by Otto Penzler
“You will take these, Michael, because he intended that you should have them. Our father used this snuff box to the end of his life and the cornelian ring was upon his hand when he died.”
The ring was too big for Michael’s finger, so his sister wrapped some cotton around the heavy gold shaft, tying the ends into a neat knot. Michael’s mouth fumbled with the hard edge of her cheek, in a shy attempt to kiss her. Then he too walked down the white path, towards the gate.
Within half-an-hour the high coach was rolling on towards Maidenhead and London. Michael pressed his feet against his carpet bag and he closed his hand so that the cotton could not be seen upon the ring. He sat, stiff and nervous, watching the occasional stretches of the river, the rafts of ice floating down, and, in one place, a perplexed swan beating her white wings upon a frozen pond. The trees were white and the earth was hard and silent.
The coach passed through Maidenhead and came to a fork in the road. The old man sitting next to Michael pointed to the grey outline of the castle on the hill at Windsor. “They say the King’s pet giraffe died not so very long ago, and that he was as unhappy about it as if it had been his own Royal lady,” said the stranger.
“A giraffe, the King’s giraffe?”
“Aye, the King’s giraffe; it’s lived at the castle these many months, and its dying has broken His Majesty’s heart, they say. A great funeral it had, and it was buried in the castle garden. A ghost walks there, they say, but the King is no ghost. They tell me he’s so fat that the leeches have to bleed him before his Christmas dinner.”
Michael Stranger opened his eyes a little wider. Rumours of the ways of kings seldom drifted as far as The Hollies. Surely, now, he was coming into the great world. The lash of the whip danced in the air; they passed an inn where Dick Turpin used to sleep and the stranger told him a story of the highwaymen at Hounslow. Late in the day, the coach came to the outskirts of Kensington.
Kensington and Westminster were still parted by a greensward: only a few years before there had been a turnpike at Hyde Park Corner. Indeed, the little stretch of open country had been so treacherous in Benjamin Grinling’s boyhood that when he crossed it, he always walked in the middle of the road, peering hard at the shadows which might spring to life and become footpads in hiding.
Michael went to the inn to which his uncle had directed him: he walked shyly through the taproom and asked for his bedroom. The wife of his uncle’s old butler, a heavy-hipped woman from Kent, brought him his food: slices of beef with potatoes and cucumber and then plum pudding. She stayed with him for a little while, talking of the old days when her husband served Benjamin Grinling. “And you’ve never even seen your uncle! Well, indeed! He’s a fine gentleman, sir, is Mr. Grinling, a fine gentleman. A quiet gentleman, mind you sir, but very kind.”
As she stood before him, she rested one swollen red hand on her breast, and with the other, she pointed out of the window. “If you lean far out, sir, you’ll see Kensington Palace,” she said. “There’s little to see at this time of the year, for the gentry shut themselves up in the winter, like bugs in a rug. Or they are off to their fine houses in the country. All except your uncle, sir, and he’s such a solitary gentleman. But when the spring comes, it’s all flowers and you will see the young Princess Victoria: she’s the daughter of the Duke of Kent that died from getting his feet wet, you know. I have seen her many a day, with her big hat, toddling with two of the biggest footmen you ever saw. Some days I used to see them lift her on to a donkey by the Round Pond, and there is an old man following her always. They say he worships the very ground she walks on. A busy young person, they say, playing the piano and making paint pictures. She’s pretty as a rose, and I’ve seen her toddling down the path with a watering can in her hand, and sitting on the terrace in the summer mornings, with her mother, eating her bread and milk.”
“And is she a great Princess?” asked Michael Stranger.
“Great, maybe. The King’s her uncle, and it isn’t all of us whose uncles are kings. But I’m not complaining. And there are noises downstairs as if somebody’s come and wanting something, so if you’ll bang the stick three times on the floor when you’ve finished, I’ll be up to bring you your pudding.”
She waddled out of the room and later, through the darkness which had come, Michael went down into the taproom and asked for a glass of Madeira, which was the only wine he had known in his sister’s house.
