by Ashly Graham
‘I had the week before turned eleven, and my aunt had put on a wonderful birthday party for me, inviting all the castle children and those from miles around.
‘When I was satisfied that there would be nothing more to eat and drink without rousing the maid, Jenny began her tale. She told it in a slightly distant tone that belonged to another time, another place, as if she were speaking of someone other than herself.
‘As I listened to her beautiful voice rising and falling, and watched the shades of expression on her perfect face, the light in her eyes, and the shine on the coils of her hair, which was the colour of autumn leaves, her features merged into her story until they and her words, and the images they conjured, became a part of and were indistinguishable from each other.’
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The young Eugénie Beauvais Plantagenet [commenced Jenny] dwelt in a coastal fortress called Dragonburgh, in the north-east of England near the Scottish border, construction of which had been begun under the Angle kings, when Northumbria had existed as a kingdom within the Heptarchy, before the Viking invasions that resulted in its incorporation into England in the tenth century.
To picture the castle, one has only to imagine a more imposing version of Bamburgh, also in Northumbria, which was reputed to be the model for Joyous Garde, the seat of Sir Lancelot in Sir Thomas Malory’s compilation of mediaeval Romance tales, Le Morte D’Arthur.
Eugénie’s father, who was the twenty-third Earl of Northmarch, had inherited the castle and surrounding estates and appurtenances from his father, to whom they were passed by his father; and so on all the way back to the first Earl of Northmarch, a Norman knight: Henri “La Fesse Brave” Beauvais.
La Fesse Brave, or Courageous Buttock, had been given the castle, with funds for enlarging and strengthening it, as a guerdon for intercepting an arrow—it lodged in his bottom, eliciting what was celebrated as his derrière cri—aimed at William, Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings; and thereby making himself indirectly responsible for the incensed aspirant conqueror’s challenge to his top marksmen, Spotton and Boulesaïe, to compete for the honour of giving Harold Godwinsson a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
The kings of England had assigned the early Northmarches the repellent job of defending their realm from the Picts and Scots, who often sought to enlarge their wild and inhospitable territories by making southern sorties.
Dragonburgh, as a base from which to accomplish the task, was well suited to the purpose. The castle was impregnable, barely accessible on rocky crags that beetled from hundreds of feet above the North Sea. It was even more impressive than Tintagel, the fastness where King Uther Pendragon came, transformed by the wizard Merlin into the likeness of King Gorlois so that he might sleep with his queen Igraine; the result of which union was the future King Arthur.
To the east, Dragonburgh commanded views of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, and the justly named Barren Isles; and to the west thousands of acres of ling-covered moor. The property and lands were similar to those owned by the factual Macbeth, one-time Thane of Cawdor and of Glamis: a worthy Scot, who, if he did kill the young and unsaintly Duncan, did so on the battlefield and not in bed. Nothing had changed over the centuries: there were still blasted heaths aplenty, and it was easy to imagine the country as a place where witches gathered in foul weather, to toss outlandish ingredients into a bubbling cauldron.
Jenny’s father’s full name was Henry St John Pheasantbane Arthur Plantagenet. As a Plantagenet, he was descended from Geoffrey, Count of Anjou, who was the father of Henry the Second, and patriarch of successive kings of England through Richard the Second. The “Plantagenet” appellation originated as a nickname derived from plante genêt, or common broom shrub: in Latin planta genista. A sprig of common broom, botanical name Cytisus scoparius, was adopted by Geoffrey as the emblem and cognizance for his family, the Angevin—which means “of Anjou”—kings, followed by the Lancastrians and Yorkists, who reigned from Henry the Second to Richard the Third.
To his friends, and he accounted two as such amongst his acquaintance, the Lord Henry St John Pheasantbane Arthur was known as Pinky.
Jenny’s mother the Countess, née Isabelle-Catherine-Geneviève-Mathilde de la Sauce Piquante, was also French, and descended from one of the early Dauphins. Within the eclectic circle of her acquaintance, she was known as Perky, and she had once been acknowledged as a great beauty, when she wasn’t standing next to Pinky, whose features his daughter was fortunate not to have inherited.
