The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

its way through the darkness on an urgent breath. ‘Nephew John, it’s Mistress Beester.’

      Now he imagined a thicker darkness near the door.

      ‘Your aunt…Uncle George’s wife.’

      His hand clamped even tighter onto the knife.

      ‘John, are you there?’

      The thicker darkness stirred. It seemed to retreat a step.

      ‘Aunt Jane?’

      ‘It was the right door! Thank God! Come at once!’ The whisper was impatient and frightened. ‘Come quickly. Your uncle is waiting in the street…Come!’

      John stood with a surge of joy. He took a step and bumped into the table. He hesitated in the darkness. What if she weren’t really there? It would be too terrible if she were a demon testing his soul’s strength. She would vanish, and he would have to rebuild his courage again from scratch.

      ‘Sweet Heaven, come now!’ Fabric rustled. A cold but solid hand brushed his wrist, fumbled, gripped on.

      John dived through the darkness after the hand.

      ‘Close the door!’ she whispered.

      They cut diagonally across a short corridor to a second smaller wooden door. His aunt opened it and ducked into the shaft of a narrow stone staircase with John behind her. Steps spun down, down, down around a pole of stone into a well of darkness. John followed the hissing of his aunt’s hems down the stone treads, his knees jerking in the rhythm of his descent. Slap, slap, shouted his feet. He tried to step more lightly as he followed his aunt’s rustling shadow down into the well. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. The truth began to shake his numbness. Tap, tap. He kept one hand on the spiralling wall to steady himself. The pitted stone bit at his fingertips. The cold damp air had the rotting leather smell of bats. He was escaping. Alive.

      A vestibule. A heavy door, slightly ajar. A porch. A passageway. John smelled the stench of offal and sewage as they crossed a bridge over the prison moat and passed through another gate. Then, a street. An unlit coach, and his uncle.

      ‘In! In!’

      Horses’ hooves scraped on stone. Running water sluiced in a shadowed trench. Inside the coach, with the door slammed shut, John threw his arms around his uncle.

      ‘You’re not clear yet,’ said Beester, patting the broad young shoulders. ‘We must get you out of London tonight.’

      ‘How did you do it?’ demanded John. ‘How did you unlock the doors and remove the gaolers?’

      ‘Ahh,’ said George Beester with satisfaction. ‘It’s a venal age.’ He hesitated. He was pleased by his own foresight; he had extracted as much money as possible from the boy’s estates in the twenty-four hours after Francis Malise’s death, before the mill of the Star Chamber began to grind. John had bought his own freedom, at no cost to his uncle. It had been an elegant transaction. However, Beester was not sure that the boy would appreciate this elegance or understand his new estate in life.

      ‘Are you aware, nephew, that the Star Chamber now holds the deeds to all your estates and assets? Your escape will make them doubly forfeit to the Crown. Your present freedom is the sole residue of your inheritance.’

      ‘It’s more than enough!’ said John with passion. ‘Thank you! And thank you, aunt!’

      ‘I’m afraid it’s far from enough,’ replied Beester. ‘As you will learn.’ He studied the shadowy rectangles of darkened windows passing outside the coach. ‘Now I must hide you in a safe burrow somewhere.’

      His uncle took him upriver by boat from a dock near London Bridge. John perched in the prow. He watched the sleeping city slide past, then the great dark houses of the Strand, then the jumbled buildings that made up Whitehall. Later, Chelsea village, and much later, the palace at Richmond. Because he was only fourteen, he couldn’t help thinking – now that he had escaped – that he was having the most amazing adventure.

      ‘This is what life feels like,’ he told himself, as the far, dark banks slid past and distant dogs barked. ‘I am being tested.’ Doubt still slept in his deserted prison cell. In John’s euphoria at leaving behind the terror of the rope and block, he now knew that his clear sight would return. His tale would end as it should, after battles, voyages, and vindications, in his own reclaimed kingdom at the side of a blue-eyed princess.

      He leaned against the Lady Tree, too tired to move. He listened for a few moments to the rustle of her mermaid tail above his head. Then he noticed the hedgehog crackling and snuffling in the leaves by his feet, the danger of the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

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

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

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

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

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

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

      He was past thinking.

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

      Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

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

Four

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

      Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

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

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

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

      Oh, yes! She breathed out a happy sigh.

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

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

      My