by John Burke
THE FLORIAN SIGNET
John Burke
© John Burke 1977
John Burke has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1977 by William Collins Sons & Co Ltd.
This edition published in 2018 by Endeavour Media Ltd.
For Mary and Christopher, who removed two major obstructions to the birth of this story
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
We are ashamed to admit we are jealous, but proud that we were and that we can be.
La Rochefoucauld
Chapter One
I had not fancied the prospect of my cousin as companion for two whole months. Now that plans had been altered, I fancied even less the prospect of going away and leaving her in possession for those two months.
‘Caroline will be company for you.’ So my mother had said when, originally, it was intended I should stay behind. ‘You used to have such happy times together when you were little.’
Mother is always very sweet and cheerful and very ready to believe what it cheers her to believe. My own recollection of childhood hours with Caroline was filled with squabbles and secret pinches, and the lingering taste of a spoilt only child’s contempt for a poorer cousin.
‘It is the least we can do, yes?’ The odd little drone of my mother’s native accent came back when she warmed to a subject. ‘They were so kind to you. Remember those lovely games in that lovely house, when poor Uncle Henry was still alive?’
Oh yes, I remembered. Some of the games had been far from lovely. Since those early days Caroline and I had met only fleetingly – the last time at Uncle Henry’s funeral three years ago, on that dismal January day in 1866 – and her family fortunes were now sadly altered. And, of course, we were both grown up now. She could hardly be the same spiteful Caroline, forever intent on snatching from me what few treasures I had. I braced myself to meet her and find her agreeable.
Then my father changed his mind. Or perhaps an alternative had always been lurking there and he had been awaiting a suitable moment to broach it.
‘Why don’t you come with us, Leonora?’
Our paths had crossed under the octagon tower. Hazy June sunshine, splashing down the columns from the soaring lantern and the high windows of the cathedral nave, rippled out across the floor. My father cast a distorted shadow as he hunched forward to ease a sudden attack of pain.
‘Gravel, they call it.’ He took my arm. His lips, dry and bloodless, twisted into a rueful smile. ‘Feels more like a few chips of jagged slate.’
We made our way slowly towards the door by the Lady Chapel. I had finished work in the choir library for the day, and after its dankness and the musty rasp of old parchment I was looking forward to the sight of greensward and sky and brighter sunlight.
To take my father’s mind off his aches and discomforts, I began to tell him about Dymoke, the sexton, and his sufferings at the hands of painters up in the nave roof. Putting some finishing touches to a few panels, they had sprinkled the sexton with a few drops of paint whenever he passed beneath, and then assured him that he was mistaken and the white flecks were really bird droppings. A lot of sparrows had got into the cathedral, they solemnly declared. The only way to deal with them was to follow the Duke of Wellington’s advice on clearing the Crystal Palace of similar pests: ‘Hawks, ma’am, hawks.’ Poor old Dymoke was now making enquiries in the district for expert hawkers.
He chuckled. ‘Unfair!’
‘You won’t say anything to anyone?’
‘Silent as one of Dymoke’s graves.’ We reached the door, and it was then he said: ‘Why don’t you come with us, Leonora?’ And as I opened the door he went on: ‘I’ve been thinking it over. Your mother has persuaded herself you’ll be well looked after by your Aunt Aurelia, and diverted by Caroline. I have my doubts. Seems to me you’ll find yourself waiting on them most of the time. And crossing swords with Caroline, eh?’ He tilted his head and twinkled at me. ‘Well, then. Why not let them have a holiday on our premises and look after themselves – while you come and take the waters with me?’
‘But I thought –’
‘You thought we regarded you as a caretaker, keeping an eye on the place in our absence.’
‘Papa, I thought no such thing.’
‘I’m sure you did. You have a very realistic outlook on things as a rule.’
Realistic, he called it. Mother, always bubbling over with goodwill to all, had been known to reproach me for cynicism. ‘You always think the worst of everyone.’ And once she had added: ‘Including yourself.’ Then she had immediately opened and begun to empty a sideboard drawer with a clatter as if to drown out what she had said. On another occasion she had warned me that desirable young men were never attracted to young ladies who cast too critical an eye on the world, not even when that eye saw the truth: perhaps, indeed, least of all then.
‘But,’ my father relented, ‘you can’t think we’d leave you to be miserable?’
‘I’ve no intention of being miserable.’
‘No. But the more I consider it, the more I fancy you’d find Caroline’s company . . . um . . . tedious. Though whether you’ll find mine any livelier, trailing from sulphurous springs to sulphurous baths, or whatever they have in store . . .’
We emerged on to the sunlit path. I said: ‘Do you want me to come?’
‘It would be nice for your mother.’
‘Mother will want to spend most of her time gossiping. I mean, making new friends and catching up with local history.’
‘Precisely. You’ll be doing her a service by taking me off her hands.’
