She sat back on her heels in the heap of her skirts. The moon looked cold and dead, like a bleached bone. At least it was waxing. Always sow your seeds in a waxing moon. Don’t try to conjure hope under a dying one.
She turned her head sharply at a falling leaf. The air in the garden was so still that she heard snail tongues rasping at the leaves of the cabbages and late beans. Even the distant sheep and ducks were temporarily silent. Then Ranter, who had also raised his head, gave a gusty sigh and flopped his dewlaps down onto his forepaws again.
Reassured by his indifference, she spat on the napkin. Then she lifted her pleated linen collar to dig under her armpit with the handkerchief. With a glance at Ranter’s tranquil shadow, she reached up under her skirts and wiped the napkin between her legs.
She took John’s glove from her bodice and held it to her face. She inhaled his scent beneath the salty tang of the leather. Felt his body heat and hard smooth muscles. Almost saw him. Then the details wavered and blurred.
I should have fed my eyes in our last moments together, she thought. Committed him to memory, inch by inch and hair by hair, instead of shouting at him in rage for abandoning me. I dared to be angry with him when he was going off to be little more than a slave.
The harder she tried to see him, the more he eluded her.
She put her hand into the void left by his and bent her fingers to fit the curves and bumps that he had shaped. Then she laid her hand in his glove against her right breast.
She looked down at the dark leather against the pale wool of her bodice. As a very young girl, she had imagined that such a touch would feel wicked. Instead, when it finally came, she had felt a deep peacefulness, as if a tightly-wound spring had loosened inside her. She had been waiting without knowing it, for his hand to arrive exactly there.
She put the napkin to her nose and inhaled her own musky smell. Suddenly, as clearly as if he had been there, she smelled the rich warm brew that rose up between their naked bodies after love.
She wiped her eyes with the napkin.
Ranter raised his head.
‘Good dog,’ she whispered.
The great rope of his tail thumped on the damp grass.
She kissed the glove formally, as if it were a bishop’s ring or a sword before battle, and folded the handkerchief around it. With her knife, she cut a long strand of hair from her nape and tied it around the bundle.
The mastiff rumbled like an earthquake and hoisted himself to his feet. Zeal froze. He lumbered to the back wall of the garden, growled again. A violent scuffling announced that whoever had begun to scale the wall had decided urgently against it. The sounds of retreat faded into the night.
She listened for a long time at the back gate. As mistress of Hawkridge Estate, she had the right to walk where she liked, at any time, however odd. The tenant farmers and her own house family, the gardeners, stockmen and grooms should all be clutching at sleep while another day of work rushed at them all too fast. But no one was in his or her right place just now. And boys slipped out to poach fish from the ponds. Unmarried couples, like Rachel and Arthur, sought darkness and solitude under the trees. The bundle she now carried could hang her.
Ranter gave a low reproachful bark when she finally closed the door behind her. ‘Stay, sir!’ she whispered through the wooden grille. ‘Guard my back.’
As she climbed the flank of Hawk Ridge, her feet slipped on the damp, crumbly beech mast and silvery patches of damp moss. Just below the spine of the ridge, in the darkness under the leafy roof, panting from her climb, she reached out to touch one of the dark columns.
He sat under this tree, and I leaned against him, rocked gently on the rise and fall of his breath.
As she began the last steep scramble, the chill of total solitude engulfed her. Here all human fires were quenched. A thick roof of branches shrouded the night sky and blotted out the moon. The air felt thick, as if a great weight pressed down on it. Though the night was almost windless, the trees around her rustled and sighed as if alive.
You enter the Lady’s realm, they murmured.
Nearly blind now, she hauled herself up the last sheer yards, slipping and clutching at branches, into the cavern of darkness cast by the Lady of Hawk Ridge. Hands outstretched, she felt her way towards the ancient beech that had chosen human form. Her hands met damp, cool bark. Found a familiar wide taut hollow, and recognized a curve.
The Lady sprang upwards into the sky, feet first, from a short trunk twenty feet around. Her head and her raised arms remained imprisoned in the trunk, while her sappy fingers twisted into roots deep in the earth under Zeal’s feet. Her body, that of a giant female, was the lowest branch of the old beech, which spread close to the ground, the result of coppicing one hundred years before.
Zeal felt outwards along the damp bark from the hollow of the Lady’s throat until she reached the two large boles of her breasts with their broken stumps of nipples. Though lost now in the darkness, the Lady’s waist, hips and crossed legs curved upwards until her ankles sprouted, ninety feet above the ground, into an angular network of springy twigs. The Lady of Hawk Ridge rose naked and unashamed from the earth with such force and purpose that she seemed to hold its centre in her buried hands.
Zeal had overheard the muttered gossip. The Lady, not Gifford, was Doctor Bowler’s chief rival for souls on the estate. Zeal had admired the little parson for his pragmatic discretion on the subject of the estate oracle. Now she too, like so many others, would let the Lady decide her fate.
As she felt along the giant rib cage, she gave a little ‘hah!’ of terror and snatched back her hand. She had touched something cold, limp and damp.
She stared at the darkness until she thought her eyes would burst. After a time she began to make out a shape against the beech bark. It swam in the darkness but did not move away. Zeal clenched her teeth and forced herself to touch it again.
Wet feathers. Crumpled, wiry claws. A dead bird. Then her fingers found the noose of twine from which it hung and she smelled the whiff of putrefaction. She turned to flee, then reminded herself that she had plucked too many scalded chickens to run from a dead crow or thrush.
She crouched among the Lady’s roots and, with a sharpened yew stick she had carried in her belt, began to dig. Her fingers felt a sharp edge. A folded parchment.
Another desperate petitioner, she thought. Perhaps the one who left the bird. She covered over someone else’s private hope or grief and dug again. She buried her bundle. Then she stood, stretched up her right hand and found the triangle where the Lady’s legs divided. The damp bark under her fingers felt as rough and complicated as her own red-gold bush, though much colder.
‘Lady,’ she whispered. ‘If you can do what they believe…do it for me. I beg you, tell me. What should I do?’
Will I understand if she does answer?
The tree inhaled and exhaled. Zeal heard it clearly.
He is truly gone. Will never touch you again. You will never hear his voice.
‘No!’ Zeal cried aloud. ‘That can’t be!’
I imagined, she told herself. Heard my own fears speaking. The wind.
‘I shall ask three times,’ she told the tree. So as to be sure of what I hear.
Be careful what you ask and how you ask it, she told herself. Remember the stories. Beware of the literal and murderous precision of magical wish-granting!
Her mind leapt from danger to danger.
‘Will I ever see him…’ she asked carefully ‘…alive and not dead?…Don’t answer me yet! I must think.’ She pressed her free hand to her face. Her skin felt hot in spite of the chill under the tree.
‘With