The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

of silent battles. She is eaten up by her enemies. So small, so insignificant, so thorough, they eat holes in her walls and undermine her paths. She is dying from within. Take a chance with me!

      Defiantly, he placed his left hand on the meeting of her thighs, to prove what or to whom, he was not sure. When Harry comes and I’m kicking my heels (if indeed I’m still welcome) I’ll draw her for my collection. An oddity.

      Her bark was as firm as bone, and delicately rough like a woman’s fur. The pointed shadow under his fingers shook desire loose from its lashings at the back of his mind. He remembered the white, quivering flesh of the maid on the high windowsill.

      It has been so long! he thought suddenly. Months without a woman, ever since my weeding woman Cat married her cooper and moved from the house to the village.

      He leaned his forehead against the grey trunk. Lord help me! he thought. Not this as well.

      Lust had found the crack in his wall that both fear and envy had missed. The flood broke through. His knees weakened. His throat felt swollen. His skin grew cold and damp. Fear and appetite tumbled together. Reason and good intent spun away downstream like dead leaves. He squeezed himself down onto his boot heels among the roots of the tree and pressed his back against her trunk.

      I must be ill!

      He thrust his hands into the leaf mould. His head fell back against the grey bark.

      Lord, are you listening? I do not envy my cousin! I will not! I have had more than most men. I am grateful.

      Nevertheless there was that other ghostly man with a different name, whom John had last known when he was fourteen.

      I don’t know what he might have been today.

      Dark emptiness scoured his gut. He felt as hollow as a bee tree, as fragile as a dried snakeskin. A breeze slid into his open collar, stroked his brown neck and teased the ends of his hair. The tree shook her mermaid tail gently above his head.

      Spare me from envy. Absit invidia. Let there be no ill will. Ill will is unreasonable, and I have made myself into a reasonable man.

      The tree lifted her branches on the back of the breeze and let them fall again.

      John shivered.

      I thought I was brave. But I am afraid, Lady. I fear. I fear and I want. Oh, how I want my own lands again. My own name. A reason for my life!

      Once, rustled the Lady Tree. Once you had it all. Once. Once.

      Then to her taunt, she added temptation.

      Ask. Ask.

      He flew through the ring of fire like a trained dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames jumped, clamped their claws into his scalp and rode him in a bright arc to the ground.

      John had been a child of ivory beauty. Even in babyhood his fingers were long and slim, his legs straight and finely-shaped. His skin was smooth at a time when a third of the people were pitted with pox. He read at four and showed early promise in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. By five he had proved to be well co-ordinated, good at riding, swordplay and all the other male games which keep thoughtful, intelligent boys from being laughed at by their peers. His grey eyes, at seven, already caused stabs of female anticipation. In short, he was a prince in a kingdom that knew his worth.

      His paternal grandfather, Howard Nightingale, had been young and ambitious when King Henry annexed Catholic lands after the English split with the Church of Rome. Though the son of a London brewer, the grandfather had been well-educated and found a patron to provide three years at Oxford, from where he had emerged with a fair knowledge of law. In exchange for loyal services to several influential Tudor lords, Nightingale was given a confiscated Catholic estate, Tarleton Court near Hatfield. Shortly after, he bought a second once-Catholic estate, Farfields, for a token price and set his family on the ladder to power. John’s parents were still only the middling sort of gentlefolk, but by the time he was born late in their marriage they had prospered enough to buy two more estates.

      They were overwhelmed that their only surviving child should be one such as John. They prayed that he live to manhood, masked their doting with severity (which did not fool their small son in the least), acquired still more land to swell his fortune, and bought him a gentleman’s education to shape him for a life of influence at the court in Whitehall. He would have been a blind saint if, from an early age, he had not been infected by their sense of his destiny. By miracle, he was not a monster.

      Both his own nature and his parents’ good sense guided him toward civil manners and a burning concern for others, who included not only his parents and his nurse, but the house families in the Nightingale estates, his many cousins, the young stable grooms who played with him, his horses, his dogs, a hen with a twisted leg, a papery globe of tiny spiders glued to the tester of his bed, butterflies doomed to short lives, and one particular piglet whose death made him refuse bacon between the ages of four and six.

      In 1617, when he turned seven, the time came to place him out. His father wooed a London lord on the fringes of the Court to take his son into the noble household for polishing into final splendour. The lord agreed. Master and Mistress Nightingale accompanied John to London from Tarleton Court, their chief estate, north of Hatfield. John’s father had business in the city with a tanner who bought hides from him, as well as with an impoverished knight with a small estate to sell. John’s mother seized the chance to visit her wool merchant brother, who was still plain Mr George Beester, in his London house rather than on his distant Somerset manor.

      They set out at dawn. While a horseman could reach London in one long day, their coach needed at least two on the muddy track which served as a road. John hung out of the window until he bit his tongue going over a bad bump. Then he begged a ride on top with the driver and footman.

      A unexpectedly swollen ford cost them three and a half hours by bumpy lane upstream to a place where the coach could cross. John was briefly entertained by his father’s angry and puzzled speculation why some idiot had dammed the river just downstream. But as the party lacked men to tear the dam down, the detour had to be made. They were still at least two hours away from their inn and deep in the shade of a forest of oaks and beech when the sun set. The footman lit the carriage lamps. Bored and hungry, John fell asleep with his head on his nurse’s lap.

      He half-woke to urgent adult voices. The coach rocked violently. The inside lantern swung like a ship’s lamp in a storm. But the coach had stopped rolling.

      ‘Are we there?’ asked John. His mother grabbed his arm as if she meant to tear off his sleeve. John sat up, wide awake.

      A man screamed in the darkness outside the coach. The scream died abruptly. John’s father threw himself against the inside of the coach door.

      ‘Richard! Who is it? What do they want?’ asked his mother.

      His father didn’t seem to hear her. Dimly, in the swinging arcs of lantern light, John saw the continent of his father’s back bunch and quiver under his coat. The coach rocked harder. The darkness outside moved and flickered with orange light. John heard crackling and smelled oily smoke.

      ‘Oh, sweet God!’ cried his nurse.

      His mother whimpered once, like a struck dog.

      His father cried out and fell across John’s legs. A comet blazed through the coach window. Hungry stars spilled onto the crowded, heaped-up yards of gown, cloak, lace and petticoat. The stars bit. Flames ran around the edges of sleeves and spread across skirts. His mother screamed; her hair had caught fire. The coach filled with the smell of burning silk and wool, and seethed like a bag of drowning cats.

      Still screaming, John’s mother hauled him from under his father’s dead weight and thrust him into the air, through the burning hoop of the window like a performing dog at St Bartholomew’s Fair. The flames in his hair sketched the arc of his fall against the night.

      John stood so abruptly that he hit his shoulder against the ribcage of the Lady Tree.

      I am ill, he thought. Soul sick.

      He wished