The Phantom Tree

by Nicola Cornick

  ‘You killed him!’ The maid was panting. She blundered about the landing like a terrified animal, backing away from the bedroom door, stumbling in her haste. Lady Fenner caught her arm and slapped her, very hard. The screams died abruptly. I saw a red smear on the girl’s cheek. The smell of heat and blood and sickness caught at my throat.

  ‘Not a word.’ Lady Fenner was shaking the poor creature as though she were a rag doll.

  I turned to creep away and one of the boards creaked, loudly, beneath my feet. I saw Lady Fenner freeze then she darted across the landing. I had the sense not to run.

  ‘You again,’ she said, pulling me into the pale pool of light thrown by the candle in the sconce. ‘Spying?’ Her tone was vicious.

  ‘I thought I heard a baby crying,’ I said, aware of the frantic battery of my pulse as I tried to keep my voice steady.

  ‘You did not.’ Lady Fenner stared at me fixedly. ‘The babe was born dead. The midwife has taken the body away. A tragedy, but perhaps for the best under the circumstances.’

  The maid snivelled.

  ‘Go away, you foolish creature,’ Lady Fenner snapped at her, ‘and remember to say no word or your family starves.’

  The poor girl dragged herself away and her mistress turned back to me. ‘Well,’ she said silkily.

  I had already decided how I was going to deal with this. I knew that she was lying, and she knew that I knew. I was no servant to be demeaned and bullied, but that made me more dangerous to Lady Fenner than her maid would ever be. I had to disarm her, persuade her that I was no threat. I was not sure I was that good an actress but my safety, my life, depended on it.

  Lady Fenner was examining me like a specimen, cold-eyed, dispassionate. ‘What am I to do with you, I wonder,’ she mused. ‘Perhaps I will have to marry you off to Will after all. That should at least clip your wings and silence your tongue.’

  ‘There is not the least need to do anything with me, ma’am,’ I said smoothly. ‘We are kin and blood is more important than all else. Anything that hurts Will would damage us all.’

  She stared at me. It felt as though her dark gaze was probing my soul.

  ‘It is not like you to put practicality before principle, Mary Seymour,’ she said. ‘I thought you had more integrity than that.’

  ‘I want to survive,’ I said bluntly, ‘And on my own I have nothing. I have come to realise that. Foolish, then, to cut myself off from you.’

  I was halfway to persuading her. I could tell.

  ‘Which does not mean,’ I added truthfully, ‘that I like you. You and your murderous son can go to hell for all I care but I will not go with you. So we must all stick together.’

  She did laugh then and I saw that through my straight talking, my words had rung true where lies would not have convinced. I had satisfied her that I would not betray them. My heart thumped uncomfortably at the deceit but I kept my voice steady and my gaze on hers and eventually she nodded again.

  ‘We will talk in the morning,’ she said. ‘Go to your chamber now.’

  I lay huddled beneath my bedcovers, unable to feel any warmth. When I closed my eyes I saw it all again, the bedchamber, the fire, the blood, and in my nostrils was the scent of death. Will had been drunk, that much was for sure, and violent with it. I knew that he must have killed the newborn child. His viciousness was not out of character but he had never displayed it so nakedly before, and in his own home.

  ‘Cat. What’s happened?’

  Thomas had felt my distress. The pattern of thought was urgent, edged with fear. I hurried to reassure him.

  ‘Nothing. Will is drunk and violent but I am safe. Have no fear.’

  His response was a violent burst of sensation; fury at Will, reassurance, comfort all intermingled.

  ‘I will come back.’

  ‘No!’ I sought to reassure him. What he was doing for me was the most important service of all, to me and to Alison. I told him I needed him to stay, to see it through.

  ‘I am safe,’ I repeated. ‘Take care, my love…’

  I felt bereft when the patterns faded and he was gone. Realising that I would never sleep, I kept my eyes open instead, to block out the memories of the things I had seen. Everything now depended on Thomas. All I had to do was keep Lady Fenner fooled until Thomas returned. Then I would have protection and Thomas and I together would bring down William Fenner once and for all.

