Читать книгу The Lady Tree - Christie Dickason - Страница 9

John stripped off his blue silk suit, climbed naked into the enclosing shadows of his fourposter bed and drew the curtains against the world. He lay stiffly against his pillows, listening to his man Arthur settle the bedchamber for the night. Suddenly, he leaned over and threw the bed curtain open again.

‘Arthur. My leather jerkin and the woollen breeches.’

He climbed anyhow into his clothes, thrust on his heavy boots. When Arthur had gone back to his pallet on the antechamber floor, John let himself through a small wooden door into the narrow passage within the wall. The passage, barely wide enough for his shoulders, led down a thread of staircase into the basse-court at the corner of the Hall Place below the dining chamber. John did not want to meet anyone at all.

From the basse-court, he saw a flickering light move through the dining chamber toward Dr Bowler’s tiny apartments behind the chapel. His aunt’s windows on the first floor glowed.

The hens are still restless, John thought. In spite of their amiable-seeming fox.

He unbolted the gate at the back of the dog yard and flung himself out into the night.

Through the taste of blood in his mouth from his broken nose, John smelled the burning wood and tar of the coach. An orange-lit circle blackened and spread on the leaves overhead. He choked on the vile smell of charred meat.

He found himself panting on the crest of Hawk Ridge. As he looked down at the house, Aunt Margaret’s window went dark. Dr Bowler’s bedroom window was hidden by the chapel. The house was so changed that he hardly knew what he was looking at. Behind the dark windows of the east tower lay the face he had seen lit by the flames of the burning coach.

When he finally woke, a day and a half after the startled farmer had delivered him to his uncle, his mind had been washed clean as a pebble in a stream.

‘The Devil stole your memory,’ his Uncle George later told him. ‘There was a smell of sulphur on you when that farmer brought you to me.’

John had remembered only a headache that lasted for weeks, and the sharp, jagged edges of broken teeth.

‘How many men were there?’ his uncle had begged. ‘How were they dressed? Were they vagabonds? Highwaymen? Soldiers?’

The boy seemed not to have heard the questions. He had stared out through the diamond window pane at the wavering lines of the world beyond, his mind filled with the blurred shadow of a bird on the sill outside.

‘Colours, John? Livery? Badges?’ Solid in his chair, holding tight to the arms, George Beester (still plain mister) had reminded his nephew of a painting he had seen of King Henry. He watched his uncle’s soft, fish-like ellipse of a mouth open and close above a square jaw.

‘John? Did you hear a name called out? Titles? Anything Frenchified? Were any of them gentlemen? I must have evidence!’

The seven-year-old John squirmed on his stool and shook his head. The answers his uncle wanted so badly jostled and seethed behind a locked gate in his mind. If he let one memory through, the rest would swarm behind. He would never be safe again. Inside the dark canopy of his bed, they would eat up all his other thoughts. They would hunt him into the daylight, throw a net of darkness over his head and entangle him for ever.

‘Where’s Lobb?’ he asked brightly. ‘May I go now? I want to find Lobb.’

George Beester sighed and released him to search for the dog.

For the orphaned heir to the Nightingale estates, there followed a constant shifting of households and a long succession of different beds. A few months on his own Tarleton estate, visits to his other three houses. A few months with his Uncle George at Hawkridge. A summer on another of his estates. Two months with an aunt in London. He remembered chiefly the pain of leaving cousins and newly-befriended pets.

In spite of adult prayers and a few charms cast in private by one particular aunt, he had hidden in blankness for the next seven years. His parents had left him, been set upon and killed in some terrible, unspecified way. He did not remember exactly how and no one was anxious to tell him. He had to make a new life without them, on the four estates that were now his and on sojourns with uncles, aunts, cousins, tutors and friends.

He paced the crest of Hawk Ridge toward the water meadows.

Memory had sparked before dying again. In his own kitchen at Tarleton Court, when he was ten, a kitchen groom had thrown a dead rat onto the fire.

‘To the Devil with him,’ the man had said, before he thought.

