A Secret Alchemy (18 page)

“How is Gareth?” says Mark. “Silly to say, ‘He’s aged,’ I know.”

“In himself, all right. Though aged, as you say. But selling the whole Chantry…Putting a brave face on it, I think. He knows there isn’t really a choice.”

“Yes.” He doesn’t say anything more, just turns out onto Avery Hill Road. “When do you go back to Australia?”

“Tuesday. I only managed to clear a week, just to settle every
thing here—selling my house and so on. Only now there’s admin to do with the Chantry so it’s a bit more complicated. Lionel’s hoping he can get the paperwork together in time for me to sign things before I go.”

“You’re selling Narrow Street?” He accelerates up the bypass toward Eltham and Blackheath.

“Yes…How did you…?”

“I do come across family news from time to time.”

“And you—” Here it comes, the anger, but it’s weaker now that I’ve an image in my head of him, alone, working, working from nothing, with nowhere to go home to. “You didn’t think to get in touch before?”

“I…didn’t think I’d be welcome. But now…I had to come back, before it went.”

“I can’t quite imagine it being sold and turned into smart flats, or whatever they’ll do. It’s—it’s always been there,” I find myself saying. “Maybe it’s selfish of me. I’m not the one trying to keep it going. It’s nothing to do with me, not really. Not now.”

“Except it’s where you’ve come from,” he says, taking me aback. It seems such an un-Mark thing to say. “You all have.”

“So have you,” I say, before I know I’m going to. “You were part of it, too.”

“I thought I was. For a while, anyway.”

“No, always. Mark, you don’t know—you’ve no idea—how often after you left…every day something needed you.” My voice is cracking painfully in my throat. “In the workshop, in the house, something that you made work and no one else could.
Every day
. Only you weren’t there.”

I’m weeping properly now, properly and angrily, as if everything that’s piled up inside me since Mark appeared can’t be contained
any longer. “You weren’t there, and it got harder and harder, no money and no help—Gareth on his own, and Izzy moving, and—and you weren’t there…You weren’t
there
…”

“I know I wasn’t,” Mark says. I reach down to find a hanky in my bag and the car suddenly swings across a lane and to the right.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see,” he says, and I do, the trees huge above us along Court Road, and then the scrunch of weedy gravel under the tires as we turn into Tilt Yard Approach and Eltham Palace—Edward IV’s Great Hall—appears across the moat. “I thought you needed somewhere quiet.”

“Can we get in? Isn’t it being restored?”

“Yes, but I know the administrator,” he says. “Let’s see if we can talk our way in.”

The whole building’s scaffolded and shrouded in tarpaulins. The Great Hall and the Art Deco country house grafted onto it are only visible through gaps: a curve of stone here and a band of brick there. The lawns are roughly cut and the shrubs are shapeless and sprawling. The fog seems to have curled around me again and I can’t read these things. On another day I’d be curious to see inside, to take up the offer of Mark’s friend Charlie-the-administrator to show us round the restoration. Today I’m shaken enough that wandering toward the far corner of the grounds is as much as I can manage. We’re among spindly trees, the grass stringy and unkempt under our feet, with last year’s leaves caught in it. A hump in the earth makes a good seat from where we can see northwest toward Greenwich and the Thames.

“I’m sorry,” he says at last. “Didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s all right. Everything upsets me since Adam died. Not your fault.”

“How long were you married?”

“Fifteen years.”

“No…no children?”

“No,” I say, and I know that is enough for him. But I want to explain. “It wasn’t too late, but it didn’t happen, and none of the alternatives appealed. It didn’t matter, once we’d decided. We were happy as we were.”

He nods without saying anything and, to my relief, doesn’t ask anything about the time before Adam.

“Do you? Have children, I mean?” I ask.

“No. Unless you count my stepdaughter Morgan. She was seven. She never knew her father, and Jean hadn’t lived with anyone before. They took my surname. Morgan still lives in Yorkshire.”

I think of Anthony Woodville and little Prince Edward, far away in the green hills of the Welsh Marches. Anthony must have been more his father than his real father was. “So she grew up with you for a father?”

He smiles. “I suppose she did. She was at college when Jean and I split up.”