  By the following morning, Will’s chamber was swept clean and bright as a pin. A great deal of scrubbing must have gone on in the small hours of the night to remove those bloodstains. The woman had gone too. I never knew her name. It had not been Lady Anne Hungerford that was for sure.

  By mid-afternoon, the High Sheriff had come to question Will on the events of that night. The midwife, he said, had laid against Will a shocking charge of infanticide. He must answer for his crimes.

  But Will was gone. No one knew where.

  ‘You, girl.’ Henry Sherington of Lacock Abbey was a small man who made up in the volume of his voice what he lacked in stature. On finding his bird flown, he had been furious and had insisted on interviewing Lady Fenner instead. She had chosen me to accompany her; Eleanor was prostrate with nerves that day.

  ‘You girl,’ the High Sheriff said again to me, taking me for a servant. ‘What did you see and hear last night? What do you know of this outrage?’

  ‘This is the Lady Mary Seymour, Sir Henry,’ Lady Fenner said, steel in her voice. ‘She is the daughter of the late Queen Katherine. You do not question her so roughly.’

  Sir Henry blinked crossly, but he did moderate his address. ‘Well? Lady Mary? What do you know?’

  ‘I know nothing, Sir Henry,’ I said. ‘I saw and heard nothing out of the ordinary last night.’

  Lady Fenner raised her brows infinitesimally at that and I repressed a smile.

  ‘There was a woman here,’ Sir Henry barked. ‘Visiting Sir William.’

  I cast my eyes down modestly. ‘That may be so, sir. As I said, it would not be out of the ordinary.’

  One of Sir Henry’s men smothered a guffaw.

  ‘I have already told you,’ Lady Fenner interposed. ‘There was a traveller, benighted here because of the weather. We gave her shelter. This morning she departed for Marlborough. That is all.’

  ‘Mother Barnes reports attending the birth of an infant,’ Sir Henry said.

  ‘Then she was not here but at some other house,’ Lady Fenner said. ‘The midwife is old; she becomes confused.’

  ‘Your daughter is sick and abed,’ Sir Henry said sharply. ‘Perhaps she is the woman Mother Barnes was summoned to help.’

  Lady Fenner looked down her nose at him. ‘My daughter is affianced to the son of the Earl of Sussex,’ she said. ‘They are not wed yet. You are premature in your suspicions.’

  ‘A babe was killed!’ Sir Henry bellowed. He was cherry red with frustration. ‘Murdered on the fire! The midwife saw it!’

  ‘She saw no such thing,’ Lady Fenner said, cold as ice. ‘This is no more than a tale cooked up to cause trouble for Sir William.’ She swung around to confront the other men. ‘Do you think I do not know it? That Sir Walter Hungerford and Sir Henry Knyvett and many more seek to bring William down through false accusation? No doubt they paid this woman to lie.’ She straightened. ‘You waste your time, gentlemen. Search the house if you must. You will find nothing. As for Sir William, he is away on business and, if you seek to arrest him on these flimsy matters, you will be shown for the fools you are.’

  She was magnificent. Even I, who hated her, had to admire her steel. They went then, grumbling, and searched Middlecote from top to bottom, and found nothing. They grew filthy with dust and thirsty and short of temper, and in the end they rode away empty-handed. Lady Fenner and I watched them go.

  ‘I will write to Sir John Hopton,’ Lady Fenner said. ‘He has seen Will right before and will do so again.’

  ‘Who is Sir John Hopton?’ I asked.

  She let the curtain fall
and moved away from the window. ‘He is a friend to our family. A lawyer.’

  ‘A useful friend to have,’ I said.

  ‘He is influential.’ Lady Fenner nodded.

  ‘I imagine he makes certain… difficulties disappear?’ I asked.

  She gave a small secret smile. ‘You and I understand one another very well after all, Lady Mary. Who would have thought it?’

  I was not going to contradict Lady Fenner if she thought that we were allies. I settled down to learn more. Anything that could be useful to me—and to Thomas in future—was valuable.

  ‘Lawyers are expensive,’ I said, ‘and Will is mired in debt.’

