The Madonna of the Astrolabe

by J. I. M. Stewart

  The Provost indicated our forbearance by picking up the menu in front of him and presenting it face-downwards to our archivist. Penwarden brought out a pencil – but not without remarking, in a tone of some injury, that this was the first that he had heard of the thing. Burnside held the instrument for a moment poised almost suspensefully in air.

  ‘Hans,’ he said, and wrote. ‘But Holbein, alas, is not what follows. Let me be sure that I get it right.’ He wrote again with deliberation, and handed the card to the Provost, who was too courteous to glance at it before handing it at once to Seashore. It then went round the table. We read: Hans Eeuwouwts

  ‘You will appreciate my difficulty,’ Burnside said, with humour.

  ‘Yes. Indeed, yes. But how very intriguing!’ The card had gone back to Seashore. ‘Hans Eworth, to be sure. The name crops up in a dozen forms. The Tudors were very little disposed to standardise in such matters. Does your document, Burnside, give any further information?’

  ‘Very little. It is a mere entry in an inventory. But, even so, it is not without some curiosity.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Penwarden said, ‘you can reproduce that for us verbatim too?’

  ‘Literatim, I do believe.’ Burnside was delighted by the challenge. ‘Provost, may I have back that card?’ This time he wrote currently, but then paused to check the result with care. ‘Yes,’ he said happily. ‘I believe I am fairly confident I’ve got it right.’

  Once more the card went round, a little more slowly. It read:

  Item one tabil ful ivele depejnting Ant. Pagden S.T.P. Praepositus aetatis 46 with satyres and quajnte devices the limner Hans Eeuwouwts

  There was a moment’s silence. Then Talbert, who in addition to being much occupied with his knife and fork had appeared a little eclipsed during these exchanges, suddenly unmasked a surprising battery.

  ‘Hans Eworth,’ he announced in his huskiest and weightiest voice, ‘is, of course, well known as having worked for the Office of the Revels from 1572 to 1574. It is remarkable that in Seashore we should happen to have with us the prime authority in that field. I have myself naturally – but in a more modest way – inquired into his career. Note the date of the lost Pagden portrait as it may be inferred from Pagden’s then age as given in the inventory. 1555 or thereabouts, hard upon Pagden’s election. Am I right, Seashore, in believing that the mid-fifties marked something of a turning-point in Eworth’s career?’

  ‘Perfectly right, Talbert. It so happens—’

  ‘Precisely!’ Talbert interrupted, in his most pregnant manner, plainly intending that a further salvo or two should not be filched from him. ‘His appointment by the Master of the Revels shows that he retained throughout his period of working in England, a fondness for allegorical painting of a kind which I understand to have been in vogue in Antwerp, where he had his training. It was a bourgeois taste, delighting in a proliferation of incident. But in England, he rapidly became a court painter, adopting in the main a style of aristocratic restraint – and along with it something of the manner of Moro, perhaps, and indeed of Holbein, whom we have been mentioning. Hence the probable extreme interest of a portrait embodying, as we are told, satyrs and quaint devices, since not much of his work in that earlier style is extant.’ Talbert paused, his pink complexion, already flushed by wine, rendered yet more rubescent by this triumph of learning on the mere periphery of his own subject. ‘Seashore, am I wildly astray?’

  ‘Far from it.’ Only a slight additional weariness in Seashore’s voice betrayed that he was perhaps a little piqued at having his thunder stolen in this fashion. ‘It sounds much as if Eworth’s portrait of Pagden resembled his portrait of Sir John Luttrell – still in the possession of that family, and to be viewed at Dunster Casde. I don’t recall Sir John as being companioned by satyrs, but the canvas is an amazing gallimaufry of allegorical references. Sir John was a species of corsair or military adventurer, and his life no doubt abounded in incidents giving scope to the imagination.’

  ‘It all sounds,’ I said, ‘as if a hunt for Eworth’s Pagden might be well worth while. Burnside, what about the secret of the tower? You will remember we talked about that.’

  ‘Yes, indeed! And I assure you I was not wholly neglectful of your advice.’ Burnside turned to the Provost. Pattullo and I had an amusing conversation about my foible for rooting among the college treasures. You have made fun of it, very delightfully, yourself.’