It was the kind of summer afternoon I shall always associate with Ely and our corner of the cathedral close. The air was clear and sparkling, the outlines of the canons’ residences and the towers and buttresses of the cathedral itself were sharp-edged. Although the sun was warm on my neck, skittish jabs of fenland wind struck through the High Street gateway, and smoke rising straight from whorled chimneys was twitched into little flurries higher up.
I said: ‘You want me to come.’
‘Do you have to have a full confession? All right, my dear, I want you to come.’
I squeezed his arm.
A gardener clipping verges straightened up and touched his cap. ‘Good art’noon, Canon Talbot. Art’noon, Miss Nora.’
The name of Leonora had been bestowed on me as a result of my parents attending a performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio just before I was born. Father used to relate – indelicately, in the view of many of his colleagues – that my mother’s labour pains began in the second act, just as the stage Leonora threw herself in front of the prison governor and defied him to kill her. The two of them invariably called me Leonora in full. Everybody else called me Nora.
Except, occasionally, Dominic.
Six impressive years older than I, Dominic had acquired the habit of patting me on the head and addressing me as ‘Little Leonora’ when I really was little. Sometimes he even did it nowadays. There had been times when, flippantly quizzed about his marriage intentions, he had replied in the same flippant vein that he was ‘waiting for Little Leonora’. I wondered, but kept it to myself, when he would deign to notice that I was now in my tw
entieth year.
‘Leonora and I have been talking,’ my father announced as we went through the house to the sitting-room above the street. ‘We think it would suit you very well if she accompanied us to Carlsbad.’
My mother looked up from a pile of clothes she had been sorting. They were in such disorder that it was impossible at first glance to decide whether she was selecting cast-offs for the needy of the diocese or attire for her own voyage.
‘Suit me?’ Her perky little smile, which always seemed to plead ‘Surprise me’, was welcoming but uncomprehending, as if her knowledge of English had all at once deserted her and she needed a translation.
My father explained.
She took it gaily and generously, as one could have predicted. In spite of our sly exchange about her wanting to gossip, and true as it undoubtedly was, it was also true that she had been looking forward to having my father to herself on their trip. But her wide mouth broadened into an even wider smile as she at once found reasons for liking the new plan. Father’s face, even before he lost weight as a consequence of his nagging illness, had been narrow and bony. Mother’s had a Slavonic broadness, like a faintly sallow moon, with a nose which my father called ‘squashed’ – wide nostrils perpetually wrinkling as she chattered and laughed and invited others to laugh.
‘It is a splendid idea, yes. Leonora, such a time you will have.’ Already it was as if she had herself reached the decision and must force it on us for our own good. ‘It will be so fine for you. For all of us.’
She was so sweet about it that I almost said I wasn’t sure I really wanted to go after all. I would stay in England and be hospitable to Caroline and Aunt Aurelia, continue cataloguing the music and copying out some of my father’s older acquisitions into modern score, and they could be together as they loved to be.
But she was launched on a tide of enthusiasm. ‘So much music for you both! There is a new theatre, I am told. And of course the concerts, all the time. Oh, the two of you! Leonora, you will be such company for him.’
The idea of Caroline as company for me was evidently to be discarded forthwith.
‘That’s settled, then.’ My father lowered himself gingerly into a chair, suppressing a wince. ‘Must see to another ticket. And telegraph the hotel.’
‘I will do.’ Mother had assumed full command. ‘I know how it is best. Disgraceful we two women must also pay the cure tax, when we have nothing to cure. But,’ she said archly, ‘we can’t pretend we have reason to dodge the music tax, no?’
Music was my father’s obsession. One of twenty residentiary canons living in the close of Ely Cathedral, he was the gentle, dreamy ‘fool of the family’ who, in the usual English tradition, had gone into the Church. His stipend had never been great but he eked it out and made a comfortable life for his own family by teaching musical theory to King’s School choristers and giving private Latin tuition. His colleagues were sometimes amused, sometimes exasperated, by his tendency to flit off across Europe in search of the works of half-forgotten minor composers, returning with complex part-works quite out of tune with contemporary taste.
But then, what could you expect from one who had shown such early signs of eccentricity? When still only a curate in a bleak fenland village he had returned from a foreign excursion with a volatile foreign lady to whom he had become impulsively betrothed. Her name was Milada, her birthplace was in Bohemia. The very word ‘Bohemian’ had for many people lost its national meaning and become associated with undesirable vagaries. Gloomy predictions were uttered by the more solemn folk in the diocese: it has to be admitted that in the surroundings of a small cathedral town there are whole cliques of folk who practise gloom as a daily religious observance.
My father and mother confounded their ill-wishers. A devoted couple, they went everywhere together and worked energetically together. Father was assiduous in his pastoral duties; she was a sociable and unflagging helpmeet. But there was no company they enjoyed better than their own. Once the community had abandoned its prophecies of doom it began to profess distaste for such unfaltering affection. Marriage was ordained for the procreation of children and for mutual loving and cherishing. The production of three sons and a belated daughter was not at all out of the way. But the blatant continuation of the loving and cherishing, their undisguised pleasure in each other, was somehow not quite respectable.
