‘It scarcely needed Shepherd’s brief programme leaflet to tell us that all of these pastimes had the potential for esoteric import, if played in the right manner and cast of mind, though most suspected Shepherd of persiflage. Certainly some of those present found the games were transformed from their well-known and well-worn rotes, and began to discern the playing-out of odd coincidences and patterns.
‘What I recall most was the way that the evening would surge from an excited hubbub to sudden silences, when the long-cased clock behind the bar could be heard in its reluctant rhythm together with the slow sliding of the glass mugs upon the counter top. Shepherd seemed well-satisfied with the whole event and Goodwin sold more beer than he normally did in a month; even some of the wary locals had enjoyed it, despite themselves, and the pointed, upright cribbage board was retained for regular use; it will no doubt be rediscovered as a curious old custom in years to come.’
The Connoisseur paused and smiled reflectively. ‘I don’t say that Edgar Shepherd’s next enactment was quite as successful. For one thing it was a much more obvious shifting of the boundaries. It was called The Cult of the Willow. He staged a game of cricket at Ivo’s ground below his house at Evermoor, in the Peaks; it was Tradescant’s Eleven versus his own coterie, known for the occasion as the Sephiroth, who all sported braids of catkins in their caps. Shepherd introduced quite a few new elements intended to emphasise the aspects of ritual in the game. The bat and ball were paraded on to the ground on silk cushions by girl-pages in tunics of white cambric, and there was much courteous bowing between the players at every opportunity. At the fall of a wicket, a robed figure ceremonially wielded two golden sickles. The field placings were made in accordance with some version of a cabbalistic diagram, and all had names of appropriate solemnity; one who might think he was at Long On, for example, was named The Tower; while Fine Leg was for some murky purpose known as The Hierophant. Runs were calculated according to a highly complex formula, depending upon where the ball had flown; the scorer was said to be attuned to certain high forces and influences governing the planes of play.
‘Not surprisingly, since only they seemed entirely acquainted with the rules of the Rite, the match was “won” by the Sephiroth, even though their skill at “enacting” certainly exceeded their aptitude for the more traditional accomplishments of the game. As a piece of theatre, a spectacle, it was clever, certainly, and added a pinch of piquancy to the game, but one tended to feel that cricket was already too arcane and eternal a ritual for Shepherd to quite make his mark upon it.
‘It was with no little interest, therefore, that I received Shepherd’s invitation to a further “enactment”, which he had called There Are Warnings… .
‘It seemed that the vulpine impresario had persuaded the Elder Brethren of Trinity House to lease him a disused lighthouse for a week, at Arkness on a sea-bitten spit of the East Yorkshire coast. I journeyed there on an afternoon of drizzle, dull, dim light and squally, wind and I was glad, crossing the all-but-treeless moor of dun, sodden earth and dank bracken, on a bony, furrowed track, to come in sight at last of the white buildings of the old compound, the lantern tower standing tall above all. Shepherd’s ushers looked gamely absurd in peaked skipper’s caps, navy jerseys, and rough black trousers tucked into mariner’s boots. While we waited for latecomers—there were to be about a score of us all told—we were conducted to the top of the beacon, to view the headland and the churning sea through the great diamond-paned glass.
‘Then we descended and were invited into the former common room of the keepers’ living quarters, somewhat spartan and dimly-lit, in which chairs were placed desultorily facing a slightly raised podium. Bleached, salt-savaged driftwood, pure and bare in its craggy abstraction, reached out white fingers from low tables; pools of dusty-red pebbles held an inner lustre from within deep high-sided bowls. Around the room, lamps and candles threw a bare, subdued light upon a few of Shepherd’s illustrations, lost within the paleness of the walls. I noted one in particular where a great-maned horse ridden by some crude-thewed Titan crashed through the ocean—the two figures seemed, indeed, part of one huge limb of that ocean—while in dim swirls below there could just be discerned faces agape; and imploring, clawing hands.