  ‘My dear Christian, far be it from me to be a mocker. I leave that to Duncan, who will doutldess make us all dance on the boards one day. But pray proceed.’

  ‘Pattullo mentioned the tower as possibly a fruitful hunting-ground. There are several large chambers there in addition to that housing the great bell. I took heed, and approached the head porter. He was dissuasive, and had a good deal to say about cobwebs and dust. I felt him to judge me not entitled to the key, and I didn’t press the matter. But I made a resolve to appeal to higher authority. I do so now.’

  This was a dramatic moment, which I would scarcely have suspected our archivist capable of contriving. Coffee having been served at table, the luncheon was over and the Provost free to stand up—as he promptly did.

  ‘Authority is to be stretched to its limit,’ he said. ‘Ullage shall surrender the key. And when we descend from our quest he shall be on hand to brush us down.’

  We all produced supporting murmurs in face of this fiat, although perhaps with varying degrees of conviction. It was with a certain sense of achievement that, minutes later, I found myself accompanying five senior persons on a wild goose chase which one might have supposed only undergraduate ilan could have achieved. It might have been held, indeed, that the spiritual form of Nicolas Junkin accompanied us. In the chain of events concatenating itself he, as I have said, had forged the first link.

  VIII

  As we ascended a surprisingly ample staircase within one of the bastions of the tower, there not unnaturally recurred to me the memory of my dream encounter with Penny and the deceased Thomas Hardy. The Hardy-figure was elusive, but Penny remained vivid as a visual image – at least in the moment in which she had plunged, a female Icarus, into a wine-dark sea. For some seconds, this renewed vision entirely absorbed me, and it was with a start that I returned to an awareness of my companions.

  ‘At least I’ve thought to collect some dusters,’ Penwarden was saying with gloomy satisfaction. ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Five to three,’ I said, glancing at my watch.

  ‘It just occurs to me to wonder what happens when the bell tolls. A major dust storm, I imagine.’

  ‘The bell tolls,’ Talbert said – reproachfully and a little breathlessly – ‘only upon the occasion of the death of the sovereign. Then alone is it swung. At other times, it is merely struck by a clapper, which is operated by a mechanical contrivance. We may properly say simply that the bell rings.’

  ‘Nonsense, Albert. A door-bell rings. It would be absurd to describe a bell of this size as ringing.’

  ‘Whether it rings or tolls,’ the Provost said, ‘it may prove disconcertingly resonant. Ah, here we are!’

  We had emerged in a large rectangular chamber. It seemed very lofty: virtually a cube, in fact, but with its four walls canted or chamfered (neither of these, perhaps, is the correct architectural term) where they met as if with some aspiration to the octagonal. East and west, as one knew it to be, the walls were pierced by large Perpendicular windows. This was all there was to look at; apart from what felt like half an inch of dust on the floor, the place was utterly void. The vacancy, as well as being disconcerting to treasure seekers, somehow produced a deeper unease. It was as if, having nothing visible with which to occupy itself, the mind began inexpertly fumbling with notions of mass and weight and balance, stress and counterstress, and was vividly aware – but with a helpless ignorance – that the tower was unceasingly at work upon itself, and had so been for something just short of three centuries. Such certainly was my own state of mind when the bell invisibl
y above us banged out three. The dust at once fulfilled Penwarden’s prediction, rising around us to an effect of momentary suffocation. And if the whole tower didn’t tremble, it did at least vibrate. I wondered for a second what the college could be thinking of to permit this hideous additional hazard to the fabric twice in the twenty-four hours in twelve differing degrees. Then my faith in Edward Pococke (which had been curiously building itself up by imperceptible increments during the period of my renewed acquaintance with him) quenched this apprehension at once. He had doubtless obtained from the highest authority – once again – an assurance that these periodic mild shakedowns were harmless to the health of our threatened architectural splendour.

  ‘At least we now have an undisturbed hour before us,’ Seashore said, politely if with no marked enthusiasm. ‘But it would be idle to expend a minute of it upon this somewhat disillusioning vacancy. Is there anything above us except that gargantuan bell?’

  ‘Certainly there is. A moment’s calculation would assure one of the fact.’ This came from Penwarden, whose command of bienseance was scarcely on the mend. ‘There is another chamber precisely like this. A little less lofty, perhaps, but otherwise identical.’

