Spring (58 page)

She knew most of the flowers, but not all of the animals that gambolled among them. The sight of them put into her a sense of nostalgia and loss for days gone by in the countryside around Woolstone, when her mother was still well enough to share such things with her . . . days she knew could now never return. She felt a wave of sorrow and grief.

She saw that while the flowers of the seasons made the eye read the tapestries one way, from left to right, from Spring to Summer and on to Autumn in a circle clockwise round the room, the landscapes they depicted took the eye in the opposite direction.

At the top right of each tapestry was a mountainous landscape which sloped generally leftward and downward into foothills, on to high moors and heaths and so on down into gentler woods and valley pastures, until at the lowest and left-hand side of each tapestry there lay the sea.

In each of the four tapestries this natural course from mountain to sea was followed by a river, a raging torrent for a time, but in the end a slow winding thing of old age that passed through marshes and side waters, deltas and mudflats of its own making, and so into the waiting sea.

Seen one way therefore, the tapestries were depictions of the endless cycle of the seasons and renewal of life; seen another they showed the passage from youth to old age across Earth’s face. One way was to the right and the other . . .

‘Sinister,’ breathed Katherine, thinking then of so many things – her mother, the shadows in the henge, her own passage through childhood, Jack’s hurt body, her feelings for him, which had changed like the seasons and yet remained the same from the first day she met him, which felt as solid as the Earth.

‘Except it’s not solid,’ she told herself, her gaze following the river from its youthful phase in the high mountains of early Summer to its place of old age, as a meandering waterway, in late Spring.

‘Oh!’ she whispered. ‘Of course! It’s obvious when you see it . . .’

The rivers in each of the four tapestries seemed also to flow into and out of each door, or rather the place beyond the door. In seeing which, Katherine began to think that the eight walls of the Chamber, whether doors or tapestries, were dissolving away before her eyes into a great world in her mind of the cycle of life’s renewal through youth to old age, of death and rebirth, as if there was an eternity in each living moment, each connected to the next backwards and forwards, up and down, every which way and more.

‘You like the tapestries?’ asked Lord Festoon, his voice saving her from a whirling and turning in her own mind that was gathering pace so fast that her body was beginning to do the same, and she in danger of losing her balance and tumbling into the confusion of the dazzling reflections and geometric illusions of the oak floor and thence into the tapestries themselves.

‘You
do
!’ he exclaimed with delight, answering his own question, though mistaking her silence for simple pleasure rather than the kaleidoscope of feelings it really was.

He had stopped talking to Arthur and seemed to have been following her progress around the chamber from the vantage point of his dais. He and his throne were now facing her, while Arthur had moved, along with the carpet he lay on, almost out of sight on the far side.

‘I do like it,’ began Katherine, ‘but . . .’

‘Sit down, my dear, for you seem quite dizzy with its pleasures and surprises, which is how we mortals should be in our wondrous world. It is only the limitations of our own minds, and the fear we surround change with, that makes our lives and perceptions dull and unrealized. I should know!’

He motioned to the floor to his far right from where, as if the carpet was sliding over the floor, Arthur soon appeared, still happily reclining. She frowned, shook her head and gave up trying to make sense of anything.

‘Sit on this rug,’ said Festoon enticingly, ‘adjust these soft cushions to your pretty person, lie down now and enjoy the refreshments from the master of my kitchen, as our mutual friend is himself presently doing.’

He spoke now so mellifluously that each word seemed to nudge Katherine’s limbs softly one by one to bring her to a supine position near Arthur.

‘Will this drink make me think strange thoughts,’ she asked doubtfully, ‘like the so-called water your Sisters of Charity gave me?’

Festoon affected to be offended by the question, but laughed heartily as he did so.

‘The Sisters have their ways and wiles, as they always have had, but trust me when I say that this plain water, which has merely been caressed by the essence of rose petals, will clear your head and whet your appetite for other pleasures to come, which is to say the later supper which it is my habit to enjoy in the night and in which I trust you will join me.’

‘I thought it was about the middle of the day.’

‘So it was,’ he said ambiguously, ‘when you arrived.
Tempus fugit!
Wherever is Parlance with your tea?’

She drank the water and felt immediately refreshed, and then drank more.

A bell suddenly tinkled and Festoon jumped as the speaking tube, which hung to the right and above his head, dropped down conveniently to his right hand, where with minimum effort he took it and applied it to his ear.

‘We are ready for supper,’ he said into it. ‘Light but nostalgic suits my mood.’

A whispering voice was heard and Festoon nodded and replaced the tube.

‘Supper is on the way,’ he announced.

Katherine decided to keep a close watch for where Parlance appeared so that she would know where his lift came from, but somehow knew that wherever it was it would not be in the direction she was looking. Nor was it. It emerged finally in the shadows of the dais, somewhere behind the throne itself, almost silently.

One moment Parlance was absent and the next he was present, holding aloft a vast silver tray on which their supper things were laid out along with a teapot, milk and a cup and saucer.

Festoon, who seemed to notice everything, observed her surprise with pleasure.

‘Unlike the other
ascenseur
,’ he said, affecting the French for the more mundane ‘lift’, ‘which has a good deal of the clackety-clack about it, this one has need to be utterly silent, so that its coming and going does not vex me and shatter my sleep. It offers a direct connection to the kitchen.’

‘Where does the other one come up?’ asked Katherine. ‘I couldn’t work it out.’

Festoon was delighted to be asked.

‘It is all done by hydraulics which work as well as the day they were installed so many decades ago. It emerges through the floor over there . . .’

