by Simon Raven
And then Baby had drawn Jo-Jo to her once more, as the two men left them. For a long time neither spoke, until at last Baby said:
‘Hero is content. She says that Xanthippe and she will wait patiently, now that they know I am coming. Oh hold me, darling Jo-Jo, for I am so afraid.’
Since the agreed forty-five minutes after the sorbets had now passed, the partridges were served.
‘Well,’ said the Princesse d’Héricourt-en-Caux to Provost Llewyllyn, ‘what shall we think of all this?’
‘I think,’ said Tom, ‘that they are telling the truth…what they believe to be the truth.’
‘But as that M’sieur Ptolemaeos, he says, there will be another way of explanation.’
‘No doubt, Madam. My worry at the moment is that my daughter may be worn out if we continue to pursue this one. She has been quite ill with it all, you know.’
The Princesse peered left, past Jean-Marie, at Baby, who was eating steadily but keeping an uncharacteristic silence. Then Mme d’Héricourt spoke crisply to Jean-Marie, received a careful and even earnest reply, and turned back to Tom.
‘That young Guiscard, he says the little Canteloupe will be all right. He was worried, he says, that she might be jealous and unhappy when he took her Jo-Jo. But that is all en règle. The little Canteloupe wants her friend to have a husband, that she may stand as godmother to the first-born infant. As for their loving together, it has come to a splendid and wonderful ending, and now they can be friends of the heart, one with the other, and never so much as hold hands.’
‘I see,’ Tom conceded. ‘But how and when did this… wonderful ending…come about? That night near the donjon? After which Jean-Marie perhaps insisted that they should cease to be…what they were to each other?’
The Princesse gave Jean-Marie a patrician tap on the shoulder, took aim, and let him have it right between the eyes. Jean-Marie looked rather hurt but answered civilly enough. Mme la Princesse turned once more to Tom.
‘Jean-Marie, he says that he insist on nothing. It is not his way, to insist. Things happened as they happened, as you shall hear after these so delectable Perdreaux.’
Thirty minutes were to be allowed between the partridges and the crêpes for the continuation of the debate. As the two octogenarians carried the last cleanly picked carcass from the dining room, Ptolemaeos invited Jean-Marie to describe how the emergency team which he had assembled probed the ground for Xanthippe’s lair.
‘The problem was,’ Jo-Jo translated, ‘whether to follow the route supposedly taken by Xanthippe herself, from the crypt of the shrine, under the donjon wall, and then towards the well; or whether to adopt the method which Len had been told to adopt and dig straight down inside the donjon.’
‘Easier, surely,’ Len interposed.
‘Yes…if they could get the mechanical excavator into the donjon, through the gap and over the ditch, and arrange it in the correct position. In the end it was decided that it would be preferable to tunnel under the donjon wall. For technical reasons there was less chance of damage being done to – er – to what they were looking for, if they came in on the flank. On the other hand the exact question of the depth at which their quarry lay was a difficult one. They did not want to tunnel over, or under, Xanthippe and straight on into the well.’
‘Should have gone down like me,’ Len said.
‘Unlike you,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘they got on with their work, and when they had cleared the foundations of the donjon, Baby heard Hero again. She was calling this time from a distance and could only make herself fully understood, she said, if Baby came to the bump in the ground, the old entrance of the shrine, where she had seen and heard Hero last night. So thither Baby went, and from there relayed through me to Jean Marie quite helpful instructions from Hero as to how to approach…chez Xanthippe.’
And so the day had gone on in a pretty humdrum way. Baby called out directions, for all the world as if she were an overseer instead of the medium for a long dead girl from the Mani, whose remains had lain in the Castle moat for over seven hundred years. Baby called out the directions, and the manipulators of the mechanical shovel responded, and the spade-men sifted the earth carefully at the shovel’s side and in its wake, and as the afternoon drew on they came to what they sought.
