September Castle

by Simon Raven

  When Baby and Jo-Jo looked sad at this, Ptolemaeos tempered his judgment by saying that theirs was a poetic and intuitive version, containing an important message about the human heart, but not constituting the literal truth…if only because it was demonstrably and damnably inaccurate in one very important instance.

  ‘Before the coffee,’ Ptolemaeos said, ‘we have a dish not mentioned in the menu.’

  He made a sign, whereupon one of the twins brought in a nobly canopied silver dish. It was set before Ptolemaeos, who grasped a handle in the shape of a salamander and slowly lifted the canopy…to reveal a giant Écrevisse of gold, ruby, diamond, emerald, and finely-worked enamel.

  ‘So you see,’ Ptolemaeos said, ‘whoever removed it from its hiding place in the Castle, it cannot have been the daemon Masullaoh, nor was it taken to the Nethermost Pit…unless, that is, I have procured it thence on loan, which I assure you is not the case.’

  There was now a service of coffee and digestifs. Nobody said anything after the production of the Écrevisse, until Len at last enquired.

  ‘Can it still move about and play its music?’

  ‘No. The mechanism was a kind of clockwork made of relatively perishable materials. Gold and precious stones can survive almost anything, and enamel can survive a good deal so long as it is not deliberately battered. But the metal used in a piece of clockwork – no. The little bells survive on which the tune was played; but not the clappers which played it nor the cogs which moved them.’

  ‘Just as well, perhaps,’ said Ivan Barraclough. ‘To judge from Hubert’s description, that tune would not have improved the moral flavour of the occasion.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Ptolemaeos looking slily round the room. ‘I should have thought it might have been rather appropriate.’

  ‘The object is…genuine?’ enquired Canteloupe diffidently.

  ‘Undoubtedly. It corresponds exactly with the description in the Byzantine Catalogue of the Artefact made for the eighth-century Sebastocrator Demosthenes Commenos, from whom it was subsequently looted at sea by a piratical ancestor of the Lord Phaedron of Ilyssos. The metals and the stones have been checked by experts whom I had down from London yesterday, while the insurance premiums, so long as it remains in this house and not in a bank, are positively cosmic. Its identity and its value – now perhaps as high as ten million sterling – are beyond any possible dispute.’

  ‘So,’ said Len, ‘now you’ve got the bugger, what are you going to do with it?’

  ‘A very nice question,’ Ptolemaeos said. ‘In any case whatever, I am first going to tell you how it comes to be here, and in the course of the story to propound a theory about the mystery of the Despoina Xanthippe altogether different from the one which we have just heard. As I say, I think it possible that Tullia and Jo-Jo may have divined an important truth about the human heart and the human soul (if any); but they, so to speak, have proposed and elaborated a metaphor, while I am about to construct a scientific explanation.’

  Ptolemaeos poured himself about a decilitre of Vieille Prune, then selected, listened to and lit a cigar. He began:

  ‘M’sieur le Marquis des Veules-les-Roses; Madame la Princesse; Mister Provost; my lord, ladies and gentlemen; my dear friends:

  ‘As Ivan Barraclough has observed, the story told by Tullia Canteloupe and my niece Jo-Jo is entirely consistent with his own researches and with the Appendix to the Chronicle of Hubert of Avallon; and it is of course this Appendix on which this whole endeavour has been largely based. But the question we must ask ourselves is whether it is to be interpreted literally, whether we are to take at face value the visits from Masullaoh, and the imprisonment of Xanthippe’s soul in her own rotting corpse, and so on and so forth; and the answer must almost certainly be “no”. Discussing this matter with Jo-Jo the other day, I proffered the following theory. First of all, I said, Hubert dictated the Chronicle of Avallon, a work quite well known ever since, the official handout about Lady Xanthippe, more or less in line with Henri Martel’s equally well-known Ballad on the subject, but containing just a hint or two, for the sake of verisimilitude, that all was not entirely well with the Despoina, that she was not at any rate perfect.

