This New & Poisonous Air

by Adam McOmber

  “When a man puts so much stock in a book of history,” Mrs. Philips said to me one afternoon over the remnants of a late tea, “that he begins to live in that other time, we must wonder what is missing from his life. I do feel sorry for my Lord, Mr. Sands. But you have brought some light to him. You should have seen this place before you came. There were months when he would not let me touch a thing—the sound of cleaning was too much for him, he said. It disrupted his reading. So much the better to have you walking these halls instead of the ghosts of that awful knight and his boy.”

  It would be vanity to say I was the only cause for Lord Weymouth’s despair. There must have been other men—a whole life of them perhaps that led to his obsession with the fantastic and useless diary of Sir Stephen. Mrs. Philips must have known about these men, of course, but she was the kind of woman who tended to let such details slip beneath her fastidiously pressed tablecloths. There were times when I thought she’d drifted as deep into a state of fantasy as he, eternally adjusting her gray uniform, acting as though at any moment “her Lord” might announce that he’d finally decided on a wife.

  “Our late age,” Lord Weymouth told me during one of his moments of clarity, “is devoted almost entirely to acting out the vision of a dream. Each of us has his own. I have my knight and you have your future happy home in the suburb. Even Mrs. Philips has a dream, I suppose. A dust-free countertop, perhaps. But collectively those dreams become phenomena—a definition of the age. What would Victoria think of all this dreaming—her subjects crawling through the bracken, mere animals attempting to achieve the sublime?”

  I left him after a single summer. Three months in all. He offered to hire me permanently as his financier, though by that time I’d already discovered there were no finances to speak of. The house of Weymouth was bankrupt and had been for some one hundred years. I took my leave of Longleat under poorer circumstances than when I’d arrived, no longer able to withstand even a moment of Lord Weymouth’s fantasies of the knight.

  “You’re mad,” I said to him in the darkness of our bed chamber. “You and Mrs. Philips live inside this hospital and support each other’s sickness.”

  “Are you the sane one then, Kenton?” he asked, voice a quiet growl. “Are you the doctor who’s come to take our temperatures?”

  We argued on the evening of my departure—I don’t remember the subject. Mrs. Philips wept as if she were losing a son, but as I’ve said already, I did not stay away for long. I returned at least once a month until my marriage—dragged back by some compulsion. Then my visits became rarer—so rare, in fact, that excursions to Longleat took on a significance larger than themselves. Visits crystallized into symbol: a return to youth. I was pleased to remember that time of confusion—the drama of my poet’s heart. Ascending the high steps to the door lit by streetlamps and gazing through the leaded glass at a distortion of the marbled foyer, I felt a warmth that my home in Maiden Bradley could not provide. The humble door opened even before my hand had touched the knocker, and it was as if I was folding myself back into reverie. Life in the suburbs was no longer my dream. Instead, my summer at Longleat called to me. The shabby rooms of Weymouth and the violence of its Lord had been trimmed to fit my foolish reach for the sublime.

  Each time Mrs. Philips escorted me down the hall to the room where Lord Weymouth sat by his fire, facing an empty chair, I felt years slip away. It was a pleasure to hear her chat happily about recent events in their lives—what few events there were. I was once again a boy of eighteen, marveling at the glass cases of Medieval artifacts. One shelf alone held the fang of the mythic boar of Garin, a Psalter used by St. Louis, and a bizarre statue of the Virgin, hinged so it could open and reveal a trinity within her womb. Mother Mary was prepared to give birth not only to a boy-child but an angry-looking god and a white dove with beams of light blazing from its skull.

