The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘Wolf Hall is nothing to do with wolves,’ Alison said. She sounded faintly patronising. ‘It comes from the ancient Saxon name for the estate.’

  ‘Saxon!’ Liz said. Her family had come over with the Norman King William. Her sniff of disdain left no room for doubt that she considered the Saxons even more barbaric than the present inhabitants of Savernake Forest.

  Alison smiled, tossing her golden plait over her shoulder. She looked very Saxon herself with her cream and roses complexion and her blue eyes. There was a look of the late Queen Jane about her, or so I was told. Except that Queen Jane was pious and demure and Alison was never that.

  Alison and I were only distantly related, but at Wolf Hall, I had already discovered that we Seymours were all jumbled up together, called cousins regardless of our relationships, abandoned here because there was nowhere else for the sprawling offshoots of the family to go. There were half a dozen of us children and I never worked out how we were connected other than through rejection or loss. There were two babies in the nursery; whose they were I never discovered. Closest in age to me was a boy of seven, but from the lofty heights of ten years, I considered him negligible. Then there was Alison, two or three years older, and above her in the pecking order a sullen youth who boasted that he was soon to be sent away as squire in a knight’s household.

  Liz had turned her back as she laid out my linen shifts in the trunk. These had been worked with fine white lace and I saw Alison’s gaze narrow on them and something cold and hard and inimical come into her pale eyes as she looked back at me. She could not have looked less like meek Queen Jane then.

  ‘Those are very beautiful linens indeed,’ she said.

  ‘The Lady Mary is dressed as befits the daughter of a queen,’ Liz said.

  Alison’s cornflower gaze swept over me. ‘Only beneath her gown,’ she said.

  Even though I was only ten years old I was adept at reading what went on in the minds of men—and women—for my fate had often depended upon it. I knew that Alison resented me; that for all my notoriety and poverty, she was jealous because I had fame even though it was not of my own seeking. I was also adept at smoothing over discord so I slid from my chair and went over to her.

  ‘Would you show me the forest?’ I asked.

  She looked scornful. ‘It would take days for you to see the forest.’ Her sharp gaze pinned me down. ‘We are forbidden from venturing there. It is dangerous.’

  ‘Why?’

  There was a sudden silence and I realised that she did not know. She had never asked.

  ‘It just is.’ Her head was bent. I could not see her expression. Her busy fingers were sorting through the skeins of thread in her workbox. She put aside the ones that drew my gaze—the red, the gold, the blue—and selected the brown and the black. ‘Besides we have no time for idleness here. We clean and cook and sew and tend the garden and dairy and a thousand other things beside.’

  ‘Are there not servants to do such tasks?’

  She gave a snort of laughter. ‘So speaks the Queen’s daughter. No, your highness—’ her mouth curved into a sly little smile ‘—we do not have that luxury here, at least not when Sir Edward is away. In his absence we make shift for ourselves.’

  I bit my tongue before I could make reference to Cousin Edward. Already she found me presumptuous. I would do nothing to antagonise her further. Instead, I slipped out of the bedroom when Liz’s back was turned. I knew Alison would tell her she had no notion of where I had gone and if I got lost in the dangerous forest she would not mourn me.

  I had not been at Wolf Hall long enough to know which chamber was which, but I ignored the blank doors staring at me and trod softly down the stair. Patterns of light and shade speckled the steps. The wood creaked beneath my feet and I hesitated, but no one came. I was accustomed to sliding away on my own, gone like a ghost. Although I had been hedged about by servants from the earliest age, I still managed to be a solitary child.

  To my left was the Great Hall with its sloping stone floor, swept clean this afternoon and smelling sweetly of rushes. Behind me the chapel door, heavy studded oak, forbidding, warning of retribution within. But ahead was the passage and, at the end of it, the door was open into the garden and I was drawn irresistibly outside.

