A Secret Alchemy (4 page)

“Yes, English Heritage have just taken it over, Lionel says. It should be very fine when they’ve finished. All that Art Deco, and
Edward IV’s Great Hall. Pity they wouldn’t be interested in the Chantry, with so little of the chapel left.” She laughs. “Maybe we should blame Hitler for demolishing that and only leaving the house. That’s in a bad state, too, now. I think you’ll be pretty horrified. Do help yourself to more wine.”

As we eat, I ask after Fay, Izzy’s daughter. Her husband works for Shell. Izzy shakes her head, puzzled almost to the point of disapproving. “She hates Bogotá, but other than that she seems quite happy drifting along in his wake. I think she does occasionally use her anthropology degree, but only as a hobby.” She reaches behind her to take a postcard down that’s stuck on the fridge. It’s of a tapestry of some sort, with brilliantly colored squared-off people:
The Marriage of the Sun and Moon
, according to the back. “Her father was out there, and they went up into the Highlands, looking for folk traditions. This was from some little local museum. He rang me, said she’s fine.” Izzy and Paul divorced years ago, and though there was another woman involved, I got the feeling she was a symptom more than a cause; she’s certainly not on the scene now. Izzy went back to calling herself Isode Butler, as she always had for work.

We’ve finished the wine rather quickly, and the jet-lag fog’s creeping over me again. “You said there are things for me to sign, to do with selling the Chantry?”

“Lionel’s got all the documents, though there’s some complication with his share of the freehold so he may not have them ready yet after all. Apparently he passed it on to Fergus: some tax advantage if you give things to your children. It may all have to go off to him—to Fergus, I mean.”

“How is Fergus?” I ask, getting up. “I’m sorry, I’m horribly jetlagged. I’d better go home before I fall asleep.”

“Of course, poor you. He went up north after he’d finished his sculpture master’s. Goodness knows why—you’d think once you’d been at the Royal College you’d want to stay in London. Somewhere near York, I think. His girlfriend came from up there, but they’ve just split up. When did you say you’re seeing Lionel?”

“Day after tomorrow. He’s invited me for the night.”

“That’s good. We should be able to get going, then. I’ve done my best with the archive, but what with the stuff I’ve got, and what’s still at the Chantry, and a bunch of the Press accounts books and records lodged at Saint Bride’s Printing Library, it’s all a bit of a muddle. I’m spending this week sorting it out before it goes to California. Doing an inventory and so on. When do you go back?”

“A week tomorrow, I couldn’t manage to get away for longer. It should be enough, if Lionel’s got ready the things he needs me to sign. And…apart from catching up with you and Lionel and Uncle Gareth, I don’t want to linger over—over all the sorting out.”

“I know.” She kisses me. “Dear Una, it’s so good to see you, and looking so well all—all things considered.”

“Yes” is all I say, but again she hears what I haven’t said.

“Poor old Una. I’m sorry. It’ll take a while, Adam and all. Especially…Well, he was so
right
for you. I used to envy you, it all coming right in the end.”

I know what she means. Funny how fifteen years of, well, unsatisfactory relationships can come so right, so quickly. It occurs to me that Izzy’s own married life worked in reverse—a good-looking marriage that wasn’t so good after all—and for all my grief I suddenly don’t envy her that, but I don’t quite know how to say it. She was always the one who did things well. I was the little sister who didn’t know how to go about doing the same.

“I know how busy you are,” Izzy’s saying, “but I hope we can meet this week? Go out for a drink or something? How are you getting home?”

“I came by tube, but I thought I’d get a cab back. Will there be enough black cabs around for me to hail one?”

“I don’t know.” Perhaps black cabs are a luxury she can’t usually afford. But she produces a mini-cab number, and after the usual awkward wait for it to arrive, I clamber in and am driven away.

Jet lag loosens the moorings of your everyday mind. I’m thinking about the ruins that are all I’ve ever known of the chapel at the Chantry, the thick stumps of flint and stubby buttresses that were once walls; the tarry beams and props supporting the wall of the house that once joined it; the tiled floor, with the white harts and fleurs-de-lis still visible, though the grass creeps over them. Once I dug some tiles up in search of buried treasure, and found only earth and worms.

