‘Will he still love me?’
With her hand still on the cleft of the Lady’s legs, she pressed her forehead against the dark, cold bark beside the dead bird.
No reply. What should I make of that?
She was no longer certain what she had heard the first time.
When her pulse had quietened a little, she tried a third and last time.
‘Speak to me now,’ she begged the Lady. I’m ready to listen.
The grove around her was absolutely still. The night held its breath. The tree did not speak.
‘Please, give me a sign, Lady! Shall I marry Wentworth and try to endure for seven years?’
Don’t even think about what might happen then.
‘Or should I kill myself?’
Why should I trust it? she suddenly thought. Why does everyone assume it’s friendly? If so, why does it want dead offerings?
The night still held its breath. Still the tree kept silent. Not a twig or leaf stirred.
Zeal sat, closed her eyes. Fortunate Daphne, she thought. Transformed to a laurel tree. All grief ended…she presumed that trees do not feel grief.
She dug her fingers into the leaf mould, imagined the chill of the ground rising slowly towards her heart, reaching it, slowing its beat until her thoughts darkened and faded into a long dream of leaf fall, rain, nesting birds and slow rot.
She sat upright with a jolt of terror and tried to remember where she was. Who she was. Not a tree. Almost, but not yet. She scrambled up, tripped on petticoats, half-fell when a numbed foot gave way. The darkness and chill pressed on her like water. She could not breathe. This was not mere fancy. She felt the silent presence in the grove, which had refused to help.
I am such a fool, she thought.
In a growing rage at the Lady, at herself, she slid and stumbled back down the slope away from the tree. Back in the clear moonlight of the kitchen garden, Ranter still waited just inside the gate.
‘Nature does not trouble itself with our petty human affairs!’ she told him, with ferocity. ‘And why should it care? Why should I expect anything, even Chance, to relieve me of my decision? I shall have to make up my own mind, after all!’
She could not bear to go back to High House, to be among all those breathing bodies, the snores, the night time farts and cries, to be attacked by the miasma of other people’s dreams. She stalked down river to the mill, where she climbed out on the narrow platform that led to the great wooden wheel. She glared down briefly into the water while moss dripped near her head and pale leaves slid into the current of the race and dived beneath her feet.
Ask nothing of anyone. I’ve always known that.
She had to keep moving lest she start to take root again.
Upstream, where the suck of the race did not disturb it, the surface of the millpond looked cold and as hard as metal.
Though the tree had stayed silent the night now seemed filled with advice. As she crossed the sluice bridge at the bottom of the ponds, the leaping water burbled, ‘Build a little, build, build, build.’
‘Dieeee!’ cried a sheep.
‘Build, build a little,’ insisted the water below the sluice.
‘Yes,’ whispered the trees on the riverbanks.
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ instructed a pair of antiphonal frogs.
Her blood pounded in her head. She could tolerate indecision no longer, felt ablaze with furious purpose, though she could not yet say what it was. She wanted to tear through the milky membranes of the night, sweep away the clouds. Propelled by a horror of that quiescent stillness in the beech grove, not knowing what she would say, and without thought for the hour, she headed for the tack room to find Philip Wentworth.
‘One moment!’ The heavy door muffled his voice. There was the thud of a chest lid. Zeal imagined she felt the remains of the east wing tremble. The door opened so suddenly that he nearly caught her with her ear against it.
He was still arranging his coat. His shirt collar was caught up on one side, the ties still undone. His eyes widened when he saw her.
‘I think I’ve come to say, yes.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Think?’ He smoothed his silver hair with his hand.
‘May I come in?’
He stepped back and left the door standing open behind her.
‘You shouldn’t be here,’ she said. ‘I looked for you in the tack room. If you won’t stay at High House, you should sleep in the tack room until that wall is braced. The back staircase shook under my feet just now.’
‘I didn’t expect you so soon.’ He finished tying up his shirt.
‘You won. Aren’t you pleased?’ Her eyes darted around his little room. A chilly breeze blew from the corridor onto her back. ‘Or didn’t you expect me to accept? Do you want to retract your offer, after all?’
He took her elbow and sat her on a back stool in front of the low fire. ‘Stop talking for a moment.’ He took a glass from his cabinet, blew into it, then poured wine from a jug which stood on the table behind her.
She turned in her chair. He had been working. Papers lay higgledy-piggledy. A pewter mug, a dirty wineglass and a pair of spectacles sat among the papers. A sempster’s candle stand, fitted with a lens set vertically, focussed the light of the flame.
‘Tell me again,’ he said.
‘I said, yes.’
He gave her the glass of wine. He had rolled back his cuffs from strong broad hands flecked with age spots. Then he refilled his own glass. He pulled out a second back stool from the wall and sat on the other side of the fire. He raised his glass. ‘To friendly union, then.’ The greying bristle of his chin glistened in the firelight.
Now that she had agreed to marry him, she had difficulty in looking straight at him. From quick uneasy glances, she saw he had a scar on the edge of his slightly box-like jaw, and deep lines from nostril to mouth. And a strong nose with a square tip, where two paler points sat just under the skin. Grey hairs curled from the open neck of his shirt. His wool stockings were wrinkled, his feet shoved into soft, scuffed leather house slippers. She smelled wormwood against moths and a faint alcoholic mist when he exhaled.
The firelight coiled at the bottom of her glass. She did not know whether or not she had responded to his toast.
For forty pounds a year, Wentworth occupied this small parlour and an equally small sleeping chamber beyond. He lived frugally, without a manservant. Through the far door, she saw the dark shape of a narrow bed, with curtains on plain square-sectioned posts. She had seen these rooms only once before, with his permission, when she first took stock of her new realm. Wentworth had otherwise forbidden all entrance to his rooms, except twice a year to clean.
His floor now seemed to slant. The corners of the room were not quite true. Thirty feet beyond his door, the corridor leading from the back stairs to what had been the front of the house dived suddenly downwards and opened onto the night.
‘What if the rest of the corridor gives way?’
‘I’m not going to retract my offer,’ he said.
She nodded mutely.
‘Drink a little,’ he said. ‘It’s no small thing we propose to do. But not so great as I suspect it feels to you just now. Drink a little. Steady yourself.’ He drank. ‘It helps me to sleep.’
Her