He was afraid it was all going to happen again; that it would go on happening forever; that this was his fate after all.
And yet . . .
It was hard to think beyond the pain that the sound of the weeping caused him. But he knew he had to listen, not so much to the sound itself, as to where it was coming from.
It was like playing a desperate game of hide-and-seek. The sound was so difficult to locate he almost wondered if it was inside his own head.
Still holding Deirdre’s hand, he crossed the great hall to a large arched doorway. Beyond it there was a stone kitchen, winsome in the crystal light. He noticed a trapdoor. There must be a cellar below, he thought.
And yet the crying was not coming from beneath them, he was sure.
He listened, he listened, he seemed to have to go deep inside himself to listen. He allowed his feet to lead him, and they led him back out of the kitchen to the great stone stairway that led up out of the hall.
They climbed it, Deirdre and he. There were two flights, and the floor above was composed of a corridor with bed chambers and sitting rooms on either side of it – stone walls and floors with carpets and tapestries and canopied beds and heavy damask curtains pulled back from crystal windows, and always the sunlight streaming in and the rainbows on the floors.
But the sound was not coming from here.
At the end of the corridor was a further stairway, a narrower, smaller one, at the top of which they could see a stone door with a stone bowl carved into the wall beside it – an ancient cross and a heart above it. It was filled with water.
‘It must be a chapel,’ said Galahad.
He and Deirdre looked at each other in wonder. They hesitated for only a moment. Then they climbed the stairs. They dipped their fingers in the water and blessed themselves. Then they opened the door and entered.
The sound had seemed to be everywhere – no louder in one place than in another until now. But as soon as they entered the chapel everything was different. They knew this place was its source and they knew something else. The castle was not infinite – or not any more. In fact its size was perfectly comprehensible. At the same time, Galahad thought, its size is not wide; it is deep.
You found something, not so much by searching, not so much by covering ground, as by staying still and listening.
There was an empty iron plinth in the entrance. It was the plinth that once held the crystal box with the living heart inside it. Now it held nothing. But there was a child huddled beneath it.
She had her back to them. They could see the short blonde bob of her hair and the back of her black dress. She was about five, and she was curled up and rocking in distress. And the terrible sound was her weeping.
Gal stood staring down at her.
He knew her at once.
So this was the one whose weeping had tormented him, whose grief he would have done anything to console.
Not Deirdre. Not his beloved. Deirdre’s grandmother. His enemy.
Galahad shut his eyes.
This was the woman who had hated him so viciously and caused him so much anguish, who had separated him from his love, crushed her spirit and hounded her to her death, who had torn out his very heart.
This was the woman against whom he had felt such anger, on Deirdre’s behalf, on his own – the woman who had persecuted them, denied them sympathy and love, tried her best to warp their minds.
But this, also, was the child of his nightmare, the defenceless little girl whose pain he would have done anything to stop.
For in her essence Deirdre’s grandmother – the enemy of all he loved – was no more than this poor little child rocking and weeping before him, a tiny creature made of need.
Deirdre had always said that. Deirdre had forgiven her, long years ago. Perhaps Deirdre had never felt there was anything to forgive.
He felt so big. She seemed so little. And yet all the suffering in the world seemed contained within her tiny frame.
He knelt down.
‘Why are you crying?’ he asked softly.
And the light in the chapel suddenly brightened, as if the sun itself had grown stronger, and all at once the little girl fell silent. But she went on rocking and hugging herself with her back turned to him.
‘Because you’ve left me!’ she said, her voice muffled and utterly forlorn. ‘Because nobody loves me!’
‘I haven’t left you,’ said Galahad. ‘I’m here. I keep returning here in my dreams. I can’t leave you. My dreams won’t let me. And it’s not true that nobody loves you. I love you.’
And although he said it before he had time to think, he realised it was true. Her suffering was his suffering. He would still have done anything to stop it.
The little girl said nothing. For a moment, she was still. Then, hesitantly, she turned and looked at him.
The blonde bob with the fringe, the piquant little face. But it no longer changed in a kaleidoscope of rage from little girl to old woman. Her face was simply that of a five-year-old girl, her eyes large and filled with tears, her red mouth as vulnerable as a baby’s.
She stared at him and at Deirdre behind him, and there was no hatred in her eyes. She seemed to be considering.
