A Secret Alchemy (35 page)

With a glance at Mark, who seems to understand, I stop the car so we can watch him. What was it like to fly a hawk after such a bird? To unhood a goshawk and feel her suddenly alert on your fist, head turning, wings easing at the shoulder. To brace yourself to put her up and feel the grip of her talons on your glove shift, tighten, thrust down, let go? To strain your eyes after her? Regina might have been her name, or perhaps Juno, for you had a classical education. Juno, yes, a gift from your father to his eldest son, the most glorious, heart-stopping gift you’d ever received. Your eyes dazzled so you could hardly see her, you feared suddenly she’d gone forever beyond mortal gaze. But no: she stooped from the sky like a thunderbolt and the heron was twisting and struggling in her grip. By the time you caught up with her the heron was dead, and you, Anthony, had taken your first quarry.

Our heron’s still flying west. The crack in the clouds has widened and gleams of sun are catching a willow-tree top, a spangle of raindrops caught in a spider’s web, the rough velvet of the meadow.

The moment’s over: I know it, and I can feel it, too, in how Mark suddenly shifts in his seat. As if he senses my attention, he looks sideways and smiles at me, and my skin’s doused with heat.

I start the car again, pull away, and before we’ve found speech there’s Sheriff Hutton, the castle towers on the higher ground far ahead of us, tall and hard and jagged, like mailed fists smashed onto the land. Four towers: the four corners of the keep, I realize, as we get nearer, still holding the ground they always did, though what joined them is mostly gone and their windows no longer watch for friends and enemies but hang above us sightlessly.

There’s nowhere in the big, tidy village where we could avoid the castle’s presence even if we wanted to. It lowers over everything, and the post office, when we go in for water and a packet of biscuits, has several booklets about its history, alongside the notices of traffic-calming consultations and the Sheriff Hutton Players in
Sleeping Beauty
.

“Are you going to the castle? It’s privately owned, you can’t go in, but you can walk all the way around,” says the shopkeeper, coming out from behind the post-office counter to serve us. “That’ll be six pound twenty, with the booklets. And the church is worth a visit too. Beautiful old tombs and the like, and flowers.”

A wide drive leads up from the road to the castle. There’s a farmhouse and a cluster of outhouses built among its ruins. From somewhere in a clutch of trees there’s the crack of a shotgun and a cloud of rooks rises, cawing. no entry, says the notice on the way into the yard, and the official route turns away from it to the right and left, through wicket gates and around the flank of the castle mound. The paths are English Heritage–functional, the red-brick farm buildings among the ruins turn their shoulders on the towering crags of stonework behind and between them. To the left there’s a stand of dark-blue ornamental conifers, and a Japanese-style pergola in orange creosote standing naked on tidy lawns. This isn’t the world I had in my mind, not the fierce, ruined power that we saw in the distance, the castle imposed by a high-stomached earl on wild Marcher lands.

We turn through the right-hand gate, widdershins, as if we’re trying to cast a spell.

The path widens a little. Mark catches me up and our hands brush, but we don’t speak. Willow trees loom over us, and beyond them a single spar of stonework, several stories high, as pale and gray as a ghost. Then, closer, lower walls that hint at chambers
beyond, and a lancet window. Around them is a thicket of briars and brambles, stems as long as whips and barbed with thorns, as if the castle has slept for a hundred years.

The path leads out into the open, where the castle mound spreads wide and low. Here, from farther away, we can see much more. There are more windows, enough for comfort and almost too many for defense, scraps of ornamental battlements, coats of arms carved above a grand doorway. Tufts of greenery grow on the tops of the towers, and a couple of small trees look rather forlorn in the wide space that must once have been leveled to make the killing field.

No shiny notice boards here, no competent line-drawing reconstructions that remind me of my childhood history books. Here are only fields and fences and crumbling stone. What’s left is just that: leavings. After the lead’s been stripped from the roof, the timbers taken to build a barn or burn Guy Fawkes, the good dressed stone carted away for some squire’s new house, what remains is only what’s too stubborn to be easily used again.

