The Maker of Swans

by Paraic O’Donnell

  Mr Crowe looks on in amusement. ‘Opera glasses, eh? You are off to see La bohème, then? If I’d known it was such a trifling thing you were after, I should hardly have put you to all that trouble.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be so monstrous,’ says Arabella. ‘Let the poor child go, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Yes, you’re quite right,’ he says. ‘I did promise, didn’t I? Off you go, Clara, darling. Enjoy them with my blessing. They belonged, at one time, to Aubrey Beardsley, of all people. A gift, no doubt, from some besotted dandy. But I am wandering again. Pay no attention.’

  Clara hurries out, clutching the glasses distrustfully. As she closes the doors behind her, she hears Mr Crowe’s voice. He is reading what she has just written down, the words of Prospero’s speech. There is something in his tone that she does not quite recognise.

  She does not stay to listen. She is on her way, already, to a place in the upper part of the house. It is a place that only Clara knows about, and she has begun to keep things there. They are small items, for the most part, but each has a particular value or special purpose. Soon, perhaps, she will have to hide even her music box there, though she has always kept it near her. She can think of nowhere else now. It is the only safe place left.

  Seven

  At first, Eustace was not certain it was him. He appeared at the far end of the street, having rounded the corner, and stood for a moment in the gown of decaying light that hung beneath a street lamp. Eustace had been sitting in the Jaguar for some time, and the windscreen was blotted with rain. He squinted down the street, but the man had passed into the shadows, emerging only when he came to the next lamp post, this one about fifty feet away. Here he paused again. He wore a battered hat and a dark, rather shapeless raincoat. It was only when he raised his black umbrella – lifting it high above his head, as if to make himself unmistakable – that Eustace was sure.

  He got out and crossed to the other side of the street. It lay almost entirely in the shadow of a disused railway viaduct, whose great arches had long since been bricked up. Some were featureless and vacant, while others had been occupied by obscure businesses or put to use as lock-ups.

  ‘Would it be entirely too much to ask, Elias Cromer, that you establish yourself in a part of town where the cab drivers do not refuse to stop?’

  Cromer touched the brim of his hat. ‘A pleasure to see you too, Eustace. I am fortunate, you see, in that I need open these premises only to those I choose, to old friends like yourself who do not depend upon the whims of cab drivers. A moment, please. My keys, as ever, have migrated to some region of my person where I have no recollection of placing them. Ah, here now.’

  He busied himself at a large and forbidding door set into one of the bricked-up arches. It was drab and unmarked, but made of heavy steel and fitted with at least three locks. When Cromer turned the key in the last of these, it swung inwards with a low and resonant throb. He used his shoulder to push it closed again once they were inside.

  Cromer flicked a number of switches. The lock-up, in the meagre light that resulted, was cavernous and oppressive. Though it was clearly of considerable size, it was filled almost to its entire extent by towering bookcases, like those of a library’s stacks. Only the narrowest of passageways had been left between each row of shelves, and they rose in height at the centre so as to almost touch the highest part of the vaulted ceiling.

  These were nothing like the ornate and burnished shelves that lined Mr Crowe’s library. They were of sturdy metal construction and were painted a dull grey that conceded nothing to elegance. Few of the volumes they contained were even visible, since a heavy veil of some oilcloth-like material hung over the face of each bookcase. These huge and sombre curtains swayed almost imperceptibly in whatever small currents stirred the sepulchral air. From somewhere beyond the shelves came the indistinct thrum of a machine of some kind. It was used, Eustace guessed, to draw moisture from the atmosphere, which had none of the dampness that might be expected of such a place.

  ‘It seems cheerier, somehow, than I remembered,’ Eustace said. ‘You have undertaken some renovations?’

  Cromer smiled blandly. ‘I should think of it, perhaps. At some establishments, I understand, one is offered all manner of inducements. A comfortable armchair by the fire. A cup of tea and a bun. That sort of thing.’