‘A skull, separated from the backbone,’ said Jo-Jo prosaically; ‘a pelvis, still attached to the backbone, but separated from the thigh bones, which were in turn separated from the shins and feet. Two arms, still attached to the collar-bone; two little starfish claws for hands, detached at the wrists. The Despoina Xanthippe of Ilyssos, Princess of the Mani.’
‘Who spoke to me,’ Baby said, ‘much as Hero had spoken. But with Xanthippe I had…I had to touch her, touch the skeleton so that the soul imprisoned there could flow into me and tell me her message.’
For a long while she was silent. Tom sat strained and white; Canteloupe sat with two huge tears poised on his lower eyelids. Minute succeeded minute.
‘And the message, Tullia?’ Ptolemaeos very gently said.
‘Already I had asked Jean-Marie to go away and take the workmen. Then I asked Len to go. Then Xanthippe told me I must ask Jo-Jo to go too, and I said no, Jo-Jo must stay, I wasn’t quite sure why, but she must stay, at least for the present, until I had learned more of what Xanthippe would tell me.
‘After this she seemed happy about Jo-Jo’s staying, and then she began. Once or twice Hero tried to correct or interrupt her, but when that happened Xanthippe always put her down, not nastily, but reminding her, as she must have done when they were alive, that she should not interrupt her mistress, however concerned she might be for her, however good her intentions. I thought this was a bit hard after all the time Hero had stayed there for Xanthippe’s sake, but Hero herself took it as a matter of course, and after all it wasn’t as if Hero had stayed voluntarily…though I suppose she might have, if the question had arisen. For she was all loyalty; loyalty but not, I think, love; loyalty to the House of Ilyssos, not to Xanthippe alone…more to her father Phaedron, I think…and there seemed to be some other, a son of Phaedron’s, perhaps.’
Baby looked distressed.
‘I could not make that out,’ she said.
‘Tell us,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘what was it the Lady Xanthippe wished to say to you?’
‘Ah. She seemed to think that I could plead with God on her behalf. Masullaoh had been a neutral spirit, he had offended God but was currently imprisoned in the realm of Satan. Either God or Satan could undo what Masullaoh had done, but surely God was the more concerned with mercy. She had prayed to God through the centuries and he had not answered; but then why should he, for after all she had been a poor thing when alive, a poor thing who had been enticed by a jewelled trinket, an enamelled image of a water-creature, instead of looking to her soul when it was in danger; so perhaps Masullaoh’s sentence had had the approval of God. She had rebelled against Masullaoh, or tried to, because neutral or no he had too much of the Devil in his conversation and activities: but he had coaxed her back to him with a dream and the gift of this golden and ruby and sweet-voiced creature of the waters, which came, she knew, from the realm of Satan. So she had been untrue to both – to Masullaoh and to God, and perhaps God had approved the sentence passed upon her by Massulaoh. At any rate God had not answered her prayer, had not perhaps even heard it. Perhaps he would hear and answer mine – the prayer of someone that loved Xanthippe and was pleading for her; for surely God prized such love as this.’
Baby drank off a glass of deep red wine, then looked very thoughtfully at her father, Tom, and after him at her husband, Canteloupe.
‘When I was still very young,’ Baby said, ‘my mother used to tell me what it would have been like for me if I’d been born a little boy. I should have had this interesting thing which went stiff, she said…and so on and so forth. Later on, when I first knew Canteloupe, he sometimes used to talk of the Greek word “α’ναγκη”, which meant “necessity”, or the “necessary structure�
�� of a situation, what is “given” as they used to say in the geometry books, either because it is there in a particular case or is axiomatic in the general condition. Thus my mother’s hypothesis, “if you had been a boy”, was irrelevant, worse than irrelevant: it was a denial of order, even a blasphemy, because it ignored reality, it ignored what had been given by God. On the other hand, it had a powerful magic as a source of erotic musing and constituted an ingenious effort to establish, if only in the imagination, an alternative and private world – a rival to God’s.
