Lord of the Hollow Dark (8 page)

“Archvicar!” Madame protested.

“I’m a pig in the sty of Epicurus,” the Archvicar confessed. “Eh, Fresca?” As if summoned, there rose up the Sicilian girl, Marina’s baby huddled asleep in her arms.

“She scarcely knows English from Mandarin,” Madame Sesostris told Marina, nodding toward Fresca. “Now shall we go into the Den? We oughtn’t to miss this rare sunshine.”

As they left the parlor, Marina glanced once more at the painting. How like! She offered to carry her baby; but Fresca, with Madame Sesostris for interpreter, declared that she had not held him long enough; so Marina laughed and submitted. At a snail’s pace, the Archvicar led them down stairs and through complex narrow corridors until they emerged from beneath an ogival arch into the policies. There were stables, and beyond them the luxuriance of the Den. What grand trees, what a wilderness of weeds and neglected shrubbery surrounding the pond at the foot of the Den!

They made their way past the stables. On a whinstone boulder sat one of those shock-headed young men who were Mr. Apollinax’s “neophytes” or “acolytes.” The boy-he could not have been more than eighteen-looked Marina up and down, with a slight grin on his lips, saying nothing.

“Good morning,” the Archvicar greeted him.

The boy did not respond, looking at Marina still, not at the rest of them.

Hobbling up close to the acolyte, the Archvicar said, distinctly and civilly, “A fine day, isn’t it, though chill?”

The boy ignored him, smirking at the ground.

“Stand up, boy!” said Archvicar Gerontion. His voice had become crisp, cutting, not to be denied. Marina wondered whether Red Beard in the painting had possessed a voice like that. The new voice was so pitiless that she trembled herself.

The young man sprang up as if he had been stabbed. “Hi,” he said, uncertainly.

“Young men better than you have been fed to dogs, in lands where I have lived,” the Archvicar remarked. “Now sit!” Gaping, Shock-head sank down again.

The Archvicar limped on, his little party following. “Those chaps and the four girls are a dazed lot.” It was his old soft voice again. “Do you suppose they talk with one another?”

They were crossing a high-arched little bridge; beneath them foamed the Fettinch Water, almost in spate from the night’s snowfall, which must have been heavier up in the mysterious hills from which the Fettinch Water came. Below the bridge, some of the burn’s water was diverted into a lade, a side channel. “That led to the old monks’ mill,” the Archvicar told them, pointing to the lade. How attentive and agreeable this old man was, except when he used that other voice of his! They labored higher up the Den, forcing their way along forgotten paths, until they arrived at two marble benches which faced toward the Lodging. Michael was awake now, but cheerful, being well bundled up.

“Take pity on an old man’s decrepitude, and sit with me here,” the Archvicar pleaded. Resting, they enjoyed a good view of the back of Balgrummo Lodging. Marina could see now that the Lodging stood upon a broad mound, doubtless steeper at the front of the house than at the back where it met the Den. To either side of them, the jagged cliffs of the Den rose up sharply. Marina could descry that the high stone dyke at the entrance to the policies stretched back, in very long graceful curves, until the walls joined with the cliffs at the mouth of the Den. It was impossible to get into the Den, or out of it, unless one passed through the pend at the front of the Lodging-unless, of course, men used ladders against the dyke; but they would have had to be very tall ladders. Still farther distant, beyond the dyke, lay the broad sinister green surface of the Fettinch Moss, and beyond that, clumps of trees. They might have been in another century, another world.

It was like being in a long quarry, Marina thought, with those sheer walls of the Den enclosing them. She looked toward the head of the Den: the Fettinch Water poured over the cliff there in a high delightful cataract, with no sign of a path leading upward. Gardeners had not pruned or planted in these policies for a long while, but the spot was lovely despite that. Her father the General had found it necessary to sell their family’s country place in Lincolnshire not long after she had been born, so that she had known only London well. She might loll here forever, listening to this strange insinuating old clergyman, quite content.

“How does one get to the top of those cliffs?” she asked, languidly.

