Somnium

by Steve Moore

  The low ruins of a broken wall appeared next in the stuttering light, marble again, but flecked this time with gold and bearing the shattered remains of a relief: of chariot wheels and horses’ hooves, of maidens’ feet and the merest beginning, I thought, of a curious representation of the wide-expanding ocean of the stars. What palatial building this represented once I could not possibly conjecture, but after tracing its course a few feet further on we came to the broken stumps of a pillared gateway. I realised then that this was merely the remains of a surrounding wall, rather than that of a building itself.

  Collapsed between the gateway’s pillars were the remains, still recognisable though tarnished and betwisted, of a pair of gate-leaves, wrought of silver and decorated, in amongst the arabesques, with combinations of the star and crescent. Yet no Mohametan swarthy hand was e’er involved in this. In that openwork of silver struts and curlicues, there was an elaborate name-plate; and when, at last, by lantern-light I was able to read it, I confess, I fainted. It was too much. I cannot say I grew dizzy, or that the world span before my eyes, or any of those other old clichés. One moment I was there, and looking; the next I simply was not. Not there, not looking, not conscious. Simply not.

  When awareness returned, I found my head was cradled in warm Cynthia’s lap, face across her softest thighs, her fingers stroking, worried, at my hair. I raised my head and tried to speak; before I could, she pressed my face against her lovely breasts and, I confess, I suddenly thought of mother, and was contented then to stay there while I gathered up my thoughts. Finally, she let me look up, to gaze upon the relieved expression lighting up her face. She said she was so glad I was alright; I wanted then to say so many things, but simply could not speak. And then, hugging each other tightly for support, we followed the thread back to the ancient door. No, I confess, she hugged me more than I did her; but it was I who needed the support by far the more than she. Regaining the familiar cellar of The Bull, we locked the door behind us, and then she helped me to my room.

  She laid me on the bed, and stroked my hair, and kissed me; and oh, her concern, it was so sweet. She sat and held my hand until I fell asleep, the finest doctor of them all. I needed that. My mind would not accept at all the thing that I had seen. That name-plate simply could not be. And yet it was. I say again: it could not be, and yet it was. The word that name-plate spelled, all twisted and all battered, it was that single word that made the world entire a dream:

  Somnium

  That should have been enough shocks for one day. Alas, it was not.

  I awoke again at evening, my dreams all filled with Moons that hid in caverns and lovely palace ladies who, though different, all were one; had my supper sent up. Dear Cynthia brought it up herself, and as I lay there propped up on the pillows, she fed me with a spoon. It was so sweet, and how I loved her for it. She told me I should neither drink nor write, and try to get more sleep. The darling woman blamed herself for all that had befallen me; I told her she must not; and if she would but kiss me once, the world entire would be set to rights. She did; my eyes they must have shown it was not so; and so she kissed me once again before she left me.

  I tried then to write my letter to dear Liz, but failing as I said, I lay there on the bed and tried to understand what I had seen. That marble slab, it so surprised me down there in the dark, I had forgot just then that I had written such a thing (so briefly) when Endimion Lee, a-dreaming, takes his chariot-flight about the world; the palace name-plate, I did not know if it was real or just absurd. Yet I had seen it with these very eyes; and more, the sight had been so real it made me faint away. How could it be that, down below the surface of the hill, beyond the ancient cellar door, there yet remained the antique traces of a palace (of a world; of a merest, nebulous fantasy) that I had invented and written down within the last three weeks? That is why I fainted. My mind it simply could not conceive how anything so strange, so extraordinary, could exist. And yet my own eyes had seen it. At least, so I thought. But who could say? Was it real? Was it a fantasy of my own devising? A dream? Or did I have the brain-fever I had not wished my Liz to think I had? At last, I decided that I simply could not tell. I knew I wanted Lizzie here with me, to tell me what was real and what was false, to hold me in her arms, and kiss me, and tell me all was well about the world; the same then that she always does when I am quite unwell.

  Of course, that could not be. My Liz was far away; my only cure to hand was further sleep.

  And that was not to be either.