‘After a while, there was a stirring at one end of the room and two young performers emerged. A light of veiled viridian was diverted onto them. One, swathed in robes of scintillant white, bent his dark, rather serpentine head and uttered a long low note from a black bassoon: it was followed by a sibilant hiss from two cymbals struck sidlingly by a flowing-robed nereid. The same brief burst of groaning sound from the ebony instrument was followed a moment later by a great cresting burst of the brass discs. This procedure was repeated at intervals, and I inferred these were meant to represent the mournful wail of the foghorn and the crashing of the sea: and there was an oddly mesmeric quality in the deep-drawn drone and the brittle shiver.
‘A final whisper of the cymbals faded like the last wave of low tide withdrawing regretfully from the shore; and then the light shifted to where the chief performer sat at a sparse desk, sombrely attired and holding a sheaf of papers. A young woman encased in a black tunic, with a white face from which gleamed malachite eyes, touched him briefly upon the shoulder, then stepped back into the shadows. Edgar Shepherd looked up, gazed straight ahead as if in a trance, and began to intone, in the practised, reassuring manner of a broadcasting announcer, a curious recitation. For a moment I could not quite place the measure and the slightly stilted punctuation that he had adopted: then I realised it was a sonorous imitation of that diurnal wireless bulletin, with its comforting, authoritative crispness, the Shipping Forecast.
‘Yet instead of the familiar names and terms, Shepherd was reciting a completely different set of formulæ. Cromarty, Forties, Fastnet, Malin were gone: there was no mention of “Northwesterly Five to Seven, decreasing, becoming variable for a time”, nor “Cyclonic, perhaps Gale Seven later”.
‘Instead, his intonations were all of lost and mythic names accompanied by fragmentary images.’
The Connoisseur reached into a casket of worn, riddled wood, and fished out a crinkled sheet of paper. He handed it to me while he resumed operations at the samovar. These complete, he replenished my beaker. Taking a sip himself of a faintly fragrant Himalayan tea from a delicate, pale green cup, he paused to enjoy the sensation of warmth upon his fingertips for a few moments. Then he read, carefully and punctiliously, the following, which I later copied down:
‘Kraken, loathly worm writhing, spume pool,—rising,
Crail, crumbling, still singing, high arches of light
Holy Island, storms—sadness—desolation
Ravenspur, the spiced dead and the end of kings
Dunwich, toll toll toll the golden bells
Lomea, the lowing of the kine, the pastures unseen
Fairlight, the blue garden, glowing
The Door, hollowed, hallowed, open
Lyonesse, white horse leaping, stone knights sleeping
Avalon, summer moon waning, a silvering causeway
Gwælod, harpstrings, quivering
Merlin’s Head, great and grave the grey locks of waves
Chapel-on-the-Sands, a glimmering lamp
Treshnish, basalt fasthold of the secret books
Mingulay, the green dreamers in the caves of the west
Sithean Mor, their castle of the brindled cat
Thule: wild far & pure; wild, far & pure’
The Connoisseur lingered over the last words and fell silent for a space. The roar of the wind outside rose and fell for all the world like the buffeting of the sea. Then he resumed.
‘There was something about the lilt of this bizarre rendition that was so far removed from Shepherd’s usual rather bluff style of declamation that I stared at him sharply. He remained with half-closed eyes, and a tremor seemed to pass through his lean body. There was a silence, during which there was a perceptible rising of the air outside and
oddly—for a lighthouse is nothing if not soundly weatherproofed—a freshet of wind seemed to flow through the assembly.
‘I saw the girl with the bright green gaze waver forward slightly. One of the youths in maritime gear held aloft a conch and mimed the blowing of a clarion call into this, while the bassoonist blew loudly a summoning sound. As this died away, Edgar Shepherd held up a hand and commenced to repeat his chant, still in the studious, deliberate tones of the Shipping Forecast. I listened more closely and began to follow each passage in this voyage of visions, visualising the domains from Caithness to the North Sea, the Channel, the Irish Sea, the Atlantic and up to Cape Wrath. Plotting them in my mind, I saw that this was a recitation of the seventeen sea kingdoms that are said to gird the island of Britain, a tapestry of drowned cities, lost lands, forlorn islands, mythical realms. Some were renowned in legend and their names known even to those uninterested in the lore of their land: Dunwich, Avalon, Lyonesse; but others I hardly knew except as far flung memories; Ravenspur, Fairlight, Mingulay.
