Читать книгу The Lady Tree - Christie Dickason - Страница 8

May 23, 1636. Water horsetail in bloom. 2nd swallow. Apple buds relaxed, about to blow, very late. A second dry day. I hide in small things.

Journal of John Nightingale, known as John Graffham.

‘I don’t know how Harry can ask it of us!’ Aunt Margaret wailed. She yanked her skirt hem from the closed door of the housekeeper’s office, where it had caught. Stiffened hip joints gave her small figure the rolling walk of a sailor.

John looked out of his aunt’s window into the immaculate forecourt. The geese had got in again and left grey-green droppings. If only he could freeze all living things until Harry Beester and his Londoners had arrived tomorrow.

‘All those extra grooms and maids and Lord knows who else! We should have slaughtered another dozen pigs last autumn!’

Her fingers moved even more intently than they usually did, constantly checking the location and solidity of things – her belt, her slightly weak chin, her skirt, her keys.

‘Your brother was still alive last autumn,’ said John with careful mildness. ‘No one could have known. Least of all Harry.’

In his head he tested the words ‘Sir Harry’.

Mistress Margaret shifted the mess of papers on her table. She shook her fluffy silver head grimly and frowned past the end of her generous nose at unavoidable disaster. Her fingers found her handkerchief in her left sleeve and assessed its lace trim. ‘We can’t bake enough pies for so many in that little oven. Agatha Stookey’s taken hysterical on me. Sukie Tanner’s about to drop her whelp and is no use to me in the kitchen, and there aren’t enough silver ewers for the guest chambers and …’ Her nose twitched, her small lower lip tucked itself even more tightly behind the upper one, and she burst into tears.

Before John could invent words of comfort, she steered abruptly into the true heart of her panic. ‘What will I do if our new lady turns me out?’ she wept. ‘George left me nothing to live on…a few pound a year for clothing …! Do you think he made it clear to Harry that I’ve nowhere else to go?’

John could not comfort her without lying. He did not know how the new Lady Beester from London would arrange things for her predecessor. He felt a quick spasm of guilt at his earlier self-concern.

He knew how little of her own his aunt had. Since reaching his majority he had paid out on behalf of his uncle the various annuities incumbent on the estate, including his own modest one. After Sir George died, John had carried on paying without waiting for legalities to be sorted out. His aunt, never married, was a tough, wiry little creature, but inclined to come adrift at the edges. She wouldn’t survive anywhere but here, where she had lived and more than earned her keep, unofficially, for the last thirty years.

‘I can’t imagine that warm-hearted Harry would let her do such a thing,’ said John. Harry could, however, do as he liked.

‘Harry’s such a fool!’ Aunt Margaret wailed and buried her face in her handkerchief. ‘Always has been. Anyone can turn him.’ Over the top of the handkerchief a suddenly malevolent grey Beester eye found John’s. ‘She might make him turn you out too! And where could you go? Carrying the mark of Cain as you do? I know what happened, even if the rest don’t. You’ve nowhere safe to go, except abroad with all those foreigners! Worse off than I am, poor lamb. We must stick together, John. We must help each other!’

John closed his fists tightly around cold fingertips. ‘Have faith in Harry. He may be a fool, but he’s a good-natured one.’

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ muttered Mistress Margaret.

‘We must pray for the best, then. Do our duty and trust in the just reward. And who knows? Harry may have changed for the better. He seems to have made a sensible marriage.’

‘You’re too good, John. No matter what they say you’ve done. You should have had Hawkridge House…Harry hasn’t visited in years …’

‘There’s no question of “should”,’ said John between his teeth. ‘After Cousin James, Harry is your brother’s heir.’

‘Harry will despise the place,’ said Aunt Margaret. ‘He’ll visit once and run straight back to his precious London …’

‘Then we’ll all go on just as before, contented as larks.’ 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 muslin ruff was askew and she had lost one of her garnet earrings. ‘Anything?’

‘Not yet,’ said John.

‘The mutton will dry out if they don’t come soon!’ She darted away again in a rustling of rose silk and muslin. ‘Agatha! Agatha!’ John heard her cries fade away through the main chamber.

A welcoming feast (perhaps now a little overdone) waited in the Great Chamber. Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate, and Sir Richard Balhatchet, who had been Knight of the Shire before Parliament was dissolved, both attended, suitably dressed, in the Long Gallery with yet another bottle of the estate’s best ale.

John glanced back at the cooper’s drum. You did the right thing, man. Don’t add to the weight already on your conscience.

He went down the three steps from the stone porch, across the gravel forecourt to the off-centre gate. He ached to yank open the scratchy collar of Harry’s lace-trimmed shirt and to haul at the excess cloth bunched in his crotch, but too many eyes were on him.

‘He should be the one,’ said the descant player to the alto, as John walked away. ‘Not that London cousin.’

Dr Bowler squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and focused his entire being on tuning his string.

All the estate residents were ranged under the beeches along both sides of the drive – the tenant cottagers and their families, the housed labourers (mainly unmarried) and the poorhouse elders. The men stood or sat uneasily in their best Sabbath clothes, which included the new shirts Harry had ordered. At the sight of John they jumped to attention, hands and caps raised high in over-eager greeting.

‘Morning, sir! Good morning! A nice dry day for it, sir!’ Their eyes weighed his unusual elegance, probed his face, and slid away.

They half-want a cockfight, thought John with clarity. My mettle and spurs are being sized up.

The women and girls eyed him over knitting or mending.

‘Oh, you do look fine, sir!’ called one of the older, bolder ones. Not like a stable groom today. But handsome either way.

‘That Cat was a fool,’ a young, unmarried woman muttered. ‘He’s not set on a gentlewoman. I’d have played him better. Had him fast enough.’

‘And where would you be after today, then?’ asked a friend.

‘I wouldn’t care!’

Among the fragrant green swags of ivy and lavender hung on the gate were tucked white and green bunches of sweet woodruff as delicate as silk French knots, against the plague which already festered in London again this summer.

John smiled to himself, a little grimly. A small gesture made by the helpless in the face of the uncontrollable.

He strolled back toward the porch. He felt numb.

Harry, thought John, come now! I can’t take any more waiting! We’re all as ready as we will ever be. Our bodies have exhausted themselves to make up for the shortcomings of our hearts and souls.

‘Still nothing?’ called Aunt Margaret breathlessly from the porch door. As she squinted past John, she tapped her handkerchief with great delicacy against her upper lip. ‘Disaster, John! We can’t find the new barrels of ale, the ones from Sir Richard …! They’re not in the cellar! Help me, John!’

‘I’ll look in the basse-court,’ said John with resignation.

The missing ale was not in the basse-court, the buttery, the stable yard, or the stream-cooled cellar. Unable to force himself to look further, John placated his aunt with fourteen bottles of Flemish wine which he had meant to save for a later occasion. He lifted a spider’s web from the pleats of his lace cuff and dusted the left side of his padded silk breeches.

Then he went into the stable yard. He stood quietly for a moment in the warm, dust-filled air of the horse-and-hay barn. Constellations of bright motes swarmed in a shaft of sunlight that cut low through the open door across the cobbled floor. His own cob and Aunt Margaret’s mare, along with all twenty draught animals, had been turned into Mill Meadow. The stalls were clean, their floors covered with fresh straw. The iron manger cribs held hay, and buckets of corn stood ready for the London animals. When John came into the barn, two sparrows flew out of the nearest bucket onto a beam above his head to wait until he had left again.

The coach house next to the horse-and-hay barn stood wide open and empty. The estate’s heavy old wooden coach had been hauled to the side of the cow barn, complete with two nesting hens, to give cover for the coaches of Harry and one of his guests. Two stable boys pumped water into the horse trough with the intense purpose of fire fighters at a blaze.

John left the stable yard through the gardens and went around the chapel into the basse-court. In the dog yard he leaned into the pen of a pregnant deerhound bitch. She lifted her head and licked his fingers.