  ‘You told me something once,’ said Eustace. ‘A man’s arse, you said, is not an organ of learning.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ Cromer smiled at the thought. ‘It was crudely put. But it is true, is it not? You did not come by your own wisdom while at leisure, as I recall. But come, this place is not entirely without comforts. There is whisky in the office, and the heater can usually be made to function.’

  Eustace followed him along a passageway that ran between the rightmost of the stacks and the bare brick wall of the lock-up. It was no wider than any of the others, and it benefited least from the dim and sulphurous light. As he shuffled ahead, still wearing his black hat and raincoat, Cromer was all but absorbed by the gloom.

  At the end of the passageway, a small office stood in a kind of clearing, an area perhaps as large as a railway station waiting room that had been kept free of bookcases. Here, Cromer dredged his pockets for yet another set of keys. When he had located them, and had undone the two further locks that secured the office, he showed Eustace in to the cramped and plainly furnished interior.

  ‘I would offer to take your coat,’ Cromer said. ‘But you may prefer to keep it on for now. This contraption, I’m afraid, can be somewhat capricious.’

  He worried at the controls of a gas heater until he succeeded, after two or three minutes, in eliciting a spark. This ignited three panels, which blossomed with a feeble, apricot-coloured incandescence but produced no discernible heat. Eustace sat on the hard, plastic chair to which Cromer had directed him and pulled his coat more closely about him.

  Taking his own seat on the other side of a modest desk, Cromer rummaged in a drawer for a considerable time before producing a bottle. ‘You will join me in a drink? It is a reasonable Scotch, but blended, I fear. I am no connoisseur of such things. It may warm you somewhat, if nothing else.’

  Eustace declined with a brief elevation of his hand.

  ‘No? Well, forgive me if I take some little sustenance myself. You have brought me out on a rather inclement evening, and the resilience of my youth has begun to desert me.’

  ‘An imposition I regret, Elias. In normal circumstances, I would not have dreamed of putting you to such trouble.’

  Cromer sipped his whisky and sat back a little, depositing his hat on the desk, where it obscured a hulking telephone. ‘Think nothing of it,’ he said. ‘I gather, from your telegram, that the serenity of your great household has been disturbed.’

  Eustace studied Cromer’s face for a moment before replying. ‘From my telegram?’ he said. ‘I made mention of it, yes, but you are nothing if not thorough, Elias. I suspect there is little you do not know of recent occurrences at my master’s house.’

  Cromer opened his palms and joined them again above his chest. ‘He was my master once, remember. Some news has reached me, of course, but you know as well as I do how stories are told. Some fraction, always, is altered or withheld. Someone, you may be sure, has adulterated the liquor, has had his thumb on the scales.’

  Eustace nodded. ‘True enough. We are not chicks in the nest. We do not take every morsel we are offered. But what of my own account, Elias? Surely it is no more to be trusted than any other?’

  Cromer drained his whisky and refilled it. ‘I have known you a long time, Eustace. And the duties that are yours now were once mine. I know a little of your position, my friend, and you have good reason, I think, to be frank with me.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Eustace said. ‘And I have no aptitude for storytelling. I will tell you what took place, that is all. And I will place my trust in you, Elias. You left Mr Crowe’s service in good standing, and he remembers you with fondness.’

 
; ‘When he remembers me at all,’ said Cromer. ‘But I am glad to have your confidence, Eustace. If it is within my power to aid you, I will do so.’

  Eustace gave a deep sigh and stared for a long while into the gas heater’s dismal and sputtering patch of radiance.

  ‘Very well,’ he said at last. ‘I break no confidence, Elias, when I tell you that Mr Crowe has not for some time resembled the man we have both known. It has been years, as you know, since he worked in earnest on anything. His services, it seems, are not wanted as they once were.’

  Cromer hollowed his cheeks as he considered this. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps Mr Crowe no longer has need of the rewards.’

  Eustace shook his head. ‘It was never that,’ he said. ‘It was never the money. You remember how he was, Elias. He delighted in it, always, the thing that was peculiarly his, but when the great and the good were not seeking it out and enriching him for it, he gave it away to whom he would. You know some of the great works that were secretly of his making. They are among those shrouded on your shelves, I imagine. But he has seen fit to lend his pen to others too, to those without the means to pay the going rate. I never quite knew his reasons.