  ‘In that case,’ the Provost said, ‘excelsior!’ He uttered this exhortation with surprising fire, and I was reminded that there lay behind him not only his Wimbledon triumphs but a notable career as a member of the Alpine Club; at the same time he shook himself vigorously in the manner of a spaniel emerging from a ducking – so that the dust, caught in a shaft of sunlight, floated around him like a nimbus.

  We climbed again. The second staircase, although narrower than the first, was still sufficiently broad to have admitted the passage of, say, a grand piano without difficulty; ascending it, one became aware of the tower as larger and more massive than the elegance of its proportions suggested from the ground. Tinkering with it in a big way would be a very sizeable job indeed. I believe we were all a little short of breath, and that this conduced to a growth of self-consciousness among us, as if we now did feel ourselves to be engaged in a juvenile escapade. It might, of course, end in triumph which would banish anything of the kind.

  At least we were not, on our second emergence, greeted by a void. On the contrary, the entire space was an impenetrable jungle of mahogany and cedar and oak and pine, all brutally hewn and sawn and carpentered and varnished into one or another article of domestic furniture. The range wasn’t wide: chairs and tables, wardrobes and chests of drawers. Nor was the chronological span; practically everything belonged distinguishably to Victoria’s middle time. Here was a comical antithesis to that Aladdin’s cave of proliferating wonders with which I had crammed the tower in my dream.

  ‘An unexpected confrontation,’ Seashore murmured. And he added admiringly, ‘And how exquisitely hideous.’

  ‘What the removal people call a repository,’ I said.

  ‘Or depository, Duncan.’ It was Talbert who thus addressed me – with an incisiveness calling up those lexical diversions with which he, his family, and his captive pupils had been accustomed to refresh themselves in Old Road. ‘An interesting instance of true synonyms that are virtually homophonous as well.’

  ‘Like Harbage and garbage,’ Penwarden said – not too politely and wholly without accuracy. ‘A mass of junk which won’t tempt even Burnside, I imagine.’

  ‘A curious spectacle,’ the Provost said, promptly and smoothly. ‘Is it evidence of a revolution in taste – even of a successful revolt – on the part of junior members long departed? And why lug it up here rather than despatch it to the sale-room? But labour was plentiful, and conceivably some old-fashioned bursar judged it demeaning to auction off college chattels. Those were spacious times.’ The Provost offered us a restrained mock-helpless gesture. ‘Whatever are we to do with the stuff?’

  ‘As an old rowing man,’ Burnside said, suddenly and unexpectedly, ‘let me make a suggestion, Edward. When the college next goes head of the river, have the undergraduates build a bonfire of it. As Seashore says, it is all extremely hideous. That, one may discern at a glance. One would feel guilty even in dispersing it among the poor.’

  ‘Not if they were also blind,’ Penwarden said. ‘Unsightly objects of practical utility might find grateful recipients among them. And there may be some charitable organisation that deals with such things.’

  Nobody responded to this, perhaps because it was impossible to be sure whether it was intended as a sarcastic comment upon Burnside’s aesthetic nicety or as a prosaically practical suggestion.

  ‘Yet we must do nothing rash,’ Burnside said to the Provost. He had opened a wardrobe door and was peering hopefully inside. ‘For here is something on which I really am an authority, my dear Edward. I can lay it down, pretty well ex cathedra, that anything may lurk within anything else. And not merely do little things conceal themselves in big things. Irrational though it may seem, the converse is possible. Or so I have come to persuade myself. Moreover, the wildest incongruities frequently attend the sort of search to which we have applied ourselves. The portrait of Provost Pagden may have been rolled up and thrust unregardingly into an umbrella stand.’

  ‘Or a golf bag,’ Penwarden said.

  ‘Precisely. Or a golf bag. We must by no means pass such an object over, should we happen upon it.’

  ‘It would appear to be a task,’ the Provost said, ‘to occupy a long vacation. Either that, or have the entire college turn to on the job. A species of levee en masse. But can we have neglected, I wonder, any less unpromising Tom Tiddler’s ground?’