“One doesn’t. The Den is steep and narrow naturally, and made steeper by art. They quarried here the stones for the fencible house of the Templars that stood below, and after that they quarried more stones when those buildings were enlarged into the fourteenth-century Priory of Saint Nectan, and then later the lairds of Balgrummo took still more stone from the Den to build or rebuild the Lodging that still stands. Despite this steepening by the quarrymen, some of the Earl of Morton’s infantry came down this way to storm the Lodging in 1578. So the Fourth Laird, not long after 1600, had his people skillfully cut away rock, making the Den walls quite sheer, that his enemies shouldn’t get at his back as they had got at his father’s. There’s no way in and no way out, except for the great pend at the entrance to the Lodging.”

“I’m afraid I know very little Scottish history,” Marina told him, “though I wish I did. This whole place seems so old, old, old!”

Squirming himself into a more tolerable posture on the marble seat, the Archvicar nodded amicably. “Something must have been on this site before Saint Ninian began to baptize in Scotland; perhaps something was here before Jesus of Nazareth was born. The tumulus or great mound where the Lodging stands is artificial in part, older than even the Picts; it’s no mere medieval mote-hill. And the oldest thing is
under
this site. One of the surprising features of your nightmare, Marina, is that some sort of cave or hall, with Lord knows what cunning passages and dark depths,
does
lie under the Lodging. You didn’t know that, not at all?”

She was at once frightened and fascinated. “Can we get down to it?”

“No one has been down there, my dear, since time out of mind-not since the Third Laird’s day, it’s thought. Yet...” He seemed to think better of what he had been about to say. “However that may be, we cannot be sure the Weem still exists: the roof may have fallen in, or it may be drowned in water.”

The Archvicar raised his heavy white eyebrows at Madame Sesostris, owl-like. “Can you bear the telling of the story all over again, Grizel? You’re kind. It’s a pity that Black Beauty here, our maid, so affectionately holding your baby, can’t follow my lecture. For she comes from Girgenti, in Sicily, which has its own labyrinth under the city, older than Hellas. What was, or is, under Balgrummo Lodging can’t be so wondrous as that Girgenti maze, but it’s strange enough, and as eerie. Isn’t she handsome, our Sicilian handmaid, our glossy pomegranate of a girl, Sikel and Greek and Roman and Norman and Saracen all blended in her hot blood? If only she were half so clever as she is faithful-but we mustn’t reproach her, must we, when the luscious Pomegranate soothes your baby so artfully?”

The Sicilian charmer in her ugly clothes, gently rocking the baby in her round arms, watched her master, guessing perhaps that he talked of her approvingly, her black eyes alert for any command. Marina curled her arms round her knees-the wind was coming chill down the Den now-to listen to this old man whose voice, when he wished, was like a long caress.

“When the Picts were here,” he went on, “they knew the Weem under that mound; and their carved stones, fetched up from below in medieval times and tossed into a kitchen midden, long lay in the policies here. They are in the Queen Street Museum now, gifted by the ninth Baron Balgrummo. What did those dawn-folk worship in the Weem? Did they seek to know the future? People go underground for such forbidden knowledge, as at the cave of Trophonius in Greece, and sometimes they learn more than they had desired to know. Our fine-eyed Sicilian pomegranate here, could you understand her, might tell you of the subterranean temple of the chthonian deities, beneath old Girgenti. Isn’t she shapely, the wild thing, sun-ripened?”

“Archvicar!” Madame Sesostris murmured.

“But I digress, however understandably.” The Archvicar turned up the collar of his coat against the wind. “The Romans,” he resumed, “found the Weem during their occupation here-they had a permanent camp not far distant from this spot-and it seems possible that the legionaries established a temple of Mithra there below, Mithra’s fanes always being below ground; Roman inscriptions were found in the Weem by the Third Laird, when his miners made a way into it for him. Or did the Romans take the Weem for a portal to Avernus, where no birds sing? They all went their way to dusty death.

“Some time in the Dark Ages, darkest of all here in Caledonia, Celtic Christians penetrated to the Weem and made of it a Holy Cave, having for baptismal font a flowing natural Holy Well. They left a splendid symbolically-carved sarcophagus down there in the darkness, and lesser tombs, and perhaps enlarged the place. A Celtic saint, called Nectan—probably no kin to the Pictish king of that name—is supposed to have worked miracles in the Holy Cave, so that thereafter it was called Nectan’s Weem. When was that? Why, about the sixth century, I suppose. Like a Desert Father, Nectan had infernal or purgatorial visions in his cave.