In that memory the tiles are quite big so I must have been small. I imagined a ruby or a diamond or a gold ducat tucked under each one, mine for the finding, though I didn’t know what a ducat looked like. I prized up one tile after another with a palette knife I’d borrowed from the studio without asking, scattering white harts and fleurs-de-lis about me and scrabbling in the earth beneath, and I thought about how I would share out the treasure when I found it. Lots of ducats for Aunt Elaine, so she could have a washing machine in the kitchen instead of the washhouse copper in the outhouse, and some of the rubies and diamonds for Izzy to wear with her best frocks, and a few ducats for Lionel, because he wanted a camera of his own so much, and all the rest of everything for me so that I could buy my ticket to go on a big ship and a fast train across America to find my father’s pictures and bring them home.

Uncle Gareth found me as I was trying not to despair. “Oh, Una, Una,” he said. “Did you have to do that?” I must have said I was looking for treasure, because he took out his hanky, which always smelled of the workshop, and wiped the earth and the tears off my face and said he understood, he’d always wondered if the monks had left any treasure, when he was my age. But monks didn’t have treasure; they took vows of poverty. Or if they
were
given any, they spent it on helping people, or making the chapel beautiful, just the way Grandpapa had, so I mustn’t spoil it by digging things up.

“But I need the treasure!” I said, and told him what I needed it for.

Uncle Gareth scooped me onto his lap, and didn’t say anything for a long time. “I know,” he said at last. “Poor old thing. I understand. I miss him too, you know. Very much.”

“Will I ever see his pictures?”

“I’m sure you will, old girl. But they’re very grand—very special pictures—and they’re safe in San Francisco in a big gallery. One day we’ll go and find them, shall we?” Even Uncle Gareth’s smell made me know he meant it, and we would go. “One day, when you’re older. And when we dock in New York, we’ll ride up and down in the lifts in the Empire State Building.”

He gave me another hug, and helped me put the tiles back so that no one would know what I’d done, and then asked if I’d help him with a very important job in the workshop. So that by the time Aunt Elaine came looking for me to give me my supper, I was covered in oil and ink and the glory of having put the Chandler & Price press back together all by myself, with only a little help from Uncle Gareth, he said, and only with the hardest bits.

Even in the Chantry house you couldn’t help thinking there was something more in the world under your feet. The thick smell of damp, stone, and earth when you first went down to the undercroft beneath the house seemed to breathe it, as if the dark was older and fuller of history, even, than the stones of the walls all round you: as old as the earth itself.

Actually, the walls of the undercroft were only as old as Grandpapa. I knew because he’d told me: he’d made the undercroft when he built the house. And when they dug it out, he said, he found a beer bottle from the Great Exhibition, and a coin from the American War of Independence, and lots of those clay pipes with long thin stems, and bits of blue-and-white china from the days of Queen Anne, like in
The Tailor of Gloucester
. He had to put the stones in to keep the earth back and build the house above it. But maybe if he’d dug more, he said, he’d have found a gold cross and candlesticks. Maybe a statue of Mary and baby Jesus that the monks had buried in a hurry to keep them safe from King Henry’s soldiers. Maybe silver coins or jewels, or secret maps of treasure islands and magical rivers, or goblins’ teeth, or the bones of other monks from even longer ago, when the chapel was new and everyone believed. I wouldn’t mind the bones if Mark was there, I thought but didn’t say, or the goblins. He and I could tunnel deep enough, long enough, for a year and a day, through thirteen waxes and thirteen wanings of the moon. And there’d be an underground river, and I’d use seven of the monks’ gold coins to pay the ferryman, and when we landed we’d walk down an aisle like a church’s, and there’d be another undercroft, like this one only much, much bigger, wide with pillars as tall as trees, a hall so high you could hardly see the roof. There’d be a great fire in the middle, the light leaping and licking into every corner so there was no
dark left. Lying around it on bearskins and piles of silvery straw, with their swords and their armor shining in the firelight, would be the knights. And with them, on a bed made of ivory and gold like an altar and heaped with furs and silks, would lie King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, hand in hand, waiting to be woken.

