Pavane sm-35

by Keith Roberts

  They took the tourists out from Wey Mouth, from the beaches and the harbour there, fishing for sole and lobster and sharks sometimes when the season was right, the little basking sharks that did no harm to anyone but made good sport. It was a fishing boat that was coming in, and the boy on her had caught his arm in a winch and made the land somehow. Margaret pushed through the crowd wriggling and shoving, sickness coming already and dark shadows at the edges of her sight, not able to stop; she saw the mess, tendon and bone showing in spikes and the man, reddened, holding himself with a hideous dignity, and didn’t know what to do.

  The car drove churning onto the beach, throwing sand, stopped for its driver to vault the door and come shouldering into the crowd. He must have taken Margaret for a midwife or something, her throat was too dry to tell him he was wrong. She found herself in the back seat of the motor, squeezing the tourniquet, propping the injured man, seeing the blood run rich and soak into the upholstery. Just out of town a little station run by a half dozen Adhelmians served as the nearest thing to a hospital; the driver pulled in there and she sat while the boy was carried through the door and wondered whether to be sick then or later. After a time she got out, not really conscious of what she was doing, and started to walk. Sarah was forgotten; she was in a desolate mood where she seemed to see all humanity as bags of skin waiting to be burst and die in pain, herself a woman trapped in a fragile body, bleeding in childbirth, bleeding in coition. She was very shocked, and felt like death.

  The beach she reached finally seemed to stretch for miles. She followed the cliffs above it, walking from headland to headland, seeing the vistas of white and blue, sparklings of salt spray in the wind, aimless and objectless. She got to the sea by a sandy slither, thought she might bathe then remembered instead she had something to do and was formally sick behind a stand of gorse. Then she sat on a rock that hurt her behind and brooded, picking pebbles from round her feet and flicking them at the water, seeing the sun burn off the sea in skeins and dancing loops of light. The voice when it came hardly penetrated her consciousness; the stranger had to shout again. ‘Hi…!’

  He was heavy and bearded, red-faced and not used to being ignored. Margaret

  turned, and regarded him despondently.

  ‘What the devil d’you think you’re doing?’

  She shrugged. Her shoulders indicated ‘Sea…’ and ‘Throwing pebbles in it…’

  ‘Just come up here, will you?’

  Another shrug. You come down…

  He did, with a crashing and a rattle. ‘Fine bloody dance you’ve led me…’ He pulled up her chin insolently with a thick-fingered hand. ‘Yeah,’ he said, nodding. ‘Pretty good…’ Her eyes burned at him. Then, ‘Is he dead?’ She asked the question listlessly; the moment of anger had passed, leaving her drained out and flat.

  The stranger laughed. ‘Not him, plebeian bastard… Blood poisoning might sort him out but I shouldn’t think so. They generally live ‘What did they do?’ A husk of interest in her voice.

  The Norman - for they were speaking, almost unconsciously on Margaret’s part, Norman French - shrugged. ‘Nothing to it. Over in a flash. Pantryman’s cleaver, pot of tar. You leave the vein sutures sticking out, pull ’em through when they rot…’

  She rolled her lips, squaring the corners. His hand was on her again instantly. She knocked it off. ‘Just leave me alone…’

  A tussling. ‘You’re a good-looking little bit,’ he said. ‘Where d’you hail from then,

  haven’t seen you about…’

  She swung a fist at him. ‘Fils deprêtre…’

  He reacted as if she’d stabbed him with a bayonet. He flung her away, stood over

  her; for a moment she thought she was in for a beating, then he turned away in disgust.

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘wasn’t smart…’ Sand had got in his eye; he knuckled it furiously, swearing, then started to climb back up the cliff. Halfway to the top he turned and shouted. ‘You’re scared…’

  Silence.

  ‘You’re a little prig…’

  No reaction.

  ‘It’s a bloody long walk back…’

  Margaret got up, nostrils pinched with fury, and followed him to the car.

  It sat seething faintly, straps across the bonnet vibrating, seeming to hunch between its widespread wheels. He handed her in - the door was about five inches deep - got in himself, released the brakes, and shoved at what she supposed was the regulator. The Bentley gathered speed with a vicious thrusting, in a silence that was nearly eerie, trailed by the faintest wisp of steam.

