The Memory Palace

by Christie Dickason

  She read:

  ‘I am come out of Egypt, out of the narrow place, into the nothingness. I am no longer where I was, but I have not yet arrived where I am going.’

  The voice found her before she saw the speaker. ‘I have been waiting for you,’ the creature said. ‘Here in the darkness at the centre.’

  She cried out and beat away the quilt.

  She could make out a shape in the dark, but nothing more. Larger than a man, but like a man. Except for the head.

  ‘I have nowhere else to go,’ it said. ‘I am already there. All my journeys are done. I am frozen here, my life achieved, without possibility, without movement. Finished. Hungry.’

  She began to back away.

  ‘I can hear you,’ it said. ‘Come closer, fresh blood. Young strength. Unlike me, you can still take another step forward.’

  Her stealthy foot felt backwards, slowly, slowly. Hit a wall. The tunnel through which she thought she had come had vanished. She felt behind her, felt solid stone as far as she could reach. Cold stone pressed at her back, pushed her towards the beast, forcing the soles of her feet to slide across the stone floor.

  ‘Yes,’ said the creature. ‘Come, join me in the still centre of everything, from which there is no escape, only waiting.’

  She struggled to stop but slid helplessly forwards.

  ‘I will not eat you, lovely child. Oh, no, I won’t eat you. Everyone lies about that. They tell such lies! I want only to put you into my place and take yours for myself. Then I will teeter on rusty feet, delirious with reborn possibility, back into the world, following the trail of light that you laid as you came to me.’

  She raised her golden rapier.

  ‘Ahhh,’ breathed the creature. ‘A fight! Nothing would please me more.’

  She saw the shape more clearly now. It had the legs and arms of a man, but pointed ears and a tail. The shoulders were massive, like a bull. Sharp white teeth gleamed briefly as it smiled.

  ‘I hunger even for struggle. I long for our limbs to clash. You might find that you like it too. I will seize you and hold you close against me. Then, as bone snaps or flesh is breached, my frozen senses will be dislodged into the ecstasy of unbalance.’

  Its claws fastened in her hair. Too close for her rapier’s point. The thick fur of its chest suffocated her. She could not inhale to scream when it pulled out a hank of her hair.

  ‘My golden rope,’ it said. ‘It will twist like a trickle of fire around the corners and folds of my prison, to lead me back to the sun.’

  She fell through the darkness as the creature released her. She stumbled and scrabbled for footing among the golden cups and plates that littered the creature’s den and fell heavily onto the black floor. The creature’s pelt had come away in her hand. She clutched it to her breast.

  ‘But how shall I find my way out?’ she screamed after it. ‘I’ve lost the map! Don’t leave me here!’

  She was on her knees on the floor, with the coverlet twisted in her hand, breathing hard.

  Don’t leave me here!

  PHILIP! She reached for him in the darkness.

  With relief, she saw the brighter shape of her window, and the shadows of her bed hangings.

  Not real. Thank God, not real.

  But she still heard her own voice in her head. Don’t leave me! And heard again the creature’s delight when she appeared.

  What did I feel as it held me?

  Would have killed it. Yes.

  But there was something more, just beyond reach of her reason. Now that she had begun to wake, the dream did not seem so terrible. Not good, but not entirely filled with horror neither.

  She climbed back onto the bed but not to sleep again. Her heart still pounded with an emotion more complex than fear. The thick air of the tunnel still dragged at her lungs. Propped against the pillows, she imagined that she still felt the wall pushing at her back. Heard the creature’s voice suddenly break the dark silence.

  I don’t understand it at all.

  Even so, she recognized it as a messenger dream, hedged about with ambiguities and confusions, but as inarguable as an angel. She rose again and stood at the window, where she could see the balanced geometry of the new house rising against the shadows of the ridge, the beautiful, perfect geometry found only in Heaven.

