The Whispering Swarm (30 page)

I only went out of Alsacia to see my mum, meet the girls, or perform an occasional gig with the Deep Fix. ‘This book's taking you longer than normal,' said Helena. ‘Have you sorted yourself out yet?' She knew more was going on than I'd told her. ‘Maybe something in your retreat is slowing you down?' Of course, I was still fascinated by Molly and the Alsacia or I might have done something more to save my marriage and change my lifestyle. At that point I had come to care for my dream more than I worried about reality. I was reluctant to leave the Sanctuary for several reasons, the chief one being what the place sent after me when I left: the Whispering Swarm, rising, falling, crying and laughing, murmuring its inaudible secrets. Driving me nuts.

As a writer I wanted routine, consistency, and quiet more than I wanted sex. Ambiguity was the enemy of my ambitions. I
liked
monogamy. I
liked
investing in one person whom I got to know better and better and love more and more. But I chose the worst ways of demonstrating this. Maybe I was what Johnny van der Kroot, now
New Worlds'
lead critic, called me: a serial monogamist. When I visited Helena and put this to her, she retreated into silence, at least until the next bit of coke turned up.

Helena had probably been talking about me with people like Jill, who still worked part-time as my assistant, coming to the flat to deal with any correspondence and messages for a couple of days a week. If I hadn't been so involved with Molly I might have wondered which of my friends was already sleeping with Helena. But my instinct didn't tell me anything. Charlie Platt, our designer, had decided I was schizophrenic, but the facts didn't support his theory. By then I really didn't care. I compromised in a way I'd decided worked for us all. I wanted everyone to be as happy as I was. I was still on holiday. Of course, I didn't put it quite like that to Helena. I had a bit of sense left. What I did notice was how much healthier and relaxed Helena had become, how well her novel was going, and how well the girls were getting on at school. I almost took credit for the lot. I had two wives. My ego had never been in better shape.

Full of Molly and work as most days were, I still continued to wonder about Alsacia's secrets. I knew there must be rational causes for the phenomenon. I was a materialist, perhaps because I was such an expert fantast. I knew there had to be a scientific principle for Alsacia, no matter how hard to grasp. But nobody wanted to talk about it. I thought they were afraid analysis would destroy them. They weren't the first to believe that, of course. I had the same superstition to a degree. If anything, it's easier to understand nowadays. They didn't want to be deconstructed. Their experience and instincts told them that deconstruction could be the preliminary to commodification. In that respect they were prescient. Nonetheless I was determined to know
how
the district was hidden from other Londoners.

I was pretty sure Father Grammaticus could have helped but he did not volunteer. Of course I did wonder if that machine in his office might be the ‘engine' driving Alsacia, but the thing seemed only an elaborate model. Might it
represent
an engine? Perhaps Prince Rupert's machine was capable of more? But Prince Rupert was still away. And when I asked Friar Isidore, the subject made him sink increasingly into a kind of sadness. I could never get him to discuss what was happening, even though he often seemed astute about the outside world. Indeed, everyone in the Alsacia knew about the outside and still fancied they risked profound danger if they stepped through the gates. And it wasn't necessarily
my
familiar world they feared. Some thought they would find wild and menacing terrain where only fools or specialists would go without being killed or being damned to madness forever. ‘Risking Their Reason Each Night On The Road,' as a popular rogue's ballad had it.

Why was my world so menacing and mysterious to Alsacians? A child told me the World Beyond was Cromwell's or Queen Anne's but ruled without justice or mercy. Save for large monuments and palaces, most of London had looked like Alsacia before the Great Fire. Tudor mostly. Perhaps, in my past, Alsacia was destroyed in the fire? I still didn't believe in the supernatural. I remained a firm empiricist. So I gave up and decided to wait for answers. For the moment at least I would take things as they came and make what friends or allies I could.

