She took another deep breath. ‘What tune is that?’ she asked in a voice muffled by bedclothes.
‘I have no idea.’ But after a moment, he began to sing the Spanish words. ‘Duerme no llores, hija de lagrimas…’
She lay still curled and tried to steady her breathing. The ring of his arms held her firmly, so that she did not crumble like an unsupported pastry crust. Though she had thought that afternoon that she would never sleep again, she drifted slowly into a drowsy calm.
When she next awoke, the fever had left completely. It was dark, some time in the night. She felt bright and edgy. Her feet twitched. Her hands prowled like spiders. Philip still held her with arms as tight as a barrel hoop. Cautiously, she tried to free herself. His candle had burned down almost to the end.
‘Can’t sleep?’ His breath was warm on the top of her head. ‘Would you like a game of Angel-Beast? I have cards in my pocket.’
‘Yes.’ Keep your thoughts busy, she told herself.
But when he had lit a second candle and dealt their cards onto the top quilt, her mind refused to hold the details of the game.
The thing she had not known. Still did not know. Still an unknown danger.
‘Who was that man?’ she asked.
‘I shall make certain you never see him again!’ Philip replied savagely, without answering her question. He stared down at the long, slim cards. ‘It was my fault the child died. If I had not been ill…if he had not come looking for me…’
She shook her head. ‘No, Philip. Don’t.’ She shook her head again but dared not risk further speech.
They both sat looking at the cards.
‘What does an agouti look like?’ she asked at last.
‘Is that one of those strange four-legged creatures you mentioned earlier?’
‘Did I?’ She had no memory of when. ‘I suppose it must be.’
Philip gathered up the cards, straightened their edges against the quilt, turned the deck over several times in his hands. ‘Imagine a giant rat,’ he said at last. ‘With long legs and a little nub of a tail.’
‘What colour?’
‘Dun, but a black tail.’
Soon after she arrived, John would call her to the window to see the creature for the first time. ‘And perroquets?’
‘Like tiny parrots.’ He lifted his face as if watching them again in his mind. ‘They fly in clouds, like blossoms blown in a storm.’ He stopped talking and absently began to lay the cards out again.
‘Thank you.’ Zeal lay back down with her face turned away.
‘Can you sleep now?’
‘I don’t know.’
He cleared his throat. ‘If you can’t sleep, shall I tell you of the most remarkable and fearful creature I saw during my own last adventure?’
‘If you like.’
He gathered up the cards again, pulled off his shoes, stretched himself out on the bed and opened his arm for her to lie against his shoulder. ‘Zeal?’
She turned back to him.
‘I sometimes wonder now if the creature was real. At the time, I had no doubt.’
She burrowed into his slightly musty warmth. This time his arm encircled her lightly. She shuddered, sighed and lay quiet, waiting to receive fragments of John’s new alien world, now offered again after she had almost given up asking.
32
‘First we missed our island landfall,’ said Philip, ‘which we had urgently needed to make, for our fresh water had run out two days before. Then a sudden storm drove The Golden Seal towards the mainland coast. We dropped our sea anchor but gales drove us, helpless, closer and closer to the cliffs that our map told us must be hiding in the mist and blowing spume. The sun rose just in time to prevent disaster. In the first glow of light, we saw that we sailed straight at a curving beak of headland. Somehow, our captain steered us safely around into the lee. Though the waters there were still rough, we managed at last to drop anchor and send two boats ashore in search of fresh water.’
‘Will you show me on your map where you were?’
He considered the question for some time. ‘If you wish…I led the party in the first boat. We soon found a shallow stream, swollen by the rain, which spread out across the beach like a woman’s hair across a pillow…’ He hesitated for only a heartbeat, but she heard the tiny falter. Her senses snapped to full alertness. Her body stiffened. By that choice of words, that fractional silence, that merest hiccup of awareness, she knew that her time of grace was ending. As the silence lengthened, she knew that he had felt her understand his intent. The blood thumping in her ears almost drowned his next words.
‘We followed the stream up into the jungle in search of a pool deep enough to fill our bottles and pails.’
They were still locked in their shared awareness though he pretended to think only of his tale.
I must tie myself to the mast like Odysseus when the Sirens sang, she told herself. And stop my ears with wax.
But not yet. When the time comes.
‘The jungle soon closed around us,’ he went on. ‘Bulging walls of vine and brush overhung the banks and forced us to walk in single file through the shallow water. The air buzzed and throbbed with sounds none of us had ever heard before…’
‘How did it sound?’
He whistled, then paused. Then, to her astonishment, he began to hoot, grunt, snort, and click his tongue. ‘And rustling…’ He rubbed his palms together. ‘You must imagine all at the same time. If I were a hundred men, I might be able to demonstrate to your satisfaction.’
She thought she detected a dry edge to his voice.
‘First, a wild pig came to drink, as rough as an old brush. It spied us and crashed away again. Monkeys followed us overhead, cursing and shouting out warning of our advance.’
‘Could you see them?’
He turned his head towards her. ‘Almost black, with flashes of white at their throats, like false beards. The size of large cats.’
