Iron Chamber of Memory

by John C. Wright

  The island’s one inn, a refurbished sixteenth-century farmhouse owned by the Stocks family, was within view of the dock at Port du Moulin, and there was only one main road from which every other path branched, running over steep green hills, tall standing stones, past sheep pastures, apple orchards, and farms, running south to north along the spine of the island. The north end of the island was rougher ground, unsuitable for farming, and covered with a few acres of wild trees as old as the last Ice Age.

  All the coastline to the north was interrupted by looming rocks, narrow coves, and booming caves. The south was crisscrossed under the earth with mining tunnels. It would have been a smuggler’s paradise here, and Hal wondered how the first seigneur had kept his promise to clear the pirates away.

  It was remarkably dark under the trees. The path as it climbed grew tricky and rocky, in places like a staircase, with stones and ruts harder to see as the sun failed. Hal was unnerved when he thought he heard soft, light footsteps padding after him in the deepening gloom.

  He waited, gripping his walking stick, wondering at his sudden, unexpected sense of fear. There was nothing dangerous on this small and rustic island, surely. But why were the footsteps so quiet, and so stealthy? And what had happened to Manfred?

  So he hid himself behind the bole of an ancient oak by the side of the path, waiting. When the sound of the stealthy, half-inaudible footfalls passed him by, he stepped out suddenly behind his pursuer.

  She gave a yelp of surprise, and then burst into a merry laugh, seizing him around the waist. Hal found himself suddenly in the strangely familiar embrace of a girl in black silk. Reflexively, his arms closed around her, tightening as if to protect her. She clung to him, as if in fear, even though she had been the one pursuing him. She buried her face in his chest, as if she was a woman crying, but his shirt remained dry. The movement knocked the wide straw hat she had been wearing from her head and it fell silently to the ground. As the evening breeze blew over her hair, a burst of well-known fragrance, like honeysuckle after a spring rain, assailed his nostrils.

  Suddenly remembering himself, Hal released her. With a lingering squeeze, Laurel let go of him as well, and she stepped back, breathless.

  Her hair was dark as a thundercloud. She currently wore it up, but Hal knew that when it was unbound, it fell well past her hips, brushing the curve of her calves. Her eyes were green as glass, and glinted in the dark like the eyes of a she-wolf, large and expressive. Her skin was the fairest he had ever seen, free from moles or freckles, eerie in its porcelain whiteness. She was not an outdoorsy girl, though she had the vivid, high-cheekboned features that spoke of Spanish or Italian blood, or perhaps of a long-lost ancestor from Araby. Her lips were wide and full, and her smile was full of mischief.

  Like Hal himself, she preferred to dress in a modest and old-fashioned style. Her wanton masses of hair were pinned up high in a Gibson, a coiffeur so large it made her head seem small in comparison and exposed a graceful neck. She wore a high, starched collar, a blue bow tie, a dark blouse of silk with opal studs, a dark sash nearly as wide as a man’s cummerbund, and a long skirt that brushed her black-leather, high-topped buttoned shoes. The vintage, narrow-waisted style she affected could have been designed with her in mind, so elegantly did it frame her timeless charms.

  Her motions and gestures were poised and graceful, as if she were a ballerina. The footfalls that had pursued him had been light, not due to any deliberate stealth, but rather to a naturally fawnlike gait.

  “You so startled me.” In the deepening twilight, her voice sounded unexpectedly close and low, almost a whisper.

  She explained that she had been waiting in the inn for Manfred since yesterday. “He was supposed to meet me, to show me the new house he inherited. But he forgot. When I saw you from the window walking up the Rue de Sermon, I called out, but you did not hear me. I trotted after you this whole way, waving, but you never turned to look. And once you were in the woods, the path bent and twisted, so you were never in sight. But I am not one to give up so easily!”

  “My apologies,” he said gallantly, inclining his head.

