Iron Chamber of Memory (3 page)

The fiefdom had passed through many hands since the first seigneur. In the nineteenth century, the island had been mortgaged to a privateer named John Allaire in order to keep the mines in operation. The fiefdom was sold thereafter to a family called Collings, whose descendants were the ancestors of the Hathaways.

During World War II, the island, along with the other Channel Islands, was occupied by the Nazis, and ruled by one Kommandant Major Albrecht Lanz in the name of the Third Reich.

In the autumn of 1990, an unemployed nuclear scientist named Andre Gardes, armed with a single semi-automatic weapon, posted notices all around the island proclaiming himself to be the rightful seigneur, and announced his intended invasion, which was scheduled to take place the next day. He arrived as promised in the morning, seated himself in the tiny brick building housing the Court of the Chief Pleas, and declared himself the conqueror of the island.

His reign lasted less than a day: when Dr. Gardes was sitting on a bench after lunch, changing the gun’s magazine, Perrée, the volunteer constable, complimented him on his choice of gun and convinced Gardes to remove the magazine and let him admire the weapon. When Dr. Gardes, nuclear scientist, did so, Constable Perrée confiscated the firearm and punched the would-be conqueror in the nose. The weapon now sat in the island’s small museum next to old naval bric-a-brack.

By ancient law, the Seigneur of the Island was the only one allowed to keep an unspayed hound, or keep pigeons. All the flotsam and jetsam thrown up by the sea to the beach belonged to him.

In the twenty-first century, Sark was designated by the International Dark Sky Astronomy Association as the first Dark Sky Island in the world, which is to say that Sark was so devoid of any urban light pollution that naked-eye astronomy was possible there.

There was only one ship that regularly made port; she traveled to the island of Guernsey twice a day, on the morning and evening tide, and she did not sail at night.

No automobiles nor motorcycles were permitted on the road and horsepaths, all of which were unlit.

When he finally saw the house for the first time, dark and tall by the light of the dying day, he was so overtaken by the feeling of lost memory, that, for a moment, he did not hear what the green-eyed girl was telling him.

The architecture was a strange eclectic collection, built over many periods, a graceful jumble that adhered to no coherent plan.

Midmost was a tall circular stone building beneath a squat dome, the remnant of the Priory of Saint Magloire of Dol, built by sixth-century monks. The bottom floor was stone, and the upper stories, built in a later era, were thick wood panels fantastically carved, pierced with small arched windows set with stained glass.

To the east sprang a curving wing built in the seventeenth century, the main hall and living quarters, roofed in slate, with a servant’s dorm attached at an angle. The main hall was of dark stone and had a distinctly military look to it, with narrow archers’ slits for windows on the bottom story, but broader windows above that were framed by decorative patterns of thick gray rock.

A gold lion, as lithe as a leopard, was inscribed over the main doors of the east wing. Its face was turned toward him, terrible in the deepening dusk. It stood on three paws and raised the fourth, claws extended, while above its back a sinuous tail curved in seeming anticipation.

Behind, to the north, peering over the shoulder of the main hall, was a square tower built in an overwrought Victorian style, fantastic with gables and peaks and tiny black obelisks. Originally these had been two separate structures, but the tower and the north wing were now connected by crenellated gallery, which ran from north to west behind the Priory, enclosing a bed of weeds and hedges in a semicircle. In the middle stood a stone pot the size of a birdbath; it was a quern that had once been used for grinding grain.

To the west was the
colombier
, connected to the gallery by the kitchens and pantry and dining hall, originally separate buildings, now one interconnected pile of corridors, colonnades, and porticos. The
colombier
, or dovecote, was the exuberant exclamation point of the meandering architectural sentence. It was a pale tower with a steep conical roof like a witch’s cap, punctured by rows of curiously carven miniature hatches for the birds.

Hal imagined that somewhere, amongst all the various ancient and peculiar laws on the island, there was probably one about doves.

