September Castle

by Simon Raven

‘Well, what did happen?’

  ‘The narrative value of the poems is variable, as Henri is vague in places, and often prefers the poetic image to the concrete fact –’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Ptoly. What happened when they got to that Castle?’

  ‘– And of course,’ said Ptolemaeos, helping himself to tench pie, ‘Henri the poet was not much exercised about architectural structure and detail. Nevertheless, it is easily possible to infer from his poetry an explanation of why the shrine has now completely vanished.’

  ‘Ptoly. If you don’t tell me what happened, I’ll never play with your balls again.’

  ‘All right, heart of my heart. I shall now tell you.’

  There was a knock on the door and Len came in.

  ‘Sorry, folks,’ said Len, ‘but the front door was open, and Tom Llewyllyn said you were late night people. So I hoped you wouldn’t mind if I popped in. Now, I don’t know quite what you’re up to, but I do know, if I can believe Tom, that it’s in an area where I could be very helpful.’

  ‘The devil you could,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘You’re a friend of Tom, you say?’

  Len introduced himself. ‘A friend of Tom,’ he said, ‘and of a lot of them at Lancaster. Balb Blakeney and Ive Winstanley and Jake Helmut.’

  Jo-Jo goggled at Len. The witty bad taste of his apparel, his crooked intelligent features, the combination of ardour and treachery in his eyes, struck her pretty nigh catatonic.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘I remember. You were in with Helmut in that matter of the rubies – the Roses of Picardie.’1

  ‘And all the rest of it.’

  ‘Tell me the details,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Tell me chapter and verse, and then I’ll consider in what way, if any, you might be able to help us. My affair is a very different one from that of the Roses, you see, at least in terms of broad exploration. But it is possible that both quests require similar talents of intellectual sleight-of-hand. So convince me, my dear Len, pray convince me that you are qualified to assist us.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ sighed Jo-Jo, ‘pray convince him.’

  Then Len began.

  Jean-Marie Guiscard paced the ground north of the keep and considered the plan which he carried. Of all the documents which related to the history and architecture of the Castle at Arques, this was the only one still in the possession of the Department, the only one to be turned up by Jean-Marie’s recent check-up of the archives. Everything else had gone up in smoke in 1944. And really, thought Jean-Marie, it might have been as well if this had gone up too. ‘This’ was a map of the Castle and its immediate environs, drawn by a Royal Surveyor in 1773, on a scale of 1 to 1,000, too large to carry with convenience, too small to convey any but the general information which two eyes and a little common sense could gather unaided: for any fool knew that that must be the gatehouse or barbican, that this must be the keep, that the Romanesque ruins with an eastern altar, situated on top of the mound, were the remains of a Chapel, and that the flat rectangular area between his present line of march and the northern rampart would have been designated for the joust.

  Why then had he brought the map with him this morning? He now had only twelve days to prepare for the forthcoming restorations and excavations, and here he was, having frittered away almost the entire afternoon with a commonplace eighteenth-century plan, drafted by a surveyor who had, by the look of it, only the barest modicum of the talent, taste and technique required by the exercise.

  Well, he repeated to himself for the twentieth time, I brought it with me in the hope that it would tell me something about the Lady Xanthippe’s shrine. As I well know, there is not the slightest sign of this anywhere on the ground, but I did work out yesterday approximately where it might have been: to the north of the keep or donjon, near the bottom of the western slope of the Chapel mound, overlooking the jousting meadow or tilting yard. Now, it so happens that this map, drawn just over 200 years ago, has the symbol Δ marked in crimson on that very area, and that in the margin, against a second and precisely similar crimson Δ, are the following words:

  Così l’aer vicin quivi se mette

  in quella forma che in lui suggella

  virtualmente l’alma che ristette…

  Dante, as M. le Directeur had informed him; somewhere in the Purgatorio (the Director thought) and meaning:

  So the air nearby puts itself

  into that form which the soul

  that is there fixed, impresses

  upon it by its virtue…

  After a painful search through the Purgatorio in his lodgings the previous evening, Jean-Marie had found that the passage was lines 94 to 96 of Canto XXV, and came in the middle of a tedious discourse, by the soul of the Roman poet, Statius, on the Aristotelian doctrine of generation and embryology, supplemented by an exposition of the Christian notion that Soul is breathed into the animal form by God. Since none of this seemed to have even the most tenuous connection with or application to the story of the Despoina Xanthippe (or any other aspect of the Castle), Jean-Marie had concluded that the lines must be taken clean out of Dante’s context and considered solely for what they stated in and by themselves, which was that ‘the air in the neighbourhood takes a shape impressed on it by virtue of the soul…che ristette…which is confined there’. So: apply this statement to the map, or rather to the area of it marked by the crimson Δ, and one deduced that there was some kind of soul fixed, confined or imprisoned in that spot, and that this soul had somehow shaped, formed or affected the air or atmosphere of the neighbourhood.