  Though wide awake, she still felt heavy with sadness, as if she had not yet finished the long journey back from the dream. Whatever it might mean, it belonged in a different world of deception and shifting truths, in the world after the Fall from Grace, where the heart of the truth is found in the tangles and confusions. Where something always remains unknown. Where all maps are hopeful lies.

  She sent for Lamb to breakfast with her at the lodge. The previous evening, she had been too preoccupied to notice that there were unfamiliar bruises on his cheek, now faded to a subtle tone of palest yellow green, which he would no doubt have appreciated had he been able to see it clearly. Dark circles still underscored his eyes as they had before she left.

  ‘What is wrong?’ she asked at once.

  ‘Nothing. Should something be wrong?’ He touched his cheek and looked at her defiantly.

  ‘What happened to you while I was away?’

  ‘You sound like my father.’

  She frowned at him thoughtfully. This was clearly not the best time to tell him what she had decided, but the matter was urgent. Given fine weather, work on the house might begin again in a few weeks. ‘I meant what I said last night.’

  Silently, Lamb cut a slice of cheese and began to carve it into narrow strips. As always, his nails were rimmed with ochre and ultramarine.

  ‘I cannot build your perfect house.’

  He set down his knife and pushed himself back from the table, flushed and pale at the same time, so that his face was splotched red and white. ‘What are you saying?’ His voice trembled slightly.

  ‘What we are building is too beautiful, too smoothed, too ordered. It’s a beautiful lie.’ She met his eyes squarely. ‘The house must be the sum of my very own truths. A map of my world, my mappa mundi. Since Philip died, my view of the world has changed. I cannot continue to build a false map.’

  ‘But beauty is a greater truth than vulgar daily human truths! It is the ideal truth.’

  ‘We must reflect the reality of deception.’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘I see. Or rather, I don’t see. You can’t have understood what I tried to teach you about Platonic beauty…perfect proportion…’

  ‘I believe that I understood, but I now see things differently.’

  He blinked several times. Then he leaned and gripped her hands. ‘Sister, if we do not believe…do not insist on the reality of beauty and order, what is left to us?’

  She was startled by the fear in his eyes but clung to her new resolve. ‘Like it or not, we’re left with Truth, which is often not beautiful. And is often hidden. You, more than anyone, must understand that.’

  ‘If we turn our backs on beauty, all that is left to us is the abyss.’

  ‘And we would be cowards not to acknowledge both.’

  He released her hands and leaned back. ‘If I keep my eyes closed and don’t look down, I might not fall in.’

  ‘If you watch where you are going, you might avoid the brink altogether. Anyway, I won’t let you fall.’

  He smiled darkly and shook his head. ‘Not even you, dearest sister, can spin a rope strong enough to hold me once I go over the edge.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘Merely some of your precious Truth!’

  ‘Then you must go farther and tell me what sort of rope you need.’

  He dropped his head onto his arms.

  Irritation warred with a deep concern at his misery. ‘Will you help me reflect the present tenor of my thoughts?’

  ‘And what of all those memories I have already recorded?’ asked his muffled voice. ‘Lies? Do I scrub them out? Slash the canvases? Take an axe to my panels?’

  ‘Some m
ay still be true. But I’ve lost the knack of knowing which. I know only that we must find a way to express their unreliability.’

  ‘Please don’t do this!’ He looked so desperate that she almost changed her mind, just to ease him.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ she begged. ‘Every decision I have made so far, every instruction I have given, was based on a false understanding. How can the result be the microcosm of my true world?’

  She imagined trying to live in the present Memory Palace. ‘It will still be a marvellous prodigy house. More marvellous than any other. We will merely push our conceit a little farther than most who build.’ When he did not reply, she added gently, ‘Lamb, it is my life in the house, not yours.’

  He looked up at her as if she were a crocodile that had crawled from one of the fishponds. ‘But the house is also a part of my life. You know that it’s to be my means of making a solid place for myself. My master piece. My introduction to English patrons. My fresh start.’

