The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘That grand dame was not ruffled by my revelation, indeed it seemed to me that she was somehow relieved by it. She nodded her head slowly. “It all makes a very good deal of sense to me. Indeed, I believe the Wriothesleys were loyal. There were not many of the lowlanders who were, I know it is said, but we have always been independently-minded here in our little enclave on the bay, and left very much to ourselves, and so I should not be at all surprised, not in the least surprised, if we helped fugitives away over the Firth after the ’45. I do not frankly ever recall my father speaking of any such thing, but as I have said, he was not a romantic man, and these things you have unearthed do rather give the game away, don’t they?” Then she paused, before resuming: “May I confide in you? I expect you have noticed that this house is not what it could be.” I uttered polite protestations. She waved a hand vaguely. “Oh, I do not mean that it is all out of order and needs a good freshening, though we do our best. That is merely material. I mean—well, it has been dismal, frankly dismal in its atmosphere, for as long as I can remember. There is some ban upon this house, some chill pall that try as I might I cannot dispel. It is scarcely fair upon poor Grace. She must sense it too, though she says nothing.”

  ‘Then she leant back, and touched again her agate brooch. “It will sound absurd to you, I am sure, but that is why I so wanted a steward upon the island again. It has been years since we sent one there, and yet it is surely our duty to look after it, and I simply had this sense that if one neglected one part of the domain, then it would surely tell upon the other. Does that sound too foolish, too curious to you? Well now, Edward is there, and I do feel it has made a difference, a little difference. Who knows whether in time all might become well? But as to your theory about the Prince, all I can say is that you might very well be right. Do share it with Edward tomorrow: he will be delighted.” I had the impression I was being courteously dismissed and I left the distinguished old Regent pondering to herself.’

  The Connoisseur yawned and stirred up the fire with a gargoyle-headed poker, then stared into the newly-quickening flames a while.

  ‘Well, I took the fisherman’s ferry over to the island the next morning, leaping out into the shallows as we approached, and was much cheered to feel the fresh sea-fit through my flesh and taste the hint of salt tang upon my tongue. Kesteven, looking more fit and limber than ever I saw him before, came down to the shelving shore and helped to haul me up, threw a wrapped-up bundle to the fisherman, with a fair word to him and a question about his mother’s health, and took from me the basket of victuals I had brought across: also, a little too self-consciously nonchalant, the lavender envelope from Grace.

  ‘After a swift look at the rather tumbledown white bothy (or “Post Office” as he called it), where on a rough table I saw evidence of the artist’s continued work on striking monochrome sea and island scenes, Edward took me on a roam around the whole island, which was, I should say, not more than a mile and a half in circumference. First we skirted the shoreline, shoving through gorse, heather and fern, and chatting all the while of our news. Then, as we came to a rocky gully, Edward halted and pointed upwards with his walking stick, saying that this was the best route to the crest of the hill, the top of the island.

  ‘It was only then that I noticed, for his hand had been covering it before, that he too had a stick carved with a hound’s head: and that again the ears had been tipped in red. I asked about it, and he said he had found it propped inside the cottage, and dashed handy it was too. This started me off on my account of its pair in the Castle, and all the Jacobite relics, and my surmised explanation of the Regent’s title, which Kesteven listened too with mild interest as we climbed upwards.

  ‘We reached after a while a deep furrow in the great mound of the hill, which seemed to weave all the way around it: and above it a bank rose to a similar circular ridge; and again above that there was another. “Now we go this way,” said Kesteven, leading us along the path of the furrow. I said surely it was quicker just to go straight up—feeling somewhat winded by then, what with the ascent and my rapid explanations—but Kesteven said we should enjoy the all round view. Then, after we had completed the first circuit, it transpired that we had managed to slope up to the second highest bank, and my friend started again to go round this. To my further remonstrations, he stopped, regarded me gravely and said: “I don’t know how it is, but whenever I come up here, I always go this way. It just seems to be the way. I tried the straight path up a couple of times when I first got here, but there always seemed a hell of a gale in my face as I did it. Haven’t a clue why, but just go along with it if you will.” So I did.