‘Again there came the deep call: a silence and then a third recitation. More slowly, more measured, more rolling. I closed my eyes and vivid pictures formed in the darkness; a great-mawed sea serpent thrashing in a vortex; the elegant gliding, like ripples of light, of slim, green-limbed spirits in the caves of Mingulay; the glimmering strand that led to the sweet meads and houses of ancient joy in long-lost Avalon; the tall, gaunt-crevassed castle rock of the Sidhe, gateway to the raging seas around Sutherland. It was as though Shepherd had captured a glimpse, a flint-struck glint of these utterly other regions and fixed it in a few despairing words… .
‘His voice died out for the last time. He sank back in his chair, and tilted his head as though craning to gain some new understanding. One or two people moved in their places, restlessly, making ready to go before the final darkfall, perhaps unpersuaded by Shepherd’s latest enactment. Among this rustle, my own thoughts still lingering in the wavering vaults of the ultramarine realms that he had conjured, I thought I heard, dim and far-off, an echo of the deep-toned winding call which had preceded each uttering. I looked up with a jolt. The young bassoonist stood starkly still, the angled reed held by his side, untouched.
‘My eyes roved among my fellow guests and I thought I caught the same question here and there: and then they came to rest on the malachite gaze of the saturnine young woman who had touched Shepherd upon the shoulder; and for a quick, shivering moment I felt a blaze of awful recognition well up within me, though I could not say why. Within a streak of time I was back in the sea-haunted crags and caverns of the citadels Shepherd had evoked, a tumult of wailing, whispering and whooping rushing through me. I shook myself, looked again: and she was gone.
‘As the gathering dispersed, Edgar Shepherd sought me out, and guided me into the clustering dusk, a short distance along a cliffwalk behind iron railings. We stood listening to the susurrus upon the shore far below, oblivious to the silver mizzle in the air. “You heard?” he asked, peremptorily. “Yes.” “A lifeboat siren, do you think? Some other lighthouse’s foghorn?” I do not think either of us were quite convinced.
‘ “At dawn or noon or dusk,” the tall gaunt figure beside me said, “the people of this island can hear on their wireless the precise disposition of the elements in the sea regions surrounding them; whether it is fair or foul, rising or falling, whether sight is clear or poor; and how hard the wind is raging. Many who will never go out upon those waves listen entranced. I admire this, though it puzzles me. What I have sought to do tonight is to recall to people some other aspect of those seas; their legends.”
‘But then he turned to face me. “I know some of them think me a mere showman.” He pulled his cloak around him and tugged at his pointed beard. “Yet, I have been to all of those places, you know.”
‘ “In imagination?”
‘ “You might call it so.” He shrugged. “They will call me grandiose for claiming that I can name and summon up the seventeen kingdoms of the coast. But they will yield, all the same, for this has the true sea-witchery in it. And I’ll indulge them. I’m going to sell parchments offering high-sounding titles: Seneschal of the Sands, Keeper of the Cormorants, that kind of thing. My share of Goodwin’s beer-money is running out and I should have patented the pyramidical cribbage. Even a Mage of the Maritime has to live.”
‘Even through the growing murk of the dusk he saw, or sensed, that I did not quite believe in this bombast. He sighed.
‘ “When I started this, all I was going to do was read out the usual shipping areas—you know, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight—and intersperse a couple—just a couple, you understand—of the mythic places, maybe Avalon and Atlantis. And when it came to them, I expected to burst into an incantation of their lost glories, before returning again, straight-faced, to Rockall, Malin, Bailey and the rest. I thought it was a good wheeze. Just a little turn with a twist of the genuinely hypnotic in it, if things came to me, as they usually do. It ain’t all mockery, you know… .