Through no fault of her own, at twenty years of age Jenny was wed to a man some fifteen years older than she was, Otto Huntenfisch. Huntenfisch was a boorish businessman of negative probity, whose origins were believed to have had as their brief epicentre a Bavarian brothel. He had been created a baron by a British government that was sufficiently grateful to him, for financial assistance in rescuing a number of failing nationalized institutions, as to make an exception to the Party’s endorsement of the Moral Re-Armament movement.
One might think that an arranged marriage was a very old-fashioned thing to have taken place in such relatively recent times, and so it was. Jenny, who was a proud and independent-minded girl, had only very reluctantly agreed to the match after lengthy pleading by her parents: the senior Northmarches regretted that such an alliance was the only way of restoring their wealth and prestige; commodities which, being to their minds inseparable, were both in serious decline.
As long as the Northmarch dynasty was on pedigree, after years of accounting mismanagement it was chronically short of money. The castle’s coffers, which once had overflowed with treasures heaped upon the family by the monarchy, in return for military services rendered, were empty; credit at the bank was exhausted, and the mountain of debt was as high as the cliff on which Dragonburgh sat. The aging earl and countess were desperate to once more hold their heads high amongst their peers, instead of skulking in a damp and crumbling, cold and draughty pile in the most inhospitable part of the country, with no one to talk to but dogs and servants.
Facing ruin, and with their loyal and only child as their sole source of hope, the Northmarches were very much open to the advances and blandishments of this Baron Huntenfisch; who, in return for the hand of their daughter and the deeds to the castle, would undertake to set them up in Edinburgh with a warm and well-appointed apartment, and an income sufficient to keep them for the remainder of their lives in the style to which they could so easily become reaccustomed.
Otto, Lord Huntenfisch was a man who made a practice of getting what he wanted; and he wanted Dragonburgh, which he had inspected on the pretext of a social call, and the Northmarches’ daughter, whom he had not. Although he could easily have bought a similar castle at a knock-down price without encumbering himself with a wife, the acquisition of Dragonburgh wasn’t his primary objective. Huntenfisch was set on marrying a titled heiress who would bring him the respectability he craved; and, owing to the relentlessness with which he had applied his financial acumen to dubious schemes from which he reaped great profit, the fact that she was penurious was irrelevant.
The title was all that mattered, and the older the family the better: the baron, whose real name could be neither pronounced nor spelled, wanted to disavow his heritage. He was well aware of the mockery and scorn with which he was discussed in society, on account of his thick accent, and the ease with which he’d bought himself a seat in the House of Lords. He was therefore determined to hobnob with, suck up to, and otherwise ingratiate himself with as many people as possible whom he most desired to be accepted by, in order that they might be prepared to ignore his murky middle-European background and connive at his shady practices.
Rude, crude, and as socially unacceptable and inept as he was, Huntenfisch recognized that there was work to be done.
The question was how best to achieve his ends. As a stranger to the arts, Huntenfisch was realistic enough to know the impracticality of pretending otherwise, by mingling with snobbish devot
ees of the opera, concert hall, and ballet; by haunting salons and galleries, and flaunting his cheque book at auctions.
The baron decided instead to turn his forebears’ skill at settling scores, by hunting down their human quarry with murderous intent, to advantage by creating a venue where a sporting and legal version of the same might be pursued by the entitled, and the rich and famous. Social barriers were more easily overcome when one was out of doors.
His lordship therefore had it in mind to convert Dragonburgh and its estates into a luxurious lodgement for Nimrods like himself, from which those he sought to cultivate might descend with their Mannlicher point-256 rifles for red deer stalking à la mode, that is, made easy, and to shoot warrantable stags—or unwarrantable, it mattered not—and hinds; and roe buck and doe; and to discharge their variable-choke over-&-under shotguns with heavy-load cartridges at drives of pheasant, and coveys of partridge, and the holy grouse; at black game and ptarmigan; at skeins of geese, sords of mallard, springs of teal, whistles of wigeon, falls of woodcock, wisps of snipe, and bevies of quail...and golden plover too, if there were any left...over the moors, in the salt marshes, and on the tidal sand and mud flats; and to hoick limitless numbers of salmon, and rainbow, brown, blue, and sea- trout, and grayling, out of the rivers and lakes.
