A Secret Alchemy (30 page)

It was fun to think about how I should dress, speak, move, and touch, to talk of type-foundries and colophons, watermarks and printers’ patrons, and all the time watch a man’s hands, the tilt of his head, the way his mouth moved as he spoke, the way his fingers brushed mine as he put more drinks on the table. It was fun that could fill my head and then my body, that bright, dumb spark in a man’s eye that made my skin shiver in response. And we were away from home, after all, it was only a week, and the sun was shining on the Venice canals, or the moon was rising from behind the Rockies, or the coal fire in my rooms was so glowing that it shut out the gray cold and the Lancashire rain, and wrapped us in warmth.

But when he’d gone—whichever he was—when we weren’t together, new questions rang in my head.

Shall we…? Can you…? Do you…?
After a while I realized I was asking, “Do you love me?” because of course Mark didn’t, so it was all right to think I wanted someone else to do so instead.

My need for answers about the man—whichever man—was newer and sharper, a tinnitus of desire, than the dull bass note of my longing for Mark, which was so much part of me that I hardly felt it as something separate from myself, and it was a new, sharp struggle to ignore it.

I’d sit and sweat in my office or my rooms, trying not to reach for the telephone, striding from desk to bookshelves and back so
that I wouldn’t stride out of the room altogether, leave my own work and go and find him at his, or in his favorite pub, or at his home, whatever the risk.

And there always was a risk: risk seemed as necessary to my desire as the man’s intelligence or his body. A risk bred of some impediment professional or personal, to put it no more crudely than that. What I told myself I wanted from him—loved in him, I swore—was never his to give, at least not freely or publicly. Though I refused to see it like that until Izzy, uncharacteristically brutal, pointed it out. I was crying over the latest, and she had her arm around me. But what she said was “I think you look for people where there’s something in the way, Una. I think you need it to be like that.”

It was true, though I refused to acknowledge it, and if it was safe to weep on anyone’s shoulder, I wept for the unfairness of other people’s lives.

I met Adam at a party, and talked to him because I couldn’t be seen talking to my host, whose wife was there too. And suddenly there was no risk, no impediment, only Adam.

Then I could allow myself to know that Izzy was right, and I’d lost fifteen years to loves that weren’t loves, to men with only half a heart to give me, to tears and sometimes guilt and always loneliness, because, without letting myself know it, I knew they wouldn’t want more than half of me, and that half was all I had to give. The other half was Mark’s.

And then I met Adam, and loved him with all my heart.

Fifteen years. I think about lying in bed with Adam and talking about everything under the sun, my head on his shoulder or his on mine; or laughing ourselves sick over some silly cartoon or the latest idiocy of the latest health minister; or coming half
awake as he collapsed into bed from a call and snuggled up to me as if my warmth made everything right; or me sitting up late into the night over a paper for some journal while he brought me hot whiskey and lemon and asked how it was going. He’d read where I’d got to while I drank the whiskey and watched the little frown between his eyebrows, and then he’d ask the one thing that made my argument fall into place. Before the eyes of my mind the pattern I’d been struggling with for hours would sort itself out, and the pleasure of that was the same as my pleasure in the way his smile went up more at one corner than the other. It was as if my mind and my heart and my body could at last feel the same, be the same, live and love in the same place.

And now Mark, who I thought was long past, is present. He’s here beside me and I’ve known since he stood, silhouetted, against the midsummer light in the Chantry garden, that what I loved in Adam, I first learned to love in Mark. So where’s Adam now?

I don’t know. Mark, sitting across the car from me, his long legs stretched out and his hands at rest, seems impossibly, bafflingly substantial. How dare he stand between me and Adam? How dare he block my access to that easy love which I refuse to know can no longer be reciprocal, the love I’m still sending into a void because not sending it is worse?

I can’t bear it. It’s unbearable, as remembering Adam so clearly was not, and a hot tear slides quietly from the corner of my eye and falls onto my jacket, a small, clean stain.

“You all right?” says Mark, and I wonder how I could have felt so angry a moment ago when I know so well the weight and gentleness of his voice.

I nod. “A bit tired. Not too bad.”

“Do you want to stop? Have a rest? Tea?”

“No, it’s okay. I’d rather keep driving. It’s not much farther. Did you say we’d meet Morgan in the market?”