  If, as Jean-Marie had calculated, the area was that in which the Despoina’s shrine had once stood, it was tempting to suppose that the statement referred to the soul of Xanthippe. Tempting but appalling. Why and how, thought Jean-Marie, should her soul be confined there? What did she feel about its detention? And what effect did it have on the air about it? Visible, audible or sniffable? Agreeable or disagreeable? Since the effect was apparently produced ‘by virtue’ of the soul, one assumed the former. Yet one never knew: ‘by virtue of ’ was an ambiguous phrase, and virtue itself could take the most hideous shapes, e.g. the Furies.

  But however all that might be, as far as he could make out after a whole morning of promenade there was no effect whatever. Perhaps it only manifested itself at night or at certain seasons? Well, one thing was certain: he hadn’t the time to hang about until it did. In any case, on what authority was the cartographer making the statement? Local knowledge (or superstition), or his own experience? And was he talking about the soul of Xanthippe (knowing from calculations similar to those of JeanMarie himself, perhaps, that her tomb could have been in that area), or was he talking about a soul, any soul, the effect of which upon ‘the neighbouring air’ had been reported to him or observed by him?

  The answers to some of these questions might have been available if only anything had been known of the cartographer himself, who he was or whence. But the map was unsigned. It was the work, so one learned from a brief note at the bottom, of a

  SURVEYOR APPOINTED

  to this task by

  THE CAPTAIN SUPERINTENDENT

  of His Most Catholic Majesty’s

  COMPANY OF GEOGRAPHERS.

  Four copies had been made, the note said: one for the military archives in Paris; one for those of HMCM’s Company of Geographers; one for the Mayor or Chief Burgher of the Township of Arques-la-Bataille; and one for the (largely titular) Constable of the Castle, which by that time was already superannuated but could conceivably be restored and reanimated as a strategical reality in certain most remote and improbable circumstances.

  And that, thought Jean-Marie, is that. I have spent a whole morning in the expectation of some phenomenon or vision or apparition which might guide or help me in the search for the Despoina’s grave; and nothing has been vouchsafed to me. And yet…and yet only yesterday, as I left the Castle walls, a voice seemed to speak to my heart. It asked me to go away and leave the place in peace. The voice of my conscience? Or of m
y love? Or that of this soul ‘which shapes the air’? But then this soul is confined (according to the map) to the area by the mound and the donjon, whereas I was a good 300 metres off. But then again, perhaps it can throw its voice, so to speak, at least for a short way. Well, I cannot go away and leave you in peace, whoever you are, because my Department is now committed. However, I have, or so I think, persuaded my Director that the Castle shall not be closed to those that love it while the work proceeds; and I have obtained his agreement to a schedule under which whatever lurks in the area marked by the crimson Δ will not be seriously intruded upon for many weeks, and will therefore have plenty of leisure in which to decide whether to assist us in our operations or to protest against them – even if it has not thought fit to show itself or its airy shape this morning.

  After luncheon (taglierini with white truffles, broiled sturgeon and assorted savoury soufflés) Ptolemaeos, Jo-Jo, and Len went for a walk over the fens. Len had stayed the night, which, by the time he had convinced Ptolemaeos that he was indeed qualified to assist him, had been very far spent. They had all risen late, and then Ptolemaeos had used what was left of the morning to start filling Len in with everything he needed to know of the legendary, historical and archaeological antecedents of the search that was shortly to conclude within the Castle of Arquesla-Bataille. By the beginning of luncheon, to which Jo-Jo called them at Ptolemaeos’ usual hour of two-thirty, Len had mastered the necessary corpus of knowledge up to and inclusive of the death of the Despoina; by the end of luncheon (a quarter to five) Ptolemaeos, with occasional assistance from Jo-Jo, had brought him to Henri Martel’s marriage to Lalage in Ilyssos; and now, as the three of them walked along a dyke, having a slow grey canal below them on one side and greasy flat fields on the other, they had come in their minds to the point at which Len had interrupted Ptolemaeos and Jo-Jo the previous evening: they were poised, with Henri and Lord Phaedron, to wind their horns under the ramparts of September Castle, to request entry of the Castellan, and to complete their pilgrimage at the shrine of the Lady Xanthippe.