  I do not know how late it was, but as I lay there half a-doze, there was a sudden rattling at the door, which, though I’d locked it earlier, suddenly burst open. It seems dear Cynthia possesses duplicate keys, which, with afterthought, says little of the privacy and security promised hereabouts.

  As I said, how late it was, I know not, but Cynthia was in that same nightdress I thought I’d seen before on Severndroog tower, all sheer and clinging in the Moonlight; I confess she looked quite charming. She told me then, in great excitement, that she’d just received strange news, by trusted messenger, directly from old London town.

  Her husband, she informed me all agog, though hardly with regret, had been taken by the officers of the law, as a highwayman and a controller of highwaymen, a burglar and a common thief, and worse a murderer too, and was, upon the instant, immured in Newgate Prison. She babbled something of information laid against him, but I confess her décolletage distracted me, as it had when last I’d seen her in her night attire, and I remember little else except she said they’d surely hang him. Then she thrust that heavy, ancient key to the cellar door into my hand and begged me, if questioned thereabout, to hide it and deny all knowledge.

  I naturally agreed (I think I would do anything she asked, and even risk my soul); and besides, the thought of some profane thief-catcher being let loose in that caverned underworld, unable to understand its glories or, worse yet, shattering those delicious depictions of Diana, was quite too much to bear. She kissed me hotly then, the more than once, and told me breathlessly how I was ‘a darling boy’ and how, before the month was out, she’d ‘make my dreams come true’. I had no idea at all of what she spoke, but when she paused for breath I thought at last to ask her where Jude Brown had been arrested; she told me it was Oxford Street and, it seemed, not far away from my own house; and suddenly she was gone again, leaving me bewildered and alone, and quite unable to sleep.

  What this means, I know not. My first thought was that already my dreams were all too true, and little has this to do with my charming and, I suspect, all-too-confusing Cynthia Brown. But second thoughts came rushing in to follow: that Jude Brown, discovering my address and thinking me a rich one, after failing with my trunk had then been on his way to rob my house. A third thought then appalled me: that breaking in and finding sweet young Liz, he could not help but rape her; and leaving behind then none to testify, he surely would have killed her. The thought, it made me sob and groan; for her presumed escape, I thanked the Goddess of the Moon, and whoever it might be who’d laid the information leading to her rescue.

  I finally slept again, after I know not how long, and dreamt that Liz had come to me all naked, and thanked me for her rescue, and said that we could love, and even marry, siblings as we are, but not in quite the way that I had thought, if I would only give up something here and take a journey with her; and at the same time she was Cynthia, naked too, who told me that she and I could love and journey just the same, for some obstacle (I naturally have to think her husband was intended) had shortly been removed; and even more than this, she was Diana Regina, Mistress of Somnium and a Goddess who (I have to think) is a literary creation entirely my own, and the journey she wanted me to take it had its destination in that lustrous city of the lunar night wherein she reigns. To convince me of the message’s earnest import she, or they (by which I intend the entire trinity) slipped sweetly into bed with me, kissed me, embraced me; and I woke up moaning, to find it then full daylight.

  Young To
m Watkins, it seems, absconded in the night, suggesting that he, himself, might have been one of Jude Brown’s cut-throat gang; all of which implies to me that the ‘protection’ he afforded me in previous days depended rather more on his involvement with the blackguards than his weaponry. I’ll be glad if he makes his escape. He was a personable lad, and I would not see him swing, or anyone else so young and apt for leading all astray; and swinging, I gather from the officers who arrived from London late this morning, is Brown’s predestined fate. The information laid against him, and the evidence found upon his person, apparently, put together, make the case conclusive. I know not where the information came from, though Cynthia, of course, denies responsibility; and, likewise, the greater part of me refuses to believe that any woman would betray her husband so. Another part, however, remembers how she looked when I did curse him in the cellar, and how these things have coincided. And that part too, it warms, I must confess, to think that if anyone knew Jude Brown’s plans it must have been herself; and if a choice it then was made, between husband and myself, and that sweet sister who is the half of all my life, then I would love, because I had to, the person who had made that choice, for all it may have cost her. Yet this cost, I think, is something better left unthought of.