‘And what of the birds?’
‘The parroquets were turquoise and cinnabar, and a vivid green…if you want me to describe them all, I shall never arrive at my encounter with that creature I set out to tell you of.’
‘I bite my tongue.’
‘I heard it before I saw it.’ He gave three low, resonant barking coughs. ‘I did not recognize the cry, but it stood the hair up on my arms…If I continue, you won’t sleep at all. I’d best wait for daylight.’
‘No!’
He laughed with delight at her urgency. ‘Well then, imagine me standing there in the stream with clear water flowing around the ankles of my boots. As I listened to those unearthly coughs, I felt askew, as if the air had suddenly twisted like a veil around my head. I turned to see if my companions felt as I did. I was alone.
‘They had vanished. I could not understand. I had not heard them go. In any case, they would never have turned back without me. The water ran as clear as if their feet had never disturbed it. Tiny transparent fish swam where their footprints should still have been dissolving away. I felt the air shift again and was suddenly giddy. Then the green wall on the left bank shivered and lifted. A shadow glided under the green hem of the jungle. Then the creature stood on the bank and looked straight into my eyes.’
He yawned. His muscles shifted under her head as he stretched.
‘Philip! You can’t stop there!’
‘You’re clearly out of danger now. Time for old bones to sleep.’
‘I won’t sleep!’
‘I did warn you.’
She started to protest further, then remembered that he, too, had been ill.
He sat up and eased himself off the bed. ‘I’ll continue tomorrow night, if you like.’
‘I know what you’re doing,’ she warned him.
‘That’s more than I do. Good night, my dearest girl.’ He laid his hand on her head like a blessing and left.
Earlier that afternoon, Wentworth had questioned Tuddenham closely about the horseman and how Zeal had come to fa
ll. Now he went to his own chamber and wrote a letter.
Sir,
If you ever again venture near Hawkridge, I will myself put a bullet through your heart. If I did not cling to some remnants of honour, I would also end our arrangement.
P Wentworth
If Zeal had died of her fever, could I have brought myself to killing him now?
Rather than try to answer this impossible question, he reached for his fishing rod.
I shall go see whether anything is biting in the High House lake.
An hour later, he returned to the lodge and listened at Zeal’s door.
‘Zeal?’
She turned restlessly in a dream but did not answer. With the silent expertise of a thief, he searched her room until he found a small locked coffer he had noted before. He took the coffer back to his own chamber and lit the candle in his sempster’s stand, with the lens to focus and intensify the light. He opened the lock easily with his knife and removed John’s letters from the coffer. He found his spectacles and sat down.
So, it seems that I have seven years. He refolded the first letter after reading it. Unwelcome intelligence. But learning the worst was vital to waging any successful campaign.
He rose and poured himself a glass of wine before opening the second letter. He had not known she had had a second one.
I wonder if Lamb knows.
He unfolded the letter and held it to the light.
33
Dearest Heart, Darling Girl, My Own Sweetest Zeal (John wrote)…
She has not told him, then, thought Wentworth. Or her letter has not yet reached him.
I reach for you in my sleep, in all my waking thoughts. I ache to be this letter, headed back to England and to you…
He skimmed quickly through the following details of Hispaniola.
…how we so often knew where the other was on the estate, like birds linked in flight by an invisible cord, long before we dreamed we might be free to love. A pair of swifts flying together out over the valley. I cannot wait to show you the birds here – flocks of perroquetos exploding from the trees like red, gold and green fireworks…
How did I describe them to her? Wentworth scowled at the paper in his hand.
I fall asleep each night planning how we shall make a life here together…
After reading that sentence twice, he leapt again over the next part and paused at the end.
…So do not fear. Dream instead of the strange and wonderful creatures I will show you when you come. Giant lizards you might almost take for dragons, monkeys, agoutis…
Wentworth poured another glass and drained it.
34
The next evening, after a visit from Lamb, Zeal lay waiting as darkness fell, afraid that Philip might change his mind about continuing his story and fish all night instead. After Rachel had gone to her own pallet in the loft, Zeal tried to stand. Though unsteady, she wrapped herself in her shawl and waited at the window until at last she saw her husband’s stocky figure walking through the darkness from Sir Richard’s lake. He saw her and waved a string of pale silvery fish.
A little later, he put his head through her door. ‘Chubb for breakfast! I must clean them before I come to bed.’
‘I’m too ill to torment like this,’ she called after him.
Please come soon, she begged him silently. The darkness in the corners of the room crept closer, like an evil fog. She felt so cold and empty that she would scream soon, just to make herself present in the world again. The dead child sat on her heart.
At last Wentworth came to her room. She felt a pang of disappointment when he sat in his chair again rather than climb onto the bed and hold her in the circle of his warmth.
‘Do you want me to continue?’ He did not sound so friendly as he had the night before.
‘I warned you once before not to play me like a fish.’
He smiled suddenly and his fists opened on the arms of his chair.
‘The creature lifted its head, with water still dripping from the fur on its chin, and looked me in the eye with the terrible gaze that holds prey frozen in place. I had become a bird, a rabbit, a buck, staring back at my death.’
