The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘ “Hmph. Well, I can add to that. It’s also an indoor weather vane.”

  ‘ “What?”

  ‘ “A weather vane. I’m willing to bet on it. That banner is meant to drive its staff; that’s why it’s clamped on. As it turns with the wind, so does the pole. And the pole—well, look.” She placed the marked string over the hole in the star-shaped cog: it fitted snugly inside. “It drives this pinion—that’s what it is—then that in turn meshes with the teeth of the brass wheel you saw me working on, and that drives the axis which protrudes through to the back of the dial and moves the hand around the compass, which will therefore, if it is properly aligned, faithfully reflect what is happening to the banner on the roof-top. As the wind blows, the dial will reflect any changes in direction. In short, it’s …”

  ‘ “A wind-dial!” we both proclaimed in unison.

  ‘ “Ingenious, I’ll admit that. And I think I can make it work, if only I can get access to the shaft where the staff goes… .”

  ‘Thomasina decided she needed to explain our theory as to the nature of the dial to the Civic Trust and get their agreement to restoring it in situ (and to her terms for this work), while I wanted to research any other examples of the instrument. This took a few days, but we arranged to meet again at the Tower and compare notes.

  ‘The Trust, it seems, were somewhat bewildered, but anxious to comply fully with the terms of their bequest, and so had authorised her to proceed.

  ‘ “Also,” she added, “We might have some company soon. It seems there’s a Dr Urquhart who is especially keen to look into this place. She tried before but got rebuffed, apparently. We’re to look out for her and let her roam around—the Trust are impressed by her credentials. So, anyway, what have you found out about wind dials?”

  ‘ “Not a great deal,” I replied, “for one thing, there’s less than a dozen working examples in Britain. One or two with nautical aspects, as you’d expect; a few in private homes; some in clubs or museums. Mechanisms vary but seem not dissimilar to what you’ve got here, if I follow the diagrams properly (you have a look). No mention in any of the literature of this one: but I’ve only found a few stray references and just one monograph. The Trust will at least have something unusual. I can’t quite see why one was put in here, but I suppose it was all part of its being a folly, just some whimsy on Horton’s part … and especially, I can’t see why he used such curious characters on the dial: I mean, why not just N, E, S, W?”

  ‘Tom shrugged and got to work reinstalling the dial, while I kept out of the way in case I was required to assist in any arduous fashion. She managed to get egress through a sealed side-panel in the chimney-piece, which she opened up so that she could re-connect the axle leading from the flagpole to the arm that drove the spindle. It took a good long part of the day and a severe test of her patience at several times, as certain abrupt audible signals from her intimated. But at the last the dial was returned snugly to its place above the oaken mantelpiece, polished up and with its hand clearly informing us of the Northerly to North-North-Westerly wind direction beyond the walls. The wind, indeed, was gathering up again and hooting around the bastion in soaring, oddly triumphant-sounding blasts, as of some great clarion.

  ‘We made a celebratory feast from our provisions and watched the flickering dial, drinking in all the while the swooping, whooping wind. It was as if we were hearing the majestic calls of some legion of great beasts, or indeed the very emanations of the land itself, the giant forms and contours of the country around allowed to unleash their pent-up voices and to bellow out their energy and exultation. I could not help but feel caught up in a vast ceremonial fanfaring, so booming and boisterous was the onrush of the wind within the tower walls.

  ‘At last this great cannonade seemed to subside a little and there was for a moment a brittle hush, a descent of silence that, strangely, seemed itself to strike the senses as the work of a living thing, like an inheld breath; then there became gradually audible once more the plaintive wailing, the high held notes of wordless voices, surging and echoing around us.

  ‘A deep dark twilight like the lining of a storm-cloud had formed in the room while we lingered, listening enraptured to the actions of the high wild air upon the tower. Then there came a moment when the effects of the dusk and of the sounding of the air seemed to converge, to meld the one into the other, so that the shadows became the vessels of the keening and the eerie song seemed to body forth into the room as strands of gloom, as cords of darkness.

