The Collected Connoisseur

by Valentine, Mark

  ‘Yes, I did know—’ Dr Mallet said irritably.

  ‘Well then,’ said The Connoisseur, ‘my dear Edith, you certainly won’t have to risk life and limb trying to get a closer look at that finial then, will you? It is already too late for that. But your friend Mr Smith has given us the answer. I am optimistic that High Mortain will not need to detain us beyond tomorrow morning, which is just as well, as the great bonfire is tonight, is it not? I shall ring for more tea.’

  ***

  ‘I shall not dress for dinner,’ The Connoisseur said. ‘We may not have the time, and we need to be in place for when the festivities begin. I do not think that the evening ahead will be uneventful. Is Edith going to station herself in her rented accommodation?’

  I said that she would be. The Connoisseur smiled ruefully. ‘She so dearly wants a closer look at that finial. Well, I have no doubt that she will get it, one way or the other. I hope that she remembers what we discussed earlier—and what she herself found out this morning.’ He consulted his watch. ‘Time to eat, I think.’

  After dinner, we went outside. The brief dusk had surrendered the last of the fading light, and the town had been transformed. High Mortain had become a hubbub of flame. Children described fizzling circles and spirals and zigzags with bunches of sparklers they had bought, and people processed through the streets with lanterns, candles and torches. We joined in. Everything seemed so ordinary and safe, just like a normal November the Fifth … except that wasn’t the date… .

  After an interval I noticed that the children had disappeared. The crowds in the street consisted entirely of adults. We entered the Market Square where the bonfire was waiting to be lit, and passed the Memorial Hall. ‘Look,’ I said to The Connoisseur. ‘The Balzarths are giving a concert later this evening.’

  It was now a sharp and clear night. There was still a tang of wood-smoke and crushed, dying leaves in the air, and a very slight breeze. The autumn stars were clearly visible: most houses had their lights switched off, and the streetlights had been turned off too. Great Pegasus rode high in the southern sky, and the bright stars of the short summer nights Altair, Deneb, and Vega, were fast declining towards the western horizon.

  We followed along with the crowd, as it milled apparently aimlessly through the old streets. Leaves were now coming down from the trees, as if the festival had been a signal for them to start falling. They rustled and clattered across pavements and against the walls of houses. We must have described another circuit of the town. Soon we found ourselves back in the Market Square. A platform had appeared by the unlit bulk of the bonfire, and a man was climbing up a ladder to reach it.

  ‘Do you recognise him?’ asked my friend.

  I peered into the darkness, illuminated as it was only by the flaming torches held high by most of the crowd, and the starlight from above.

  ‘He looks a bit like that waiter, that celebrant, that Dr Mallet first talked about.’

  ‘Exactly.’ The Connoisseur looked around. ‘The others should be in their places by now. The bonfire is about to be lit, and certain invocations made. But not everyone here is just out for the traditional High Mortain revels.’

  The man on the platform spread his arms wide, just as some sort of celebrating or sacrificing priest would do. He boomed out a welcome to the crowd and to all visitors, particularly the special ones. He announced fireworks, and a surprise outdoor performance by the Balzaths of The Bright Charioteer. (Hearing that, The Connoisseur nudged me and smiled. ‘Or something,’ he said.) Then the fire would be lit, and the festival proper could begin.

  The celebrant raised his arms heavenward and fireworks boomed out and cracked open the sky in sheets and bursts of incandescent glory. The crowd cheered, and gasped in awe. Suddenly the rooftops of the buildings around the Market Square stood out, as torches previously placed there burst into flame. There was fire in the sky, fire on the earth.

  We inched our way back, away from where the fire still waited to be lit, until we reached the edge of the square and had our backs against the reassuring solidity of a house. That felt good. Then I saw the Balzarths appear on the platform. They began to chant and to clash together great cymbals like golden wheels and I was astounded at how loud they were. I hadn’t quite been prepared for that, by what Ivo Tradescant had said. The Balzarths’ unearthly music was like a form of fire itself, combined with the sounds of bursting and whistling fireworks, and the sight of the sky and earth lit up in one seeming mass of fire, coloured and white and again all colours… . As the music seemed to be moving towards a climax, the celebrant made a sign again, and the black bulk of the bonfire burst into flames. The crowd shouted and screamed in ecstasy. I couldn’t see how he had arranged for the fire to detonate the way it had. Then people started to throw their torches onto the fire, and it roared and reached higher, and sparks danced in the hot air and gusted upwards towards the obscured stars.

  ‘Come on. We must get to Edith. I’ve left us enough time, but we must not get caught or distracted on the way.’ I followed The Connoisseur, as we inched our way along the sides of buildings that lined the Market Square. Our backs were literally to the wall, and no-one saw us as we reached an alley and ran along it in almost total darkness, with the central fire blazing behind us and the cries and shouts of the crowd falling away somewhat.

  ‘Most of them don’t know what is planned to happen to the town,’ my friend said, as we ran. ‘The light-bringers are here amongst them—those seemingly ridiculous matchbox-label collectors are here! But if Hephaestus has been true, we will yet see them brought down, just as the first Lucifer was.’

