‘Now, my fluffies, having relished the sad tale of The Thrush, the Weevil and the Apple, tomorrow Finchy-boy edges closer to the drumstick with The Fox and the Canary. G-olé!’
Jones whispered, ‘It’s bizarre, Obbers! They adore Finch-speak, and Finch adores them. They can’t stop laying.’
Finch reversed out of the hen-coop, displacing a rooster from his right shoulder as he closed the door. He carried a pail half-filled with speckled brown eggs.
‘They cluck at the good bits,’ said Finch, greeting Oblong with his free hand.
‘We’ll be constipated for life at this rate,’ muttered Jones.
Inside, three armchairs faced a roaring fire.
‘Where are the Ferdys?’
Jones eyed the velvet bag in the crook of Oblong’s arm and fell silent, leaving Finch to field the query. ‘We think – and we hope – that Bill’s in town for appearances and the missus and the brood have scarpered. It’s Wynter, the long arm of history, you understand. He has special uses for children.’
‘Fled where?’
Finch shrugged.
Initial badinage faded into serious narrative. Finch shared his tale first: his underground odyssey, the rising tower, the monstrous sac where the observatory had been and his return to the moleman’s kingdom.
At this point Jones took over. His delivery had the clipped brevity of a soldier’s despatch. ‘Orelia and I ran across the marsh. We got to the cell where they kept Finch. The rock wall had opened. There was a scream, a woman’s scream. I went that way, Miss Roc to the opening in the wall. I found Fortemain’s dead body, speared by a trap, with Miss Seer standing beside him.’ Jones added an unexpected poetic touch. ‘Inconsolable. I returned to the rock wall, but it had closed, back as before. I heard nothing beyond. We buried Fortemain with full honours, telescopes across the chest, in a barrow fit for a king.’
‘You’re saying Orelia was behind the wall?’
‘I can’t be sure,’ said Jones.
‘The North Tower can blow away rock, surely.’
‘Maybe what’s in there is meant to be hidden. Maybe there’s another way out.’
‘You left her!’ protested Oblong.
Finch turned surprisingly stern. ‘Cool it, Oblong. Jones rescued Morval. Hindsight, dear boy, is the historian’s luxury. Put yourself there and then, in the moment, before you judge.’
Oblong relented. ‘Sorry, Jones, that was unfair.’ Belatedly realising that the three chairs had already been in place when they entered, he changed the subject. ‘Morval is here?’
‘Upstairs and feverish, but slowly on the mend,’ said Jones wearily. ‘She’s been to hell and back.’
‘Her speech isn’t that easy to follow,’ added Finch.
‘A tad rich coming from you,’ said Jones, the old breeziness magically restored. ‘Now it’s Obbers’ turn.’
Oblong related Pomeny Tighe’s tragic end in the mixing-point, the mantoleon’s raid, the accession of Wynter, Snorkel’s unexpected and unexplained demise, the clue in Pomeny Tighe’s room and his trip to the Clauds’ family tower in Hoy. He quoted the Chaucerian verse by Ambrose I and produced the escharion as his final flourish.
‘Some rooty-toot,’ muttered Finch, turning the instrument in his fingers before raising it to his mouth.
‘No!’ cried Jones. ‘Cover it up and put it away.’
Finch blinked. Gallantry and heartiness, Jones’ default position, had shifted to gravitas. Odds are it’s the truth peeping through when people go out of character. He obeyed Jones’ request.
‘You’ve seen it before?’ asked Oblong.
Jones half-retreated. ‘Maybe I did, a long time ago, and maybe I didn’t. But I wouldn’t trust it.’ He added a casual rider. ‘Did this Claud fellow mention druids or hedge-priests?’
‘The escharion came to Ambrose from one of them, but nobody knows when.’ He paused: a tangent, but it seemed relevant. ‘And Ambrose III knew Wynter.’
‘A fifteenth-century druid – is that what eating dock leaves does for you?’ exclaimed Jones, back in default mode.
Jones laid the table for three and a tray for one, while Finch made a mushroom omelette with unnecessary panache. Oblong carried the tray upstairs to the Ferdys’ bedroom, which Jones and Finch had assigned to Morval for its curative view.