Jenny loved her home dearly, and couldn’t stand the thought of subjecting it to such a monstrous indignity. She pleaded with her father to impress upon Otto Huntenfisch that his idea was impractical; that the Dragonburgh property was so stark and forbidding, the gales so forceful and arctic, as to put off any professionally accoutred would-be sportsman down from London in search of a good time.
But Northmarch, cognizant of how miserable the Countess Isabelle would make life for him if he failed to close the deal, shied from doing or saying anything that might change Huntenfisch’s mind, on the rare calm and clement day when his team of advisers arrived to survey and audit the castle and estates.
It wasn’t that Northmarch pulled the wool over the baron’s eyes, because the man was determined to have his way; but he might be said to have cast a blanket over generally accepted commercial precepts of disclosure and fair dealing…this being in the days before sellers of properties were obliged to furnish Home Information Packs of key information regarding their properties to interested purchasers.
So Jenny and Otto were married, in a Registry Office, and her parents packed off to Edinburgh. Jenny’s life was changed for ever, and she had no option but to settle down to her new existence as the wife of a tycoon. Huntenfisch told her on their wedding night that he was the son of a pig farmer; and he quickly proved that he was endowed with all the characteristics of the swine that he grew up amongst, and then some.
Many thousands of pounds-worth of tuition later, the Right Honourable the Lord Huntenfisch of Mass-Acres, as he styled himself—his new neighbour, Gralloch of Blastkyll, counselled him against morphing into Lord Shottover, on the grounds that it was contractible into Otto Shotto, and too Home Counties—had, in addition to his title, bought himself a tolerable seat on a horse, sufficient accuracy to ensure that with a shotgun over the moor, or a rifle, he was more likely to kill a pheasant getting up from the rough, or a deer, than a beater or stalker; and enough proficiency with a salmon rod to lessen the odds that he would catch the gillie instead of a fish.
The breeding of horses, hunting and retrieving dogs, and cattle, was no longer a closed book to him. He made the London gunsmiths, rod-makers, and outfitters very happy with his extensive orders for custom-built equipment and bespoke attire. He learned to tie large clumsy fishing flies, and designed one of his own, called the Otto, with which he caught in quick succession a grilse, a frog, and a duck. Confident also that he knew enough about the principles of hunting to avoid public derision, he asserted his droit de seigneur by appointing himself Master of the Dragonburgh Foxhounds.
The sport of hawking and falconry was the only branch of venery in which the baron was forced to accept defeat. Although he hired an austringer, and acquired a mews-ful of goshawks, sparrowhawks, kestrels, and Lugger, Lanner, Saker and Peregrine falcons, Red-Headed merlins, and Red-Tailed hawks and buzzards, upon being cast off from the fist at a tasty woodpigeon, rabbit or hare, or the less appealing rook, crow, and lesser species of vermin, the hawks were quick to evince a superior taste for his lordship’s prized shooting-party birds—with decimating results—and elected thereafter to fend for themselves rather than return to the lure and internment.
The austringer was dismissed without a character.
Dragonburgh’s new owner went to extraordinary lengths to make the castle not just comfortable but extravagantly so.
In a massive engineering feat, an engine-powered cable lift to the craggy summit on which the castle stood was constructed, so that important people would not have to toil up the precipitous winding path, with their heavier luggage being transported for them on a mule or pony, as had been necessary since time immemorial.
The great terrace on the roof had been cleared of its giant urns and terracotta pots and stone furniture, and redesignated as a helicopter landing pad.
Inside, millions of pounds were expended on installing industrial-strength heating equipment capable of raising the ambient temperature from frigid to tropical; and on electrical wiring of which very little had existed before, other than of a dangerously antiquated type; and on a spa, and steam rooms, and saunas; and on the plumbing-in of many new self-flushing toilets, and showers and baths and hot tubs, from the gold-plated heads and taps and jets of which instant and limitless streams of hot water issued, instead of it having to be called for in coppers and ewers that were cold by the time they arrived; and millions more lavished on fixtures and fittings, artwork, a film theatre, and drawing- and bedroom furniture.