Zeal sat upright in the bed, watching him in the light of the single candle.
Resolve. That was what she felt in him tonight.
‘At the same time, it was as beautiful as Lucifer. Its head was a triangular wedge of golden fur. Its eyes were outlined in black and glowed green in their dark frames as if the sun shone behind them. Its pelt was marked with spots, as if God had pressed his bunched fingers into the ink. Powerful shoulders and a wide chest folded down onto two great paws as wide as my palm. Its fangs were longer than my thumbs.’
She looked at the hand he held out before her, seeing the claws, the sleek flattened fur, the ridged sinews.
‘It is crouching to leap, I thought, but I still could not move, not even to pick up my sword from the stream where my hand had let it fall. I felt an exquisite pleasure, which was entirely new to me – that of total helplessness. The end of all responsibility, all decision, all need to act.’ He paused, somewhere on the coast of another continent. ‘It tasted sweet.’
‘That is death,’ she said quietly.
Wentworth breathed in and out as if he climbed a steep track and needed to catch his breath. ‘The creature lowered its head to drink again, as if it knew I was helpless to flee. It swept a long tongue across its jaw and yawned. Then it rose onto its hind legs.’
‘Like a man?’ breathed Zeal.
‘In such distant parts of the world, God’s laws reshape themselves. However much it wrenches our sense of what we think we know, we must alter our familiar world to make room for the wonders of these new laws.’
She stared at his hands, now contracted like claws. ‘Did it spring?’
‘It had more than a meal in mind for me. Did I say that the beast did not have rear paws like the front ones?’
She shook her head.
‘Its hind feet were those of a man. I saw the bare brown skin, five toes with flat nails as smooth as mother-of-pearl…’ He reached under the coverlet and touched her bare foot. ‘Very like yours.’
She shivered, trying to imagine him tasting helplessness. The young man, standing ankle-deep in the clear stream, skewered by the eye beams of a monstrous but beautiful beast, made her swallow against a thickening in her throat. An uneasy shifting took place just below her heart.
‘Instead of attacking, the creature, still on its hind feet, half-turned back towards the jungle, and cast a look at me over its shoulder, as if to say, “Follow!” In the front, its nakedness was that of a virile man, but a rope of golden tail grew from the base of its back.’
The image was both beautiful and shocking. ‘Did you follow?’ she asked quickly.
‘I did.’
‘Alone? Into the jungle?’
‘Could you have refused such an invitation?’
Their eyes met with a shiver of shared understanding.
‘No,’ she said.
‘Nor I. I felt a fierce purpose in the beast, as if it wished to show me something. As we moved through the jungle, the creature dropped onto four legs again, leaving me to scramble behind as best I could. I lost it, then saw glints of its pelt between the leaves. Sometimes it was no more than a shifting shadow. I began to imagine that I followed a phantasm. Once, I felt my own forehead, thinking I might be driven by the madness of my ague.’
‘And did it prove to be so in the end?’ She leaned back a little, preparing for disappointment.
‘Wait and I will tell you.’ He pointed upwards. ‘Imagine now, that the beast and I climbed alongside the course of a waterfall that spewed through a break in the cliff high above us, then tumbled down a giant staircase in the mountainside. As I hauled myself up from boulder to boulder, slipping on the loose rock and moss, grasping at tree roots that came away in my hand, I was constantly brushed by veils of spray. My ears were thick with the roar of the falls. Twice, we crossed u
nder a thundering curtain of falling water to continue upwards on the other bank.’
With her head tilted back to the bed canopy and eyes closed, she saw him, a tiny figure against the foaming water. He disappeared, so that she thought he had been swept away. Then he climbed into sight again, out of the mist.
‘And then, at the crest where the water leapt into the void…Oh, my dearest girl…I looked down over the farther edge into a deep, deep valley, at a city of gold.’
He stood up. ‘More tomorrow night, I swear.’
In the night, she thought that the golden beast with the head and tail of a jaguar and the genitals and feet of a man crouched on the end of her bed. She could not move. She was a bird, a rabbit, a field mouse under the shadow of a hawk.
The next day, she found that the golden spotted beast kept slipping between herself and other thoughts. She saw clearly what Philip had done. He might mean to distract her from her grief, but he had also taken his tales away from John and drawn her into his own story. Seeing this, however, did not lessen her urgency to hear the rest.
Philip Wentworth sat on a log above a gravel bank in a clear fast-moving stretch of the Shir. The cold spring meant a late spawning, and the fish still offered good sport. Through the clear water, he could see the long pointed heads of three large barbel eagerly scouring the river bottom. He closed his eyes. He had not even brought his rod. Had come here only for the solitude and to think.
He was playing a dangerous game with his young wife.
He dropped his head into his hands. Every word, every well-meant act tangled him more inexorably in his own net.
35
That night, he sat on the edge of her bed, still fully clothed. She was combing out her hair, which had grown tangled from lying so long against the pillows.
‘Did you believe your eyes?’ she asked.
He picked up a strand of her hair. ‘Did you think that El Dorado was only a fable?’
The Memory Palace Page 21