  In greeting Lord Weymouth, I watched for intrusions of age, some intimation that these visits would not continue. My own father had died during my youth, and since then I waited constantly for the expiration of older men. I studied Lord Weymouth as he stood to welcome me, watching for a wince of arthritis or a foot askew—a furtherance of slippage and of loss. Yet such changes were infrequent. He seemed the same man, unhappy, yes, but in good health. I began to wonder if by returning to Longleat I was keeping him in some stasis. He did not change, because I did not. I was still the young graduate come to hear his stories—and there were always more of those. Stories of how Pieter was enchanted by a castle of maidens and Sir Stephen had to rescue him in the night. Of how they found the mythic pool of Narcissus and discovered that the boy’s spirit still floated on the surface of that water. Or how they discovered a dark nest hanging from a tree in the forest, and they pulled at it and pierced it with their swords until they realized it was the Earth’s sadness—a tumescent growth and there was no way to heal a thing like that.

  It was not until my final visit at Longleat—the last time I saw Lord Weymouth—that I realized how much he’d changed over those years, all the while covering it with a mask. When I attempt to describe our last evening, I find myself losing word and audience. My wife, a good example, will not listen. She adopts an uncharacteristically hazy expression, as if looking at a shape in the far distance, beyond what she can see clearly. She shuts the windows behind her eyes. My mother used to wear such a face when kneading bread dough. In the happy light in our stone kitchen near Avon, she pulled at the floured meal, working her fingers and eventually allowing her entire body to sway, all the while looking as if she were watching something invisible and far off. When I asked what she saw, what she fixed her eyes upon, she laughed and said, “What a ridiculous question Kenton—I don’t see anything but the kitchen—I know it all too well.” But I persisted, and finally she said that if she had to give an answer, she would tell me that she imagined her fingers were dissolving in the dough. This was something she’d thought about since she was a child. She tried to relay this with laughter, but I could tell she didn’t find it funny. The longer she kneaded the dough, the more it seemed as though her fingers were extending into the tensile compound and dissolving. Eventually, when she was well into her work, she had no hands at all.

  An attempt to write down what I experienced that Christmas Eve is perhaps an attempt to literalize—to make physical a thing which was not. And yet what more can I do? Like my mother, I must have hands. I must pull back from my kneading and see my fingers whole again. Now that Lord Weymouth is gone, I must ensure I do not follow him down that strange path. I must know the footing, recognize where the groundwork begins.

  IT WAS MY WIFE AMELIA’S IDEA to go into the city. She wanted to finish up her Christmas shopping, and I asked if it might be all right for me to pay a visit to Lord Weymouth while she went to Bainbridge’s, one of the city’s voluminous new department stores, claiming to support a living miniature of London within its walls. Anything that could be bought elsewhere could also be bought at Bainbridge’s, and the thought of the place was dreadful. Lord Weymouth himself said it had more levels than Dante’s Purgatorio and Inferno combined and such a place was to be avoided. Amelia agreed to my visit, having no interest in shopping with me. Nor did she have qualms with Lord Weymouth, unaware of his propensities and pleased that he’d kept me from my friend Marie all those summers ago. The two of us parted ways in Piccadilly, and I traveled in the rocking carriage down snow-laden streets toward Longleat, thinking not of Lord Weymouth but of Sir Stephen de Lorris. I was surprised at how often I became caught in those stories, thinking about the long-dead man. For most of the journal, the knight errant was without winters, living in some eternal spring and summer with Pieter. I had become like Lord Weymouth, taking pleasure in simply recounting their early adventures to myself because they spoke to a rarely seen kindness of life.

  Even before I reached the door of Longleat that Christmas Eve, I realized something was wrong. The lamps in the entry were not lit nor any of those in the front windows. At fir
st, I feared Lord Weymouth might have left the place—unlikely though that seemed since Longleat was his ancestral home. Rather than having the door open before my first knocking, I had to rap three or four times in order to draw response, and when Mrs. Philips did come, she was in terrible disarray. Her uniform looked as if it had not been pressed and her white hair had fallen around her face. “Oh, Mr. Sands,” she said. I felt that I should grab hold of her because she looked like she might fall, but instead I took her hand which seemed to rouse her a bit. “What is it? ” I asked. “Is Lord Weymouth alright? ”

  “No. Not alright,” she said. “Not at all.”