  The gardens at Wolf Hall proved a delight, a tangled land of enchantment full of overblown roses and secret paths. Beneath the trees of the orchard I could see a harassed-looking goose girl trying to round up her flock. She was flapping as much as they. Over in the stable yard, I could hear the chink of harness and the murmur of voices. The air was full of scent and heat, and I wandered at will, lost in the pleasure of it.

  The garden led to the wood. There was a half-open gate covered in ivy and a path beyond. Naturally, I followed it. I say naturally because I am drawn to the forest. I don’t know why; people say it is a lonely, lawless place, but to me it is a safe haven in which to hide. One path led to another and another, some overgrown tracks, other wide avenues lined by trees that looked like the entrance to a manor far more majestic than Wolf Hall. I went where I willed, following a butterfly here or the sound of water there, running through the dappled shade, discovering new delights.

  It was growing dark. I realised it suddenly, knew I had been out for a long time because I was hungry. There was a damp chill settling on my skin. The trees that had enchanted me now threw long shadows. The rustle of the leaves sounded too loud. The air felt still and watchful.

  I had no notion which way was the road back.

  Distantly, I heard the sound of hoof beats. My hopes lifted, for where there was a horse and rider there might well be a track leading to Wolf Hall. I scrambled through the undergrowth, pushing aside bracken and nettle and grasses, fighting my way towards the noise. With each step the night seemed to close in. The hoof beats were growing louder and, as I stumbled out of the clutch of the thicket and onto a wide avenue, they seemed to fill my head and make my entire body pulse. The earth shook. I fell, dizzy and sprawling, and lay there in terror, waiting either for the shout of fury from the rider or the crush of the horse’s hooves.

  Neither came.

  The beat in my head eased a little and I dragged myself up onto one elbow and stared into the engulfing shade. Down the long avenue, I could see the white shadow of a horse galloping hell for leather. In the saddle swayed the figure of a woman. She looked as though she were about to fall at any moment. Her cloak billowed out behind her, a fine velvet cloak laced with silver thread, and on her head… But she wore no hat and she had no face because above the line of her collar she had no head, nothing but white bone gleaming in the last light and deep red splashes of blood.

  *

  There was a jumble of light and voices about me. I was not lost in the forest but lying in a bed. The tip of a feather pricked my cheek and I turned my head against the pillow. There was candlelight. It was night, and I felt hot and sickly and wretched.

  ‘Already nothing but trouble…’ The lamentation floated far above my head. I recognised Dame Margery’s voice. ‘Only here for two minutes and already we have had to send out a search for her, and pay for a physician—’

  ‘Pass me the bowl and the cloth.’ Liz this time, sounding snappish. ‘You heard what he said. She has the fever.’

  ‘She has only herself to blame, wandering around the forest alone! She’s like her father was, reckless and foolish. She does not think about the consequences of her actions.’

  ‘She is a child who got lost, that is all.’ Liz was starting to sound frayed. I thought it unlikely she would defend my father, whom she had never liked. It was my mother to whom she had been devoted.

  ‘Babbling about phantom horses and headless women!’ Dame Margery was not so easily appeased. ‘It sounds like witchcraft to me.’

  ‘It’s fever, no more,’ Liz repeated. I heard the rustle of cloth as she stood. ‘I need fresh water.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ Dame Margery sounded hurried now, as though she did not wi
sh to be left alone with me for fear of enchantment. ‘Alison can watch over her for a moment.’

  I had not realised that Alison was there. I opened my eyes a crack. She saw the flicker of movement and immediately she was at my ear.

  ‘I hope you are satisfied, your highness.’ She smelled of peppermint and sweat. Her whisper was fierce. ‘Thanks to you, I have to share a chamber with the babies now whilst you lord it in here alone. I wish they had not found you!’ Her face hung over me like a big red angry moon.

  ‘It’s true, there are phantoms in the forest,’ she said. ‘I think it was the black shuck you saw, a huge dog that brings death and madness to all that see it.’

  ‘It was a horse.’ My lips were dry. I felt hot, feverish, and my head was full of the nightmare but I was still stubborn. If I were to be terrorised by a phantom at least let it be the right one.

