The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

in the centre of the long, unwindowed inner wall. Zeal trotted over to it and wrinkled her nose. Sure enough, there was a problem there to be set right. This discovery made her even happier.

      John rose early and listened for some time at his open door. Then, ignoring the silk breeches and padded doublet that Arthur had laid out for him, he put on his woollen work breeches, linen shirt and leather jerkin. He breakfasted in his room on a quick mug of ale and a slice of cold meat pie.

      Without comment, Arthur folded John’s good clothes and replaced them in a chest. Arthur was twenty-four, fair-haired and freckled. He had been born on an estate near Basingstoke and sent to work as a housegroom at Hawkridge House when he was ten. As boys, he and John had fished, swum, wrestled and talked whenever John visited his uncle’s estate. At eleven, Arthur had shown John the Lady Tree and dared him to put his hand on the meeting of her thighs.

      When John had suddenly arrived for good at the age of fourteen, Arthur (then twelve), like most of the estate residents who knew John, had been fascinated by the mysterious drama in a far-off place that had changed John’s name from Nightingale to Graffham and sent him into what was eventually understood to be hiding.

      When the two boys first met again, Arthur was surly. He didn’t want John to think that he presumed on childhood intimacy. John was preoccupied and seemed distant. They went on for several months with Arthur resentful and over-quick to snatch off his hat, John distracted but feeling yet another loss. Then John began to heal, to talk, to seek Arthur’s opinions, and Arthur lowered his raised hackles.

      As John slowly took over running the estate, he called more and more on Arthur’s slightly edgy, challenging help. The two youths relaxed slowly back into respectful companionship without quite regaining the childish ease. In the end, Arthur moved formally from housegroom into the role of John’s man. He gave John loyalty and an honesty that never flattered. In exchange, John stirred up Arthur’s safe and humdrum life. Arthur felt that he never knew exactly what would happen next. He also had the more superficial but gratifying joy of being close to the man at the centre; everyone believed he knew what John thought, even if he didn’t. Their connection was amiable, comfortable and trusting, but it had never been tested.

      Now John watched Arthur thoughtfully, considered confiding in him, then decided to wait. He took his leather belt and dagger from the hook on the wall. He let himself through a side door into the little parlour above the chapel where he stood at the window and looked down into the basse-court.

      The wet thump and sloshing of churns came from the open door of the dairy room. A boy was dreamily sweeping the brick pavement. A cat lay curled asleep in the sun on top of a barrel. Two washing women side-stepped out of the washroom, heads bent together over the heavy basket of wet linens they were carrying out onto the lawns to bleach in the sun. Nothing indicated the possible arrival of men-at-arms called by Malise.

      Well, for certain, John thought wryly, I’ve not faced a day so filled with fascination for many years. I wonder if it will be my last one here. He used his wryness to mask from himself a puzzling sense of failure.

      He went down into his office where he collected up a small bundle of papers, a bag of coins, and his pistol, all of which he locked into a cupboard set into the wall. He opened the doors and drawers of his collection, then closed them again. One of Malise’s men was strolling in the forecourt. John watched him for a moment. Then he left the office to sharpen his knife on the whetstone in the lean-to outside the kitchen.

      His uncle brought him safely to Hawkridge House and left again at once, a single horseman and groom, seen only by the family of house servants and two stable grooms.

      Aunt Margaret had already been resident on the estate for fifteen years and resigned to spinsterhood. At first she had twitched and exclaimed, and cried out that they would all be ruined if John were discovered and retaken there. Then, still muttering disasters, she had applied poultices to his sores and rashes that prison had bred (even an above-ground apartment). She half-drowned him in tisanes, decoctions and nourishing broths. She doused him for lice and fleas. She prayed for him twice a day on her knees in the little chapel, on the tiles of tulips and royal Spanish pomegranates, her head bent between the female acrobat, the monkey, and a cockerel being swallowed by a fish.

      ‘Poor, poor lamb. Poor doubly bereft little soul. My poor, dear nephew, so fierce, so unfortunate!’

      ‘I’m well, aunt! I’m well! I don’t need dosing!’

      But she pursued him with mint and rosemary, with garlic and willow bark, and with the panic of suddenly acquired responsibility. Like his uncle, she understood better than John how the butterfly must now reverse nature and shrink back into a worm.

      Two soldiers arrived a week after John did. They were making polite enquiries. No one who mattered had evidence to link Beester with his nephew’s escape, however much some might suspect it. John saw nothing of his aunt’s performance, of course, as he was hidden in the attics, but he picked up awestruck comments from the servants. The soldiers left later the same day, well-fed and unsuspecting.