Edward glanced at his watch. “Well, we’ve seen the sun at midnight, and it’s way past my bedtime. We should do what we came to do.” He fished under the cushions and brought out the black razor case with the initials E.L.F. stamped in gold. “Such a small thing,” he said, “to contain such pain,” then held it balanced across his palms, studying it in silence. “A votive offering, I thought,” he said at last, “ – to the Lady of the Lake. Better than my last idea, don’t you think?”
“I’ve never quite dared to think what that was.”
Edward sighed, shook his head, and his breath came as a little wince. “I had the tremor cordis on me. Who knows? Perhaps I was just trying to make us both feel something.”
“It certainly worked.”
“To the point of overkill.” He tapped the case against his palm. “There are gentler ways. I look forward to exploring them. And yet…”
“What?”
“What I said that night… The feel of it was all wrong, of course – hideously so. But the gist… I don’t know…”
I took in his quick, wary glance, and said, “Say it.”
Edward smiled. “It’s just that if the art is to hold two absolutely contradictory truths inside you at the same time, then that may have been one of them. And about that we will say no more. As for this” – he held the case towards me – “it belongs elsewhere. Will you throw it for me?”
I held the case for a long time, feeling its weight in my hand, studying its black, its gold.
“Throw it,” Edward said. “You never know, an arm in white samite might rise to catch it.”
I stood up, balancing myself in the skiff, and hurled the clasped case far out into the lake. It turned in flight, was lost against the shadow of the Mount, then we heard the distant splash and the whirr of a coot’s wings as it scuttled across the surface before settling again. The skiff rocked a little. Water slapped against the varnished wood.
The end of Edward’s cigarette sizzled in the lake as he said, “Poor Frere.”
“I wonder what became of him.”
“I know a little about that. Ralph followed it up for me through a friend of his in the Cathedral Close. It seems that with some encouragement from King’s the Church took care of him. A parish was found in the London slums. Apparently it was what he wanted… I see him as an unassuming, rather saintly figure among the gin palaces and stews of the Dickensian fog. He died in a cholera epidemic. And I rather suspect that a pile of letters was found amongst his remains.”
“You mean?…”
“Oh yes, I think they kept in touch. Ralph tells me that shortly before Louisa died a maid found her in her room burning a large number of letters. He remembers the rumpus it caused.” Edward grinned across at me. “Playing with fire at her age – she might have sent the Hall up in smoke. They must have been from her mystic brother, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t accept any evidence to the contrary.”
“Me neither. Just as well we’re not scholars.”
“What about Frere’s wife?”
“God knows… I wonder if she ever even knew. Can’t imagine it – not in those days.”
“Either way, she must have been pretty embittered.”
“Or glad to be rid of him? Anyway, they’re all at peace now.” He stretched his arms in a yawn, and said, “Shall we get back?”
I reached for the oars, pulled on my right to turn the prow and, as I looked over my shoulder, caught a prospect of the Hall in the fading light. I said, “I’m going to miss this place so much.”
“Then take it with you,” Edward answered. “Carry it invisibly inside, the way Louisa kept her secret.”
“I wonder if there really was one – beyond the one we found, I mean.”
“What do you think?”
“I’d like to think so. But it’s a pity we didn’t uncover it.”
I tightened my grip on the other oar and smiled up at Edward expecting his agreement, but he too was smiling. Provocatively.
“You’re looking very sphinx-like,” I said.
His smile broadened.
“Edward, are you holding out on me?”
“Would I do that?”
“Of course you would.” And, as he made a small tutting noise and muttered something about mistrust, “You know something I don’t know.”
He tilted the lined head, twitched his moustache.
“And you’re not going to tell me.”
“I wouldn’t want to spoil your fun.”
I shipped the oars and said, “I can always keep you out here till you sing.”
“And miss your son’s birthday? Anyway, the Lady Alchimia responds only to gracious requests.”
“Forgive me. I’d forgotten. Would she be so gracious as to give me a clue?”
Edward smiled and nodded. Then he raised the index finger of his left hand upright in the air beside his shoulder, and with the other sealed his lips.
I recognized the ancient gesture of the secret. It was the enigmatic position adopted at the completion of their work by the adept and his mystic sister in the final illustration of the Mutus Liber – the silent book, whose title Louisa had chosen for her epitaph. In Edward’s version there was something both comical and solemn about the posture. I waited, studying him from under a raised brow until he lowered his hands.
“That’s all I get?”
He nodded and glanced away.
“Are you telling me the secret is there is no secret?”
“Did I say anything so dull?”
“I didn’t hear you say anything at all.”
“Precisely.”
