The Fire Court. Andrew Taylor

drew nearer. She kept her eyelids tightly closed. She heard the sound of his breathing and knew he must be stooping above the bed, bringing his face close to hers.

      ‘Jemima.’ His voice was a whisper, and his breath touched her cheek. ‘Can you hear me?’ When she said nothing in reply, he went on, ‘Where were you yesterday afternoon? Where did you go?’

      Philip paused. She heard his breathing, and a creaking floorboard, the one near the door, where Mary must be standing.

      ‘What made you so distressed?’ he said. ‘What did you see?’

      After a few seconds, he let out his breath in a sigh of exasperation. He walked away from the bed. ‘Mary? Are you sure you know nothing?’

      ‘No, sir. I told you – she left me in the hackney.’

      ‘I’ll whip the truth out of you.’

      ‘That is the truth.’

      The door latch rattled. ‘Send for me as soon as your mistress wakes. Do you understand?’

      ‘Yes, master.’

      ‘Don’t let anyone else talk to her until I have. Not Hester, not anyone. And not you, either. Is that clear?’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      The door closed. The footsteps clattered down the stairs.

      She listened to Mary moving around the room and the buzzing of the fly. After a moment she opened her eyes. Daylight dazzled her. ‘I thought he would never go,’ she said.

      Jemima spent Saturday and Sunday in bed. Mary tended to her needs. Mary was her maid. She had come with her from Syre Place. Her father was a tenant farmer on the estate, a man with too many daughters. Sir George had charged Mary to take special care of her mistress when she married Philip, and to obey her in all things, not Philip.

      Mary sometimes slept with her when Philip did not come to her bed, especially in winter.

      When Mary wasn’t in the room, she sent Hester in her place. Hester was a stupid little girl, fresh from the country. When she was obliged to speak to her mistress, she blushed a cruel and unforgiving red that spread over her face like a stain. She blushed when her master was in the room too, but he never spoke to her.

      ‘My lady?’ Mary said on Monday afternoon. ‘We need to change the sheets.’

      She opened her eyes and saw Mary standing over her with an armful of bedlinen. She allowed herself to be helped out of bed and placed in an armchair by the window. It was a fresh, clear afternoon. Her bedchamber was at the back of the house. The trees at the bottom of the garden shielded the brick wall behind them and the fields stretching up to Piccadilly.

      The window was open, and she heard hooves, hammering and sometimes distant voices. The trees blocked out most of the view, but occasionally she glimpsed a flash of colour through the leaves or wisps of smoke, rising higher into the empty sky until they dissipated themselves in the empty blue of heaven.

      If one went to heaven after death, Jemima thought, how eternally tedious it would be if it were nothing but blue and infinitely empty. Better to be nothing at all oneself. Which was blasphemy.

      Philip came up to see her while she was sitting there.

      ‘Madam,’ he said, bowing. ‘I’m rejoiced to see you out of your bed at last.’

      He glanced at the maids, who had continued at their work but were making themselves as unobtrusive as possible, as servants should. ‘Mary says you remember nothing of your – your illness.’

      ‘No, sir.’ She and Mary had agreed it was wiser this way, wiser to bide one’s time. ‘I had pains in my head when I woke up.’

      ‘The doctor called it a sudden inflammation of the brain. Thanks to his treatment, it came and went like an April shower. Can you remember how it happened?’

      ‘No. It is all a perfect blank to me until I woke up in my bed.’

      ‘You and Mary went out for a drive in a hackney coach,’ he said slowly, as if teaching a child a lesson. ‘After you’d dined – on Thursday. Remember?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘The fever came on suddenly. You were insensible, or very near to it, when Mary brought you home.’

      ‘I remember nothing,’ she said, though she remembered everything that mattered. She remembered every inch of the way to Clifford’s Inn, every step up the stairs of Staircase XIV. For now, however, it was better to pretend to forget.

      Philip’s hand touched her arm. ‘The doctor said that sometimes sufferers are much troubled by dreams when the fever is at its height, and believe all sorts of strange fancies. But thank God all that is passed now.’

      ‘I am much better, sir,’ she said. ‘I feel quite refreshed.’

      ‘Good. In that case, will you join me at supper?’

      ‘I think not. I will take something here instead.’

      Jemima watched him as she spoke, but his expression told her nothing. Her husband was tall, lean and dark-complexioned – like the King himself. He was not a handsome man but usually she found his face good to look at, because it was his. But now his face had become a mere arrangement of features, an array of hollows, projections, planes, textures, colours. He was a stranger to her.

      A familiar stranger. A treacherous stranger, and that was the very worst sort of stranger.

      ‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, smiling. ‘For dinner. We shall have guests, by the way – a brace of lawyers. One of them’s Sir Thomas Twisden, the judge.’

      It seemed to her that he spoke more deliberately than usual, enunciating the words with precision as if they were especially significant. He paused – only for a second, but she knew that the pause meant something, too. He knew that she didn’t like people to come to the house.

      The maids had finished making the bed. Hester left the room, her arms full of dirty linen. Mary remained, tidying the pots and bottles on the dressing table.

      ‘And I’ve asked Lucius Gromwell to join us,’ Philip said.

      Jemima caught her breath, and hoped he hadn’t noticed. Gromwell, of all people. The sly, twice-damned, whoreson devil. How dared they? She stared at her lap. She sensed he was looking at her, gauging her reaction to Gromwell’s name. She was aware as well that, on the very edge of her range of vision, Mary’s hands were no longer moving among the litter on the dressing table.

      ‘It will be good to have you at the table,’ he went on. ‘You must make sure they send up something worth eating. We must do our best to keep Sir Thomas amused. We want him to look kindly on us, after all, don’t we?’

      His voice sharpened towards the end, and she looked up. He wants me to twitch like a hound bitch, she thought, to the sound of her master’s voice.

      ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

      ‘He’s a Fire Court judge,’ Philip reminded her. ‘He’s down for the Dragon Yard case.’

      He smiled at her and made his way towards the door. He paused, his hand on the latch.

      ‘Lucius is writing a book, by the way. He is mad for it. It’s called The Natural Curiosities of Gloucestershire, and it will have many plates and maps, so it will cost a great deal to produce. I promised him I would pay for the publication, and he assures me it will make me a handsome profit when the edition sells out, as well as enshrine my name for posterity.’

      Gromwell, she thought. I hate him.

      ‘You remember him, don’t you? My old friend from school and Oxford.’

      She nodded. Gromwell will look at me tomorrow and know my shame, she thought, and I shall look at him and know that he knows it. He arranged it all. None of this would have happened without him. Gromwell, who dared to stand