‘Oh, Cassie! Cassie, you silly, sloppy beast! I’m not your master now. We must all learn new manners.’ He held her head in both hands. They gazed into each other’s eyes. ‘Can’t you see into our future as your namesake could?’

She thumped her massive tail against the side of the pen and tried to jump up to place her paws on his chest. He pushed her gently down and turned away.

He left the basse-court, heading for the orchard. The damp grass darkened his new kidskin boots like spilled ink. At the crest of Hawk Ridge, the hen still cowered in her bucket. John lifted her gently to count the chicks.

Six. Carefully, he removed the bad egg which had not hatched and laid it in the grass away from the nest. The apples were in full blow at last. He laid a hand on one of the wicker bee skeps set among the trees. It vibrated with life.

He looked down through the blossom at the basse-court frozen in unlikely tidiness, the walled gardens suspended in temporary order. Life-in-waiting, a state only briefly possible to sustain. The fish ponds glinted like polished pewter plates. A flotilla of ducks drifted out of the reeds, full of faint inconsequential gossip. From the water meadows to the right came the constant, ragged bleating of sheep.

I can’t bear it! John thought suddenly. His throat felt as if he had swallowed a hot coal. I can’t accept! Harry and his new wife won’t love you as I do.

He heard shouts, faint and far away, from the gatehouse beyond the top of the beech avenue. The bell on the brewhouse tower began to clang as it did for meals, festivals and prayers. The back of a dark, lumbering tortoise hauled itself over the crest of a far hill and sank again into the trees. John gathered himself like an actor pushed onto the stage or a criminal shoved at the steps of the scaffold. It had to be done. He yanked at the fabric bunched in his crotch, shook out his cuffs and stalked down the hill toward the house, stiff with a curious mixture of terror, excitement and rage.

Can I call him ‘Sir Harry’ without laughing? he wondered in the midst of his panic. A scrappy young cousin who arrived in my life as a poor second to a litter of staghounds when I was four! John picked his way between the grey-green turds which an escaped goose had left on the stone path of the hornbeam allée at the end of the west wing.

And what will his rich London woman be like? Do I still remember how to talk to a lady?

When clean, the carriage would have been burnished and studded with brass and copper, but after two and a half days on the road from London it was thickly frosted with mud. The horses were splattered to the chest, the mounted grooms to their knees. But the estate residents, freed from waiting, played their part undeterred. The mud-caked tortoise heaved and swayed down the drive through cheers and showers of posies. Boys fell from the trees like shaken nuts and capered alongside. The five musicians in the forecourt clutched their instruments in damp hands.

The carriage rolled through the forecourt gate onto the relative flatness of the pounded gravel. Four yellow posies revolved, stuck to the mud, two on its front right wheel, two on the back. The carriage stopped.

Dr Bowler raised his bow with an authority he never showed in the pulpit. The cooper rattled a drumroll. The parson swayed like a tree in a blast of wind, then launched into a galliard, followed in lurching panic by the descant, alto and bass.

Sir Harry’s flushed face appeared at the coach window. A housegroom leaped forward to open the door at the same time as Harry’s own footman. The assembled house staff cheered on cue. A tossed posy hit the groom. More cheers from the top of the drive signalled the approach of a second coach.

As Sir Harry bent forward through the coach door and stepped to the ground, Dr Bowler switched to a march. Sir Harry raised his arms in greeting to the assembled crowd, provoking a second cheer from the housemaids and grooms. Sir Harry, the new master of Hawkridge House, had arrived at last and he was magnificent.

Caesar to the hilt, thought John. He had grown tall, long-legged and wide-shouldered. No longer the scrappy young cousin. The jolt of surprise was a little unpleasant.

‘Oh, isn’t he fine!’ cried a maid.

Harry’s blond hair curled to his ivory ear lobes, his horizontal moustache gleamed with pomade. His cleft chin was clean-shaven. A lace collar as large as a shawl set off his pink, square-cornered handsome face with soft dark-pink mouth and long-lashed blue eyes. His nose was a little short to have been Caesar’s, but it was straight, with nostrils which seemed permanently flared in eager questioning of a rose, a lady’s nape or a new soup.

Wide butterfly leathers flapped on his boots. An embroidered silk garden grew on his pea-green doublet, which also boasted slashed sleeves with satin linings, triple cuffs and enough lace to have bloodied the fingers of all the grandmothers of Bruges. He was like nothing they had ever seen before at Hawkridge House, and he was theirs. His staff cheered one last time with even more fervour than before. John quivered with a spasm of betrayal.

Then he stepped forward.

‘My dearest cousin!’ cried Harry with determination.

‘Welcome …’ John swallowed. ‘Welcome, Sir Harry.’ He bowed.

There! I said it, he thought. A little stiffly, but it’s out.

‘Thank you, John,’ said Harry. ‘It’s good to be home.’ His eyes flicked away from John’s.

John wondered if he had seen fear in Harry’s eyes.

Then Harry took a deep breath and with a rush of his usual boisterous enthusiasm flung his arms around John, and squeezed him hard.

‘Can you believe it, cousin?’ He breathed a hot, happy gust into John’s ear. ‘Sir Bloody Harry? Me?’

Washed by suddenly remembered warmth, John pounded his cousin on the shoulders, relieved that the words now came easily. ‘Who better, coz? Who better? And you look every inch a conqueror!’

‘And you, John. And you. Quite splendid! Almost a courtier. Though the waist could be a little higher…Not at all like the rustic pose of your letters.’

If Harry also felt a twinge of unpleasant surprise, thought John, he hid it graciously.

They parted. Sir Harry moved on to Aunt Margaret’s curtsey.

‘You’ve grown, Harry,’ she said, dry-mouthed and too flustered for protocol.

‘Older, wiser and much richer, Mistress Margaret.’ Harry grinned wickedly.

A crowd of estate workers jostled at the forecourt gate, pushing each other aside for a better view of the new master.

The cooper rattled a finale; the music died. John presented the vicar, who had once been tutor to them both.

‘Doctor Bowler!’ cried Harry. ‘Enchanted to see you again. All the more so now that I’ve escaped your rod at last. A charming country tune, that was!’ He clasped the hand that still held the bow.

As John opened his mouth to introduce the maids and grooms of the house family, something moved in the door of Harry’s coach.

A thin child leaned out, pale with chalk powder, a smear of red across her small mouth. Her wiry red-gold hair curled around her face and was caught up in a knot at the back of her head in the latest London fashion. Below the stylish frizz and a pair of pearl and diamond ear-drops, her neck glowed bright purple, right up to the edge of the rouge and powder mask. She hauled at her green silk skirts, levered them through the door and jumped to the ground, spurning the hand of the groom.

John saw a flash of two thin ankles in knitted silk stockings. The ties and swags of her dress jounced and settled around two mouse-sized slippers of embroidered dark green kidskin. She twitched her stiffened stomacher back into place. In the startled silence that followed her sudden descent, she stood by the coach glaring at the ground, stiff-armed, with fists pressed against the front of her green silk skirt.

What is Harry doing with that sulky child?

Instantly, John answered himself. He was startled and appalled. Distracted by meeting Harry, he had forgotten the new wife.

The crowd at the gate edged into the forecourt.

Harry looked as startled as John felt. He extended a hasty hand. ‘Mistress, come meet my cousin, John…Graffham…who has tended things here so well for me, as I can already see.’

Obediently, she scraped her skirts across the gravel to stand beside Harry with eyes lowered under eyelids as smooth as washed pebbles. The red smear remained set in an unfriendly pinch.

‘This is Mistress Zeal…Lady Beester…my wife.’ Though Harry met John’s eyes squarely, his lashes beat a tattoo against the tops of his pink cheeks.

‘Welcome, my lady,’ said John. He bowed, then took the small, uncertainly extended, barely unclenched hand. It felt no more substantial than a dove’s foot and was ice cold. ‘Hawkridge House has been in a lather these last weeks, trying to make itself worthy to be your new home.’