The less I questioned, the more I grew to enjoy the unselfconscious, accepting fellowship of those great, life-loving Cavaliers. Kind-hearted, even intellectual and artistic sometimes, believing themselves tolerated by a generous God and His Son, they were men of action. They were on one side of the French Enlightenment and I was on the other! Their politics were so remote from the twentieth century's we had little to disagree on except possibly the rights of slaves and Huguenots. In general these people were the soul of humanity who could, while keeping none of their own, grade slaves as well as they graded horses. They treated both, when they encountered them, as they believed God wished them treated. They could guess a man's religion at a casual glance, yet they hadn't an inkling as to the workings of the human mind. They caricatured Jews, Arabs, ‘Moors', Englishmen, and Germans at every turn, believing them all they were alleged to be, except of course the ones they knew personally, who were wonderful exceptions proving the rule. I felt privileged to be witnessing the birth of modern self-serving racialism.

Both Aramis and Athos were God-fearing intellectuals, and their grasp of ideas was as quick as any twentieth-century philosopher's. While D'Artagnan was comfortable only with his closest friends, Porthos had made me his special mascot, though I was a little taller than he was. He would include me in affectionate jokes against the others, helping me build my confidence until I no longer felt callow and self-conscious in their company. Compared to the giant Musketeer, I was slender. I admired but simply couldn't handle the huge consumption he expected of me. ‘Every man is required, as a matter of loyalty, to build his strength, the better to serve his king.' I think he had an idea he could feed me up, make me a better roisterer! Enough wine and ale and I would be the son he never knowingly had. I thought of him as a grand mixture of Falstaff and Don Quixote. Maybe Rabelais, too. His pretensions to the nobility seemed to me more an invention of a nineteenth-century satirist than a seventeenth-century historian, but perhaps such stereotypes change rarely in France. The Musketeers were the king's secret emissaries, they said. They had been summoned here by Prince Rupert to help defend the Alsacia from any attack, to serve King Charles's interests, and to guard the abbey Treasure with their lives.

One night grave Aramis told me the prince was due to arrive back the next day. I was delighted to welcome the king's nephew home. Moll had no interest, she said, in hearing his manly talk, and found excuses to do other things, much as I implored her to join me downstairs to welcome Rupert when he returned. But she was insistent.

‘I don't dislike him, Mike. I only dislike the way you all fawn on him. It's a man's pleasure, I know. But I don't choose to add to his admirers or hear his tall tales. Your Prince Rupert, I think you'll agree, is a man's man if nothing else.'

So I went to the party downstairs on my own.

I joined Duval, the Musketeers and Pierre Ronet, a fellow highwayman visiting from France, in the big private bar to be greeted with a friendly cheer by the prince, who held a bumper in one hand and a scroll in the other. Boye, his big white poodle, was at his feet. The prince was dressed in ordinary soldier's clothes, with the dust of the road still on his boots. A great tartan sash over his shoulder supported a heavy, basket-hilted rapier. A brace of big horse pistols lay on the bar. He demanded I drink a shant of scrumpy with them, it now being the season. Against my better judgment I accepted a massive mug. To roars of drunken approval, we drank King Charlie's health and we drank to the Queen and their sons, Rupert's cousins. We drank to their spaniels and, without disrespect, their spaniels' fleas. We drank to drink and after an hour or two of this I stopped wondering if Moll would join us. In fact I rather hoped she wouldn't. Some instinct told me she would not be sympathetic to our condition.

By the third hour I was still sober enough to remember the question I had waited so long to ask the prince. ‘I am glad you found us once more, sir. How, Your Highness, can it be that this place, this Sanctuary of ours, cannot be seen from any direction, nor even from above?' I think I smiled drunkenly at him, proud of my ability to form and complete a sentence. ‘Why do people age slowly—or sometimes rapidly—sometimes, apparently, not at all—and why are so few children found here?' I almost fell forward at that moment but held my balance, steadying myself on the bar. Suddenly, I wished with all my heart that I was sober and capable. He was looking at me with some amusement, brushing pork pie crumbs off his leather waistcoat.

I began to feel sick.

A little later, when everyone's attention was engaged elsewhere, Prince Rupert murmured to a quieter and more sober me: ‘There are answers to your questions. They are a little too widely scattered, in shreds, waiting for a certain breeze to blow them together again. I will summon you when the time has come. I promise you, St Maur's whelp.'