  ‘Henri, by this time, was disturbed and suspicious,’ Ptolemaeos was telling them; ‘more than suspicious – he was angrily apprehensive, as he now knew exactly what Phaedron wanted and pretty well how he proposed to get it. If we follow the sequence of Henri’s songs on the road from the Mani, we find a gradual but definite downward curve in his moods and in his affection for Phaedron. He started by being happy and carefree:

  As I ride out in the autumn morn

  I greet the winding road with glee;

  For we now depart from this land forlorn

  (Where the Portal of Hell gapes over the sea)2

  Heading north for the ranges of Lamorie…

  ‘And at Corfu he is still lyrical, telling us of

  …the pomegranates of Kerkyrå,3

  Which the West Wind quickens to rich and ripe,

  While under the branches the maidens play

  And foot to the tune of Silenus his pipe

  The dance of the Princess Nausikā.’

  ‘Oooh,’ said Jo-Jo, and shivered slightly.

  ‘Cold, baby?’ said Len, giving her a quick sideways hug.

  ‘Warm, much too warm,’ said Jo-Jo, and looked anxiously at Ptolemaeos. But Ptolemaeos smiled like a serenely bloated seraph and went on with what he was saying.

  ‘By the time they had reached Avignon, however, Henri was beginning to get the message about their mission. In general terms at least he realized that Phaedron was up to no good at all. In a poem called “The Ballade of October” he laments the waning year and compares it with waning love, still beautiful at times, but melancholy, and shortly to turn chill and treacherous. Such, he says, is the state of his own friendship with the Kyrios Phaedron. He had come to love the old Ruffian in Ilyssos and had hoped for magic things from their journey together; but now something grey and steely has entered Phaedron’s heart, something which has all but placed him beyond the reach of Henri…who no longer wishes, no longer dares to show Phaedron the poems he is writing, even though most of these are still nominally addressed to him as the poet’s benefactor and patron…

  Prince, to whom I have pledged my truth

  To bring thee safe to my own fair land,

  I pray thee, come in love and truth,

  Ne with eyes that pierce ne with raking hand.

  ‘That was the kind of thing which Henri was writing in Avignon. He was still not entirely without hope, you see, though already too fearful to show his envois and his prayers to his “Prince”. By the time they had struck west for Chartres and Rouen, Henri had become totally disillusioned. In a passage of rare precision he explains what Phaedron is after – a gigantic and magnificently wrought metal Écrevisse. This he knows because Phaedron, drunk, has told him about it and described it. Here is Phaedron talking:

  A creature fashioned of silver and gold,

  Of ruby and emerald and deep sapphire,

  Carnelian, diamond, enamels bold

  With crimson and purple, forged in a fire

  That had scorched off the very Devil’s cock

  And made Troytown’s blaze a laughing stock.’

  ‘Racy chat,’ said Len.

  ‘Yes. It is most touching,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘to reflect how Henri shows a kind of vestigial love and appreciation of Phaedron by giving him colourful and challenging and audaciously phrased speeches. But the burden of the poem is not at all in Phaedron’s favour. Phaedron, Henri says, means to have that Écrevisse, wherever it may be. He will be very grateful for any help Henri may give him, and will richly reward it. On the other hand, let Henri impede him, for whatever reason, or betray his purpose to any that might disapprove of it – well, says Phaedron,

  Ye see my knights riding two by two,

  Thirty lusty paladins -

  Who will cut out the heart and tripes of you.’

  ‘Ugly chat,’ said Len.

  The low fields receded into a gathering mist, a ‘mauvefrosty Bank’ thought Jo-Jo, no, no, what is that phrase from Tennyson, ‘a purple-frosty bank’, that’s it, ‘of Vapour, leaving night forlorn’; but that was on Hallam’s birthday, in the middle of the winter, and now it’s only September. But then it is so cold on these gloomy old fens. I wish Ptoly would live somewhere else, abroad perhaps, fair Verona or sandy Pylos or sweet Argos or even windy Troy. No, no, I must think no thoughts disloyal to Ptoly, I must be like Tennyson to Hallam. I must not go all wet just there every time this Len so much as looks at me, because what would Ptoly feel, what would Baby feel, if I let them down?