“Yes. She’s got a jewelry stall. She said come and find her there.”

We roll on up the motorway, out of the plump, low Midlands toward a bigger and rougher landscape of hills and moors and deep-carved river valleys. There are signs to the junction at Ferrybridge and I think of young Anthony seeing his beaten fellows limping back from there, waiting on Towton moor for the battle that would certainly come and the death that might. It didn’t, not for him. And then, half a lifetime later, he rode back over that old life, retracing himself from Sheriff Hutton to Pontefract, knowing that this time he was, certainly, going to die. We know that they told him, and we know the journey need have taken no more than a day, so near midsummer: a long, hot, single day.

But I can’t think what he thought as he rode, or feel what he felt. He was a man of—no, not
piety
, that’s too smug and narrow a word, and
faith
too weak. He had a belief that’s hard for us to feel, perhaps impossible: a structure of absolute certainty that transcended faith, a knowledge as much part of him as his own bones, clothed in words and rituals that had clad him since the chrism-cloth first wrapped him, since he was borne to church, to be baptized with holy water to bless him and salt to scare away the Devil.

I’m very tired, and deeply shaken, and it suddenly seems unbearable, too, that I can’t know Anthony, that I can’t read his books, talk to him, walk beside him, look into his eyes, touch his hand. Perhaps if I try hard enough, perhaps if I imagine completely…I try to feel him riding at my shoulder, but he isn’t there.

Pontefract Market fills the whole of Micklegate with people and goods: pyramids of oranges, freezer packs of chicken thighs,
videos and CDs, and cheap T-shirts swinging in the breeze. The far end is filled with crafts and tourist-catchers: old prints, sweaters hand-knitted in colors like muddied jewels, unlikely-sounding jams with gingham tops.

Morgan’s sitting down, with a tray of work-in-progress on her lap: silver wire, clasps, beads, and miniature pliers. She has dark-golden skin with shimmering purple eye makeup and dark red lipstick, and her long, wiry black hair’s tied up with a rubber band and clumped into dreadlocks. There’s a vague air of richly jeweled alternativeness about her, but without the mind-body-spirit accessories, except for big silver earrings, one a lightning bolt, the other a broadsword. She’s a bit taller than me, looks around twenty-five, and is very pleased indeed to see Mark.

He envelops her in a hug, then holds her away from him to inspect her properly. “You’re looking well.”

“Yeah, not too bad. Yourself?”

“Can’t complain. Now, this is Una—Una Pryor. Una, Morgan Fisher.”

“How do you do, Morgan?”

“Hi,” she says. “I remember Mark talking about you.”

“Goodness!” I say brightly.

A couple approach and start to admire her stock, and it is indeed admirable: on one black-velvet-covered side of the stall lie necklaces of suns, nose studs of moons, and a Melusina in her dragon form. On the white silk side are delicate, dangling earrings of green and blue glass that looks like rainwater, silver stars and enameled leaves, and another Melusina, this time in her double-tailed sea-serpent guise. There are neat little notices, hand-written in gold and silver ink, about all the earring fittings being sterling silver, and credit cards accepted, and how hallmarking works.

“Looks like you’ll be busy for a while,” I say, as the couple pay for a ram’s head pendant for him and a lightning-bolt brooch for her, and their place is taken by a round-eyed girl still clutching the consent form for ear-piercing and fingering her own bright pink lobes with awe. She starts to inspect the stars.

“Morgan, would you mind if I went to the castle?” I say. “Sorry to be unfriendly. But it’s important and I’ve never seen it.”

“Of course I don’t mind,” she says simply. “That’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

“Mark?”

“Yes, all right. Morgan, love, we won’t be long.”

“Take your time,” she says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Mark and I walk up Castle Chain in silence and the market has scarcely petered out before we enter the barbican. Above us the castle walls are thick; even in ruins the towers are massive, the entrance broad, the scale formidable. This is a great administrative center and the big map on a signboard shows it: there are lodgings for a king and others for a queen, as well as for clerks, comptrollers, and justices. There are stables and armories for hundreds of men, counting-houses, bread ovens, wine and ale cellars, magazines for gunpowder and cannonballs, space for tourneys and jousts, gardens for food and medicine and gardens for pleasure, even a bowling green.