  ‘Whatever it was that moved him, it has not done so lately. He was never a man to turn away from pleasure, if it was within arm’s length, I do not pretend that. But when it was not before him, he was apt not to think of it. I have seen him go a week without so much as calling for a bottle.

  ‘But he has changed. Whatever force it was that kept him, for all those years, from being consumed by the temptations that surrounded him, it has weakened. He sees no reason, now, why he should not devote himself to pleasure for every hour that he is awake.’

  Cromer nodded at this, but rather absently. He tapped the side of his glass with a fingernail, as if thinking of something else.

  ‘I am not wandering, Elias,’ Eustace told him. ‘This may seem a digression to you, and perhaps it is nothing that you do not know. If the truth be known, I am trying to account for it all in my own mind, for the decline that has led us to this. I have asked myself if it might have been halted by some word or action of mine.’

  ‘What could you have done, Eustace? No one has been more faithful than you, but he takes instruction from no one. That much I remember.’

  ‘You do not judge me harshly out of kindness, but I am not so sure. Still, it is idle to think of these things. I can change none of it now.’

  Eustace broke off, staring for some minutes into the glow of the gas fire before resuming.

  ‘Well, then,’ he said at last. ‘I must come to the incident itself, and to the events that gave rise to it. He returned late from an evening out, which is by no means out of character. He was in the company of a woman, a singer of some kind. She has had some training, I gather, but now performs at certain nightclubs. That too is unremarkable. Such are his amusements now.

  ‘The woman was not married, but she had – we learned this afterwards – an attachment, let us say. She did not trouble herself much with the sanctity of this bond, of course, and nor did Mr Crowe. The young man in question, however, was rather more ardent in his feelings.’

  Cromer raised his eyebrows. ‘He rebuked her in a letter?’

  ‘Do not tease me, Elias. You know the matter is grave. No, the young man followed her – followed them both – to the Estate. There was a confrontation in the avenue.’

  ‘There was nothing that could be done to restrain them?’

  ‘Perhaps there was. It was late. I knew nothing of what had occurred until I heard the shots from my bed.’

  ‘Ah. Un crime passionnel.’

  ‘Nothing so vulgar. He may be in decline, Elias, but he is not a hack. He was provoked, yes, and it is true that he acted intemperately. The young man raised his hand to the woman, you see. Mr Crowe’s response exposed a want of caution, perhaps, but we may hardly condemn his instinct.’

  ‘But he went too far?’

  ‘Too far,’ Eustace repeated the words with a small breath of weariness. ‘It is one way of saying it, I suppose. You know what he is capable of, Elias, and why it is that people seek him out. It is no small matter, after all, to create something, to make it so only by setting down the words. We forget the magnitude, sometimes, of that miracle. I think, sometimes, that he forgets it himself. It comes too easily to him.’

  ‘Easy come, easy go,’ said Cromer.

  Eustace hesitated. ‘But it is more than that, sometimes. I have seen it on a few occasions, as you have yourself. He goes further, when he is greatly roused. Beyond the page, I mean.’

  ‘I have seen it,’ said Cromer quietly.

  ‘But how, Elias? Was it always so with him?’

  ‘For as long as I knew him. But not always, I think. That ability was something he came by.’

  ‘Came by? How?’

  A moth had been drawn to a lamp on the desk, and they both fell silent for a time, watching as its urgent tatters looped from the darker air to be beaten back, again and again, by the bulb’s unbearable surface.

  Cromer set his head on one side, his expression curiously intent. ‘Remember, Eustace, that you guard more than one person. Remember it now, especially, for our friend may not have drawn attention only to himself.’

  ‘Clara?’ Eustace stared at him, unsure that he had understood. ‘But she is only—’

  ‘She is only what? Come, Eustace,’ said Cromer. ‘How long have you lived with them? There are things, surely, that you cannot have failed to notice?’

