The Bedlam Stacks

by Natasha Pulley

  As we walked towards the house, I smelled something burning. It was so clear that I turned round twice, looking for smoke, but I couldn’t trace where the smell was coming from and after a few seconds, in the way you lose sight of a star if you stare at it too long, I couldn’t catch it at all any more.

  It was only once we were on the driveway that it came back. Something bright half-blinded me and I looked up, worried there was a fire in the house, but the light wasn’t coming from that way. It was in the tree. There were starry points all through the canopy. The glass shells were in the crows’ nests, winking where the sun came down through the loose edges. Where one of them made a dot of brightness on the ground beside me, the pine needles were starting to smoke. They went up with an odd blue flame while I was watching. Gulliver squeaked and hid behind me. Points on the branches and the trunk were smoking too. Through the grey haze, more fires burned thin and chemical-looking. The gardeners weren’t there; they were sitting on the kitchen steps with the tea that Sarah always provided at ten on the dot, unbeknownst to Charles.

  ‘Tree’s on fire,’ I called.

  The head gardener twisted back. I had a feeling his name was something brilliant, like Sisyphus, but although he had worked here since we were both children I wasn’t confident enough to say it and we had never had a proper conversation. I’d been away too much. ‘What?’

  I pointed with my cane.

  ‘Jesus!’ There was a clatter as teacups clanked down on the steps. Men ran past me and I stood still so that I wouldn’t get in anyone’s way. ‘How in God’s name is it on fire?’ Sisyphus demanded of the world more than of me. ‘It pissed down in the night.’ Then he flushed. ‘Sorry, sir.’

  I shook my head, although Charles had trained them too strictly not to swear for me to convince anyone I didn’t mind. ‘The crows have been collecting these, look.’ I found the one I’d had in my pocket and showed him. The glass was thick enough that the spiral of the shell winked and lensed the light. The little spotlight it made on my palm felt warm. Sisyphus took it and moved it to and fro over a handful of pine needles, then gasped and dropped them when they caught alight with a hissing crackle. Gulliver nudged me further away from it.

  Sisyphus was still embarrassed and when he spoke, the gorse and the ferns in his voice withered until there was almost no Cornwall left in it at all. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t well spoken. Charles was and, as far as the gardeners were concerned, I was only a taller, blonder extension of him. I’d never had the energy to sit them all down and explain I didn’t go through their faults with him nightly over dinner. ‘But that ought not be hot enough to – should it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘The tree’s from the Amazon. God knows what it should and shouldn’t do.’

  In the end there wasn’t much they could do but put out what fell to the ground and hope nothing really got going. The fires only hissed damply, and after about ten minutes a misty rain started and we all stood just shy of the canopy, watching. Some of the smoking patches were on the rotten branch. Close to, the angle at which it hung above the house was mad. It was held on by nothing but one last string of wood and a pretty fungus.

  ‘Better get it down sooner rather than later,’ I said towards the cut the hawsers had made in the trunk. ‘While it’s raining.’

  He nodded and called to some of the other gardeners. They were nervous, but they began to saw again anyway and I smiled, proud of them. Sisyphus watched too, his hands pressed over his kidneys.

  ‘Sir – are you sure you should be living up near the attic?’

  ‘I haven’t got anywhere else to live.’ I didn’t want to explain Charles’s refusal to clear out all the boxes of ancient gear and books on the first floor, or that it wouldn’t change now just because there was a tree about to fall through my room; it hadn’t when I’d nearly lost a leg, despite three sets of stairs. He was only asserting his ownership of the house, reminding me that living there didn’t make anything mine, but it was so stupid that it didn’t deserve any more oxygen.

  ‘Honestly, I’d camp in the greenhouse if I were you. Even forgetting the tree, that roof could go at any minute. I mean, look at it.’

  I inclined my head to say it was a fair point, then put two and two together and felt stupid. The gardeners must have been in the greenhouse because they’d moved the statue. ‘By the way – can you tell whoever moved the statue, thanks?’