The taproom was filled with happy, noisy people and with Christmas as their excuse for merry-making, they mixed hot punch and called on Michael to drink with them. He held the glass in his hand and slowly sipped the punch. Alarmed by the drowsiness and contentment which came over him, he walked out into the cold air of Kensington. The road was white and a few late robins, frightened from the trees, shook their wings and scattered the snow into showers. Bells were ringing, and the window of a big house was open so that Michael could see people dancing within. A tall man came out on to the balcony, a slim, dark form against the inner brillance of chandeliers and gilt. He threw coins down to some children who were singing in the street. Michael walked past them.
“A merry Christmas to you, stranger,” somebody called, from a doorstep.
“A merry Christmas, sir,” Michael answered.
He walked on until he came to a big, dark building set back in a park. There must have been fifty windows, sleepy, dark windows, with the curtains drawn. He stood before the park railings for a long time, so long that the night-watchman passed him twice and peered into his face.
“Is that Kensington Palace?” he asked.
“It is,” the watchman answered.
They stood together in the snow, and as they talked, more bells rang, more and more bells, so that the cold air was alive with them. It was so dark now that all the robins had gone to sleep. As Michael looked up to the dark palace, one window—two windows—suddenly became alive with light. “There must be somebody there,” Michael said to the watchman.
“Somebody! Why don’t you know what that is?” asked the night-watchman. “Lor, you must be a country bumpkin. That’s the room where the young Princess sleeps.”
“Princess Victoria? That’s the one the woman at the inn where I’m staying, told me about.”
“Yes,” answered the watchman. “I’ve heard tell—of course you never know about these things, because in my line of profession, you hear a tidy bit of gossip—I’ve heard tell that some day, when she grows up, that self-same Princess may be made Queen of England.”
II
Michael’s uncle lived in Half Moon Street. Benjamin Grinling’s origin was a mystery, even to the family into which he had married. The frowns of doubt had been smoothed away when he married Michael’s aunt Florence: the shadow over his origin had been forgotten when the rich comforts of his house in Half Moon Street were revealed. Room upon room, paintings by Canaletto in the drawing-room, curtains so thick and rich that they hung in sumptuous curves, resting their hems upon Aubusson carpets and rare Persian rugs, which Grinling had brought with him from the East.
His fair wife had shone in the dark house in Half Moon Street for little more than a year. She had been unhappy in the noisy gloom and had pined for the open fields about her old home in Reading. The red stains upon her cheeks had become sharper as the first London winter pressed in upon her, and one dull, grey December day, she had died in Benjamin’s arms, her golden hair tumbling about his hands as he held her. For seventeen years Benjamin Grinling had lived alone in the beautiful Queen Anne house, venturing out every day to his warehouse in Mincing Lane, and returning every evening to his lonely dinner, his glass of port, and the silent hour beside the fire, when he read books about the countries he had visited as a younger man. He was a cultivated and a travelled gentleman. He had seen the Great Wall of China and he had ridden all the way from Jerusalem to Jericho on a donkey so that he could bathe in the Dead Sea. He had clapped his hands in the echo room in the palace in Würzburg and he had seen the chattering apes
climbing up the rocky slopes of Gibraltar. Dim prints upon the walls and books bound in dark brown leather were all that he possessed now to awaken pictures of the more sprightly days … they alone could make his thoughts stray from the limited rooms of his house, into the greater spaces of the world which he had known when he was a boy.
A little of the old spring came into Benjamin Grinling’s walk upon this Christmas morning, when he set out to drive across the green from Piccadilly to Kensington, to meet his nephew from Reading. He had engaged chambers for the boy in Jermyn Street. A faint suggestion in an earlier letter from his niece, that Michael might perhaps be allowed to live with his uncle, in Half Moon Street, had so frightened the old gentleman that he wondered now if even Jermyn Street were not a little too near. By this time, Benjamin Grinling has become jealous of his loneliness and alarmed by any attempt to intrude upon it. No visitors ever crossed the threshold of the house in Half Moon Street: indeed, the only caller in ten years who was admitted to enter beyond the hall was his old and trusted clerk. Five years before on Michael’s sixteenth birthday, Benjamin’s niece had sent him a miniature of the boy. And there had been a silhouette, but by an itinerant artist who had passed through Reading in 1816. Benjamin Grinling had observed them, seeking the face of his beloved wife in the likeness. Then he had put them away in a drawer to wait until the day when he could see his nephew in the flesh.