All the way home in the stale-air-and-diesel grumbling of the mini-cab I think of Adam, because that’s what I do when I’m too tired to stop myself, though what I think of is nothing I could draw, or speak of, or write about. I can’t hear his voice or feel his touch, but what fills me is too real, too whole, to call memory or even remembrance.

The mini-cab drops me at my front door in Narrow Street, and all is quiet. But if it’s late enough, if the fog’s closing in, if you’re sad enough, jet lag makes you hallucinate. When I walk into the sitting room, I see a figure standing by the window, looking out over the dark water. I dig my fingernails into my arm to wake myself up, and walk forward. He’s not there.

It isn’t Adam who’s not there, though. It’s Mark.

Antony—Matins

I do not sleep so well, these days, and wake early. This
morning I stood watching the sun rise over the Fosse and Sheriff Hutton village, and listening to more noise of business from below than I have been accustomed to hear so early in these long days.

When the sun had risen in all its blind glory, I turned away.

It is said that a chamber such as this is all that the soul requires. Four paces wide, and six deep. It is the same at both sides, I know, for I have measured them. Four well-made walls of pale gray stone,
a high window to admit God’s light and air, the timber under my feet and above me as straight and seasoned as the door.

My old friend Mallorie, and the Duke of Orleans: it was enough for them. They even wrote great works in their imprisonment. Is it enough for me? Here I have all that a man’s body requires: food, shelter, clothes. The sun and the moon shed light for me, and I have my book of hours. I would I had Cicero or Boccaccio, or better yet Boethius in my hand, but perhaps to have them in my head and heart—as I do—is enough.

I have my rosary, and I have that which I could not have hoped for: the Jason ring. I pray that Louis is safe, and have some hope of it, for he, of all men, will know how to slip through Richard of Gloucester’s net. It were no true love that could wish him prisoned, but such is my love that even as I thank God he is not, my heart aches with wishing that he were with me.

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” Mal used to say, when we children pestered her to bring us fairings from the market: gilt gingerbread, whip-tops, ballads, ribbons for the girls. I said it, in my turn, to Ned, for even the wishes of a prince may not be granted if I, his uncle and guardian, say them nay for the good of the kingdom, or his soul. Ned is not held thus, is he? A child of twelve summers: Edward, Prince of Wales, but not yet a man to offer them any threat. Can it be God’s will to hurt such a good, such an innocent prince? I will not believe it. Ned is no enemy to Richard of Gloucester. He has Ned close, and thus has no cause to do him greater harm. I know it to be true—I
know
it to be true.

And yet my spirit requires a consolation I cannot have.

To face all that Fortune brings with steadiness and faith is the highest virtue a man may seek, whether he be the meanest or the most worshipful in the world. That is what the philosophers say,
and what I have written many times. When I was first taken, I thought they would make away with me privily. I feared that I would not know the hour of my death, so I tried to keep my soul in readiness for the end.

Each time I heard the bolts drawn back I would pray,
Deo, in manus tuas
. It was weeks before I realized that it would not be thus. For an hour or two I hoped. And then I understood that I would still die, and that it no longer mattered if it were known, for there was no man with the power or the will to protest, or to do Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester, harm in revenge.

And now I know the hour of my death. We ride today from Sheriff Hutton, south and west, to the great castle at Pontefract, and there, on the morrow, I am to die.

I have made my will. I shall not see Louis again in this world. There is nothing left to me, either of duty, or of love, except for God.

When there is nothing left, there is always prayer.

Beyond the door I hear the sharp stamp and clatter of men called to attention. The bolts are drawn back, and the well-oiled lock turns like Fortune’s wheel.

Antony—Prime

This midsummer dawn is so early that the world seems
barely to have slept. I pull on my gloves, for my hands are still cold: the leather presses the Jason ring into my skin as if Louis himself touches me. Even the horses, dozing in the chill mist, hang their heads as if exhausted, with none of the scuffles and nips that horses do, as men do, to find out who is master this morning. It is sixty miles to Pontefract. We will ride it in one of these days, almost without end, that are bringing me so swiftly to my own.