  I stepped across the threshold into the darkness of the house. “Go slow now, dear. Tell me what’s happened.”

  She seemed to catch her fear for a moment so she could talk. “There was another young man a few weeks ago. From the museum. He looked so much like you, Mr. Sands, I thought he would be kind, but he was not. He accused Lord Weymouth of terrible things. He took his accusations to the constable.”

  I stood frozen.

  “They came not more than a day ago. They’re going to come again after Christmas, and I fear they may take him. He told me I should pack my things in case of that event. And I said, pack my things? How should I pack an entire room? Put my whole life in luggage? But what could this young man have accused him of? Lord Weymouth never hurt you, did he, Mr. Sands?”

  I wanted to comfort her, but after looking at her pink and tear-swollen face, I felt not compassion but anger. “Please, Mrs. Philips, don’t play-act. It won’t do any good. You know very well what he’s being accused of.”

  She shook her head, folding her arms over her apron and looking as if she was going to cry. When I did not respond to her condition, she said, “You’ll help him, won’t you, Kenton? He’s not strong, nor am I. We can’t be taken from Longleat. And you’re a man of learning. You have good standing. You can help, can’t you? I was hoping you’d come.” Instead of responding with further unkind words, I asked her to take me to him, but she didn’t move. “There is something else,” she said, and the dark hallway felt terribly cold—the house utterly silent, but for our voices.

  “What else could there be?” I asked.

  “A box,” she said. “A large crate. It arrived special delivery this morning, and he’s been sitting in his room all day staring at it. He hasn’t spoken to me. Hasn’t touched food. He only looks at the box.”

  “He hasn’t opened it?”

  “No, sir. But I believe it to contain something in regards to the knight. Sir Stephen is the only thing that makes my Lord behave in such odd ways.”

  I took her arm. “I want you to go to your room and remain there,” I said. “Have a cup of tea as we used to do. Read a book that soothes your nerves.”

  “And you’ll help him? You’ll help us?”

  “I will.”

  She hurried off into the shadows, and I adjusted my coat before walking firmly down the hall toward the parlor, putting one foot in front of the next, attempting to decide what I could possibly say to Lord Weymouth. I certainly couldn’t help him. The penalties for his sort of crimes grew more stringent by the year, and coercing a younger man into such a life would be punished dearly. He hadn’t coerced me of course; we’d colluded, I suppose, though there had been nothing physical about the thing. Our connection had been played out through Sir Stephen, stories of Romance and passion played out on the page, reveled in by both of us. And yet I had been able to remove myself; all the more reason I could not become entangled in any legalities concerning Lord Weymouth’s life at the museum.

  I entered the room, expecting to find a man beside himself with anxiety, but what I saw was Lord Weymouth dressed comfortably and sitting by a low fire. The lights in the parlor were out as they were everywhere else in the house, but the firelight revealed the shaded hollows of his face and that his hair had changed color since last I’d seen him, turning to spun silver. In his lap he held the diary of Sir Stephen, the blazon gleaming on its cover, and near the chair was the crate Mrs. Philips had described—large enough to hold a bank safe. He squinted at me for a moment, as if he’d lost his eyesight too, then said, “Ah, Kenton. Come to wish me a fine Christmas?”

  I approached his chair, wondering if I should play along with his greeting. Instead, I replied with, “Mrs. Philips told me what’s happened.”

  “Many things,” he said, sighing. “Many things have happened.”

  “Do you have money for a barrister?”

  He raised his woolish eyebrows. “Whatever would I need a barrister for?”

  “Because you will be taken to court and given a rough trial,” I said. “A barrister might be able to reduce the length of sentence. I know a few men in Maiden Bradley. I could ask them if—”

  He waved his hand. “No need for all that trouble, Kenton,” he said. “But I am glad you’re here.” He looked at me carefully, and there was a pinched expression on his face that I’d never seen before, as if there were a straight pin sticking him from the cushion of his chair. “I want you to take Sir Stephen’s diary,” he told me.

