Celestial Chess

by Thomas Bontly

  That night, at the clerks’ table along the side of the great hall, with the fire roaring in the open area between the tables and the hounds gnawing their bones beside its warmth, Gervaise watched Queen Eleanor and her maids of honor picking disdainfully over their humble English fare. Mother Venus and her nymphs, Gervaise thought. How they love to prey on men, and how they delight in their wickedness. How false and foolish it all is—and yet how damnably enchanting! A man of faith and reason should rise above such snares.

  He saw the golden-haired Annjenette seated next to the queen, her fine complexion unpolluted by her reputed crimes. Had the girl been wronged? But how could she still be innocent, to have come of age at the infamous Court of Love? Annjenette’s blue eyes turned, all innocent and childlike, in his direction.

  Christ, I will not bear it!

  “What say, Gervaise,” asked a young clerk, slapping him on the shoulder, “are we off to the city this evening?”

  “Nay, nay,” cried Bartholomew from across the table. ‘‘Haven’t you heard? Gervaise has sworn to have no more of London whores. We are playing a quiet game of chess this evening, like good boys.”

  Gervaise said, “I am sorry, Bartholomew. I cannot play chess with you tonight after all. I have business of a priestly nature.”

  Bartholomew’s eyebrows rose. “Another of your long chats with Becket, perhaps, or some party of politicking monks from the abbey? Gervaise, you’re after something.”

  “I have a duty to attend to. I can say no more about it.”

  “Then you can go to hell, for all of me,” Bartholomew said.

  “No doubt I shall, eventually,” Gervaise sighed.

  At the king’s table, where Becket in his dandy’s robes held forth as usual, amusing the Lord Highs with his wit and rhetoric, Henry had risen from his seat. It was difficult for the king to remain seated even long enough to partake of his simple meal, and, a joint of mutton in his fist, its grease dribbling down his sleeve and chin, he began to pace up and down the table, arguing with Becket above the heads of his counselors. Gervaise watched them with woeful envy. It was in Henry’s nature to scheme and plot and fight for power, and then to govern wisely and efficiently, for he was an extraordinary man, chosen by God for a special role in the destiny of nations. But what of Becket? A commoner, and a product of the schools like Gervaise, how had Becket learned to assume such power?

  Gervaise wondered if it was the power he envied or the way in which the exercise of that power protected such men from their human frailties. Did the king call for a concubine or seduce a serving maid? No matter; he might have gone hunting or dicing instead and returned to business with as keen and easy a mind. Such men were like unto gods who sometimes, as a brief respite from the chores of divinity, condescended to dally with mortal women, then rose unsullied from their copulations, ready to rule again.

  If I had such power, Gervaise thought, if I had mere human enemies to contend with (be they as powerful as the King of France)—then even I might retain some semblance of sanity. But it seems my fate to contend with those demons which infest the mind and pollute the soul—those invisible foes who come upon us in the night.

  The most horrible thought of all, Gervaise knew, was that there was no God.

  Without God, the pursuit of reason and order was itself a madness. Prayer was a travesty, and the struggle to achieve goodness an absurdity beyond equal. Better to suffer damnation and everlasting torment than to exist for even a few paltry years in a godless world. And what was faith, finally, but an act of the will—a freely made decision not to live in a Godless universe? That was a decision, Gervaise felt sure, he would always make, even if it led to hell.

  The lady Annjenette rose from the table, paid brief homage to the queen and demurely left the hall. Would she turn to cast one single beckoning gaze upon the priest? No, she would not. She enjoys this game, Gervaise thought bitterly. Ah, but what a small, fine body she has! How soft her skin must be, how smooth her thighs, how fine her maiden’s fluff. Quickly, Gervaise, to your prayers!

  ~§~

  The small chapel reserved for the lower clergy of the court stood dark and deserted at this hour. Gervaise knelt before the uncandled altar, in the damp and dark, the musty scent of a winter of disuse. There were prayers which, by the rule, he should say at this hour. But the Latin phrases, the formal supplications and well-couched entreaties of legalistic minds, were neither direct nor forceful enough for his impassioned mood. O God, help me. Lord Jesus Christ, help me. Blessed Virgin, pray for me. Saintly Margarette, my own betrayed and stricken sister, pray for me. I am a wicked man and harbor wicked thoughts . . . yet still I do not, will not, cannot despair. O God, send me a sign!