The sulky eyelids lifted briefly. John saw grey-green eyes filled with panic. Then the lids dropped again. John released the cold hand and stared down at the top of her red-blond hair. Coppery tendrils at her temples clashed with the violent purple colouring her neck and small flat ears. Her white-painted face was still marked by the fierce dash of compressed, red lips. The nails of the hand were chewed short.

She’s no more than twelve, thought John. And young for that. Too young to change nests yet. He knew all about nest-changing. He felt a rush of pity toward a young animal harnessed too soon.

‘Madam!’ said Harry sharply. ‘Come meet your new household. Mistress Margaret Beester, my aunt …’

The panic flashed at John again. The girl let out a shaky sigh, picked up her skirt, and moved forward up onto the porch into the icy blast of Mistress Margaret’s basilisk gaze and crocodile smile.

‘How was your journey, my lady?’ asked Margaret. Her eyes took inventory as fiercely as a bailiff. Her upper lip glistened unwiped, and her remaining earring trembled with her emotion.

The new Lady Beester inhaled, looked at the twenty or so faces, including Harry’s, that attended her reply and closed her mouth again.

John was distracted by the arrival into the forecourt of a second carriage as muddy as the first.

‘I hope, my lady, that you will approve of my efforts,’ he heard Aunt Margaret say as she took the new mistress in charge. ‘This is Agatha Stookey, the chief housemaid…Roger Corry, housegroom …’

John turned his back on the stammering curtseys and blushing bows.

The second coach stopped behind Harry’s, drawing twelve estate workers and eight goggling boys in its wake.

‘Sir Harry! Is this your stern Roman senator?’ called John.

‘Oh, Lord!’ cried Harry in dismay. He reappeared on the porch. ‘Where’s Doctor Bowler! Why isn’t there music? Where is everyone?’

The parson leaped back to his stool and snatched up his viol. The pipers dived for their pipes. The cooper, however, stayed where he was, bent over a wheel on the offside of Harry’s coach.

‘Where’s Aunt Margaret?’ begged Harry. ‘And the house staff…They were just here!’

The parson began the galliard for the second time, minus the drum.

‘You can’t possibly expect my niece to make that journey more than once a year,’ complained Samuel Hazelton, a lean sixty-year-old in Puritan black with a complexion like tree bark. He shook and brushed himself with a great rustling of silks and travelling wool. ‘We left Edward mired down just outside Windsor. He took a horse and went to dine with a friend in Eton while his men dig his coach out…How can so much mud get inside?’ He beat with his hand at the end of a black silk jacket sleeve. ‘Mistress …’ He turned back to reel in beside him the square-cornered woman, also wearing black silk, who had just descended from the coach. She waved aside a posy offered by one of the weeding women.

‘Samuel Hazelton, my wife’s uncle and former guardian,’ explained Harry, sotto voce. ‘And his wife, Mistress Hazelton.’

‘All the way from Rome,’ murmured John. He dropped back as Harry moved forward in welcome.

Even as he bowed stiffly to Sir Harry, Hazelton’s eyes moved swiftly, taking stock of house and men. He already knew Harry’s worth as a husband to his niece. He had still to determine the soundness of his own social and political investment in letting the young cockerel marry her.

Mistress Hazelton’s eyes were glazed. She had been sick from the motion of the coach.

‘Mistress Hazelton, Master Hazelton, my cousin Mister John Graffham.’ Harry pushed John forward with the air of offering a plate of sweetmeats.

‘Mr Graffham! I have looked forward most eagerly to meeting you,’ said Hazelton. The stock-taking eyes examined John.

A sharp-eyed pirate’s face coupled to a forced mildness of manner, thought Hazelton with interest and surprise. A pirate pretending to be a monk. A broken nose and woman’s brows…it’s the face of a licentious Corinthian, not a simple country Corin. Not over-eager to please like his cousin. He’s assessing me. Looks good for what needs doing.

John stiffened under Hazelton’s open appraisal. There’s more here than mere manners. What has Harry told these strangers?

Don’t panic, man, he then told himself. The man called you Graffham, not Nightingale.

‘Your reputation as a botanical enthusiast spreads farther than you may realize,’ said Hazelton.

John achieved a social smile. John Graffham, enthusiast of Botany and student of Agriculture, had nothing to hide.

‘A good friend, Sir George Tupper, is an enthusiast like yourself,’ said Hazelton. ‘He tells me that you have written excellent advice on replicating certain bushes, or some such thing…I don’t know a fig myself about the domain of Flora …’

‘I am flattered to be so much talked about,’ said John. He was, in fact, shocked. ‘But I’m merely a countryman who observes what lies around him.’

‘More than that, coz!’ exclaimed Harry, pinkly eager and delighted that his introduction was going so well.

‘A man in tune with the preoccupations of his time,’ said Hazelton. ‘A fortunate thing to be. We must speak further.’

Mistress Hazelton looked past John into the house.

Two large muddy carts pulled by equally muddy oxen heaved into the forecourt. Behind the carts trudged Harry’s hunter, ridden by yet another groom. Two dogs and five boys bounded alongside.

‘If you will excuse me,’ said John, ‘I’ll see them into the stable yard.’

‘Until later, then,’ said Hazelton.

Thoughtfully, John watched Harry lead his new family into his new domain, heralded by the fourth repeat of the vicar’s march.

There’s probably nothing to fear from Hazelton, he decided. If the dear friend who carries weight at court is no more danger than that Puritan guardian of the little wife, I can leave the past alone after all. Do what needs doing now, and learn what Harry plans for my future.

Harry had brought seven waiting men and two pages. Hazelton five men and one page. Lady Beester and Mrs Hazelton had two women each. The carters made four more. Even without the servants who accompanied the ‘dear friend’s’ coach which was yet to arrive from its mud puddle outside Windsor, they were already four over the expected number.

‘We’ll have to use the Lower Gallery as a dormitory for the men servants,’ John told Aunt Margaret under his breath. ‘Lay them out like flitches of bacon.’

‘I’ll wring his knightly neck!’ she said. ‘I’m happy to say that Agatha has agreed to let Mrs Hazelton’s waiting woman share her bed.’

‘Oy! Another coach!’ shouted one of the cottager boys from his perch in the beech avenue. ‘A coach! A coach!’ The cry passed down the drive.

The bell began to clang again.

John was on his way back to the house after seeing to the supply carts and settling the eight visiting coach horses. ‘Go fetch Sir Harry,’ he ordered a groom. ‘And Mistress Margaret.’

‘Where is everyone?’ asked Harry a moment later. ‘Damn! Have all the cottagers left? Where’s Bowler? I don’t pay him just to sit there and drink my ale and debate whether or not we have the right to impose the Book of Common Prayer on the stiff-necked Scots.’ He searched the forecourt with anxious eyes. ‘Don’t we even have the bloody pipes?’

Aunt Margaret’s pale damp face arrived in the door, framed in limp white curls. ‘If you want your guests to dine, you must really let me get on with things,’ she announced in despair. ‘… Sir Harry,’ she added in quick afterthought.

‘Does it matter so much if you welcome your dear friend without your armies behind you?’ asked John.

Harry pulled his lips back in a nervous grimace. He straightened the front of his flower-garden doublet and bent to flick at the ruffled garters that decorated his shapely knees. ‘This is one with influence, John. The one I must woo. The one in the Queen’s eye. The one I really wanted all this for!’ His voice was plaintive as a disappointed child’s.

John counted another five serving men as the last invading coach rolled into the forecourt. Four more coach horses and two mounts.

‘I must alert the stable boys,’ he said, ‘or we’ll have a shambles in the yard.’

Harry clutched John’s sleeve. ‘Don’t leave me now, cousin!’

The footman leaped down and opened the door. The circular top of a feathered hat appeared, followed by the shoulders of a red coat. The man straightened and stepped to the ground.

‘I hope, Sir Harry, that your cellar and kitchen can make up for that appalling journey.’ Edward Malise removed his hat and ran his fingers through his heavy straight black hair. The falcon-nosed face was sulky and tired. ‘I’m bruised from nape to heel and dusty as a church.’