  Margaret was rigid, sunwarmed leather under her thighs, wondering why she’d never been able to resist a dare, whether it was something in her that couldn’t grow up. The driver looped away from the coast and turned east again. The rutted roads were unkind to the motor; he leaned across one and shouted something about ‘Do two hundred on macadam,’ then relapsed into silence. Margaret realised more fully what she’d known before, that he came from no ordinary stock. Technically steam cars were permissible; but only the wealthiest dare own them, could in fact afford them. Petroleum Veto had long been tacitly recognised as a bid to restrict the mobility of the working classes.

  Passing through Wey Mouth she thought of old Sarah still scraping about looking for her charge, driving the local peelers crazy no doubt by this time. She yelled to stop but the driver ignored her; only the sidelong gliding of his eye, bright and bad-tempered, showed he had heard. Outside the town the rain came. Margaret had seen it building up for some time; the storm clouds ahead, dusty yellow and grey, piling against the midsummer blue of the sky. She yelped as the first drops hit her, slashing over the tiny windscreen. He bellowed back. ‘Didn’t bring the bloody hood…’

  A mile further on he lost steam and condescended to stop under a huge oak but by then she was so wet she didn’t care anyway. She was glad when he drove on, away from the booming of the branches. Corvesgeat showed on the horizon, a cluster of towers like fangs of stone. The rain was easing. They passed through the village the focus of a yapping herd of dogs; the Bentley’s burners hit them in the ultrasonic, drove them wild. Her driver crossed the square and swung into the castle, under the portcullis of the outer barbican.

  The gatekeeper saluted as the car bounced past. A fair had camped in the outer bailey; Margaret saw golden dragons, caryatids rainwet and erotic against grey stone. Show engines stood about, only slightly more ornate than the Lady Margaret herself. The Bentley thumped across the grass, blasting folks from her path with her twin brass horns. At the Martyr’s Gate the portculli were grounded to keep the people from the upper baileys and the precincts of the donjon; Margaret saw steam jet from the high stone as the winches raised the iron trellises for the car. Then they were through, sidling up a slope that looked one in one, the bonnet higher than their heads. The Bentley docked finally in a stone garage set below the soaring walls of the keep.

  Above them, dizzyingly far off, floated banners; the oriflamme, ancient and spectacular, flown only on Saints’ days and holidays, the bright blue of Rome, the swallow-tailed Union flag of Great Britain. The leopards and fleurs-de-lis of the owners of Purbeck were absent, so His Lordship was not in residence. Margaret caught glimpses of the flags and the high walls, sunlit now, through roofless passages as she scurried behind her captor, one wrist gripped in his paw, too breathless to argue any more.

  She lost all sense of direction; the castle was a great confusing mass of stone, hall after hall, building after building stacked and added round the colossal massif of the donjon. She saw through arrow slits past a spurred drum tower, across a vastness of heathland clear to the harbour of Poole; she climbed a stair set curling into a buttress to a chamber where Lord Robert of Wessex, son of Edward Lord Purbeck, swung irritably at a bellrope that threatened to disintegrate under his attentions.

  Margaret was given, kicking, into the charge of a burly female in the brown and scarlet livery of the House. ‘Do something with it,’ swore Robert, f
lapping his arms. ‘Take it off and bathe it or something, before it starts to sneeze. It stinks of the sea…’

  Margaret, furious, tried to swing round on him but the iron-studded door had already slammed. At her spluttered accusations of kidnapping the servingwoman laughed. ‘What, with his mother at home? He keeps his own nest clean, ye can be sure of that… Oof… Come on now m’lady, don’t be cross-grained… Ow, you little beast

  The room to which Margaret was lugged, and in which she was deposited spitting, was by the standards of the place small. Delicate perpendicular arches supported windows of stained glass that repeated glowingly the heraldic motifs of leopards and lilies. Brocade drapes covered part of the walls; in the floor was a massive bath built of slabs of polished Purbeck marble. Over it loomed an ornate geyser, black japanned, replete with rings and polished curlicues of copper. Grilles in the walls covered what were evidently the vents of a warm-air system. Margaret was impressed in spite of herself; her home at Durnovaria was well equipped, but this was a standard of luxury she had never seen.