In the foreground was an Edwardian chapel with an octagonal belltower or carillon at one end, and at the other, past the vestry, a round signal tower, built of stone shipped from Spain. From the roof of the signal tower the mouth of a bronze cannon peered, a remnant of days when privateers ruled this isle.

At the foot of the signal tower was a thing Hal could not quite fathom in the dusk: it was a circular stone track about two yards in diameter, in which a great stone wheel on a wooden arm was contrived to turn and turn again. To one side was a spigot carved like an open-mouthed gargoyle. It looked like some barbaric torture machine. Then he remembered Manfred mentioning a nineteenth-century cider mill, turned by a horse, whose stone wheel could crush the gathered apples.

The house was at the crest of the hill. Beyond the hilltop, Hal could dimly see the crowns and upper branches of the woods that fell like a great, uneven staircase to a beach of shells and pebbles far below. This was steep and tumbling terrain that even the most desperate forester had never tried to log. From the gigantic height and girth of those massive trunks, it was apparent that those serene and ancient trees had never felt the axe of man. This was Wronger Wood, for which Wrongerwood House was named. Beyond were the waters of the Channel. The gray line on the horizon before them might have been a low cloudbank, or the coast of France.

The sun was sinking into the Atlantic, and the red light glanced from square windows and arched windows, and glinted from one round window like a giant’s eye peering from beneath the dark eaves.

Then a cloud smothered the dying sun. The windows were black. There were no lights visible either near at hand or far away.

He caught the scent of her perfume as she stepped closer. Hal felt an unexpected tingle as she softly touched his arm.

“Did you not hear me, Hal?”

“I beg your pardon, I was not listening.”

Laurel said, “I say! You are taking your sweet time to ponder this, Hal. He left us no choice!”

The words were light with gaiety, but there was another and more urgent note beneath. Hal Landfall felt fascinated by her voice, and wondered what that other note meant.

“He and I will be duly wed—Manfred and wife, as it were—in two months, and I will be mistress here. This will be my house, too. At that time, I will remember to retroactively give myself permission to enter here now. That should suffice, should it not?”

Like a small drop in a still pool, insight came to Hal. He knew what the deeper note in her voice meant. It was as if she held the world and herself to be opposing players in a game, a charming game to be played seriously, but not taken seriously. It was a game she meant to win. She must have some personal reason to get into the manor house that she had not mentioned aloud, something more than a mere desire to escape the cold.

Hal had known many women, most of whom were either stoic and hard, or shallow and soft. Laurel was neither. She glided through life with a droll aloofness that was distinctly at odds with the inner
joi de vivre
that he could occasionally glimpse shining through her outer coolness, like a candle seen through a frosted window. Manfred had found himself the perfect woman, an ideal, even. Hal wryly acknowledged the ripple of envy as it ran through his heart.

Hal spoke. “It was not the legality, but the practicality I was pondering, Miss du Lac. You are sure the house is locked? All the doors? Is there no groundskeeper, no parlor maids, or whatever you Englishmen have?”

She smiled. Her teeth were bright and even in the gloom. “You are so formal and old-fashioned! We’ve known each other for ages! But of course the Best Man is allowed to call the Bride by her first name. Laurel, please.”

“Laurel,” he replied obediently, slightly dismayed at how good it felt to say her name.

She said, “And I was here with the Seneschal of the Island yesterday night, and he could not find a way in. I have the key to one of the inside doors. I don’t know what happened to Mrs. Levrier. She and her boys are supposed to be looking after things.”

“This island is smaller than some golf links I’ve been on. How can a man disappear? A whole man? Well, let’s look under the welcome mat. Maybe he left a note.”

He turned his back to the enchanting woman, and shook his head wryly, half-ashamed and half-amused at himself. They had been friends for years. It was not the least bit improper for them to spend time together. But then the two them had never been alone before, not for any length of time, not in the dark, not on a timeless island that seemed unexpectedly glamorous. He reminded himself not to get carried away with her.

Hal trudged up the slope to the house. The stars here were so bright and so many, that he wondered if there were some strange atmospheric condition over the island to magnify them.

