by Anya Seton
Akananda walked to the coping and stared down into the cloudy water, seized by a frightening question. And was at once reassured. No. He knew that Richard was alive, and though the guidance was imperfect—or his reception of it—he had achieved a measure of certainties. Richard was alive somewhere in that dark cloistered house, but the next development could not be foreseen, and Akananda tried to gather together the golden forces into his body, into his brain, as he had been taught, while fighting weakness—an immense desire to be free from pressure, to rest again in his quiet isolated rooms in London, away from turmoil, misery, effort.
Even towards Lily, waiting in the car, he felt impatience. Let them all help themselves now, he thought, Celia is saved. Through whatever unorthodox measures he used, and however he had suffered with her, expiation would continue—for him. He had felt, since emerging from the ordeal in the London Clinic, a stricture in his chest, darting pains in his left arm, and knew very well what they meant. He had now sacrificed his splendid bodily health, the mechanism was impaired.
This beating on a closed door is stupid, he thought. There’ll be comfortable rooms in Alfriston; I’ll knock up the chemist, get some digitalis at least. But I want to be alone. I’ll tell Lily Taylor. She’ll do whatever I say. And nothing actually has to be done tonight. Arthur would think me mad . . . perhaps I am hallucinating—self-hypnosis. At Guy’s they thought I was cracked. “Now, Mr. Akananda, will you kindly dissect for us the pineal gland, where you aver the soul . . . has . . . had . . . but I admit this corpse is deader than mutton . . .” and the fawning, jeering laughter.
Akananda turned sharply away from the swimming pool; he was aware of faint musical sounds from the house behind him. He listened, frowning, and walked towards the Elizabethan wing. The sound was unmistakably chanting . . . men’s voices . . . the cadences . . . the sliding mysterious harmonies—Gregorian—adoration . . . to the Virgin . . . to God . . . as he had heard it in this house last week, as he had heard it hundreds of years ago.
He sighed, bowed his head, and threw his arms out in front of him, palms up, in a gesture of weary surrender. Alien music, alien voices, but nonetheless compelling, and significant.
He walked to the door of the garden room and found it open. With sureness and resignation he followed the sound. Up the front stairs, down those passages, around a corner, down another small flight to the old schoolroom. Here, the din of men’s voices from the speakers was garbled, deafening. The door was wide open, and Richard was kneeling in the tiny makeshift chapel, his head resting on his clasped hands. He jumped up when he saw Akananda standing beside him.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. “How dare you spy on me! How the devil did you get in?”
Akananda took a deep breath as the haggard, unshaven baronet loomed over him. The hazel eyes were savage, the eyes of a trapped uncomprehending animal, and dangerous. Paranoid, Akananda thought. He had seen that look often enough.
Akananda gestured at the stereo. “It’s a bit loud,” he said mildly, “though very beautiful—this old church music. I’d like to listen with you, but let’s turn it down a little.”
Richard glared at the slight, elderly doctor in the well-cut brown suit. “You were here when Celia died,” he cried. “I remember you. Get out, you spy! I sacked the servants, and locked the doors.”
“Well, yes—” said Akananda smiling, “I suppose you did, except the garden door—maybe the lock is defective.” He went to the record player and lowered the volume to a soothing murmur. “My Latin is rusty,” he said, “what are they singing?”
“A Salve Regina—” answered Richard warily after a moment. His eyes lost their dangerous glint and grew haunting and puzzled. “I don’t see what you’re doing here.”
“Please sit down,” said Akananda. “It’s hard to listen to music standing, don’t you think?” He sat himself on an old school bench and waited, quietly watching, until Richard slowly followed suit.
“I’ve always wished I had a better knowledge of western religious music,” said Akananda casually. “I heard some at Oxford, of course, but I didn’t understand it, I was reared amongst instruments very different—like the sitar—though our Indian chants struck me, even in my youth, as somewhat nasal. I’m afraid I haven’t a very keen ear.”
“Oh, indeed?” Richard’s eyes continued perplexed, but his fists relaxed. He swallowed once or twice.
“By the way,” said Akananda, “your wife, Celia, is not dead—I came down to tell you that she is at the London Clinic, and doing very well.”
