Читать книгу The Memory Palace - Christie Dickason - Страница 11

‘There you are!’ Rachel, a ripe twenty-four, had acquired Zeal as her mistress while the latter was still a Hackney schoolgirl and did not intend to change her manner just because the girl now owned an estate in some godforsaken corner of Hampshire. ‘I left your tray on your bed back at High House. Did you want me to do something with this?’

‘Not yet!’ Zeal snatched back the letter she had left to be sent to John after her death.

‘Your skirt hem is covered in mud.’ Rachel did not quite dare to ask where she had been so early. However, Zeal felt curious eyes on her back as they trudged up the track that led to High House.

‘We both have wet feet now,’ observed Rachel.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Zeal had said.

Wentworth flinched. ‘Is it my age?’

She shook her head.

‘The only ridicule I fear is yours,’ he said. ‘I meant the form of marriage only. Please don’t fear that there’s any need for love. Warm friendship, perhaps, in time.’

‘No.’

‘Is it my modest circumstances, then?’

‘At least you can offer me a set of fine fishing rods. All I would bring you in jointure are a bastard, ridicule, a burned-out house and a few sheep. It’s a fine gesture, but I can’t accept.’

‘Don’t mistake me, Zeal. I’m not a man for fine gestures. I’m old and lonely. You would do me a great favour.’

She stepped back and collided with the nymph. ‘You know very well which way the favour lies. To marry a woman with a bastard in her belly, abandoned by both husband and lover…you won’t survive the laughter.’

‘Laughter has never concerned me so long as I get what I want.’

Their glances collided for the length of a heartbeat.

‘Master Wentworth, only three weeks ago, I vowed to stay true to John Nightingale.’

‘A vow won’t help him if you’re dead.’

She did not reply.

‘I hate to think that death is preferable to a few years of my company,’ he said.

‘You don’t want to marry any more than I want to die. I’ve never seen a man so content with his own company.’

‘I want the child.’

She caught her breath.

‘I’ve no children who are alive to me,’ he said. ‘I’d be proud to claim Nightingale’s pup as my own. Until he wants it back, of course.’ He shouldered his rod. ‘In the name of the man you love, consider my proposal. Save his child. Life need not change much. Take time to reflect. I won’t retract my offer. You will find me at Pot Pool, below the mill.’

Zeal had not meant to go back to High House, but now that Rachel had intercepted her, she could not think what else to do. She had used up all her will on the chapel roof during the night. The two women paused for breath on the brow of the grassy ridge that separated the two estates.

‘Winter’s coming.’ Rachel gazed back across the ruined house at the bright slaps of colour on Hawk Ridge.

‘I need to sit down,’ said Zeal.

‘Madam! Think of your skirts,’ cried Rachel, too late.

After breakfast, Zeal rode her mare back to Hawkridge. While she waited in the office for her estate steward, Tuddenham, to finish in the stables, she picked up a stack of sooty papers, then set it down again. The old lethargy sucked at her again.

Wentworth offers a way out. Take it.

But I vowed to stay true to John. I believe that excludes marriage to someone else.

But this would be merely the form of marriage. An arrangement.

A rush of nausea sent her outside where she was sick onto the forecourt gravel.

‘Madam! Are you ill?’ Anyone who met Tuddenham on a dark road at night, would hand over his purse without waiting to be asked. Even when concerned, the steward glared.

She stared at him blankly. ‘No,’ she said at last. Then she remembered that illness was preferable to the truth.

She could not accept. The answer lay in her bones. Reason could not touch it.

‘I made a schedule for the salvage and clearing the house site,’ said Tuddenham. ‘Sir Richard has spared us five men to help. We might be done by Christmas. Begin rebuilding after Twelfth Night, weather permitting.’

She almost said, ‘I won’t be here by Christmas.’ The day was catching her unprepared. Expecting to be dead, she had let go of the strings that tied one day to the next. ‘Will you send a boy to High House to make my excuses at dinner?’

Tuddenham glared even more ferociously and agreed at once.

Zeal took a straw hat from the office, crossed the sluice bridge and began to climb the hill beyond the river and ponds. She did not look at the river as she crossed it, lest she see Wentworth.

I can’t marry anyone but John, she told herself again. But that can’t be, because if I don’t marry Wentworth, I must die.

Arrangement or not, marriage would give him rights and power over her. She had learned the dangers of marriage in any form.

How do I know I can trust him?

She could not think straight because she had not expected to be alive to make such a decision. She had used up the deciding part of herself last night on the roof.

Still queasy, she crossed a low grassy curve on the shoulder of Hawk Ridge itself and picked up the straight track, peppered with sheep droppings, which led towards the old Roman garrison town of Silchester. She grew tired far too soon, perhaps because of the child. She wished she could ask advice of the older married women, but dared not risk even reading about pregnancy and childbirth in her books.

She turned back, then found that she had to rest.

He was clever to have used the child.

The faint clanging of the bake house bell woke her. She had fallen asleep in the grass with her back against a rocky outcrop where she had often sat with John, seeming to talk of estate affairs or gazing into the valley in shared silence, but with all her being concentrated in the small part of her arm that touched his. A flock of her own Wiltshire Horns, rangy goat-like creatures, was grazing past her. She set off back down hill with damp skirts and the metallic taste of dread and indecision still in her mouth.