‘How?’ asked Peter, the oldest, who by this time was thoroughly gripped. Maggie was unhappy with the turn that the conversation had taken, but she made no move to stop it yet, knowing how scornful her husband would be if she tried to censor proceedings.
‘Just what I was about to tell you, young sir,’ said the man. ‘He cut his throat in front of that very pier glass you are looking at.’ There were gasps from the boys. ‘And if you two lads look closely at the marble surface of the table underneath it, you can just see faint traces of his blood still there.’ He pointed at two shadowy ghosts of splashes on the greenish grey variegated surface of the marble.
‘Look, mum! Blood!’ said Andrew. Maggie closed her eyes.
‘It’s been washed many times, of course,’ said the man, ‘but it’s almost impossible to get bloodstains completely out of marble once it’s sunk in.’
‘You haven’t explained about the glass,’ said Jack, who felt that a call to order was needed.
‘Ah, yes, well I was coming to that. Now after Sir Everard died, his son Jocelyn becomes master of the hall. Well, Jocelyn was very fond, as you might say, of the bottle. He takes over the Grey Bedroom here as his own, not minding that his father had died in it. In fact he takes something of a pride in doing so. He and Sir Everard never got on, you see. Well, late one night the servants hear a terrible crashing and a crying out from this very room. They come in here and there’s Mr Jocelyn lying on the floor, and the mirror all smashed, and it turns out he’s thrown a half empty gin bottle at it. Mr Jocelyn, he says he saw something in the mirror, he doesn’t say what, but he had been badly drink taken, and it was not long after that that they had to put him into an institution for his problem. And that’s how the Hall comes to be sold and with the National Trust.’ It would appear that to the man in pebble glasses this constituted a happy ending.
‘There you see, boys,’ said Jack rallying from the shock of the narrative. ‘That is how once successful families decline. The values of hard work and responsibility fall by the wayside as soon as bad habits set in. Remember that. Learn from it. Now then, this glass cabinet looks interesting. What’s in here?’
The glass case which stood against the wall to the right of the bed contained three items. There was an oval photograph of a heavy-lidded, languid young man with a drooping, well-groomed moustache, dressed in the aesthetic style of the 1890s. There were two sheets of paper on which some verse had been written in an elegant, flowing, but near illegible hand. The title was just decipherable: ‘A Vilanelle of Ladies Long Dead’. The third item was a book. It was a slim quarto, leather bound, and open at the title page, which had been designed by Beardsley. The wording read:
‘THE MASQUE OF SATAN
A Dramatic Phantasy
By Lord Deverell Cheke’
And at the foot of the page:
‘Leonard Smithers, Dial Arcade, 1897’
‘Ah!’ said Jack. ‘A Leonard Smithers with Beardsley designs, This must be a valuable book.’
‘Quite correct, sir. It is valuable and also extremely rare. Unknown to the British Library. This is in fact the only copy in existence. It was written by Lord Deverell himself, the last Earl that is, sir, and his family destroyed all but this one copy after his death.’
‘Why?’ asked Peter.
‘Shhh!’ said Maggie.
‘Lord Deverell was a younger son and not expected to inherit. He was the literary one of the family. Rather frowned on generally — and he did mix with some curious people. His writing output was quite small. A villanelle of his was published in The Yellow Book, I believe, and then he wrote The Masque of Satan. He was involved in various occult societies at the time, and the piece is supposed to contain a number of coded references to their practices, so they were outraged, as well as all the decent folk. Only Leonard Smithers had the courage to publish. Even the great Beardsley himself is said to have regretted his illustrations, and destroyed the original drawings shortly before his death in 1898. I can only quote to you the Prologue.
‘Night’s canker stains the sky with yellow blood
And strikes out pallor from the leprous day;
Under a dome of shadows let me brood
And blindly stare upon my darkling way.
Lost in these mortal thoughts I stand before
The gilded portals of the House of Sin
Where once a harlot led me to the door,
A stainless scarlet youth, and took me in.
Undrowned Narcissus that I was, unschooled
In all the labyrinthine ways of vice,
I drank the ancient ruby vintage, cooled
In three hard circles of Eternal Ice.
I wallowed in the pallid bowels of death,
Frail bodies broken on the lips of Lust,
The pain of innocents, their startled breath,
And white flesh riven by dark weals of rust.
Now in the cobweb chains of sickened age
I call upon the goat-foot God of old.
Give me the sinew once again to rage
Kindle my cravings ere my sins grow cold!
O spice with sorrow my dull soul of sense,
And brand me with Infernal recompense!’
‘Somewhat lurid, you will agree. The rest of the poem is even worse, and anyway too obscene to quote. What the family objected to, I understand, was not so much that he had written The Masque of Satan as that he had put his name to it. Shortly after publication he was packed off to France. His elder brother Edward, who by this time had become the ninth Earl, wanted nothing to do with him and conceded Lord Deverell a pitiful allowance provided that he remained abroad. Well, in 1906 the ninth Earl dies unexpectedly in a shooting accident, and, as he had no heirs, Lord Deverell inherits the title and the estate. So the executors must go over to France to find him. They have the devil of a job locating him, and when they do he is living in an attic in Montmartre with an elderly lady of very doubtful reputation, as you might say. He has ruined himself with drink and other noxious substances; and he is dying of what you might call a social disease caught in France. But, sick as he was, they take him home to Blakiston, and to this very bedroom.