‘ “We held the first one up in Kincardine, in the upper chamber of a restored broch. I’d stayed in the village nearby and roamed the remote shoreline quite a bit, to get it all into my veins, as it were: the sound of the sea, the sifting of the sands; and I dare say I declaimed as I did so, to get the rhythm right; and I expect I probably muttered under my breath some of the stuff I was going to come out with. But as I settled myself at the trestle table that night, taking in the cast of the audience, in the round stone room, it was then that she joined me; I saw her as you saw her, a forbidding-looking young woman in black robes, pale-fleshed, malachite-eyed and stern of jaw. I had prepared myself for the rigmarole I’ve just outlined, when I caught her stare. And then it all changed.
‘ “When the opening music died away, I struggled to give tongue to the routine I’d rehearsed—it just wouldn’t come; and instead, with a lurch, all of these godforsaken lost lands came tumbling out. Yes, certainly, I’d heard of some of them: I could have written their incantations. But most of them might as well have been in a foreign tongue. I knew nothing of them. More than just reciting them, though; I saw them. I was transported to them in a quick quiver of insight. Man, I know each of the seventeen kingdoms, while ever she is there with me.
‘ “And so it has been ever since. She seems to be called Athalria, and that’s all I do know; and she is taking me around all of the sea-corners of this island. I can barely scrape a living from selling a few charts and pictures. Yet I have seldom felt so much, so much course through me… .” He tailed off.
‘ “What if I told you I am involved in nothing less than the re-enritualling of Britain, led from its lost lands and the holy places of the coast and those shining visions seen out at sea in the mist and the storm?”
‘ “I could believe it,” I said. I meant it. He made it sound true.
‘ “Here,” he pointed to the cliff edge, “and out there” (a sweep towards the seas), “we have the greatest treasure-hoard of spells and visions we could wish for. At every turn in this old, old land we could encounter them. And we are bounded and encircled by wave-ridden realms, ever-glinting, ever-calling, and those who are in them, whatever they may be, are urging us back to the honouring of these ancient sources: or so it seems to me. But if not, if we don’t—well, there are warnings… .” He did not go on.’
The Connoisseur halted. ‘Well, who is to know whether that sly-tongued romancer was not just embellishing more than a little? Yet … I wonder. Suppose that all of the glamour and the light had been leached out of this land by all our centuries of misuse, only to linger falteringly, forlornly, in forgotten corners? From whence would the restoration come? Where else but from those seventeen citadels? Could that be why we nearly all feel the yearning call of the shore and find in the sea’s sighing some strange surging of the spirit?’
The Prince of Barlocco
A great luminous yellow moon hung low in the sky as I made my way to the secluded rooms of my friend The Connoiss
eur on one late October day. I found him contemplating this apparition through his quaintly arched windows as I entered. ‘Very remarkable, isn’t it?’ he commented, ‘Almost an alien moon, almost not the moon we normally know. One could imagine anything might happen under its sway… .’
He beckoned me to my accustomed chair and poured into two delicate glasses a rowanberry liqueur which he had acquired some time ago and which he eked out sparingly since the supply was uncertain. As we sipped, he assumed that meditative air which I knew often presaged a story of one of his encounters with the curious: so I remained silent and waited.
‘Early in the summer of last year,’ he began, gazing at the little yellow fire which murmured to itself in the old stone grate, ‘I received a handmade envelope of Archenfeld paper, strong and well-textured, which bore the distinguishable postmark of Kirkcudbright, in South West Scotland, impressed upon two stamps. One was the standard British issue, the other an unserrated black and white label which had a picture of a domed island, with the waves of the sea pleasingly delineated in fine plumes of pen-strokes: and which bore above this the legend “Barlocco” in strong clear lettering, together with one or two lesser inscriptions. Greatly intrigued, I nevertheless opened the envelope very carefully with my brass, serpent-hasped paper knife—’ The Connoisseur reached behind him and wielded this instrument in emulation—‘and took out the letter inside.’
‘It proved to be from the illustrator Edward Kesteven, an old friend from when we had both worked on a short-lived arts journal. He was writing to say that he had discovered a rum old place he thought I should rather like: Barlocco, one of the Isles of Fleet, just offshore in a bay of the Solway Firth. Needing some solitude and time to think, to revive his art, and also being rather down on his luck, he had been introduced, through a set of mutual acquaintances, to a most unusual opportunity.
The Collected Connoisseur Page 14