  ‘When at length we reached the last turn of the last path and came out upon the rounded summit, I was grateful to see that there was a little hollow in the earth which provided a certain amount of shelter, so I sank down in this, and, after a slight hesitation, Kesteven joined me. For a summer’s day, the wind was somewhat keen, even allowing for the influence of the sea, and it seemed to rake its fingers through the wild grass and whisper in the ears of the haggard clinging hawthorn trees. We took a pull each from a silver hip-flask that I had brought with me and Kesteven began to say how much he relished the life of the island, though he would not want to be a hermit forever, he added hastily, his fingers (I noticed) stealing to the lavender envelope that he had secreted in the inner pocket of his tweed jacket.

  ‘He told me that he had now completed to his satisfaction five different postage stamp designs as well as a deal of other work—sketches and illustrations that he thought he should be able to sell when he returned home. I outlined to him a plan to get the postage stamps printed up as limited editions and he liked the scheme, so we agreed I would take away such as he had done to put this into effect. So the talk went desultorily on, pleasantly enough, but it seemed to me that I sensed some reservation in him, something that he was not sure how he should broach. After a while, he suggested that we return to the “Post Office”, and I was not surprised to find that he took us by the same circuitous route back, as if we were unravelling what we had walked before.

  ‘This time I held my tongue on the matter. I asked instead if he knew the age and nature of the earthworks—defensive? quarrying? lynchet strips? Kesteven said that this was not his province, but that the Regent, who was, after all, an historian, thought they were very probably the signs of an Iron Age hill settlement, perhaps an outlier of the old realm of—was it Rheged?—but that they might be earlier. I emitted noises of interest, but actually this started me thinking. Yes, the old dame had said she was an historian. Why then had she not made the fairly likely Jacobite connection to her house, herself? Not her era, possibly, they all tended to specialise: but even so… .

  ‘The boat was coming back for me at seven, so we spent the rest of the time over a pleasing meal of the simple but good fare that had been sent across, and in making all sorts of unlikely plans for the promotion of his illustrations and even for the revival of that long-lost arts journal which, I am glad to say, never came to anything.

  ‘There was just the first faint hint of dusk as we stepped out of the door and I remembered Kesteven’s passing remark in his letter, so I asked him what it was like after dark on the island. “Well, of course,” he replied, a little hesitantly, “there is always the lamp that the Regent made me promise to keep lit… .”—he indicated its dull glow through the shore-facing window. “But aside from that it is devilish dark here I can tell you. Never known it so deep. In towns, there’s always some light somewhere and even in the country there might be a farmhouse lit up or a stray street light or two. But here—nothing. Just very dense black. If I step out for a stretch after working late on a piece, I look up to the top of the island and I can make out its shape all right, if there is starlight, but it just seems a great dome of darkness. It does make you think, as I said. Standing here, just as we are now, it’s as if that there” he pointed to the hill, “is another kind of place entirely than during the day.” He made as
though he might say more, but held back: and after giving me messages to take back to the Regent and to Grace, he accompanied me down to the landing-place and we parted.’

  The Connoisseur allowed me to catch up with my note-taking, and proffered me a shallow dish containing walnuts-in-ginger, a favourite delicacy of his, which I declined so as to concentrate upon his story.

  ‘After my return from my first visit to Barlocco, I made myself busy in arranging the printing of a limited edition set of the postage stamps from the island, which Kesteven had designed, showing scenes of the island from the sea, the “Post Office”, the White Well and the Black Well, as they were known, a (somewhat imaginary) view of the Castle, and so forth. I knew that “private issue” stamps from Britain’s offshore islands appealed greatly to certain collectors, both here and overseas; and that Lundy, Sanday, Colonsay, Bardsey, Bernera and others had all issued these. Some collectors preferred them “mint”, direct from the press: others liked to have them on envelopes actually dispatched from the island; between us, Kesteven and I could cater for both. The quality of the design was an important element for these collectors, and since my friend was refining his draughtsmanship very well indeed, the stamps soon found a following. Furthermore, I contacted those I knew were appreciators of his artwork and they too were eager to acquire such unusual and ephemeral examples of it, so that, all told, we soon found we had a decent subscription list. Over a few months, as the orders came steadily in, I handed over the administration of it to Grace, and so from this and from the “duty” that Kesteven insisted he pay, there was an extra stream of income for the Castle.