We walk up the slope to get as close as we can, lean on the fence, and look into what I think would have been the inner bailey. I tell Mark about how George Duke of Clarence’s children were kept here, prisoners of their blood, because they had a better right to the throne than Richard Duke of Gloucester himself. Later Elizabeth’s daughter Bess was sent here too, it was said, because the rumors about her and her uncle became too loud and reached the ears of his cancer-ridden wife.

“Pity we can’t get in,” says Mark.

“Yes,” I say, gazing up at the tower. Here, if anywhere, Anthony should be: the echo of the slam of a door, the clank and stench of a bucket, a wisp of candle smoke, the shadow of a bent head cast
on a stone wall as he writes.

To Elizabeth, perhaps, newly widowed, brought full circle back to her old condition, alone.

Mark’s watching me, and this time there’s no mistaking what’s in his gaze. I meet it, hold it, try to see through it to Adam, because otherwise Adam’s lost to me.

“Una, can I tell you something?”

I nod.

“Let’s sit down,” he says. So we walk down the killing field and sit across from each other on a picnic bench that has two sides, one watching the castle, one looking out over the fields. What is this? Into my blank surprise all sorts of things project themselves: illness, bad news, a girlfriend, or that…that he—that he’s…Silly idea that he’s going to say something about us, because there isn’t an us, whatever I’ve seen in his eyes. That’s just—that’s just what Adam rescued me from. I must hold on to Adam.

“I…I want to tell you why I left the Chantry,” he says.

Something’s beginning to ring in my ears. “That would be…That would be good.”

“You see, I’d got this idea for
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
. Licensing a translation. Would have been a big outlay, but Penguin had done well with theirs. Seemed to me we’d find buyers for a really fine edition with a good translation. And because he’d had a proper education—Latin and Greek and everything—I asked Lionel about it. About which were the good translations of Homer. And he said…Una, love, are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Yes,” I say, then realize what he’s called me. But he’s speaking again, quickly, as if he’s held this in for years and years, and now it must come out.

“He told me some names of good versions. People who might
do a new one. And then he asked me if I’d said anything to Gareth. I said no, not yet. Then he…Then he laughed and said, ‘Well, don’t worry, he’s not going to say no, is he? Not to his heir-apparent. Gareth refuse to print the story of Achilles and Patroclus? Not for his blue-eyed boy. Not an…an old queer like Gareth.’”

He stumbles on the words, and their offensiveness stings my ears, but I don’t know what to say. I’ve no clue to what Mark is feeling now, or what he felt then.

His hands are clenched on his knees, as if he’s driving himself on. “I—I…I’d thought Gareth just…I’d no idea…We didn’t know much in those days, did we? I mean, I knew what Lionel meant, of course. But Gareth…He—I’d thought of him as an uncle. Sort of a father…”

Sort of a father
. Suddenly I want to cry. “I did too. He was to me. And he said…That’s how he saw you, he told me. As—as the only person who could carry the Press on. Oh, Mark, I’d no idea. I thought it was what I said.”

“What
you
said?”

“About Izzy.” Not about me, I never said about me, after the first time.

“What?”

“I thought it was because I said you didn’t care about anyone except Izzy. When you went. And she didn’t care about you…And then you didn’t answer my letter, when I asked you to come back. When Grandpapa died. You didn’t answer, and I thought…”

He’s silent for a moment. Then he reaches and takes my hand. “No, I know. I should’ve. I’m sorry. I—I was in such a muddle…But in your letter you said so much. Told me all about it. Your grandfather’d died, and the business was failing. It was…But I
couldn’t go back. Everything I’d learned from Gareth—everything we’d talked about—was poisoned. Even though he’d never said anything. Because of what Lionel said. Oh, not because Gareth was a man, not in the end, though then, well, I wasn’t sophisticated, like Lionel and Sally, just a Bermondsey boy. But I couldn’t remember Gareth cleanly. It…All his care. All his teaching me. It meant something different. Not what I’d thought. Not what I relied on. I think it was because I wasn’t there anymore: I just remembered the things I
couldn’t
join in with. The talk and the art and everything…I didn’t belong. I wasn’t family, just a boy who Gareth…Gareth…And Izzy had left…” I must have moved or something, because his hand tightens, gripping mine so it almost hurts. “No, not that. It was just knowing how empty the Chantry was without her—without a real artist. Like your father was, by all accounts. Nothing else mattering. I did have a crush on her when I was younger, it’s true, but I grew out of that long before, years before she married Paul. It was you were my friend.”