I nod. There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say, but it’s a comfortable nothing, a silence that’ll do for now. When Mark eventually speaks, it’s as if he’s waking me up. “How about you? How do you feel about the Chantry going?”

Another un-Mark thing to say, somehow. “Me? I don’t know, really…I suppose sad, rather. It’s part of the past. And I’m worried about Uncle Gareth. But it’s not present to me, not really.”

“You wouldn’t move back to England?”

“No. People asked me that when Adam died. But my life’s in Australia. I’ve got teaching and research, and all our friends…I come back every few years and see everyone. And there’s the
phone. And e-mail, too, with my academic friends. Adam said…when he got ill…he said I must do what I wanted…” My voice dies. After a moment Mark’s hand covers mine, and holds it, and I can go on. “But I always knew I’d stay in Sydney.”

When I’ve said it safely, he moves his hand away while he seems to digest this. Then he says, “And no one’s thought of saving the Chantry?”

“How do you mean?”

“No one’s thought of trying to save it? Getting funding to restore it?”

“Well, Lionel asked the National Trust, as you know, but there’s no money to endow it. None of us has that kind of money, not even Lionel, I don’t think, so of course they won’t take it on.”

“No, I know. Just thinking aloud. But it’s a historic building, being made for the Press. Even with the chapel ruined. And almost unaltered inside.” His quick smile lights. “We might even rescue the rabbits and the starry ceiling.”

“You mean some kind of campaign?”

“Yes.”

“I…Sorry, it’s so surprising that I’m having trouble imagining it. But people do, don’t they? Someone must know how it’s done. Do you?”

“Well…Never run one myself, but there’s plenty of people who have. The first thing is getting the local council interested. It’s listed, so they’ll already know it has some value.”

“You sound like Lionel when you talk like that.”

“Do I?” he says, and falls silent.

“But it’s an idea,” I say quickly, wondering how I’ve put my foot in it. “What would be the next step?”

“Getting the rest of the family to agree. And getting the auction stopped.”

“Izzy would agree, I’m sure. I think—I get the feeling that once she was living somewhere else things, well, went a bit…not wrong, exactly, but—”

“She needed the Chantry.”

“Yes, she needed it.”

“We all did,” says Mark, getting to his feet, and holding a hand down to help me up. “But don’t tell Gareth. Not till we know if it’s a runner.”

I think again of Gareth’s photo of Mark, and the hidden letter. Such a thin memorial to Mark’s life at the Chantry.

As we walk back out of the trees and cross the wooden footbridge over the moat, Mark’s friend Charlie comes toward us, carrying hard hats. “I’ll be closing up soon,” he calls. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a look first?”

“Una?”

It’s too good a chance to resist. “Well, if you’re sure…”

The craftsmen and builders have gone for the day. “I was involved with excavating Bermondsey Abbey in the sixties,” I say, and Charlie’s eyes light up. I tell him what I remember about the dig while we walk along a wide, curving, sleek-paneled corridor that wouldn’t look out of place in a grand ocean liner, and into the huge quiet of the Great Hall.

The space seems to hum against me. The windows are high in the walls and so big their stone mullions shimmer against the light, and a great hammer-beam roof of age-darkened oak lowers above and between them. Charlie says proudly it’s the original. He’s talking about the firebomb that came through it in 1940: the burn marks are there, on the stones of the floor, and must be kept,
for they’re part of the history too. Mark’s asking him about the masons’ marks and carpenters’ joints, and what the principle of restoration is.

“Well, in art restoration the rule is that the new work must be visible at two feet, and invisible at four,” says Charlie. “That way you’re not pretending it’s real, but there’s a sense of realness. Obviously here it’s a bit different. We might darken a new wooden beam so it blends in with the originals, but we wouldn’t falsify. No fake wormholes or smoke marks. On the other hand, where you have to conjure up from nothing, it works better to do something completely modern, not faux-historical. Clean glass and steel, or whatever: something good in itself. The Courtaulds’ architect in the twenties mostly knew that.”