  ‘Then with a great onrush there surged in a strange, wavering, fluid procession of conjoined colours, great vivid greens and scarlets and royal amber and imperial indigo, a swirling vortex of illuminated hues that spun before us as if some vital force had taken in upon itself all the brilliance of the earth. It was there but for a flicker of time, I am sure, but it seemed to hold us in awe for long, long moments: it drew to it all else that was in that room, the songs and the shadows. And within that moment, Tom said too that she dimly saw again the contorted face in the dial waver in its place and spiral, fierce-eyed and mouth ajar, toward that bright energy.

  For all the rest of that night, though we each got some fitful sleep wrapped in our rugs, there was a hollowness, a void within the place, as of a force withdrawn, and with the dying of the wind there seemed to be another dying too.

  ‘We were in sombre mood the next morning, and made preparations to depart: but we were interrupted by the arrival of the scholar that the Trust had mentioned. A slight, long-faced, walnut-fleshed elderly lady, surprisingly agile, Dr Urquhart explored the tower with a joyous zest, examining every aspect of it, and listening attentively both to our account of the restoration of the wind-dial and a somewhat guarded intimation of what had followed. She nodded, beaming, then accepted our invitation to join us in a modest repast. I should be hard put to reproduce her tumult of enthusiasm, but I shall give it a go:

  ‘ “I have been trying to gain access to this place for some years, you know. The literary tower is my forte. Yeats, Beckford, Berners, I have been to them all. But the late owner was highly indifferent. He lived abroad and I sensed the tower was of no use to him, and its upkeep a burden. He did not want to set a precedent by opening it up to anyone, which might then lead to a stream of such requests. Also, he seems to have got from his forebears some notion that the tower was better left shuttered up.

  ‘ “They do not seem wholly proud of Henry Horton, who built it. But I was persistent and, I believe, persuasive, and I sensed some signs of relenting in our last correspondence. It was Henry, of course, who was the object of my interest. Why so? Peacock, sir. Thomas Love Peacock. Friend of Shelley. Gentle satirist, author of Headlong Hall and Nightmare Abbey and several others. Relisher of the eccentric. Gathers a group of curious characters together in his novels at some remote country house, has them drink and feed well, and indulges in some spry, well-meant mockery of their foibles. Very diverting humour, even today. Recommend it to you. Ah? Well, you may well ask. There is a thirty year gap, nigh on, between his sixth and seventh novels. Did he write nothing of that kind in all this time? Hardly likely. And we have fragments, sketches of characters, places. One of these is about Mr Waftwill, the wind-worshipper, who has had built a temple of the winds, which Peacock calls Tumbledown Tower, supposing that it will meet the same fate as Beckford’s abbey. There, it seems, Waftwill proposes to make the acquaintance of each one of the thirty-two wind spirits, which he is convinced can be conjured up and personified. He has given them all a secret name and formulæ and set of attributes, and believes that they are prime movers in human affairs. ‘Think, sir,’ Peacock has him say, ‘how high the human spirit rises in the tumult of a storm, how tranquil we feel when laved in a delicate breeze, think of all the ways we respond to the movement of the air, do these not betray an affinity we have not yet studied, still alone fathomed?’ This, of course, is just the sort of reasoning that Peacock enjoys.

  ‘ “Well, now, it has always been assumed that
Mr Waftwill was based upon a real person, as so many of his characters are, but we have not quite been able to prove that. But here we are. Horton’s Tower is, indeed, quite like Peacock’s description: I avow he must have been here. The Anemological Instrument, as he has it (which by the way is always going wrong), must be your wind dial; while I have observed on the window-ledges the remains of the aeolian harps that Waftwill had installed at every casement. Mmmm? Yes, pine caskets with silver threads that trembled in the wind and gave out sounds of aery melancholy. Coleridge wrote a poem about one; so did Smart and Thomson and others. Very Romantic artefact. These are all broken, of course, mere husks. What? Well, I suppose they could still work, in some way … however.