Harry’s hand pushed on John’s elbow. John did not move. As he stared at the newcomer, the hair lifted on the back of his neck and on his arms under the sleeves of his new shirt.

‘It will be a pleasure to try to console you, Edward,’ said Harry uncertainly. He glanced at his cousin in covert bewilderment. What on earth was wrong with him?

John’s lips tightened across his teeth. His breath shortened, and his muscles coiled themselves like springs on his bones. His fingers became knives.

‘My dear Edward, this is the cousin we discussed.’ Harry’s distant voice was nearly drowned by the pounding in John’s ears. ‘John Graffham…Master Edward Malise.’

John braced himself for Malise’s gasp of recognition. His hands felt themselves already closing around Malise’s throat.

But the dark eyes passed over him. ‘Delighted,’ Malise said wearily. ‘Our botanist. Sir Harry has sung your praises, sir. We shall talk more later when I have recovered.’

Confused and unbelieving, John licked dry lips. He bowed curtly, sucked in a deep breath. Made the thick dry lump of his tongue shape words. Malise seemed not to know him, but he would never forget Edward Malise.

Seven-year-old John flew through the ring of fiery tongues, out of the coach window, like Icarus falling away from the dreadful heat of the sun. He trailed flames like a comet, wrapped in his own screams and the smell of burning wool and hair.

His face smashed into the dirt and stones. He felt hands drag him away from the coach and beat out the flames on his hair and clothes. He clawed back toward the burning coach and his parents trapped inside. His mother was a shadow dressed in flames, a burning goddess with fiery hair. She screamed and screamed. Hands pulled at his coat, dragged him away into the darkness.

He saw men’s legs on the far side of the coach, and logs braced against the door, to hold it closed. The four coach horses shrieked and reared in their harness. The offside bay twisted and bucked, its foreleg tangled in the logs of the roadblock. A man darted and dodged through the black smoke, trying to cut the horses free. Others, stippled by flames then blurred by smoke, jammed the far-side coach door closed with logs.

‘Mother!’ His scream was lost in the furore of terrified horses, shouting, and flames.

The hands hauled at John’s jacket.

‘Please, Master John!’ begged the voice in his ear. ‘Before they take notice of us …!’

The silk-padded upholstery, heavy dried-wood frame and pitch-covered roof of the coach burned fast. The screams stopped. In this new silence, the flames cracked loudly. Sparks drifted up into an orange-lit canopy of blackening leaves. The men around the coach dropped back. Now on his feet, John followed the Nightingale groom through the brush towards the road beyond the coach.

‘There’s justice done,’ grated a smoky voice from the group beside the coach. ‘A just death to thieves and plunderers, and the courts and King be damned!’

The Nightingales’ coachman lay dead on the ground, his cut throat spreading a black pool across the orange-lit ground.

‘Ralph! It’s Cookson …’ John started to say.

The groom clapped an urgent hand over the boy’s mouth. ‘He’s past help, Master John. Let’s get you away while they’re still busy!’

The coach lurched sideways and settled unevenly like a dying stag still trying to stand. Three of the horses, loose at last, darted and whinnied, dragging the men who clung to their leathers. The bay had fallen out of sight and was still.

In the confusion of logs and bodies, a face suddenly stood out brightly in a shudder of firelight. The head was turned to the side. The brow, cheekbone and chin of Edward Malise glowed hot orange. His single visible eye was alight with a terrible glee. Then he turned suddenly, the eye caught by movement in the brush. He seemed to look straight at John.

‘Run, Master John!’ whispered Ralph. He shoved the boy deeper into a thicket and drew his dagger.

‘We missed a brace of them,’ said the smoky voice. ‘Over there!’

Three of the men beside the coach drew their swords and turned to black silhouettes against the flames as they moved towards the groom.

‘Run! To London. To your uncle. For the love of God, run!’

It was told for months, until a new excitement made fresher telling, how a singed, dazed and smoky boy wearing ashy tatters of silken clothes had staggered into a cottage on an estate six miles from the ambush, announced that he was Master John Nightingale of Tarleton Court and demanded to be taken to his uncle George Beester in London to tell him that the Devil had killed his father and mother. He had then sat down in a large, carved chair-of-grace and fallen soundly asleep as suddenly as if struck by a magic spell.

‘My dear Edward,’ said Harry, ‘let me begin to make it up to you at once. Food and drink are waiting for you inside.’ He shot John a disappointed, reproving glance. No help there. His cousin John needed a good shaking up and brushing off before he could be trusted in elevated company. Harry felt the chill of imminent disaster. His joy when Malise had agreed to visit Hawkridge House had drowned his common sense.

I should have come down here first, to make certain the place does me credit! Please God, at least let supper be worthy!

John stood like a man who had just been clubbed. Upright but unbalanced, a sawn tree just before it falls.

‘Shall I take the coach round?’

John looked up blankly at a strange face above yellow livery.

Harry had betrayed him to Malise.

‘Sir?’

‘What do you want?’

‘The coach…where, sir?’

John frowned in confusion. The coach had burned so fast. Pitch-covered roof and dried wood frame. He had begged the screams to stop. And then the meaning of the silence had shrivelled him into a tight, cold ball of ice.

‘Sir?’

John looked up again. A London voice and curious eyes.

Malise’s coach was here in the forecourt. The Serpent had arrived at Hawkridge House. But the Serpent had been in Eden from the start. Must get a grip on myself, thought John. Deal first with Malise’s coach. Then deal with Harry…And then Malise.

‘Through that gateway,’ said John. ‘Someone in the stable yard will help you…Down, boy!’ he called to the yellow cur that danced among the fetlocks. The heavy wooden coach swayed and jolted through the gate to the stable yard, the cur trotting behind.

Oh, Harry! thought John. Harry! Harry! Harry! This is worse than all the rest. He held onto one of the stone eagles with both hands and waited for the sensation of falling to pass.

‘There you are!’ said Harry reproachfully, emerging onto the porch. ‘Why didn’t you come in? Sir Richard and I more than had our hands full. Our aunt veers from gawping to squawking…Old Doctor Bowler’s no better than he ever was, is he? Still goes red as a cock’s comb when you so much as look at him…used to make me want to climb under the pew, the way he darted at his sermons like a panic-stricken mouse. What the Hazeltons and Malise make of him, I hate to think!’

Harry mistook his cousin’s unnatural stillness beside the eagle for contemplation. ‘It hasn’t changed since I last visited,’ he said. He surveyed the forecourt from the top of the steps. ‘More’s the pity. Not like the two of us, eh? Lord, how long ago was it? Remember riding these eagles? Not changed one bit. Still, being so far from London …’ He put one arm around John’s shoulders, but quickly dropped it again. He might as well have embraced the eagle. ‘You must show me my new property before dinner. I want to learn the worst. There’s just time for a quick look. My guests mustn’t see that I’m as ignorant as they are.’

John turned a cold assessing eye on this stranger from London whom he must call ‘Sir’, who rode a coach instead of a modest cob, sweated in silks instead of wool and glowed moistly with nervous ownership.

‘A good-natured fool,’ John had assured Aunt Margaret. But loyal. Or so Harry had seemed, many years before.

‘Titles and ambition have changed people before now,’ she had replied.

‘John?’ asked Harry uncertainly. He was puzzled and a little alarmed by John’s gaze. He looked suddenly shy.

I see no guilt in those blue eyes, thought John, just the ghost of the younger cousin I so often pulled away from the consequences of his own silliness. Or has he learned guile along with the names of good tailors and hatmakers?

‘I’ll show you, if you like. Do you want to start with business or pleasure?’

Harry lifted an eyebrow. ‘Pleasure first, of course, coz. I never have it any other way.’

A touch over-hearty, John noted grimly. ‘Get back to work,’ he shouted at three grooms who were grinning through the stable-yard gate.

