… the mark of Cain,’ his aunt had reminded him.

If they had hanged me after all, I think I would have felt like this the night before.

Dr Bowler had left the book coffer open. John lifted out a volume of Virgil’s pastoral poems and opened it at random.

Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt.

Et tibi satis …

Fortunate old man, so your land will still be yours. And it’s enough for you…

His eyes leaped away and onward.

Fortunate senex, hinc inter flumina nota …

Happy old man! You will stay here, between the rivers you know so well …

He slammed the heavy leather covers shut. Traitors everywhere, disguised as former friends! Columella, Cato, Varro, Pliny…He did not trust himself to test any of the others either, in his present mood. He replaced the Eclogues and spun around to the end window that looked out onto the forecourt. The geese had gone, but their route was clearly marked. John’s left hand touched the left corner of his jaw where the skin puckered over the bone.

Let the storm break! Thunder, lightning, hail – whatever wrath the Heavens may thunder down tomorrow. Lord, just end this waiting!

May 24, 1636. A cold sour night but sun again today. Soil in the Far still too wet to sow beans. Do I end with unsown beans?

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

There was still no movement on the road. John shifted his body unhappily inside its carapace of stiffened and padded pale-blue silk. (Harry had sent the doublet and new, narrower trunks from London, to be sure that John looked like the cousin of a rising baronet.) Two immaculate white cuffs of Brussels lace fell over the tops of his green kidskin boots. Two more half-hid his brown hands, which were half-raw with scrubbing. He looked more elegant than he felt. Even in baggy work clothes, his physical outline was naturally precise. With the curly acorn-coloured hair trimmed and the right corner of his neat beard shaved to match the bare scars of the left corner, he looked very much at home in clothes that he wore only under duress.

From the small stone entrance porch, John surveyed the players in Harry’s requested triumphal masque. He saw ominous portents of comedy.

Below him in the forecourt, Dr Bowler sat on a stool in his best black coat, viol against his ear, picking with irritation at one of the strings. A glass of cider leaned dangerously in the gravel at his feet. A distant sheep was bleating a half-tone higher than the string. Three estate workers, washed, brushed and polished, lounged against the pair of stone eagles that flanked the porch, with their wooden pipes under their arms – descant, alto and bass. The cooper’s drum lay abandoned on the gravel; he had no doubt gone in search of his bride Cat.

John stared at the drum. She’d have had me, he thought with a renewed jolt of loss. I should have taken her and not worried what a bad bargain it made for her.

Mistress Margaret darted out of the doorway onto the stone porch. She was trussed, painted and frizzed for a court ball, but a line of sweat glistened on her wrinkled upper lip, her stiff, pleated muslin ruff was askew and she had lost one of her garnet earrings. ‘Anything?’

‘Not yet,’ said John.

‘The mutton will dry out if they don’t come soon!’ She darted away again in a rustling of rose silk and muslin. ‘Agatha! Agatha!’ John heard her cries fade away through the main chamber.

A welcoming feast (perhaps now a little overdone) waited in the Great Chamber. Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate, and Sir Richard Balhatchet, who had been Knight of the Shire before Parliament was dissolved, both attended, suitably dressed, in the Long Gallery with yet another bottle of the estate’s best ale.

John glanced back at the cooper’s drum. You did the right thing, man. Don’t add to the weight already on your conscience.

He went down the three steps from the stone porch, across the gravel forecourt to the off-centre gate. He ached to yank open the scratchy collar of Harry’s lace-trimmed shirt and to haul at the excess cloth bunched in his crotch, but too many eyes were on him.

‘He should be the one,’ said the descant player to the alto, as John walked away. ‘Not that London cousin.’

Dr Bowler squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and focused his entire being on tuning his string.

All the estate residents were ranged under the beeches along both sides of the drive – the tenant cottagers and their families, the housed labourers (mainly unmarried) and the poorhouse elders. The men stood or sat uneasily in their best Sabbath clothes, which included the new shirts Harry had ordered. At the sight of John they jumped to attention, hands and caps raised high in over-eager greeting.

‘Morning, sir! Good morning! A nice dry day for it, sir!’ Their eyes weighed his unusual elegance, probed his face, and slid away.

They half-want a cockfight, thought John with clarity. My mettle and spurs are being sized up.

The women and girls eyed him over knitting or mending.

‘Oh, you do look fine, sir!’ called one of the older, bolder ones. Not like a stable groom today. But handsome either way.

‘That Cat was a fool,’ a young, unmarried woman muttered. ‘He’s not set on a gentlewoman. I’d have played him better. Had him fast enough.’

‘And where would you be after today, then?’ asked a friend.

‘I wouldn’t care!’

Among the fragrant green swags of ivy and lavender hung on the gate were tucked white and green bunches of sweet woodruff as delicate as silk French knots, against the plague which already festered in London again this summer.

John smiled to himself, a little grimly. A small gesture made by the helpless in the face of the uncontrollable.

He strolled back toward the porch. He felt numb.

Harry, thought John, come now! I can’t take any more waiting! We’re all as ready as we will ever be. Our bodies have exhausted themselves to make up for the shortcomings of our hearts and souls.

‘Still nothing?’ called Aunt Margaret breathlessly from the porch door. As she squinted past John, she tapped her handkerchief with great delicacy against her upper lip. ‘Disaster, John! We can’t find the new barrels of ale, the ones from Sir Richard …! They’re not in the cellar! Help me, John!’

‘I’ll look in the basse-court,’ said John with resignation.

The missing ale was not in the basse-court, the buttery, the stable yard, or the stream-cooled cellar. Unable to force himself to look further, John placated his aunt with fourteen bottles of Flemish wine which he had meant to save for a later occasion. He lifted a spider’s web from the pleats of his lace cuff and dusted the left side of his padded silk breeches.

Then he went into the stable yard. He stood quietly for a moment in the warm, dust-filled air of the horse-and-hay barn. Constellations of bright motes swarmed in a shaft of sunlight that cut low through the open door across the cobbled floor. His own cob and Aunt Margaret’s mare, along with all twenty draught animals, had been turned into Mill Meadow. The stalls were clean, their floors covered with fresh straw. The iron manger cribs held hay, and buckets of corn stood ready for the London animals. When John came into the barn, two sparrows flew out of the nearest bucket onto a beam above his head to wait until he had left again.