  ‘A horse and a dead woman?’ She laughed. ‘Mayhap is was Queen Anne Boleyn you saw then. If it had not been for your Aunt Jane she would not have lost her head. Maybe she is coming for you in revenge.’

  The sound of voices and the lifting of the latch warned her. She scrambled away and when Liz and Dame Margery re-entered the room she was sitting on the window seat all prim and quiet.

  ‘She sleeps,’ she said sweetly. ‘May I go now?’ And with that she slipped from the room leaving me with my feverish nightmares.

  *

  Darrell came to me that night as I was tossing and turning in my sleep. Darrell had been my companion, from the earliest time. He was more than a daydream or an imaginary friend. I knew from the start that he was as real as I; that we could talk to each other in images and thoughts and ideas. Such things are natural to children. We do not question. I did not know who he was. I assumed we must be related in some way, such gifts so often connecting members of one family, but I had so many relatives and when I looked around at the sprawling network of my Seymour cousins not one of them felt right. He told me his name was Darrell and even though he knew I was called Mary he called me Cat because he said I was small and fierce. I loved him; it was simple and comfortable because I had always known him. He felt almost like another aspect of myself, closer than close

  ‘Cat. Are you there?’

  The words came to me, as they had always done, as a whisper sliding into my mind, calling me. From earliest childhood it had happened like this, first in blocks of colours and images in my mind and then, as I grew older, in words and emotions.

  ‘Where are you?’

  I ignored him, turning a shoulder as though he was in the room and I was shunning him. When I had been obliged to leave Grimsthorpe, I had called to him for comfort but he had not replied. I had been hurt, needing him and the comfort his presence brought. Yet sometimes it had been like this. He slipped back and forth through my life and sometimes when I needed him, he was gone. This was the first time he had spoken to me since I had left Lincolnshire and it was contrary of me to sulk when he was the one person who could make me feel better.

  ‘Cat?’

  ‘I am at Wolf Hall.’ I was short with him.

  I felt his puzzlement before it cleared like rain clouds running from the sun.

  ‘Savernake? Why?’

  ‘They sent me away again.’ I was sick and feeling sorry for myself. I felt him laugh. Unforgivable.

  ‘Poor Cat.’

  I sent him the mental equivalent of a rude gesture I’d seen the servants make and felt him laughing harder.

  ‘Such a lady.’

  ‘Go away.’

  He sobered at once, sensing the genuine misery beneath my ill temper.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is it very bad?’

  This time I sent a shrug, a hardy sort of a feeling. It was bravado. He knew I was homesick and lonely and unhappy. He could sense it. I could not keep him out even when I wanted to do so. Yet I also knew that not so many years before he too had been sent from home. I had sensed his loneliness and isolation. I had tried to get him to tell me about it—had he gone to another household for his education? It was the way life ran for the sons of noble households and sometimes the daughters too. He would tell me nothing about himself, though, not then, not ever. He was a mystery to me.

  ‘There’s the forest to explore. You love the forest.’

  The thought felt eager and so like a boy, trying to offer solutions. If only he knew how much the forest had cost me already. Nevertheless, I had softened towards him. I could not help myself. He always made me feel better. There was comfort in his presence and I no longer felt so alone.

  ‘Yes. I suppose so.’

  He sent me a boy’s hug, clumsy, affectionate. I smiled. The warmth of it soothed me, lulling me back into sleep.

  ‘Goodnight, Darrell.’

  ‘Goodnight, Cat.’ Goodnight, goodnight…

  I slept.

  Chapter 3

  As soon as my fever had gone, Alison came back like nettle rash, irritating, never leaving me in peace. Of course I would not be ten years old for ever and Alison and I would not always be at daggers drawn, but just then it felt as though we would. For a little while we rattled around together like two cats trapped in a box, hissing, scratching each other, fighting on occasion, but over time we learned to live with each other. We kept a wary distance although life at Wolf Hall did not make it easy to avoid her.

