The Memory Palace. Christie Dickason

vow won’t help him if you’re dead.’

      She did not reply.

      ‘I hate to think that death is preferable to a few years of my company,’ he said.

      ‘You don’t want to marry any more than I want to die. I’ve never seen a man so content with his own company.’

      ‘I want the child.’

      She caught her breath.

      ‘I’ve no children who are alive to me,’ he said. ‘I’d be proud to claim Nightingale’s pup as my own. Until he wants it back, of course.’ He shouldered his rod. ‘In the name of the man you love, consider my proposal. Save his child. Life need not change much. Take time to reflect. I won’t retract my offer. You will find me at Pot Pool, below the mill.’

      

      Zeal had not meant to go back to High House, but now that Rachel had intercepted her, she could not think what else to do. She had used up all her will on the chapel roof during the night. The two women paused for breath on the brow of the grassy ridge that separated the two estates.

      ‘Winter’s coming.’ Rachel gazed back across the ruined house at the bright slaps of colour on Hawk Ridge.

      ‘I need to sit down,’ said Zeal.

      ‘Madam! Think of your skirts,’ cried Rachel, too late.

      

      After breakfast, Zeal rode her mare back to Hawkridge. While she waited in the office for her estate steward, Tuddenham, to finish in the stables, she picked up a stack of sooty papers, then set it down again. The old lethargy sucked at her again.

      Wentworth offers a way out. Take it.

      But I vowed to stay true to John. I believe that excludes marriage to someone else.

      But this would be merely the form of marriage. An arrangement.

      A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.

      ‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.

      She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.

      She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.

      ‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’

      She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’

      Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.

      Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.

      I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.

      Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.

      How do I know I can trust him?

      She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.

      Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.

      She turned back, then found that she had to rest.

      He was clever to have used the child.

      The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.

       5

      She took her place at the middle of the long, scrubbed elm table in the Hawkridge bake house kitchen where the small house family most often ate supper following the fire. Even this outbuilding smelled like the inside of the smokehouse, but with a colder, seeping edge. A light dusting of ash from the fire seemed always still to salt the food. She looked at the familiar faces around the table with a stranger’s eye. She might as well have been a Mede or Ethiop dropped by magic carpet.

      Since the recent fire, the estate residents had split their lives between Hawkridge House and assorted temporary lodgings. Her nearest neighbour, Sir Richard Balhatchet, had given rooms at High House to Zeal and Mistress Margaret, who was the unmarried aunt of Harry and John. Their two serving women, and Agatha, the chief house maid, and Doctor Bowler the estate parson also slept at High House. Others of the house family, including three house grooms, two kitchen grooms, and John’s former manservant, Arthur, slept where they could in the outbuildings and barns. The large mid-day dinner was served at High House to those not in the fields. Apart from the house family, the rest took supper wherever they found themselves.

      Thank the Lord, Master Wentworth never comes to the table, Zeal thought. I could not bear to see him just now.

      According to Mistress Margaret, he had never eaten in company since he first took up residence on the estate long before Zeal arrived.

      Now, as they sat on borrowed stools along either side of the long table, their voices and laughter, the sound of their chewing, the scrape of stool legs on the stone floor, a dropped knife, all made her flinch.

      As Mistress Margaret supervised the passing of rabbit stew, she hummed with grim glee at news that a neighbour (not Sir Richard) had been fined five hundred crowns for ploughing across the boundary of an adjoining estate. ‘He always takes the largest portion at table, too!’ she said. ‘And the last sweetmeat.’

      Doctor Bowler paused for a polite beat of silence then ventured, ‘But surely, that is exactly what the king did to John! Boundaries, I mean, not sweetmeats.’

      The king meant to cut across John’s land – the very same estate so recently awarded to him for service to the Crown. A great wall was to be built right between John’s new horse barn and his paddock, to enclose a royal hunting park at Richmond, taken from common grazing land and other men’s farms.

      ‘But the king is the king,’ protested Mistress Margaret. ‘Our dear neighbour is not even a knight.’

      ‘Do you mean to say that the right to trespass is defined by rank?’ asked Doctor Bowler with a degree of heat uncommon in him. ‘Do you say that John did not have good reason to protest to the king? Did the king have the right to call such reasonable protest “treason”? I expected more support for your nephew’s cause!’ Doctor Bowler turned to Zeal. ‘Are you not proud of him, my lady? He did not creep away with his tail between his legs like so many others who were equally wronged.’

      Zeal stared blankly at their animated faces, then realized that they were expecting her to speak.

      Mistress Margaret and Zeal’s serving woman, Rachel, exchanged looks.

      ‘Zeal,’