  He was extremely glad to see her. In part because a familiar face was always a comfort when one was alone in a strange place, but mainly because, upon seeing her, he was struck by the cheering thought that while Manfred might conceivably forget one of them or the other, he was hardly likely to forget them both!

  Hal had known her over the last two years, as she and Manfred had been seeing each other steadily. The two of them had put off their wedding until after Manfred’s dissertation was due at the end of the spring term. Hal had been selected as best man, and he took his duties seriously. He determined to be as fiercely loyal to Laurel as he was to Manfred. When at the University, he made it his mission in life to keep other students and professors from coming between Manfred and Laurel.

  They spent a few moments looking for her dropped hat, gradually circling out from the path as they searched, but the did not find it. It seemed the wind had taken it away and hidden it somewhere among the trees. He found the size of them oddly disquieting, rather like seeing a cow taller than a man. They were giants; it was an old-growth forest. It was amazing to him that in all the years back before the reach of history, despite all the boats and ships that sailed forth from France and from England, no mariner ever cut down these mighty boles for ships, no crofter for planks, no shepherd for firewood.

  He called off the search, saying the two would have to come back in daylight. She took his hand playfully.

  “Now you have to lead me there. I don’t know this path. I’ve never been here, not at night, I mean. Small wonder they call it Wrongerwood! Everything about it is wrong.”

  He said, “Is that really the reason for the name?”

  “No, Wronger is a corruption of the French. Like most things English, I suppose. It comes from Rongeur d’Os. It means Wood of the Gnawer-of-Bones. Lovely name, don’t you think? After the ghastly hound which supposedly haunts this forest. But perhaps we can we talk of something more pleasant?”

  He agreed to change the subject, and they walked under the trees together as the world grew darker.

  He asked her about the house and the island, and she told him what she knew.

  The Unlit Isle

  The island of Sark rose sharply from the sea eighty miles south of England, between Jersey and Guernsey. It was small, inhabited by less than a thousand souls all told. Magdalen College, where Hal and Manfred first met, was more populous. He tried to recall how many people lived in his dormitory; it was entirely possible that there were more people living there than were now present on the island.

  There was one abandoned silver mine on the south spur of the island, called Little Sark, and one manor house to the north, on Greater Sark, perched on a promontory rising three hundred feet above the sea. The two segments of Little Sark and Greater Sark were connected by an isthmus called La Coupée, a bridge of rock as tall and narrow as a wall. It was three hundred feet long, with a dizzying drop of two hundred sixty feet or more to either side. Before railings were put up, children were wont to crawl across on hands and knees, fearful of being thrown over the side by the powerful winds that often rushed out to sea.

  The island’s single village held exactly one inn with rooms to let for travelers, whose lower story, which had once been a livery stable, was the public alehouse fronting the road. This macadam road, the only one on the island, had been paved by German prisoners of war. The post office was in back, where the postman, who was also the volunteer constable, and something of a local hero as well, kept his bicycle.

  Sark was not just an island in the Channel, it was also apparently an island in the stream of history, stubbornly unchanging. It was the last feudal government in Europe. The seigneur held it as a fief directly from the Crown, and the island landowners held their parcels from him in return for their ceremonial vows of service, duly and properly sworn. The parliament of the isle, called the Chief Pleas, consi
sted of the Seigneur, the Seneschal, the forty Tenants and the twelve Deputies.

  The fiefdom had passed through many hands since the first seigneur. In the nineteenth century, the island had been mortgaged to a privateer named John Allaire in order to keep the mines in operation. The fiefdom was sold thereafter to a family called Collings, whose descendants were the ancestors of the Hathaways.

  During World War II, the island, along with the other Channel Islands, was occupied by the Nazis, and ruled by one Kommandant Major Albrecht Lanz in the name of the Third Reich.

  In the autumn of 1990, an unemployed nuclear scientist named Andre Gardes, armed with a single semi-automatic weapon, posted notices all around the island proclaiming himself to be the rightful seigneur, and announced his intended invasion, which was scheduled to take place the next day. He arrived as promised in the morning, seated himself in the tiny brick building housing the Court of the Chief Pleas, and declared himself the conqueror of the island.

