‘Here,’ he said. ‘Disgusting, that is. Give it a rest.’
‘What you talking about, disgusting? Good grooming is what it is.’
‘It’s that sound the clippers make,’ said John. ‘That little snick? Oof.’ He gave an elaborate shudder.
Eustace rose from the desk and crossed to the orrery.
‘Do you know your planets?’ he said.
They shared a brief, consulting glance. ‘Not massively,’ Abel said.
‘Don’t come up much,’ John confirmed.
‘The plough,’ Abel said, as it occurred to him. ‘Is that one?’
‘What do you see?’ Eustace said. ‘Never mind the stars. They do not figure. What do you see, when you look up? Day or night.’
Abel flexed his neck. ‘There a point to all this?’
‘What do you see?’ Eustace asked again.
John spoke, stretching his limbs to dispel his embarrassment. ‘Sun, moon and stars, innit.’
‘Never mind the stars,’ Eustace said again. He gestured towards the orrery. ‘They are beyond our scope here.’
‘The sun and the moon, then.’
‘The sun and the moon,’ Eustace repeated.
Abel shook his head and sank back in his chair. John looked from Eustace to the orrery, but could offer nothing further.
‘What we are discussing,’ Eustace said at last, ‘are details of business. Important details, but details nonetheless. I want you to keep the sun and the moon fixed in your thoughts.’
They said nothing.
‘Mr Crowe and Clara,’ Eustace continued. ‘Look to them, above all. Seek my guidance in all else, but if they should be threatened with any harm that it is in your power to stop, you must not hesitate. Do you understand?’
Abel sat upright again. The brothers looked at him almost without blinking. Each of them lowered his head. The gesture was curt and emphatic.
‘The fees we have discussed,’ Eustace continued. ‘These are guaranteed in any event. But your rewards, if one or both of you should be forced to take such an action, will be far in excess of those. I have seen to it that this provision will be honoured even in the event of my death.’
‘What about you?’ Abel said, after a long pause.
‘What about me?’
‘If they cut up rough, you don’t think they might have a go at you?’
‘I am of no consequence. I am from nowhere, as you gentlemen will recall.’ Eustace drew the dust cloth over the orrery. ‘I no longer exist.’
At a quarter before midnight, Eustace put on a heavy overcoat and let himself out by the stable yard door. He crossed the yard and slipped out into the west lane. It had been used, at one time, by servants coming in from the town. Where it passed through the gardens, various contrivances of landscaping kept it from the sight of those in the house. Further on, its course ran through the beech woods all the way to the edge of the grounds.
The night was cold, and the wind was gathering a strength he had not seen since the previous winter. Already, the lane was strewn with skittering claws of dead wood, and worse would be done before morning. Eustace found himself glad of the air, however unquiet it might be. Having extra hands about the place did nothing to lessen his own burden. When he had not been concealing firearms about the living quarters, he had been showing some dead-eyed scullery boy which end of a rabbit was its arse. He could not remember when he had last rested.
Half a mile or so from the house, where it passed through the thickest of the woods, the lane was partly blocked by an old holly tree. The night was almost lightless, with only a faint blade of the old moon remaining. He was almost upon the tree when he saw it, the great twists of its dimly silvered limbs looming from the darkness like a sea monster.
Eustace ran a hand over the holly’s bark, idly gauging its girth. It was no sapling – he put its age at eighty or even a hundred years – and it had come down in the last hour or two. A tree of even a quarter of its size could have killed him. The thought did not disturb him greatly. There was a simplicity in such a death, an innocence almost. There was nothing that could be done.
Still, he cursed softly. It would have to be cleared in the morning. It would make him no easier in his mind to know that the way was barred on the safest road from the Estate. It was yet another thing to think of. He knew, too, that before he set someone the task, he would first have to show him the way to the tool shed and instruct him in the use of a saw.
