September Castle

by Simon Raven

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘How can you be sure,’ said Jo-Jo, going, ‘that Xanthippe wasn’t somehow faking these…these talismen that her dreams brought? How can you be sure she wasn’t planting them herself?’

  ‘Of course I can’t be sure, my dear, but if I believe this Appendix – and why shouldn’t I after all the trouble we went to in order to get a copy? – if I believe this Appendix, I have to conclude that one such talisman, the most solid and sensational of all, was responsible for her death. There was no faking or fiddling about that.’

  ‘But Hubert’s Chronicle says she simply pined to death, out of yearning for her home and the sea.’

  ‘That’s the official version. The Appendix states, unequivocally, that she was killed, actually and physically killed, by an extraordinary object which was found near her bed one morning when the ladies-in-waiting came to wake her.’

  ‘You mean…she was dead when they found her?’

  ‘No. Death came quite a long time later.’

  ‘But Ptoly, this extraordinary object. What was it and how did it kill her? And why, for Christ’s sake why, are we to believe that it came to her or was given to her in a dream?’

  ‘I am very excited, little plum pie, by the prospect of that caviar. It is bad for men of my age and temperament to be kept waiting.’

  About ten miles north of Dubrovnik, Ivan put the Land Rover into a left turn along a narrow isthmus. A Venetian Campanile loomed ahead; the isthmus turned suddenly into a circular Campo; two churches, one Palladian and one early Gothic confronted each across it, while in the dead centre and plumb in line between the churches a marble column stood pedestal to the Lion of Saint Mark.

  ‘Why do you bring me here? This is a bad place. Everyone is gone from here except the old – and the young children of unspeakable marriages.’

  Ivan drove on. As soon as they left the Campo they were driving through a heath of pine and shrub. To their left were occasional glimpses of the sea under the moon; to the right the ground mounted to a ridge. As they drove on it became flat. No more pines; just reeds. They were driving along a raised track through mud and salt-marsh, of which there was about half a mile, on either side, between the track and the sea. After driving for another few minutes, during which the width of the salt-marsh diminished slightly, Ivan stopped the Land Rover and dismounted. He signed to the young man in the sea captain’s rig, who stepped sullenly down from his seat and took a few dainty steps to join Ivan on the left-hand side of the track.

  ‘Follow me,’ Ivan said. ‘Don’t loiter, or you’ll lose the path.’

  He led the way down the embankment. At the bottom a single plank was laid across the marsh. Ivan walked along this, then turned sharply left where it ended and proceeded down an invisible path which lay under the brackish water. His companion followed, muttering. In a few minutes a small island, little more than a tussock in the marsh, appeared, as if from nowhere, ahead of them. On it was a wall pierced by a single arch, above which a small recess housed a bell. Ivan led the way through the arch.

  A box tomb, sunk so far into the damp earth that only six inches still protruded above ground level, was surmounted by the marble effigy of a man dressed in a curious garb of breeches and jerkin, the head and throat being protected by a skull-capcum-collar.

  ‘A sailor,’ said Ivan, ‘a real one. A pirate. One of Xanthippe’s ancestors. He was the most bold of all his adventurous race. Too bold. He made the mistake of leaving his own waters and poaching up and down the Dalmatian coast. When they caught him at last, the Byzantine despot had him put to death by force-feeding him with live crawfish.’

  ‘What is this to me?’

  ‘However, some years later the man’s son, Xanthippe’s great-great-grandfather, obtained permission, in exchange for a large bribe, to build this shrine and bury him here. He’s in the box, under his own effigy. So of course when Xanthippe broke her journey in Dubrovnik she persuaded her guardian to bring her out here, to see the tomb and pray for her ancestor’s soul.’

  ‘Do what you have to do, and then let us be gone.’

  ‘According to the Guardian – Hubert of Avallon – something very curious occurred. Mind you, he says nothing about it in his published Chronicle, but he describes it vividly in a suppressed Appendix. According to this, the moment the Lady appeared the effigy began to show signs of violent displeasure. There was a terrible rumbling sound… “and the statue did shake and shudder; the face whereof, when the disturbance ceased, was found to bear an aspect of loathing and disgust, in place of the tranquil sweetness which had hitherto informed the visage.”’