  ‘ “Peacock’s fragment breaks off when Waftwill is about to try to conjure up some supreme wind deity, to sanctify his tower as The House of Boreas, the great high god of the North Wind, and the king of all the winds. Eh? Laborious? Ha, ha, a charming malapropism. No, no. Boreas it was, and ought to be. Why did he stop? Well, that we shall never know. Did he indeed witness some demonstration that made Horton’s work come alive and less fit for mockery, that shook his own genial epicureanism of the eccentric and made him wonder a little? Possible, though not, perhaps, probable. More likely, I think, is delicacy on Peacock’s part, for Horton died of a seizure not long after the tower, so long in the making, was finally completed. But I am glad to have confirmed at last, from all the features within, the veritable locale of Peacock’s lost work.” ’

  The Connoisseur paused in his evocation of the estimable Dr Urquhart and grew more thoughtful.

  ‘The Civic Trust have decided, under Thomasina’s and Dr Urquhart’s influence, not to throw the tower open in an unrestricted way, but only upon certain days under careful stewardship. They were able to justify this on grounds of the rarity of the instruments it contains and the need to preserve these. This is as well: I am not sure we can be quite confident that whatever consort Henry Horton had with the wind spirits in his Tower of Boreas has quite played itself out.

  ‘After talking to the good Doctor, I wonder if he underwent the same trajectory as Coleridge, who at first mused wistfully upon the “soft floating witchery of sound”, the “gentle gales from Fairy-land” which he heard play upon the aeolian harp, but later became oppressed by the fierce grandeur of the wind, and proclaimed it “a Scream of agony, by Torture lengthen’d out”, fit to play upon “jagg’d rock”, “blasted Tree” and all such torn and craggy places: these, he apostrophised the Wind, “were fitter Instruments for Thee, Mad Lutanist!” They both may have found that sighing for the sublime was one thing; encountering it in its full awful force, quite another.’

  The Mist on the Mere

  ‘I have seen lights shine upon the water when I know that I am all alone, and shapes in the mist that I know cannot be there. I have lived for a few months now by the side of the mere, in my great-uncle’s house, but I am not sure I can stay much longer. It is not the loneliness, though that can be keen enough: it is the doubts about myself—about my steadiness, if you understand me.’

  The young woman with the tawny hair and very pale grey eyes stared across at my friend The Connoisseur as if hoping he could at once put her at her ease.

  ‘Do many people come for the crossing?’ he asked.

  ‘Very few. Only some stray walkers, or those who have heard something of the place and want to come and see it. It might be a score or so a week, but much less of course in the winter months. There is nothing much on the other bank, anyway. It is just a wilderness, quite queachy underfoot, without tracks except one footpath that leads to the old flint road and so in the end to the hills; or a short walk to the head of the lake. But most days I row across a little way, just for the practice and the exercise, unless it is really rough.’

  ‘And have any of them ever remarked on anything untoward?’

  ‘Oh no. Only on the scenery and the remoteness and the quaintness of the custom. But then, you know, I see what I see at night or in the dawn mists, and they would hardly be likely to be around then.’

  ‘The quaintness… ?’

  ‘Well, there are not so many rowing-boat ferries left now, you know. And the boat itself is quite a thing, more like a deep coracle, or half an upturned walnut-shell, as one said. It took me a while to get used to it, and I had done rowing at college, which is why (I suppose) he left it to me. People would always think it funny because of my name—Rowena the rower, you know. And then, the willow token and so on. They give me the fare and I give them a piece of willow bark with a mark I inscribe on it. It’s better than some paper ticket, which they might throw away and litter the place. But of course they have to have two.’

  ‘A return?’

  ‘No. One ticket takes them to the middle of the mere, or about so: and another on from there to the other side. I don’t know why this is so, but it was all in the instructions he left me. I stop halfway, they admire the view, I get a rest, and then I hand out another token and so onward to the further shore. And if they approach from the other side, which is rare, they ring a bell which hangs by the jetty, and so I go across to them; and they still have two from there too, and the pause in the middle.’

  ‘And the mark you make?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose it’s just to stop somebody from picking up their own bit of bark and pretending they’ve paid, although there are so few passengers that of course I should know. It’s just a quick squiggle of a spiral, like this… .’

  And she drew a curlicue like a ram’s horn or snail’s shell or the head of a fern.