‘Now, with some shift of emphasis,’ Baby went on, ‘there was a hint here as to what might be done about Xanthippe. It was clear to me that God had forgotten her, or simply did not care about her: for that an innocent girl (in herself she must have been innocent) should have been condemned to such a hideous fate and then left unheard and unheeded for so long was quite unthinkable – unless one assumed either that God no longer knew of her predicament or that for some reason of his own (very difficult to fathom) he had deliberately put her out of his mind. But surely God was omniscient, could never forget anything: therefore his heedlessness must have been purposeful. Perhaps her innocence really had not been enough to recommend her to his mercy: perhaps he felt that she should indeed have struggled harder against Masullaoh: perhaps he thought that since Masullaoh had found her attractive and had come to her in the first place, she was somehow tainted from the beginning (if by no fault of her own) and must be excluded from his charity, thrust out from his kingdom lest she contaminated it. In which case it was clear that no amount of pleading on my part was going to move God; He would have to be shamed into saving Xanthippe.
‘In order to shame him, I thought, one must show him what human love could do. One must deliberately do what my mother had done (though with a different emphasis and from a very different motive) – one must create a rival world, a private one, which defied necessity, went beyond the bounds which God had ordained, and so protested against his law and its vile application to Xanthippe. If we, out of love for Xanthippe, can do this thing (we should be telling God), braving all your most terrible sanctions in order to bring Xanthippe to your attention again, surely you, in your charity, can at last relent and release her. So the central element in our protest or blasphemy (there are times when the two words mean much the same thing), the central feature of our whole endeavour, must be a specific denial of Necessity, an assumption, so whole-heartedly acted upon that it would amount to an assertion, that something, which was not and never could be the case, nevertheless was the case.’
‘You say “our”,’ said des Veules-les-Roses; ‘you say “we”. You were not to do this by yourself then?’
‘I might have done, but I had not the strength or the courage.’ Baby rose and walked round the table to Jo-Jo, on whose shoulders she lightly rested both hands. ‘It needed a stouter heart than mine. I had love; I needed will. Tell them, my darling,’ Baby said to Jo-Jo, ‘how you gave me that will.’
Punctual to the second, the crêpes were served.
‘Tell me,’ said Len to des Veules-les-Roses, ‘how much do you know about the other side of all this?’
‘The other side?’
‘The other, the rational, explanation.’
‘A very great deal, as it happens. But we must not anticipate.’
‘Dear me no,’ said Len. ‘It’s just that I’m bothered about one little thing. When I first got into this, we were discussing who made that burrow under Xanthippe’s shrine…the one through which she and the Écrevisse supposedly made their way to a lair near the well. Now, on Baby’s showing so far, Xanthippe dug it – while she was still sound enough to activate her limbs by the power of her soul. But in a rational and realistic approach something else will have to be proposed. The strong suggestion here the other evening, when I was first allowed to join the party, was – rats.’
Des Veules-les-Roses nodded.
‘Someone was bound to mention them at some stage,’ he said.
‘Oh yes. But you see, although I don’t want to boast, I have to tell you that I have a kind of empathy thing with rats1 – or did once – and I just know, as I had to tell Jo-Jo several times (she was so insistent), that this could not have been their work. They’d never heave a heavy metal object about, for one thing. A body, yes, in certain circumstances, but not this Écrevisse that’s talked of. So…strictly no rats here.’
Des Veules-les-Roses nodded again.
‘Why are you being so insistent?’ he said.
‘Because although I’m happy to wait long and patiently for the other explanation, I don’t want any time-wasting when once we get to it. So please assure me, since you know a thing or two about what’s coming, please assure me if you can that when we arrive at a second and “natural” explanation of that burrow, no one is going to spout bloody balls about rats.’
‘“Bloody balls”?’ M. le Marquis said.
‘Merde.’
‘I can absolutely assure you,’ said des Veules-les-Roses, ‘that nobody is going to spout merde about rats.’
The port was put on immediately after the crêpes in order that a health might be drunk to Our Lady the Queen and those present might now be free to smoke if they wished. The next stage of the debate was to take place while the decanter circulated for thirty minutes, after which there would be a service of coffee, Cognac, Armagnac, Calvados, the Marcs of Burgundy, Champagne, Provence and the Loire, Vieille Prune, Poire William and Framboise. Rightly or wrongly, Ptolemaeos opined that the later and more rational depositions that were to be made, being of their nature comparatively sober, could only be improved by strong drink.
