A Brief History of Montmaray

by Michelle Cooper

  As for the Solar, it used to be quite grand when Isabella lived here. She was constantly redecorating it according to the latest craze (which Uncle John used as an excuse to move downstairs, although I suspect it was really that they couldn’t spend ten minutes together by then without having a screaming row). She never got rid of the old stuff, so the room ended up a fascinating, exotic muddle, with an antique kimono draped across one wall, Persian rugs, a Tutankhamen-inspired frieze, bed-curtains made out of Indian silk, Parisian etchings propped on the chimney-piece, and a pair of Art Deco figurines holding up glass spheres. Even now, stripped of its decorations, the Solar is impressive—the largest room in the castle, apart from the Great Hall. There are two big mullioned windows fitted with window seats, an enormous fireplace, and a dais for the four-poster bed. Most of the furniture is gone now, but the bed is still here because no one could work out how to take it apart and it’s too big to it through any of the doors.

  I have propped the silver-framed photographs I found beside me so I can look at them as I write. One is clearly of Toby and Veronica, their christening gowns trailing over the lap of someone wearing a long, shiny skirt. (Isabella? My mother? Her face is blurred and shadowed.) Toby is gnawing at his fist and Veronica is either grinning or grimacing—it’s hard to tell. The only way I can distinguish them is that the little bit of hair Veronica has is scraped into a wisp and secured with an enormous bow. Along the bottom of the photograph, someone has written, The twins, 1919. (And I can just hear Veronica exclaiming, “What if some poor future historian reads it and thinks we actually were twins? When in fact we were born six weeks apart! And are cousins, not siblings!”)

  The other photograph is of a vaguely Moorish mansion with a fountain in front. I’ve never seen it before. Is it somewhere Isabella lived? Her family home? Does Veronica know it’s here? Peering closer, I see that what I’d imagined was flowering vine creeping up the walls is in fact mold. Ugh. It’s underneath the glass, too—it may be too late to save the photograph, but I’ll take it back to our room anyway, along with the other one. I don’t think Veronica will mind, even if the house does turn out to be Isabella’s. I don’t think Veronica cares anymore.

  Looking around at the blank walls and dusty flagstones of the Solar, remembering how it used to be, makes me wonder again at how little Isabella took with her. I was only eight when she departed, but I recall sitting on her favorite rose-patterned rug afterwards and thinking that surely she could have rolled that up and strapped it to her suitcase. But she left in such a hurry. There’d been an argument between her and Uncle John, the sort involving shouting and smashed china (these had become depressingly ordinary). What was out of the ordinary this time was Isabella’s storming upstairs to toss some clothes into her little alligator suitcase. She’d caught sight of a ship making its slow way past the island.

  “Enough!” she screamed, loud enough for the entire castle to hear. I remember standing in the bathroom in my striped pajamas, shivering violently, while Veronica patted my shoulder, saying, “Never mind, Sophie, never mind.” Toby, peering through a crack in the bathroom door, watched Isabella stalk out of her room in a swirl of calf-length mink, suitcase handle clenched in one hand. He was the last one to see her.

  We were all certain that she would come back, or at least send for her things once she was settled in her new place. But she never did. We waited and waited, and we never heard a thing. And after a while, Veronica stopped going up on the roof with the telescope to scan the sea for ships. The fox fur Henry had taken to play with lost its Isabella scent, and then its glass eyes and chunks of its fur. Uncle John sank even further into his misanthropic gloom and refused to leave his downstairs burrow, so Rebecca and the villagers moved most of the Solar furniture into the other rooms and threw dust sheets over the enormous bed. Isabella’s remaining possessions scattered throughout the castle, and beyond. We sold the most valuable of her trinkets to pay for a new water pump in the village. We used bits of her old woolen bathrobe to block a drafty gap in the bathroom wall. Her white crêpe de Chine skirt came in handy for bandages when Jimmy broke his wrist. Mind you, most of Isabella’s clothes got burnt up in the stove one night. We never did find out whether that was Uncle John or Rebecca.