  Perhaps they wouldn’t mind, thought Jo-Jo: they love me, they want me to be happy, they wouldn’t want to spoil my fun, and they know I’d share with them if they asked me.

  No. I must at least try, at least for a time, to go on loving Ptoly and Baby and no one else. I must not behave like this Kyrios Phaedron behaved, getting greedy and eager for other things and forfeiting the friendship of dear sweet Henri Mattel.

  ‘So that was how things stood,’ she said aloud, ‘when they came to Arques? Phaedron had spoiled everything, but Henri was still there for very fear of being served with a premature quietus? In a state of deep depression?’

  ‘Yes. That’s more or less it,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘When they reached the borders of Normandy, near L’Aigle, Henri did manage a brief bout of euphoria because he was home again, but it lasted only long enough to produce one quirky little song about “country matters”.

  I took my Heloise

  Beneath the cider trees

  And gave her a good bang

  While the nightingale sang;

  It sang a dismal song

  Of what might go wrong:

  It did not sing for me -

  Dieu merci.

  ‘After which his misery and forboding returned and deepened as they covered the leagues to Arques:

  And so we came to the Barbican

  On a bitter night of wind and rain;

  And the Kyrios called to t
he Castellan

  That we came as friends to his terrain.’

  ‘Unlucky in their weather,’ said Len. He dabbed his right forefinger at the nape of Jo-Jo’s neck and gently tweaked her between the tendons, inviting her assent in more ways than one.

  ‘No,’ said Jo-Jo, willing herself to contradict: ‘if they left the Peloponnese at Michaelmas, of course they should have expected rough weather by the time they reached Arques. They were lucky not to have snow. I must say, the whole thing seems to have been very badly planned.’

  ‘Remember that Phaedron had become very impatient,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Once he’d decided to go, he wasn’t going to hang about till next spring. Corsairs are not easily deterred by weather forecasts.’

  ‘Anyway, there they all were, turning up on a dark, wet, windy night, and a villainous crew they must have looked. Thirty-two mouths to feed,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘to say nothing of esquires and pages. If I’d been that Castellan, I’d have slammed down the portcullis.’

  ‘They’d probably sent word on ahead to warn him. “The Kyrios called to the Castellan” is just poetic licence,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘Anyhow, the Castellan knew Henri well enough.’

  ‘Surely, this was Henri’s big chance. He should somehow have got a message to the Castellan – “This lot’s up to no good. Don’t let ’em in. Love from Henri.”’

  ‘What?’ said Len. ‘With thirty lances and the old man’s cutlass ready to dig his guts out if he puts a toe wrong? Strictly a time for a man to zip his lip, and keep pen well away from paper.’

  Jo-Jo cringed with pleasure at the note of reproof in Len’s tone. They crossed the canal by a wooden bridge and turned for home along a footpath which led past high reeds on one side and a long black pond on the other.

  ‘And now for the scènes à faire,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘What happened, Ptoly, whatever happened, O sweetest of Ptolies, when Phaedron and his thirty butchers got into the Castle?’

  ‘The morning after they arrived,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘Phaedron waited on the Castellan, presented his best compliments to him as representative of the Villehardouin Lord of the Castle, and intimated, very politely, that he would like to be admitted to the shrine and tomb of his daughter, the Lady Xanthippe of Ilyssos. Now as far as that went, it was a perfectly reasonable request, not to be faulted even by Henri – who, let us remember, did not know of the weird circumstances in which the shrine, according to Hubert, had been built and occupied, since all of that had deliberately been kept from him. As Henri saw the matter, Phaedron was entitled and indeed obliged to visit Xanthippe’s shrine – provided he didn’t start pulling the thing apart in his search for the Écrevisse. But obviously, Henri would have thought – did indeed think, according to his own verses – obviously it’s early days for that kind of carry-on, and to judge from Phaedron’s present behaviour he means to play it all calm and gentle, just like the book of manners says – at least for as long as he can. He will visit the shrine to make himself look thoroughly respectable in person and in purpose, spend several hours praying there, and then, the next day or the day after, he will start diffidently enquiring whether anyone has seen a spare gold Écrevisse lying about. Only if he doesn’t find it will he turn nasty and tear the place to pieces.