John led the way down the steps onto the rolled gravel of the forecourt. ‘I had the chapel newly roofed last year; the bills are in the accounts I have waiting for you …’ He looked up at the square gap teeth of the chapel’s crenellations at the east end of the house.

‘Oh, coz,’ said Harry. ‘Is this what you call pleasure?’

It is for me, thought John. But he said, ‘Only a taste of Purgatory on the way to Paradise. I’m afraid I just have a business habit of mind.’

‘That’s splendid, John,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a habit I must study now that I’m a man of means. But later!’

Before Malise, John would have smiled. Now he stared bleakly at his younger cousin.

They turned right through a small gate out of the forecourt into an allée of pleached hornbeams that faced each other along the west wing like a long set of country dancers. Harry assumed the abstracted enthusiasm of a man at an exhibition, hands clasped behind his back, chin leading. His blue eyes filled with memories and calculations. He nodded graciously at two awe-struck sheepmen beyond the wall.

I’m certain that Malise didn’t recognize me, thought John as they walked. Is it possible?

‘My fields?’ Harry stepped carefully over some green-black goose turds and stopped to survey the green slope beyond the outer row of hornbeams and a low stone wall. ‘They haven’t been sold off?’

He had time to prepare himself for our meeting, decided John. He pretended strangeness in front of Harry.

‘My fields?’ repeated Harry, a little more loudly.

Sheep grazing in Roman Field below the beech avenue raised their heads at the sound of his voice. The afternoon sun glowed pink through their pricked ears.

John finally heard. ‘Yes. The nearest, here across the wall is the Roman…Roman coins were dug up there years ago. Beyond that lies King’s, and then our water meadows, there behind the beech ridge and along the Shir. Two years ago, as you will see in the estate accounts, I bought more good grazing from the Winching estate when the widow died. Hawkridge now runs from Winching Hanger across the road, that way…’ He pointed back up the hill past the top of the drive. ‘All the way past Pig Acre to that second wood there, on that hill above Bedgebury Brook. The limit that way is the field you can just see below the east end of Hawk Ridge, called the Far.’

He counted the sheep that munched down toward the water meadows. The ewe pregnant with late twins was not eating but lay awkwardly on the ground. As he watched, she rose then lay down again. He must send someone to see to her.

But it’s not my job now to think like that. One way or another, this life was now over. But he would not go back to prison. He would never surrender to the rope or block.

They reached the far end of the hornbeam allée and passed through a gap in a shoulder-high yew hedge into a flat empty green kept tightly shorn by grazing geese, a quiet green room enclosed by high, dark-green aromatic walls.

‘The bowling lawn.’

‘Bowling,’ said Harry dully. ‘Not much in favour now in London. I must do something with this.’

A blue and white cat slipped onto the green from under the hedge, froze when it saw the two men, flattened its ears and streaked under the hedge towards the fields.

Water glinted through a gap in the yew hedge. Harry crossed the bowling lawn in long-legged strides.

‘This is better!’ he cried.

From the north-west comer of the house they now looked along the north front and over the basse-court. A little farther on, the river Shir slid like oil over a small weir into the highest of the three fish ponds, dug before any man or woman on the estate could remember.

‘Now here …’ Harry said, ‘I see possibility! We make these ponds into one long lake, the full width of the house. Try to imagine, coz, if you can…statues. And water jets. A bronze of Nereus, just there below the weir.’ He looked around for his cousin, faltered slightly at John’s set face but surged onward. ‘Conjoin the ponds and there’s room for all his fifty sea-nymph daughters around the edge!’

John lifted his eyes beyond the ponds to the smooth swell of hillcrest that rose from the orchard blossom like the naked shoulder of a woman from her smock. He had swallowed a brand from the kitchen fire.

This time, I must kill Edward Malise, he thought fiercely.

‘What’s all that?’ asked Harry, pointing at the jumble of brick buildings and walls that jostled against the back of the house.

‘That?’ John stared as if unravelling the well-known corners and jogs for the first time. ‘… The basse-court yard …’

Two hens scratched in the arch of the gate which opened onto the ponds from the yard between the dairy house and a storage shed.

Not so fast, John then decided. It may be possible that he didn’t recognize me. I may have time to think what’s best to do. But how, dear God, do I deal with my cousin?

‘Come with me!’ Harry ordered. He strode along the bank of the pond, to get a more central view of the basse-court and the north face. ‘Oh, John! This is quite wonderful! I can see exactly …’ He pulled John round by the arm to face his vision. ‘We’ll knock all those old buildings down. Make a new ornamental lawn between the house and the ponds…Can’t you see it? Grass from there to there!’ He threw his arms wide like a bishop gathering his flock in a spiritual embrace. ‘Not Hatfield perhaps …’ Harry laughed with the pure pleasure of his vision. ‘But the best in Hampshire!’

In the eleven years since Malise and I last met, thought John, I have changed from boy to man and sprouted a beard. From fourteen to twenty-five. He was already twenty-seven then. Perhaps he really doesn’t know me!

‘Then …!’ Harry pulled again at John’s sleeve and pointed at the house. ‘Leave aside all those little sheds and things. Try to imagine a portico centred between the wings in place of that old-fashioned porch.’

There was no reply.

‘John? What do you think of my idea of a Greek portico in place of that old porch?’

John focused on his cousin again. ‘No portico, Harry,’ he said quietly.

‘The first on a private house,’ insisted Harry. ‘A portico in the new classical style, like the Queen’s banqueting house just built in Greenwich. I shall build the first in Hampshire. The King himself might come to admire it. Oh, coz, we shall have such fun putting this place right!’

‘No,’ said John in a voice like a scythe.

Harry faltered and dropped in mid-flight. ‘What’s wrong?’ He licked his pink lips and swallowed. The long-lashed blue eyes blinked, and looked away. ‘No, I know.’ Then, ‘Please don’t look at me like that! It makes me feel five years old.’ Harry frowned across the ponds as John had done earlier. He squared his shoulders. ‘Very well. I owe you honesty, though I had hoped it would not need to be said.’

John did not breathe.

‘I want you to stay here,’ Harry said thickly. ‘Did you think that I can’t see how much you do…have done? I need you to stay.’ He cleared his throat and hauled an uncertain smile onto his face. ‘Cousin, with my ideas, your organizing and my wife’s money, we shall have more fun than you can imagine!’ He waited for John’s gratitude and relief.

‘Harry, who does your dear friend Edward Malise think I am?’

‘What?’ Harry looked startled, then defensive, then a little sulky, the way he had used to look when Dr Bowler asked him to conjugate a Latin verb. ‘What do you mean? The same as everyone else, I suppose…You’re my cousin who has been running my estate.’

‘And my name?’

‘Your name?’ Harry now looked angry, as if John were unfair to ask him something he didn’t know but might have remembered if John hadn’t worried him by asking about it.

John waited.

‘Whoosh.’ Harry shook his head. ‘I don’t understand. It’s John Graffham. Or have I got that wrong too?’

John walked to the edge of the pond. A grey and white feather bounced gently on the ripples behind a swimming duck. If Malise did not know him, then why was he here?

‘John?’ Harry felt that both his explanation and invitation had been handsome enough to merit a better response. I won’t wheedle or apologize any more, he told himself. My cousin will just have to accept the new order and his place in it.

Eleven years ago, Harry was only nine, thought John. And no doubt as self-absorbed as he is now.

Harry cleared his throat and said firmly, ‘Nothing will change that really matters.’ He nodded toward the basse-court, ‘I’m sure you can find somewhere else on the estate for all that!’

‘I can always chop down the orchard to make room,’ said John.

‘You’re not serious.’

Hot rage suddenly swelled in John’s chest and throat, and banged in his temples. ‘That “old-fashioned” porch suits the house!’ He thrust his fists together behind his back. ‘It’s the nose it was born with,’ he shouted. ‘Why cut it off and try to make a duck’s bill grow instead?’