  ‘Next, I conjectured, he was attacked by his conscience, which told him he must tell the whole truth; and the whole truth was that the Lady suffered from a species of epileptic mania which caused her to masturbate in frenzy (and often in public) and then to devour raw meat like a beast of the jungle. The disease also had such ancillary symptoms as feverish dreams, when the fit was over, and an obsessive urge to steal and sequester glittering or colourful objects, a grave embarrassment when she was visiting the houses or castles of others. All this was closely controlled or concealed by Hero, called her chief maiden-in-waiting but in truth her nurse, who could usually recognize the signs of an approaching seizure and get Xanthippe out of the way before its onset, who helped her to masturbate as fiercely as she was impelled to but without harming herself, provided her with raw meat, heard her and soothed her after her dreams, and gave her pretty things to play with (often from her dowry chest) in order to keep her from expropriating those of her hosts. These were the facts, as I conjectured to Jo-Jo, which Hubert felt should go on record in order that history and truth might not be mocked; they need not be made public, these facts, but they must be recorded.

  ‘The trouble was that Hubert could not bear to record them. He tried; he started; but when it came to the point he could not dictate, to the learned monk who was writing down his story, such squalid and degrading things of the young Princess whom he had guarded and loved. And so, I speculated, he transformed the Despoina’s pitiful and horrible illness into something dark and mysterious and grand and powerful. Instead of masturbating she now offered her body that a daemon might enter it; she did not gobble raw flesh, she devoured whole sheep or oxen to refresh her daemon lover within her; when she dreamt, she was transported to Heaven or Hell; she no longer craved or pilfered pretty trinkets, she was handed strange and magnificent gifts while lingering in her dreams by Styx or Phlegethon and allowed by special favour to carry them back with her into this world.

  ‘In this way, I surmised, Hubert salved his conscience by describing something like her actual behaviour but at the same time saved her face and served his love by transposing it into something magical, something unearthly, something almost numinous. Served by spirits and privileged to converse with angels, Xanthippe was not just a wretched little epileptic frothing at the mouth: she was Medaea, she was Hecate of the Three Ways, she was the Witch of Endor; and to top it all, she met an end far more haunting and appalling than that of Faust himself. This was the illusion which Hubert wished to promote; but all the time, of course, she was in reality the squalid and violent victim of the falling sickness which he wished to conceal. She was ill – no more and no less. Surely such a conclusion,’ said Ptolemaeos turning to Barraclough, ‘would be consistent with your researches.’

  ‘Broadly, yes,’ conceded Barraclough. ‘Obviously the depictions and records of Xanthippe’s progress through the Peloponnese and elsewhere were based on her observed behaviour. As far as this went, although the impression she gave was not entirely wholesome, and although superstitious idioms or images were occasionally used in describing her (e.g. the imp who is stimulating her genitals at Karyteina), it is nevertheless clear that she is regarded as being abnormal or pitiable on a human scale rather than as the grand supernatural phenomenon of Hubert’s Legend.’

  ‘So you have no complaint about my interpretation of the Appendix? That it was, to sum up, a hyperbolical and metaphorical device to conceal a pitiful illness?’

  ‘You have yet to prove this interpretation,’ said Ivan Barraclough, ‘and in this connection there is one surviving monument which must be carefully considered. The Chapel of Our Lady of the Sea Marshes, near Dubrovnik. There is an effigy of one of her ancestors, resting on its own tomb, which she naturally visited while in Dubrovnik with Hubert. The effigy wo
uld appear to have been so shocked, so horrified by whatever was…informing or attending her, surely in this instance something more sinister than mere illness…that its shape and facial expression were fundamentally altered. I have examined them several times myself, and I can only describe them as tormented.’

  ‘Time, weather, salt and damp,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘There is also, I think, some question of an earthquake – almost certainly, at that latitude, of many earthquakes.’

  ‘I think the burden of proof, of your interpretation of the Appendix, still lies heavily on you.’