  His reign lasted less than a day: when Dr. Gardes was sitting on a bench after lunch, changing the gun’s magazine, Perrée, the volunteer constable, complimented him on his choice of gun and convinced Gardes to remove the magazine and let him admire the weapon. When Dr. Gardes, nuclear scientist, did so, Constable Perrée confiscated the firearm and punched the would-be conqueror in the nose. The weapon now sat in the island’s small museum next to old naval bric-a-brack.

  By ancient law, the Seigneur of the Island was the only one allowed to keep an unspayed hound, or keep pigeons. All the flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the sea to the beach belonged to him.

  In the twenty-first century, Sark was designated by the International Dark Sky Astronomy Association as the first Dark Sky Island in the world, which is to say that Sark was so devoid of any urban light pollution that naked-eye astronomy was possible there.

  There was only one ship that regularly made port; she traveled to the island of Guernsey twice a day, on the morning and evening tide, and she did not sail at night.

  No automobiles nor motorcycles were permitted on the road and horsepaths, all of which were unlit.

  The Unlit House

  When he finally saw the house for the first time, dark and tall by the light of the dying day, he was so overtaken by the feeling of lost memory, that, for a moment, he did not hear what the green-eyed girl was telling him.

  The architecture was a strange eclectic collection, built over many periods, a graceful jumble that adhered to no coherent plan.

  Midmost was a tall circular stone building beneath a squat dome, the remnant of the Priory of Saint Magloire of Dol, built by sixth-century monks. The bottom floor was stone, and the upper stories, built in a later era, were thick wood panels fantastically carved, pierced with small arched windows set with stained glass.

  To the east sprang a curving wing built in the seventeenth century, the main hall and living quarters, roofed in slate, with a servant’s dorm attached at an angle. The main hall was of dark stone and had a distinctly military look to it, with narrow archers’ slits for windows on the bottom story, but broader windows above that were framed by decorative patterns of thick gray rock.

  A gold lion, as lithe as a leopard, was inscribed over the main doors of the east wing. Its face was turned toward him, terrible in the deepening dusk. It stood on three paws and raised the fourth, claws extended, while above its back a sinuous tail curved in seeming anticipation.

  Behind, to the north, peering over the shoulder of the main hall, was a square tower built in an overwrought Victorian style, fantastic with gables and peaks and tiny black obelisks. Originally these had been two separate structures, but the tower and the north wing were now connected by crenellated gallery, which ran from north to west behind the Priory, enclosing a bed of weeds and hedges in a semicircle. In the middle stood a stone pot the size of a birdbath; it was a quern that had once been used for grinding grain.

  To the west was the colombier, connected to the gallery by the kitchens and pantry and dining hall, originally separate buildings, now one interconnected pile of corridors, colonnades, and porticos. The colombier, or dovecote, was the exuberant exclamation point of the meandering architectural sentence. It was a pale tower with a steep conical roof like a witch’s cap, punctured by rows of curiously carven miniature hatches for the birds.

  Hal imagined that somewhere, amongst all the various ancient and peculiar laws on the island, there was probably one about doves.

  In the foreground was an Edwardian chapel with an octagonal belltower or carillon at one end, and at the other, past the vestry, a round signal tower, built of stone shipped from Spain. From the roof of the signal tower the mouth of a bronze cannon peered, a remnant of days when privateers ruled this isle.

  At the foot of the signal tower was a thing Hal could not quite fathom in the dusk: it was a circular stone track about two yards in diameter, in which a great stone wheel on a wooden arm was contrived to turn and turn again. To one side was a spigot carved like an open-mouthed gargoyle. It looked like some barbaric torture machine. Then he remembered Manfred mentioning a nineteenth-century cider mill, turned by a horse, whose stone wheel could crush the gathered apples.

