She turned her cheek against the smoky pillow. Only seven years to be survived. With the child, and work, she could bear it now.
The ginger tom that John had given her as a kitten had found her in the night. It now rearranged itself against her feet with a thump of protest at being disturbed. She placated it by wiggling her toes while she tested the steadiness of her new humour. She threw back the covers. The paralysing spell of the last weeks had indeed lifted. Today, she would regain her grip and take command once more.
In her chemise and wrapped in a blanket, she sat at once at the office table and began to write.
Zeal’s Work Book – October 1639
Salvage what we can from ruins, to rebuild with and clear the site
Borrow feather beds and blankets for winter sleeping
Set all maids to weave new blankets
Dry feathers in ovens to make new beds…
She raised her head while she thought what to write next. If John had been there, he would have helped her with the list of tasks for the gardens.
He had left an old coat, hanging on a peg behind the door. Apart from his glove, the quill pen, and a few books and curiosities kept here in the office, all his other belongings had burned in the fire. She got up and put on the coat.
It was made of rough wool from their sheep, dyed brownish black with walnut skins. The sleeves hung down over her hands and the bottom of its skirts fell almost to her ankles. She raised her arm to her nose to sniff the sleeve and caught her breath sharply, then inhaled again. Through the smokiness, she thought she could smell the warm salty sweetness of his body. She ducked her head to sniff inside the coat. A miasma of his being inhabited it with her. She pulled it tightly around her and his child, rolled back the cuffs and began to write again.
Set hedges
Plant spinach, kale, purslain and poppies…
She imagined that he whispered in her ear.
…Set artichokes, strawberries and garlic cloves
Transplant leeks
Salve sheep against the scab…
Wait, she told him. I’ve just remembered something else.
Buy needles for sewing new clothes
Buy 20 ells of fine linen to make Christmas shirts for the women…
She set down the pen. She needed a morning to write it all. But it was a start.
Without Rachel’s help, she did not try to put on the corset she had thrown last night onto the office table. In any case, it was filthy with soot. Still wearing John’s coat, she set off for High House, to reassure Rachel that she had not disappeared for a second time, and to put on her working clothes. Then she would assess the possibilities for salvage.
She left her mare grazing nearby. Then she picked up her skirts and stepped through the charred brick doorway into what was left of Hawkridge House. The remains of the oak door looked like a crust of burnt toast.
The cat had refused to follow her and now sat outside on a piece of broken masonry in the pose of a heraldic beast, watching her with courteous disbelief.
Tuddenham had warned her that there might still, even three weeks later, be pockets of hot coals in the rubble. Crunching over the lumpy black landscape that had been the hall, she imagined that the soles of her shoes were growing hot, that her petticoats flared into flames and transformed her into a burning flower.w
Her foot crushed what might once have been a stool leg. She stared down at the glistening black fragments, then at a puddle of dark oily water. Then at the jagged rim of a charred wall.
Here I once lovingly rubbed honey-scented beeswax onto the wooden panelling, she thought. Only three weeks ago.
In spite of her revived spirits, the blackened wreckage made her feel light-headed and queasy. She was not alone. Everyone on the estate still walked a little uncertainly, as if drunk or ill. They forgot simple things, would break off whatever they were doing and go to stand and stare at what was left of the house. They told each other the same stories again and again. How Master John had stamped out embers on the precipitous bake house roof. How fish had been carried up from the ponds in the fire-fighters’ pails and fried by accident. How the children had brought rain by singing hymns, though not in time to save the great hall or long gallery. They compared how many inches of hair and beard had been singed off. They debated how the fire had started – which chimney might have held a bird’s nest, which fire might have bred lethal sparks as so often happened, or whether malice, even, might have played a part. They wept suddenly without warning over trivial losses.
Near her right foot, a carved oak rosette fallen from the great staircase gleamed with buried fires like a crow’s back. It looked solid, perfectly intact, but she knew that at the lightest touch, it would crumble to dust. For a moment, she froze, afraid to move. She felt that her whole life lay lost under this black, unfamiliar ruin. The shapes of the last three years, of her marriage to Harry, were fragile shells of ash.
The stairs and the dog-gate had burned. The upper landing hung like a black flap from the slanted floor of the upper hall. Her charred marriage bed had crashed through the floor into the back parlour, where it seemed to struggle to rise to its feet like a cow, hindquarters first. The massive headboard tilted. Black ribbons of the costly hangings that had so gratified Harry fluttered gently in the open air.
She could see past it right through the back wall of the house to the nymphs around the ponds. The cat now crouched in the grass studying the charred remains of a fish.
She looked back at the bed. Heard the hollow chomping of her mare, children shouting, cooing from the dovecote, the thump and slosh of a churn. A woman laughed loudly in the bake house. A creamy dove landed on the shoulder of one of the nymphs.
My life is not in ruins at all, she thought suddenly. Only my life with Harry has burned. All I have lost, in the end, is this house. Harry’s house. The rest remains. So long as I am patient and steadfast. The child. John, who loves me. My people. My estate. Even the tribe of magnificent water spirits who so kindly look after three very ordinary fish ponds for me.
She took three crunching steps. Then she jumped and landed hard with both feet. Crunch, crunch. She walked to the bed and kicked it. A half-burned foot-post shivered into a shower of black chunks. She kicked again. Shattered the footboard. Stamped the fragments into dust. Burying Harry and his lies and his disdain for all her efforts to please him. She yanked down the shreds of the hangings in one succulent, gratifying rip.
So much for his ruinous extravagance!
She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely. Clear it all away and build a new house. Her own house, not Harry’s.
Then she spied a gleam, pulled a diamond of unbroken glass from under a dusty black skeletal bench. She spat on it and rubbed with her thumb. When she held it up to the sky, a hot coin of sunlight fell on her cheek.
I will have such light in my new house, she thought. My house, which I shall build. Not Harry’s. With great windows so that even on the darkest days we will be able to see clearly. Mistress Margaret will not need her spectacles except to sew.
With black hands and smuts on her face, she imagined the God-like act of creation. Ex nihilo. She would abandon this ashy nothing entirely, knock down everything but the chapel and fashion her own place on earth exactly as she wanted it, where she wanted it. A prodigy