The lines of his face are deeply carved, his eyes shadowed and the lids heavy. I put my hand to his cheek and hope he can’t feel the pulse, like a drumbeat, in my wrist. Just as well that he doesn’t seem to remember what I only said once, about me. Just as well. It’s so long ago, long before Adam.

He takes my hand from his cheek and holds it. “I’m sorry, Una. I could’ve told you all this in London. Should’ve.”

“Isn’t that what happens with pilgrimages, though? That you end up where you started?”

With his other hand he gestures at the jagged castle towers. “It’s a long way from New Eltham. And I couldn’t ever tell Gareth what I told you. Not face to face, anyway.”

“No, I can see that. But I meant where you started in yourself…the things you’ve always had…The—” It’s difficult for me to say, dangerous and yet necessary. “The feelings you’ve always had. Only you come back to them—and see them differently.” He says nothing, but he’s still holding my hand. I raise it, and kiss his fingers where they curl around mine. The skin’s warm, the bones and tendons clearly defined under my lips. “Thank you for trying to save the Chantry.”

He pulls his hand away. “Didn’t, though, did I? I didn’t come back, and the chances are it’s still going to be sold. We’re not going to raise the money, you know.” He starts to get up from the bench. “Let’s go home.”

“Mark! Look at me!” He’s standing now, very tall and half turned away. It feels like my last chance, but I don’t know what to say. “You tried to save it—us—everything. That time, with your plans for the Homer. This time, with the trust. You did something about it. You’re doing something now.” I get up too, disentangling myself from the bench and stumbling on the rough grass in my hurry to get between him and the road. “Listen! You—you tried then, and you’re trying now. Trying is enough. You can’t do everything.” He doesn’t move. I remember how he was always there, running a press, doing a late delivery, mending a light switch, persuading the van to start. Even if he was in his room, not officially working, he always seemed to know if something needed doing and there he was, offering to take the spanner or hold the other end of the shelf and saying, “Would you like a hand?” And it seemed to me then that it always worked, whatever it was, as soon as he set his hand to it. “You did more than anyone else for the Press. And—and everything. All of us. The whole Chantry.”

He still won’t look at me. “But it was your family, not mine.

Perhaps that’s why I failed.”

I grab his arm and try to pull him around. “Is that what you think? That you failed?”

He nods, slipping his arm out of my hold. “They say everyone destroys what they love most, don’t they? Maybe I’ve destroyed the Press. Certainly haven’t saved it.”

Suddenly I see it all, as if the sun’s come up. “Destroyed it? I’ve never heard such rubbish in my life.”

He shakes his head and moves away, toward the path.

“Mark! Stop! The only thing that nearly destroyed the Press is postwar economics, only it didn’t, not quite.” I go after him, raising my voice and not caring if anyone will hear. “The only thing that
might
yet destroy the Chantry is Izzy.”

“Well, that’s her right, you could say,” he says over his shoulder, and his voice is dull and cold. “Nothing to do with me.”

“But it’s
your
right to try to save it. If you want to. None of the rest of us can, not without you. It’s you who would make it possible.” He’s still far away, but at last he stops and looks around at me, really properly. “You’re necessary. And this time…This time everyone knows it.”

He’s too far away. I can’t see what he’s thinking. Then he says, “There are people I know. Things I can do.”

I nod and don’t move, but as if I had I can tell by something in the way he’s still holding my gaze that his mind’s beginning to thaw, so I keep silent.

He says slowly, “It could work, you know. It could be good.”

Relief begins to shake in my stomach. “Yes. I think it could.”

“Got to get the money together first.”

“As you say, you know people. And Lionel’s good at money. But—but not the other stuff.”

“No.”

“We won’t know unless we try.”

“Well…” He takes a step toward me. “I’ll…If you think…”

“I do think. And trying is enough.”

He sort of smiles. “We could have a bloody good try, all together.”

“Yes, we could,” I say, and he comes closer and takes my hands, both of them, as if it’s some sort of pledge. Something releases inside me and he’s filling my sight, blotting out everything else, so that even as I return the pressure of his fingers I’m crying, I’m gasping, I’m fighting for Adam.