He nodded vaguely in a direction which lay between the doors to Winter and Spring.

‘The floor opens, the lift emerges noisily, its occupants get out, and there you are! Simple but intrusive, but such is the nature of life – it should be simple but the world intrudes,
n’est-ce pas
? But forgive me, you are hungry as am I. Parlance, serve us if you please.’

They ate in pleasant silence until, supper nearly done, Katherine said, ‘Lord Festoon?’

‘My dear? You have a question? I always did appreciate an enquiring mind,’ he said. ‘What would you like to know?’

‘Is Jack coming here? Will you help us escape from the Fyrd?’

‘He is, my dear, and we will.’

‘Shall we escape through one of the doors?’

‘No doubt you will,’ said Lord Festoon.

‘But what lies beyond the four doors of the seasons?’

‘Dreams,’ he replied.

‘Whose?’

‘Our own,’ he whispered, turning from her sadly, the question evidently too hard for him to think about for long.

B
ut Katherine refused to let him avoid the subject so easily. She sensed she was near a truth that had to do with her dreams as well as his.

‘What’s your dream?’ she dared to ask.

He didn’t have to think for long.

‘To go to a place which . . . or rather, where . . . a place . . .’

He shook his head. The memory was too painful, the dream too hard to face.

His eyes were filled with real sadness.

‘To which
what?
’ persisted Katherine.

‘You’re very direct, just as the Shield Maiden should be.’

‘I’m not the Shield Maiden or whatever, I’m Katherine.’

‘Well you’re direct, that’s certain.’

‘So . . . what’s the answer? Have you been to the places beyond the doors?’

‘Only one of them, which was Spring. The rest I have visited in imagination only, with the rather special help of Parlance.’

‘When did you go through the door into Spring?’

‘Ah!’ he said very softly. ‘You have asked the question I feared you would. I cannot
actually
go there again of course. Indeed, in my condition I cannot now go through any of the doors, not ever. But I suppose if I tell you about Spring I can briefly relive that time again and you will understand better why I am in the pitiful and helpless position that I am.’

‘Speak of it, my lord,’ murmured Parlance dreamily.

The chef had an odd ability to make himself scarce most of the time but to reappear when needed. In fact Katherine had forgotten all about him. Now here he was, bold as brass, wiping a nostalgic tear from his eye.

‘It is the madeleines we have just eaten that make me weep,’ he said, ‘as much as my lord’s sad words and the memory of a Spring gone by.’

It was Lord Festoon who told her the outline of the story and Parlance who filled in the details.

When Festoon was ten he had wandered away from the servant who looked after him and found himself outside and alone. He reached the banks of the River Rea, attracted by the noise of stones splashing in the water. It was a kitchen boy, Parlance, playing ducks and drakes with flat stones they found.

‘It was that most magical of days,’ recalled Festoon, ‘the first day of Spring, when the sun shines lightly on the first new life and the air, so long made harsh by Winter cold, turns warm again.’

The two boys lost themselves in the wonder of the day, roamed up the river and found themselves finally on Waseley Hill, that verdant rise of ground from which the river issues forth as a tiny spring.

‘We were out all day and half into the evening before my mother’s servants – my father being dead – found me. My siblings had all died young and I too was a weak child and so she was more fearful for my health and safety than she should have been. I was chastised severely, but that was not the worse punishment. I was also confined within, and from that day on I was never allowed to go out more, nor to meet again the boy whose companionship was the first true friendship I had ever known.

‘From that time on I knew him only from the food he secretly sent me from the kitchens, made for me by his hand as evocations of the sights and sounds of that single day of Spring we saw, or thought we saw. His food was a celebration of our friendship and my gift in return was to enjoy it and suggest new things.’

‘But did you not go outside at all?’ asked Katherine, astonished.

‘That I did not do . . . and of course, as I grew, and grew large, and then fat and . . .’

‘If only I had known what I was doing to my lord,’ cried Parlance, ‘but I did not and no one told me what he was until he was obese. Too late, too late. From that time on I cooked to comfort him and he ate to comfort me.’

Festoon waved his hands over his vast body and tree-trunk legs and simply said, ‘It was just so, too late and I could no longer do what I had so wanted to.

‘But there were compensations. Parlance’s skills increased, his genius emerged, as did mine in matters of taste and ideas. Having conquered Spring in a culinary sense, we spread our clipped wings and explored the other seasons too. My weight increased still more.

‘When my mother died, and I took over as High Ealdor, the first thing I did was to summon Parlance. He wept to see what I had become.’

Katherine stood up impatiently.

‘But . . . but you could . . . surely between you both it would be possible to . . .’

‘Pray don’t tell me to stop eating as so many have before. If I do that I lose the one pleasure that remains to me. Do that and I die. And who then would Parlance, a true genius at what he does, cook for?’

‘But you would still like to experience Spring for real?’

Festoon hesitated. Parlance likewise.

‘More than anything but one thing, and of that I’m not even sure.’

‘Which is?’

‘To hold the lost gem of Spring, of fabled Beornamund’s creation, in the palm of my hand. Then I could die and return to the Mirror-of-All content that my life has been fulfilled.’

‘But failing that?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I would like to see again the places we so briefly saw when young.’

‘Would that not happen if you went through the door marked Spring, Lord Festoon?’ asked Katherine. ‘You said our dreams lie beyond it.’

‘I suppose it might. But for me that is but a dream, and better left that way. I cannot even rise from my throne without help, let alone cross the vast empty space that lies between it and that door . . .’