The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

we’re agreed.’ Harry considered a cementing embrace but decided instead to lead briskly onward beside the pond. ‘After we dine, I’ll show you the Dutch pattern books for houses and gardens that I brought from London. The Classical orders are explained – Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Fireplaces and lintels, pilasters and friezes. All there for us to harvest for our own use…Those geese do get everywhere, don’t they?’

      John absolved his cousin and steadied himself for supper with Edward Malise. In any case, you can’t kill a man over a dining table, he told himself wryly. Not with ladies present.

      ‘For God’s sake, John, don’t desert me as you did this afternoon,’ whispered Harry when they met in the New Parlour an hour later. ‘I need your help! Do what you can with Mistress Hazelton, and don’t let Sir Richard drink any more!’

      Sir Harry ushered his guests into the large dining chamber at the back of the house which had once been the Great Hall. A tiny knife jabbed his stomach. He would have killed to be in the corner seat of some safely distant tavern with a quart of ale in his hand. In the last hour while being brushed off for dinner, he had become less and less sure whether to claim Hawkridge and its residents as his own or to reserve the right of distance from any possible disasters.

      First there had been John’s strange behaviour by the ponds. Then the realities of mended and faded curtains and hangings. He had spied a dog’s marrowbone in the entrance hall and chased a cat from his bed. The pisspot in his own bedchamber, though spotless, was only plain white porcelain. The chapel was smaller than he remembered. (And the female acrobats and monkeys carved on the stalls lost charm when seen through the eyes of Puritan house-guests.)

      Sir Henry Bedgebury could wait no longer and had left on urgent business. His aunt was nearly weeping because it was closer to supper time than dinner and claiming that the mutton was overdone. And there was some other palaver about missing ale.

      Harry needed to become angry, to belch out his nervousness in justified irritation.

      ‘John!’ hissed his aunt. She beckoned from the door of the buttery.

      John stepped into the small chamber.

      Aunt Margaret closed the door and locked it. Her bunch of keys clattered in her shaking hands. ‘That’s the brother isn’t it…that man who came last?’ Her whole being quivered with panic.

      ‘Yes.’ John laid the admission down like a heavy load.

      ‘What will you do now?’

      ‘Dine.’

      Aunt Margaret twisted knotted fingers together against her lace apron. Her eyes opened wide like a terrified rabbit. ‘How can you joke? He’ll have you arrested again. You have to get away! How could Harry bring him here? I told you he couldn’t be trusted any more …!’

      ‘Aunt!’ John laid his hand on her arm the way he would soothe a frightened dog or horse. ‘Malise may not recognize me.’

      ‘Then why is he here?’

      ‘That’s what I must learn.’

      ‘How can I serve him dinner? And sit there as if nothing’s wrong? And what if he does recognize you? How can you possibly …?’ Her right hand tried to pull the fingers off her left.

      ‘Darling aunt, listen to me!’ He took both of her hands in his. ‘Are you listening?’

      Mistress Margaret nodded distractedly.

      ‘You saved my life once before, when the soldiers came looking for me, eleven years ago. I need you to do it again. I need you to be just as calm and wily now as you were then. Pretend I really am John Graffham, an inconsequential by-blow nephew who washed up on your doorstep. Worry only about the sauces and the joint. Show Harry that he hasn’t inherited a lower circle of Hell. I need you to forget that you are a good, virtuous woman. You must lie your head off…deceive so well that you believe it yourself.’

      Mistress Margaret gave a quivery sigh. ‘These things get more difficult…Of course, I’ll try. But John …’

      ‘Our guests are waiting for your incomparable meat pies. To battle, my Boadicea of the pots! Distract the enemy with titbits. Feed him into harmless, full-bellied sleep.’ He took the keys, unlocked the door, and pushed his aunt towards the dining chamber.

      ‘Be seated,’ cried Harry to his guests.

      Mistress Hazelton frowned at a carved wooden pilaster set into the wall, from which a bare-breasted nymph offered passers-by an overflowing basket of fruit.

      Harry noted her frown. The little knife stabbed again just above his navel.

      The dining chamber at the back of the house, however, offered no excuse to purge Harry’s emotional wind. The diamond window panes glistened in the late afternoon sun. On every window ledge, John had set blue and white Turkish ceramic pots of late white tulips. Their faint, sweet, green scent twined itself into the smoke of apple logs and rosemary branches that burned in the great plastered brick fireplace to cover the smell of must and mice. One of Harry’s own London hounds snuffled and twitched before the fire as if it had always slept there. Harry quivered like dried grass and watched his guests for the direction of their breeze.

      At least, he thought, Hazelton seems so far to approve of Cousin John, in spite of my cousin’s odd humour. Can’t tell what Malise thinks. Please God, let it work. Let them see that I can offer something in my own right. That they must reckon with my advice in the future.

      Edward Malise looked out of one window. Samuel Hazelton gazed appraisingly out of another across the yard and outbuildings of the basse-court towards the swell of the orchard ridge beyond. The trees were carved in high relief by the slanting rays of the sun.

      ‘It’s a poor view now,’ said Harry. He winced at the row of churns airing outside the dairy room and at a hen balanced on one leg in the middle of the courtyard to scratch itself. ‘But I’ll soon put that right. You must imagine the sweep of a lawn where that jumble of a courtyard is now, and a lake beyond! Please do come sit down.’

      ‘It’s not a bad view,’ said Hazelton pleasantly. ‘A scene of good husbandry and industry. In your circumstances, Sir Harry, not to be dismissed.’

      All three Londoners gave John a quick look.

      John’s stomach tightened with renewed alarm. What was that about? he wondered. I feel the hunt is on but don’t know from which thicket the hounds will appear.

      Harry flushed.

      ‘But there’s nothing wrong either in wanting to put things right,’ said Hazelton, making peace again.

      Harry took John’s former chair in the centre of the table. He ached for a gilt Venetian candlestick and Italian glasses, but he could not fault his aunt’s muster of the resources she had.

      The long, heavy oak table, pulled out from the wall into the middle of the room, smelled sweetly of beeswax. The wood of the carved oak stools gleamed, and their faded red and green needlepoint cushions were brushed clean of dog and cat hair. (Harry pined for chairs but supposed that he was grateful to be spared the humiliation of benches.) The linen tablecloth was sunbleached to an irreproachable white. The pewter plates and cups shone like water on a bright day. Mistress Margaret had even found, somewhere, a silver spoon to set at each place.

      Soon, thought Harry, when cousin John has carried out his task for us…Then I will buy silver plates, Venetian glasses with spiral stems and lugs, and the French forks they are now using in Whitehall.

      Harry called for his knife case and that of his wife, which was a very expensive wedding gift from himself. He hoped that Malise, sitting across from her, would notice the fine Spanish workmanship of both leather and steel.

      ‘Welcome,’ said Harry. He raised his glass. ‘To the renewed life of Hawkridge House.’

      The food, though plain, was plentiful and appetizing: glazed meat pies, the troubling joint of mutton (not ruined by the delay at all),