  ‘It still will be.’

  ‘Not if you insist on a reflection of ugliness and deceit! I have already changed it almost past recognition to suit your previous whim of recording your life. I replaced gods with your tenant farmers and centaurs with pigs! And I didn’t protest then, but I do protest now.’ He jumped up from the table, knocking over his stool. ‘You’ll make me a laughing stock!’ He left the stool where it had fallen and crossed to the door. ‘No matter! I will go back to London and pursue another hopeless cause. If you don’t want my plans for your house, you don’t want me.’

  ‘Don’t be an ass!’ Her face was now as splotched as his. ‘I need you more than ever!’

  He slammed the door so hard that Philip’s fishing rod, leaning on the wall beside the door, quivered and fell.

  Hellfire and damnation! She stared after him, trembling with anger and astonishment. I knew I should have waited. He never rages like that. Something is badly amiss. But I must make him understand, nevertheless. And keep him from London if I can.

  She found him at High House, directing his manservant how to pack his things. ‘Please stay! We must not quarrel! Your work is the outward shape of my thoughts.’

  He handed his man a red wide-brimmed felt hat. His face was blotched and swollen with weeping. ‘Will you raze all that we’ve built so far?’

  ‘I never said I meant to.’

  ‘A glimmer of light,’ he said bitterly. ‘Which lies will you keep?’ He began to gather a mess of scattered drawings together into a pile.

  ‘We keep the outward appearance of perfection,’ she said. ‘That which we all strive to show. The façade. Your portico and columns…’

  Briefly, she remembered making love with Philip for the first time, between two of the columns, when she had foolishly imagined she was beginning to know him.

  ‘And the memories in the halls and staircase, if only to record my credulity. The domestic offices and kitchens, so that we may sleep and eat. But behind it all, nothing must be as it seems.’

  Lamb dropped the drawings into a small oak chest. ‘And the theatre? The painted shutters, which I have begun to shape? Will you recall Master Quoynt to blow it all up? The theatre deals in beautiful lies, for sure!’

  ‘Don’t you see that the theatre and its lies now become the very heart of my conceit? How can we better express the unreliability of the world? We shall make solid rock crack open. The earth must shift under our feet.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said. ‘Destroying my only chance to show English society what I can do, merely because your humour has darkened. Because Philip died and unexpectedly made you a rich widow and, instead of rejoicing in your good fortune, you now see the world as some sort of devilish fair ground full of illusion and deceit.’ He slammed down the chest lid. ‘I can’t imagine what you now mean to build!’

  ‘I won’t build a monument to your ambition.’

  He threw back his head and glared down his beautiful nose. His eyes glittered. ‘I never before thought I could dislike you.’

  ‘Because I have never before denied you anything.’

  ‘You think I’m a spoilt brat? You hid it well, madam. All that time I thought you valued my work…’

  ‘I still do! Just because I have changed my…’

  ‘Indeed, madam! You have changed!’

  ‘Lamb, stop this nonsense!’

  ‘I shall!’ He held up a large drawing of a portico column, tore it in two, then dropped the pieces on the floor. ‘I shall stop, indeed! I resign. From this very instant, you no longer have a master surveyor. And good fortune to the poor fool who takes my place! I only wish I could watch while you tell the craftsmen what you intend. I see now that you never wished to build my house. Will you keep the original model as a monument to our lies?’ He picked up half a column again and crumpled it viciously. ‘Madam, you have left me with nothing. Now, please go!’

  As he was beyond reason, she went.

  51

  From Zeal’s Work Book – February 1641

  Finish trenching and mucking garden

  Sow:

  Orach

  Cabbage

  Spinach

  Set tarragon slips: and garlic cloves…

  Fine J. Simms and H. Bull, 2s each, for brawling with M. Dauzat

  To M. Dauzat, 5s for torn shirt

  Commission a finer nightingale. Engine to start it running?