He had no flashlight, and the moon was not up, so Hal was soon reduced to groping, running his hand along the cold gray stone of the walls, searching for a doorway.

The back lawn came into view. In the near distance, in the starlight, he could see ghostly rectilinear outlines of outbuildings, perhaps a stables, or an icehouse, a pumphouse, or servant’s quarters. Beyond the outbuildings were boxes that once might have held beehives, solitary walls, and archways standing alone, tall and strange, which once might have opened up on formal gardens. Farther away and down the slope was the fishpond dug by medieval monks to provide for their Friday meals.

The doors of the main hall were some wood too thick and heavy to return an echo when he pounded on them, and were bound in iron. He doubted a battering ram would have dented them.

The golden figure above the door,
lion passant-guardant or
, was bright in the starlight. He could not shake the strange sensation that the yellow beast was a living being, holding still, pretending to be a carving. He was happy to back away from it and circle the house.

The same stone face, with bristling mane, fang bared in silent roar, was carved into each cornerstone of the arched window slits. The eyes were yellow chips of topaz, and pointed at him, no matter where he moved. He told himself it was a trick of his imagination.

Groping, by touch, he walked around the many bays and inlets of the house.

He stumbled across bootscrapers, or hitching rings, set in the lawn, and odd protuberances of stone, gutters carved as gargoyles.

It was futile. He found six doors and one hatch. All of them were locked.

The windows of the main hall were set six feet off the ground. With great difficulty, he clung to the rough stones and pulled himself up. With one hand he fumbled at the casement and the glass, discovering that the windows were small, thick panes set in iron frameworks, with no way to swing open. They were more like the windows of a church than a house, and no wider than eighteen inches. Even if he broke the glass, he could never force his body through the narrow opening.

He was climbing down. As he turned to dismount from the wall, he misjudged the distance to the ground and stumbled. She, hearing him fall, put out her hands to catch him. For the second time that evening, he found the fragrant warmth of her silken body in his arms.

“Sorry about that,” he murmured into her ear. He wondered if the perfumed warmth coming from her masses of hair was a scent, or heat, or both. Perhaps it was an electric aura, for it seemed to tingle and dance. “It is so dark. No one will see us.”

No, that was not what he had meant to say. “I—I didn’t see you.”

She disengaged from him slowly, moving perhaps an inch away, perhaps half an inch. He could feel her breath from her lips on his neck and chin.

“I am a little turned around, I must say,” she said, her voice unexpectedly husky. “It was not supposed to be this way. Where is Manfred? Did he forget us?”

She took another step away, and his arms ached to seize her again. The thought that it would serve Manfred right for forgetting them here, leaving them locked out, in the dark, on his half-uncivilized island, in the chill of winter, buzzed in the back of Hal’s mind like a fly he could not find and swat.

He sternly dismissed the notion as unworthy of him.

“Who locks their doors in the country, anyway?” he said.

He was slightly out of wind from his climb and stumble. His voice was breathless, rough, and his heart was racing.

“It’s the wild beasts. Such savage creatures!” she drawled mockingly.

“Actually, no one is allowed to own dogs on the island, except for Manfred’s great-aunt twice removed or whoever. The Seigneur can keep pigeons, but cannot get cell phone coverage.”

She said, “Remember he has to keep the island clear of pirates, or else it reverts to the Crown. The English love their queer old laws. Did you know Her Majesty the Queen, personally, owns all the swans that swim the Thames? Counts them once a year in a grand ceremony. There is also a ceremony, the day before Good Friday, where she gives out tupence and thruppence to beggars to sell to coin collectors. I think there is one where the Prime Minister tramples on the face of an Irishman every leap year on Saint Matthew’s festival, but the UN Commission on Irish Faces put a stop to that as a condition for letting us out of the European Union.”

“I cannot tell when you are joking.”

“Always, otherwise life is dour and dull. Getting the manor house wired for electricity is one of the things Manfred was talking about with that dreadful lawyer fellow, Mr. Twokes. There are rules about how many lights can be lit here on Sark … well, speak of the Devil! Look! A light! Someone is here!”