Richard made a grimace. He jumped up. “You’re wrong . . . of course she’s dead. I killed her, I and that Simpson woman. We killed her you know, and by God, Celia deserved it. Celia the wanton and fair.”
“Edna Simpson is dead,” said Akananda, with inward trepidation. How far and how fast dared he go? “She had a—an accident, fatally burned in a fire caused by a spirit lamp. She is dead, Celia is not,” he repeated in a slow, measured voice. “Now, Sir Richard, I’d like you to go to bed and rest. We can hear the Gregorian chants in the morning.” He saw signs of renewed tension, and an angry spark in the baronet’s eyes. “Is Nanny still here?” Akananda asked pleasantly. “Or did you sack her too?”
Richard looked startled. “Nanny? I don’t know. She kept pestering me. I did make her clear out . . . I think.”
Akananda nodded. “Nobody likes being pestered, though I expect she’s around. Anyway, shall we go look? I gather she’s always been devoted to you.”
“Devoted . . .” Richard repeated. He considered the word and shuddered. “There is no devotion,” he said. “There’s always betrayal . . . soon or late, they betray . . . You too!” He rounded on Akananda, his eyes slitted, his upper lip drew up in a tigerlike snarl.
Akananda, for all his experience, felt a thrill of primitive fear. He must get the man from this room, and he must overpower with his will alone—there was no help to be had, no physical help.
“Go touch your crucifix, Stephen Marsdon!” cried Akananda in a loud voice so penetrating that Richard started. He shook his head like a goaded bull. “What do you mean!” He glanced from the corner of his eyes to the altar.
“Do as I command you, Brother Stephen,” said Akananda. “You vowed obedience to your superior. I am your superior!”
Richard wilted very slowly under the force behind the doctor’s eyes, the concentrated beam of light. He licked his lips and fumbled, breathing hard, at his brown leather belt.
“Not the rosary on your scourge,” said Akananda. “Touch the altar crucifix.”
Richard dragged himself to the altar and put his hand on the wooden shaft, below the nailed silver feet.
“Ecce Agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi . . .” said Akananda, as the monks’ voices murmured their imploring chant from the far corner which contained the speakers.
Richard stood rooted with his hand on the crucifix. “Domine non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum,” he said in a muffled voice like a frightened child. He began to tremble.
Akananda walked three paces very quickly, and took Richard’s other hand. “Come,” he said. “We’ll find Nanny. She’ll make us some tea and toast, I hope. I’m very fond of buttered toast.”
Richard followed the guiding hand out of the schoolroom.
Lily was admitted to Medfield Place by Akananda, over an hour later. He stood in the doorway, smiling faintly, but she saw by the blaze of electricity in the entrance hall how tired he was.
“Is it bad?” she whispered. “You found him, didn’t you?”
He nodded. “He’ll do, I think. I’d brought a syringe-full of sedative with me—in case. He’s been given it, and is sleeping. Nanny’s with him. It was quite bad for a while.” Akananda gave a grim laugh.
He had no intention of telling Lily how bad it had been, though after leaving the schoolroom, Richard was docile long enough to permit Akananda to inject a powerful tranquilizer. Fortunately, it had begun to take effect before Richard saw th
e slashed portrait of Celia in the stairwell. “See . . . I told you she was dead, and I killed her!” he shouted furiously to the doctor. “She betrayed me!”
Akananda looked at the ribbons of painted canvas hanging from the frame, and said nothing. He kept his charge on the move, his anxiety mounting. What had happened to the little Scottish nurse? He dared not leave Richard alone to hunt on his own. By the time they had wandered through most of the great house, and Akananda had often called out, “Nanny, where are you?” in the silent passages, even in the attic, he saw that his charge was flagging, and must be kept quiet, though he was as sure that Nanny was nearby as he had been that Richard was, earlier. His intuition strengthened as they went downstairs and returned to the kitchen. Of course—with all his knowledge of the past, which in Richard’s disordered brain was so gruesomely intermingled with the present—he should have guessed.
