The Memory Palace. Christie Dickason

The ship no longer lacks a rudder. She is to be my wife.’

      Zeal sat frozen with the weight of his hands on her shoulders and the heat of his belly against her back.

      Sir Richard broke the silence with a violent coughing fit. When Comer had thumped him on the back and offered a handkerchief to mop his eyes, words began to emerge between the splutters. ‘…old dog. Lucky old bastard!’ He straightened. ‘My congratulations!’ He blew his nose. ‘Suppose I’ll have to arrange a bridal chamber at High House then. Can’t have your wedding night in a barn!’

      Graciously, if tentatively, Gifford offered his own congratulations. ‘I shall marry you in Bedgebury, it goes without saying.’

      Wentworth gave Zeal a warning look. She kept silent while Wentworth and Gifford at last agreed that the Hawkridge attendance at his services in Bedgebury could be limited to one Sunday a month.

      ‘I would have touched the gun!’ Zeal said tightly to Wentworth when Gifford, Comer and Sir Richard had gone. ‘I would have fired it if I could!’

      ‘Of course.’ He gave her a conspiratorial smile. ‘But never confess anything in the presence of a judge.’

       12

      ‘Tell me the old sot was raving in his cups!’

      Zeal was alone in the bake house the next morning blearily eating a slice of cheese with her morning ale when Mistress Margaret arrived breathless and alone, on foot from High House. The sun was barely up. The ovens were still banked.

      Mistress Margaret lowered herself onto a stool and wiped her red face with her apron. ‘Tell me you are not going to marry that old man!’

      ‘You heard this before dawn?’ Zeal picked up a knife. ‘Bread?’

      She had not slept.

      ‘Not dawn. In the middle of the night! Sir Richard was roaring around as drunk as an owl till he keeled over at cockcrow…Give that old loaf to the hens. I’m about to bake more…I haven’t slept since I heard about Harry, and then that other nonsense Sir Richard was spouting.’ Mistress Margaret had loved her nephew John fiercely.

      Zeal kept her head down as she began to cube the stale bread. ‘It’s all true.’

      Mistress Margaret squeaked like a small rusty hinge. She got up and took the yeast sponge from the oven where it had been rising overnight along with a bowl of water. Still silent, she beat down the puffy yeast mix with a wooden spoon, measured flour by the hand full, mixed all together. Her amethyst ear drops trembled.

      Zeal swept the bread cubes and crumbs into the hens’ basket, then stooped to feed the sleeping fire under the first bread oven.

      ‘I don’t understand,’ said Mistress Margaret at last. ‘If you love my nephew as you claim, how can you bolt to the altar before his ship has scarce cleared the horizon?’ She turned the dough out onto the floured tabletop and attacked it with both fists. She pinched her small mouth, then sniffed angrily. ‘I expected better of you, my girl.’

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      Mistress Margaret turned the dough and slapped it, though not as hard as she might have done before the knuckles of her hands had grown swollen and red. She worked for several minutes with her head down. ‘I’m not sure I can live here if Wentworth becomes master. Even if he deigns to permit me. But where can I go? How can you do this to me, at my age?’

      Can’t she see what’s before her eyes? Zeal wondered. Even if she’s never carried a child herself? Rachel guessed.

      She ached to tell the older woman, but Mistress Margaret had kept a secret just once in her life, and then only when her nephew’s life had depended on it. ‘I won’t let him turn you out, aunt. In any case, our lives won’t change that much. He has no ambitions beyond his fishing. We shall carry on just as before.’

      Fiercely, the older woman pressed down on the dough, folded and turned it then pressed down again. The smell of raw yeast began to fill the air. ‘I had thought – at the worst, if it came to it – that you might have to make a business-like marriage to bring in some money to help run and repair the estate. And pay our Crown levies. But all Master Wentworth can settle on you is a bucket of trout! And not even his own trout, at that! Most likely your trout! The old wrinkle-shanks!’ She thumped the dough again and raised her voice. ‘And I don’t care if he hears me!’

      She paused as one of the dairymaids staggered in from the cow barn with two full pails. Together the three women lifted the heavy pails to pour the milk into a shallow lead sink rescued from the dairy house, so that the cream could rise to the top for skimming.

      ‘The churn Mistress Wilde lent us from Far Beeches needs to be scoured and set to dry in the sun,’ Zeal told the maid.

      ‘Waste!’ muttered Mistress Margaret, pummelling her dough again.

      Zeal began to pump the bellows.

      ‘I like the man well enough, don’t mistake me,’ said Mistress Margaret.

      Slap, thump.

      ‘…As far as I’ve had a chance to know, that is. It’s not that…can you find me the seeds?’

      Slap, thump.

      ‘…but he’s old. And odd.’

      Thump!

      ‘…keeping to himself, forbidding anyone to clean his chamber. He might be a murderer for all we know. Have chests full of severed heads.’ She sliced the dough into six smaller lumps.

      Zeal took a lump and began to shape a cob loaf. ‘I like him well enough too.’

      ‘“Like!” La, la!’ Mistress Margaret stood staring down at her loaf. Then she burst into tears and hobbled out of the bake house.

      Before Zeal had shaped her second loaf, Rachel came into the kitchen. Without speaking, she went straight to the second oven and began to work the bellows.

      After several minutes, Zeal said into the silence, ‘Yes, it’s all true.’

      ‘God be praised!’ Rachel’s elbows flapped as if she were a duck trying to lift off a pond. ‘I can save my tears then.’

      

      When Zeal passed him in the forecourt mid-morning, Doctor Bowler wore the expression of a kicked dog and avoided her eyes.

      ‘Terrible, terrible about Harry,’ he said. Though he did not mention the proposed marriage, she knew by his odd manner that Wentworth had spoken to him as promised.

      By the end of morning milking, the rest of Hawkridge estate seemed to have heard the news of both death and marriage, and split into those for the match and those against. John Nightingale had been popular during the fourteen years he had run the estate, first for his uncle and then for his cousin. Wentworth shunned friendship and had often given offence by repulsing well-meant overtures. Few were in favour.

      ‘They’ll work it out soon enough,’ Rachel told her, having caught Zeal near tears in the still room. ‘But we must get you into a safe berth first.’

      Zeal pinched her lips and drew a deep breath. ‘And what do you hear about Sir Harry’s death?’

      Rachel peered into a tiered muslin sieve, which was dripping a greenish juice into a crock. ‘Everyone on the estate knows the truth of what happened. Any rumours will soon die.’

      Zeal had never before felt out of favour here, even when first proving herself to them as Harry’s new, fourteen-year-old wife. Now the averted eyes and pursed lips hurt her. She hated the way talk stopped whenever she entered a room. She was frightened by the occasional assessing eye that measured her waist. Wentworth was right. They must marry as soon as possible.

      That morning,