This New and Poisonous Air (8 page)

“You bought it on the black market?”

“Rescued,” he corrected.

“Very like a knight then,” I said. “Courage, honor, and endless self-delusion.”

He lifted the sleeve of his robe to his mouth and coughed. “You must be a student of psychology as well.”

“Kenton Sands,” I said, extending my hand. “Incorrigible generalist.”

He neither shook my hand nor introduced himself, and I’d later learn from his servant, Mrs. Philips, that going to the museum and inspecting the Medieval artifacts was one of the few excursions Lord Weymouth allowed himself. He was not adept at
meeting
and became terribly uncomfortable around new faces that were not done in oil and brushstroke. “It’s the diary of Sir Stephen de Lorris,” he said. “Sir Stephen of Sorrows. It’s as strange an account as I’ve ever read from the period. There are a few adventures and then the whole thing takes a frightening turn.”

“Frightening how?” I asked, tucking my untouched hand into the pocket of my velvet jacket and feeling the edge of Marie’s lace handkerchief which she’d given me
earlier that day to blot perspiration. I’d begun having small attacks since my graduation—panic really—a throat-closing, hand-numbing feeling because I’d been cast out of a system I dearly loved. I was free-falling in the world of commerce. And I realized I hadn’t excused myself as I’d intended, but there was nothing wolfish about the man. He was neither superior nor predatory. Instead he was lonely and trying his best to make conversation—on top of that, he was succeeding at holding my interest.

“My knight discovers how time betrays love,” he said. “The specifics of the story you’d have to come hear for yourself.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I have to locate my friend,” I said.

He drew himself slightly taller and the gold-framed paintings seemed to swim around him in the dim gallery light—all those pallid men and women, sitting for their portraits—stags and oceans, skulls and fields of wheat. “I assure you, Kenton Sands, that you will find these artifacts more interesting than any modern friend. Despite your attempts to hide it, you seem a man of history.”

FROM THE MUSEUM, we took dinner of stewed turtle and red wine at the Winged Stag, apparently a favorite of Lord Weymouth and then continued on to his home, called Longleat House, which was not as impressive as I’d imagined. Rather forlorn-looking with its black-painted shutters and slouching porch, it stood on the outskirts of the fashionable neighborhood of Mayfair. From a locked cabinet (one of many in the house), he produced the diary, a copy of a copy bound between boards and covered in cracked leather. It bore what he told me was the blazon of Sir Stephen de Lorris—a St. Andrew’s cross. “Unlike Christ,” Lord Weymouth
said, touching the embossment, “St. Andrew was crucified on the diagonal—his cross in the shape of an X, you see. I think my knight identified with such a death. Out of kilter. Ready to fall off the edge of the Earth at any moment.”

“May I have a look? ” I asked. Lord Weymouth treated the book with such totemic reverence that I felt the need to touch the thing myself if only to prove it did not burn in my hand.

He pulled away. “I’ll read aloud to you, Mr. Sands,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”

Who was I to argue? I had no governance in his home. The trip to Longleat had been a lark and, in my mind, remained so. I wondered about Marie—walking the chilly galleries alone, perhaps skulking around the Elgin Marbles waiting for some direction from their pale blank eyes. I might catch up with her in a few hours, I thought, but as soon as we’d settled by the fire and were served brandy by the servant, Mrs. Philips, I forgot the world outside. Lord Weymouth opened his book and situated it in his lap so I could not see the lettering, and I half-closed my eyes to enjoy the narrative.

What did he read to me that first evening? I want to say it was the story of how Sir Stephen de Lorris met his squire, Pieter, in the woods after competing in an allegory held by the Duchess of Burgundy. This, after all, was the day that would forever change Sir Stephen’s life, and it would make for a logical introduction to his tale. Not only did he meet Pieter, but he won the Burning Armor as a result of freeing a so-called giant from the gilded oak in the center of the battlefield. The Duchess was known to have become involved in alchemy after the death of her husband, an event which had freed her from wifely constraints, and the Burning Armor was purportedly a product of her arts.
Its mysterious sheen of reddish gold that appeared almost alive did not belie such rumors.

But in truth, the Duchess was more actress than alchemist. The giant was nothing more than a slightly taller than normal man guarded by dwarves, and the gilded oak had been painted earlier that morning so it glittered as if from Avalon. An allegory or a masque as they were sometimes known, according to Lord Weymouth, was a piece of theater—a stylized tournament held during the age of Elizabeth. There were actors dressed as gods and goddesses—the Duchess herself was arrayed as grayeyed Athena, carrying shield and olive branch, and Pieter portrayed a lesser deity, Anteros, who stood for requited love, the sort that is fulfilling and good and does not lead to a life of longing. There were, as well, actual knights taking part in the allegory, mostly lower-class men, all vying for the prized armor and a few words with the Duchess.

