The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

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