  In the gloom he could see the crucifix above the altar, the emaciated and brutalized body of the murdered Christ. How had this outrage come to pass? What was man that he could kill his God, and what was God Who would submit to an agonized death at the hands of His creatures? Whose God are You, Gervaise demanded, and why have You put us all upon the cross?

  He could not pray now. It was wrong to have expected a sign; wrong of Margarette to promise one. Old Megin had produced signs. Megin was a witch, and Carn the spell she conjured to destroy his soul. His guilt would not be prayed away.

  Gervaise rose and left the chapel. In the palace courtyard, away from the main gate where the watchmen sat by their fires, he could look up and see the stars. What were they? If one could rise high enough to grasp them, would they burn one’s hand, or were they as cold and hard as they looked? Could a bird fly through them? Did angels hold them in place or were they attached to the black fabric of the sky? But dusk came not as a cloak, as the ancient poet had described it. Dusk was but a deepening of the blue, at first nearly imperceptible, then darker and darker, as a tomb might darken when a candle was withdrawn. An enormous tomb in which all men were buried alive to wait out the long night of their Savior’s death, to watch in hope of His Resurrection.

  The answers he’d been given were not satisfactory. His mind tested them and found them false. And yet, on occasion, the mysteries did define themselves in his mind, finding words which could clarify the terms of uncertainty. When the words came, Gervaise wrote them down. In a chest in his chamber, with him on all his journeys, there were many such words scratched hastily on scraps of parchment stolen from chancellery supplies. Of late, the words had begun to form themselves into lines of poetry, and sometimes the lines became stanzas. They were not Latin words nor French ones, but words in the language his mother, a peasant’s daughter, had used—the language of the monks at Wellesford and of old Eadmer himself. The ancient tongue, as fresh and vibrant and mysteriously potent to Gervaise as the stars themselves.

  Yet for all its force and honesty, this language was too limited for all he now knew—the writings of the ancients, the heathens, the contemporary scholars of Paris. There were no models for the poem he wished to write. A sort of Historia Calamitatum in verse, his own personal trials ennobled and enlarged by allegory. Gervaise had never read such a poem as his. It was harder than playing chess, though in ways more satisfying. For chess was but a symbolic world, whereas this poem of his—should he ever complete it—might speak to the full mystery of things.

  A vain pursuit, no doubt; but in those moments when faith failed him, a man might turn to art. Or to the ruling of kingdoms, like Henry and Becket. To magic, spells, heathen rituals . . . to the sweet, hot poison of a lady’s lips and sopping loins.

  O Lord, Gervaise thought, have I failed You once again? Or have You failed me? Perhaps we’ve failed one another, for I am tending, it seems, toward the bedchamber of the lady Annjenette.

  It was perilous in the extreme for a lowly clerk to be caught skulking in this wing of the palace where the noblewomen slept. Yet peril was a pleasure in itself; damnation a most adventuresome vocation. Your audacity knows no bounds, Gervaise. And why is it that when you are being most despicable, your mind is at its sharpest? Do you cherish guilt, you aweso
me bastard, for the sake of wit?

  One of the serving women appeared from the shadows and motioned for him to follow. The slut knew I’d come, Gervaise thought. All my agony for nothing; it’s been pre-ordained. The serving woman opened a door and quickly withdrew. The room was large, rich with draperies and sweet with perfume. The young woman sat waiting for him before the fire. Her hair was undone, a cascade of golden tresses down her slender back, and she wore only the thinnest of shifts.

  “Good Gervaise,” she said softly, “come hither and attend to my confession.”

  “My lady, this is not seemly. This is an outrage in the eyes of God.”

  “But I worship another god, kind sir. And he shall bless our sacrament . . . in his own way.”

  “Pagan! I’ve heard of your gods.’’

  “They are kinder by far than yours. Why do you look so stern? Is it so painful for you to gaze upon a pretty face? And upon . . . ?” Her eyes dropped to her own breasts rising sharply against the flimsy linen and to the shadow of her womanhood where her thighs shone whitely beneath the shift.