Harry stepped back in alarm. He’s mad, he thought, with sudden clarity. After all these years of sequestration down here. To get so hot over something like this. Mad, of course! This place would drive me mad!

‘Why change what needs no changing?’ John clamped his teeth down on his anger.

Stop this! he ordered himself. It helps nothing.

‘You ride in like one of the Four Horsemen,’ he bellowed, ‘swinging your blade, mowing down everything in your path …!’

‘John!’ Harry’s alarm grew. He glanced toward the house. Perhaps he should call for help.

‘And the worst of it is, I believe that you may not even know what you’ve done!’

They stood, both breathing hard, staring at each other, equally afraid of the next moment.

‘I’m sorry,’ said John.

Harry breathed out. This was the old John again. ‘It’s already forgotten.’ He felt the rich joy of magnanimity. He nodded. Tm sorry too, if I’ve upset you in any way. I remember you were kind to me when I was small. I would hate to repay you badly.’

Only with Malise, thought John, suddenly exhausted. This scene has nearly turned comical.

Gossipy quacks from the reeds near their feet wandered inconsequentially through their silence.

Harry took a deep breath. ‘I’m not as much of a fool as I suspect you may think me. Please don’t be offended, but being hidden away down here has kept you unworldly. I’ve learned things in the last few years that you can’t know. Will you hear me?’

Let him talk, John told himself. If he’s guilty, he’ll betray himself; he can’t help it. ‘Teach me. Make me worldly.’ And he turned away towards the weir bridge below the bottom pond.

Harry followed. ‘How long have you lived here?’

‘Eleven years steadily, and childhood sojourns before that.’

‘It’s very pleasant, I’m sure,’ said Harry. ‘But a man can rust here.’

‘Yes,’ agreed John. ‘I’m sure he can.’

‘In London…in the real world …’ Harry was still wary of his cousin’s strange temper. John had always been quick to flare and quick to forgive, he seemed to remember, but it was a great many years since they had last played together. And even then Harry remembered John mainly as reliable for piggy-back rides and rescues, not closely observed beyond his uses.

When John did not growl or start to shout again, Harry continued.

‘I now live in the larger world, coz, where power and influence stretch wider than the limits of a single estate, a single parish, or even a whole county. You have no idea how much appearances matter out there! The way things look is how men believe them to be. And what men believe becomes the truth. I mean to be rich and influential before I die.’

He fell into stride beside John.

‘I must begin by being seen at all,’ said Harry.

‘Is that why you married that little girl, so her money would make you visible?’

Two precise, round, pink spots bloomed on Harry’s fair cheeks and one in the centre of his forehead. ‘Isn’t a rich wife every man’s ambition? Don’t fault me for it. You should congratulate me.’ He walked two steps. ‘Your own future depends on her wealth!’

John raised a neutral enquiring eye.

‘You know as well as I,’ said Harry, ‘that our uncle left a title that needed renewing, some run-down houses, great bundles of land and almost nothing to live on! And I can see already that this place won’t produce enough to feed a fasting saint.’

‘We manage, but then we have no worldly ambition to be seen. Quite the contrary. How old is she?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘She looks younger.’

‘Not too young to wed, just young to bed. I’ll entertain myself elsewhere while I wait.’ Harry’s blue eyes slithered toward John. ‘It’s only contract marriage, coz. Take off that episcopal face. I merely tied her fortune up safe on contract before some other aspiring esquire did. Hazelton has to make the best of it, and me!’

His good humour reasserted itself at this triumphant thought. ‘Do me justice, coz. Her uncle had his own favourites. How do you think I snatched her from under their noses?’

John shook his head.

‘She wasn’t afraid of me! I wooed as if she were little cousin Fal…told tales, sang her songs, and generally made an ass of myself. I swore love and passion too, and all the things she expected to hear, but it was kindness that won the day. I even promised her I won’t insist on my bed rights until she’s ready. I could see that she was afraid of the others…enter Big Brother Harry! All games, jokes and an occasional careful tickle.’

‘You relieve my mind,’ said John. ‘Tarquin is not come to Hawkridge House. I hope you mean to go on kindly.’

Harry missed the irony and swelled to the allusion. ‘I owe her the kindness. Her wealth is my philosopher’s stone. With it, and my new lands, the base metal of Harry Beester, plain gentleman, will be transmogrified into Sir Harry Beester, man of note!’ He listened happily like a bad actor to the echoes of his own voice.

One corner of John’s mouth lifted in spite of himself. Harry had not changed. Only his size, clothes and moustaches.

They crossed the weir bridge at the bottom of the lowest pond and continued back along the far shore, at the foot of the orchard slope.

‘You’re still thinking what a fool I am,’ said Harry. ‘You have that distant adult look. But I really have learned something worth knowing.’ He stopped and reached out to grasp John’s arm and full attention. ‘Men’s eyes used to pass through me, John. I was an inconvenient mist between themselves and more important things. You can’t imagine how it feels when you don’t really exist.’

John looked away.

‘But after Cousin James dried up with dysentery and left me as Uncle George’s sole heir …’ Harry shook his head and smiled at the thought. ‘Men began to see me. I’m there now, filling up a real space. Their gaze warms me as if the sun had come out. I like it, John. I like it so very, very much! And I will not let myself decay back! I couldn’t bear it!’

He held out his arms to the house across the pond. ‘This estate is my new dignity. With your help, my wife’s money, and the changes I imagine, it will become my glory!’

Even as a small boy, John had not needed his mother’s admonition to look after Harry – Harry had so obviously needed looking after. John had never been able to stay angry long with such cheerful self-satisfaction. Even now, he almost envied it. Surely not a traitor, merely a fool. This conclusion made him very happy.

‘Oh, Harry,’ he said. ‘My dear cousin.’

‘Pax, then?’

John shook his head helplessly. If Harry had betrayed, he didn’t know it.

‘So we’re agreed.’ Harry considered a cementing embrace but decided instead to lead briskly onward beside the pond. ‘After we dine, I’ll show you the Dutch pattern books for houses and gardens that I brought from London. The Classical orders are explained – Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian. Fireplaces and lintels, pilasters and friezes. All there for us to harvest for our own use…Those geese do get everywhere, don’t they?’

John absolved his cousin and steadied himself for supper with Edward Malise. In any case, you can’t kill a man over a dining table, he told himself wryly. Not with ladies present.

‘For God’s sake, John, don’t desert me as you did this afternoon,’ whispered Harry when they met in the New Parlour an hour later. ‘I need your help! Do what you can with Mistress Hazelton, and don’t let Sir Richard drink any more!’

Sir Harry ushered his guests into the large dining chamber at the back of the house which had once been the Great Hall. A tiny knife jabbed his stomach. He would have killed to be in the corner seat of some safely distant tavern with a quart of ale in his hand. In the last hour while being brushed off for dinner, he had become less and less sure whether to claim Hawkridge and its residents as his own or to reserve the right of distance from any possible disasters.

First there had been John’s strange behaviour by the ponds. Then the realities of mended and faded curtains and hangings. He had spied a dog’s marrowbone in the entrance hall and chased a cat from his bed. The pisspot in his own bedchamber, though spotless, was only plain white porcelain. The chapel was smaller than he remembered. (And the female acrobats and monkeys carved on the stalls lost charm when seen through the eyes of Puritan house-guests.)

Sir Henry Bedgebury could wait no longer and had left on urgent business. His aunt was nearly weeping because it was closer to supper time than dinner and claiming that the mutton was overdone. And there was some other palaver about missing ale.

Harry needed to become angry, to belch out his nervousness in justified irritation.

‘John!’ hissed his aunt. She beckoned from the door of the buttery.

John stepped into the small chamber.

Aunt Margaret closed the door and locked it. Her bunch of keys clattered in her shaking hands. ‘That’s the brother isn’t it…that man who came last?’ Her whole being quivered with panic.

‘Yes.’ John laid the admission down like a heavy load.

‘What will you do now?’

‘Dine.’