‘Lord Deverell’s mother was still living and devoted herself to his care. By this time he could hardly walk and his mind had gone, so they kept him in that wheelchair beside the bed. You boys have a good look at it.’ Peter and Andrew went over eagerly to inspect the chair while Maggie looked on. She hated herself for not doing something to stop this horrid little man, but she too was fascinated. ‘Now boys, you see those leather straps on the arms? And the belt round the middle? That’s how they used to hold him in his chair, because he tried to escape many times. He hated this room, and he wanted to move somewhere else, but his mother wouldn’t let him. No one knows why. I suppose she wanted to keep his wretched condition as secret as possible. By this time he was suffering from terrible dreams and delusions and most of them were centred round that door there.’ He pointed.
‘To the Black Room?’
‘To the Black Room, exactly, sir.’
‘Can we go into the Black Room?’ asked Andrew.
‘No. We don’t usually allow visitors into the Black Room. Well, Lord Deverell, as I may call him, though he was the Earl of course, had these delusions that people with strange dark heads came out of the Black Room at night when he was alone in his bed. He said they came with little pipes and straws which they put into his ears and into his feet, and with those straws they sucked out his blood and juices. Those were the words he used: “They’re sucking away my blood and juices.” Of course it was all madness, but they couldn’t persuade him out of it. He was too far gone. They had the door locked and bolted; they even had that chest of drawers put against it, but still the people with the straws and the heads “like a swarm of buzzing flies”, as he put it, came out at night to suck away his blood and juices.
‘Well, he didn’t last long. He was found dead one morning on that bed in this very room, which was
only to be expected considering how sick he was. But one odd thing was noticed which nobody could explain. On the morning the servants came into the Grey Bedroom to find him dead they found that the door of the Black Room was open. As for the chest of drawers that had been set against the door, someone had put it back in its usual position against the wall. Over there.’ He pointed once again.
There was a silence while all four of the Protheroes stared as if hypnotised at the very unremarkable early nineteenth century commode which had failed to protect the tenth Earl from his demons. The last onslaught from the man with the pebble glasses had left them stunned. Eventually Jack, who felt on behalf of his family, that enough was enough, spoke.
‘Thank you, yes, very good, You have been very informative, unlike some others I could mention, but really we must be on our way. Thank you, Mr, er— I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.’
‘My name is Cheke, Stanley Cheke, sir. Yes, I am connected with the family. Distantly. Very distantly, you might say. But just before you go, if I might draw your attention to the fireplace and mantelpiece?’
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘Nice piece but nothing spectacular, if you don’t mind my saying so.’ It was of scintillating pure white marble and of a relatively plain neo-classical design, but impeccably executed.
‘Ah, there, you might be wrong, sir. Finest Carrara marble, that is. Acquired in Venice by the seventh Earl, Francis, Viscount Aylsham as he then was, that being his courtesy title as the eldest son, on his Grand Tour of Italy in 1773. Notice the Satyr masks at the capitals of the pilasters on either side. Said to have been executed by the young Antonio Canova himself.’
‘1773? It’s just possible, I suppose.’
‘It is indeed, sir. He was apprenticed to a Venetian stone carver in 1768 at the age of eleven.’ Jack bent down to examine the carving and beckoned his sons to study it too. The masks were finely, deeply cut without that smooth near-blandness that one associates with the mature Canova. The faces frowned and grinned fiercely. Peter put his hand on the tip of one of the little horns that protruded from their curling pates.
‘It’s sharp!’ he said in wonder.
‘Don’t touch!’ said Maggie.
Mr. Cheke said: ‘And above the mantel you will see the portrait that Pompeo Batoni painted of Lord Francis at Rome in that same year.’
The young Viscount Aylsham had elected to be portrayed in the then fashionable Van Dyck costume with a broad lace collar, leaning pensively against an ancient Roman sarcophagus. The face, handsome enough in its way, already showed signs of puffiness and self-indulgence. No doubt the painter had intended to convey an expression of soulful melancholy, but if this was so, he had failed. Lord Francis looked petulant and discontented, angry even, while a water spaniel fawned almost fearfully around his feet. The fleshy salmon pink of His Lordship’s silken fancy dress stood out sharply against an unusually sombre background. He appeared to be enclosed in a kind of classical temple or mausoleum. To the subject’s left a swag of dark red curtain half concealed the black entrance to some inner sanctum. Jack had the feeling that this fragment of painted darkness conveyed, for both artist and sitter, a hidden meaning which was now lost.