“After the Synod of Whitby, and the triumph of Latin Christianity in Scotland, Nectan’s Weem seems to have fallen into disuse: it may have been suspected of being more pagan than Christian. Near the Weem or over it, the military monks of the Temple built a commandery rather late in the history of their order. It is thought that they made a chapel of the cave, and the rumor spread, near the dissolution of the Temple, that the Templars worshipped a head or skull far below the earth.”

“Ugh!” Marina shuddered. “Whose head?”

The Archvicar gestured soothingly. “I suspect that it must have been the skull of that old obscure Saint Nectan, poor half-forgotten Pict, perhaps ornamented reverently with gold and silver, and venerated as a holy relic; but some alleged that it was the mummified head of a grand master of the Temple, worshipped rather than venerated, and invoked to prophesy. There’s no way now of learning the truth of the matter, I suppose: for the Templars were dispossessed and dispersed, and their lands passed to a little contemplative order, or sub-order, of monks less militant, called locally the Weem Fathers. Or, to speak more accurately, this site and the hills back of it and the mosses below it passed to the contemplatives; the crown took for itself the more arable lands of the Temple.”

“
Lei
!” said the black-haired maid to the Archvicar, laying her long fingers on his arm. “Lei!” She was pointing upward to the brae above the northern cliffs of the Den.

Someone was walking there, Marina made out-a man with a rucksack on his back, it seemed. He was distant and dim, but he picked his way along the very lip of the quarrylike wall, as if seeking a path downward. The Archvicar was saying something in Italian to the Sicilian pomegranate.

“I do believe that man means to join us,” Madame Sesostris observed.

“He sha’n’t.” The Archvicar struggled up to observe the walker. “These eyes of mine! I see nobody at all. But you may be sure that he’ll not find a way down. One reason why Apollinax chose the Lodging for this conference is that nobody can enter the policies, or leave them, except through the pend.”

“Doesn’t anybody ever come down from those hills?” They were so near to a great city, Marina thought, and yet so cut off from everything distracting and disturbing.

The Archvicar had settled himself back upon the bench. “Two burglars-or miners given to burgling when unemployed—came down perhaps twenty years ago, in the last Lord’s time. They knew something of rock-climbing, and used ropes, leaving a confederate up near the waterfall.”

“What a dangerous thing to do!” Marina imagined herself dangling on one of those cliffs by the waterfall. The man with the rucksack, she noticed, had vanished from sight; probably he had given up the foolish notion of descending into the Den.

“So they found, I believe,” said the Archvicar. “They never were seen again.”

“Never
seen
again? Do you mean that they fell and were killed?”

“There were no bodies found anywhere in the Lodging or the policies,” the Archvicar explained, “but the burglars never returned to their ropes. Their confederate heard someone-not his friends-laughing down below in the Den, and ran away. Later he told the police about their disappearance, saying his friends had been only ‘having a look round.’”

“Could they have fallen into this little river?”

“The official theory was that they must have got over that tremendous ashlar dyke, some distance from the pend-one side or the other from it. But if they did clamber over the dyke somewhere, why did they never return to their wives or even their favorite pub?”

“You know so much about this house, Archvicar!”

“I was often here when I was a young man, a university student,” the Archvicar offered, blandly. “Now let me see: what was I telling you about Scots history before that hill-walker diverted us?”

“About the contemplative monks who succeeded the Templars here, those Weem Fathers.”

“Ah, quite. I wasn’t boring you? Well, then, the monks patched up the Templars’ buildings, and enlarged them-that massive tower above the northern portion of the Lodging is said to be the chief remnant of the Templars’ work-and established the Priory of Saint Nectan. Rather quietly, they revived the old Celtic cult of that holy man from the shadowy beginning of things. Beneath the Priory, it became known, was the Weem in which the half-forgotten Nectan had glimpsed Purgatory. Or was it quite what we would call Purgatory? The medieval line of demarcation between Purgatory and Hell was ill-defined. And many Scots seem to have believed that just above Hell lay the Kingdom of the Fairies-which every seven years must pay its teinds to Hell. Rather discreetly, the monks let it be understood that others possibly might behold in the Weem what Nectan had beheld. Indeed, there might be visions of one’s future at the foot of the splendid carven stair, six ells broad, which led into the Weem. It was all rather like the better-known Purgatory of the famous Saint Patrick, at Lough Derg, in Ireland.”