The Lady Tree. Christie Dickason

rose water, and some not-bad wine that his cousin had managed to find.

      (‘Do we deny Sir Richard?’ Harry had whispered frantically to John in the parlour. ‘Or else risk offending the Puritanical conscience of the Hazeltons? Though I think I may once have seen Master H. take a glass of claret.’)

      Harry’s guests set to with appetite. The three housegrooms and two kitchen maids served without splashing gravy or stepping on toes. So, although his aunt’s spoon rattled against her plate with every bite, Harry had to turn his discomfort elsewhere for relief.

      His wife drew his nervous eye. She sat hunched and silent beside his cousin John, across the table from Edward Malise. Since arriving, she had spoken seven words. Harry had counted every one.

      He opened his mouth to force her to speak. Then he closed it again. Best not to call attention to her. For the first time since getting her in his sights at the boarding school in Hackney, he wondered whether the advantage of her money would make up for the hobble of her gaucherie.

      Zeal Beester was more content than she looked. After her parents died of the plague when she was eight, though her money kept her fed and housed, she had grown used to being dismissed as a social creature. It often seemed easier, if not more pleasant, to accept dismissal than to struggle for notice. Relegated to silence, she at least had time to think.

      She studied the company from under the washed pebble eyelids. What were the rules here? Who had to be flattered and who really held the power? Who might become a friend?

      She noted that Harry’s ease had slipped. On one hand, she was disappointed in her husband’s shaky grasp on his new role. On the other, that same look of anxious bewilderment on his handsome face had made her decide to marry him. It was as if, without meaning to, he had trusted her with a secret.

      ‘More wine, my lady?’

      The young groom stared at her with wide brown eyes.

      That’s me, Zeal thought in astonishment. She nodded. As she sipped, she eyed Mistress Margaret Beester, her husband’s unmarried aunt who seemed to serve as housekeeper. And who bared her teeth at Zeal when she meant to smile.

      She hates me, thought Zeal. Wishes I’d never come.

      She was used to that, too. In cousins forced to share their beds with her when she suddenly arrived, in girls already at school with alliances firmly made. Zeal looked at Mistress Hazelton. In aunts whose own children had all died and who couldn’t forgive the ones that lived when no one wanted them.

      Zeal pushed a piece of mutton around her plate with her knife.

      Harry’s cousin John, who sat on her right, just might be a friend, unless he turned out to be Harry’s rival and enemy. He clearly had been in charge before Harry. He had tried to make her feel welcome. She was sorry she had been too tongue-tied to let him know that she was grateful for his kindness.

      She glanced at his preoccupied profile. Handsome, but not as beautiful as Harry. Harry was gold, his cousin steel. Or perhaps copper, because of the colour of his hair. A strange, mysterious man. He seemed upset about something. Wound up tight, as silent as she was. She wondered what would happen when he came unwound.

      He glanced at her suddenly. Zeal blushed and looked away. He had a look that you had to let in. It didn’t just rest on the surface like a look from Mistress Hazelton or that Malise man across the table.

      As for the shy old parson – he acted even more frightened than she felt.

      I think I can manage this crew, thought Zeal. Particularly when the Hazeltons and Edward Malise go away again.

      Samuel Hazelton cleared his throat. ‘Excellently fresh pie. In London they’re so often tainted by overlong keeping.’

      ‘Et un très bon vin,’ said Malise civilly. He swirled his glass and drank again.

      ‘Oui,’ agreed Mistress Hazelton. She glared at Zeal as if the girl had missed a cue.

      ‘Thank you,’ said Harry, deeply grateful for any crumbs of reassurance.

      Then Harry heard only the sound of chewing. Where, oh where is the easy London wit? he raged in despair. How Malise must be suffering after all his suppers at court! Harry now glared at wife, cousin and aunt.

      My wife is hiding in her mutton. My aunt may be able to provide a decent meal but should stay in the kitchen where she doesn’t have to talk to proper gentlefolk. And as for John! Useless! All he can do is stare into his wine, mute as a stone!

      ‘… The Common Book of Prayer,’ ventured Dr Bowler timidly from the far end of the table. ‘What is your opinion, Master Hazelton? I mean, in Scotland …? To send English soldiers? I mean, do we English have the right …?’ He retreated, blushing into the depths of his wine cup while Hazelton sought a diplomatic reply.

      ‘Too serious and too military a subject for the ladies,’ said Harry reprovingly.

      ‘And too expensive! The Crown’ll cry for another tax!’ Sir Richard Balhatchet, Harry’s neighbour, grown graciously drunk as fast as possible, began a discourse on the iniquities of the King’s endless new taxes as if there were still a Parliament and he were still a member of it.

      As Balhatchet spoke, Samuel Hazelton assessed the serving men’s clothes, the wine, the Delft charger on the mantelpiece, the Turkish rugs on the wooden floor, the two life-size portraits of a man and woman, one at either end of the room, with daisy-eye faces in the centres of white ruffs as large and stiff as cartwheels. ‘You must mend that road,’ he said suddenly.

      ‘As soon as possible!’ agreed Harry. ‘I had no idea it was so bad!’

      Sir Richard was diverted onto his second favourite subject – the lack of good ferries and fords. ‘It’s all right for you Londoners who can travel by river.’

      ‘I’m not so sure,’ said Malise. ‘An acquaintance of mine rolled off a barge only last week, into the Thames above Windsor, coach, coachmen, grooms, pillows, curtains and all.’

      ‘I am grateful,’ said Mistress Hazelton, ‘that to get to our own country house we have to travel no farther than Hackney.’

      There was another silence.

      John looked across the table at Malise trapped between Mistress Margaret’s pale, watery terror and Mistress Hazelton’s black, blunt displeasure. Malise had the smooth, short, rounded forehead and curved beak of a falcon.

      The man’s eyes met his. John held the eyes with a thrill of expectation, but Malise looked away with a small puzzled frown. Then he resumed his faintly bored civilities to the women on either side.

      John’s throat had closed against his food. He finally managed to wash down a bite of rabbit fricassee with wine. He did not believe that even Edward Malise, for all his lies, could hide recognition.

      ‘I beg your pardon, Sir Richard?’ John had not heard the question. He missed its repetition as he concentrated on placing his wine cup steadily back on the table.

      ‘I said, I never knew you were such a scholar and enthusiast, Mr Graffham!’ bellowed Sir Richard. ‘Letters in Latin to all those Flemish and Netherlandish chaps, Hazelton here tells me. A dark horse after all these years!’ He addressed the table at large. ‘A hard-working fellow – more than’s right or good for him. Always up to his elbows in muck when I see him, or on his belly with his eyeball up a cowslip! Who’d have thought all that Latin and Greek! How did you come to be such a botanical scholar, sir?’ His red-rimmed eyes were slightly accusing.

      ‘Under the benevolent rod of our own Doctor Bowler,’ said John.

      ‘A natural instinct for scholarship. Ab incunabilis…from the cradle,’ mumbled Dr Bowler, both pleased and appalled by suddenly becoming the centre of attention again. ‘A privilege and a pleasure…I offered only the discipline. The appetite for learning is his own …’ He dropped a piece of bread into his lap and fumbled after it.

      ‘Are