  He slumped a little in his chair. ‘I am not a fool,’ he said. ‘If I overlook things, in the child, it is for just that reason. She is a child, whatever else she may be. And I have come to feel – it is as if she were my own, Elias. I have no one else now.’

  ‘A blameless weakness, if it is a weakness at all,’ Cromer said. ‘They say that children keep you young. And look at you – you are living proof of it. As am I, in my way.’ He moved closer to the light, inclining his head so that deep shadows marked his face.

  ‘You could return still. You would be welcome.’

  ‘No, there is no going back. Not for me. But I think of it often enough. It is a place unlike any other. But come, let us return to the matter at hand. Let us see what may be salvaged from the situation. The incident you spoke of – it was unfortunate, though not unprecedented. One does not condone such excesses, of course. Some reparations could be made, perhaps? Some comfort given to the young man’s family?’

  ‘As far as I have been able to discover, there is no one. He has not even been reported missing.’

  Cromer raised an eyebrow. ‘How very fortunate.’

  ‘It is curious,’ Eustace replied. ‘And I do not intend, of course, to rely on continued good fortune. I have taken steps to ensure that I am informed of unwanted attention.’

  ‘Very prudent,’ Cromer said, nodding gravely.

  Eustace shrugged. ‘It is no more than you would have done yourself. But it is not the police that concern me most.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I have not yet told you everything. I mentioned that shots were fired. Mr Crowe was the worse for drink, and is no great marksman at the best of times, yet the young man we spoke of was gone when I reached them. He was gone, and there was nothing to be done. It seemed plain enough what had happened. I was sure of nothing, mind you, but it seemed plain enough. But when I examined him the next morning – his remains, you understand – I found bruises, nothing more. It was not the shots that killed him, Elias.’

  Cromer nodded slowly, and gazed out through the small window of the office for so long that Eustace began to wonder whether he had heard. ‘That does rather complicate matters,’ he said at last. He reached for the bottle again. ‘You had really better have that drink, Eustace.’

  ‘Perhaps I will, after all.’

  They drank in silence for a while. The gas heater sputtered out, and Cromer attempted, without conviction, to coax it back into service. When it produced nothi
ng more than a faint clicking sound and a poisonous odour, he kicked it and returned to his seat.

  ‘Nothing can be relied upon these days, it seems.’

  ‘The world is much changed,’ Eustace agreed.

  ‘Much, but not entirely. Some things remain certain.’

  Eustace looked up.

  ‘I am thinking of death and taxes, Eustace. Equal and opposite reactions. The tendency towards disorder, and so on. That reminds me, I have come into possession of a delightful 1726 copy of Newton’s Principia. Only a third edition, mind you, but a notable one in this instance. He omitted Leibniz’s name, you see, from the later editions, since the poor chap had obligingly died since the first publication and was therefore unlikely to object. Word had got about that Leibniz might have had a hand in calculus too, and Newton would have none of it. If I have seen further than others, it is by booting them off the shoulders of giants.’

  Cromer seemed thoroughly satisfied with this witticism, and allowed Eustace a moment to savour it before continuing. ‘At any rate, it was all rather unsporting.’

  ‘I’ll be sure to mention it to Mr Crowe.’

  ‘Oh, he has a first. I procured it for him. The provenance was a little opaque, perhaps, but its authenticity is unimpeachable.’

  ‘Well, then? I am tired, Elias. There is some message in this, I suppose, but I cannot decipher it just now. You must be direct with me, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said Cromer. ‘I have acquired the habit of circuitousness. It is a necessity, sometimes, of my trade. I was thinking of the inevitable, Eustace, that is all. Of what is to come. It is a question that preoccupies you, is it not?’

  ‘I think of little else. It was this question that brought me to you.’

  ‘You wish to know what is in store for you?’

  ‘You know them, Elias. The others of his kind, the one they must answer to. You know how they think, what weighs with them. You have some idea, perhaps, of what might satisfy or dissuade them.’