  “I couldn’t do that,” I replied. “Lord Weymouth, I couldn’t.”

  But he was already attempting to hand it to me, and in his weakness, he dropped it to the floor. The book fell open, revealing its pages to me for the first time, and we both stared down at the stark whiteness of them, utterly blank. It was a journal of some sort, made to look antique, but certainly it had never belonged to a Medieval knight. It was the sort of thing that could be bought at Bainbridge’s. I quickly gathered the book and closed it, putting it beneath my coat. “I’ll take the diary,” I said. “I’ll keep it safe in the suburbs.”

  Lord Weymouth laughed. “What would Sir Stephen and Pieter make of the suburbs?” he said.

  “I’m sure they’d find adventures there,” I replied. “Now please, we should talk seriously for a moment about your plan.”

  He took a deep breath. “I don’t need the book anymore,” he said, “because I have that.” He gestured to the wooden crate sitting near the fire. “Each of us, Kenton, is building a collection in life, piece by meager piece. There are many men who do not realize what they seek and would not even know how to look for a capstone—an object that completes the collection. You, for instance—what do you collect?”

  I thought of my home in Maiden Bradley. I’d collected nothing in those rooms; Amelia had made most of the decorations.

  “What’s the capstone?” I said.

  “I’d been tracking it for nearly a year,” he replied. “It surfaced at a Turkish bazaar, believe it or not. A collector there purchased it and knowing of my interest, contacted me. I had to give him most of my artifacts in trade just to acquire this piece, but it completes the story after all. It’s necessary.”

  “What?” I said. “What completes the story?”

  He put his hand on his brow, as if even the dim light from the fire were too much for him. “The Burning Armor,” he said softly. “Both their skins, Sir Stephen’s and Pieter’s, will have been inside it. There could be remnants of the boy’s blood even. It is there inside that crate. And here I sit too frightened to open the thing. Aren’t I a ridiculous old man, Kenton?”

  “No,” I said. “No, you’re not. But Lord Weymouth—Thomas, the book—”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’ll take the book. I know all the stories by heart. And at any rate, I will have the men themselves. I haven’t told you everything, you know. Would you like to hear the end of Sir Stephen’s tale?

  “Yes,” I replied, thinking of the empty book beneath my jacket. I certainly could not read the end of the story there.

  “The finale then,” he said. “The Duchess of Burgundy came to the flooded tower near the end of Sir Stephen’s life, no longer the powerful woman who’d held the allegory. Her strength and authority had diminished since the rise of the Hapsburgs, but she still dressed the part, wearing heavy robes colored like the skins of ripe plums and her
hair was tangled with talismans. She looked more like a witch than an alchemist when she came to the flooded castle, and she sat with the old knight, Sir Stephen of Sorrows, holding both his hands. She was silent for so long, he wondered if she would reveal herself to be some specter, but when she spoke, her voice was thick with living care. She told him she was sorry for the poetry of the allegory. Sorry for the theater. She’d heard what had happened to his squire—to Pieter, for she knew the boy’s name—and she was to blame for the Burning Armor. ‘It was a foolish thing to make,’ she said. ‘Mere simulacra—layers of protection that did not protect, but I bring you a final gift.’ She produced a letter from the pocket of her robe. ‘The boy wrote to me years ago,’ she told Sir Stephen, ‘telling me of all the wonderful adventures he’d had at your side and how much he’d grown to love you. Pieter knew it was safe to say a thing like that to me. Listen here to his lines. And she read from the letter in the flooded tower, her voice echoing beautifully toward Glastonbury: My knight has two hearts, one of iron to keep me safe and one of wax—so soft and warm. He presses me to that second heart and makes a mold of me. I know that I am there in him—a copy that will be loved even when I am gone.’ With that the Duchess folded the letter and leaned over the Burning Armor, kissing it on its Saint Andrew’s cross. So you see, Kenton, even a part of the Duchess is there. All of them there in that box.”