  But thinking of that curse again, I cannot help but wonder. I wished him dead, although I could not say it quite unto his dear wife’s face; the least I wished him instantly removed from all I had to do with. And so it seems he will be. This gives me much to think on.

  Well, there’s nothing I can do. They tell me Jude Brown’s case is thought so serious that a special Sessions will be convened within a day or two; upon his certain conviction, the following day they’ll bring him back here to the Londonward foot of Shooters Hill and hang him by the crossroads, just outside The Fox Under the Hill (coincidentally, that’s just where I had Endimion Lee first board the silver coach; but whether there’s significance in that, I hardly can conclude). Then they’ll parade his corpse up past this very inn and take it down the Kentish side, and leave it hanging in a cage to rot on Gibbet Field, as a warning to all the others of his kind. I’ll neither attend the hanging nor go to see his body crow-pecked; and nor, agreeably to me, will Cynthia Brown-eyes either.

  The officers, of course, were searching for other members of Brown’s gang who numbered, on occasion, some seven or more, I’m told, ranging everywhere from here to Blackheath and even as far as Deptford dockyards where, long gone, poor Kit Marlowe, daggered in the eye, expired, and took with him to other worlds all those wondrous words unwritten that might, perhaps, have been (I fancy if he had a Moon-play in him, it might be found at last in Somnium). All that Doctor Gould and the Woolwich army officer suffered too is laid at Jude Brown’s door; and far more than this besides. Some of the things I heard the officers talk of simply do not bear repeating. They questioned me, as they did all the inhabitants of The Bull, but Cynthia (corroborated, I gathered, much surprised, by the unattractive Daphne Squires) swore the most atrocious oaths by that god I know we’ve both abjured, that I had arrived here with the falling leaves, and that I was a strange one (I winced to hear her say it) who rarely left my room, and a writer poetical who was, to my great good fortune, able to produce page after page of manuscript to confirm all this. Lastly, she asked them if they thought I looked a brigand; of course I was relieved when they said no and yet, somehow, I felt myself diminished.

  Much more relief to me, of course, was to discover from the officers, by questions indirect, that Brown had been arrested before the perpetration of any London crime; and so my Lizzie, she is safe and well.

  The officers’ other task was, of course, to search for Brown’s ill-gotten gains. Having already satisfied them that I knew nothing of the case, I was allowed to withdraw to my room, as a result of which I had no embarrassing questions to answer about the ancient cellar door; still less about its equally-ancient key. Cynthia told me afterwards that the officers battered at that door but, being made when last a true Queen sat the throne, with all the wondrous workmanship of that bold and mightiest imperium, it withstood all their efforts, impregnable in itself as she was virginal. No key being traceable (I had it hid beneath my mattress) they gave up at the last and, by middle afternoon, departed for the city; and I could tell, simply from their angry bickering as they left, that had they found the loot they sought, no great part of it would have been delivered by them to their masters. Thief-takers, I fear, take almost as much as the thieves they take in turn.

  Cynthia brought a bottle of claret to my room when they were gone, and laughed aloud; I could instantly conjecture why. Those chests stored just beyond the cellar door had no part of their origin in the ruins of Somnium that lay beyond.

  If Somnium exists. Ruined, whole, or merely dreamed. And if it does, then what place is this? Who is Cynthia? And who am I, and what then have I wrought? I do not know, and am no longer sure: am I here in The Bull Inn, new-built in 1749? Or far more ancient Somnium? Or Bedlam? Or fainted, lost in some bewildering delirium, never quite woke up? Or even written by another, two hundred years ahead? Or but a story in a palace of the Moon?

  I asked sweet Cynthia, when the bottle was empty and I thought she might be prone to answer, how her feelings were on what had happened, and who she thought had consigned her husband to his doom. She laughed and put an arm around my shoulder, pulled me close and whispered all conspiratorial; swore me quite to silence, then murmured that Jude Brown had never been her husband and, as for who had laid the information, she simply did not care. Before I could ask her anything else at all, she kissed me swift and left me all alone.

