The King in the Tree

by Steven Millhauser

  Over the next few days a loose, easy-flowing routine was established at Swan Park. Don Juan, who was accustomed to rising late in the morning, would come down to find that Squire Hood had risen six hours earlier and was out supervising one of his many projects in the gardens or parkland. Mary and Georgiana had eaten at nine but sat with Juan in the breakfast room as he was served the third breakfast of the day: hot brown bread, honey, hot chocolate, buttered toast, and a pot of steaming tea. The three would then walk along the river, or on one of the many garden paths, as they awaited the return of Squire Hood. He would come galloping along the riding path, swing from his horse, cry “Hah!” or “Gad, what a day!” and burst into enthusiastic talk about his projects as he took a short turn with them in the gardens before riding off with Juan to the farthest reaches of Swan Park. The gentle squire, Juan thought, was like a fire—or a Spanish rake: he was always burning. They returned for dinner at four, in the high dining room or on the lawn above the Ymber. Hood, dressed carelessly in riding boots and an old broadcloth coat, consumed platefuls of roast veal and pigeon pie washed down with cider and red port as he discussed everything under the sun: the operation of a silk loom, the superiority of timber props to pillars of coal for supporting the roofs of mines, the idea—shocking to Juan—that modern battle heroes depicted in paintings ought to be shown in contemporary garb instead of in Greek or Roman armor. The elaborate dinner, lasting two hours, ended with bowls of gooseberries, thick wedges of currant pie, orange pudding, and pots of green and black tea.

  After dinner they played charades or piquet in the drawing room, walked by the river, and sometimes drove in a calash along the graveled riding path that wound among the gardens. Then Hood retired to the library, to read a treatise on the cultivation of laburnum or the operation of a Newcomen engine, or to examine a bit of leaf or the wing of an insect through the microscope that stood on a corner table. A light supper of cold meats was served at nine-thirty or ten; afterward first Hood and then the women retired to their rooms. Juan, unused to going to bed before dawn, would climb the stairs to his apartment— a bedroom and sitting room in a separate wing—where his new valet had prepared his bed for the night. On the third day Juan had sent his servant back to Venice, unable to bear the thought of having about him the all-too-faithful partner of his Venetian revels; Hood had immediately supplied an English valet, the self-effacing cousin of a Swan Park chambermaid. In the long night Juan would play dozens of games of patience at an inlaid mahogany table in his sitting room. He would drink Madeira, look at the sky through the telescope that Hood had mounted for him on a stand by one of his sitting-room windows, and glance through the leather volumes of English poets that Mary had chosen for him from the library. Then he would sit for a long time in his bedroom armchair in the embrasure of the casement window, savoring his solitude and staring out at a distant turn of the Ymber before climbing into his canopied bed at three in the morning.

  In the vast house, he was the only guest. Hood, for all his exuberance, enjoyed his solitude—or at any rate he was happy to shut himself up in the library whenever he liked. One afternoon his landscape architect, a quietly amiable man named William Gravenor, came to dinner, during which he unrolled a large sheet of paper that knocked over a glass of port; after dinner the two of them retired immediately to the library, while Don Juan walked with the women by the river. He knew that Hood liked him, but it struck him that he was also useful to the squire, who could disappear at a moment’s notice.

  “I walk,” Mary Hood was saying, as she and Juan walked along the path of osiers behind Georgiana and Augustus, “every day. I am walking—now—at this moment. ’Tis the difference between what is customary and what is singular. I am walking beside the river.”

  “I am walking,” Juan said, “beside the river.”

  “You are walking beside the river,” Mary said. “You are talking beside the river. We are walking and talking beside the river.”

  “I am talking beside the river,” Juan said. “We are walking beside the river.”

  “They are walking beside the river,” Mary said, pointing at Georgiana and Augustus. “The birds are singing in the trees. The sun is setting in the west.”

  “Night is coming,” Juan said. “We are walking in the north beside the river. Day is dying.”

  “I am going mad,” Georgiana said, glancing back over her left shoulder, “beside the river.”

  He was making rapid progress in English. Mary had taken it upon herself to be his teacher, and he spoke to her easily, though an odd shyness prevented him from practicing his sentences with Georgiana. He was never alone with either woman; he wondered whether it was by design. Of the two, Mary seemed to enjoy his company frankly, while Georgiana held him at a playful distance, as if he were a very amusing piece of foreign furniture—just how amusing, he would show her in time. Georgiana liked to engage in serious discussions with her brother-in-law, about such matters as whether natural beauty might ever be excelled by artistic beauty, or how the impression made by a word differed from the impression made by the object represented by a word; Juan admired her brilliant gray-green eyes with their long, curved lashes, the green feathers she liked to wear in her thick auburn hair, and the green silk ribbons around her neck. Her movements were quick, even impatient; there was a tension in her hands and at the edges of her mouth that suggested secret energies. Mary Hood was gentler and more flowing in her motions. She liked to assume the role of teacher, repeating sentences patiently and giving examples, as if Juan were a child of seven and she a stern governess with excellent references; at dinner she preferred to listen. Her hair seemed to Juan a contradiction: light brown, like a paler, duller version of her sister’s, combed softly back from the forehead and temples, but at the back thickly ringleted and hanging to the nape; when she moved, her curls shook continually, as if her passions were in her hair. Her eyes were hazel. She was given to sudden, unexpected fits of laughter.