He could leave the tree where it lay. He could carry on past it, all the way to the west gate. He could pass through without stopping to the roads and the country beyond, walking until the sky showed the first sweetness of dawn, until the sun coloured unfamiliar fields. He would stumble then into the yard of some inn, in a town whose name he didn’t know. It was nothing he had not done before.
Mr Crowe had encouraged such excursions, at one time, to remind him that he had chosen his life freely, that he could do so again. It had been years since he had made such a journey, but he remembered the levity of being on the road, the clean ease of the stainless horizon. He remembered how real it had felt, that liberty. He might go anywhere; he might never return. He had known, though, that it was an illusion. He had always known.
The car was parked in the lane just outside the west gate, a battered Wolseley of indeterminate colour. Its engine had been silenced and its lights switched off. Eustace approached the passenger door and knocked – three taps, quick and even. The door was opened, and he lowered himself wearily in.
Cromer consulted his watch. ‘It is after midnight, Eustace,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I shall be forced to impose a charge for unsociable hours.’
‘I apologise, Elias. There was much to detain me. And a tree had fallen in the lane.’
‘Per aspera ad astra,’ Cromer declaimed softly. He coughed, seeing Eustace’s look, and dropped his theatrically raised hand. ‘You have brought the documents? And signed them in the places I had marked?’
Eustace reached into his coat and drew out the envelope. He checked the seal and stared down at it, stroking the brown paper with his thumb. He passed it to Cromer, who deposited it in a briefcase he had left open on the back seat.
‘You set me a melancholy task,’ Cromer said, after a slight pause. ‘Although I am obliged to add, in a professional capacity, that it is prudent to make such provisions.’
‘It is a matter I had neglected. I am not as young as I look, after all, and none of us knows now what faces us. I must think of—’ Eustace paused, bringing his hand to his mouth.
Cromer glanced at him, then decorously bowed his head.
‘I must think of those who depend on me,’ Eustace said at last.
‘Of course,’ said Cromer. ‘To say nothing of your new employees. Well, the arrangements have been made final and binding. You have informed the beneficiaries?’
‘Yes,’ said Eustace. ‘All but one.’
Cromer paused. ‘You are aware of my advice in this matter.’
‘You know their identities,’ said Eustace. ‘If I should be unable to give you further instruction, you may proceed to make contact with them in the manner we discussed.’
‘It is preferable, as a rule, if all the beneficiaries have been informed.’
‘Your advice is noted. The circumstances, as you know, are unusual.’
‘You understand, also, that when we have concluded our business here tonight, the arrangement becomes irrevocable. If for any reason you are unable to attend our next appointment, I will expedite matters without further consultation. I – or my duly authorised delegates, should I myself be incapacitated – will take the actions we agreed.’
Eustace stared out the window.
‘I understand the arrangements, Elias. They are my arrangements.’
‘Forgive me, Eustace. A professional habit.’ He extended his hand. ‘Until our next appointment, then.’
Eustace shook his hand and climbed out.
‘Go,’ he said. ‘Stop for no
one. It begins now.’
Ten
The changes are everywhere in the house. Clara senses them almost from the moment she wakes. It is no longer quiet, even in the dark hour before she dresses and goes downstairs. She is disturbed, at her writing table, by unfamiliar sounds, by the indistinct commotion of activity that fills the house below. Alice, she knows, has been joined in recent days by other servants, and Eustace has ordered all manner of preparations. By seven o’clock, the ovens are at work and the grates are being scoured and made ready. In the scullery, the boards are being pounded and there is a dim but constant clatter of crockery.
On the landings and stairways, Clara encounters a procession of unfamiliar maids. Charwomen gossip in the unshuttered rooms, straightening unsmiling portraits and beating the drapes until the sunlight is slow with dust. They chatter among themselves as she passes, and she turns to find them staring after her. They murmur as if in disapproval, as if it is she who is the stranger.