Gal’s heart ached inside his ribs. But it was not the pain of a wound. He held out his arms to her. She jumped up and came forward and fell into them. He stood, holding the child against his chest, and Deirdre came closer and held them both.
His anger had passed forever. Now there was only love.
He only just got out in time.
There was a moment down in the foyer when he hesitated, when he sympathised, again, with Deirdre’s attraction to death, her fear of life. It would have been so easy to stay, to allow Corbenic to collapse on top of him, to be lost in its destruction as he had once been lost in the living labyrinth of its halls and stairs and landings and vestibules – in the monument of its rooms and its secrets and the ghosts that had haunted it, a monument he had imagined would stand forever.
And life stretched out long and lonely and unknowable before him, like a highway obscured by pelting rain.
But his heart was no longer hidden in the most secret room in the building. And Deirdre was no longer trapped here, guarding it. His heart was inside him, and Deirdre had been set free.
He had paused for perhaps a couple of seconds. He had been running down hallways and stairs, through landings and across vestibules, through the twisting labyrinth of crazy architecture from the room at the centre of the building. He was breathing hard. It was strange not to feel the pain he had been feeling in his rib cage since he was five years old. Oddly, he missed it. But at the same time he felt whole – complete in a way he never remembered feeling before. It was not just because his heart had been restored to him. It was because Deirdre dwelt within it; it was because their love had been fulfilled at last. And it was because his anger had departed forever.
He heard a sound and looked up just in time to see the stairway collapsing, dragging, it seemed, the walls and the ceiling down with it. It looked as if a wedding cake, a large one with many layers, had been pushed off a table at a reception. For a split second he stood motionless, staring at it. It was the unbearable noise that drove him finally to the glass door where ‘Cinebroc’ was inscribed, and back out at last through the splintered wooden hoarding and onto the street.
The night air outside was still and startlingly fresh. In a moment it would be filled with dust from the collapsed building. There was no one on the street. No one but he knew that Corbenic was collapsing yet. But the noise alone would alert someone soon. Surely it could be heard streets away.
Gal crossed the street quickly and returned to the streetlight under which he had been standing when Deirdre had looked out her window and seen him. He had hoped to catch the sight of her window before it fell – to see her window one last time. And yes, the front of the building was still there, standing straight but doomed as the building crumbled behind it.
He gazed
up at her window, remembering what it had felt like to see her ghostly face in it, the black shadows of her eyes, the strange silvery fairness of her hair, her white dress. He had known of course that she was dead, but he had not been afraid. He had longed only to see her and talk to her and be with her. He had longed only to rescue her, as he had not been able to do while she was alive.
He kept looking up at her window – not knowing what he expected to see, hoping to see nothing, hoping to see something.
But the window was empty. And as the front of the building began to waver and to crumble at last, he knew that he would never see Deirdre in this life again.
Soon he could see nothing for dust. When he heard the first wail of a siren in the distance he turned on his heel and began to walk slowly away.
He walked into his future, leaving Deirdre and her grandmother and Corbenic behind him.
And as he gazed into the distance, it seemed to him that he saw a girl on the road ahead of him, a girl in a white dress, with long fair hair. She was walking slowly, deliberately, dreamily, and yet he knew it would take him a long time to catch up with her. She had such a start on him.
But he knew he would catch up with her at last.
I grew up in old, complicated buildings, with stairs and hallways and vestibules and landings, with attics and cellars and even a boiler room. And I grew up looking out of windows, because we always lived upstairs, and living in the centre of town, because these buildings – a nineteenth-century hotel and an Art Deco block of flats – were close to railway stations and surrounded by shops. My sister and I didn’t play in backyards – we played inside. And inside always seemed bigger than outside.
When I started to read, it was easy for me to believe that you could get to another universe through a wardrobe door. The buildings I grew up in had so many unexpected portals and dead ends, you felt you could have found almost anything around any corner. I guess that’s why the landscape that has always intrigued me most is the landscape within. It has all the mountains and rivers and forests and wildernesses, all the wind and rain and snow and clement sunshine, all the calm seas and tempests, all the meadows and rocky paths there are outside. But the space on the outside can only be so big. The space on the inside is infinite.
Cassandra Golds
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia), 2013
Text copyright © Cassandra Golds, 2013
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ISBN: 978-1-74253-819-8
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