John had been alerted by the uneasy eyes the man then turned on him. The man’s quiver of embarrassment stood John’s hair on end. John and the groom locked eyes.

The rat’s fur flared as quickly as lightning. The flesh blistered, sizzled, blackened and drew back from the bones. The rat writhed as its sinews shrank and hardened in the fury of the heat.

‘That’s that!’ said the servant with false heartiness. ‘You’d hardly know, it was so quick.’ He hooked a charred log-end from the side of the hearth into the central blaze. The ashy form of the rat crumpled as if it were hollow. It was gone except for the shriek of small sharp white teeth that rolled away to lodge against the leg of an iron trivet.

‘Master John,’ said the groom. ‘Would you like a swig of the new cider? It’s better than last season’s. What do you think?’

John read correctly the attempt to distract him. He thought he would be sick. Then he saw that this was only an approximate idea. More precisely, he was a brittle shell around nothing, not even sickness. He was nothing, except for the swelling pressure of his eyeballs against the bony rings of their sockets.

If he touches me, I will crumble like the rat, John thought. His mind stopped there.

‘I’m fine. Jack. Fine,’ he said. ‘Why are you fussing?’

Then, eleven years ago, when he was fourteen, memory had returned in a firelit room in a private London house. His uncle George Beester took John to a meeting of the directors of the South Java Trading Company. Beester greeted colleagues and introduced his wealthy nephew who might one day join them. There were a dozen men in the room. Then two newcomers arrived late.

In low voices, the men who knew explained to the men who did not. New investors. Francis and Edward Malise, from an old Catholic family which had survived King Henry by fleeing to the Netherlands. However, as the Malises were stubborn Catholics, the king had, by self-elected right, taken most of their money and all their lands. The Malise estates were sold or distributed to deserving supporters of Henry’s expedient split from the Church of Rome. (One or two men had looked at John.) The parents had died abroad. Then, under James, the two Malise sons returned to England and crept slowly back into wealth and position. The new French queen of James’s son Charles was said (by low voices into close-held ears) to be oiling their way upward, as she did for any man who could speak her alien tongue and was willing to make the sign of the Cross.

‘A little over-concerned with being seen at court,’ muttered Mr Henry Porter, owner of coastal ships that carried sea coal and dried cod.

Sir James Balkwell, owner of a large part of Buckinghamshire and local magistrate, replied, ‘Who cares if a man cuts his hair long or short so long as he has money to invest?’

As he plunged through the meadows up towards the road, John startled sleepy sheep into bleating flight. At the top of the hill, he leaned his arms on a wall and lowered his head onto the hard damp stone.

The Malise brothers were wrapped in an expensively fashionable softness of lace and curling hair which contradicted their sharp-boned, beaked faces and dark, hungry eyes. They were as alike as a pair of hunting falcons.

The brothers set off a glimmer of fear in John, as faint as distant lightning in a summer sky. He stared, hunched into himself like a rabbit under the shadow of a hawk.

The newcomers turned sharp eyes on the assembled men. They were quiet in manner but shuffled a little on the perch, lifting and settling their feathers. They moved around the room, accepting introductions. Then they paused before the fireplace. Edward, the younger brother, turned his head to Sir James Balkwell. Firelight flickered on bones of his nose and cheek. Sir James said something. Edward Malise showed his teeth in a laugh and changed John’s life for the second time.

Memory flared white-hot. John saw the things his uncle had begged him in vain to recall. He saw Edward Malise laugh in the orange light of the burning coach. His mother writhed in the brightness of her burning clothes. His father fell dead across his legs. John flew through the burning window frame. His hair flared. His heart was a red-hot coal. His arms and legs were flames.

He shrieked like a demon and flung himself through the bodies of the other men, across the room, shooting flames like thunderbolts, at that orange-lit, gleeful, beaked face of the Devil.

He knocked a cup of wine through the air and sent blood-red rain showering onto the hems of jackets and lace boot tops. A sheaf of papers fell from startled hands. The twin falcon faces snapped around. For a suspended moment, the time of an indrawn breath or the fall of an executioner’s axe, John blazed across the room in the stillness of the men’s disbelief and his own absolute intent.