“Did you put Nanny in the cellar?” he asked, maintaining his quiet, casual tone. Richard looked at him blankly. His lids were drooping. He yawned rendingly. Akananda pushed him down onto a kitchen chair and debated summoning the chauffeur outside for help—the patient was probably beyond the danger of a sudden murderous spring, but any new stimulus was unwise.
“Sit there,” he repeated. “Don’t move! I command you!”
Akananda went down to the cellars, a labyrinth of coal holes, wine bins and storerooms. He switched on the lights, and saw at the far end of the cellar a cubbyhole with a little wooden door, bolted from the outside by a heavy iron bar.
This time, in response to his call he heard a faint answer. Nanny was sitting in the dark on a pile of rusty household implements, thrust there long ago and forgotten by earlier Marsdons. The tiny resolute figure greeted Akananda with one sobbing cry, then said, “God be thankit. I’ve been pr-raying, pr-rayers I learned as a bairn. How’s Master Richard? Oh, but he fr-righted me, Doctor-r. He’s gan daft, ye ken.”
Akananda wasted no words. “How long have you been here?”
“Yester nicht,” she said. “I’m a wee bit thir-rsty, but how’s him?”
“In the kitchen. Hurry!”
Surprisingly nimble, Nanny pelted through the cellars and up the stairs ahead of him. She saw Richard hunched in a chair, and threw her arms around him. “A naughty lad, ye are,” she said, “playing tricks wi’ ye’re auld Nanny.”
Richard looked at her in a dazed way, then let his head fall on her round poplin-covered bosom. “I’m sleepy . . .” he said.
It crossed Akananda’s mind to wonder whence this love sprang. There was nobody in the Tudor life, as far as he knew, who might have been Nanny Cameron, nor did it matter. There had been other lives, or perhaps the attachment started in this one.
Between them, they got Richard to bed.
Lily’s anxious blue eyes surveyed the doctor. “You look all in,” she said gently. “Some supper, maybe? I take it the staff has left, but the fridge must be loaded. I’ll scramble some eggs—and I guess I’ll send the driver into Alfriston. We won’t want him, will we?”
Akananda said, “No, I think not, and I’ve another syringeful of chlorpromazine in my kit—if he’ll bring that in. Though I doubt if Sir Richard will need it. This psychotic break has passed, and it was not a typical one.”
The next morning Richard slept on heavily as Medfield Place rapidly returned to its normal appearance.
Lily, refreshed and competent, sent the hired chauffeur into the village to make phone calls and get a temporary housekeeper to fill in until new help could be sent from London. Before the woman arrived she and Akananda removed all traces of the destructive forces engendered by the week of violence and anguish.
Celia’s slashed portrait came down from the stairwell, and as it was beyond salvage, they threw the fragments in the dust bin. Two photographs of Celia were unmarred except for smashed glass. Lily put them in her own bureau drawer until they could be reframed. A telephone repair man came from Lewes and mended the cut wires without showing a trace of curiosity about the matter. When service was restored an immediate call to the London Clinic brought the reassurance that Celia was fine had slept well and eaten a big breakfast
“What about the schoolroom?” asked Lily. “Should we change anything there? It seems to have been such a place of torment for him all these days he’d hardly leave it—poor man.”
Akananda frowned thoughtfully. “Let’s go look.”
The bright June morning exposed nothing sinister in the shabby room with its old coal grate, its battered desks and benches, the ink-stained drugget on the splintery floor.
“Mercy,” said Lily, “look at the dust! This place certainly needs a good cleaning. What’s that over there in that closet—is that an altar?”
“Yes,” said Akananda. “Sir Richard’s chapel.”
Lily stared at the candles and crucifix. “But he isn’t Catholic, he’s always sort of sneered at religion. Any kind.”
“Nonetheless, he was devoutly religious once—and the contents of that rather pathetic little cupboard saved him last night.”
Lily shivered, half in awe, half in joy, looking from Akananda’s quiet face to the tarnished crucifix. “Prayer . . .” she said softly, “the redeeming light . . .?”
He smiled. “You understand, my dear. I think we mustn’t touch this room now. Let Sir Richard decide when he’s able to.”