  The aria from Messiah intruded into my mind as we ran, but it didn’t quite blot out the sounds of the rest of the town, or the occasional bursts of eerie song from The Balzarths, who must have redoubled their outlandish performance. ‘Break them, break them,’ I gasped. ‘A rod of iron!’

  We arrived at the turreted café that Dr Mallet had described so vividly. The Connoisseur pointed up at the roof of the large building. I could see the turret silhouetted against the bright sky. I could even make out the finial. It was bathed in the strange fire that Dr Mallet had told us about. Then I saw that one window in the building was lit, and I thought that I could make out a shape moving around behind the drawn curtain.

  ‘Is that Dr Mallet?’ I asked. The Connoisseur didn’t answer, because the light suddenly went out, switched off. The curtain was pulled back, and the window opened with a loud, drawn-out creak.

  Dr Mallet leaned out. ‘I must get to the finial,’ she shouted down to us. ‘I can see how to get to it—’

  We charged through the street door and up the stairs. When we got to Dr Mallet’s room, it was empty. The Connoisseur said, ‘She’s just ahead of us, and we must stop her getting to the finial. She said that she wouldn’t try to reach it, she knows what it’s there for. But with all the excitement of the evening, and the powers that are abroad …’

  We rushed on up another staircase, and burst out onto a narrow space between the parapet and the steep roof. The turret was straight ahead. I could make out Dr Mallet, struggling with a ladder that had been lying against the inner wall of the parapet. She was illuminated by the weird light, the fire that still played about the delicate and hauntingly-shaped finial.

  ‘Edith! Stop!’

  She hesitated. I looked at her, and then glanced out, away over the parapet. Over the rooftops I could see where the central bonfire was still blazing, its flames reaching to meet the fireworks that still rained down. If they were the fireworks—the sky was all alight now, as were the rooftops themselves. And yet the fire scarcely burned, in the sense of consuming material. That fire simply flourished there, on earth, where it had no real right to be. I looked down into the street, and the crowd was there, filling it with their torches and tumult, their dancing and frenzy. I wondered how many of them would remember this night—and if they would have the chance to.

  Then, from a distance that seemed more interstel
lar than anything else, I heard the Balzarths’ song surge again, and what seemed to be some sort of low murmuring response. Dr Mallet stepped back, away from the ladder, and staggered against the roof. Before I could react, The Connoisseur leapt forward and grabbed her, stopping her from hitting the roof or possibly stumbling against the parapet and falling over into the parading street-fires underneath.

  I looked up at the finial again. It had started to glow. Its winged shape stood out against the sky. Flame lanced from it, at an angle, firing towards the bonfire in the Market Square. The singing grew louder again. The heat grew stronger—from above. The lone voice of the celebrant boomed out over everything, shouting and invoking in a language that I had never heard before.

  All three of us backed away from the turret, with its glowing finial, as the heat and light poured out of it. Dr Mallet made one last despairing gesture towards the finial, now totally unearthly in its terrible bright beauty and deadly purpose. We rushed back down the stairs. We didn’t care what—if anything—might await us back down in the street.

  We needn’t have worried. The milling crowd ignored us. Everyone was looking up towards the finial. Then silence fell, an incredible hush after all the noise. It was the silence of anticipation.

  And then the finial broke apart. It didn’t shatter or explode; it simply split where the iron rod met a slender disc of almost hairline frailty, which glowed a different, warmer, coppery colour than the rest of the structure.

  A great gasp went up from the crowd, and the rooftop fires died down before flaring up for one last time. Then they went out. The sky went dark again; the autumn stars shone down again. I welcomed their return—at least they were familiar, for all their distance and utter untouchability.

  The Balzarths attempted to start singing again, but their voices died away. The celebrant’s voice had also fallen silent, and later we found that no-one had been able to trace what had happened to him, though Colonel Gaspard had pursued his agate-eyed quarry through the narrow streets until he was lost from view entirely: nor did the other philuminists grace the streets of High Mortain again.

  We returned to our inn through streets fast thinning of revellers, who were mostly returning to their homes with a slightly abashed and puzzled air, muttering quietly to each other, and casting anxious glances about them, as if not keen to be seen abroad.

  ***

  ‘What we have witnessed,’ my friend explained, ‘was an attempt to call down the influence of Phaeton, the lost planet, and a vessel of the great fire of the heavens. Its votaries believe there was once a major planet between Jupiter and Mars and its astrological force can be felt on Earth still. The qualities of that planet, which was shattered into mere asteroids millions of years ago, are those of fire, ecstasy and destruction. This night its phantom influence was at its closest to the Earth, if Vesperine’s impressions are right. And those who wanted to bring it amongst us had brought together all their summoning strength: and had chosen High Mortain because of its quaint fire customs, which provided a fine focus to support their invocation. Never would they have so great an opportunity: the planetary position of the Phaeton force nearing the Earth at the same season as the town’s fire celebrations.