He snuggled back among the cushions, the red socks crossed at his ankles, one freckled hand resting on his stomach, the other loose at his thigh. His head reclined against the cushion, eyelids closed, quietly serene, with perhaps the faintest suggestion of a smile at his lips. So many years of experience were charted there, you might almost navigate among their reefs and shoals, past islands where his monsters dwelt, and others where the Graces sang. Here were the burial grounds of lovers and of friends; here a contented resignation to fresh happiness in store; and somewhere, perhaps, behind those lidded eyes, a prospect even Mandeville had been denied on paradisal shores. For though all seven deadly sins had left their evidence across those windrow features, it seemed also that a kind of innocence had been resumed, and it was younger even than the indolent, elusive glamour of the youth in Ralph’s old photograph.
Reflecting on this, I recalled how in the late portrait of Louisa Agnew innocence and experience had been brought to gentle reconciliation like the lovers of my dream, and I wondered whether – if Louisa and Edward did hold a secret in common now – it was because they were what they knew, and in that identity was no distinction such as words must seem to make.
But Edward raised his hand as though to shoo a fly, then sighed and murmured, “I’m tired, Cambridge. Take me home.”
Smiling, I dipped the oars again. I might pester him with questions on our way back to the shore but I’d get no larger answer. Nor – in a sudden, wiser preference for silence – did I wish for one. Edward was right: it was getting late, Laura was waiting for us, he needed rest, and I had a long journey ahead of me, and once you begin to admit the truth there is no ending.
Acknowledgements
If the Stone of the Philosophers was a stone rejected by the builders of European culture, then no one has worked with greater intellectual courage than C.G. Jung to recover and illuminate the values it represents. The influence of his later works –Psychology and Alchemy, The Psychology of the Transference and Mysterium Coniunctionis – is evident everywhere throughout this romance. I owe much also to the way Jung’s friend and student, Esther Harding, has patiently demonstrated the contemporary relevance of the ancient rites of the Mother Goddess. It was in the pages of her Psychic Energy (2nd edn, Princeton/Bollingen 1963) that I found the seed of what was to become Darken’s dream in Chapter 5.
Stan
islas Klossowski de Rola’s Alchemy, The Secret Art (Thames & Hudson, 1973) enlarged my acquaintance with the magical world of Hermetic art, and its illustrations furnished some of the contents of the library at Easterness. For the history of alchemy I have relied on E.J. Holmyard’s Alchemy (Penguin, 1957) and H. Stanley Redgrove’s Alchemy Ancient & Modern (first published in 1911, and reissued by E.P. Publishing in 1973). For insight into its meaning and significance I was helped by essays in Alan McGlashan’s marvellous book, The Savage and Beautiful Country (Chatto & Windus, 1966), and, as a provocative corrective to the Jungians, I found Titus Burckhardt’s Alchemy (Stuart & Watkins, 1967) invaluable – particularly in its insistence on the vanity of trying to describe the essence of alchemy in solely psychological terms.
Devotees of the Hermetic art will have recognized a much larger debt. I should explain and acknowledge it.
I was still looking for a form for this romance when my friend, Richard Lannoy, introduced me to a rare edition of a book with a curious history. A Suggestive Enquiry into the Hermetic Mystery was written and published by Mary Anne Atwood (née South) in 1850, and then immediately withdrawn at the behest of her father, a Hermetic poet, on the grounds that it revealed too much. Even more than the book itself I found the circumstances of its appearance and disappearance very suggestive – though in ways quite other than its author can have imagined or intended. Like all the characters of my novel, Sir Henry Agnew and Louisa are creatures of fiction, and are in no way offered as portraits of Thomas South and his daughter. I have borrowed what I needed – the bare outlines of their intriguing story – and adapted it to the demands of my imagination. In consequence, the events of Louisa Agnew’s life are far removed from the quiet, meditative, happily married career of that remarkable Victorian Hermetic, Mrs Atwood. She and Louisa have a middle name and the authorship of a withdrawn Hermetic text in common, and little else. Nevertheless, without the real Victorian (who lived in Hampshire, not in Norfolk), the fictional one would not have been conceived, and I owe her shade my thanks.
Fortunately, Mrs Atwood’s work was not completely destroyed and, even while I was making use of her story, the Suggestive Enquiry was reissued by the Yogi Society in Britain and the Julien Press in the USA. It came as a relief to know that she was free to speak for herself once more, and that her attempt to share the wisdom of the Hermetic tradition has now been honoured on both sides of the Atlantic.
I am indebted to Richard Lannoy for much more than this timely introduction. He first interested me in the Tarot many years ago and, since then, both as colleague and friend, has freely (and often hilariously) shared with me his extraordinary range of learning and experience. Also, though they are in no way accountable for the use I made of it, Dr Alan Blandford and Dr Phil Harvey gave me professional advice on the matter of the heart, and there are many other friends for whose confidence and support I am very grateful; but, as always, the greatest debt is to my wife, Phoebe Clare.
THE WATER THEATRE
A new novel by
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As war reporter Martin Crowther arrives in Umbria, still raw from a recent assignment in Africa and from a failing love affair back home, a storm hits and the sky opens. Things are powerfully on the move inside him too as he comes to the small village of Fontanalba, on a mission to track down two friends from a lifetime ago.
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The Chymical Wedding Page 62