She nodded. “You know, it’s funny, but I remember hearing when Celia first came to Medfield, somebody said the Marsdons’ old chapel, the one they used in early days—oh, long before the first baronet—was built in this wing, do you think it was here?”
“Very probably. The Marsdons retain stronger links with the past than most, especially Sir Richard, though his haven’t been quite conscious.”
“Yours are, aren’t they?” she said wistfully. “Oh, I wish I could remember.”
Akananda shook his head. “Remembrance can cause great suffering. Imperfect, uncomprehending remembrance nearly killed Celia and Sir Richard, though it’s a different and logical force of the Law which has punished Edna Simpson.”
Lily sighed deeply. “I don’t quite understand,” she said, and looked out through the smeared, diamond-pane window towards the garden and the old dovecote. “But I learned a poem once, I forget who wrote it—somebody Phillips—” She paused and went on in a groping voice:
’Twas the moment deep
When we are conscious of the secret dawn
Amid the darkness that we feel is green . . .
Thy face remembered is from other worlds,
It has been died for, though I know not when,
It has been sung of, though I know not where . . .
She broke off blushing a little. “Awfully romantic,” she said with a rueful twist of her delicately rouged lips, “but then I was romantic at fourteen, and I felt—felt—well, that there was something true about it. It just came to my mind.”
Akananda joined her at the window. He put his arm around her shoulders, and kissed her cheek. “There is something true about it, my dear, and you, at least, will always feel the hope of secret dawn.” He turned abruptly and added, “I must go and check on Sir Richard. If he’s awake, we’ll have to get some food down him—the man hasn’t eaten in days.”
Twenty
ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, Celia came home to Medfield Place, accompanied by Dr. Akananda and her mother. Arthur Moore saw them off from the steps of the London Clinic. He was jovial but hurried, due shortly at a hospital governors’ meeting, and after that an appointment with a distraught countess whose son had suddenly and openly declared himself a homosexual.
“Well, well,” said Sir Arthur beaming, “you’re fit as a fiddle, Lady Marsdon. I couldn’t be more delighted. Good way to celebrate this day, eh? When you Yankees threw tea or something at us poor old fogies over here. Independence all the thing now, but your chaps thought of it first. Oh, I don’t say you didn’t have me scared for a while in hospital but these episodes like yours—they pass—I’ve seen se
veral—Dr. Akananda was most helpful.” He gave the Hindu a warm smile. “Glad you’re taking him back with you for a bit. Lucky fellow—I could do with some fresh Sussex air m’self.”
The Marsdons’ Jaguar twisted deftly through the heavy London traffic. Akananda sat in front with the chauffeur Lily had hired. She had, in fact, almost completely restarted Medfield Place, and since the calamitous strain of the past weeks was lessened, she now had room for a moment of complacency. It was disturbed when Celia spoke.
“Why didn’t Richard come for me?”
“But, darling—” said Lily, “he still isn’t very strong, you know that. He was sick, too—but he’s longing to see you.”
This was not strictly true. Richard was apathetic, detached. When Lily told him they were fetching Celia from the clinic, he said, “I suppose so, if she’s well enough. I married her.”
“Much better . . . he has lost his delusions,” said Akananda later to Lily. “But not completely recovered.” There would be an intermediate phase, but scant danger of acute paranoia again. “Yet, there is much unresolved,” he added, and Lily, who felt that she now knew the Hindu doctor so well, had caught his uncertainty. She looked at her daughter.
Celia was dressed in a simple and very expensive violet linen frock, ornamented only by a white monogram. The color became her clear, tawny skin, and the soft dark hair, shampooed in the hospital but not set, made her rumpled little head look boyish. Yet, Lily again noted maturity in the gray eyes, and there were a few new lines around the mouth, which was tinted a faint iridescent pink. She looked older now than her twenty-three years, perhaps it was the hint of sadness, an other-worldliness. Perhaps it was the knowledge of pregnancy. The urine test had come back yesterday—strongly positive.
As they crossed to Southwark on London Bridge, Lily glanced at Southwark Cathedral to their right, and said hesitantly—“Does this place, I mean the church and everything, bring back any—I mean, do you get impressions?”