  ‘What statue?’

  ‘By Dad’s grave.’ Charles would have said old Sir John’s grave. That sort of thing sounded right in his voice but not in mine. In mine it sounded like I had a rod down my spine.

  He frowned. ‘No one moved that. Christ – don’t reckon you could move that thing with five men and a winch.’

  ‘They must have. Someone moved it out of the way of the trees yesterday night before the storm. And someone was in the greenhouse.’

  He gave me an odd look. ‘Yesterday was Sunday. There was no one here but you and Sir Charles. No one came in till six this morning. The storm was all over by then.’

  ‘Look, I don’t mind if people use it – it’s not mine, nothing here is mine, there’s no need to cover for anyone. If they could just shut the door, though. Otherwise the crows steal my keys.’

  ‘I’m not covering for anyone, I promise.’

  ‘I’m sharing the greenhouse with a ghost, then. With boots bigger than mine. I found footprints.’

  He was still frowning. ‘There’s . . . no one that tall here.’

  ‘Well, there’s someone out there,’ I said. ‘Has been for a while, I think.’

  ‘We’ll have a look through the valley. If we’ve got tramps drifting about the greenhouses, we need to know. There’s valuable things lying about.’

  I felt like a damselling idiot for not being able to help. ‘Don’t turf them out if there’s no need. It isn’t as though we’re using that particular thousand acres.’

  He looked like he might have argued with me, but he didn’t have the chance.

  It seemed to happen in slow stages, although it couldn’t have. The gardeners were looping ropes around the trunk, ready for it to tip, but it leaned before they were ready, only a couple of inches, and the dead branch swayed. It fell, smouldering, straight down into the damaged section of the roof, which broke. Tiles slid down in a flint landslide and smashed on the drive. I was sure that I heard those sharp crashes well before the bigger, deeper bang of the branch smashing into the main stairway inside, for all that would have made Galileo wrong. There was a moment of quiet in which things seemed to settle and there was no sound but pine needles falling and the little hissing of the remaining fires in the rain. But then, inside the house, something exploded.

  It blew out the windows nearest to us and dust and smoke plumed everywhere. We were just far away enough not to be hurt and for a second it was nothing but beautiful, because the peach-coloured sun was still filtering through the tree and now the light came down through the smoke like threads in a loom. The taste of burned paper and brick scratched the back of my throat. Men must have been shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the crunch of the gravel where Gulliver had jerked in front of me. The first real thing I heard was when she barked.

  She must have been able to see or smell something else through the smoke, because she ran around the house, towards the front door. I followed her as best I could and by the time I reached her, pacing up and down, the smoke was clearing; part of the wall had been blown clean through, and the one between the hallway and Charles’s study.

  ‘Come on, let’s find him,’ I said. I gave her a push inside.

  She understood and hurried over the scattered bricks. Her normal pace was a sort of ooze, but she was quick now. I followed. There wasn’t much to climb over and the doorways were more or less all right, but just inside the hallway now was what was left of the exploded branch. It had sprayed pieces of itself everywhere and each one burned like a phosphorous torch, smoke pouring from them. The hearts o
f the flames were bluish green. Gulliver barked again. She had found Charles; he was in the corner near the desk. She nudged him out towards me. He was all right, but he had banged his head and there was blood just under his hair. He was unsteady even with both crutches.

  ‘Charles—’

  ‘Of all the bloody juvenile things!’ he shouted at me. ‘What, you can’t bear to see the wretched tree come down, so you douse the thing in turpentine?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything, don’t be stupid.’ I put my arm around him to help him over the rubble near the door.

  ‘Get off me,’ he snapped.

  ‘Look, it takes something to go from sniping at each other to blowing someone up, doesn’t it?’

  ‘You’d do it in the right mood,’ he said. ‘And you know you would. Your idea of benign and acceptable violence is nearly crucifixion.’