  ‘And Hephaestus Smith had become aware of what his art was going to be used for. His nom-de-feu, as Edith called it, was not chosen by chance; he knew his mythology, and entered into the ancient and mythical tangles of love, hate, and rivalry that characterises those stories.

  ‘Our friend Hephaestus, suspicious of those who had commissioned from him this most curious finial, had put a weakness in the rod, at the disc of copper. It is the metal of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and the patroness of smiths. Hephaestus knew his iron. It was truly in his soul, as one might say.’

  ***

  Some days later, visiting my friend in his rooms, I asked about Dr Mallet. The Connoisseur went over to an intricately-inlaid bureau, and retrieved a letter. ‘She was able to retrieve fragments of the finial that fell to the ground. Somehow I do not think that she will be asking Hephaestus to return it to its original form. And the remains of the finial left in situ on the turret will be harmless.’

  I sipped at the polychromatic liqueur that The Connoisseur had served on my arrival.

  ‘I don’t suppose that there’ll be any more concerts by the Balzarths?’

  ‘Not in rural Shropshire, at any rate. Not of The Bright Charioteer! And that reminds me, I heard you humming the Hallelujah Chorus as you came up the stairs earlier. I take it that you are still singing in Messiah? I think I may well attend the performance.’

  Acknowledgements

  ‘The Effigies’ and ‘After the Darkness’ were first published in Dark Dreams number 8 (1990), edited by Jeffrey Dempsey and David Cowperthwaite. I am grateful to them for their encouragement and for allowing The Connoisseur to make his debut. ‘The Paravine Cries’ was first published in Lichgate number 1, edited by Colin Langeveld. My thanks to him for enabling me to resume The Connoisseur’s adventures. The story also made a more recondite appearance as a limited edition booklet, complete with peacock feather, published by The Stenbock Society in 1996. My thanks to the Society, whoever they are.

  The painting which makes its appearance at the end of ‘In Violet Veils’ is taken from A Comedy of Masks by Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore (1896). The cubist building in ‘Café Lucifer’ is based on the House of the Black Madonna in Prague, which I have taken the unreasonable liberty of transporting to Worcestershire. The phrase ‘the rarest perfume dwells in the frailest flowers’ is not, alas, mine: it derives from a line in a poem by Fabian Woodley.

  ‘The Lighting of the Vial’ was inspired in part by the paintings ‘Still Life’ (1951) and ‘Natura Morta’ (1938) by Giorgio Morandi, and an essay on this artist by Merlin James (The Times Literary Supplement, 18th June 1999).

  ‘Sea Citadels’ draws the names of some of the lost offshore places of Britain from Nigel Pennick’s pamphlet Lost Lands (1986), which first interested me in this theme: and from Alasdair Alpin MacGregor’s Islands by the Score (1971).

  In ‘The Prince of Barlocco’, I have set the scene around an imagined version of the real island and castle of Barlocco, in Galloway. But I have changed the topography somewhat and of course my characters are not intended to bear any resemblance to any real person.

  Some of the tunes cited in ‘The Black Eros’ are genuine, others made up. Readers will recognise in Michael Casparian a light disguise for Michael Arlen, the true author of the story ‘The Revolting Doom of the Gentleman Who Would Not Dance With His Wife.’

  ‘Mad Lutanist’ was informed by an interesting monograph, Wind Dials and their Makers by Liz Brooks (Portico Library, Manchester, 2000), which I drew upon for information about their construction: and I should like to record my thanks also to Richard Summers, no mean lutanist himself, whose desk furnished an introduction to this monograph. I found the story’s title and an interesting literary history of aeolian harps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Harp of Aeolus (Routledge, 1947 [1948]).

  The names of the crannogs on Islay given in ‘The Mist on the Mere’ are taken from the Catalog of Crannogs in the Inner Hebrides compiled by Mark Holley.

  ‘The Last Archipelago’ draws its factual elements, and the basis for some of its description, from an article in The Pall Mall Magazine (January 1898), ‘The First Crossing of Spitsbergen’ by W. Martin Conway. The members of the expedition were as named in the story, except that the artist was Mr H.E. Conway: I have taken the liberty of replacing him with another. The fictional versions of the explorers may not bear any relation to their actual characters.

  ‘The Rite of Trebizond’, ‘The Serpent, Unfallen’ and ‘The Temple of Time’ were first published in The Rite of Trebizond & Other Tales (2008) by Ex Occidente Press, Bucharest, Romania, and appear here with thanks to that fine publisher.

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  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Effigies

  After the Darkness

  The Paravine Cries

  Pale Roses

  In Violet Veils

  The Lost Moon

  Café Lucifer

  The Craft of Arioch

  The Secret Stars

  The Hesperian Dragon

  The Lighting of the Vial

  The Nephoseum,

  Sea Citadels

  The Prince of Barlocco

  The Black Eros

  Mad Lutanist

  The Mist on the Mere

  The White Solander

  The Last Archipelago,

  The Rite of Trebizond

  The Serpent, Unfallen

  The Temple of Time

  The Descent of the Fire

  Acknowledgements

  About Tartarus Press