The Crouch brothers too have changed. Though they arrived only recently, Clara had begun to accommodate herself to their peculiar presences. She had become accustomed enough to their movements, to the places where they might be found, that she could avoid encountering them for much of the time. When she did, she no longer felt her habitual discomfort, the small pressure of unease amid her ribs. For John, who has treated her with bashful deference since she led him from the maze, she had begun to feel something almost like fondness.
Now, she sees him only at a distance. He has been given duties, it seems, that keep him always about the grounds and often far from the house. She has glimpsed him from the tower with the opera glasses, trudging along the west lane towards the beech woods, returning much later from the direction of the front gates, passing from tree to tree as he skirts the margins of the avenue. He carries something, always, slung over his shoulder or gripped warily at his side.
Yesterday, at dusk, she saw him sit down to rest at the edge of the fountain. He seemed utterly weary, slumped with his back to one of the dragons and staring into the dark and undisturbed water. She watched as he lowered his knuckles to the surface of the pool, grazing it gently at first, then smashing his fist into the stillness.
Abel, for his part, is usually to be found about the house, dressed now in sombre domestic uniform, though his official function is not clear. When Clara goes down to breakfast, she finds him in the entrance hall. He no longer lounges against walls or mantels, but stands with an oddly self-conscious uprightness. Though he notes her arrival with the same laconic adjustment of his features, he no longer follows her idly with his gaze. Instead, he stares straight ahead as if he were a sentry.
In the dining room, Clara crams a buttered roll into her pocket. She goes to look for Eustace, though he too has come to seem unlike himself. She sees him less often now, and is conscious, when she does, that his attention is strained by other matters. He takes care, as before, to make some mild enquiry as to how she has spent her day, to remark on some detail of whatever scrap of manuscript she has most recently set out for him. Though he is diligent still in reading through to the end, she does not believe that he finds amusement in it as he once did. She can no longer imagine his face as he reads, his expression softening as he lingers over a particular line.
Clara tries not to think of it. He is preoccupied, she knows, by whatever business it is that has brought about the recent changes in the house. She is more circumspect now in what she shares with him, and feels she ought to trouble him less with idle diversions. Still, she could not bear to abandon their customs altogether. She cannot believe he would wish for that either.
And it is not only that. Not all of what she shows him, she has begun to feel, is inconsequential. She reads what she has written, sometimes, and feels a peculiar weight of certainty. So it was with today’s pages, which came to her unprompted just after she awoke. They were written all at once, with a strange, unthinking compulsion. It was only when she read them over, half an hour later, that she set them quietly aside. She marked them with Eustace’s name, so that she would not forget, and underscored the title.
The Song of the White Nightingale
Once, in the far north, there was a dying king.
He was prodigiously old, having reigned for the better part of a century. Although he was not greatly loved by his subjects, his time on the throne had been for the most part untroubled. His youngest son had been born a simpleton, it was true, but neither of the others displeased him especially. The eldest was quite of age, and eager to take up the sceptre if that burden should fall to him. Indeed, he scarcely left the palace lest he should fail to hear the cough that announced his father’s passing.
For all this good fortune, the king was enraged by the prospect of death. He railed against the cruelty of the gods, who would visit such suffering on a man left unready by many decades of comfort. He cursed the uselessness of physicians, of whom he had put so many to death that there was no one left at court who would admit to the slightest acquaintance with human anatomy. When he offered an immense reward to anyone who might possess a remedy, not a single soul ventured to come forward.
At last, his most trusted counsellor took him aside, a man who was himself widely feared in the kingdom. The counsellor confided to the king a story that he had heard as a boy. In a forest at the borders of the kingdom that was known to be enchanted, there lived a nightingale. It was no common nightingale, he said. Its plumage was as white as Arctic snow, and its eyes might have been beads of purest sapphire. What set it truly apart, however, was its song. The song of the white nightingale was of such bewitching loveliness that it was said to cure any ill, no matter how grave. Hearing it, even a man lamed from birth would spring from the woods like a deer; an infant that had slid cold and still from its mother’s belly would climb pink and mewling to her breast.