The red-hot knives of his fingers seared Edward Malise’s laughing face. Then the elder brother, Francis, seized him from behind. John twisted in the man’s arms. The matching falcon face glared into his, contorted with effort, teeth bared. John tried to breathe, but the man’s arms crushed his lungs. He wrenched free and, with all his force, knocked the face away. Francis Malise staggered two steps backward, then toppled. John sucked in air like a drowning man and threw himself once again at Edward.

Francis Malise’s feet danced back another two steps, trying to catch up with his shoulders and head. His head smashed against the stone floor with the succulent thud of an overripe gourd. His lungs whooped like a collapsing bladder.

John didn’t see him fall. He screamed and clawed at the four men who tried to pull him off the other brother. Then slowly the stillness in the room chilled his fury. He looked where all the men were looking. Francis Malise lay on the stone flags, arms thrown wide at his sides, mouth ajar, jaw a little askew. All eyes in the room watched a small damp patch spread darkly out from his groin across the front of his pale blue silk and wool breeches.

John buried himself deep in the shadow of the Lady Tree. He leaned against her trunk and embraced her for steadiness. He had become a helpless conduit for the past.

The silence in the firelit room had continued for five more breaths, then everyone had shouted at once.

‘Francis!’ screamed Edward Malise. He jerked free of restraining hands and flung himself down beside his brother’s body. ‘Fetch a surgeon!’

Henry Porter lifted the head and examined the back of the skull. A man called Witty knelt to place his ear on Francis Malise’s chest although the stained trousers had already announced death. ‘It’s too late.’

Sir James Balkwell sent a man to find an officer.

John stared down at the man on the floor. His anger alone had done that, without knife or sword or club. He had never dreamed he had such power. Now everyone shouted at him.

He looked blindly into their faces. His uncle pushed him across the room, down into a chair. From there, John could see only the soles of the dead man’s shoes and a foreshortened peninsula of kneecap, ribcage, crooked jaw and nostrils.

Dead. He had done that. He had wanted to burn both of them to death in the heat of his rage. He had not thought that he had the power to succeed.

His uncle’s face interposed itself intently between John and the foreshortened dead man. ‘Why, John? Can you remember now? Was he the one?’

‘Satan was shining from his eyes,’ said another voice.

All the fire had left John. He shivered. He felt cold, and very young, and confused, burned to ash by his own fire. He had been right to keep memory behind the gate. Now, if he could only force it back again, the man on the floor might sit up again and demand that John be merely beaten.

Edward Malise raised his head and looked at John.

‘Tell me!’ his Uncle George begged. ‘Why did you attack him?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill him,’ said another voice.

‘He meant to kill me.’

John looked into the dark, prey-seeking eyes.

‘He meant to kill me,’ said Edward Malise. ‘You all saw him!’

‘You killed my parents,’ said John.

John wept against the smooth grey bark. He shuddered and clung to the Lady Tree. He wept as he had not wept before.

So much loss, he thought. Mother! Father! The pain of loss! I can’t bear it!

A hedgehog rustled unnoticed among the leaves. Later, a fox trotted past, unworried by the still figure that embraced the tree. The gamy smell of the fox pulled John back into the present night.

He felt the chill of his damp shirt-sleeve. He inhaled the night air and slid down to sit on his heels, braced against the tree, a little eased. Memory still flowed through him like the diverted Shir through its cellar pipes.

George Beester gave a great sigh of satisfaction, straightened and turned to Edward Malise. The other men’s voices died like a wave pulling back. Silence curled tightly around John, his uncle and Malise.

Malise shook his head as if dazed. He laid one hand on his brother’s body. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen, I can’t get a grasp on this madness …’

‘You stood beside their coach and laughed!’ shouted John in fury. Surely all these wise older men could smell out the acting.

‘When?’ demanded Malise. ‘What coach?’

‘Your men blocked the door so they couldn’t escape, my mother, father and nurse!’