  ‘I also began preparation of an article on the Jacobite folklore I thought I had found in connection with Barlocco, and sent it to the Regent for her approval. She replied most tactfully, but intimated that she did not want to draw attention to the Castle because of its condition—this was italicised, so that I apprehended she did not merely mean its physical condition—which, though better than it had been, still caused her concern. Also, I have to admit, there was something nagging at the back of my mind which told me I had overlooked an obvious discrepancy. I therefore laid the work by and turned to other things. Just as well.

  ‘As the year wore on, the letters that I got from Kesteven, though they were firstly concerned with the postage stamp side of things, nevertheless became increasingly edgy about his solitude on the island, even though Grace and a friend had been over to visit a few times. The nights crept in, of course, and he found it harder to just shut himself up in the bothy for longer, but neither did he relish walking on the rest of the island in the deep, deep gloom, even armed with a flashlight. There were more and more allusions to the great engraved mound of the hill and how it seemed to him a place apart, that he now found himself reluctant to visit even in daylight. At last, he said plainly that he would like company again for the last days of his stay, and urged me to join him.

  ‘In late October, therefore, I made my way again to the domain of Barlocco, and renewed my acquaintance with the Regent, and with Grace, who was brimfully keen on the stamp business and more especially about Edward’s part in it. The old great-aunt, I found, was pleased too with how well it went, and there were little signs of revived fortunes here and there—the gardens for one had been cleared and trimmed well—but I could not help notice a reserve in her. She seemed, too, more tired than when we had first met, and we spoke only briefly in the parlour on the evening before I went across. I thought at the time that her speech was more wandering, though just as beautifully intoned, and it was as if her watery blue eyes were gazing inwardly, not out at me at all.

  ‘ “Things are better,” she began, “thanks to you and Edward. There is a change that I am sure you can feel too. But yet the ban has not fully gone. Whatever a little extra prosperity can do, whatever the excitement a new venture can bring, whatever the joy that young love imparts, has worked its influence upon this house: and now as I walk around it, even in those rooms I could not bear to enter before, for all their coldness and decay, now I find a new atmosphere which hints of hope and fortune. And yet I sense an omission, an abeyance in all this: and I fear for what will happen in future. Am I really, do you think, the Regent for a long-dead lost cause? It seems so fearfully apt. You found the evidence did you not? All there. The bowl, the painting, the locket, the stick. Yes, the stick. You shall take the stick I think, over to the island, so that you can—compare it with the one that Edward has. Take it when you go walking. You’ll need it going up that hill. Edward will need his too.” With that she relapsed into a silence, as if overtaken by her thoughts or, perhaps, visions. I took the stick as she had insisted and stole out.

  ‘I went across to the island the next morning, when it lacked just two full days and a half day before it had been arranged that Kesteven should leave, according to the old lady’s calculations. I found him still as bodily fit as before, and still working at his drawings, but the odd shadows in his ways of thought that I had discerned when I first met him there, had crept closer into the forefront of his mind, and he was eager to be away. He asked me, for example, if I had ever thought where darkness came from and was unsatisfied by my rather too ready answer. “Absence of light?” he repeated. “Yes; or presence of darkness. Which? Is it what goes? Or is it what comes?” I tried not to encourage him in these abstract speculations, but it was clear that the last dark nights of his time on the islet had burdened his soul. It was with some anguish, therefore, that he waited in vain on that last afternoon for the ferryman to come and collect us.

  ‘The first grey veils of dusk descended and still there was no sign of the fisherman’s boat. It was long past the time when he had been due to pick us up. Kesteven was very restless, having made all his plans to depart.

  ‘We waited until it began to become too dark to descry very much anyway, and then I said that it seemed to me we must take the flashlight up to the top of the island, where it would stand more chance of being seen, and signal. The crossing could still be done at night, for there were no hazards, and perhaps someone might alert the fisherman or one of the other boat-owners, and come and get us. But Kesteven was curiously obstinate, saying we must wait where we were in case anyone came. I said we could see that no-one was coming, since there were no lights, and if we climbed the hill on the landward side we could keep an eye out for any that did set out, and scramble straight down again. He replied that we could not go up the hill that way nor could we go down that way, remember? and I chided him for clinging to this custom of his in such pressing circumstances.