Soon after that, he disappeared. Half an hour later, Moll came down into the bar, curtseying to her Cavaliers and rather than scolding me for my drunkenness, she joined me in another jug of Rhenish. And so we passed the evening, with me able to take greater pleasure from the company and the wine now that I anticipated an answer to my most pressing questions.

Prince Rupert was glad to take me under his wing in the following days. He told me tales of warfare and plunder in the Americas and the Indies, on land and sea. His dog Boye always with him, both in the telling and the tale. This time I saw him, I thought the dog grew greyer about the muzzle. I said nothing then. Any observation I made on age or death was generally ignored or laughed down by my new friends. I remember asking myself why, except in the stories I wrote, French musketeers were in England. These four were, after all, usually in France, either retired to their estates or being drawn reluctantly back into a Parisian life at once vigorous and rewarding. I reminded myself that I would soon have answers.

 

23

MY GHOSTS

Apart from the specific fashions of the day, I could imagine these beribboned dandies, with their puffed chests and exaggerated gestures of chivalry, belonging to any period. For all their attention to fashion, they were brave, intelligent men, who wore their learning lightly, preferring to talk only of old times, good friends and of the sinister villains they had defeated. All my life I had heard veteran soldiers speak and behave the same. The subject and consequences of war were only good for a comic yarn.

I must say I remained in awe of their vitality. They roared through life, impulsively pledging their swords to all good causes, never thinking of their own safety. If there was an innocent to be rescued or woman's honour to be redeemed, they would spring to volunteer. They were loved by the whole Alsacia and were only larger than life in their tireless adventuring. They had great generous hearts. The best men of their time, they were cheerfully physical in showing affection, pity or insult compared to modern friends. They smacked one another about the head, kicked and hugged and kissed and swore that there had never been such friends since Roland and Oliver, David and Jonathan, Arthur and Lancelot! And they came mainly in pairs. As did we. With Molly, they all swore loyalty to Rupert (Count Palatine of the Rhine, Herzog von Bayern, First Duke of Cumberland, First Earl of Holderness, close heir to the throne of England and Scotland), though an infamous Protestant.

‘Why is everyone gathered here?' I asked Molly one night while my friends argued and whispered downstairs. She was drunker than usual and saw nothing wrong with telling me.

‘Why, to create justice, of course. Always! To save King Charlie from the scaffold. There's a plan. It will involve that squalid London thief taker, Jedediah Jessup, being substituted for His Grace. Jessup deserves to die. It will not be the first time he's 'personated his grace! He's a murdering coward who burned down the house of my mother's dear friend Lord Mettlesfield with the poor man's aunts and uncles and aged parents all in their beds when it happened.' She glared up into my face. Did she know she was playing a part?

This Moll favoured a nondescript blouse and skirt when not dressing up as the highwayman. She looked great in anything. But I noticed how, gradually, she had changed her clothes. Now, with the blouse cut low, she looked like a kind of low-budget all-purpose Nell Gwynne. When I first met her she belonged to the eighteenth century and the tram we held up to the nineteenth. When I put this to her she looked blankly at me and carried on, just as the others did if I asked simple questions about their business in London and so on.

I think most of my ideas were far too abstract for them. They had an air of waiting for something or someone to happen. I had thought at first the event was Prince Rupert's arrival. Dressed these days in civvies, a long wig, lots of lace, a silk waistcoat almost to his knees and a coat just a shade or two darker than the vest, he often carried a beribboned dandy cane in his left hand. He kept me close to him, doubtless from mutual liking, and we saw much more of him, back from facing a thousand dangers. Although she was inclined to be bored by his wonderfully entertaining monologues, Moll obviously admired him, pretending to listen intelligently and never interrupting. Like me, he was a man of the world and I knew it was stupid to be jealous, but I could have sworn I saw her blushing once or twice. When I asked her if she found him attractive, she said quite the opposite.

The highwaymen from the later century—Turpin, Sheppard and the rest—were rarely at the tavern these days. I asked after them and Moll was a little vague.