Malise passed a hand across his eyes and drew a long breath. ‘Can someone else take over this insane interrogation? Make sense…perhaps make this young man understand what he has done …’ His eyes met John’s again, briefly. ‘Unless he is possessed. And then he is beyond any help.’

John quivered with fury at the note of forgiving compassion in the man’s voice.

‘He’s not possessed by any devils,’ said George Beester, ‘but by memories no child should have.’ He raised his voice to reach everyone in the room. ‘When my nephew was seven, some of you will remember, my sister and her husband were burned to death in their coach. The boy was with them but survived. In spite of much time and expense, I never discovered their killers. I knew who might have wanted them dead …’ Beester sighed again and studied Malise with gratified certainty. ‘But I had no proof. The boy himself remembered nothing of that night until this evening, when he saw you and your brother.’

‘Your implication is too monstrous and mad for me even to take offence.’

‘Then it should be easy to answer,’ said Beester.

Malise searched the surrounding faces for hostility or support. ‘I swear that I am innocent. I did not kill this boy’s parents, even though some of you must know that I had good reason to hate them, as my family have had for two generations before. The bones of my family were stripped by those vulture Nightingale upstarts. Or do you all choose to forget the plundering barbarities of King Henry? Do you shut his victims out of your thoughts as fast as the Star Chamber was able to forget the meaning of justice?’

‘One barbarity never excuses another,’ said Sir James. ‘Nor do old stories of land disputes and exile answer the boy’s accusation.’ He looked severely at Malise. ‘You should be careful, moreover, how you fling around that word “barbarity”.’

‘No doubt highwaymen killed his parents – it happens often enough. The Malises are being blamed for the guilty conscience of the Nightingales.’

‘Where were you and your brother that summer?’ asked Sir James. ‘August, seven summers ago.’

‘How can I answer that, at a time like this …? But I don’t even need to answer it. I’ve been falsely accused by a shocked and frightened boy, whose brain, as his uncle has just testified, was addled by his tragic experience.’

John opened his mouth but his uncle’s hand closed hard on his wrist.

‘Seven summers ago,’ repeated Beester.

Malise stared into George Beester’s face. ‘It comes back to me now. I remember. My brother and I were both in the Low Countries…serving with a Flemish unit against Spain. We had just engaged the Count de Flores in a pointless skirmish.’

There was a murmur from one or two of the company members. Englishmen serving as mercenaries, in a foreign army. Former soldiers now playing at commerce with their blood money.

Malise felt the quiver of hostility. ‘I will prove this to be true and when I have, I will expect reparation from you. As I trust the justice both of God and man to punish this youth for murdering my brother.’

Malise looked around in the silence and saw the assessing looks. ‘It was seven years ago, and the boy was only seven at the time. Is this how you conduct the business of your company…wrestling truth and reason to the ground on the dusty memory of a fallible child? Sir James …?’ He turned in appeal to Sir James Balkwell.

‘We are all as shocked as you,’ said Balkwell to Malise. ‘And we regret your monstrous introduction to our Company. As to our business dealings, sir, we examine all propositions calmly and without prejudice. No one here has yet laid a hand on either truth or reason.’

‘Am I the one on trial, then?’ demanded Malise. ‘That man …’ he pointed at George Beester ‘… has as good as accused me of murder when his Satan’s whelp of a nephew has just killed my brother!’ His eyes returned to the slack limbs and oddly angled jaw.

‘The boy must be tried,’ said Balkwell. ‘It needs no examination to conclude …’

‘It was an accident!’ protested George Beester. ‘It was surely an accident. He may have meant to attack – and with good reason – but not to kill!’

‘We have more than enough witnesses to what happened,’ said Balkwell. ‘Intelligent men who have eyes and will report honourably what they saw.’ He turned to Edward Malise. ‘I’m sorry that you feel on trial at such a tragic moment. But the boy has also made a claim against you, and we must deal with it as judiciously as any other matter. Whatever my feelings, I cannot agree with his uncle that the death was an accident. Like you, I saw clear intent in his face. I wish, therefore, to examine why the boy is so enraged against you.’