Aunt Margaret twisted knotted fingers together against her lace apron. Her eyes opened wide like a terrified rabbit. ‘How can you joke? He’ll have you arrested again. You have to get away! How could Harry bring him here? I told you he couldn’t be trusted any more …!’

‘Aunt!’ John laid his hand on her arm the way he would soothe a frightened dog or horse. ‘Malise may not recognize me.’

‘Then why is he here?’

‘That’s what I must learn.’

‘How can I serve him dinner? And sit there as if nothing’s wrong? And what if he does recognize you? How can you possibly …?’ Her right hand tried to pull the fingers off her left.

‘Darling aunt, listen to me!’ He took both of her hands in his. ‘Are you listening?’

Mistress Margaret nodded distractedly.

‘You saved my life once before, when the soldiers came looking for me, eleven years ago. I need you to do it again. I need you to be just as calm and wily now as you were then. Pretend I really am John Graffham, an inconsequential by-blow nephew who washed up on your doorstep. Worry only about the sauces and the joint. Show Harry that he hasn’t inherited a lower circle of Hell. I need you to forget that you are a good, virtuous woman. You must lie your head off…deceive so well that you believe it yourself.’

Mistress Margaret gave a quivery sigh. ‘These things get more difficult…Of course, I’ll try. But John …’

‘Our guests are waiting for your incomparable meat pies. To battle, my Boadicea of the pots! Distract the enemy with titbits. Feed him into harmless, full-bellied sleep.’ He took the keys, unlocked the door, and pushed his aunt towards the dining chamber.

‘Be seated,’ cried Harry to his guests.

Mistress Hazelton frowned at a carved wooden pilaster set into the wall, from which a bare-breasted nymph offered passers-by an overflowing basket of fruit.

Harry noted her frown. The little knife stabbed again just above his navel.

The dining chamber at the back of the house, however, offered no excuse to purge Harry’s emotional wind. The diamond window panes glistened in the late afternoon sun. On every window ledge, John had set blue and white Turkish ceramic pots of late white tulips. Their faint, sweet, green scent twined itself into the smoke of apple logs and rosemary branches that burned in the great plastered brick fireplace to cover the smell of must and mice. One of Harry’s own London hounds snuffled and twitched before the fire as if it had always slept there. Harry quivered like dried grass and watched his guests for the direction of their breeze.

At least, he thought, Hazelton seems so far to approve of Cousin John, in spite of my cousin’s odd humour. Can’t tell what Malise thinks. Please God, let it work. Let them see that I can offer something in my own right. That they must reckon with my advice in the future.

Edward Malise looked out of one window. Samuel Hazelton gazed appraisingly out of another across the yard and outbuildings of the basse-court towards the swell of the orchard ridge beyond. The trees were carved in high relief by the slanting rays of the sun.

‘It’s a poor view now,’ said Harry. He winced at the row of churns airing outside the dairy room and at a hen balanced on one leg in the middle of the courtyard to scratch itself. ‘But I’ll soon put that right. You must imagine the sweep of a lawn where that jumble of a courtyard is now, and a lake beyond! Please do come sit down.’

‘It’s not a bad view,’ said Hazelton pleasantly. ‘A scene of good husbandry and industry. In your circumstances, Sir Harry, not to be dismissed.’

All three Londoners gave John a quick look.

John’s stomach tightened with renewed alarm. What was that about? he wondered. I feel the hunt is on but don’t know from which thicket the hounds will appear.

Harry flushed.

‘But there’s nothing wrong either in wanting to put things right,’ said Hazelton, making peace again.

Harry took John’s former chair in the centre of the table. He ached for a gilt Venetian candlestick and Italian glasses, but he could not fault his aunt’s muster of the resources she had.

The long, heavy oak table, pulled out from the wall into the middle of the room, smelled sweetly of beeswax. The wood of the carved oak stools gleamed, and their faded red and green needlepoint cushions were brushed clean of dog and cat hair. (Harry pined for chairs but supposed that he was grateful to be spared the humiliation of benches.) The linen tablecloth was sunbleached to an irreproachable white. The pewter plates and cups shone like water on a bright day. Mistress Margaret had even found, somewhere, a silver spoon to set at each place.

Soon, thought Harry, when cousin John has carried out his task for us…Then I will buy silver plates, Venetian glasses with spiral stems and lugs, and the French forks they are now using in Whitehall.

Harry called for his knife case and that of his wife, which was a very expensive wedding gift from himself. He hoped that Malise, sitting across from her, would notice the fine Spanish workmanship of both leather and steel.

‘Welcome,’ said Harry. He raised his glass. ‘To the renewed life of Hawkridge House.’

The food, though plain, was plentiful and appetizing: glazed meat pies, the troubling joint of mutton (not ruined by the delay at all), a ham, a platter of spit-roasted doves and woodcock, a deep brown, pungent fricassee of rabbit. There was an excellent chicken cullis served as soup, flavoured with ginger and 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 you any one sort of enthusiast, Mr Graffham?’ asked Malise suddenly. ‘Of roses? Vines?’

Hazelton leaned forward into the conversation.

‘I study all that grows on this estate,’ said John.

Malise studied him now.

‘Are you an enthusiast, sir?’ John asked levelly. Still no flicker of recognition. But the man was digging deep into his mind, under the casual talk.

‘Not in the least.’

‘Nor I,’ said Hazelton. ‘A mere merchant…crops of cargo and specie for me. But talk of petals and broken colour and blooming seasons has grown most amazingly fashionable among my London friends.’

‘Like Sir George and his roses,’ said Harry eagerly.

‘Ah, yes, Sir George – a fellow shareholder in the South Java Trading Company,’ explained Hazelton, ‘who called your reputation to our attention. He claims to ignore anything that grows lower than his knees. Stiff joints, he says. Mr Graffham, can you look lower than your knees?’

‘Nothing in God’s creation is beneath interest,’ said John lightly. ‘Even below my knees.’

‘Amen,’ said Hazelton. He glanced at Malise.

‘I would like to retire and recover from that appalling journey,’ announced Mistress Hazelton suddenly. She pushed away a plate with a half-eaten quince cake.

Hazelton finished his silent conference with Malise. ‘And I,’ he declared, ‘would like to take a little air. Sir Harry? A gentlemen’s stroll? Malise?’

His giving of orders was subtly done. Dr Bowler blushed at the omission of his name.

‘Splendid!’ cried Harry. ‘John, you lead the way to the gardens, and I’ll explain our plans for the lawn and portico!’

John was sure that Hazelton had a different purpose.

‘Forgive me,’ said Sir Richard, levering his bulk up over his feet, ‘if I take to my horse while the sun’s up.’ He leaned over the table, braced on his knuckles and puffing in triumph.

‘Why not stay the night, Sir Richard, I beg you,’ said Harry.

Aunt Margaret gave John a quick, horrified look.

‘Be a pleasure, young Harry,’ said Sir Richard. ‘A true pleasure. But needs must. Duty. Y’know. In the morning. No, best if off I go!’ He pushed himself upright and balanced uncertainly.

They rustled and scraped and bowed and murmured as they rose and the women took their leave. At the last moment, one of the serving men spat on the floor behind Mistress Hazelton’s chair. For one moment, Mistress Margaret forgot Edward Malise and planned a murder of her own.

‘I’ll join you in the gardens,’ said Harry. ‘When I have seen Sir Richard safely off. I leave you till then in my cousin’s care.’

‘I don’t know why,’ muttered Mrs Hazelton to her husband, ‘I really don’t know why we paid to school her! She sat there like a turnip…didn’t take the chance when Master Malise spoke in French. I told you it was a waste of time to send her to Paris with Lady Chase. No one would ever guess what she has cost to educate!’

‘With her own money,’ said Hazelton.

‘Which could have had other uses.’

‘It has, mistress. It has,’ said Hazelton. ‘And lack of charity makes your face unbecomingly red.’