  ‘Look at this,’ I said, gesturing to the brilliant fires.

  He did look. Though he had shaken me off, he leaned on my arm while he stood still, the top of his dark head not quite to my shoulder. He was so frail it didn’t feel like touching a human being. ‘Why is it burning like that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Once we were safely out, I cast around for a decent-sized shard of wood. I found one just outside the door. It was warm when I picked it up. I held it to my nose, waiting to catch the smell of dynamite, but there was nothing until I tipped it to the light. It was honeycombed with tiny holes, minuscule. The combined surface area inside must have been vast.

  ‘What is that, some sort of disease?’ Charles murmured.

  ‘I don’t . . . God, feel that. It’s light.’

  I put it into his hand and his arm bobbed upward because it weighed so much less than it looked.

  ‘There’s nothing on it,’ I said at last. I hooked my cane over my arm and found some matches in my pocket. He frowned but watched me hold a flame to the corner of the wood. Nothing ignited on the surface, but I threw it away from us, on to the grass, just in case. After a second it went off like a bomb and left a little crater in the lawn.

  ‘It explodes,’ he said slowly.

  ‘Listen – you’ve got a concussion, your eyes aren’t even. Sit down.’

  He did as he was told. I perched on some of the ruined brickwork too. Gulliver put her nose on his knee. He didn’t usually like her, but he stroked her ears. I rubbed some ash off his jacket. He smacked my hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. He sounded more tired of me than he ever had. ‘How did this happen?’

  ‘There was some glass on the ground. The crows took it, the sun was out . . .’

  He seemed not to hear. ‘What are we going to do about a hole in the wall?’

  ‘Some of the bricks will be all right. We can board it up for now,’ I said, knowing it wouldn’t just be for now.

  The rain turned harder and the fires in the main tree went out. The gardeners were in the hall with buckets. All that was left of the rotten branch were chunks of charcoal. I helped Charles around to the back of the house and the kitchen door, ashamed, because two years ago I could have carried him. I got him to sit down at the big table, where there was some abandoned dough because Sarah must have gone outside to see what was going on. I poured him some rum, some of the strong fantastic Jamaica kind. I bought it from smugglers in town. I could probably have bought it legally, but edging into the back of the Creely brothers’ bakery was a tradition I was trying to keep alive from when Dad had taken me when I was tiny, and in any case, I liked the idea of bakers smuggling in rum from Calais.

  He told me to stop fussing before long, but I left Gulliver with him. I went out into the rain to see if the gardeners were all right and rounded them up to count heads. They were all there, though some of the younger ones were shaken. Aware that Charles wouldn’t like it but deciding that now was a nice moment not to care, I herded them all round to the kitchen to share the tea. In fact, Charles seemed relieved to see other people. The gardeners, big men for the most part, were just as relieved to have somebody fragile to be kind to and within a minute or so they were all talking as if they had always belonged together. Gulliver wagged her tail, pleased.

  Sisyphus came to stand with me by the stove, where I had the small of my back propped against the hot part just above the oven. I didn’t remember jolting anything, but something right under my spine hurt and the heat helped. He smelled of sweat and grass. I breathed in slowly, because I missed it, being fit enough and quick enough to sweat over real work.

  ‘Where did you say that tree was from?’ he said.

  ‘Peru.’

  ‘They must have problems out there.’

  I smirked into my cup.

  He was quiet for a while. Then, ‘Right. I’ll get them to have a look through the woods. Give them something to do, find your mystery man.’

  I nodded and waited with Charles and Gulliver. It was nasty of me, but I liked Charles a lot better when he was upset than at equilibrium and we laughed together for the first time in years. But when the gardeners came back, they hadn’t found anything. The greenhouse was empty and so were the woods, which were too overgrown to walk through without a struggle. Even the old charcoal pits were impenetrable. There was no one there and in the end I doubted what I’d seen. It must have been my own footprint in the greenhouse, but hazed and distorted as the water dried.