I killed a man in rage, John thought. I should feel such a mortal sickness of my soul. But he still felt only the rage.

In prison, his newly acquired memory was still sharp as freshly broken glass. Time had had no chance to dull it. Seven years of rubbing and grinding took place in mere days. He lay on his cot, hearing, smelling, seeing, and feeling, again and again and again. Smoke, roasting meat, the screams of the horses and of his mother. His own hair on fire. Malise’s beak. His father’s groom who had saved him and almost certainly been killed while John slipped away through the bushes to fetch up at the farm. The thrust of his mother’s hands as he flew through the window. They had saved him and died.

John hoped that rehearsing his memories might wear them out, but rage, grief and guilt wore him out first. Rage was the most bearable; he spun it into a case around himself like a silkworm. Then he raged that he had not paid heed in that firelit room to what Edward Malise had said – to the reason his life had been destroyed – instead of staring in a trance at Francis Malise’s shoe soles. Then he sieved the memories again, for a detail, a phrase, a name, anything to give his uncle as evidence against the Malises.

Then he suddenly asked, why? Why did the Malises hate my family so desperately? That ambush had been a desperate act. He found the word ‘vulture’ lodged in his memory. He closed his eyes and saw again the flickering light on Francis Malise’s body, and his brother’s face. More words surfaced like dying fish. John curled tightly on his cot. Had the Nightingales truly been vultures?

After three weeks in prison, it finally occurred to John to become afraid, not of death but of how he would die. The rope – he had once watched friends of a condemned man hang on his feet beneath the Tyburn gibbet to speed the terrible slowness of strangulation. At best, he would be given a gentleman’s way out on the block. He tried to tell himself that he would merely leap cleanly from this life into the next. He would never see the bloody mess and the strange turnip thing that had once held his soul.

He knew he would be judged guilty, because it was the truth. He had killed Francis Malise, in rage.

He knew that men had the right to punish him under temporal law, but he had expected to suffer in spirit as well. On the contrary, he was still glad he had done it. This realization shook him profoundly. At fourteen, he began to suspect that Good and Evil, the works of God and the works of Satan, were not separated after all by a boundary as clearly marked as a river bank. As a child, you were good or you were bad. Usually you knew the difference, and if caught you were punished. If you didn’t know the difference, you had merely failed to understand God’s Will.

Now, at a time when he most needed his childish faith, he was most filled with wretched doubt. He called on God to explain the ambiguity that surrounded His Commandments. ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ If John felt unrepenting triumph, what about soldiers fighting in the King’s name? And what about the soldiers fighting on the other side? There were long hours of opportunity, as John waited in his prison cell, for a Divine reply. The Lord did not seize the chance.

Is this one of the adult secrets, John wondered. That we walk as uncertainly as blind men? That to believe is merely to prescribe and to hope?

His uncle had bought John lodging in a room among the debtors of the Fleet Prison instead of a cell below ground. He also dropped the coins of his own suspicion into the pockets of gossip and influence. Sir James Balkwell had not been alone in feeling that John’s accusation might be true. He and the others were easier in their minds when there seemed to be no hurry to bring the boy to trial.

‘Bogus Englishmen as well as murderers,’ George Beester said of the Malises wherever an ear would listen. ‘Catholics…French name. Whipped off to the Netherlands in King Henry’s time and now they’re slinking back again, encouraged by the marvel of a French Catholic queen on the throne of England and protected by her papist cronies.’

A successful, self-made man, Beester understood the close connection between principles and pockets and had the means to make this connection work for his nephew’s cause. Even so, though he found many sympathetic ears, his efforts were not enough.

He visited the prison six weeks after John’s arrest. John scrambled up from his cot.

‘They’re going to try you next week,’ said Beester. The majority of those honourable men who witnessed Francis Malise’s death have agreed, however reluctantly, that you intended harm. The plea of accident has been rejected. And Edward Malise is pressing his case among the Catholic faction that has the Queen’s ear. It’s her word against the other side’s reluctance to act.’