  We were up at five, whether it was summer or winter. In the summer this was no hardship for dawn had crept into the room long before, but in winter I clung to the warmth of my bed for as long as I could. Naturally, Alison called me lazy. In order to eat we had to work, and the work started early. There was milk to be churned, pottage to be boiled, flax to be spun and carded, rushes to be peeled to make lights and rooms to be swept clean. I preferred working in the kitchen in the winter. At least there was a fire, whereas the damp chill of the forest crept like a ghost through the cracks and crannies of the old house. There was no idle chatter to accompany our work. This might be a nobleman’s household, but whilst my cousin Edward Seymour lived the life of a courtier in London, we followed the older rules of life in the country.

  I was lucky. I had time given to learning: languages, reading and needlework. So did Alison. The idea, I imagine, was that we should be settled creditably in marriage when the time came. Alison had no interest in book learning and neither did I really, but there were two things that kept me at my studies. The first was the knowledge that my mother had been a well-educated woman and I felt in some obscure way that I would be letting her down if I were to abandon my lessons. The second was more practical. I knew that time spent in study was time not spent washing, cleaning and pickling fruit, which I liked even less than book learning.

  Going to the market in Marlborough was our treat. It was not permitted often, which made it all the more exciting. We had no need for the eggs, butter and cheese on sale there since we made our own, but Dame Margery would purchase meat and fish to augment our stocks and we would browse the stalls selling leather purses and belts, nails, knives, dead pigeons and coneys.

  The day would start with the long cart ride into town, jolting over the rutted forest tracks. Dickon escorted us. He had fought alongside the late Sir John Seymour, Edward’s grandfather, many years ago. On bad days, when his bones pained him, he would grumble that all he was fit for now was acting as nursemaid to a parcel of women. On good days, when the sun shone and the birds sang, he would whistle tunelessly as he rode beside us.

  I loved the market for the noise and colour, the gossip and drinking, the smells and the sense of a bigger world beyond the brick walls of Wolf Hall. It mattered not to me that the cobbles of Marlborough ran with blood from the carcasses that hung on the pegs on the stalls, or that the sweet sickly smell of them mingled with the scent of ale and burning until Alison pressed her pomander to her nose and threatened to retch. When Dame Margery took her eyes off us I would slip away between the booths. The shouts and calls of the traders crashed like waves above my head as I wriggled between chickens in their ca
ges.

  ‘Good day, Lady Mary.’ It was the barber surgeon, pausing in the removal of a tooth to greet me.

  ‘Hold still,’ he instructed the groaning man in the chair. ‘Take some more spirit to dull the ache.’

  The scent of cloves, the heat of a fire, the man screaming in pain: that was the world of Marlborough market as I remembered it. After a few hours, Dame Margery would round us up like sheep and take us back to the cart, where Dickon lounged with a flagon of ale, and we would jolt our way home. Dame Margery would be mellow and smell of meat pasties. I would doze as she regaled Alison with the gossip from the town.

  One trip was different though. It was a hot summer day, too drowsy to do much except sleep. None of us wanted to exchange the cool shadows of the forest and the scented gardens of Wolf Hall for the rotting smells and flyblown stalls of the market. Dame Margery insisted, however. She was in a bad mood and was determined the rest of us would be unhappy too and so we took to the rutted roads, the journey almost shaking the cart apart, and arrived in town in the blazing heat of midday.

  It was curiously quiet. There was no business for the barber surgeon, no business for anyone save the stalls selling ale. Dame Margery and Alison disappeared off to buy some gold and silver thread to embroider a shirt for Cousin Edward. He was due to visit Wolf Hall soon, a rare occurrence, and there was much excitement at the prospect. I wandered listlessly between the stalls where the vendors did not even trouble to glance my way. Some snored in the sun, others were drinking, everything was muted and still, and over the top of it all was the smell of the dung and the meat and the rot, strong enough to make my head spin.