John led them out of the main door, across the forecourt and into the Knot Garden. Along one wall the white tulips glowed in the dusk. Against the opposite wall the red tulips punched soft dark holes in the evening light. Hazelton sniffed the air, which was faintly perfumed with honey. There was also a not-unpleasant undernote of dung newly ridged along the lines of germander and box.

‘How it refreshes the soul to contemplate the works of God,’ said Hazelton. He strolled beside John; Malise walked behind. ‘The city is now almost entirely the work of man.’

‘You might detect the hand of man even here,’ said John amiably.

‘Yes,’ said Hazelton, sniffing the air again. ‘But only as Adam was the first gardener in God’s Paradise.’

They circled the central device in silence. John wished he had Malise in view.

‘Perhaps you can answer a question I have often asked,’ said John. ‘Does vegetation in Paradise, whether on earth or elsewhere, show the same natural rage for disorder that I find here in Hampshire?’

Hazelton glanced at John to check his tone. ‘All disorder is unnatural. Divine order is the natural state. Here in Hampshire you wrestle with the corruption of Man’s Fall.’

‘Do you mean to say that slugs and caterpillars might respond to increased piety and prayer?’

This glance from Hazelton was longer and held a glint of amusement. ‘I suspect that they’re susceptible to good works.’ He raised his voice. ‘Edward, are not Mr Graffham’s tulips very fine?’

Come to your point, man! thought John. ‘I ordered them from Leyden. It’s now possible to write to dealers in the Netherlands for their bulbs and fruit trees.’

‘Have you been to the Low Countries?’

John shook his head. ‘But I mean to go before I die. I hear that they have fields of flowers as we have meadow grass.’

Hazelton actually smiled. ‘I may be able to help.’

They passed under a gated arch into the New Garden, where the central walk was lined by chest-high fruiting walls. The pale green fish skeletons of espaliered peaches and apricots were not yet in full leaf. At the far end of the fruiting walls, the two night-watch mastiffs, Bellman and Ranter, raised large heads and rumbled in their throats.

John whistled. The mastiffs wagged ox-sized tails. Then John finally allowed himself to turn to look at Malise.

Malise stood braced in the arch that led from the Knot Garden as if he had just stumbled and caught himself. John’s nape bristled.

‘Now, Mr Graffham,’ said Hazelton. ‘I’m not a man to tie conversation into diplomatic knots, nor, I suspect, are you. Please sit down.’

Hazelton settled his black folds and pleats on a wooden bench. John sat beside him, trying to listen.

Malise stared into a gooseberry bush.

At last! thought John.

‘Master Malise and I have descended on your cousin like the Egyptian plagues before he has even had time to sleep in his new bed because we need to speak with you urgently. You must go to the Netherlands for us.’

John kept his eyes on Malise. He barely heard Hazelton’s extraordinary command.

‘Your two tracts on fruit-growing,’ went on Hazelton, ‘have given you a modest but solid reputation in the circle of botanical enthusiasts which seems to be growing daily. That stiff-kneed friend I mentioned at supper, Sir George Tupper, has recommended your reputed good sense, education and energy.’

John wasted no words on modest demurral. Any minute, Malise would lift his head.

‘And your cousin, of course, chimed an eager echo,’ said Hazelton. ‘Will you help us?’

‘Us?’

‘The South Java Trading Company – members include myself, Master Malise, Sir George, as it happens, and several others whom I doubt you know. And Sir Harry, of course …’

‘I’m sorry,’ said John. ‘I can’t help you.’ He stood up.

‘Have the courtesy to let me finish, sir!’

‘There’s no point.’

Hazelton inhaled sharply. His thin dry face turned dark red above his white collar. He was seldom dismissed so abruptly.

Edward Malise raised his head. He listened, but did not turn around.

‘Please forgive any offence my refusal gives,’ said John. ‘But I am not your man.’

Hazelton steadied himself. ‘I misjudged you, sir. A man of sense would at least hear me out. I haven’t given you any reason yet for refusal.’

‘None that you know.’ John was still watching Edward Malise.

Malise turned his head and met John’s eyes.

Silence pressed down upon the evening air.

The waiting had ended. Now would come Malise’s denunciation, his call for armed men, his summons to Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate. But Malise’s teeth stayed clamped tight against his tongue.

Hazelton shifted on his bench. He had suddenly ceased to exist, and he did not like it any more than he liked to be refused. He had had three surprises today, which was unsettling for a man who understood how both God and the world ticked. This cousin had been a pleasant surprise. An educated villain suited their purpose perfectly.

But then came the villain’s impertinent refusal. And now, it seemed, there was bad feeling between Edward Malise and a man he had pretended not to know. The non-existent Hazelton looked from one pair of eyes to the other. Worse than mere bad feeling. Graffham and Malise would clearly be happy to slit each other’s throats. Hazelton had stubbed his toe on two mysteries. In business, mysteries were usually expensive.

At last, Hazelton broke the silence. ‘We have no time for niceties,’ he said. ‘Mr Graffham, tell me what stops you so absolute before you even know what we want.’

‘I am truly sorry …’

‘Hear me out or say why not! I would have expected more manners from you!’

‘I hope that you are gentleman enough not to insist on pressing an impossible case.’

‘Leave it, Samuel!’ said Malise sharply.

Hazelton stood up. His face turned puce. Twenty years of money-making, silk nightgowns, a large town-house in London, and a deciding voice in the Court of Committees of a royally chartered trading company had not yet hardened him to an insolent command from a man who fancied himself a social better.

‘There you are!’ cried Harry from the archway into the Knot Garden, before Hazelton could think how to reply. ‘Sir Richard’s safely off, and I’ve ordered pipes laid out in the parlour. Just before I left London, I managed to buy some of the new Virginia tobacco …’

‘Please excuse me,’ said John. He bowed and slipped out through a small gate in the side wall.

Harry watched him go in astonishment. ‘What’s wrong with my cousin?’

Hazelton’s rage spilled onto Harry. ‘You mistook him, Sir Harry. Wasted my time and Master Malise’s with this junket down here.’

‘What has he done?’ cried Harry. ‘How do you mean, “wasted”?’

‘He won’t even to listen to our proposal!’

‘He must!” Harry looked ready to burst into tears. ‘It’s so perfect!’

‘Nothing is, in this world,’ said Hazelton with fury. ‘But I had hoped for something better than this! I’m going back to the house. With luck, I can stop the unpacking in time to save restuffing it all. I’ll set off back to London first thing in the morning. Malise can do as he likes.’

‘But we’re to dine with Sir Richard tomorrow! And there’s the hunting…Your time won’t be wasted. I’ve planned so much …!’

Hazelton turned brusquely to Malise. ‘If that idiot Graffham won’t do it, we’re almost out of time to find someone else!’

‘Let me try,’ begged Harry. ‘I’m sure I can talk him round!’

‘You were sure of him before,’ said Hazelton.

‘I think,’ said Malise carefully, ‘that perhaps I should speak with him.’

‘John?’ Harry laid his ear against his cousin’s door. ‘John? Are you there?’ He opened the door onto a dark, empty room. ‘He’s not here,’ he said over his shoulder to Edward Malise.

‘Clearly not. Where does he keep his sword?’

‘I don’t know.’ It seemed an odd question. After a second, Harry shuffled cautiously into the shadows of John’s room. ‘It’s here. On a peg, with his belt.’

‘Then he hasn’t left the estate,’ said Malise. ‘I’ll try him again in the morning.’ He leaned through the door and peered around the darkened room.

‘Shall I send a man to look for him in the barns?’ asked Harry. ‘Maybe he’s not back yet from whatever he does at night.’

‘I’ll find him in the morning. He can’t hide for ever.’

‘You must forgive his bad manners,’ said Harry in anguished apology. ‘Cut off from decent society for so many years. But he has a good heart and a good brain. You’ll respect him once you get to know him, Edward, I promise you.’ Harry began to feel angry now. He shouldn’t need to apologize for something which was really nothing to do with him. Some things really were going to have to change and his cousin had better get used to the idea! Starting with the right way to treat guests!