‘The mutton will dry out if they don’t come soon!’ She darted away again in a rustling of rose silk and muslin. ‘Agatha! Agatha!’ John heard her cries fade away through the main chamber.
A welcoming feast (perhaps now a little overdone) waited in the Great Chamber. Sir Henry Bedgebury, the local magistrate, and Sir Richard Balhatchet, who had been Knight of the Shire before Parliament was dissolved, both attended, suitably dressed, in the Long Gallery with yet another bottle of the estate’s best ale.
John glanced back at the cooper’s drum. You did the right thing, man. Don’t add to the weight already on your conscience.
He went down the three steps from the stone porch, across the gravel forecourt to the off-centre gate. He ached to yank open the scratchy collar of Harry’s lace-trimmed shirt and to haul at the excess cloth bunched in his crotch, but too many eyes were on him.
‘He should be the one,’ said the descant player to the alto, as John walked away. ‘Not that London cousin.’
Dr Bowler squeezed his eyes more tightly shut and focused his entire being on tuning his string.
All the estate residents were ranged under the beeches along both sides of the drive – the tenant cottagers and their families, the housed labourers (mainly unmarried) and the poorhouse elders. The men stood or sat uneasily in their best Sabbath clothes, which included the new shirts Harry had ordered. At the sight of John they jumped to attention, hands and caps raised high in over-eager greeting.
‘Morning, sir! Good morning! A nice dry day for it, sir!’ Their eyes weighed his unusual elegance, probed his face, and slid away.
They half-want a cockfight, thought John with clarity. My mettle and spurs are being sized up.
The women and girls eyed him over knitting or mending.
‘Oh, you do look fine, sir!’ called one of the older, bolder ones. Not like a stable groom today. But handsome either way.
‘That Cat was a fool,’ a young, unmarried woman muttered. ‘He’s not set on a gentlewoman. I’d have played him better. Had him fast enough.’
‘And where would you be after today, then?’ asked a friend.
‘I wouldn’t care!’
Among the fragrant green swags of ivy and lavender hung on the gate were tucked white and green bunches of sweet woodruff as delicate as silk French knots, against the plague which already festered in London again this summer.
John smiled to himself, a little grimly. A small gesture made by the helpless in the face of the uncontrollable.
He strolled back toward the porch. He felt numb.
Harry, thought John, come now! I can’t take any more waiting! We’re all as ready as we will ever be. Our bodies have exhausted themselves to make up for the shortcomings of our hearts and souls.
‘Still nothing?’ called Aunt Margaret breathlessly from the porch door. As she squinted past John, she tapped her handkerchief with great delicacy against her upper lip. ‘Disaster, John! We can’t find the new barrels of ale, the ones from Sir Richard …! They’re not in the cellar! Help me, John!’
‘I’ll look in the basse-court,’ said John with resignation.
The missing ale was not in the basse-court, the buttery, the stable yard, or the stream-cooled cellar. Unable to force himself to look further, John placated his aunt with fourteen bottles of Flemish wine which he had meant to save for a later occasion. He lifted a spider’s web from the pleats of his lace cuff and dusted the left side of his padded silk breeches.
Then he went into the stable yard. He stood quietly for a moment in the warm, dust-filled air of the horse-and-hay barn. Constellations of bright motes swarmed in a shaft of sunlight that cut low through the open door across the cobbled floor. His own cob and Aunt Margaret’s mare, along with all twenty draught animals, had been turned into Mill Meadow. The stalls were clean, their floors covered with fresh straw. The iron manger cribs held hay, and buckets of corn stood ready for the London animals. When John came into the barn, two sparrows flew out of the nearest bucket onto a beam above his head to wait until he had left again.
The coach house next to the horse-and-hay barn stood wide open and empty. The estate’s heavy old wooden coach had been hauled to the side of the cow barn, complete with two nesting hens, to give cover for the coaches of Harry and one of his guests. Two stable boys pumped water into the horse trough with the intense purpose of fire fighters at a blaze.
John left the stable yard through the gardens and went around the chapel into the basse-court. In the dog yard he leaned into the pen of a pregnant deerhound bitch. She lifted her head and licked his fingers.
‘Oh, Cassie! Cassie, you silly, sloppy beast! I’m not your master now. We must all learn new manners.’ He held her head in both hands. They gazed into each other’s eyes. ‘Can’t you see into our future as your namesake could?’
She thumped her massive tail against the side of the pen and tried to jump up to place her paws on his chest. He pushed her gently down and turned away.
He left the basse-court, heading for the orchard. The damp grass darkened his new kidskin boots like spilled ink. At the crest of Hawk Ridge, the hen still cowered in her bucket. John lifted her gently to count the chicks.
Six. Carefully, he removed the bad egg which had not hatched and laid it in the grass away from the nest. The apples were in full blow at last. He laid a hand on one of the wicker bee skeps set among the trees. It vibrated with life.
He looked down through the blossom at the basse-court frozen in unlikely tidiness, the walled gardens suspended in temporary order. Life-in-waiting, a state only briefly possible to sustain. The fish ponds glinted like polished pewter plates. A flotilla of ducks drifted out of the reeds, full of faint inconsequential gossip. From the water meadows to the right came the constant, ragged bleating of sheep.
I can’t bear it! John thought suddenly. His throat felt as if he had swallowed a hot coal. I can’t accept! Harry and his new wife won’t love you as I do.
He heard shouts, faint and far away, from the gatehouse beyond the top of the beech avenue. The bell on the brewhouse tower began to clang as it did for meals, festivals and prayers. The back of a dark, lumbering tortoise hauled itself over the crest of a far hill and sank again into the trees. John gathered himself like an actor pushed onto the stage or a criminal shoved at the steps of the scaffold. It had to be done. He yanked at the fabric bunched in his crotch, shook out his cuffs and stalked down the hill toward the house, stiff with a curious mixture of terror, excitement and rage.
Can I call him ‘Sir Harry’ without laughing? he wondered in the midst of his panic. A scrappy young cousin who arrived in my life as a poor second to a litter of staghounds when I was four! John picked his way between the grey-green turds which an escaped goose had left on the stone path of the hornbeam allée at the end of the west wing.
And what will his rich London woman be like? Do I still remember how to talk to a lady?
When clean, the carriage would have been burnished and studded with brass and copper, but after two and a half days on the road from London it was thickly frosted with mud. The horses were splattered to the chest, the mounted grooms to their knees. But the estate residents, freed from waiting, played their part undeterred. The mud-caked tortoise heaved and swayed down the drive through cheers and showers of posies. Boys fell from the trees like shaken nuts and capered alongside. The five musicians in the forecourt clutched their instruments in damp hands.
The carriage rolled through the forecourt gate onto the relative flatness of the pounded gravel. Four yellow posies revolved, stuck to the mud, two on its front right wheel, two on the back. The carriage stopped.
Dr Bowler raised his bow with an authority he never showed in the pulpit. The cooper rattled a drumroll. The parson swayed like a tree in a blast of wind, then launched