  The house was at the crest of the hill. Beyond the hilltop, Hal could dimly see the crowns and upper branches of the woods that fell like a great, uneven staircase to a beach of shells and pebbles far below. This was steep and tumbling terrain that even the most desperate forester had never tried to log. From the gigantic height and girth of those massive trunks, it was apparent that those serene and ancient trees had never felt the axe of man. This was Wronger Wood, for which Wrongerwood House was named. Beyond were the waters of the Channel. The gray line on the horizon before them might have been a low cloudbank, or the coast of France.

  The sun was sinking into the Atlantic, and the red light glanced from square windows and arched windows, and glinted from one round window like a giant’s eye peering from beneath the dark eaves.

  Then a cloud smothered the dying sun. The windows were black. There were no lights visible either near at hand or far away.

  He caught the scent of her perfume as she stepped closer. Hal felt an unexpected tingle as she softly touched his arm.

  “Did you not hear me, Hal?”

  “I beg your pardon, I was not listening.”

  No Way In

  Laurel said, “I say! You are taking your sweet time to ponder this, Hal. He left us no choice!”

  The words were light with gaiety, but there was another and more urgent note beneath. Hal Landfall felt fascinated by her voice, and wondered what that other note meant.

  “He and I will be duly wed—Manfred and wife, as it were—in two months, and I will be mistress here. This will be my house, too. At that time, I will remember to retroactively give myself permission to enter here now. That should suffice, should it not?”

  Like a small drop in a still pool, insight came to Hal. He knew what the deeper note in her voice meant. It was as if she held the world and herself to be opposing players in a game, a charming game to be played seriously, but not taken seriously. It was a game she meant to win. She must have some personal reason to get into the manor house that she had not mentioned aloud, something more than a mere desire to escape the cold.

  Hal had known many women, most of whom were either stoic and hard, or shallow and soft. Laurel was neither. She glided through life with a droll aloofness that was distinctly at odds with the inner joi de vivre that he could occasionally glimpse shining through her outer coolness, like a candle seen through a frosted window. Manfred had found himself the perfect woman, an ideal, even. Hal wryly acknowledged the ripple of envy as it ran through his heart.

  Hal spoke. “It was not the legality, but the practicality I was pondering, Miss du Lac. You are sure the house is locked? All the doors? Is there no groundskeeper, no parlor maids, or whatever you Englishmen have?”

  She smiled. Her teeth were bright and even in the gloom. “You are so formal and old
-fashioned! We’ve known each other for ages! But of course the Best Man is allowed to call the Bride by her first name. Laurel, please.”

  “Laurel,” he replied obediently, slightly dismayed at how good it felt to say her name.

  She said, “And I was here with the Seneschal of the Island yesterday night, and he could not find a way in. I have the key to one of the inside doors. I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Levrier. She and her boys are supposed to be looking after things.”

  “This island is smaller than some golf links I’ve been on. How can a man disappear? A whole man? Well, let’s look under the welcome mat. Maybe he left a note.”

  He turned his back to the enchanting woman, and shook his head wryly, half-ashamed and half-amused at himself. They had been friends for years. It was not the least bit improper for them to spend time together. But then the two them had never been alone before, not for any length of time, not in the dark, not on a timeless island that seemed unexpectedly glamorous. He reminded himself not to get carried away with her.

  Hal trudged up the slope to the house. The stars here were so bright and so many, that he wondered if there were some strange atmospheric condition over the island to magnify them.

  He had no flashlight, and the moon was not up, so Hal was soon reduced to groping, running his hand along the cold gray stone of the walls, searching for a doorway.

  The back lawn came into view. In the near distance, in the starlight, he could see ghostly rectilinear outlines of outbuildings, perhaps a stables, or an icehouse, a pumphouse, or servant’s quarters. Beyond the outbuildings were boxes that once might have held beehives, solitary walls, and archways standing alone, tall and strange, which once might have opened up on formal gardens. Farther away and down the slope was the fishpond dug by medieval monks to provide for their Friday meals.