  ‘An earthquake. It would have caused the rumbling and altered the relation of the features.’

  ‘Of features carved in marble? Let’s have a look.’

  Ivan bent over the effigy and turned a pocket torch on to it. Two stone eyes glared up in hatred and the mouth writhed in repudiation.

  ‘No question about it,’ said Ivan. ‘If the face really was “tranquil” before the Lady’s arrival – the normal monumental convention, so why should we doubt it? – then her appearance certainly started something. What did she do? one asks oneself. Or was it just…something about her…that got her ancestor so worked up?’

  ‘What difference can it make now? What do you want here, Mr Barraclough?’

  ‘I want to try to get some sense, from looking at the face of this effigy, of the kind of thing which might have caused it to take such a ferocious form.’

  ‘Time and damp. The salt air. Damage by some thief or hooligan.’

  ‘No. It is all of a piece. No hooligan damaged it. As for time and erosion, they would have softened the expression if anything. But see how strong it still is. Not just disgust; real horror. As if it feared the Lady Xanthippe might have some power over its soul…or the body that lay beneath it.’

  ‘This is mere fancy. Let us go. Our friends will be waiting.’

  ‘I think I have it now. Loathing; offended family pride, that a female of the family should do or be what the Despoina had done or been; terror, suppressed and controlled by that same pride.’ Ivan straightened himself up and backed away from the tomb. ‘I do not care to meet your friends,’ he said, ‘and I am rather at a loss what to do with you. Although I have already, on the Pharaoh’s instructions, superintended the death of one member of your conspiracy, I cannot go through Europe leaving a trail of corpses, for I find the notion offensive. On the other hand, I cannot endure this continued pursuit and persecution. So I have decided on the following course. First, you will swear on your oath, on this tomb, not to pursue me further. Second, you will swear another oath, to inform these “friends” we were to meet that I gave you the slip and that although you found me again, it was just too late to stop me boarding the ferry to Bari –’

  ‘Why are you saying all this? You are mad. I tell you, we wish only to help you.’

  ‘I know different. And third, I shall leave you behind when I go. Since you do not know the path through the marsh, you will be well advised not to attempt to escape until the morning. Even then you will find it difficult. By the time you are able to break your oath, if you dare, and inform your friends what has happened, I shall be well on my way – and I promise you I shan’t give you a second chance to find me.’

  ‘You can do none of this.’

  A slender hand came out of the belt of the jeans and pointed a pistol at Ivan.

  ‘Now you will come away from here,’ said the lilting voice. ‘I have borne with you so long and so far in case information of interest should come of it; yet there has been nothing but superstitious nonsense. Now you will come to my friends and give proper information about your task. We may even let you continue in it – provided it is clear that you are working for us and not that fat degenerate in England.’

  Good, thought Ivan; he is showing his hand too soon.

  ‘Come,’ said the man. ‘Let us go back to your vehicle.’

  Ivan looked at his watch.

>   ‘In thirty minutes,’ he said, ‘when the tide has started to ebb.’

  ‘There is no tide in the Mediterranean.’

  ‘There is a small tide in the Mediterranean. Our path was only just passable when we came by it. Since then the tide has flooded it completely. We cannot leave for at least half an hour.’

  Ivan went back to studying the stone face of the marble pirate, while the seaman minced uneasily up and down the wall on which the moon threw his shadow, slim and jerky like that of a puppet on a screen.

  ‘Now look, Ptolykins,’ said Jo-Jo as she spooned the last three luscious eggs of Beluga into her mouth, ‘this whole thing is the most infernal muddle. On the one hand is the official Chronicle of Hubert of Avallon and that poem, that ballad, written by this Sire de Longueil, in both of which Xanthippe is presented in much the same way – as the tender and innocent hostage, the poor little damsel who died of homesickness and/or because she missed the sight and sound of the sea. So far, so good. But on the other hand, Ptoly-pie, there is all this stuff in the Appendix of the Chronicle, to say nothing of those clues which Ivan Barraclough is checking on his way home, the burden of which turns her into some kind of monster – or at least into somebody who is being haunted by some kind of monster. Dream-treasures which are still there when she wakes up and later cause her death; inscriptions hinting at some horrible curse or taint which she carries everywhere with her – God knows what all.