  “I expect it’s just that she’s still settling into the new place,” Toby whispered consolingly one evening to Veronica and me. We were all huddled under the covers of her bed (Henry was there, too, but asleep). It was nearly summer by then, but Uncle John was on one of his rampages downstairs, so we’d decided we were better off invisible under a blanket. “It must take such a long time to buy carpets and furniture and all that,” Toby added. “I expect she’s awfully busy.”

  “She probably wants it to be all nice before she asks you to visit,” I told Veronica. “You could take some of her things in your trunk when you go. The little things—the jade elephant and—”

  “No,” said Veronica firmly. “She doesn’t care about any of this anymore. About any of us.” Then she turned over on her side, and Toby and I looked at each other and silently vowed not to mention Isabella again, at least not in Veronica’s presence. And as the months passed, this became easier and easier. We exhausted the subject of where Isabella might be (I thought Spain; Toby said Paris) and what she might be doing (being a mannequin for Schiaparelli, decorating rich people’s houses, learning to fly an aeroplane). We were too young then to understand what I now can guess—that back in the big world, where she belonged, she’d found another lover. Perhaps he’d even been one of her former suitors (I imagine she’d had plenty of those), someone who’d waited patiently for her all those years. And when she’d protested that really, she was married now, he’d pointed out that she deserved better than life on an isolated island, in a crumbling castle full of someone else’s children (this was a year or two after my parents died, and although Toby and I were fairly well behaved, Henry was a toddler by then and given to throwing monstrous tantrums). Perhaps he was rich—perhaps he’d promised her exquisite gowns and diamond necklaces and pink champagne. Or perhaps he was good-hearted but poor, charming but middle-class, and she’d never really stopped loving him, despite his unaristocratic origins. So she took the hand he held out and he whisked her off to some exotic place, Argentina or Mexico or Barbados, where she strolled through admiring crowds in one of her beautiful swirling dresses, a bright flower tucked behind her ear.

  At least I assume that’s what she did. Toby kept an ear out for any mention of her after he went away to school, but he didn’t hear a word. The one time he asked Aunt Charlotte, she snapped that she hadn’t the faintest idea where “that woman” was, but if Isabella had any decency, she’d continue to stay away from polite Society. This attitude seems to have been shared by Isabella’s own aristocratic family. They weren’t thrilled when she married a non-Catholic and had her child christened in Montmaray’s chapel instead of Seville Cathedral, but they were even less thrilled when she abandoned both husband and child. We haven’t heard from any of them in years. I suppose that could be the result of all the recent upheavals in Spain, although I suspect it’s simply that when they disapprove of something, they do it passionately and wholeheartedly. Just like Isabella.

  It’s odd, actually, how vivid my recollections of Isabella are, when my own mother is such a blur to me. I was six when she died. I know that she was named Jane; that she was the only child of an impoverished viscount; that she played the piano, wore spectacles, and enjoyed the poetry of Wordsworth. But this is secondhand information, gathered from the personal possessions she left behind. I ought to remember more. After all, I can recall other, earlier events quite clearly: the croquet mallet incident; Nanny Mackinnon forcing me into a scratchy pink frock for Henry’s christening; George rowing us out past South Head one spring morning to see the milky blue swirls of a plankton bloom spreading across the bay. And I can recall my father—blond and handsome, always laughing, everyone’s favorite. But as for my mother, I have no idea what her smile
was like (she looks shy or solemn in photographs, even her wedding portrait) or what scent she wore, or even the exact color of her eyes. I don’t know whether she wrote poems or was frightened of the dark or missed her parents (they had both died by her twenty-first birthday). I haven’t had any success asking the others about her, either. Toby just changes the subject, and Veronica is uncharacteristically vague. A few weeks ago, for instance, I was struggling with a handful of hairpins that would not stay in and I asked her whether Mother’s hair had been the same.