Benjamin Grinling’s carriage moved out into the wider space of Piccadilly. Hyde Park Corner was a white field … it might have been a country green, with its snow men and its urchins, and the last carts making their way home, with berries and torn holly leaves in the cracks between their floor boards.
When the carriage stopped before the Goat and Compasses Inn, Benjamin Grinling did not move from beneath his rug. Michael was brought out to him, and, with his carpet bag and his hat-box, he was packed in and driven to his uncle’s house. His wide brown eyes opened in wonder. The houses of Piccadilly were so high that their chimneys seemed to touch the sky. Benjamin Grinling sat back. Shyness tied the old man’s tongue, but he turned again and again and watched the face of the boy beside him. There was a likeness which startled and pained him. He saw Michael’s long lashes and his country-coloured cheeks. He saw his heavy hands and the cornelian. He saw the roughly made clothes, the meagre carpet bag and the hat-box in which Michael’s belongings were packed. To himself, Benjamin Grinling said, “His face is like that of my beloved Flossie. But he is a raw fellow. Yet I shall make him into a gentleman. Good clothes and good food will drain the yokel out of him.”
Michael Stranger’s feelings did not assume the form of words. He turned his ring round upon his finger, hiding the cotton with his left hand. He leaned forward upon the edge of the seat, with the shy self-consciousness of one who has never driven in a sumptuous carriage before. When he came to his uncle’s house in Half Moon Street, when the servant took his hat and his coat and opened the door of the sitting-room, Michael was amazed. He walked on tip-toes.
The furniture in the room made it seem like the cemetery of the old man’s happiness. Upon a table was the box of ivory spillikins which Benjamin had bought for her in Paris. Above this hung a painting of the Doge’s Palace by Canaletto, as they had seen it together when they came into Venice from the sea. The picture glowed with gold-pink light. Behind the sofa was a Chippendale fire-screen, its embroidered basket of flowers incomplete, with the needle and the strand of green silk, just as Florence Grinling had left them. The realisation that Michael was her nephew and of the same blood, teased Benjamin’s memory and awakened a picture of her moving across the room in a heliotrope silk dress. Once, he remembered, she had come down to dinner and she had stood upon the polar bear rug. They had been married only four weeks then, but his love for her had already reached fullness and quiet. He had been sitting by the fire when he heard the rustle of her dress. He had looked up and had seen her with her heliotrope skirt billowing upon the white fur rug.
“Dear Flossie,” he had said, “you look just like an autumn crocus blossoming in the snow.”
She had laughed as she said: “But, my dear, my dress is heliotrope and an autumn crocus is saffron. And autumn crocuses do not bloom in the snow, Benjamin. Oh yes, and I am sure that they are saffron.”
“Then it’s the light,” he had answered.
“But it’s very poetical of you,” she had said, coming over to him from her raft of white fur, and resting her hands upon his coat. “Very poetical!”
It was their first foolish little joke. “Oh, you remember the night when you were poetical?” Florence would say, and they would laugh, neither Heaven nor themselves knowing why.
When she died, the emptiness of the white rug hurt Benjamin so much that he removed it. Once, ten years afterwards, when he went to the Wolfgangsee and saw the late crocuses, he had gone back to his room and cried like a child.
Benjamin Grinling touched his nephew’s arm and led him to the fire. The servant came in with a tray, two glasses and a decanter of sherry wine. Benjamin filled the glasses and lifting his own, he smiled at his nephew and said, “You have the look of your aunt in your eyes, my boy, and for this alone you are endeared to me. You must not be afraid of me, nephew. Give me your arm and let us stand thus before the fire, where she used to stand. We are going to be great friends … yes, we are going to be great friends.”