  Thursday, 11th October 1803

  Last night I thought of many things; but most of all I wondered why I had not heard a word from Liz. I wrote to her again this morning, but hesitated far too much on what to tell her; so many things have happened (or at least, I think they have). In the end, I told her that I loved her, missed her, had so many things to tell her that, upon the instant she received my letter, she should hire a trusted guard and take the next and fastest coach to join me here. I know that many other rooms are standing empty in the inn (though I’d rather Lizzie shared my own); but what Cynthia would think of having Lizzie here, I simply do not know. More important to me, right now, is that I need my sister here to hold me in her arms.

  And yet, right now, I am no longer certain-sure at all I actually have a much-loved younger sister, Elizabeth Melisandra Morley, brown-eyed, warm and sweet as honey, to whom my letter was addressed. But let me believe, because I have to believe in something, that I actually have. I signed my letter ‘From your loving Kit’ and sealed it with ten thousand passionate kisses, and all my hopes: that somehow she would be there, to receive it and to read it. And that she’d come, or at least write back and tell me that I am not mad, and that I have a sister who loves me (oh, I want to hear her say she loves me), and that all of this, and I myself, am really real and not just some fantasy made up by another.

  I never should have left my Liz. Never. She is my dearest, darling sister, and now that I am gone I realise how sweet it was to be with her. And more, far worse than the thought that I myself might not exist, is that she might not either. And to think of a world without my Liz; that never had or never will have anyone as sweet as she; that is too much to bear. But if she’s not and yet I am, then I think I’ll soon be quite as she is.

  But what if she were, and I was not? Now there’s a thought. Oh, sweet beloved Lizzie, I know nothing of what may happen, to me, or you, or to the world itself. But if you read this, simply know: if ever I was, and had a reason to be, it was to love you. And I do.

  Friday, 12th October 1803

  Yesterday the inn was closed, which hardly was surprising. Having written my letter, I took it down to the Red Lion myself, there being no-one else to take it. It took me half an hour to extricate myself from Eustatius Wellbeloved and all his silly questions. I tried to tell him that I knew nothing of Jude Brown’s notorious past; litt
le less of what had happened in the last two days, and nothing again of what might happen next. His curiosity, though, was quite insatiable. I left him disappointed.

  I returned and found The Bull apparently deserted. In my room I found a note from dearest Cynthia, telling me she was gone out (‘to put things righter for the future’), and I should help myself to claret and a cold supper from the kitchen; and that she would see me ‘in my dreams’. And so last night I wrote and drank and slept, and know that she was right; I remember little of my dreams, but lovely laughing Cynthia certainly was in them, and oh, she seemed so happy. I woke in pre-dawn light and wondered: if she could will to be there in my dreamworld, what other marvels might then follow?

  I had some inkling when I woke this morning and found The Bull entirely filled with delightful female laughter. It seems that Cynthia’s lengthy expedition was for no other purpose than replacing the inn’s entire staff with personable young maidens of the most extraordinary beauty. Everyone hereabouts before, apart from Cynthia herself, is gone: Tom Watkins, Daphne Squires and Jacqueline Smythe, Bates the cellar-man, old Marguerite the ancient cook, and all, replaced with alluring lovelies all of whom, it seems, bear flower names: Rose, Lily, Violet, Iris, Ivy, Daisy and more than I can quite recall, all serving under their charming ‘matron’, an equally young maid called Flora who, it seems, prefers to dress in boots and britches, a man’s shirt and a waistcoat. Shepherdesses are now found out there in the fields, lady-grooms bring out fresh horses, dear damosels set forth upon the cart to visit the warehouse in Woolwich; while housemaids, cooks and serving-wenches are all as eye-delightingly beautiful as the sweetly-scented flowers whose names they bear. All are dressed in purest white but Flora who, besides, has a brace of pistols chased with silver, in case some stranger seeks to trouble her sisters in the slightest. Apart from dearest Liz and Cynthia (who is infused, upon the moment, with a sudden, surprising, enormous and quite charming vivacity), I’ve never seen a lovelier collection of sweet young virgin maids.