  “And your confession?”

  “Is a confession of love. I have seen the way your eyes burn with desire for me. That fire has lit a like contagion in my own breast. You have seduced me with those eyes, that great black beard, those snarling lips that even now would curse me if you dared. I long to unite my fire with your own, so that together we may blaze as hotly as the sun which warms my distant homeland.”

  Gervaise stood over her, conscious of the fire’s warmth and of the small gold cross that reflected its light as it lay against his chest. “My lady, I cannot oblige you. I am a priest of the one true God.’’

  Annjenette’s blue eyes revealed a momentary anger, quickly hidden. “I have heard of your exploits. Your vows have oft been forsaken, I think.”

  “True, my lady, but I have vowed to forsake them no more.”

  “Not even,” she asked, rising with the hem of her garment in hand and her legs already bared to the knee, “for me?”

  Gervaise shut his eyes. A universe swarming with stars—vast, chaotic and godless—filled his mind. When he opened his eyes again the lady was naked.

  “I have taken a horrid chill in this hideous climate, Gervaise. Will you not have pity on me and warm my poor cold body? Won’t you bless me with the healing powers of your mighty staff? Why do you look at me in that mournful way? I am young, I am beautiful, I am passionately in love with you, and I beg your mercy.”

  Gervaise removed his cross. “You have no mercy on me, my lady,” he said, and covered the small gold object with his clothes.

  On Sunday morning I boarded a nearly empty railroad car and rode a lonely two hours beneath watercolor skies across the glistening green plain of East Anglia. Of course I had brought along my notes on the Westchurch manuscripts and the pamphlet Archie had given me; once out of the station, I opened my briefcase and took out the little book. Bromley House: A Short History, by J. R. Wedgkins, M.A., D.Phil., Fellow of Duke’s College, Cambridge. The first part contained profiles of Sir Maxwell Bromley and other irrelevant gentlemen who had owned the house prior to 1885. The second part was devoted to Bromley’s most illustrious master, Sir Percy Wickham George.

  A physician, psychologist and fellow of King’s, Sir Percy had become interested in the scientific study of the occult at that curious moment of history when such matters also captured the attention of men like William James and F. W. H. Myers. Over the years Sir Percy conducted many experiments designed to render the supernatural a fit subject for scientific inquiry. None of these experiments, so far as I could tell, had proved in any way conclusive. Not sure whether he was involved with physics or metaphysics, psychology or demonology, Sir Percy traveled the globe, from Liverpool to Timbuktu, seeking out instances of ghostly phenomena and subjecting them to his frenetic and schizoid analysis.

  In a section subtitled “Sir Percy and the Duke’s Ghost,” Dr. Wedgkins reported that upon hearing of several new manifestations in the College library (!), Sir Percy received permission from the Master to investigate the case and showed up one All Hallows Eve with (1) a learned delegation from the Society for Psychical Research, (2) a battery of technicians and a drayload of clumsy late-nineteenth-century ghost-hunting equipment, and (3) an Anglican priest armed with bell, book and candle. Even the press was in attendance, and the pamphlet included a portion of an article that subsequently appeared in one of the morning dailies:

  Scarcely had the clock struck twelve than a light appeared behind the stained-glass windows of the College library, causing great consternation among all present. “There she is, sir,” cried the College porter, “just as we’ve seen her these past six nights—but I’d swear an oath the library was locked up tighter than a bank vault at half-past six!”

  Sir Percy immediately ordered out his men and, the porter unlocking the massive door, a party of six, including Sir Percy and the Reverend Hugh Good blood, entered the horrid gloom. Your reporter was not far behind. The light having extinguished itself when the door was opened, the intrepid ghost hunters proceeded to prowl the labyrinthine interior with lanterns and lighted candles. Several minutes of the most severe and agonizing suspense had elapsed when suddenly, from the back of the library, near the iron gates which seal off the College’s highly valuable Special Collections, the minister of God was heard to cry out in alarm. He was then seen by the search party backing across the room, ringing his bell and chanting the exorcist’s rite. Sir Percy later reported seeing a shadowy figure behind the iron bars, reaching out from between them like a prisoner begging release. The Rev. Goodblood himself described a tall man in a monk’s robe and cowl, and also spoke of the ‘‘malodorous effluvience of evil” that seemed to emanate from the figure.