  ‘And on top of all this,’ Jo-Jo continued, vigorously scratching the crack in her rump, ‘you tell me that Mr Barraclough is having “complications” on his journey and is having to cut off protruding noses – by which I’ve little doubt you mean heads. So for Christ’s sake, Ptoly darling: what is going on? And what exactly was going on with that poor little Greek Princess seven centuries ago?’

  ‘As you must already have gathered,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘these are not easy questions to answer. The best way is for me to deal with the second question first. So stop scratching your arsehole, little pusskin, and go and get your Uncle Ptoly some more vodka – the cayenne vodka – and then he will resume his efforts to guide you through the labyrinth to its centre, where lies the enchanted garden.’

  ‘With poor Xanthippe underneath it, I suppose, pushing up the flora.’

  With some difficulty, Ivan Barraclough turned the Land Rover round and drove back along the embankment across the salt-marshes, making for the Venetian Campo and the main road up the coast.

  Poor little brute, he thought.

  The moon was almost down now but he refrained from turning on his headlights; for although he had done nothing culpable (if one considered his situation) there were nevertheless questions which he could reasonably be required to answer, and he had no wish to attract the attention of potential inquisitors. If he could slip unnoticed through the Campo (surely deserted at this hour) and make a hundred miles up the coast road to the north before dawn, then he had every chance of escaping from Yugoslavia without further trouble. He could find a boat from one or another port for Bari or Venice and embark on it, with or without the Land Rover, before the wretched sea captain’s colleagues had any idea of what had happened to their friend, or any cogent motive for Ivan’s pursuit.

  He glanced to either side. He was now passing through an area of shrub and pine, which meant that he must be nearing the Campo. There was a low ridge to his left, behind which the moon now modestly retired. He slowed down, decided he must use the fog light, switched it on, and picked his way among the pot-holes.

  Poor little brute, he thought again. Deceived by Ivan’s plausible lie about the tide, he had fidgeted restlessly round the remains of the chapel, constantly asking how soon they could leave. Then Ivan had the piece of luck for which he had hoped. An earth tremor; common at this latitude and at this season of the year. An earth tremor, accompanied by a low rumbling and by a sudden and absolute eclipse of the moon by a thick stray cloud. In the pitch dark Ivan delivered a ferocious jab at where he calculated the capering Captain’s solar plexus would now be, felt his fist sink into a surprisingly soft stomach, heard the Captain gag horribly as if about to vomit, and then followed up with a back-hander which was intended for the jaw but in fact struck the temple…and was none the less effective for that. As the moon emerged from behind the cloud, the Captain slumped at Ivan’s feet. Ivan disarmed him, then took a leaf of the herb from the island at Ioannina, tore it slightly and thrust it between the man’s lips. ‘Sleep till noon,’ he told the unconscious figure, ‘then tell your friends, when you meet them, that I am at sea and beyond their reach.’

  He had no confidence, however, in the herb’s efficacy to enforce obedience to instructions which were given to an unconscious person. Before the herb could act, he told himself, the brain must presumably register. The brain of a sleeping man could in some cases register; but could the brain of a man rendered unconscious by violence? Not knowing the answer, and concerned to prevent any possibility of early pursuit, Ivan stripped the Captain stark naked and gathered up his clothes, which he dumped in a pool of sludge half way back to the Land Rover.

  ‘So that’s you out of the way,’ he said to himself: ‘you poor little brute, you.’

  And now, some ten minutes later, he was driving into the Campo (deserted as he had hoped, or so it would seem), past the central column half way between the Palladian and Gothic churches, out the other end and on to the isthmus which would take him to the main road. Yes, he should be half way across the Adriatic before any pursuit could start.