  ‘We found a way to retain Sir John’s assistance.’ Lady Fenner said. ‘It was not what I would have chosen, but without Sir John’s help, Will would already be imprisoned or very likely dead.’ She sighed. ‘Now that Eleanor is safely betrothed and dowered…’ She let the sentence hang. ‘Besides, it was a way to ensure the future security of the estate.’ She was speaking quietly now, almost to herself.

  I do not know how I guessed the truth. Perhaps I had remembered Thomas’s words:

  ‘Middlecote will never be mine…’

  He had seen the future that Lady Fenner was revealing to me. Somehow Thomas already knew.

  ‘You have given Middlecote away,’ I whispered. ‘You have promised it to Sir John in return for his help.’

  ‘It was the only way to protect William,’ Lady Fenner said. ‘It is no more than bricks and mortar for a man’s life.’

  I struggled to conceal my feelings. I had no love for Middlecote Hall but I knew that Thomas had. He would never have bartered away his past and his future in so shoddy a fashion.

  ‘You are loyal in your affections, ma’am,’ I said. ‘You do much for Sir William and I am not sure he deserves your generosity. Have you noticed how he seeks your advice and yet always goes his own way?’

  She shifted. I felt her antagonism. We might be allies now, or at least she thought we were, bound by mutual silence over Will’s misdeeds, but that did not mean we liked one another. Nor did I understand why she tied her fortunes so tightly to Will’s wayward star. She was ruthless and clever and calculating. Will was reckless and unpredictable and could ruin all her work at a stroke. Yet she loved him. It was the only explanation. She loved him with so fierce a maternal love that she was, if not blind to his faults, then prepared to tolerate them.

  She did not answer me, turning her back, reaching for the ink pot and paper to summon Sir John Hopton.

  Sir Henry’s men found Will in an alehouse a few miles outside Wilton. He had been gambling on a game of shove ha’penny and could not pay his debts. Of course, there was a fight. They threw him in Salisbury Gaol and we all waited to see if Sir John Hopton could save him.

  Chapter 24

  ‘Hey.’ Adam’s voice was warm. ‘I know we hadn’t made any plans but I wondered if you’d like to get something to eat? I’ll cook for you—I’ve got some research I wanted to show you.’

  ‘You don’t need to bribe me.’ Alison reached up and kissed his cheek. Her heart had leaped when she had seen him waiting for her outside the office that evening and the realisation terrified her. In theory it should have been possible to walk away now, to draw apart again as abruptly as they had come together. Sex with the ex, she’d heard people call it, but it didn’t feel like that to her. Already it was too complicated, too intimate, simply too special to write it off as unimportant and cut Adam out of her life again. Yet she knew she was going to do it. She had found the sand glass, and with it, the way back to the past and to Arthur. She was already planning how to use it.

  Adam was laughing. He folded his arms about her and kissed her properly. Over his shoulder, Alison could see Kate emerging from the office door and pausing in the act of wrapping her scarf about her neck as she stopped to stare. Then she grinned, gesturing that she was getting her phone out to take a photo. Alison waved her away, closed her eyes and kissed Adam back, forcing herself to forget about her planned betrayal, living only for the moment.

  ‘Get a room, you two.’ Andre hustled Kate away down the street and Alison tucked her hand through Adam’s arm as they walked slowly towards the Tube station.

  ‘Busy week?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Adam said. ‘I’m starting to prepare next term’s syllabus, planning a couple of guided tours to Italy for Easter, plus there are plans for another TV series.’ He glanced down at her. ‘Strangely, though, all I seem to be able to think about is researching Mary Seymour—and spending time with you.’

  He drew her a little closer as hurrying passers-by buffeted them in their rush to get home. It felt nice; cosy, comforting, as though they were a couple, as though, for a moment she had seen a different past in which they had by now been married for ten years and were totally at ease in each other’s company. It was as though a whole vista opened up in front of her then: children, an extended family, a whole web of links and connections, work, travel, a settled home she could always go back to at the end of a trip… The regret shot through her, the sense of loss, of what could have been. It was a moment before she realised she was seeing an idealised vision of what her life might have been like. It had not happened, but even so she felt the regret, as though she had lost something precious.

  ‘Ali?’ Adam said, and she realised that she was standing blankly at the ticket barrier, holding up all the impatient people behind her.