  I felt uneasy when I went back out the next day, but the greenhouse was the only warm place I could go. By the time I came to open the glass door, I was convinced that I must have been telling myself stories. But someone had put the map of Peru back on its hook. I eased aside the ferns and looked under the couch. There was no one, but the statue had moved again. It was back by the grave, but not like it had been before the storm. It was facing me this time. No one would admit to having moved it.

  THREE

  When Charles tapped on the greenhouse door a few days later I got up too fast, worried, and swayed when my weight went too far on to my bad leg. I’d never known him venture so far from the house. Thinking that it must be an emergency, I pulled the door open for him and moved one of the wooden benches closer to the tiny ceramic stove I was burning twigs in. It gave off just enough heat to keep tropical things alive. He propped his canes against the pottery and sat down on the spare stool, then caught the edge of the workbench when it wobbled. He looked at his hand and brushed the earth off against his trouser leg.

  ‘Good news,’ he said, and it really must have been good, because he looked cheerful. ‘I’ve a friend near Truro with a parsonage that’s about to be empty. The parson is going to Bristol, apparently. He asked if you’d like to take it. The telegram just came.’

  I didn’t know what to say at first. I hadn’t known he had been asking for me, or that he had wanted me out of the house so much. It was like being hit by a cricket ball, nowhere near a cricket pitch or players. I had to sit holding it before I could understand properly. Eventually I said, ‘I can’t be a parson. I thought Deuteronomy was the academic study of Germany till I was eighteen.’

  ‘It’s only Truro, we’re not talking about Canterbury. There’s a little cottage near the church. Own garden,’ he added, nodding at the seed trays and the grafted saplings. He smiled, properly. He often smiled – he was a beautifully mannered man – but not in private and it made me feel like he hadn’t quite recognised me. ‘I said you’d be delighted, of course. Decent salary, and you can start next month.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a parson – where did this come from?’

  His grey eyes turned hard. ‘One of the gardeners has raised some concerns. I’ve told them all to keep an eye on you. He said that you thought the statue had moved.’

  ‘It has. Someone moved it.’

  ‘No one’s moved it, Merrick. The thing must weigh a ton and a half at the inside.’

  ‘I know that, but—’

  ‘You’re getting towards the age that Mama was,’ he interrupted. ‘And I’m sure she began by thinking her mind was hiccuping.
’

  ‘Well, if I’m going to go mad I’m sure I’ll find something to fixate on, whether it’s a statue or a tree near a parsonage or whatever. Why not sign me up to the asylum now?’

  ‘I can’t afford to. You know how much it costs to keep Mama at Brislington? They have silver pheasants wandering the courtyards, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘I was joking,’ I said flatly.

  ‘I know you were. It was in such poor taste that I decided to ignore it,’ he said. He looked out at the grave and the statue. ‘It isn’t good for you to be here, in any case. Perhaps you might fixate on something else, but that wretched thing means something to you and perhaps whatever that is will fade if you don’t see it every morning. There is such a thing as out of sight, out of mind.’

  ‘If you’d let me oversee the gardens it would bring in a lot more than a parsonage and I wouldn’t be sitting here all day,’ I said, though I knew it was dangerous.

  ‘If I won’t have you take after Mama, what in God’s name makes you imagine I’d let you take after Jack?’

  ‘I don’t mean obsessive biannual trips to Peru, I mean keeping what we have. I mean not cutting down rare trees when there are people who would pay money to have cuttings, or even to come and see—’

  ‘I’m not having anyone wandering through the grounds for no reason and I’m not having you up to your eyes in his memory, and if you ever mention it again, forget Brislington, I’ll take you to the county asylum and let them try out all their interesting new electroshock therapies.’

  ‘For God’s sake.’

  ‘I’m trying to keep you safe!’ he snapped.

  ‘Yes. The county asylum is very safe. I’ll take the parsonage, thank you.’