  The apparition, if such it was, seemed to vanish as the members of the party approached the gate. Later, the entire room housing the Special Collections was diligently searched, dusted for fingerprints and subjected to other forms of scientific analysis. No evidence of an intruder was found. Nor was it determined that any human creature could have gained access to the room after the library doors had been locked for the night. “Confounded peculiar,” was Sir Percy’s comment to this reporter on this latest and most extraordinary episode in the long history of the haunted College.

  In his later years, Sir Percy was obliged to curtail his psychic investigations because of a weakened heart. He spent these years at Bromley House compiling ponderous tomes on folklore and mythology in an attempt to vindicate in theory that branch of science he had been unable to establish via experimentation. He died in 1926, according to the College pamphleteer, “a weary and embittered man.”

  Serves the old bastard right, I thought, as I tossed the book aside and gazed at a landscape of windmills, canals and rustic hamlets.

  On the flyleaf of Archie’s pamphlet I jotted down a list of names and dates:

  Geoffrey Gervaise, d. 1175 (burned at the stake)

  Earl of Westchurch, d. 1649 (beheaded)

  Gerald Brice, d. 1789? (disappeared in France)

  Sir Percy Wickham George, d. 1926 (bad heart)

  Throcknagle, 1930s (“repugnance”)

  Dilbey, 1940s (“oppression”)

  Jameson, 1950s (pyromania)

  Dr. Greggs and Rev. Stemp, d. March 1962 (accidents?)

  David Fairchild—two “visitations,” March & April, ’62

  Scarcely a full account of everything those manuscripts had been up to over the centuries, I was sure, and yet there was logic and coherence enough in the whole affair to persuade me that what I’d stumbled onto—of all the preposterous perils of scholarship!—was a haunted manuscript. Burned at the stake for his reputed dealings with the devil and practice of the dark arts, Geoffrey Gervaise had somehow survived both fire and the grave—had survived for centuries, unknown and unsought save by a few eccentrics and devotees—and now here he was at last, an incredible anachronism in this age of atomic bombs and space satellites, showi
ng himself to me! I need not detail the reluctant frame of mind with which I regarded this proposition. That I had become nervous and irritable as a result of ‘‘overwork,’’ and thus subject to hallucinations, was simply not the case; I had never lived a life as serene, as lucid, as free from anxiety and self-doubt, as I had lived these past seven months at Duke’s. The intricate hieroglyphics of Gervaise’s poem intrigued and fascinated me, but I could hardly believe they had led me to the brink of madness. If I could, therefore, doubt neither my senses nor my sanity, I had no choice but to conclude that the universe was other than I had formerly supposed, and that somewhere in its ambiguous immensity there was a place for spirits such as Geoffrey Gervaise.

  What I found most difficult to understand, under the circumstances, was my remarkable steadiness of mind. Either I was a braver man and more dedicated scholar than I’d ever realized, or—and this was the more likely answer—it had somehow come to me that the ghost of Gervaise meant me no harm.

  Perhaps I was just the one he had been waiting for—in preference to all those other dreary, earnest scholars, whom I wouldn’t have cared for, either—in order to reveal the secrets of his magnificent poem. Yes, I liked that idea. I could see how, as another outcast, another man misplaced in time, I might strike Gervaise as just the fellow for the job he had in mind. Not that I expected that the ghost would sit down to tea with me and cheerfully explain, like a writer being interviewed by the Paris Review, what he’d been thinking of when he wrote some of his more impenetrable lines. But mile by mile, I became increasingly convinced that if I could only be watchful and receptive enough, if I could continue to remain sympathetic and unafraid, Gervaise would find some way to put the whole of his genius before me in perfectly usable fashion.

  Of course, I didn’t really believe any of this. And yet events seemed to be carrying me into a world where the merely plausible was not a relevant factor; where I would have to let go of certain prejudices regarding “reality” and “proof” and “common sense” (those shibboleths of the dullard modern consciousness) and allow the currents of experience to determine my course. It wouldn’t be the first time that I’d found myself intellectually adrift, and I’d not lost faith in my ability to swim ashore whenever the water became too treacherous.