  ‘Granted,’ said Ptolemaeos. ‘And I can’t possibly prove the version I’ve just given because it simply isn’t true. I gave it only as an example of how the allegories of the Appendix (for allegories of some kind they must surely be) might be translated back into natural, worldly terms. Let us start again – when we have recharged our glasses. This time I shall be aiming to kill.’

  ‘So what do you think now?’ said the Princess of Héricourt-en-Caux to Provost Llewyllyn, as the chariot of digestifs clanked round the table.

  ‘I have always pinned my faith in rational deduction from proven evidence,’ said Tom, pouring himself a royal measure of Marc de Champagne, ‘and I do not expect to be disappointed tonight.’

  ‘And yet,’ said the Princess, ‘you would not, you could not, repudiate the suggestion that chance, the most fiendish and improbable chance, may have been at work even within a logical and rational context.’

  ‘I should expect any rational solution, even of a baroque affair like this one, to be, at bottom, pretty commonplace and prosaic.’

  ‘But surely,’ said the Princess, ‘you are famous for your books on the Random Nature of things. Of power, for example. You believe, do you not, in strong elements of the unexpected.’

  ‘Only because there are so many factors which we must try to anticipate that we cannot compute all of them. Inevitably there are omissions, even gross omissions, and the factors omitted are in that sense unexpected and are therefore seen as random. In reality they have merely been overlooked, and are as commonplace and prosaic as any other.’

  ‘Perhaps they deliberately camouflaged themselves,’ teased the Princess.

  ‘Not a rational conception,’ said Tom.

  ‘No? Well then, perhaps God deliberately camouflaged them?’

  The Provost Select smiled in polite scepticism.

  ‘You wait and see, my learned friend,’ Madame la Princesse said.

  ‘We have just examined,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘the possibility of Hubert’s having deliberately dictated a text which was false as to fact but significant as metaphor or allegory. We have also examined one set of possible motives for so doing. But although I think I was right about Hubert’s technique of falsification, I have already admitted that I was wrong in my interpretation of his saga and I now further and freely admit that I was wrong in the motives which I imputed to him. In order to understand the full truth which lay behind his lucubrations, we must now take an entirely new point of departure. Aristarchos of Thessaly,’ Ptolemaeos said: ‘the Mage Aristarchos.

  ‘This gentlemen encountered Xanthippe on Corfu, saw that all was not well with her, and offered her a supply of a herb which he had gathered on the island in the Lake of Ioannina – in exchange for her own confidential account of her clinical symptoms. In none of this need we doubt the word of Hubert.

  ‘But his account of the properties of Aristarchos’ herb must make us blink a little. Apparently it enables a man to exercise total control over his own soul, and through the soul control of his body, if he administers it to himself, and total control of the soul and body of another if he himself administers it to that other. Rather a long order, one tells oneself. Why should a herb which grows in the fabric of a little chapel on an island in a lake possess these powers? Well, I reply, and why not? I have friends nearby who own a meadow in which grows a certain type of mushroom: eat it raw, and you will be entertained, for some hours, to the most brilliant hallucinations. So why not a herb that possesses the soul instead of deluding it? In any case, Aristarchos’ herb has been tested. Some time ago now Ivan sent me a sample which I submitted to a discreet acquaintance in the laboratories in Cambridge. The scientific truth about it is very simple: it heightens the ego, it enormously strengthens the ego’s command of mental will and bodily effort – but it also transfers control of that ego to the person who has the power to apportion and administer the herb. If I administer the herb to myself, I retain control of my own ego, which enormously gains in power. If I give it to another his ego falls under my control, because he has accepted the herb from my hands, and he will obey my most trivial or most abominable command.’

  ‘As I have seen for myself,’ Ivan Barraclough said, remembering the fat Greek with the winkle-pickers on the island in the lake.