Beester settled on a little stool and spread his legs wide to balance his bulk. ‘I don’t think I can save you in court unless we can find a strong enough case ourselves to bring against Malise. One last time – try to remember more! Even one detail…a name called out…livery.’

John shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been trying…Uncle, did the Malises have any right on their side?’

‘Has the Devil been pissing in your brain?’ George Beester flushed. ‘You ignorant, evil young …’ He stopped himself. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a fair question for a boy in your position.’ He studied his sturdy knees. ‘They had no right, only what they pretended was a reason. And Malise was canny enough to admit that straight off. His grandfather chose the wrong side, against King Henry while your own grandfather did not. The Malises tried every means to win their lands back. Your father had won a final lawsuit four months before he died.’

‘Lands,’ said John in wonder. ‘My parents’ lives for lands?’

‘The Malises claimed injustice and persecution.’

‘In a way, they were right.’

‘Don’t be a fool. The courts ruled that they were not. And that is the truth, as it stands, on this earth. The Malises are murderers. No law, Divine or temporal, gave them the right to play executioner.’

‘I killed Francis Malise.’

‘But with more right. And I still say it was an accident. And I have support on both counts. That’s why you must not come to trial! Morally, your guilt is still a little slippery. All those official words and papers will set events rock solid. The logical sentence will be required. I must do something before then.’

‘I did kill him.’

Beester leaned forward. ‘Swear to me again that you saw Edward Malise beside my sister’s coach!’

‘I swear,’ said John. ‘By anything you like.’

His uncle studied the boy’s eyes. Then he grunted. ‘All right. There’s no more to say. They won’t have you as well.’ He stood and rearranged the layers of his clothing for leavetaking. Beester saw no point yet in telling the boy that all four Nightingale estates, including Tarleton Court, had been confiscated by Crown agents to be held pending the verdict.

‘If those two were guilty,’ said Beester, ‘then it may yet be proved. And what a shame, then, if you were already dead.’

He crossed to the unlocked door. ‘Do you still keep handy that knife I gave you?’

John nodded.

‘If rumour gets out that I’m trying to delay your trial, Malise or a helpful crony might just see fit to play God’s role again. There aren’t enough guards here. Take care.’

The heavy wooden door of the cell scraped across the floor. John woke. He listened. Heard the tiny barking of a far-away dog. Inside the cell, cloth rasped on cloth. The darkness was tight with the silence of held breath. John felt rather than saw the change in the darkness where the door would be. Someone had opened his door. He slid his right hand under the cotton bolster onto the handle of his uncle’s dagger.

He waited, straining to hear over the clamour of his body.

Cloth scratched across cloth again, in the darkness near the door. Agile as an adder, John slid sideways off the bed. On the ice-cold floor, he listened again. Over the thumping of his heart, he heard a roughly drawn breath, and another. The intruder needed air badly and could keep quiet no longer.

How many were there?

Silently, John coiled himself near the foot of the bed. If he attacked now, he would have the brief advantage of surprise. He shifted his grip on the handle of the knife. The sound of breathing had not moved away from the door.

‘John?’ His name felt its way through the darkness on an urgent breath. ‘Nephew John, it’s Mistress Beester.’

Now he imagined a thicker darkness near the door.

‘Your aunt…Uncle George’s wife.’

His hand clamped even tighter onto the knife.

‘John, are you there?’

The thicker darkness stirred. It seemed to retreat a step.

‘Aunt Jane?’

‘It was the right door! Thank God! Come at once!’ The whisper was impatient and frightened. ‘Come quickly. Your uncle is waiting in the street…Come!’

John stood with a surge of joy. He took a step and bumped into the table. He hesitated in the darkness. What if she weren’t really there? It would be too terrible if she were a demon testing his soul’s strength. She would vanish, and he would have to rebuild his courage again from scratch.

‘Sweet Heaven, come now!’ Fabric rustled. A cold but solid hand brushed his wrist, fumbled, gripped on.

John dived through the darkness after the hand.

‘Close the door!’ she whispered.