But meanwhile, after the royal health had been drunk (‘God bless Her Majesty,’ called Captain the Marquess Canteloupe, with the privilege of an officer of Horse), Jo-Jo resumed the story as Baby had asked.
‘By now the afternoon was well on,’ Jo-Jo said. ‘Jean-Marie had seen the workmen off, and had returned to keep “Cave” with Len. There were quite a few people around in the warm autumn evening, and they were made curious by the tunnel which led under the foundations of the donjon. But Len and Jean-Marie, who had a very fierce official card with him, let none of them beyond the tilting yard, and inside the four walls of the donjon Baby and I were left in peace.
‘The assumption, the assertion, that had to be made was that if Xanthippe’s soul was still attached to her body then she was still alive. What Baby and I were going to say to God was this: human love requires us to treat her as a living human being, and if you don’t like it you have only yourself to blame, because it is all the result of your cruelty. So now take heed: repent and let her go. This was the way in which we were going to shame God into freeing her.’
And so as the shadows gathered in the donjon Baby and Jo-Jo made love to each other and to the poor broken bones of Xanthippe, talking to her the while, clasping her head and caressing her arms and thighs, taking care she had close part in all their pleasure, plighting their love for her by making her privy to their love for one another. As they came towards their goal (which men call the little death), Xanthippe’s voice was joined with theirs in celebration, until she cried out that she must leave them, and her presence ceased.
‘Time to toast Xanthippe,’ said Ivan Barraclough, ‘and wish her a good deliverance.’
The decanter went round in silence. When they had all filled, Ptolemaeos said:
‘I think we should know one thing more before we drink. What, meanwhile, was happening to Hero?’
‘She thanked me for what had been done,’ said Baby, ‘and told me that although she was now free of her charge, for the time being at least she could follow her mistress.’
‘Where to?’ Ivan asked.
‘Hero said that first of all Xanthippe would do what many souls of the Maniots did: she would visit the places where she had lived, in order to see with the eye of her soul what her soul could not see while in the living body, since then it had been dead. “And then?” I said. “When
she has been back to Greece and to Ilyssos, will she journey across the Wilderness and approach the Throne?”’
Baby paused and giggled.
‘“I do not know,” Hero said, “for myself or for Xanthippe. You see, gratitude requires that if we do indeed voyage over the Wilderness, if we do indeed enter the Courts and approach the Throne, then it must be the Throne of that Being who has heard your cries of love and been moved to pity and release us – the Throne of Satan.”’
Invited to comment on Baby’s and Jo-Jo’s depositions, which were corroborated, in most matters of circumstance, topography and appearance, by Jean-Marie and Len, the auditors gave various opinions. Ivan Barraclough remarked that everything Baby and Jo-Jo had vouched for was entirely consistent with the Appendix to Hubert’s Chronicle, with Henri Martel’s eye-witness if rather frenzied account of the opening of the shrine by Phaedron, and with such pieces of inscription, sculpture and monumental masonry as he himself had often inspected in Greece and beyond, and had indeed been inspecting once more when interrupted in his recent journey.
Ptolemaeos countered this by saying that if anything the girls’ account was too consistent with the sources cited. Two impressionable and romantic young ladies, excitably in love with each other, one of them about to fall in love with Jean-Marie as well, both of them no doubt sexually disturbed by the Mephistophelean attractions of Len – two such young ladies, being emotionally stirred by the tragic tale and hideous situation of (so to speak) a spiritual contemporary, might well begin to hear voices, see figures and feel presences and communications of just this kind – which were all, in fact, derived from the basic matter of Hubert and Henri. This had been deeply absorbed by the two girls, had been processed by their subconscious minds to include their egos and fit in with their fantasies, and had only too obviously been delivered back again in their recent imaginative and indeed hysterical projection.