  Don Juan understood that his genius in the art of seduction lay not in his gift of beauty, not in his power to charm, not in his fearlessness, not even in his ferocious will, but rather in a subtle evolution in the domain of feeling: his uncanny ability to burrow his way deep into a woman’s nature, to detect with precision the slight, subterranean ripples of inclination and repulsion that constituted the hidden life of women. He knew that Mary Hood enjoyed his company, and he knew something more: her interest in him quickened whenever he turned his attention toward Georgiana. Then he would sense in her body a slight stiffening, in her bottom lip a slight drawing in; and lowering her eyes, she would wait for his attention to fall on her again. Juan understood that this was not yet jealousy, but some elusive foreshadowing of it, akin to an instinct of ownership. It was as if Mary Hood had taken charge of him and didn’t like him to stray. Juan understood one other thing: it was the beginning of a particular interest in him that might, in time, take a more lively turn. It was his way in.

  Meanwhile, he savored his long outings with the tireless squire of Swan Park, who proved to be a passionate horseman with a fondness for dangerous descents along craggy paths and wild gallops across open downs. The outer reaches of Swan Park were in a continual state of development and reinvention, and Hood was in the thick of things, assisting laborers as they cut a glade or opened a serpentine path through a wood, directing the construction of a pond or the draining of a swamp, and discussing with tenants on outlying farms the breeding of cattle or the cultivation of turnips. He had strong opinions about a host of subjects that Juan had never given a thought to. Lakes, Hood declared, should always be wooded to the shore, their ends lost to view among trees, and he argued that the most picturesque coppice was one composed of beeches and Scots firs. He was currently overseeing a number of exciting ventures, including an interconnected series of subterranean tunnels, a hollow hill containing a library, and several curious projects that he called “living representations”—small tracts of parkland turned into legendary or historical places
that blended perfectly into the forests of oak, beech, and ash, the undulating meadows and fields, the hills and valleys of Swan Park. Passing through a thick wood, they came to a region of gently rising hills and shady dales, watered by many streams. A shepherd sat on a rock under a tree, playing a reed pipe, while eight or nine shorn sheep grazed nearby. This, Hood explained, was the land of Arcadia, where real shepherds and shepherdesses dressed in authentic Greek costumes tended flocks of sheep, whose wool was sheared by tenant farmers and sold to merchants in Flanders, while skilled musicians wearing the costumes of shepherds and shepherdesses played pipes made from reeds imported from the Peloponnesus, and actors dressed like Elizabethan lords and ladies enacted scenes of love-longing, such as sighing aloud, weeping by the sides of brooks, pining away in shady groves, and writing love sonnets to hang on the branches of trees. As they rode, Juan saw one young lord in doublet and hose leaning cross-legged against an oak, staring sorrowfully at the ground; the lord looked up at the intruders on horseback, and turned his face away with an expression of angry despair.

  Scarcely had they passed through Arcadia when Hood began to speak eagerly about a more recent representation—a venture into the Saxon past. After a time they came to a realm of thick forest and swampland; dark islands rose from the marsh. Here, Hood explained proudly, stood the Isle of Athelney; here during the Danish wars, when all of Wessex was on the verge of a humiliating defeat, King Alfred had retreated for seven long weeks, brooding over the fate of England, waiting for the chance to strike back at his enemies, and emerging at last to defeat Guthrum at the battle of Edington. Hood showed Juan the dense thickets of alder, the fort of the brooding king, the wild deer, a rough wooden bridge; and here and there Juan could see, deep in the alder woods, an ancient Saxon disappearing into the gloom.

  But Hood could scarcely suppress his impatience to show Don Juan his latest representation, still under way in a remote corner of southwest parkland. “This way!” he cried, as he broke into a gallop across a field of yellow wildflowers. “Faster! Zounds! I’ll take you to the end o’ the living world!” Juan, spurring his horse, felt the excitement of it—the irrepressible squire had a way of making you feel like a twelve-year-old boy following an adventurous fourteen-year-old brother. They dashed over meadows, slowed to a walk through narrow forest paths darkened by overhanging branches, splashed through rushing streams, startled hares and deer, burst into secret glades trembling with sunlight, until at last they came to a dark lake bordered by gloomy hills. Here Hood dismounted and motioned for Juan to tie his horse to a thick branch. Eagerly he led the way on foot along the edge of the dreary lake, which emitted a stench of sulfur. “ ’Twas said that birds flying over this noxious lake would sicken and die. Hah! What have we here?”

  They had come to a high cave partially concealed by dense bushes. Above the entrance hung a stone plaque in which were carved the words FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO. Underneath, in smaller letters, stood four lines of verse:

  Smooth the descent and easy is the way

  (The Gates of Hell stand open night and day);

  But to return and view the cheerful skies,

  In this the task and mighty labour lies.