  ‘Why this transferred control of the ego, you may well ask? The crude answer,’ Ptolemaeos pursued, ‘is that Aristarchos’ herb operates, in some respects, rather like certain truth drugs: just as these latter induce psychic subjection to the interrogator in the person who is being interrogated, so this herb persuades him who tastes it to subordinate himself, his ego, his soul, to the donor. Or again, the working of the herb may be compared with an Amazonian drug, sometimes used as an anaesthetic, which paralyses the body and renders it immune from pain but otherwise allows it to retain full consciousness and powers of perception.

  ‘Such, then, were the powers inherent in the herb with which Aristarchos furnished Xanthippe in exchange for her description of her illness, which was, we postulate, an intense form of epilepsy that had troubled her from her early pubescence. The herb might help her, Aristarchos said: it would enable her to govern her soul. Let her chew the leaf when she felt herself about to succumb to one of her fits, let her command her soul, and through her soul her body, to be still, and she would find peace. And with that, exit Aristarchos. Xanthippe now wonders what, if anything, to do with the herb and consults Hero. Clearly, Hero says, no herb can give Xanthippe or anyone else power over a soul which they know, from their religious teaching, is dead in the tomb of the body and will not be awakened or released until the physical death of that body. But might the herb not work on the living spirit which controls the body, Xanthippe now suggests: for they know that there is a kind of substitute soul, the “thymos”, which operates the brain and the nervous system in the absence of the soul itself, might not the herb give her powers over this “thymos”, and thus enable her to check the horrible fits?

  ‘At this stage, we may imagine, Hero becomes the heavy nanny, and treats Xanthippe as if she’d been accepting sweeties from a strange gentleman. Who is this Aristarchos, Hero would like to know, and just what is he up to, we don’t know anything about him or his herb. God knows what will happen to Xanthippe if she starts eating that sort of rubbish. There are worse things than fits, when all is said, and they’ve learnt to deal with them quite tidily, thank you, and if my Lady knows what’s good for her, she’ll throw those nasty little leaves away and forget them.’

  ‘Hero was quite right, in a way,’ Ivan Barraclough put in. ‘She instinctively felt what I myself discovered by accident only the other day. That herb can raise sheer disaster if given to someone who is allergic to it. If Xanthippe had taken it and turned out to be allergic to it, she would indeed have learned that there are worse things than epileptic fits. The chap I gave it to nearly tore his own eyes out.’

  ‘In fact,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘and as you will learn later, Xanthippe was not allergic to the herb: it worked on her as it was meant to work, as Aristarchos said it would work. But for the time being, Hero’s natural caution prevailed; and although Xanthippe did not throw the leaves away, she put them up in an onyx box and for a long time she thought no more of them.

  ‘But none of this had gone unremarked by Lalage, the second lady-in-waiting, or by Hubert. And it was at this stage that Lalage began to work on Hubert (who was, let us remember, in overall charge of th
e party) and to propose a scheme inspired both by vindictiveness and greed.

  ‘You see, Lalage hated her mistress. Why should she serve anyone so disgusting simply because of an accident which made her inferior in birth and rank? And again, Lalage, who came of a relatively poor family, needed a dowry: why not possess herself of part at least of Xanthippe’s? And yet again, Lalage knew that Hubert was in trouble. His business on his estates in Avallon, the ostensible reason for his voyage, was trifling – not the kind of thing to bring a man all the way from Achaea to Burgundy: what was really in train (so Lalage had heard from one of Hubert’s pages in exchange for a round of hot cockles) was an ecclesiastical suit which was being secretly threatened by the Bishop of Sens. Unless Hubert provided a very substantial sum of ready money as a “gift” to one of my lord Bishop’s “Charities”, the Bishop was going to charge Hubert with having married within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, a conviction on which ground would make a bastard of his young son and heir and would in any case lead to the immediate forfeiture of all the lands and honours which this son stood to inherit. So Hubert was going home to bribe his way out of this fix, and Lalage reckoned that he would be only too happy, in all the circumstances, to grab the opportunity she was about to offer him.’