The Constable has given me his word that at Pontefract lie Elysabeth’s boy Richard Grey, and my cousin Haute, and good old Vaughan. They were taken because they were doing their duty, and under my command. God send that I am allowed to see them. God send them courage.

When most of the men are horsed and ranged about me, I mount too. They are never insolent, rarely even surly, yet I feel their presence about me as I would a steel chain. The Constable has a pouch of dispatches for Anderson, who commands the troop; they say a few words.

It is the horses as ever who know before we do that the time has come. They are suddenly alert, shifting and tossing their heads; then orders are spoken, the dark bulk of the main gate cracks open, and we ride over the drawbridge and through the bailey, on to the open road.

I look about, for we were muffled in darkness when they brought me to Sheriff Hutton, and I have not been in this country for many years, though once I reconnoitered it as carefully as any commander must. It is flat, quiet land, seamed with innumerable streams that the men call becks. Could it be—could one of my crazed hopes be granted—that deep in the trees I shall see a shadow that is Louis? I must not hope it, for neither safety nor fortune can come to him here in Richard of Gloucester’s country. Ahead the forest begins, and the warming sun breathes the smell of pines toward us, above the peat-scented mist that lies over the marsh and breaks into wisps about the horses’ legs. The road lifts to a bridge over the Fosse itself where Whitecarr Beck joins it, and as we clatter across, a heron turns its head to gauge this new threat, then shakes out its wings and, with a few quick steps, rises into the air.

The body has its own memory. My left hand shortens the reins before my mind knows it, and my right arm aches with remembering the shift and grip of my goshawk’s weight. She was big, even for a goshawk, and her name was Juno. When she bated on her block in the mews, her wings were the best part of four feet from primary to primary, and my care for her, that summer, was
such that any day I could have told her weight down to the nearest ounce and grain. “Goshawks are delicate,” Wat the austringer would say. “They’ll not take much lightening, but if you overfeed her by so much as a fieldmouse, Master Antony, she’ll rake away and never come back.” My belly would quake at the thought of losing her. Even now I remember the steely blue-gray gloss of her back as if I could touch it, the soft, white-speckled chest-feathers that she would let me rub when her mood was good, her long, strong legs that took possession of my fist like a conqueror.

“She sees every feather of that heron,” Wat said, “even your young eyes, master, they’re nothing to hers. Now, gently off with her hood. Let her see it first. You’ll feel when she wants to fly.” I unhooded her and unknotted her leash, and she shifted her talons, loosing her wings at the shoulder as if she readied her sword in its scabbard. She turned her black-capped head, her gaze fixing on each part of her new surroundings in turn, like a bowman on guard duty.

My father sat still on his horse in the water-meadow’s morning light, and Wat nodded to me as the heron’s flight steadied, high above and before us. I did my best to throw Juno into the air. My arm was puny against the weight and power of her surge and my hand clenched tighter before I realized and opened it to let the jesses go.

Up she rose, not in pursuit but surveying the ground; the sun was behind us as we watched. Then, after what seemed little more than a breath, she fixed on the heron and went after it.

I was a boy then, twelve years old and home for the harvest. Home, perhaps, for good. Only the night before my father had declared it more fitting that I be brought up in my own inheritance than in that of another.

But of him I dare not think.

The eye of my mind can still see how the birds flew, raptor and prey, Juno streaming after the heron, the heron’s steady wing-beats quickening at some sign or sound of danger that we humans could not read, thrusting through the air. But Juno had more speed and soon was close enough to rise up high above her prey, and pause for a moment of suspended time, before stooping like some sleek and taloned cannonball. Down and down she stooped, and the heron tried to twist and double back, its head weaving, its great wings clumsy in such unaccustomed need. Then Juno reached forward and, with a surge of power, seized the heron’s neck and bore it, struggling, to the ground among the reeds. All we could see was a puff of feathers floating downwards against the sky.

