The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

      ‘John? Did you hear a name called out? Titles? Anything Frenchified? Were any of them gentlemen? I must have evidence!’

      The seven-year-old John squirmed on his stool and shook his head. The answers his uncle wanted so badly jostled and seethed behind a locked gate in his mind. If he let one memory through, the rest would swarm behind. He would never be safe again. Inside the dark canopy of his bed, they would eat up all his other thoughts. They would hunt him into the daylight, throw a net of darkness over his head and entangle him for ever.

      ‘Where’s Lobb?’ he asked brightly. ‘May I go now? I want to find Lobb.’

      George Beester sighed and released him to search for the dog.

      For the orphaned heir to the Nightingale estates, there followed a constant shifting of households and a long succession of different beds. A few months on his own Tarleton estate, visits to his other three houses. A few months with his Uncle George at Hawkridge. A summer on another of his estates. Two months with an aunt in London. He remembered chiefly the pain of leaving cousins and newly-befriended pets.

      In spite of adult prayers and a few charms cast in private by one particular aunt, he had hidden in blankness for the next seven years. His parents had left him, been set upon and killed in some terrible, unspecified way. He did not remember exactly how and no one was anxious to tell him. He had to make a new life without them, on the four estates that were now his and on sojourns with uncles, aunts, cousins, tutors and friends.

      He paced the crest of Hawk Ridge toward the water meadows.

      Memory had sparked before dying again. In his own kitchen at Tarleton Court, when he was ten, a kitchen groom had thrown a dead rat onto the fire.

      ‘To the Devil with him,’ the man had said, before he thought.

      John had been alerted by the uneasy eyes the man then turned on him. The man’s quiver of embarrassment stood John’s hair on end. John and the groom locked eyes.

      The rat’s fur flared as quickly as lightning. The flesh blistered, sizzled, blackened and drew back from the bones. The rat writhed as its sinews shrank and hardened in the fury of the heat.

      ‘That’s that!’ said the servant with false heartiness. ‘You’d hardly know, it was so quick.’ He hooked a charred log-end from the side of the hearth into the central blaze. The ashy form of the rat crumpled as if it were hollow. It was gone except for the shriek of small sharp white teeth that rolled away to lodge against the leg of an iron trivet.

      ‘Master John,’ said the groom. ‘Would you like a swig of the new cider? It’s better than last season’s. What do you think?’

      John read correctly the attempt to distract him. He thought he would be sick. Then he saw that this was only an approximate idea. More precisely, he was a brittle shell around nothing, not even sickness. He was nothing, except for the swelling pressure of his eyeballs against the bony rings of their sockets.

      If he touches me, I will crumble like the rat, John thought. His mind stopped there.

      ‘I’m fine. Jack. Fine,’ he said. ‘Why are you fussing?’

      Then, eleven years ago, when he was fourteen, memory had returned in a firelit room in a private London house. His uncle George Beester took John to a meeting of the directors of the South Java Trading Company. Beester greeted colleagues and introduced his wealthy nephew who might one day join them. There were a dozen men in the room. Then two newcomers arrived late.

      In low voices, the men who knew explained to the men who did not. New investors. Francis and Edward Malise, from an old Catholic family which had survived King Henry by fleeing to the Netherlands. However, as the Malises were stubborn Catholics, the king had, by self-elected right, taken most of their money and all their lands. The Malise estates were sold or distributed to deserving supporters of Henry’s expedient split from the Church of Rome. (One or two men had looked at John.) The parents had died abroad. Then, under James, the two Malise sons returned to England and crept slowly back into wealth and position. The new French queen of James’s son Charles was said (by low voices into close-held ears) to be oiling their way upward, as she did for any man who could speak her alien tongue and was willing to make the sign of the Cross.

      ‘A little over-concerned with being seen at court,’ muttered Mr Henry Porter, owner of coastal ships that carried sea coal and dried cod.

      Sir James Balkwell, owner of a large part of Buckinghamshire and local magistrate, replied, ‘Who cares if a man cuts his hair long or short so long as he has money to invest?’

      As he plunged through the meadows up towards the road, John startled sleepy sheep into bleating flight. At the top of the hill, he leaned his arms on a wall and lowered his head onto the hard damp stone.

      The Malise brothers were wrapped in an expensively fashionable softness of lace and curling hair which contradicted their sharp-boned, beaked faces and dark, hungry eyes. They were as alike as a pair of hunting falcons.

      The brothers set off a glimmer of fear in John, as faint as distant lightning in a summer sky. He stared, hunched into himself like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk.

      The newcomers turned sharp eyes on the assembled men. They were quiet in manner but shuffled a little on the perch, lifting and settling their feathers. They moved around the room, accepting introductions. Then they paused before the fireplace. Edward, the younger brother, turned his head to Sir James Balkwell. Firelight flickered on bones of his nose and cheek. Sir James said something. Edward Malise showed his teeth in a laugh and changed John’s life for the second time.

      Memory flared white-hot. John saw the things his uncle had begged him in vain to recall. He saw Edward Malise laugh in the orange light of the burning coach. His mother writhed in the brightness of her burning clothes. His father fell dead across his legs. John flew through the burning window frame. His hair flared. His heart was a red-hot coal. His arms and legs were flames.

      He shrieked like a demon and flung himself through the bodies of the other men, across the room, shooting flames like thunderbolts, at that orange-lit, gleeful, beaked face of the Devil.

      He knocked a cup of wine through the air and sent blood-red rain showering onto the hems of jackets and lace boot tops. A sheaf of papers fell from startled hands. The twin falcon faces snapped around. For a suspended moment, the time of an indrawn breath or the fall of an executioner’s axe, John blazed across the room in the stillness of the men’s disbelief and his own absolute intent.

      The red-hot knives of his fingers seared Edward Malise’s laughing face. Then the elder brother, Francis, seized him from behind. John twisted in the man’s arms. The matching falcon face glared into his, contorted with effort, teeth bared. John tried to breathe, but the man’s arms crushed his lungs. He wrenched free and, with all his force, knocked the face away. Francis Malise staggered two steps backward, then toppled. John sucked in air like a drowning man and threw himself once again at Edward.

      Francis Malise’s feet danced back another two steps, trying to catch up with his shoulders and head. His head smashed against the stone floor with the succulent thud of an overripe gourd. His lungs whooped like a collapsing bladder.

      John didn’t see him fall. He screamed and clawed at the four men who tried to pull him off the other brother. Then slowly the stillness in the room chilled his fury. He looked where all the men were looking. Francis Malise lay on the stone flags, arms thrown wide at his sides, mouth ajar, jaw a little askew. All eyes in the room watched a small damp patch spread darkly out from his groin across the front of his pale blue silk and wool breeches.

      John buried himself deep in the shadow of the Lady Tree. He leaned against her trunk and embraced her for steadiness. He had become a helpless conduit for the past.

      The silence in the firelit room had continued for five more breaths, then everyone had shouted at once.

      ‘Francis!’ screamed Edward Malise. He jerked free of restraining hands and flung himself down beside his brother’s body. ‘Fetch a surgeon!’

      Henry