The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

Within these living walls, sharp-cornered as newly-planed wood, sat thymes, lavender cotton, wood strawberries and auriculas, which would cover the earth in full summer and delight all his senses.

      The device itself was framed by a square of brick herringbone walks. Outside these walks lay a further square of four long beds in which grew John’s fragile darlings, his objects of study and his roses.

      Not a leaf out of place. Not an unruly twig to nip. John plunged onward into the New Garden.

      Where the Knot Garden was for contemplation, the New Garden filled bellies. It was nearly a hundred paces end to end and walled with brick to the height of eleven feet, with a low double brick fruiting wall as its long axis. That morning two gardeners were ridging the cucumbers in a hot bed made of horse-dung, built by John according to the Roman model. Eight weeding women sidled on their haunches along rows of feathery carrots and blunt young cabbages. Four more, under the eye of Cope the chief gardener, tended newly sprouted beans and lettuces. Birds perched in lines on the wall tops, waiting to swoop on the beetles and grubs so kindly being turned up for them.

      My hortus conclusus, thought John, as Cope hailed him. Where I emulate the closed Garden that God built around all that he valued, to shut out the wilderness. In two more days, my Eden must open her gates.

      ‘… finches,’ Cope was saying.

      ‘Hire more boys to drive them off,’ John heard a distant self reply. ‘We’ll need all our fruit with this plague of guests.’

      The two men walked a moment in silence. Cope stooped and pulled an early radish. He rubbed it clean against his leather apron, then gave it to John to taste.

      John bent his senses to the peppery crunch and the prickle of hairy cloth-like leaves, but was distracted by the anxiety in Cope’s eyes.

      ‘An excellent radish, Cope. And the gardens are as ready as imperfect Nature can ever be. My cousin will be pleased.’

      ‘And you, sir?’ Cope was Cope junior, about John’s age and new to his responsibilities, trained by his father who had died that winter. John filled him with terror relieved by moments of shared satisfaction.

      ‘Adam’s own Paradise was never finer,’ said John. He tossed the radish leaves into a trug and fled before he was tempted to add that his opinion no longer mattered.

      The three fishponds lay in a line behind the house, parallel to its length. They were fed from the western end by the slow, brown Shir which flowed lazily through them, gathered energy at the weir, slid a little faster toward the mill pond and then pounded along the race. John had diverted a channel from above the ponds through the cellar of the house to provide storage for wine and food that was cool on the hottest summer day. And though John’s tidying grip had loosened around the ponds, Nature still served man obediently with carp, pike, freshwater eels, rushes and willow withes.

      The spring ducklings were already half-grown and the colour of dead rushes. A drake flapped on tiptoe along the surface of the middle pond, then lurched suddenly into the air. The accompanying clamour in the reeds died to an absent-minded murmur. John reached the bottom pond, crossed the narrow plank of the weir bridge and marched up the slope of Hawk Ridge into the precise grid of the orchard he had made.

      Bees plunged in and out of the mud and wicker skeps John had set among the trees. The medlars were already blown. The Swan’s Egg pears had set. The buds of the later pears and apples were still tight and pink as toe-tips on the angled grey spurs. John emerged from the trunks of Great Russetings and Billiborues onto the grassy crest and looked back down at the house. In the grass at his feet, a runaway hen peered anxiously over the rim of an abandoned bucket where she had laid secret eggs.

      Hawkridge House sat low in the valley, astride the buried stream, a modest H-shaped hall of pink brick, with a fine stone porch in the centre of the cross bar and a small crenellated chapel crouched on the north-east corner. She had been built with her head down just after King Henry died, when too many noble rumps were aiming at the same time for the English throne.

      I do not aspire, the house seemed to say. I am one of the blessed meek.

      The house and her estate had remained unraped while ambition and politics had burned greater manors and lopped overweening heads elsewhere.

      John looked down at the single storey of the basse-court. Stillroom, dairy, dog yard, laundry, schoolroom, storage sheds, around a paved yard. Behind this fruitful jumble, the north front of the house rose like a smooth tawny forehead. Sun glinted on her leads and warmed the rosy brick of her dormers and crenellations.

      Mine for eleven years, in truth if not in law. The womb of my invention, chief object of my will, the only true measure of my life on this earth. For the last eleven years I have hidden in her safe embrace.

      John loved her as if she were a woman. Now he was preparing her for another man.

      He stamped down on his jealous rage, but felt a new wash of fear. A void opened. There was nothing left for him to do. He could not see himself three days from now.

      A bee rattled in the grass near his feet.

      Even Nature rules against me, he thought. Take bees, a model of loyalty to the common good. When their kings become too numerous, they reluctantly destroy them.

      He walked on, across the crest of Hawk Ridge, down through the hazel copses that gave game birds cover and up the steeper slope of the beech hanger.

      Among the beeches stood the Lady Tree. Like her sisters, she was grey-trunked and copper-clawed now in the late spring. Pale sea-green leaflets were just twisting clear of their translucent claws. Like her sisters, she had been coppiced a hundred or so years before, her leading shoot cut out for firewood or a fence pole by an assart-holder or poaching peasant. Their side branches had grown into similar goblets around empty centres. Unlike her sisters, she was more than a tree.

      I should cut her down, thought John as he always did. She’s too disturbing to be part of God’s design. But who on this estate would do it?

      One of her branches had grown, not up but out, at the height of John’s hip, into a naked woman.

      She was a little larger than life-size, stretched full length half on her side, shameless as if she waited for her lover. Her head and arms were hidden inside the trunk from which her two armpits arched. The armpits led to two breasts, tightly nippled with broken branch stumps. A ribcage, then a rounded belly and perfect navel. A bulging mound of Venus, then two voluptuous thighs began to curve gently upward. Above the thighs, stretched two slim calves. These elongated themselves, divided like a mermaid’s tail, divided again, then again into arching, springy branches as regular as lace.

      She feigned sleep, one eye open to see what the man was up to. Yet another visitor. So many this spring. Never so many before.

      She shook her amber claws, as pointed as frost, from which the pale green leaves already escaped.

      Do I bless or curse? she asked, as she asked all visitors. Take your chance. I’m as sure as life, no more, no less. I make no false promises, but my roots reach far beneath your feet. Plant your deepest desires between the knobby curves, under my moss, and see what grows. Take a chance.

      The earth between her roots was pocked with fresh mounds. John counted seventeen. A garden of fears and desires. He knelt and dug. He found a slip of parchment tied with hair, a prayer in misspelled Latin – Deliver Us from Evil.

      He sat back on his heels and let out a shaky breath. Amen.

      In other years he had found phials of menstrual blood and other vital fluids, names, pieces of silver, knife blades. His eyes traced her armpits, her breasts, her belly, her sex, and followed her legs upward. A fresh rowan wreath hung around one of her knees like a loose garter. High on the main trunk above her invisible head, someone had skewered a thrush.

      I wonder if Dr Bowler knows who his real rival is on the estate, thought John.

      So, she said to the man. You have finally realized that I am stronger than that garden of yours down there, that so-called little