  The Connoisseur stared at this thoughtfully for a while, then resumed his questioning.

  ‘So, the lights: why couldn’t they be the will o’ the wisp?’

  ‘Well, they could be, I suppose. They hover like that all right, in zig-zags over the other side of the mere, above the water. Flickers of light, only briefly, which stretch from the shore towards me but die out long before. But too often, I would say, and always in the same place.’

  ‘And the shapes in the mist?’

  ‘In the early morning, the mist hangs over the lake and it is very beautiful and—and, well, dreamy. And I like—liked, anyway—to take the boat out and be within it, enjoy the silence and the secrecy. I would ship the oars, and wait for the ripples to die down and just listen intently to the quiet and drink in the whiteness and mystery of the mist. But then I began to see the shapes and so I don’t do it anymore.’

  ‘Can you describe the shapes?’

  She pulled her shoulders up a little and tensed them, and her grey eyes withdrew her gaze within.

  ‘There was nothing there, really. I found if I stared hard enough the mist would begin to resolve itself into shadowy forms. It might become a white-cloaked lady with white hair streaming behind her, or there might seem to be the barest outline of a ship’s wheel or a billowing sail. Such things as these. They would be in the middle distance, but coming towards me. But I never stopped to find out what I was seeing, as you can imagine. As soon as they began to form, I would take up the oars and row away fast. Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Do you ever see them in the mist when you are not on the water?’

  She looked startled for a moment. ‘Oh, don’t ask that. I wouldn’t want to see them even then! No, I haven’t. But perhaps I haven’t looked hard enough …’

  The Connoisseur perceived the need to change the subject.

  ‘Now, about your great-uncle. Did you know him well?’

  She returned to herself with a visible effort and concentrated on his question.

  ‘No, hardly at all. He was grandmother’s brother. I saw her often enough and she spoke of him, quite proudly I always thought. He was the scholar of the family, she’d say, and add, “like you”, because I was at the university. You would get on well together, she’d say. He wrote a book once, apparently, and had taken himself away to the mere-side house to write another, though it wasn’t there when I moved in. All his papers went to the local history
archives, the solicitor told me.

  ‘For a while the ferryman and his wife lived-in too and saw to his needs and I suppose they told him all the things he’s passed on to me in his instructions about the ferry. But they left in the end and then he tried to keep the ferry going himself, and of course he shouldn’t have: too much for a man his age, even with so few visitors. It must have harmed his health, but he wouldn’t give in, so my grandmother said: and in any case, sometimes the passengers would take a turn with the oar too, when they saw how he struggled. So he got by … anyhow, she once said to me, he knew when his time would come. I don’t know what she meant by that, exactly… .’

  ‘And he left you the house and the mere?’

  ‘Yes, and some money—just about enough—to go with them. I suppose because grandmother had impressed upon him that I liked learning too—that would be the way she would put it—and had been in the rowing team, I must have seemed right. But there aren’t many others of us, anyway. We’ve thinned out and my few cousins are scattered over the globe.’

  There was a silence. ‘I want to stay, I really do. But with these—happenings—I’m not sure I can. I wonder if you can find out if it’s just me, or—or, what it is. I think if I knew, or if I had some inkling, I could make up my mind more. Will you come and look? Lucy, who I was at college with, said you were some help at Silverthorn, when she found something strange, and surely would.’

  This appeal seemed sufficient for my friend, whose curiosity had, I think, in any case been stirred by aspects of the story he had heard: and we arranged we would both go to the distant mere-house as soon as we could make arrangements to be absent from our duties.

  Soon after we arrived at the little white-walled waterside house, The Connoisseur prevailed upon Rowena to row him out upon the mere and, with a hazy sunlight glinting on the ripples, she did, while I watched from the bank. He lolled in the boat, his straw hat set at a jaunty angle, with its salmon and sap-green ribbon, and his purple-heather breeches fastidiously placed upon the least damp part of the vessel. When she paused in the middle, he rose somewhat unsteadily and stared intently about him and into the water, even going so far as to lie down and look over the side. Then, as she began to draw towards the bank, he repeated the procedure at intervals.