Masts bearing direct-broadcast satellite dishes and parabolic antennae, and radio aerials, and fibre-optic cables, were erected and run in so that plasma televisions, mobile phones, Wi-Fi laptops, and handheld devices would work as they did in town.
The quality of the cooking by the new chefs in the new kitchens was superb, and the contents of the wine cellars were beyond reproach; in the enjoyment of which one was able to admire the three hundred and sixty degree vista—on a clear day one could see forever—from the plate glass-windowed room that had been added at the top of the castle, without moving a muscle: a rotating lounge and dining facility had been constructed in which, as soon as the safety inspector had pronounced himself satisfied with his gratuity and left, his lordship sat down and went round for three days without stopping.
Around the estate the facilities were equally magnificent. A golf course rivalling the best of those north of the border was laid out on imported grass, to a design commissioned from that year’s repeat winner of The Open, Lionel Irons, at double his normal fee. The contours of the greens were adjustable, so that a clubhouse caddie with a radio device could alter the slope to suit his client, or not, and guide the worst putt into the hole, or away from it, depending on whom Huntenfisch was most or least anxious to cultivate.
The rivers were stocked with hatchery salmon that had been implanted with microchips: at the press of a gillie’s button on a net handle, the fish rushed to impale themselves on any artificial fly—Jock Scott, Usk Grub, Alexandra, General Practitioner, or Yellow Parson—in the vicinity, even if it wasn’t in the water.
Aerials on the heated butts on the moor broadcast signals that the game birds, at the time of their rearing in the pens, had been taught by the keepers to associate with feeding time. To pamper the guns in their Hackett shooting suits as they took their breaks together between marauds and battues, a mobile rest station with chef, butler, and masseuse also contained bathrooms, a lounge, a snooze area, and stock ticker monitors for up-to-the-minute money-market prices.
What his guests didn’t know was that, having discovered the Northmarches’ perfidy in exaggerating the estate’s mammalian, avian, and piscine inventory, Huntenfisch was obliged to conti
nually restock the moors, woodlands, and rivers with thousands of ungrateful creatures that wasted no time in abandoning their new home in favour of more fauna, et cetera, -friendly zones in the million or so acres that constituted the county of Northumberland.
The anguish and frustration that this caused his lordship, he heaped as recriminations on Lady Eugénie’s head, as he ordered additional consignments of wildlife to replace those that had decamped the premises. If his project were to be a success, and those he desired to impress were not to be disappointed, he had no choice but to do so; but the necessity made him grind his teeth so much that the gold wore off and they had to be recrowned.
Jenny was soon sick of acting as hostess to a lot of fat drunken replicas of Lord Huntenfisch, who ignored her quiet attempts to talk about anything except hunting, shooting, and fishing, and money; who resented her non-admiration of their artificially aided sporting triumphs, and her lack of interest in their nefarious financial dealings. The austere but distinguished atmosphere of the castle was polluted by party after party of obnoxious peers and businessmen, and their gaudy and imperious wives, and tittering totties; who, as if they were royalty, expected to be waited on hand and foot; who expected that their toothpaste would have been squeezed onto their brushes when they picked them up, and their newspapers ironed and orderly when they came down, late, for breakfast; who threw a tantrum if their faddish dietary requirements weren’t catered to.
Fortunately, Lord Huntenfisch didn’t give a fig for what his wife did with herself, so long as she stayed out of his way. Although he was a notorious Lothario when he was not committing faun, et cetera, -icide, Otto Huntenfisch was no Othello. It didn’t bother him that Eugénie refused to participate in the entertainment of the spouses, partners, mistresses, and girl- and boyfriends, and rented companions of his guests, and would not attend his brunches, lunches, cocktail parties, dinners, soirées, and screenings. The invitees preferred their own company anyway, and Huntenfisch was content to live the life of a bachelor so that he might indulge himself as he pleased…and he pleased himself greatly.