To some extent my parents’ mutual sufficiency shut me out of their lives. They had done what had to be done in the education and guidance of my three brothers. When it came to me they were perhaps a trifle offhanded. I occasionally felt I was an orphan with parents still living: never neglected, often treated with absent-minded amiability by my mother and with a shy, rather fonder respect by my father; but left largely to my own devices. Closest contacts with my father all had to do with music – listing his discoveries, giving him moral support in his tirades against Philistines in the cathedral and the local concert society, and accompanying my mother at the piano when he could persuade her to sing rather than talk.
I was touched that he should have gone out of his way to seek my companionship on this forthcoming trip. Carlsbad had been my mother’s idea. Once treatment had been prescribed, she took our hapless doctor to one side and expounded the virtues of Bohemian waters and the uselessness of English and French imitations. Bath, Buxton and Tunbridge Wells had never been more than chauvinistic travesties of the real thing. All French spas were polluted: an insanitary race, the French. My father would take the cure in her homeland, where they knew about such things, and where the air was in any case so much better for invalids.
As I left the sitting-room I heard my father say: ‘Have you heard about the droppings on poor decrepit Dymoke?’
‘Droppings, dear?’
‘Bird droppings.’
‘Oh, really, my dear.’
And I said: ‘Really, Papa! You promised you would not say a word.’
‘Only to your mother,’ he said sheepishly.
Which, I thought, was tantamount to hiring the town crier to ring his bell and proclaim it to the whole population of Ely.
Mother was beaming expectantly. He always told her everything, and it was silly of me not to have taken this into account. Father might know it was not a subject to interest her, or even that it was something best kept from her – such as secrets of a birthday or Christmas present – but he could not help himself. Often she scarcely bothered to listen but nodded and enjoyed the sound of his voice and nearness. At other times she missed nothing: provide her with some titbit of gossip from the choir chapel or an outlying parish and she would imbibe every word, chew it over, adopt it as her own, and pass it eagerly and exaggeratedly on to everyone she met.
There was only one other reference that day to our forthcoming trip. At supper my father, reverting to the subject of the painting of the nave roof, stopped in mid-sentence, looked puzzled at his own absent-mindedness and then said:
‘Ah, yes. Yes. Just occurred to me. Do we need Aurelia and that girl here, now that we’re taking Leonora with us?’
‘I do not think we can tell them they are not required.’
‘Um. No. But they’re not, really, are they?’
‘They will keep the place aired,’ said my mother. ‘And,’ she went on in more charitable mood, ‘it will be so good for them after that poky little place in Sunderland, poor things.’
*
Poor things . . .
Aunt Aurelia was certainly prepared to play the part of the timid relation, deferentially grateful. She had aged little: but then, even in her thirties she had been prematurely elderly and twittery in manner, blinking when Uncle Henry boomed at her or Caroline had one of her tantrums. Good fortune or bad fortune dazed her to roughly the same degree.
‘Such a glorious day. And everything so beautifully kept.’ I heard her breathless voice as soon as I left the north door of the cathedral. ‘They do look after it all so beautifully for you, don’t they? We are going to have such a delightful
time . . . so lucky . . .’
Time had slipped past without my noticing as I tried to identify two sheets of music which had parted company with the rest of what must have been a six-part motet. With the two fragments in my hand I was leaving the library to seek my father and his advice; and realized as I turned the corner of the Lady Chapel that I ought to have gone home some while ago to be ready for our guests.
‘We’ve been counting the days.’ Aunt Aurelia’s voice shrilled along the path. ‘Haven’t we, Caroline?’
Caroline showed little sign of poverty or humility. She was a glow of deep mauve against the background of green grass and mellow, weathered stone. Below a short jacket her skirt was bunched out behind in a graceful curve, trimmed with chequered silken ribbon. From her jaunty pill-box hat a golden pheasant feather soared to make her taller than ever.
She turned from kissing my mother to greet me.
I envied her those imperious golden-brown eyes just as I had always done. And her arrogant pose, and the strange, compelling fire which seemed always to burn just below her skin.
She was the same Caroline. I knew this at first glance, and knew that it was absurd to suppose she could have changed or ever would change.
‘Nora.’ As if to parry my thought she said: ‘The same old Nora.’
‘Caroline.’
We kissed.
‘I was desolated to learn you wouldn’t be here with us, after all. Desolated.’ When Caroline found a word she liked, she used it over and over again until it began to sound unreal.
Desolation seemed an inappropriate emotion for such a matter-of-fact rearrangement of plans. But the moment this crossed my mind, it was intercepted by an echo of my mother’s voice telling me that I was too cynical, I must stop picking holes in things, I was far too anxious to seek out weak spots.
Aloud, my mother was saying: ‘Come inside, do come in. I’ll show you your rooms. And Edgar, tell the driver to be careful when he turns out into the High Street. Jessica, get the boy to take Mrs Talbot’s luggage up to the south room . . . yes, girl, this is Mrs Talbot too . . . please, do let’s go in, shall we?’
