They trooped out of the estate office back into the forecourt, where the carters, Wentworth, Bowler, Mistress Margaret and the others waited with faces ranging from expectant to glum.
‘Legal niceties!’ said Sir Harry bitterly. ‘All law and no justice!’ To Fox, he said, ‘You’re going to have to figure out how to get the statues without going through there.’
Sir Richard lowered his massive head and glared at Harry through his eyebrows. The carters examined the entrance to the paddock to the west of the maze garden.
‘Can’t get a wagon through over here, either.’
Beyond the paddock, stretching up to the high road, lay the hedge of the Roman field, reinforced with stones and willow hurdles set to try to stem the constant leaking of sheep. The stable yard and walled garden blocked access around the eastern end of the house.
‘I’m taking those statues, and I don’t care how!’ said Harry. ‘I’ll stay until someone works it out.’
‘An ox without a cart could reach the ponds through the paddock.’
Heads turned towards this unexpected voice. Harry looked startled, as if he had not known the man could speak at all. Indeed, given Wentworth’s absence from table during Harry’s short time on the estate, perhaps he had never before heard the older man utter. ‘You can’t drag a statue across the ground like a plough.’ Nevertheless, Harry eyed Wentworth with hope.
‘The Indians of the New World shift blocks of stone twenty times greater than that statue, without even horses, let alone oxen or carts.’
‘Pray, enlighten us,’ said Harry.
Though she was curious to hear Wentworth’s solution, Zeal went to see Sir Richard off on his horse.
‘A word in your ear, young mistress,’ the old knight murmured as he prepared to mount. ‘Keep an eye on that Fox man. Wanted me to have you arrested for threatening him with a gun. I told him not to be a fool, that you wouldn’t hurt a fly. What a business!’
When Zeal returned, the carters were prising planks from sides of two of the carts.
‘I’ve no doubt, sir, that you’ll pay me to replace the sides of my carts,’ Fox said to Sir Harry.
‘I’ll pay you if you ever manage to do the job you’re contracted to do.’
‘Four will be enough,’ Wentworth told the men. The reclusive fisherman had assumed authority with apparent ease. The carters obeyed him without question.
‘Imagine him knowing about things like New World Indians,’ said one of the knitters. ‘Or talking so much,’ said another.
As he gave orders, Zeal observed her future husband with increasing interest and surmise. I must ask him more about those Indians. She was looking forward to his wedding gift of truth even if she avoided thinking about any of the rest of it.
On Wentworth’s instruction, the carters led one of the draught oxen through the paddock. Then they laid the four cart planks on the ground, end to end in pairs, beside the recumbent statue.
‘You haul him up…’ Fox pointed at the two men on the pulley rope. ‘…then you lot over there swing him over the planks, crosswise, mind. Then you…’ he pointed at the first pair again ‘…let him down again, nice and easy. Ready?’
The men settled their feet and drew deep breaths.
‘Heave!’ cried Fox.
Nereus did not wish to be heaved. Instead, his weight drove the feet of the poles down into the mud. The harder the men tried to lift, the deeper they drove the poles into the ground.
‘I did say,’ said Pickford. ‘Straight off. Soon as I saw all this mud.’
‘God’s Teeth and Toenails!’ cried Sir Harry.
‘I’ve never had such trouble, ever before!’ exclaimed Fox. His scowl included Zeal in the trouble. ‘The thing acts as if it’s been cursed!’
Doctor Bowler began to sing quietly as if to himself.
The sun was sinking, orange as a pumpkin beyond the water meadows.
‘“To labour is the lot of Man below,”’ sang Doctor Bowler. ‘“When God gave us life, he gave us woe.”’
‘Put something flat under the feet,’ said Fox. ‘Is there anything about that we can use?’ He looked around for Wentworth, who had seemed to be the only sensible authority, but Wentworth had gone.
‘Leave the wretched thing till tomorrow!’ Harry wiped his face and jammed his tasselled handkerchief back into a slash in his sleeve. ‘We soon won’t be able to see the road back to Ufton Wharf.’ He glared at Zeal. ‘If anything is taken or harmed, I shall have you indicted for theft and wilful damage. In spite of your tame magistrate.’
If I were a man, I could call him out, thought Zeal as she watched Harry ride away up the drive, leaving Nereus abandoned on his sling. Now there’s a grand thought! Rapiers, not guns. Snick, snick, snick. Cut off his buttons. Whisht! Whisht! There go the bows from his shoes! Whisht! And a tassel from his handkerchief! And he’d never touch me. Not even close! With enough people watching such humiliation, I wouldn’t even need to draw blood.
After a quick supper at the long table in the bake house, Zeal slept in the estate office again, to be on the spot in the morning in case Harry arrived early. With John’s coat beside her, she yanked the smoky coverlet up to her chin and imagined setting her grooms on him with clubs. She would borrow Sir Richard Balhatchet’s old falconet, which he had recently had cleaned and made fit to fire.
Then she heard again the danger in Harry’s voice when he warned her against opposing him. He might be a fool, but he was a fool with powerful friends and infinite self-esteem.
Why do I care so much? she asked herself. They’re only stone!
Her feet were now cold. She crawled to the end of the makeshift bed and tucked the coverlet in again, then banged her head ferociously back into the pillow. She still did not know how to deal with the hole where a piece of her life had been excised and then declared officially never to have existed.
‘We must find a way out!’ Harry had said one night on one of his rare and brief returns from London. He wore a grim but shifty look that told her he had already decided how to get his way.
‘From our marriage?’ She dared not hope that he meant to set her free. ‘But you need an Act of Parliament to be granted a divorce!’
‘Don’t be a fool! Do you confuse me with old King Harry? I don’t have that much influence yet.’
‘But given another wife, with grander connections, you mean to get it?’ she taunted him. ‘Lady Alice, whose fortune you have not yet spent.’
But, oh, how she had snapped at his bait!
The fleck of decency in Harry’s soul, which Zeal had once mistaken for a far larger portion, was the cause, ironically, of her fall into the crime of perjury. Harry had a mutually advantageous plan. If she would collude to dissolve their marriage, he would give her Hawkridge Estate.
She rolled onto her side, then onto her back again. The ash still in the coverlet made her sneeze.
Their bargain gave him the freedom to trade Hawkridge for Covent Garden and to pursue London heiresses with larger fortunes than Zeal had ever had. It left her free to love Harry’s cousin, John Nightingale.
She turned her head to look at John’s stool and table. Then she reached out to touch the smooth polished dent at the base of one of the stool legs where he had always rested the heel of his right foot.
She would have sworn to anything.
She