The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

John fled into the audit office, away from her quavering voice and spiked briar thoughts.

      He turned all his attention to the delicate task of re-carving the point of a quill pen from his table. He split the point unevenly, cursed, and began again.

      ‘John …!’ The voice of Dr Bowler wavered in through the open window. The old parson stood on the gravel of the forecourt. ‘Can I have a word? Do you have a minute…I won’t need long. It’s just that I’m having a little trouble …’ Bowler’s high white bald forehead gleamed in the sun. His slightly-close-together eyes were even more anxious than before a sermon. ‘I know you’re busy …’

      ‘Come round,’ said John. ‘I’m doing nothing important.’ He threw knife and quill violently down on the table.

      It’s like before a storm, he thought. All the livestock have the jitters. Including me.

      Bowler was usually an ally. He had been John’s tutor and was now his chief drinking companion in the evenings. But since the news of Harry’s coming, Bowler had become morose and silent. He had stopped playing his viol and could no longer be tracked through the house or the gardens by his constant cheerful bumble-bee humming of hymns and glees.

      The parson was better at music than religion. He had an authority with his flock when he mustered them into choirs which deserted him entirely when he was asked for moral certitude. John’s request for a full musical consort for Harry’s arrival should have excited Bowler into a melodious frenzy.

      Instead he hid away in his small apartment of rooms behind the chapel, where he leafed wanly through sheaves of musical scores. He chose tunes, then rejected them. Picked others, rehearsed them twice with his musical conscripts and gave up in despair.

      ‘John!’ exclaimed Bowler in a tone of discovery as he edged through the office door. ‘I’m so glad I found you. You know that we’ve been practising ever since you told me…Do you think Harry…Sir Harry, that is…expects us to be note perfect?’

      ‘Perfection’s not possible in this world. Just catch the spirit.’

      ‘He’ll have changed,’ said Bowler, ‘since I taught him. Not that I taught him for long, nor very much, I’m afraid.’ He sighed. ‘He was never…not like you …’ His voice trailed away. His worried eyes crouched close together like small animals seeking comfort.

      He opened a coffer of books and peered in. Many of the volumes were his gifts to John.

      ‘A requiem, John. That’s what I will be conducting. A requiem.’

      ‘What nonsense!’ bellowed John, suddenly beside himself. He wanted to kick his table. Bowler never moved in straight lines. That was why he could never string together a coherent sermon nor teach Greek grammar. ‘What utter nonsense! Who’s dead?’

      ‘Coherence,’ said Bowler.

      ‘What?’

      ‘It’s a requiem for coherence.’ The old man held firm with dignity against his former pupil’s outburst. ‘You know I have trouble with my grip at the best of times. I’m afraid, John. I’m getting too old …’

      John pulled himself back to order. Bowler had taken the wind out of him. What he felt for his old tutor was as close to love as anything he felt for anyone, including his fondness for his aunt.

      ‘Do you think Harry…Sir Harry…will appoint another parson? Although that wasn’t what I meant by coherence…I wouldn’t presume to hymn my own demise. Although I don’t know what I would do without the tithes.’

      ‘I’ll do my best to see that he doesn’t appoint another,’ said John. ‘But I can’t read even my own future.’

      ‘It’s like waiting for death,’ said Bowler. ‘Supposed to be all right if you’ve done the right things, but you never really know. The Greater Power either tosses you up one way or chucks you down the other. I dare say one manages either way, but I must say I find the waiting most unsteadying.’

      ‘If there is justice, Doctor Bowler, you will be one of the chosen.’

      Bowler demurred, modest but also amused. ‘You haven’t had much to compare me with. But you’re kind, John.’ He seemed to feel better than he had when he arrived. ‘I suppose I should go visit Sukie Tanner, though she’s quite unrepentant about this child of hers…child-to-be, that is. At least my dutiful stone won’t be the first one cast at the poor girl.’

      After Bowler had left, John paced tight circles, aped by the fly still there from the day before.

      He still felt as fragile as a shed snake skin. He could not contain everyone else’s fears.

      ‘… the mark of Cain,’ his aunt had reminded him.

      If they had hanged me after all, I think I would have felt like this the night before.

      Dr Bowler had left the book coffer open. John lifted out a volume of Virgil’s pastoral poems and opened it at random.

      Fortunate senex, ergo tua rura manebunt.

      Et tibi satis …

      Fortunate old man, so your land will still be yours. And it’s enough for you…

      His eyes leaped away and onward.

      Fortunate senex, hinc inter flumina nota …

      Happy old man! You will stay here, between the rivers you know so well …

      He slammed the heavy leather covers shut. Traitors everywhere, disguised as former friends! Columella, Cato, Varro, Pliny…He did not trust himself to test any of the others either, in his present mood. He replaced the Eclogues and spun around to the end window that looked out onto the forecourt. The geese had gone, but their route was clearly marked. John’s left hand touched the left corner of his jaw where the skin puckered over the bone.

      Let the storm break! Thunder, lightning, hail – whatever wrath the Heavens may thunder down tomorrow. Lord, just end this waiting!

      

      May 24, 1636. A cold sour night but sun again today. Soil in the Far still too wet to sow beans. Do I end with unsown beans?

      Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

      There was still no movement on the road. John shifted his body unhappily inside its carapace of stiffened and padded pale-blue silk. (Harry had sent the doublet and new, narrower trunks from London, to be sure that John looked like the cousin of a rising baronet.) Two immaculate white cuffs of Brussels lace fell over the tops of his green kidskin boots. Two more half-hid his brown hands, which were half-raw with scrubbing. He looked more elegant than he felt. Even in baggy work clothes, his physical outline was naturally precise. With the curly acorn-coloured hair trimmed and the right corner of his neat beard shaved to match the bare scars of the left corner, he looked very much at home in clothes that he wore only under duress.

      From the small stone entrance porch, John surveyed the players in Harry’s requested triumphal masque. He saw ominous portents of comedy.

      Below him in the forecourt, Dr Bowler sat on a stool in his best black coat, viol against his ear, picking with irritation at one of the strings. A glass of cider leaned dangerously in the gravel at his feet. A distant sheep was bleating a half-tone higher than the string. Three estate workers, washed, brushed and polished, lounged against the pair of stone eagles that flanked the porch, with their wooden pipes under their arms – descant, alto and bass. The cooper’s drum lay abandoned on the gravel; he had no doubt gone in search of his bride Cat.

      John stared at the drum. She’d have had me, he thought with a renewed jolt of loss. I should have taken her and not worried what a bad bargain it made for her.

      Mistress Margaret darted out of the doorway onto the stone porch. She was trussed, painted and frizzed for a court ball, but a line of sweat glistened on her wrinkled upper lip, her stiff, pleated