III
At nine o’clock Michael walked out of his uncle’s house, into the snow. He had dined well: his tongue had been loosened and his misgivings dispelled by his share of a bottle of burgundy and a decanter of port. Half Moon Street was a floor of snow, walled in by the dark houses. They shielded the snow from light and sound. His uncle’s servant had walked ahead with Michael’s traps, so he was free to swing his arms as he passed the dark doorways, his feet sinking four inches into the snow, his breath making a turbulent cloud in the milky grey light.
As Michael came near to Piccadilly, he saw an open door and a wedge of light coming from inside, making a gold-white path across the pavement. When he came to the light, he paused to observe the inner, warm scene of furniture, stairs, and carpet. As he became used to the outer silence, his ears were sensitive enough to hear sounds within the house. They seemed to come from the first room, the door of which opened into the hall, which he could see. The sounds of human movements stopped; Michael heard somebody screaming and then groaning. The groans ended in a thud. Michael walked into the house. He paused when his feet touched the carpet, but he heard the groans again and he walked nearer to the door of the room. As he passed the table in the hall, he saw a big print upon the wall. It bore the title Coronation of Queen Victoria, 1839.
In the second during which he peered at it, in passing, Michael thought this strange, for the year in which he lived was 1832 and he knew that Princess Victoria was still a child, walking in the gardens of Kensington Palace. Three paces more and he stood before the open door of the sitting-room. The scene astounded him. The snow fell in the street, but here, in the house, the room was full of sunshine. Hyacinths and daffodils were in bronze urns, upon the tables. Lying upon the floor was a woman in a light summer dress, and bent over her was a man, pressing his thumbs viciously into her throat. The woman’s head was turned towards the door, and her white face was framed in a tangle of red-gold hair. Her hands had clutched the green rug so that it was drawn up about her body. As Michael watched her, she released the rug and it fell back from her hands. Then the white fingers lay still and limp among the scattered primroses and snowdrops which had fallen from a broken vase. The man weakened his hold upon the woman’s throat and then he stood erect.
The sunshine made every object in the room alive with light. The furniture was of a fashion unknown to Michael. There were bunches of stiff flowers beneath glass shades, lace mats upon the chairs and dyed pampas grass in the grate, for, despite the winter outside, the room was warm and there was no fire.
The man was still unaware of Michael’s presence. Michael saw him
take the hyacinths and daffodils from the vases and scatter them over the girl’s body: he saw him scatter the white snowdrops upon her red-golden hair.
Michael sped out of the house, into the street. The wedge of light still made a pathway across the snow. He turned and ran down towards Piccadilly. The wide white expanse was scored by carriages and befouled by the feet of the pedestrians. But all had gone now: the street was dead and there was no night-watchman. Piccadilly seemed to yawn with emptiness. Michael turned and ran up the street again, towards his uncle’s house. His hands were already raised, to beat wildly upon the door for help. There were eight houses between the corner stone and the house from which he had seen the wedge of light. When he was twelve yards away, the light disappeared from the snow. He came to the door and found that it was closed. Upon the upper panel was the number. The darkness of the windows was deepened by the shutters, which were closed. Michael leaned against the railings, his face held forward, towards the black velvet shadow of the lower window. It was the window of the room which he had seen two minutes before, filled with sunshine and spring flowers. He walked back a few paces to the steps. Upon the railings, he saw the outline of a board. He knelt down in the snow, and, by holding his face near enough, with the aid of the faint moonlight and the reflection of the snow, he deciphered the words For Sale.
Ashamed and bewildered, Michael walked down the street again. The picture of the room tumbled and changed in his brain. As he trudged on, the snow growing thicker and thicker upon his heels and then falling off again, he forced his memory back to every detail of the furniture and the white face upon the carpet. He crossed Piccadilly and then he turned down St. James’s Street. By this time, his uncle’s servant had come back and, walking beside him, the man guided him to Jermyn Street. Incredulity and the fear of seeming ridiculous made Michael hold his tongue, but he asked the man if any of the houses in Half Moon Street were unused. “Oh, no, sir, but most people are away in their country houses this time of the year, you know, so the shutters is up and they seem to be empty, sir.”