She was not in bed. She had sniffed out every inkpot, brush and paint-box in this artistic household and had also found receptive paper, homemade by Mrs Ferdy, in one of the many outhouses. Like a rainbow of all colours, the paints ran in an arc from white on the left to black on the right. Her golden hair flooded the chair back, fanning out wider than her shoulders. Nothing moved but arm and fingers.
Oblong placed the tray on a stool and peered over her shoulder. He had expected a symbolic work-in-progress, an earthing of her grief. Instead, the scene had the instant impact of recent events, perfectly rendered: Jones leading Finch leading Morval through the fields at dusk, the particular meadows irregularly streaked with snow after the first half-thaw, the dead sheep lying in the lee of a hedgerow. Their clothes were their clothes, likewise the posture – Jones ramrod-straight, the taller Finch stooped, the light-footed Morval. He felt oddly humbled. He knew dates, events and dynasties, but she held a true mirror to what had been.
She turned and smiled. Too often beauty creates distance – stand back, admire, but do not touch – or the false proximity of desire. To Oblong, it merely exacerbated the devastating damage she had suffered and prompted an urge to heal her.
‘Your supper,’ he stammered. So banal, he attempted an artistic critique. ‘It’s them, it really is. You’re a chronicler.’
‘The murrion flock . . . the pelting river . . .’ she replied.
‘Quite so,’ stumbled Oblong, suddenly feeling himself an intruder – this was her bedroom, her studio, her private space. Yet he had made a tentative connection between Morval’s cryptic words and an observation by Gorhambury after his fleeting visit to the spiderwoman’s lair. After supper, Finch handed over his notes of Morval’s ramblings and the connection strengthened, prompting a grim conclusion. He would have to return to the other place: only an understanding of her symptoms might yield the workings of a cure.
The day had not exhausted her surprises. As the three men gazed into the blazing embers, the iron grate tinkled and sparks flew as an object fell down the chimney. They all craned forward. A cylinder glowed in the embers, the writing on its side stencilled in fire: Geryon Wynter invites.
Jones hauled the cylinder out with the tongs and doused it under the tap. Finch, master of documents, unfurled the scroll inside.
‘It’s a party at the Manor, Valentine’s Day, addressed to any adult resident here – but you have to be unrecognisable. Voice disguisers will be provided at the gatehouse, apparently.’
‘How on earth do you make yourself unrecognisable?’ asked the self-consciously conspicuous Oblong.
‘My dear boy,’ said Finch, ‘every Rotherweird home has a dressing-up box.’
*
In the early hours, with the fire dead and the men asleep, Morval slipped downstairs. Chimneys don’t rattle without reason. She read the scroll on the table with no sense of danger or self-preservation. Such an event had to be recorded, ergo, she must be there. Only her solitary gift had kept her sane when trapped in the spider’s body. Thereafter the loss of speech and, after its recovery, coherent language, had only accentuated art’s anchoring role.
The young man who had brought her supper intrigued her. All her life she had been surrounded by men and women with prodigious talents and self-certainty. Even the spider had been a predator par excellence. Oblong’s hesitation struck her as virtuous. His odd physique had character. She hoped he would do something memorable deserving of preservation in paint.
2
A Bard in Lost Acre
Oblong followed the precept that dawn to early morning was the safest time to visit the other place. He rose in the early hours and left a note thanking F
inch and Jones for supper and their company. The escharion he placed beneath the bed in his temporary room.
He reached the white tile later than he would have liked and survived his entry, but it was painful and more dislocating than usual. Once in, however, the open meadow was unusually quiet. The dark star, all but burnt out, had declined to a mere smudge. The survivor of the original impact, creator of these two parallel worlds, was now itself approaching extinction.
He reached the great tree and scrambled down to the stream and over it before blundering into a silvery wire: a fragment of the spiderwoman’s web. Minutes later, he caught the gleam of a brass door-handle. He hurried in, closing the door behind him.