  “Oh, it was sort of… wavy,” Veronica said. “Or wait—perhaps she put curlers in it at night? I think it was brown—no, more a darkish blond. She kept it short, I recall, although it may just have been that she tucked it up under her hats …”

  Even Alice and Mary, while agreeing that my mother was “lovely,” are frustratingly short on details. I think it’s simply that Isabella was so beautiful and vivacious, so utterly dazzling, that my mother faded into the background.

  I do take after her, then.

  Much later, written in bed (hooray for candles). I stayed in the Solar for an hour this afternoon, then returned to our bedroom in a glum mood. Veronica was sitting on her bed, reading, having just washed her hair—it splashed like black ink down her back. I offered to brush it for her.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling over her shoulder at me. “Oh, what’s that you’ve got?”

  The photographs did not spark much reaction. She shook her head at the label under the “twins” and said she had no idea about the house. Then she went back to her reading. I drew the brush through and through her thick, glossy waves, trying not to sigh with envy.

  “I ought to ask you to cut it off,” she remarked, turning a page. “Although I suppose it’s easier to tie it back when it’s this length.”

  “How can you even think of cutting it?” I exclaimed. “It’s so beautiful!”

  “But isn’t long hair terribly unfashionable?” she teased.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I grumbled, looking down at my skirt (the hem has been let down so many times that it seems to have horizontal pleats). “Especially as—Veronica, what’s that you’re reading?” Because I’d just glanced over her shoulder and seen the most horrific photographs—of people who’d been tortured, it looked like.

  She flipped it over to show me the cover, which was even worse—a maniac dressed in a blood-soaked apron, waving a cleaver. “The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror,” I read. “What is it? And where did you find it?”

  “It’s about the Nazi government in Germany,” she said calmly. “Communist propaganda, of course, put out by the Left Book Club. Nevertheless, there are some rather interesting sections. You see, it puts forward a theory about the burning of the Reichstag—”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. I was certain I was going to have nightmares about those awful pictures.

  “—and if even a tenth of it is true, it raises some serious questions about the British policy of … Oh, I’m sorry, this must be boring you.”

  “No, no,” I said, suddenly spotting an opening. “You mean, about Britain not wanting to get involved in the Spanish war?”

  “Exactly!” she said, clearly too fascinated by the subject to stop and wonder about my puzzling level of interest. “I mean, obviously the Nazis are assisting Franco. And a significant number of British politicians support the principles of Fascism, if only because they believe Fascism is the true enemy of Communism. On the other hand, how can they be seen to support a military coup against the democratically elected Spanish government? Hence their policy of non-intervention. Best to do nothing at all, you see.” She sighed heavily. “There was a time when Montmaray played a vital role in Britain’s diplomatic relations with Spain. In 1710, for example, we hosted secret talks between Henry St. John and the Marquis de Torcy regarding who should rule Spain. They may not have agreed to meet otherwise, but this was the perfect location—midway between the two countries, a neutral island with impregnable defenses—and both sides were thoroughly sick of the fighting by then. Why, if it hadn’t been for the Montmaray peace talks, there might not have been a Treaty of Utrecht …”

  “Anyway,” I said hastily, because Veronica was getting that faraway look she gets whenever she starts theorizing about history. “Don’t you think Montmaray should be doing something now? Taking part in these non-intervention talks, for example? Shouldn’t we have some sort of diplomatic presence in London?”

  “Toby, you mean?” she said quizzically.

  “Er, yes,” I said. “Toby. Yes.”

  Veronica looked thoughtful. “Well, it would be wonderful if Toby started to take more of an interest in … Oh, not now, of course, he has his studies to concentrate on, but in a year or two…”

  “I expect he’d need a lot of help from you,” I said. “I don’t think he has much of a clue at the moment, but if you were there…”

  “There?” said Veronica, her gaze suddenly sharpening. “In England, you mean?”

