The Memory Palace. Christie Dickason

up the track from the mill, where she had no doubt gone to hide a basket of cheeses.

      With one eye on their audience and a touch of swagger, the carters threaded one of the ropes through the pulleys and tested that it ran freely. Then they linked the three poles together at one end, and hoisted the linked end into the air. Their audience gave a gratifying ‘ahhhh,’ as a great spindly tripod rose above the head of Nereus and settled its feet in the mud.

      The carters next spread the canvas sling on the ground beside the statue. Then they tied the pulley rope to Nereus’s thick bearded neck. They secured the second rope like a belt around his dolphin’s belly. Fox set four men on the taut ropes.

      ‘Now.’

      His son thrust a large jemmy under the plinth and dropped his weight onto the iron bar. The crowbar slipped in the soft mud of the bank. Young Fox grunted, fell against the dolphin’s nose and swore.

      ‘Take care not to chip him!’ cried Sir Harry.

      The old sea king did not budge.

      ‘Perhaps he’s not a movable after all!’ called Zeal.

      ‘He will yield to our machines, madam,’ said the elder Fox. ‘You can raise siege cannon with these sheer legs. A statue such as this is nothing.’

      ‘What are they doing?’ called Doctor Bowler in alarm, from the far side of the middle pond, book under his arm and a leaf in his fringe of hair.

      ‘Giving us a lesson in how to raise cannon,’ Zeal replied across the water.

      The audience continued to gather. Four women of the house family, their hands busy with knitting needles or the quick rise-and-fall of drop spindles. More children. A tenant farmer and his son leaned over the hedge of the Roman Field. Ducks, never known to be sensitive to the moment, gathered on the water below the struggle and quacked to be fed. Even the cat watched from a neat hunch on the edge of the still house roof.

      Young Fox sucked his bleeding knuckles.

      ‘Bring on a grown man!’ shouted one of the onlookers. The young carter gave him an evil look.

      Under his breath Harry asked Zeal, ‘Can’t you find useful employ for these idlers elsewhere?’

      ‘What could be more useful than a chance to observe and learn from London men at work?’ Zeal replied sweetly.

      Pickford took the crowbar. Young Fox was set on the end of the restraining rope. But after several more attempts, Nereus still stood unmoved.

      ‘Fetch a shovel,’ said Pickford.

      ‘If to labour is indeed to pray,’ observed Doctor Bowler, now crossed over the sluice bridge to join the crowd, ‘these must be the most devout men in England.’

      Suddenly, Wentworth’s voice asked quietly in Zeal’s ear, ‘Can Harry do this?’

      ‘He has the right.’ She made a helpless gesture. ‘But I’m happy to say that whether he can still seems to be in question.’ She looked over her shoulder at Wentworth. ‘You left your fishing for this?’

      ‘You might need me.’

      She did not look at him again but felt him still standing at her back. His words made her feel odd and needed thinking about at some other time.

      After a short break for dinner, which they took from their bundles on the carts, the carters dug away the mud from under the forecourt side of the plinth. Five men pushed. At last, Nereus consented to give way, as reluctantly as a deep-rooted tooth. Slowed by the two ropes, he tilted ponderously onto his side in the centre of the sling, with his head hanging over one long edge and his feet over the other.

      ‘Don’t break the dolphin’s nose!’ shouted Harry.

      ‘He looks just like a sausage pasty,’ said one of the boys. The rest of the on-lookers, fewer in number than before dinner, seemed torn between groans and a natural instinct to cheer.

      ‘Now fill the hole you’ve made in the bank,’ said Zeal. ‘I recall no mention anywhere of a legal right to dig holes.’

      Harry ignored her, but Pickford gave the shovel to young Fox.

      ‘Now back one of the carts down here to the pond,’ ordered Harry.

      ‘How?’ Zeal stood up from the corner of Amphritite’s plinth, where she had stayed on guard during the dinner break.

      From the arch in the hedge, Fox and Harry contemplated the maze. Then Fox set off towards the forecourt, traversing the maze with exaggerated care. A few moments later he reappeared with a measuring rod, which he held against the opening in the hedge.

      ‘We can’t get a cart down to the pond in any case, sir. It’s too wide to pass through this arch.’

      ‘Then cut down the hedge.’

      ‘That right is not given in the deed,’ said Zeal.

      Harry turned to the estate manager. ‘Tuddenham, bring us that bill you had earlier, and three others, and an axe. The hedge is already ruined. And no one has mazes any longer, in any case.’

      ‘Tuddenham, please do nothing of the sort.’ To Harry, she added, ‘I have a maze.’

      The watchers shifted in anticipation of new drama.

      With an oath, Harry seized the nearest boy by the arm. ‘Come, my lad. You show us where the things are kept!’ He dragged the boy towards the stable yard, with carters hopping over the maze walls behind him.

      Wentworth cleared his throat.

      Zeal called a second boy and sent him to fetch her neighbour Sir Richard Balhatchet. ‘Beg him to make the greatest possible haste. For our part, we must hold them off until he arrives.’

      Wentworth touched her arm. ‘Do you recall what you asked me yesterday morning?’

      She and he arrived back on the pond bank just as Harry’s men returned with four billhooks and an axe. When Harry gave the order to attack the hedge, Zeal produced Wentworth’s pistol from the folds of her skirts.

      ‘Shit!’ said Pickford under his breath.

      Harry was the only one to laugh. ‘She won’t shoot,’ he told his men. ‘Carry on.’

      There was a long uneasy silence. Zeal leaned against Amphritite and braced her arm, which had begun to tremble under the weight of the gun. She aimed first at Fox. Then at his son. Then at Pickford.

      Pickford scratched his neck and sat down. The others looked from her to Harry and back again. They laid down their billhooks.

      Zeal watched Harry eye the tools as if considering even the gross impropriety of taking up one himself.

      ‘The law is on my side, madam,’ said Harry. ‘I shall call for a constable if you don’t let us proceed.’

      ‘Better than that, I’ve already sent for a magistrate.’

      

      After examining the deed, which Zeal kept in a casket in the estate office, Sir Richard was forced to agree that Sir Harry did indeed have the right to remove the statues. But, on the other hand, Sir Richard also had to agree with Zeal that Harry could not cut down either hedge or maze.

      ‘That’s absurd!’ Sir Harry reached over Sir Richard’s shoulder to take the deed for a closer look. ‘What am I supposed to do?’ He threw his arms to the Heavens in protest.

      ‘Mind the candlestick on the mantle,’ Zeal said quietly.

      ‘This is a madhouse!’

      ‘Let me see that deed again.’ Sir Richard frowned at the document as if it would yield something it had failed to say before. Zeal wondered if the old knight had simply forgotten what it said. His once-keen mind had seemed to lose its edge quite suddenly, early that past summer, and his memory had begun to misplace things.

      ‘Most