I’m not thinking about the twenties; I’m thinking that here Elizabeth and Anthony danced, here ambassadors were given audience and wedding feasts were held, nobles drank and fenced, and the children ran riot on wet days, perhaps, with the dogs barking around them. Did they come here when Edward’s sister Margaret of York had been safely married off to the Duke of Burgundy? What did it smell like, then? Velvets and flower water? Sweet herbs and banquets? Latrines and flyblown meat? Sweat and fear? What did it sound like? The court was famous across Europe for its music, but how did they hear it? Did it creep into Elizabeth’s ears as it does mine, and make her want to laugh, and cry, and love? She wasn’t in love with either of her husbands, it’s a fair guess. But there’s nothing—not a single whisper in a court full of her enemies—that murmurs of anyone else. Did
she
ever love someone so much that she hurt for joy, so much that it seemed beyond reason? Did she regret that she never had?

There’s ancient dust gritty under my feet and outside a last,
late chisel rings like a bell on the stone. If I strain my ears enough, perhaps I might hear them. If I could only peer hard enough through this time-thickened, time-thinned air, they might come before my eyes.

“Una?” Mark’s voice is gentle. “You all right?”

“I’m fine,” I say, as I see he’s standing in front of me.

He takes my hand. “Time we were going.”

“Yes. Sorry.”

“All right if we go via Charlie’s office? He’s got the local names and numbers who might help with the Chantry appeal. And then I’ll take you home.”

Antony—Sext

It is some time after midday. Anderson spies a spinney a
couple of furlongs off the road and orders a halt to rest the horses. The corn in the fields is well grown, and we ride along the rising ground of the headlands to dismount in dappled shade, like a group of friends taking their ease after a morning’s coursing. One of the men leads my horse away, but no man tries to hold me. They have no need, of course: I am disarmed. There is no help on its way for me, and I could no more escape on foot across these open fields than I could from an island in the sea.

So no formal watch is posted, no sentry-duty ordered. These men know each other and their trade too well. They are quiet but for a jest or two: taking off their helmets, loosening girths, checking horse and harness, going aside to piss, eating barley bread and cheese, because men must eat to do their work, watering the horses when they have cooled, but always watching. That their
watch is not needed is beside the point. Still they watch, bows and horses to hand, because that is what soldiers do.

I think of my old dead friend Mallorie, leaping from his prison window and swimming the moat to gain his freedom. His peril was real enough, for none could have had faith in the justice that he would meet, when the justice who held him was the old Duke of Buckingham’s friend. Old Buckingham persecuted Tom Mallorie with one trumped-up charge after another for years. I have often thought he would have lived longer without all those years in prison. At least I got his great work to press, though Caxton is as good a judge as any of which way the wind blows through Westminster, and his preface will not mention me by name.

Great men have great power, but they wield it as much according to their own temper as any shopkeeper rules his prentices or a goodwife her babes. In the business of the realm Edward had no more scruples than any other, but he never harbored hatred and never let his own enmities rule his action. He understood that if a man turned his coat, he might more profitably be charmed than bludgeoned into turning it back to a Yorkist blazon. George of Clarence had his brother’s charm but somewhere in a bitter, exiled childhood it turned sour, and his tenants and enemies suffered for it. And so, too, did his wife, it is said. When old Buckingham died, his heir was made Elysabeth’s ward and married as a child to our sister Katherine, bitterly against his will. Now this young Duke of Buckingham is Richard of Gloucester’s most devoted ally.

And what of Richard of Gloucester himself? In Burgundy he was little more than a quick, clever lad serving his brother the King, and when we returned, even as I was sent west with Ned to rule in the King’s name, he was sent north. He was known by report to have become a quick, clever man of firm dealing. Cer
tain it was that Richard had his allies and his enemies, but I never heard that he did anything that was tyrannical or against most men’s sense of good government. To name him as the arbiter of some dispute or as the executor of a will is common. I have done so myself, when some tenant or debtor of mine could not agree with my judgment.

Does Richard of Gloucester feel the same bitter enmity as Clarence did toward me and mine? As old Buckingham did toward Tom Mallorie? I would not think it, were it not for what he has done.

Guilt cramps my heart: guilt that I did not see what they would do, that I lost Ned to them by a stupid trick, that I could not—did not—lift a finger to save him. The pain is real, but I would bear twice as much—bear all the pain in the world—if it would save my boy. But nothing now will do that, if Richard of Gloucester wills it otherwise.