  Two girls attended her. She frowned, half minded to send them packing; she was distinctly unused to being bathed. Sister Alicia used to scrub her sometimes when she was first away at school; ‘Come along,’ she’d say, ‘you unsavoury little thing,’ and bang her down in one of the great square tubs, already swilling with icy water, and let fly at her with a large hard-bristled brush, and sometimes she nearly enjoyed it; but that was years ago, a lot of things had changed.

  Margaret shrugged, and started to wriggle out of the tabard. If this crazy young nobleman cared to waste the time of his house-people on her then the chance was too good to waste; it would probably never come again.

  The bath was filled rapidly, with much snorting and hissing from the geyser; the maids bound her hair, and one of them added to the water a handful of something that produced great towering masses of iridescent foam. That intrigued her, she’d never seen anything like it. An hour later she was feeling nearly inclined to be civil again; she’d been scrubbed and kneaded and massaged, and had to kneel upright while they poured on her shoulders something that smelled of sandalwood and ran and burned like fire and left a splendid glow in the muscles of her back that soaked away stiffness and tiredness. There was a dress laid put for her, a formal thing with a wide scooped neckline and miles of frothy skirt, and a diamante circlet for her hair. The clothes fitted; she wriggled, feeling the satin-cleanness of her skin against the cloth, and wondered a little wildly just how well Robert had equipped the castle with the apparatus of seduction. She found out later he’d ordered his absent sister’s wardrobe ransacked for the occasion; whatever his faults, he certainly never did things by halves. She was badly worried now about Sarah and her parents, but events seemed to have passed her at the gallop; it was bad enough just trying to keep pace.

  It was evening before she was through, the sinking sun throwing mile-long shadows across the heath, waking blazing reflections from the tier on tier of diamondlighted and mullioned windows; the castle seemed to butt against the huge western haze like the prow of a stone ship. Sounds from the fair floated across the baileys; shouts, the din of the organs, the grumbling vibration of the rides.

  Dinner was served in the sixteenth-century hall built alongside the donjon; the diners promenaded outside it, richly dressed, arm in arm in the warm air. Margaret was vaguely disappointed when she learned the great keep had been disused for centuries except as storehouse and armoury. On high days and holidays the Lords of Purbeck were accustomed to take their meals in the ancient way reintroduced by Gisevius; the less favoured guests sat at long tables in the body of the hall while the family and their personal friends ate on a raised dais at one end. Lamps burned in profusion, lighting the place brilliantly; the minstrels’ gallery was occupied by a small orchestra; servingmen and girls scurried about tripping over the dogs, brackets and mastiffs, that littered the floor.

  Margaret, still a little dazed, was introduced to the Lady Marianne, Robert’s mother, and to the half dozen or so important guests. Her mind, whirling, refused to take in the names. Sir Frederick something, His Eminence the archbishop of somewhere else… She curtsied automatically, allowed herself to be steered finally to a place at Robert’s right. A cold nose shoved into her lap warned her she was attended; she fondled the bracket absentmindedly, tickling beneath the ears, and drew from her host a grunt of surprise. ‘You’re honoured, y’know that? Doesn’t take kindly to anybody, not that one. Had a swipe at one of the Serjeants the other day.’ He grinned broadly. ‘Two fingers…’

  Margaret gently withdrew her hand. Mutilation seemed for Robert a major source of fun.

  He’d heard her name more than once, introduced her by it a dozen times, but it seemed it hadn’t sunk in. She asked him, with as much dignity as she could muster, for a message to be sent to her home. Her eyes hadn’t missed the semaphore rigged beside the keep, or the chain tower on the nearby hill. He listened looking faintly surprised, bending his head to catch the request, then snapped his fingers to the Signaller-Page hovering nearby. ‘Who’d ye say, Strange?’

  ‘My father,’ said Margaret coldly, ‘is Timothy Strange of Strange and Sons, Durnovaria.’

  The bombshell was not without effect. Robert grunted, raised his eyebrows, swigged wine, drummed a tattoo on the linen cloth. ‘Well, damme,’ he said. ‘Damme. Well, I’ll marry a bloody Bulgarian…’

  ‘Robert…!’ That from the Lady Marianne, a little further along the board.