‘There’s a story about that fireplace which I think you’ll be interested to hear,’ said Cheke, interrupting Jack’s thoughts. ‘Now Lord Francis, he returns a year or so later with his treasures and an Italian manservant called Balthassare. At least he was called a manservant, but many thought he was more like a companion or tutor. He was a fine violin player, was this Balthassare, and it was said that he could charm the very devils out of Hell with his fiddle. There was a good deal of prejudice against the man, no doubt because he was a foreigner, but many thought his lordship had changed in some way since his voyage to Italy, and that this Balthassare was to blame. Well, a year later the old Earl dies, unexpected and sudden, and Lord Francis succeeds to the title. Changes are made in the house to make it new and fashionable. One of the changes happens right here. That room through there——’
‘The Black Room——’
‘Just so, sir, just so. It stops being a chapel and becomes — well, one doesn’t know what, but there was a statue put in there which came all the way from Naples that had to come up the Grand Staircase draped in a sheet for fear of offending the ladies, it was said. And that was not all. The Earl, as Lord Francis then was, took to roaming about the nearby villages with his man Balthassare, and began to acquire an evil reputation, as they say. This in the days, remember, when young gentlemen of noble birth were allowed some freedom. Well, what you might expect happened, and several of the young girls in the villages began to show signs of having been with him, as you might say. But he never made a single move towards helping them in their trouble. Quite the reverse. Some of these girls he had thrown out of their cottages and onto the mercy of parish charity. Now there was one of these girls who had a touch more spirit than the rest of those poor wretches, and she began to plague him for assistance. He scorned her appeals, but one night, it’s said, a freezing cold night, in November it was, she came here to this very house with the offspring of their sin in her arms. Somehow she found her way into the Hall and up to this chamber, his bedroom. It is a cold night, as I said, and a fine fire is burning there in the grate. His Lordship is in his silken gown and cap and no doubt toasting himself with good French brandy when in comes the girl with her child. She begs him for money, not for herself, but to feed and clothe the baby, his own offspring. “By the Gods below,” cries the Earl, “I’ll see your puling spawn burn in hell fire before I hand over a penny piece!” And with that he wrenches the child from the girl’s arms and he hurls it on the fire in that very fireplace. But that, believe me, sir, was not the worst of it. The baby lands on the fire and lets out this scream that’s not like any baby’s cry you ever knew. It’s like the roar of a damned soul burning forever in hell, and the sound of it could be heard all over the Hall, right up to the rafters where the servants slept and down into the kitchens where the kitchen boy was shivering over the last embers in the stove. They say that cry still seemed to be echoing round the house for weeks afterwards, and that even now on still cold nights in November that hideous howl can yet be heard, far, far off, but as clear as a needle point of starlight.’
‘What happened to the wicked Earl?’ asked Peter.
‘They say he was never the same again. He took against all company, even Balthassare, who vanished suddenly and was never heard of more. His Lordship used to eat all his meals alone at the long table in the hall, and then he stopped even that and would only take his food and drink at a little table in this very room. Then one night, a year after the business with the child, the servants come in here to clear the dish of mutton he had ordered and they found his lordship sitting bolt upright in his chair, dead at the head of his own table. He had choked to death, and in his throat they found what he had choked on. It was charred and burnt but still recognisable, and it was not the mutton. It was the fat little hand of a dead human baby.’
‘Right! That’s it!’ said Maggie. ‘I’m not listening to any more of this horrible, horrible talk. How dare you say such things in front of my children! Come along Andrew, Peter!’
‘But Mum!’
‘No arguments! Come along! Are you coming, Jack?’
‘Now, Maggie dear, don’t overreact!’
‘How dare you tell me I am overreacting! I am not overreacting! We are leaving now. Are you coming, Jack?’
‘Maggie, you go if you like and take the kids with you. I will join you in a minute. But it so happens I have at last found someone in this Godforsaken place who is not a complete ignoramus. I know that may mean very little to you, but it does to me. You don’t understand. That’s fine by me! I don’t mind! So you just go along and take the kids with you. All right, love?’
‘All right! Fine! Don’t mind me! Come along, boys!’ And she marched them out of the Grey Bedroom. As she was leaving she thought she heard Jack saying to the man
in pebble glasses:
‘Now then, Mr Cheke, I wonder if I can prevail upon you to show me this famous Black Room.’
She shut the door of the Grey Bedroom and breathed deeply. It was not often that she stood up to Jack, and she was quite convinced that she had been in the right. It made her feel rather light-headed.
The boys were already scooting along the polished floor of the long gallery which was, oddly enough, deserted. The old man with the paper-thin skin had obviously gone off duty and had not been replaced. Sun came from behind a cloud and filled the great room with angled shafts of light.
‘Come along, boys. Let’s go outside,’ said Maggie. Jack would just have to find them, and serve him right.
The boys liked outside a lot better than in. There were a number of interesting features in the grounds, including a shell grotto which captivated her youngest, Andrew. Peter liked the fact that the fountain in it was in the form of an old river god crouching over the basin, his great stone body diseased with lichen, water belching from his bearded mouth.
‘It’s like he’s being sick for ever and ever and ever!’ said Peter. He was extremely proud of this observation, which he made several times until Maggie had to tell him to stop. It was getting towards lunchtime, and Jack must have finished in the Grey Bedroom by now. They made their way towards the house.
MASQUES OF SATAN Page 3