  Dryden, Hood remarked—was Juan familiar with the English poet?—had taken a strong liberty by translating “Dis” as “Hell,” although the more interesting question concerned whether Avernus referred to the lake proper or, by extension, to the Underworld itself. The opinion of the learned was divided, some saying that Averno must mean to Avernus, others that it could only mean by way of Avernus. However that may be, he remarked as he led Juan into the cave, he had chosen to call this representation Avernus, for the simple reason— “Hah! Well! I see you enjoy my little effects.” Juan had drawn his sword as a hissing form half emerged from the shadows. “ ’Tis the Lernean Hydra,” Hood explained, nodding toward the retiring monster. “She o’ the many heads. In this art, Sir,” he added, “shadow is all.” In a trembling blackness lit by small fires, he pointed to shadowy creatures that half showed themselves and half withdrew. There lay a Gorgon, there a flamebreathing Chimaera, there Briareus of the hundred arms—but surely Juan knew his Aeneid? Beyond the tree of false dreams lay the shore of the river Acheron: there the souls of the dead fluttered moaning near the bank.

  Hood led Juan into a broad flat boat. At one end Charon with his burning eyes and wild tangle of white beard stood in his filthy cloak knotted at one shoulder, gripping his pole like a grim gondolier. “ ’Tis only the buried dead may cross,” Hood said, sitting down on a wooden thwart. “The unburied must wait on shore for an hundred years.” “Are you and I the buried dead, then?” Juan asked with a smile. “We are all buried, in comparison with what may be,” Hood riddlingly replied.

  On the far shore of Acheron he led Juan into the flickering dark. Here there was still much work to be done. The three heads of Cerberus lay in a heap, and Dido, dressed in black and looking rather bored, sat at a small table playing patience by the light of a lantern. A fork in the path led to Tartarus on the left and Elysium on the right, both under construction. Hood led him to the left, through a passageway that opened into a torchlit place where laborers struck at the walls with picks, pushed carts laden with rocks, or sat wearily on barrels, eating bread and cheese.

  “And yet,” Georgiana said a few hours later, “you cannot deny that all of Nature is the work of a great Designer.”

  “Come now, I do not deny the existence of a great Designer,” Hood replied, as he cut into his roast goose. “I deny only that that existence may be proved from the evidence of Nature.”

  “But—Augustus—what more evidence can there be, than the regularity and order of Nature? Night following day, the succession of seasons, the regular progress of the stars, the orderly development of the oak tree from the acorn and the rose from the rose seed, the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, so perfectly adapted for the sensation of vision—surely the sense of a Designer must present itself forcibly to a mind unbiased by ideas repugnant to reason.”

  “Indeed, ’tis well argued,” Hood said. “I do not—upon my word, I do not deny the appearance of order in Nature. I deny only—”

  “Appearance, you say!”

  “Aye, just so: for what appears, may not be. Yet the appearance of order once being granted, I deny ’tis evidence of purposeful design. It may, with equal reason, be explained as the result of an accidental collocation of atoms, as in the system of Democritus and Epicurus.”

  “What! My dear Augustus, you—why, ’tis the rankest atheism!”

  “Nay, my dear Georgiana. ’Tis the rankest Reason. Come, have some more port, Mary. The white is better than the red. Is it my fancy, or does our friend Don Juan look as if he has just returned from the dead? Why, I’m only joking, dear. Pray, Don Juan, do explain my little riddle, else she’ll cook me and carve me and serve me up on a platter.”

  After dinner, Hood retired to the library to read a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, while Juan took a turn with Mary and Georgiana along the path of osiers on the bank of the Ymber. In the early evening light, a swan and five cygnets passed near the shore. Georgiana stopped to watch for a moment, while Mary, who had been agreeing that the spelling of English was much in need of reform, and who hadn’t noticed her sister’s interest in the swan, walked on several steps ahead. Juan, seeing that Georgiana had been left behind, inclined his head and said in a low voice, “I fear your sister has taken a dislike to me.”

  “Why—why—but surely you are mistaken.”

  “You see how she avoids us.”

  “But I cannot understand—”

  “Come, come,” called Georgiana, “what are you two plotting?”

  “We were speaking,” Mary replied, coloring slightly, “about the irregularity of English orthography.”

  The flush in her cheeks, the reflection of the osiers in the dark water, the shimmer of the lace frill on her square décolletage, the evening light falling on distant fi
elds, the sense of sudden intimacy caused by his words and by Mary’s little falsehood, all this filled Juan with a sense of well-being, and that night, lying in his curtained bed, he recalled the pleasing scene as if it were a painting: the man standing with slightly inclined head, the woman close beside him, the second woman standing at a distance, her face turned toward them, in the soft light of dusk.

  Now in the late mornings, whenever he walked with Mary and Georgiana along winding garden paths, or in the evenings when all four played together until supper, Juan seized any chance he had to exchange a word in private with Mary about Georgiana, or to speak with Georgiana while Mary watched across a distance. And Juan could feel, in the young wife, a quickening of interest, a ripple of feeling that was deeply familiar to him—for he was never mistaken, in such matters.