  He bowed to his mother, unabashed. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, you’re a bad-tempered young bitch, I suppose that goes a way to explaining it…’ He scribbled on the pad proffered by the Signaller. ‘Look lively with that, lad, or we shall lose the light.’ The boy departed, scampering; a few minutes later Margaret heard the clack and bang of the semaphore, the answering clatter from the great tower on the hill. An acknowledgement was back-routed before nightfall; just a frosty ‘Message received and understood.’ From that, she presumed she was in disgrace.

  The night passed quickly enough, too quickly for Margaret; she could imagine well enough the surly reception waiting for her at home. The dinner was followed by an entertainment by a troupe of acrobats and fairground people. Trained dogs bounced through hoops, ran on their back legs in kilts and breeches; the affair was a great success. The near-demise of one of the performers, caught and tossed by Robert’s delicate tempered hounds, scarcely dampened proceedings.

  The animal act was followed by a jongleur, a long-faced, mournful-looking man who, evidently primed by Robert, delivered a series of rhymes in a thick patois that Margaret perhaps fortunately couldn’t follow but that set Robert roaring with amusement. Then trays of nuts and fruit were passed, and more wine; the party broke up well past midnight, Robert bellowing for linkboys to escort Margaret to the room he’d had prepared.

  She decided abruptly, trying to stand without swaying, that it was just as well nobody was fetching her tonight; the rich Oporto, once restricted to the tables of kings and the Pope, had nearly proved too much for her. She collapsed in a warm haze, mumbling good nights to the woman who relieved her of her clothes, and was asleep within minutes.

  She woke soon after dawn, lay listening for the sound that had roused her. She heard it again; a dog barking, far off and bright. She got up fuzzily, draped an embroidered counterpane round herself and padded to the long slit of a window. She saw far below over a tumble of roofs Robert, two brackets circling the heels of his horse, ride across the lower bailey to the gate, falcon sitting his wrist like a little blind and bright-plumed knight. The ringing barks of the dogs sounded on the quiet air a long while after their master had gone from view.

  At eleven that morning a Foden, maroon-liveried, puffed its indignant way through the outer barbican, its driver demanding the person of one Miss Strange; and shortly after Margaret bade good-bye, regretfully, to the great castle of Corfe Gate. Once home she found things weren’t as bad as she’d feared; the family, with
the exception of Sarah, were more impressed by her jaunt than annoyed. It took a lot to impress a Strange; but the Lords of Purbeck owned most of Dorset, their demesne stretched to Sherborne and beyond. Once they’d been landlords to Jesse himself, until he’d scraped and saved and bought the place in fee simple. Her uncle approved, in his silent way; and that counted for a lot. He sat with her that night while she told him how things had gone, pulling at his pipe and frowning, throwing the odd quick question that brought out every last detail. But Jesse was an ailing man already, illness marking and greying his face.

  Again Margaret was scurried forward in time. It was as if the images presented themselves with all the ghostly, flickering speed of the yet-to-be-invented cinematograph. She remembered the brooding and waiting, the hoping for some sign that Robert hadn’t forgotten her totally. She tried to analyse what she felt about him. Was it just his craziness that appealed to her, was she attracted to the sheer animal maleness of him, or was it something deeper? Or more reprehensible, the simple urge to sell herself in the best market possible, set herself up above the rest, above her own family, as mistress of Corfe Gate? She told herself if it was that, to forget it, stop dreaming third-form dreams. Because she never would belong in that great place down there on the hill.

  Autumn came and the carrying-in of the sheaves, the services for Harvest Home. The hauliers plaited new corn dollies out in the sheds, hoisted them into the house eaves to replace the old dusty shapes of last year that were ritually burned. Margaret was kept busy in the kitchens supervising the laying-in of preserves for the winter ahead, the bottling and jam-making and salting-down of meat; and the locos came in one after another off the freezing, rutted roads, travel-stained, rusting, to be refurbished in the sheds, greased and oiled and polished and painted for the next year’s work. Every bolt must be checked, worn wheel treads replaced, valve gear stripped and reassembled, steering chains examined and tested.