  ‘Assuredly we have.’ Talbert, who had been silent for some minutes, spoke in the manner of a man who, having bided his time, breaks pregnantly in upon idle talk. ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, my dear Provost, Acheronta movebo!’ Achieving this arcane sortes Vergilianae, Talbert predictably rumbled. ‘The heavens have proved unpromising. We may yet attempt the nether regions.’

  ‘Good heavens!’ Burnside exclaimed. ‘The original gate towers—’

  ‘Precisely, Burnside. The flanking turrets were by no means demolished. I believe that two small vaulted chambers remain. It may well be possible to enter them to this day. We have only to descend and investigate.’

  I was beginning to regret any initial impetus I had given to the wild goose chase; even to feel (like undergraduates at a demo) that it was time to call it a day and go home to tea. But there was no help for it. Talbert’s inspiration had to be followed up. There was even a specious logic in the idea that Provost Pagden’s most likely lurking place would be within some part of the college already extant in his time. So we retraced our steps – climbing down through the decades and centuries, as it were, but without shedding much of the dust acquired during our upward progress. By the time that we arrived at ground-level we were prepared, I think, for disillusion – and with disillusion the first of Talbert’s postulated chambers almost immediately confronted us. A short tunnel-like passage, low and damp, brought us to a narrow archway where a door had once been – although of this the only surviving evidence was a pair of rusty iron stumps recessed in blackened stone: on these, it was to be supposed, massive hinges had at one time swung. The door itself had been replaced by a stone wall, and this had the appearance of having been built very long ago. Perhaps we were not the first generation to have been confronted by the need to strengthen the fabric of the tower.

  ‘It is probable,’ the Provost said, ‘that the other turret will have suffered the same fate. We had better have a look at it, all the same. And that means going through the porter’s lodge. It is to be feared that Ullage will be further discomposed.’

  Ullage, standing by with a clothes brush, certainly wasn’t pleased. But his providing the Provost with a large electric torch seemed to give a hint that, this time, we were not to be confronted with a blank wall a few yards on. There was a general revival of spirits – most marked in Burnside, who must be supposed to have a nose for this sort of thing. We passed through a door – a common
place door which nevertheless opened with difficulty, as if nothing had disturbed it within anybody’s lifetime. There was again a narrow passage, distinguished from the first only by a faint new smell. ‘Musty’ would be the unassuming word for this. But when I glanced at the Burnside nose I persuaded myself that it was actually twitching, much as the nose of an oenophilist may do at the whiff of a particularly appealing claret. And now there really was another door in front of us: small, massive, and of the most undoubted antiquity. It beckoned us from behind a curtain of cobweb, rather to the effect of an odalisque (it was possible to feel) who has cast off all veils but one. And then as the beam of the Provost’s torch steadied, we saw that there was a very large lock, and in it a very large and rusty key.

  ‘If that key is turned,’ Penwarden said, ‘we’re not likely to get any further without the services of a locksmith.’

  This was discouraging, and seemed only too likely to prove true. We had come to a halt, and in uncomfortable conditions – being crammed together as tightly as a group of politically unfortunate persons suffering deportation in a cattle-truck. Burnside, however, managed to edge forward enough to put a trembling hand on the key. He wrestled with it, and nothing happened.

  ‘My dear Christian, will you allow me?’ the Provost asked mildly, and stretched out a long arm. There was a harsh grating sound (such as gaolers contrive in grand opera) and the key turned in its wards. Then, to a great effect of drama, the door swung open by a couple of inches of its own accord. There it stuck. The Provost, edging past Burnside, gave a shove, but to no effect. He shoved harder, although still with caution – being perhaps apprehensive that Provost Pagden himself might receive damage. Something did, in fact, slither or tumble, and now the door swung fully open upon near-darkness. There was thick dust in the air again; it danced in the beam of the torch; the beam circled and was suddenly still. We were peering – one man over the shoulders of another – at a large wooden crucifix: ancient, worm-eaten, yet with much paint surviving on it. Still strongly realistic, it might have been Flemish, German, Spanish, I couldn’t tell. It was canted against what appeared to be a pile of rubble or plaster. There was something shocking, even ghastly, about it, and this effect was enhanced by its being upside-down, as if it were temporarily standing in for a martyrdom of St Peter.