  “Well …” But there was no point equivocating; Veronica’s too clever and knows me too well. I put down the hairbrush and slid onto the rug so I could peer into her face. “Oh, Veronica, wouldn’t you love to visit London? Imagine, all that history! Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, all those libraries and museums and newspapers and, and …”

  “I can’t,” she said. “You know I can’t. Someone needs to stay here to look after things. What about Henry? And Father? And making sure Rebecca actually does some work instead of sitting by Father’s bedside all day? Besides, there’s the Brief History—”

  “But wouldn’t there be all sorts of information—about Queen Elizabeth and the Armada, for example, or Henry St. John in 1710—that you could only find in England?”

  Veronica looked almost wistful at that, but she shook her head. “Aunt Charlotte won’t pay for me to go over there and spend all my time digging through archives,” she pointed out. “I’d be hopeless at what she does want—being decorative and charming—and I’ve no interest in finding a husband. Really, Sophie, it makes more sense that she should spend all her money on you. And you know you’d love all that dressing up and—”

  “Not without you there!” I burst out. I stared down at my suddenly blurry skirt and blinked furiously for a moment. “Wouldn’t you … wouldn’t you miss me a bit if I wasn’t here with you?” I whispered.

  “Oh, Sophie!” she cried, grasping my shoulders. “Of course I would! I’d miss you terribly! But I’d be happy that you were getting the chance to do all the things you enjoy. And we could write lots of letters. Remember when you were in quarantine with measles and we had to write each other letters instead of being able to talk to each other? Your letters were always so entertaining you had Toby and me in fits. Even when there really wasn’t much new to write about, you were so clever and funny.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” I mumbled. “You’re the writer in this family, not me.”

  “Stop that,” she said firmly, tipping my chin up. “What about that diary of yours? I saw you yesterday, scribbling away with the most intense look on your face—”

  I felt myself starting to blush—that had probably been when I was writing about Simon.

  “—and I think it’s a wonderful idea that you’re writing about Montmaray now, all your observations and memories and thoughts, before you go off and have lovely new experiences in England.”

  Is that what I’m doing? Recording my last months here for posterity? Perhaps I am. Not that I’m certain I want to leave, but …

  “Veronica!” I said. “Wait, what about Aunt Charlotte? She expects both of us to go to England.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Veronica airily, closing her book and standing up. Of course, this is the same person who ignored my quarantine to read aloud to me when I complained in my letters about being bored—and she didn’t get much more than a few spots and a runny nose, either, despite the grown-ups’ dire predictions. Normal rules don�
�t apply to Veronica. I watched with great affection and not a little awe as she piled her hair on top of her head with a couple of pins and wandered off, saying something over her shoulder about having a chat with George before dinner.

  I don’t think she’ll go to England. I don’t think I can make her; I don’t think anyone can make her. And I can’t stand up to Aunt Charlotte by myself. And I do want to go to England, I do, except the very idea of leaving Veronica and Henry and Carlos and everything else at Montmaray fills me with such a sense of panic—how would I possibly cope in a strange place, all alone?

  I must say, it’s a very good thing that I have this journal as an outlet for all my moaning and whinging.

  After all the angst of the afternoon, it was a profound relief to have a pleasant evening. Veronica and Simon had a brief but polite conversation about the French government over dinner, and I managed not to spill anything or otherwise embarrass myself. Rebecca was unusually talkative as well. She got out her darning while Veronica and I washed the dishes and delivered her version of a bedtime story, which consisted largely of warnings to Simon: that he ought to make sure his barber burns any hair he cuts off, lest birds fly away with it and weave it into their nests and cause Simon to suffer horrendous headaches; that if—God forbid, touch wood, spit thrice—Simon was to grow a wart, he should rub meat into it and bury the meat until it rotted away, whereupon his wart would disappear; and that Simon must take care to block his ears with sealing wax when sailing back past Land’s End, because to hear the bells of wrecked ships was terrible luck.

  When Rebecca is in such a mood, Henry can occasionally nudge her into other, more entertaining tales, of Piskies and Spriggans and Knockers. Not tonight, though. So Henry had to make do with my version of one of her favorites, the story of Bolster the Giant, whose doomed love for Saint Agnes led to his gory death at Chapel Porth, where the sea still boils blood-red.