By the time we cantered up, Juno had killed the heron and was beginning to plume it. Wat walked forward and took her off, at which she bated angrily before she would jump to my fist and be hooded. Wat gave the heron to one of the men who, with a flick of his fingers, tied its feet and slung it on his belt.

“She must think she deserves it,” I said.

“She does, son,” said my father. “But if she eats it, where’s our dinner? And she’ll not be hungry for more, and will not hunt for us. Or she will eat her feed as well, and sicken.”

“Sire, do you think I would feed her back at the mews, if I knew she’d had so much in the field? Wat has taught me better than that.”

“No, I know you would not. But she’s wild, don’t forget. She’s not a dog, or a man. You cannot teach her loyalty. She has none, and she’s no use for yours. You are not her liege lord, nor she your servant to command. She will not work for you now in the hope or certainty of favors or protection later. All she knows is that today she was hungry, and we helped her to her food. Tomorrow? Who knows?”

He was silent, looking over his land—so carefully manured and tilled, coppiced and drained, as it was by his order and with his overseeing—as if it, too, might be lost to him on the morrow.

Then he shortened his reins. “Come, son. Perhaps we can put up a hare and give the dogs some sport.”

In the forest insects hang where the sun’s streams warm the air; as we ride through they dart and nip. The horses toss their heads and snort to shake them off, but we trot too fast for all but the biggest flies to stay with us. How it will be when the horses are weary, I do not know. The marshes north of York are low-lying, and agueish even in winter; on a hot summer’s day they swarm with gnats and midges.

“Captain Anderson?”

“My lord?”

“Where do we change horses? Or do we not?”

“I have not yet decided.”

I know what I would order in such a case, but this journey is not mine to command. After a moment Anderson says, “Have no fear, my lord, it is provided for, as are all matters to do with the security and good ordering of His Grace’s affairs.”

“I have no doubt,” I say, and indeed I have none. Richard of Gloucester has ever been thus, and thus he commands the allegiance of men as much as does his royal blood and the confidence of his brother whom I have learned to call
the late
King Edward. Have I not made Richard the chief executor of my will, though he be my captor and my enemy even to death?

Men are not hawks: we have allegiances. It is our nature and our safety, for no man is so strong that he has no need of other men, as liege lord or servant, as confessor or Father or server at
the Mass. Then there are those men who become companions by chance or design, whose friendship knows little of command or obeisance, at least till their own allegiances drag them apart. Nor can one who has sisters such as Elysabeth and Margaret, or a mother such as ours, disdain even the companionship of women, though I never found it in my first wife. She was all that is commonly looked for in a wife, but we were not well matched. In my second marriage I had hoped to make amends for my fault in the first. That I failed in love for Mary too, and now have failed in guarding even her bodily safety, is not the least of the things for which I must pray forgiveness.

I have no hope for myself, not for this world, though I hope for forgiveness in the next. Only one small flicker, like a dancing insect, will not quite leave me. Louis may yet be at liberty, and no man is more cunning in dangerous times. This tiny hope should comfort me, and it does. Yet still I fear for him. When there is so much awry among the rulers of the realm, so many secrets that threaten so many men of power and mettle, even one such as Louis may take one step too many in the shadowy world he knows so well, for my sake and for Ned’s. Perhaps even now he is fled to Burgundy or his own Gascon lands. Perhaps he has even been taken.

But that I cannot believe easily: he is too clever for that. And if he is fled…it will be from policy, not fear. I comfort myself with knowing that our love has reached further than this, in its time, and endured. I will believe that it endures still, and forever.

The country now about us is more open, and to the east, through the mist, burns the sun. We ride west, and I may not yield to my desire to turn aside and seek the light. I long for it, even as lovers’ souls are drawn to the moon though clouds shadow it. And thus, too, are pilgrims’ souls drawn through incense smoke to the
great candles of the shrine, where they may at last hope to touch God. My soul is as weary as a pilgrim’s. This day, I must believe, is my final earthly pilgrimage, though none can know what will be asked of his soul on the other side of death.