Hips and ankles met hard edges as he groped for surfaces in the darkness. He found a rattling box and beside it a tall cylinder: matches and a candle. The wick flared and homely details emerged wherever he looked – half a bottle of Vlad’s best brandy; glass and cutlery for one laid on a round oak table; a single tap with a bronze bowl beneath; dry grass, flints, kindling and wood tidily stacked; arrays of pans, saucepans and oil-lamps. He ran a finger along the tabletop, gathering a smudge of dust. He heaved a sigh of relief. No one had been here since Valourhand’s summertime visit.
The room was pleasantly warm despite the season and the bare stone flags. He traced the heat source to a flagstone with an iron ring by the back wall which lifted to reveal a smouldering red eye deep in the ground: a permanent oven. Beside it, with a space in between, a like slab opened to a cold store, a blue glow sulking beneath the stone shelves. Lost Acre’s mysteries ever multiplied.
He explored further, holding the oil-lamp aloft like a miner. A warren of passages spread wide and deep, opening into a variety of chambers, some fair, some foul. A larder crammed with body parts lay next to a chamber with a circular skylight in the roof. It housed an easel, piles of spent and half-spent tubes of paint, wooden boards, a palette, cut canvasses and scores of brushes. Miniature studies stood propped against the wainscot and along the easel-rail: flowers, implements, details of costume. The large bulb-shaped door confirmed that Morval painted when the spider-half of their composite body slept. He prayed the converse was true, when the spider was at work in his butcher’s room.
The room felt incomplete: there were too many expended materials for the work on view, even to Oblong’s inexpert eye. Behind the easel, he found another door: no handle, and fitted so close that only a hairline declared its presence. It took a while to locate the hidden mechanism, which only opened when pushed dead centre. Fortemain must have constructed it for Morval centuries ago.
Oblong walked in, oil-lamp held aloft, and stopped in amazement. The chamber had the impact of a chapel frescoed by a Renaissance master. The scenes flowed into each other, divided only by hedge or wall. Dead centre, where a tabernacle might have been, stood the largest image, Rotherweird Manor, festooned in roses and espaliered fruit trees. Leaning on a stick, a benign figure peered out. Ordinary scenes – baking, apple-picking, fishing, classes outdoors and indoors – rubbed shoulders with the more obscure. Men, women and children from peasants to the privileged had a startling clarity, with no hint of caricature or invention. They were real. Morval must have always painted what she saw – or rather, remembered seeing – not what she felt, but her observational powers were so acute, the distinction mattered little.
Oblong identified Wynter and Bole without difficulty, for they dominated the left-hand wall. Wynter, tall and cadaverous, wore an easy, superior look, while Bole skulked in the background, deferential, even obsequious – but, oh, how he watched. The more Oblong studied him, the more disturbed he became. In an adjacent scene the adolescent Slickstone, instantly recognisable by his modern self, wore his attributes for all to see: cleverness, intolerance, cruelty and an immutable self-belief. Bole, by contrast, remained an enigma. The other Eleusians ignored him, but he did not ignore them.
The mixing-point was there, the great tree and the monsters. On his rare appearances Morval’s twin brother, the youthful Ferensen, was always alone with Nature. She had only painted Fortemain from behind, his head lifted to the heavens, as if to protect him from later detection. He found Estella Scry, that heavy jowl no less distinctive in youth, sitting beside another Eleusian woman, as Wynter taught from a lectern. Behind, as ever, Bole watched. The dynamic felt disturbed; undercurrents were at work. Scry looked suspicious, not of Wynter, but of Bole and of the other woman.
The opposite long wall furnished a striking antidote: an undulating landscape with one season melting into the next, sections for day and night in each. Everywhere the valley’s ordinary people busied themselves with ordinary tasks, with no sign of the Manor’s inhabitants. That thought triggered another: Morval had excluded herself. He could understand why. Painting her body as it was would have been too painful.
But Oblong was wrong; she had not flinched. On the otherwise undecorated rear wall, at the base of the doorway, easy to miss, she sat in a meadow, a bag of painting materials beside her. Her mouth half open, her hands gestured towards the doorway. She looked incredulous, and in conversation, but with whom?
On the other side of the doorway, a man in ragged leather and primitive sandals occupied the same bank. Despite the luxuriant dark beard, there was no mistaking the nose and set of the forehead: Gregorius Jones! Not so far away, Wynter was conversing earnestly with a druid-like stranger. Whether his flowing robes were white with black folds or vice versa, Oblong could not be sure.