They cut diagonally across a short corridor to a second smaller wooden door. His aunt opened it and ducked into the shaft of a narrow stone staircase with John behind her. Steps spun down, down, down around a pole of stone into a well of darkness. John followed the hissing of his aunt’s hems down the stone treads, his knees jerking in the rhythm of his descent. Slap, slap, shouted his feet. He tried to step more lightly as he followed his aunt’s rustling shadow down into the well. Tap, tap. Tap, tap. The truth began to shake his numbness. Tap, tap. He kept one hand on the spiralling wall to steady himself. The pitted stone bit at his fingertips. The cold damp air had the rotting leather smell of bats. He was escaping. Alive.

A vestibule. A heavy door, slightly ajar. A porch. A passageway. John smelled the stench of offal and sewage as they crossed a bridge over the prison moat and passed through another gate. Then, a street. An unlit coach, and his uncle.

‘In! In!’

Horses’ hooves scraped on stone. Running water sluiced in a shadowed trench. Inside the coach, with the door slammed shut, John threw his arms around his uncle.

‘You’re not clear yet,’ said Beester, patting the broad young shoulders. ‘We must get you out of London tonight.’

‘How did you do it?’ demanded John. ‘How did you unlock the doors and remove the gaolers?’

‘Ahh,’ said George Beester with satisfaction. ‘It’s a venal age.’ He hesitated. He was pleased by his own foresight; he had extracted as much money as possible from the boy’s estates in the twenty-four hours after Francis Malise’s death, before the mill of the Star Chamber began to grind. John had bought his own freedom, at no cost to his uncle. It had been an elegant transaction. However, Beester was not sure that the boy would appreciate this elegance or understand his new estate in life.

‘Are you aware, nephew, that the Star Chamber now holds the deeds to all your estates and assets? Your escape will make them doubly forfeit to the Crown. Your present freedom is the sole residue of your inheritance.’

‘It’s more than enough!’ said John with passion. ‘Thank you! And thank you, aunt!’

‘I’m afraid it’s far from enough,’ replied Beester. ‘As you will learn.’ He studied the shadowy rectangles of darkened windows passing outside the coach. ‘Now I must hide you in a safe burrow somewhere.’

His uncle took him upriver by boat from a dock near London Bridge. John perched in the prow. He watched the sleeping city slide past, then the great dark houses of the Strand, then the jumbled buildings that made up Whitehall. Later, Chelsea village, and much later, the palace at Richmond. Because he was only fourteen, he couldn’t help thinking – now that he had escaped – that he was having the most amazing adventure.

‘This is what life feels like,’ he told himself, as the far, dark banks slid past and distant dogs barked. ‘I am being tested.’ Doubt still slept in his deserted prison cell. In John’s euphoria at leaving behind the terror of the rope and block, he now knew that his clear sight would return. His tale would end as it should, after battles, voyages, and vindications, in his own reclaimed kingdom at the side of a blue-eyed princess.

He leaned against the Lady Tree, too tired to move. He listened for a few moments to the rustle of her mermaid tail above his head. Then he noticed the hedgehog crackling and snuffling in the leaves by his feet, the danger of the fox long past. His trousers were damp from the earth. His legs ached.

My aunt is right. I must leave at once. I won’t let myself be arrested again. And to kill Malise here on Hawkridge Estate would be a shameful way to repay my uncle and his heirs. I’d spoil poor old Harry’s chances at Court for ever.

He imagined going back to his chamber now and packing. Stealing away to Mill Meadow, saddling his horse and riding away.

In which direction? he asked himself. How do I choose?

He stood a little longer without moving. Malise had known him but said nothing. Why?

He’s either playing with me or needs something. I should have paid more attention to what Hazelton was trying to say.

I won’t run tonight, he decided a little later. I’m too tired, and there’s too much to arrange. Unless I want to live as a vagabond outlaw, I must arrange my flight a little. If Malise hasn’t raised the alarm yet, he may wait a little longer.

He was past thinking.

He laid his hand on the Lady Tree in farewell. You outlasted me after all, he thought.

Ask, ask, ask, she rustled.

I’d be a fool, thought John suddenly, to abandon everything before I know what Malise wants.