Una—Tuesday

When I turn into the drive from Sparrow’s Lane, I see that
the Chantry window-frames are peeling a little more, and some slates on the roof of the front porch—the pilgrim’s porch—have slipped. Higher up, one window has a flag of Che Guevara caught at the top for a curtain; another has underwear and a pair of gym shoes on the sill. But the bulk of the house looks exactly as it always has: broad and solid in rose-colored brick, gabled and windowed with deliberate plainness. It was grafted onto the medieval chantry chapel, and my post-Victorian grandfather would have no vulgar improving and reworking of what he’d fallen in love with: the true, pure Gothic of pointed arches, hammer beams, and tracery like stone lace. I don’t remember the chapel, only the ruins, and they haven’t changed. There are the stumps of the flint walls, now lapped with rank grass so that the tiles are invisible, the tarry pit-props and rusting bolts that hold up the end wall of the house, which was never built to stand on its own.

Here and there I can see rubbish: a rotting sack, beer bottles, cigarette butts. Beyond the bulk of the house, across the garden, is the workshop, long and low and rose-pink too, built to house presses and storerooms and binding machines, and all the paraphernalia of such an ancient trade and craft. It rained last night, and there’s a smell of apple trees and earth and even, faintly, of the
spindly roses that somehow still straggle up from their beds and through the suffocating grass.

My memories are almost suffocating, too. It had just stopped raining the day Mark came to the Chantry, I remember, and the garden smells were so thick I could almost see them. I was sitting at the front of the house, in the pilgrim’s porch, looking at the wreck of my dolls’ banquet. Bertie-the-beagle-next-door hadn’t wanted to be a noble charger after all—at least not when I tried to wedge Golly’s feet into his collar to ride him and be the King’s Coronation Champion. Even Smokey Bear had been knocked flying when Bertie escaped.

I heard a scrunch on the gravel: a boy a bit bigger than Lionel was pushing his bike up the drive. It wasn’t the butcher’s or the baker’s, and he didn’t have a telegraph boy’s uniform on.

He cleared his throat hard. “Excuse me, miss. Could you tell me the way to the Solmani Press?”

I jumped down from the bench, picked up Smokey Bear from the puddle he was lying in, and sat him in the sun to dry. This was interesting. “I’ll show you.”

Visitors came to the pilgrim’s porch and jangled the big front-door bell, and tradesmen jogged down the path along the side of the house to the back door and knocked. Family went in and out of any door that wasn’t locked, and we children climbed through the windows as often as not. I wasn’t sure what to do with this boy, but I knew it would be rude to ask what he was. So instead I said, “Are you looking for Uncle Gareth?”

“Is that G. Pryor Esquire?” He had a local voice, and his clothes were shabby like Lionel’s but not mended, and a bit too big the way mine were because they’d been Izzy’s first, and sometimes Lionel’s too.

“Yes.” I suddenly realized. “Are you the advertisement?”

Willing boy wanted for general duties
, Uncle Gareth had written on the card he put in the window of the newspaper shop.
Must be conscientious and hardworking. 5s. per week plus dinner, rising to 10s. after 3 months’ trial. Half day Saturday. Apply to G. Pryor Esq., The Solmani Press, The Chantry, Sparrow’s Lane, New Eltham
.

“Yes.” He bent, still holding his bike, picked up my golliwog and smoothed his hair where Bertie had chewed it. “This yours?” I nodded. Golly was still a bit slobbery, but not so bad that Aunt Elaine would notice and want to wash him. I didn’t like it when Golly smelled of soap. “Can you show us the way?” the boy said. “Don’t want to be late.”

“Of course,” I said. But I still didn’t know what to do with him. In the end I took him the other way, across the garden.

He looked up at the broken walls I used to think were like the wreck of a ship. “Was that a church?” he said, in a church voice. None of us family went to church, but Aunt Elaine used to let Annie who helped in the house take me to the children’s ser vice sometimes, when she went with her little brothers. I quite liked it, especially the singing. No one sang at home. Uncle Robert said it was because none of us could do anything except croak.