  Cannon balls to make thunder

  Hire new masons

  Engage new painter, limner and gilder

  Write to Master Webb, master builder, to seek his services as master surveyor and architect

  52

  By good fortune, Zeal had kept more of Lamb’s work at the lodge than he had at High House. For the next week, she sat each evening turning over his drawings, admiring his light, quick line and noting his taste for feathery curves and dramatic sweeps that warred with his purported goal of perfect proportion and simplicity.

  ‘You have left me with nothing,’ he had said.

  We see with the same eyes, more than you want to admit, she told him. My poor, dear brother, I fear that things are not going well with your pure new passion. If only you will listen to me, I believe I can restore at least our more innocent passion.

  Though she did not entirely understand his bruises, she suspected that he must seek them out for reasons of his own, and that they spoke of danger for him.

  Any rope she could offer was better than none. At the least, it might delay his fall.

  She wrote to Sir George Tupper in London, though not for a bed. As she owned two lodging houses, she would seize the chance to see for herself how well or ill they were managed.

  Sir George accompanied her to three theatre performances, The Fair Anchoress of Pausilippo at the Blackfriars and two private masques. What she saw confirmed her belief that theatre was indeed the key to what she now intended.

  I must persuade Lamb to rejoin forces. Not only for his sake. I fear that Jonas Stubbs and my master joiner are not equal to my new ambitions without more guidance than I can give them.

  ‘Had the king still had his players at court,’ said Sir George later, over supper at his big house on the Thames, ‘I might have been able to arrange for you to attend. I myself was fortunate enough to see the last performance of Salmacida Spolia. You’ve come just in time, I fear. Many fierce Puritans want to see all playhouses closed.’ He shook his head. ‘What will all the poor players do then?’

  Zeal nodded, struck by the sudden image of a closed theatre, playing without players, all the same. ‘I must speak to your Master Cobb while I am in London.’

  ‘Will you still build a theatre in your new house in defiance of the killjoys?’ asked Sir George eagerly, a spiced chicken wing between finger and thumb and a fine linen napkin tucked into his collar. ‘An act of admirable courage! But we who know the value of art must fight to keep it alive, don’t you think?’

  ‘I had not thought of my ambitions in quite those terms. But, yes, I still mean to build a th
eatre.’

  With his free hand, Sir George raised his glass to her. ‘To poetry and illusion!’

  ‘And to music.’

  ‘To all enemies of the new barbarians!’

  As Zeal drank the velvety claret, she considered how following one particular purpose can, before you know it, ally you with other purposes you never imagined or intended.

  ‘I would be grateful for directions to the house of your friend, Captain Parsley.’

  Sir George grew suddenly sober. ‘Young Lamb’s father? A friend no longer, I fear. Thinks me a pander for merely entertaining his son. I shall take you there myself in my carriage though I won’t descend. I imagine they will be very pleased to see you.’ He held out his glass to be refilled. ‘Poor Lambkin. It’s sad how those sweet fellows often seek out their own retribution.’

  Zeal stood appalled, trying not to show her dismay. ‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ she said at last.

  Lamb nodded without taking his eyes from the window, where he sat looking down into the street.

  His father, an older, paunchy, raddled version of his son, had indeed been pleased, if a little startled to see her. ‘Mistress Wentworth. I feared that my son had quarrelled fatally with you, his best friend. Indeed, I don’t know…’ He had stopped distractedly. ‘Damnable boy!’ Then, with effort, he smiled.

  ‘Are you still angry with me?’ Zeal asked Lamb.

  He was pale. His red-gold hair had lost its gloss, so that it resembled ravelled orange rope.

  ‘Father didn’t tell you?’ He gave her a quick glance then turned his eyes to the street again. ‘But then, I don’t suppose he’s telling anyone, unless examined on the rack.’

  She could not bear to see him like this. She crossed to stand beside him at the window. ‘Darling Lamb! What has happened?’