  *

  She loved Adam’s house as much as he had loved her flat. It was Georgian, combining elegance with a modern colourful vibe. There was a study overflowing with books and a state-of-the-art kitchen.

  ‘You’re surprised,’ Adam said. He was watching her reaction.

  ‘I wonder if you really can cook,’ Alison said, ‘or whether this is just for show.’

  ‘You’ll find out,’ Adam said.

  ‘I was expecting something plainer, more minimal,’ Alison said. ‘This is so vibrant.’

  ‘You’re the minimal one in this relationship,’ Adam said, a little dryly.

  Alison put her bag down slowly and slid off her coat. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Only that sometimes it feels as though you’re just passing through,’ Adam said slowly. He pushed the hair back from his forehead. ‘You seem to travel light with few commitments. I was surprised when I saw your flat because it felt more established than I was expecting. Sometimes I have the feeling you’ll just disappear.’

  His acuity disturbed Alison. When she had first arrived in the present that was exactly what she had intended. The fact that she had not been able to find her way back had forced her to rethink but she had never intended this life to be the defining one. Even now, ten years later, she felt almost like a trespasser, treading lightly, because she had always intended to return to the sixteenth century if she could. She shifted in the comfortable chair, thinking of Richard’s shop and the glimpse she had had of the White Hart Inn, the past lying behind the present. To her, time had always felt like that, non-linear, layers you could find your way through if only you knew how to do it. That was what she had always been searching for: the way back.

  Adam handed her a glass of chilled white wine. ‘Hector is settling in well,’ he said. It was almost as though he had read her thoughts. ‘Richard says that he’s quite at home and he and Monty are getting on fine.’

  They ate pasta with lemon and basil, which Adam served with a crisp salad.

  ‘It’s basic,’ he said.

  ‘But delicious,’ Alison said.

  They did not talk about the research until they had finished, when Adam cleared the table, made them coffee and spread out some papers in front of Alison.

  ‘You’ll see here that I managed to find two other possible references to Mary at Middlecote in the 1560s,’ he said, pointing to a sheet neatly annotated in his writing. ‘This is in addition to the one referring to payment for the upkeep of the “late queen’s child”.’ He glanced at her. ‘This is v
ery significant. I think you’ll like it. There was an obscure Italian artist called Francisco Estense, who came to England in the mid-1500s. He had no success at court and in the 1560s became an itinerant painter and teacher who travelled the country taking commissions where and when he could. There’s a note in his diaries for the year 1566, when, apparently, he went to Middlecote Hall to paint “Mistress Eleanor Fenner and the Lady Mary”.’ Adam waited and looked at her expectantly.

  ‘That could be the portrait you found,’ Alison said. Her heart leaped. ‘Is there any way of comparing it with existing works by Estense?’

  ‘It’s already in hand.’ Adam sounded smug. ‘I’ve got a specialist on the case. Unfortunately, Estense doesn’t have a large body of work. He was considered third rate. A lot of his portraits have been lost or destroyed and he died only a few years later from the plague, but even so it might be possible.’ He smiled. ‘The best bit is that apparently he was never paid. There’s a very terse note in the diary to the effect that Sir William Fenner does not honour his financial commitments, which sounds about right since Fenner was always fathoms deep in debt.’

  ‘Poor guy,’ Alison said. ‘It must have been desperate to be dependent on people like that and to be let down.’ She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘You seem quite pleased. I thought you’d be furious to find that the portrait probably wasn’t Anne.’

  Adam shrugged. ‘I’ll admit that I’m not thrilled, but in the end I’d rather be right.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘All those bloody books will have to be pulped.’

  ‘You could rewrite it as a sensational story of discovery,’ Alison said lightly. ‘Not Anne Boleyn but something even more astonishing. The secret life of Katherine Parr’s lost daughter.’

  Adam laughed. ‘Yeah, I suppose I could. I need to find out a lot more before I could do that, though. It’s all pretty circumstantial.’ He stopped, scowled. ‘Yes, I know, it didn’t stop me before.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up,’ Alison said. ‘Tell me instead what else you’ve discovered.’