  But would that be the end of it? They would know, these people, which way he was heading; they would know his goal. Very possibly they had allies in Italy and France. Perhaps all of Ptolemaeos’ agents were now in conspiracy against him; or perhaps the rot was confined to Yugoslavia and Greece. Who could tell? But even in the latter case there was nothing to prevent his continued harassment. Yugoslavs, it was true, might have certain difficulties in leaving their country, but there were ways and means, particularly for those who lived on the coast, particularly for men who would stop at nothing (and most of them, it could be reckoned, would be of sterner stuff than the sea captain), particularly for people who had a prize in view such as they had.

  Ivan turned left off the isthmus and drove, very carefully but at the top speed the Land Rover could manage, towards the north.

  ‘At first sight,’ said Ptolemaeos Tunne, as the cayenne vodka lapped into his glass, ‘the contradictions in the various accounts of the Despoina Xanthippe are not difficult to explain. We know that certain Greeks wished to discredit Phaedron of Ilyssos for doing a deal with the Franks. We can easily suppose that the method they adopted was to vilify his daughter, and that they tricked, bribed or blackmailed many Franks into helping them. Thus Prince William’s Bishop-Chaplain went on record as hinting that she had some sinister or supernatural accomplice – though he, at least, was decent enough to express a belief in her personal innocence. Or again, a sculptor who did a carving in the chapel in the castle of Geoffery de Bruyère at Karyteina shows her in the process of being pricked by a kind of sexual imp. Or yet again, there is an interesting and very rude carving in the family chapel of my friends des Veules-les-Roses at Barville, a piece of work done long after the Despoina died but inspired by the local legends about her, which clearly included substantial elements of bawdry.’

  ‘And such obscenities,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘would have been invented by Greeks and crooked Franks far away in Romany…but would still have been powerful enough, you think, to spread as far as Normandy?’

  ‘Oh yes. Some of the knights or mercenaries who accompanied her could have been paid or suborned to tell the stories on the march. So the rumours would have travelled with her…false rumours that she was a woman abandoned to lewd practice (the carving at Barville shows her masturbating on a castle wall), that she was attended by a daemon or familiar who egged her on, and that she was, therefore, almost certainly a witch.

  ‘But the trouble is,’ pursued Ptolemaeos, �
�that this explanation just don’t fit. If people were out to vilify Xanthippe, they could have recorded anything they cared to imagine. Harlotries, orgies, adulteries. But we have nothing of the kind. All we have are rumours of masturbation, artefacts showing her at it, and, in inscriptions and so forth, the implications that she was accompanied by some supernatural doppelgänger. Pretty tame stuff for those days.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Jo-Jo, ‘Phaedron’s enemies thought that a relatively quiet and consistent series of charges would be more convincing than sexual spectaculars.’

  ‘Possibly. But in the end the theory that the accusations against Xanthippe were merely anti-Phaedron propaganda fabricated by his political enemies founders utterly on the rock of Hubert’s Appendix. You see, Hubert was as absolutely on her side as a man could be. He adored her. Granted, his official Chronicle does contain a few hints that people sometimes found something sinister about her, as when he quotes the Sire de Longueil’s remark that “Another watched him from behind her eyes”; but this is presented as someone else’s view, not as Hubert’s. As far as the author of the official Chronicle of Avallon was concerned, the sun shone out of her navel. And yet in the end Hubert was too honest and clear-sighted to give her a clean bill. He knew there was something wrong all right – and hence his dictation of the secret Appendix. He had to tell the truth under God even if he tried to conceal most of it from man.’

  ‘But couldn’t the Appendix have been a forgery by the propagandists? Or couldn’t they just possibly have managed to bribe Hubert to make it all up?’

  ‘No, no, sweetheart. If either of these things had happened, the Appendix, like the Chronicle itself, would have been much copied and had wide publicity. The propagandists would have seen to that. But the great point about the Appendix is that it has been kept almost entirely secret right down the centuries. While the Chronicle was much read by the literate, and while rumours and tales in bawdy supplement were bandied about by the general public, the actual Appendix was all the time mewed up in its box in Vezelay, and never saw the light, save when it was inspected by its guardians, until the drunk Curator got it out for Ivan and your uncle.’