These tantalising discoveries threatened to distract him from the true purpose for his visit. He backtracked to the kitchen and followed the rear passage to the black tile, which was still dead, and the mosaic of the young Ferensen on the ceiling. On the way back, he found the recessed shelf which Gorhambury had mentioned and let out a whoop of triumph. A very early Collected Works of Shakespeare nestled among the library books. It bore a publication date of 1632, at least sixty years after Morval Seer’s imprisonment in the spider’s body. The frontispiece boasted a print of the dramatist in a splendid ruff.
Excited now, he hurried to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written some twenty years after Morval’s entangling with the spider. He did not know where the text came, just that it did; nor did he know the full context, just those two short phrases which Morval had spoken in the Ferdys’ bedroom: ‘pelting river’ and ‘murrion flock’. Connections engulfed him – the sustaining beauty of the language, achieving in words the vividness of Morval’s painting of their journey, and the chilling fact that Titania’s speech concerned the horrors of winter:
Contagious fogs; which falling on the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents . . .
. . . The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock . . .
The lines had been marked with tiny ink dots beneath the text. Here Morval Seer had maintained her sustaining contact with the English language. On recovering speech, these fragments had been her starting point. He found other passages from Finch’s note similarly marked – themes of darkness and suffering, but hope too.
Objective achieved, he hurried back to the white tile, the priceless early folio wrapped in a square of leather from one of the many larders.
‘All according to plan,’ he announced to himself as he stepped on the tile, only to emerge high on an escarpment in an unfamiliar glade of yew trees, deep in shadow and frost. Like Orelia before him, he was greeted by Gabriel and escorted in the same gruff manner by the same route to the Witan Hall. He arrived shaken by the journey’s dizzier moments but unharmed.
Once again Ferensen strode across from the huge fireplace. ‘Our pet historian, if I’m not mistaken.’ He did not shake Oblong’s hand but embraced him like a comrade-in-arms. ‘Welcome to the endgame,’ he whispered as he did so, before adding a social touch. ‘Here, Mr Oblong, the cider is usually better than the beer.’
Tankards filled, Oblong shared
all he knew, ordering the revelations according to impact. Ferensen’s early reactions mixed the humane and the pragmatic. Stricken by the death of Pomeny Tighe (‘the kindest of the three’), he treated Wynter’s lightning rise to power as inevitable. ‘He’s had centuries to prepare,’ he observed. Fanguin’s adventure with the mantoleon cheered him up. ‘Tying up its legs! He’s a chip off the old block.’
The way Ferensen looked alternately at him and the embers suggested he knew worse was to come. As delicately as he could, Oblong related the death of Fortemain.
For a time, they said nothing. Ferensen poked the fire and crossed himself.
‘When the best are lost, the ordinary must do their best,’ he said at last. ‘And is there news of my sister?’
As Oblong fumbled for words, Ferensen found a prompt. ‘You’ve a package stuffed down your jacket, Mr Oblong, and to judge from the shape it’s neither toothbrush nor nightshirt. Let’s start with that.’
‘I found it in the spiderwoman’s lair.’ Oblong showed Ferensen the Shakespeare folio, explaining how the candle of human language had kept Morval sane. ‘I shall cure her, Mr Ferensen, you have my word.’
Sometimes the correlation between the old man and Morval’s youthful beauty stretched understanding to breaking point, but at others, as now, the bond between them seemed wholly natural.
Ferensen placed a hand on Oblong’s. ‘You do that, Mr Oblong, please do. But now it’s my surprise.’ He called over Oblong’s guide, who was sitting at the Hall’s main table. ‘This is Gabriel, the best forester we have. He knows every inch of the escarpment, every tree in the valley. I sometimes think he is a tree.’
Oblong wanted to say, ‘He’s as verbally forthcoming as one!’ but restrained himself.
‘Would you kindly find our second last new arrival?’ Ferensen asked Gabriel, who disappeared without a word.
When he returned with Orelia, Oblong stumbled to his feet and opened his arms. Like writing to the bereaved, words could not do justice. ‘Oh,’ he said as they hugged each other.
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