Mistress Margaret came from the bake house with a mug of beer, crossing the forecourt with the painfully stiffened gait that made her roll like a sailor. ‘I suppose you’ll want to rinse the dust from your mouth. Nothing fine, not like London. Take it or leave it, this is all we’ve got.’
Harry took the beer but eyed his aunt around the glass.
Curious faces began to fill the arch that led from the stable yard. ‘Morning, sir,’ called two or three voices.
‘Can we walk apart?’ he muttered to Zeal. ‘I’d have thought they all need to be hard at work somewhere.’
‘Anywhere in particular you’d care to go?’ she asked. ‘For old times’ sake?’
He shook his head impatiently.
She led him through the trampled ruins of John’s knot garden and around the chapel at the east end of the house. They walked in silence except for the sound of his boots crunching on the cinders still covering the ground until they reached the grassy slope above the fish ponds.
‘I’ve come for the statues,’ said Harry abruptly.
‘No!’
‘They’re movables, you should know. My movables. Neptune and all his daughters.’
‘You mean Nereus! And you can’t take them. Not now!’
‘I’m afraid I can.’
‘But you deeded this estate to me. As the price of my warbling to your tune so you could go stalk your precious Lady Alice. You’ve had all my money. The estate is now mine.’
‘You’re welcome to the land and the house – or what’s left of it. And the barns, sties and so on. The carts and ploughs…hardly need those in London. I even let you keep the animals, though I could have sold them all if my mood had been less kind.’
Or less frantic for your freedom to chase another, richer wife, she thought.
‘But the movables were mine. And I count the statues as movables! In any case, you don’t need them. What use do you have down here…’ His sweeping hand brushed away the fields, the beech hanger, the ponds, the ruined house. ‘…for art?’
‘As much as any Londoner.’
He sniffed in derision. ‘Debate is pointless. I bought those figures and I’m taking them back. A wedding gift for Lady Alice, as a matter of fact.’
They reached the edge of the middle pond.
‘Ha!’ Harry pointed. ‘Case proved! Finest Italian marble, bought from a friend of the king’s own agent, and you use them as nesting boxes or to anchor fishing lines!’
Indeed, the line was still tied to Amphritite’s wrist, while a duck now squatted on the nest Zeal had seen the day before between the feet of another nymph.
‘Perhaps they find it peaceful here,’ said Zeal. A shivery rage in her chest had begun to make it hard to breathe. ‘Perhaps these ponds are more like their original home than a London courtyard surrounded by stench and noise.’
Arrived at the top pond, Harry stood with his head on one side and hands on hips beneath his open silk coat. ‘You misunderstand. They’re intended for Lady Alice’s Bedfordshire estate. They’ll have a garden worthy of them there.’
The old sea god, Nereus, seemed to list even farther forward than yesterday; his dolphin peered even more closely into the depths.
‘My men will start at once, should finish tomorrow. Then I’ll not trouble you again.’
Zeal lowered her voice to avoid being heard by the boy who passed them on his way to the dovecote in the paddock. ‘This estate is all I have left. You’ve taken enough.’
‘On the contrary, I believe I’ve been most generous. I rescued you from that Hackney hencoop, didn’t I? Turned you from a dowdy little smock of a schoolgirl into a fashionable lady.’ He pursed his lips in triumph at this wounding shot.
I’ve only myself to blame, she thought. Killing him now won’t change that fact, however much satisfaction it would give me.
She turned away and walked along the bank.
‘I spent nothing that wasn’t legally mine,’ Harry called after her. ‘Mine in good faith, as your husband. At the time.’
She shook her head and kept walking away. He followed.
‘You were happy enough to collude!’ His voice quivered with emotion. ‘I know how things stood between you and my cousin!’
‘Never!’ She turned on him. ‘Never while it still suited you to admit to being my husband! And you know it!’
‘I know nothing of the sort.’
They stood poised in murderous silence.
Harry recovered first. ‘I don’t mind anyway,’ he said loftily. ‘Couldn’t care less. We’re nothing to each other now, any more than we ever were. Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, shall we?’ He swung away from her towards the front of the house. ‘Fox! Pickford! Here!’
To Zeal, he added, ‘You perjured yourself just as I did. If you try to cause me trouble, I vow you’ll come off the worse.’
Two of the carters arrived through an arch in the yew hedge at the west end of the house, near the top pond. Behind this hedge, John had planted a maze the previous summer. Both hedge and infant maze, though badly scorched, promised survival with a pale green frosting of the past summer’s growth.
‘Take Neptune first,’ Harry told the men.
‘I forbid it,’ said Zeal.
The men exchanged startled glances. Then one looked into the distance, while the other studied his stockings.
A shilling-sized spot of red flared on each of Harry’s cheeks. ‘Carry on,’ he said. He took Zeal by the arm and led her aside. ‘Go read the deeds, if you’ve forgotten what they say.’
‘I know what they say,’ she said loudly. She yanked her arm free. ‘And if you touch me again, I will kill you.’ He was right. In law, she could not stop him. If only he had taken them at once and not left them to become part of her life.
Arms crossed, she perched on the corner of Amphritite’s plinth and summoned up her most chilling basilisk eye, though she felt more like weeping.
With wary glances at Zeal, the two carters circled the statue of Nereus. They tested the mud at the base of the plinth with the heels of their boots. They sucked their teeth, shook their heads.
Zeal felt a twinge of hope. Nereus was eight feet tall and made of solid marble. He might choose to stay.
‘Seven of you should be able to manage,’ Harry said impatiently.
The one who turned out to be Fox went to fetch reinforcements.
Zeal followed him through the arch in the hedge. ‘Don’t trample the maze!’ she called sharply.
He soon returned, with thick coiled rope and a heavy wooden pulley block, stepping carefully across the low maze walls. Behind him came a youth with a younger version of the same face, carrying a second rope and block. The youthful Fox chose to follow the paths of the maze. He approached, then suddenly veered away. He circled, turned again and at last emerged with a triumphant grin, released back into the unmeasured world. Behind him, three more men staggered under the weight of the long canvas-wrapped poles. After a brief conference, they elected, like the elder Fox, to play colossus and bestride the complexities in their path. One of them lost his balance and trod on a young box.
‘Take care!’ cried Zeal.
The men’s burden proved to be three stout wooden poles, each as long as a May Pole, wrapped in a canvas sling large enough