  ‘At length, and I think only because I said I would go up the hill alone, and he did not like the idea of this, he consented to my plan and we returned to the bothy to get the flashlight. As we stepped out of the door, I remembered the words of the ancient Regent, stepped back inside, retrieved the two pale hound’s-head sticks, and, giving Kesteven his, strode on. It was a rough climb. We stumbled frequently even with the torch and there was a sullen told-you-so air about Edward. There were great massifs of dark cloud on the horizon and fleeter-shifting emanations from these, which were fitfully lit at intervals from unseen beams. Yet if they were so wind-driven, how was it that the air where we were was so very still, and the sea, by the sound of it, so calm?

  ‘As we reached the first ridge, Kesteven made as if to circle round and it was all I could do to stop him and make him trudge straight up the incline with me. Leaning heavily on our sticks, we clawed and lumbered our way up to a gap in the next ridge, and halted for breath. Then the black cloud on the western edge gave way and there emerged, vast, veiled and oddly luminous, the great old moon of October, the last moon of October. The way to the earthen bank above us seemed strangely lit, with each blade of the sward, each pockmark of rock, each burrow-hole, each pebble even, picked out in a rich, bright illumination.

  ‘This sudden irruption of light after the deeps of the darkness caused our vision to waver for an instant, so that we had to blink and to refocus not so muc
h the optical apparatus of the eyes but the inner comprehension of what we saw. It was in that instant, an instant that seemed then, and seems now, the sort of instant that sometimes in our lives we experience as stretching on for far longer than our watches would tell us, that the great glow of the moon, the lesser light of the few revealed stars, and the chasing of the high clouds, were changed in our sight into something else.

  ‘Changed, that is, into a great streaming procession, all gold and silver and white and shapes of black, that seemed, in that long, long moment, to storm from the sky in a vast cascade, led by a magnificently-clad horseman whose form twisted and glimmered and turned from a dazzling radiance to a dense darkness in quickening succession, like the moon when it dons and doffs the mask of the clouds. And flailing behind him was a cloak of black, seeded with silver stars; and its wrought shoulder-clasp bore upon it all the colours of all the agate that there is in all the islands that there are.

  ‘The rout that he led was vast, and there were faces and figures in it that were human, and some that were animal, and some that were neither of these, and floating above all there were shards of darkness, like black pennons on unseen lances, and leaping around all there were long graceful hounds, white in the coat and with red-tipped ears: and I clung to my stick and crouched quickly to the ground, and put my hand on my friend’s shoulder and made him do likewise, and in this wise we saw through our veiled eyes that wild high retinue pass from the skies into the earth, into the hollow of the crest of the island that belonged to a Prince that I knew now was no mortal Prince. And we knelt there, shivering, for longer moments than the moment which had just passed as we saw the descent of the vision, but these moments seemed to flicker by, like a missed heartbeat.

  ‘We made our way haltingly down, straight down, murmuring to each other glimpses of what we thought we had seen, neither quite able to really believe it was so: and yet it was so. And we waited, awake, in the white bothy until the dawn when the boat came, rowed by Grace and the old gardener they had taken on, with news that the fisherman had been called away at once to his ailing mother, and they had tried to signal that they would come in the morning, yet knew in their hearts that the lantern-flashes would be lost amid all that sudden storm of summer lightning which they could see crackling over the isles. And her great-aunt had been beside herself and had said over and over that they must get them off the island, that it was the day before the night of the last old moon of October, and the steward never stayed on the island on that night, never as long as she ever knew. Grace had placated her only by suggesting that they keep vigil over the island and watch from the highest tower: and the old lady had at last agreed and sat there gazing out, all the while fingering her brooch of agate, while Grace simply thought hard about both of us. And I for one was not wholly fooled by that “both”, and the old gardener and I suddenly found much to admire in the view of the priory isle, while Grace and Edward embraced.’