“He must have known what it meant, being brought to Pontefract.”

“Who? What did it mean?”

“Anthony. That he was brought here after all those months hidden away at Sheriff Hutton. You see, Richard III seized power. Well, he wasn’t Richard III then; he was Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of Edward IV, who’d just died.” I never
know how much history people will know: Is it more condescending to explain too much or not to explain enough?

But Mark’s just listening as we walk into the chill between the gatehouse towers, and come out into the inner bailey. “So Richard of Gloucester was uncle to the new boy-king, Edward. Anthony was Elizabeth’s brother, so Edward’s uncle on the other side, and
he
was his guardian. He was bringing Edward to London to be crowned, and Richard met them at Northampton, and took control of Edward, arrested Anthony, and sent him to Sheriff Hutton. Sheriff Hutton was Richard’s private castle, if you like. His personal stronghold, miles from anywhere, just the castle and a village to supply it. I haven’t been there, but you can see from the maps and the records. And a few weeks later they told him he was going to be executed, and brought him here. But this is quite different.” I wave a hand ahead of us. “It’s an official place, a government castle, if you like. Richard didn’t have to hide Anthony away anymore. He was secure: he’d got everyone who mattered to support him. He
was
the government. Not young Edward. He was safely put away in the royal apartments in the Tower, and then he was moved to smaller ones…Richard III was crowned the day after Anthony died…I wonder what Anthony was thinking on that ride from Sheriff Hutton. He must have known what Pontefract meant, mustn’t he? That Richard had complete control?”

The inner bailey’s vast, ringed by the roots of walls and the stumps of towers, with the keep lowering over it from its motte. More information boards tell of butteries, pantries, chapels, and draw impressions of what was once here. And yet it’s all impossibly other, impossibly strange: we’re estranged from it. Perhaps it’s just as well I’m only writing about their books and their accounts, what the annals say and what the ruins show.

There’s bright new gravel on the ground, and we’re standing under the stony, vaulted remains of a building labeled as the brew house and steward’s lodging. “I want to know what really happened to those people. What it meant to them.”

As I say “them,” our eyes lock, and then he looks away. I wonder if he’s thinking not only of Elizabeth and Anthony but also of the Chantry, as I am: Are history and memory the same thing? The clean earth-damp of the undercroft; the tang of bramble jelly cooling and dripping in the scullery; turps and linseed oil from the studio; warm wood under your bare feet where the sun had been lying on the stairs all morning; shaving soap and Pears in the bathroom; the dry dustiness and the raw wood of the handrail as you run up the attic stairs to call Mark for something…A hundred thousand moments—memories—as fleeting, as transparent, as a scrap of gauze tossed to the wind, which nonetheless can take over your body and senses as completely as hate, or fear, or love.

“Shall we walk around the walls?” says Mark, and we do, but still I’m thinking of the Chantry: the rhubarb smell outside the back door; the creaking clucking of the hens; the dance-beat clamor of the press. The sharp, warm smell of Mark’s skin as we bent, side by side, over it and watched the latest section of
Gulliver’s Travels
appear: the ghost of Aristotle “stooping much and making use of a staff,” then Gulliver and Alexander the Great trying to understand each other’s Greek, conjured by ink and iron and wood.

These things fill my mind’s eye and my body’s memory; by comparison the hard yellow stone under my feet, the municipal gravel, the leisure-clad tourists, and warning signs of steep drops and dangerous masonry are nothing.

“Do you want to see any more?” says Mark, as we descend from the walls and stand once more in the outer bailey.

I want to smell and feel Anthony’s past, but I can’t. “No, let’s not bother. He’s not here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Anthony. He isn’t here.” Something akin to grief, a wisp of what I’ve known for Adam, catches me in the throat. “I can’t find him.”

He looks at me. “Did you think you would?”

“My grandfather’s still at the Chantry.”

“But he…We knew him there. And the house is still there.”

“But so is this. Sort of.” What does it matter that I can’t find Anthony? I turn away, back toward the entrance. “Oh, well. I’m still glad we came. And the shop will have booklets and things. I’ll be interested to see what line they take on Anthony. Up here they’re still Richard of Gloucester’s supporters. They won’t have him responsible for the death of the Princes in the Tower.”