For all their wondrousness, such miracles were vanishingly rare. The white nightingale had been spoken of for a thousand years or more. Countless afflicted souls had braved the forest to seek it out, but no more than a handful had been so fortunate. It was not for the counsellor to say that it was beyond hope. That was for His Majesty alone to contemplate.
In this counsel, the king heard only what he wished. At once, he dispatched his youngest son, choosing the simpleton first on the pretence that the boy might have his wits restored into the bargain. Hardly a week had passed when news reached the palace that the idiot prince had been drowned while fording a river.
Again, the king wasted no time. He ordered his second son to ride out, forbidding him to return without the white nightingale. Within days, a letter was received from the prince himself. He had renounced his title and his birthright, he said, and had fled to a neighbouring kingdom. He was betrothed to the daughter of a swineherd, and would swallow poison before he would return.
It was with some weariness, then, that the king turned at last to his eldest son. He dispatched the crown prince, who protested fiercely, on the morning of winter solstice. Already, as he watched him gallop into the blizzard, hope had grown dim in his heart.
A month passed, and in that time the old king had grown so ill that he could no longer rise from his bed. The counsellor entered his chamber one evening with grave news. His eldest son, he said, had been slain by bandits just outside the city gates. They had stolen what he carried, the counsellor said, but he himself had pursued them. He had returned with their heads, which were mounted now on pikes outside the palace, and with the prize he now unveiled: a birdcage, most exquisitely gilded and ornamented, and within it, serene on its perch, the fabled white nightingale, its snowy feathers and sapphire eyes more magnificent than any story could have conjured.
The bird was placed at the king’s bedside, where it was served with the finest of sweetmeats. It was given nothing to drink but freshly fallen dew, collected each morning in a jewelled goblet. But the nightingale would eat or drink nothing. It would not so much as turn to face the king, however he beseeched it, and it refused t
o utter a single note of song.
Other songbirds were brought to the king’s chambers, in the hope that the bird might be moved to imitate them. Musicians were ordered to perform before it, to coax it into song with delicate melodies played on flutes and piccolos.
It was all in vain. The bird would not be enticed from its silence, and the king grew ever closer to death. Seeing this, his counsellor urged him to try another course. If the bird would not be induced to sing by kindness, he said, it must be compelled to do so by other means. The king gave his assent, for he knew now that each hour might be his last.
Opening the gilded cage, the counsellor held a burning torch to the bird’s white breast.
‘Sing or burn, little one,’ he said. ‘You have exhausted our hospitality. You shall sing now, or you shall burn.’
And indeed the bird did sing then, and its song was of such extraordinary beauty that the frail king sat up in bed for the first time in months, thinking himself restored to health. But it was not the king that the bird had healed. It was a lioness, a lioness whose pelt had lain before the hearth in the king’s bedchamber since the day he had taken the throne. That lioness was roused now, made whole by the bird’s song, and quite as powerful and sleek as if she had just stolen from among the parched grasses of the Serengeti.
She felled the counsellor, tearing out his entrails while the torch he had held set fire to the king’s bedding, the flames rising quickly to consume him. When she had sated herself, she paused beneath the cage and allowed the nightingale to alight on her shoulder. The bird had broken off its song, and was silent once more as the lioness bore it from the burning palace.
Many people marked the passage of these two strange creatures, as they paraded calmly through the streets of the city. In the stories that were afterwards told, it was said that they were greeted with rejoicing, for the blood that dripped to the snow from the lioness’s maw was taken to be the king’s. It was usually remarked, at the conclusion of these stories, that the next king had the good sense to die when his turn came, by which time he had decreed that in all the length and breadth of that kingdom, no songbird should ever again be caged.
The Maker of Swans Page 10