Pieter as Anteros wore sleeves of crow feathers and painted his torso with lead and vinegar so he shone brightly in the sun. When Sir Stephen saw the young man for the first time, he stopped his fight and stood frozen, the chambers of his heart flooding with icy water as if a winter dam had burst. He thought something had gone awry at the Duchess’s allegory and in fact a truth had risen from her artifice. Was it possible that, as in ancient times, a god was paying visit to the world of men? “Wait there,” he managed to say to Pieter over the noise of the brawl. “Come tell me your name.”

Startled because knights were not permitted to talk to the actors at the allegory, as such distraction would pierce the Duchess’s carefully planned illusion, Pieter ran off across the battlefield to gather with the other lesser gods. And for the rest of the tournament, Sir Stephen searched
for the young man—a pagan flower blooming on the icy banks of his humble Christian heart.

But I think it was not this passage that Lord Weymouth chose to read that night. It would have been too obvious, perhaps, after our own meeting at the museum. “Wait there…come tell me who you are,” was the command hanging in the air whether we heard Sir Stephen speak it or not. Lord Weymouth gauged my reaction to his story, glancing up from the page from time to time. He may have read a passage closer to the end of Sir Stephen’s life. After Pieter had been killed at the Battle of Novara where Sir Stephen had been attempting to make a name for himself, the knight retreated in despair and burrowed alone in the tower of a flooded castle near a lake in Glastonbury, writing lines of poetry to his lost squire. Lord Weymouth read with deep compassion: “I could not keep myself from your hair—pulling at it and twisting it to make tendrils of flame. My hands ache for you. The centers of my palms. Fine straight nose, cleft of chin, tiny ears tucked close to the head. Where has all this glamour gone? The forehead has broken, hair turned gray and lashes come off. The eyes themselves are tarnished mirror glass, and who am I but a man of vanity left to sit and look? ”

The Burning Armor was laid out on Sir Stephen’s table like a permanent funeral or a feast, never to be eaten. There was a hole in the suit of armor’s side, still ringed with Pieter’s own blood. The young man had been wearing the plating when he died at Novara, running ahead foolishly as if at sport. He and Sir Stephen were boys playing at war, and even when Pieter fell on an idle spear, driving the head through the weak metal, he looked at it with surprise, as if he could brush the shaft away and go on. Sir Stephen stripped off his own gloves and held Pieter’s
head. “The Burning Armor,” Pieter whispered, grimacing at the pain, “how could it not save me?”

Without money or honor, Sir Stephen retired. Peasants from Glastonbury threw stones at his turret. He prayed for a
danse macabre
—for Pieter to pull himself from his grave all in silver and wings of black as he’d been on the day of their first meeting. He wished the squire would drag him to the underworld by the hair, asking why Sir Stephen had allowed such a death, begging with a throat full of dirt to know what sort of knight allowed his good helpmate to be erased, swept off into the circling ether? Weren’t they supposed to be printed together in the histories?

My first evening at Longleat ended in drunkenness from the ever full cup of brandy, and I fell asleep in my chair by the fire, somehow already unafraid of Lord Weymouth. When the embers in the hearth had gone white, Mrs. Philips came to cover me with a woolen blanket, tucking it around the edges of my body, and in a dream, I saw Sir Stephen and his squire, Pieter, fording a stream—the trees around them glittered with pastoral light. The stream itself was carved glass laid in the woods. And the two men were laughing. Pieter carried the Burning Armor on his back. His reddishblond hair matched the color of the metal so perfectly. Sir Stephen wore a sun coat made of silk, the blazon of Saint Andrew on his chest, and the X of that cross looked like a mark or a target. Was I foolish enough to think I could join them? Walk along their trail and laugh with them? The two men heard my movements in the woods. I’d stepped on a branch and they turned to look, searching for me, the dreamer, and when they found my hiding place, their eyes were not as kindly as I’d imagined. They were not eyes at all, in fact, but holes dug into the earth. Ragged pits with stony sides. And in those holes were animals, bone-thin and starving, caveish and so fearful of the light.

LORD WEYMOUTH KNEW that I would leave London. He said he could see in the plainness of my face that I was set on moving to some suburb, Maiden Bradley or another like it, taking up with a wife and using my degree to become a clerk. “The velvet coats and poet’s hair don’t fool me, dear boy, but you might as well stay for a bit. Work at Longleat. I have certain finances that need looking after.” He must have known a part of me would remain—even if I declined the work and chose to take my leave at that moment. Perhaps he could see the dream of Sir Stephen in me or that my heart too was a ruin, one that the suburbs would not restore. I would visit him at Christmastime, bring fruit and sit with him as one would sit with a father. We had a future together, and even if it was not precisely the one he desired, Lord Weymouth had learned to settle.

The summer I made my home at Longleat was a dark one. Storm clouds rose like castle walls at the edges of the city, and each day brought with it some new difficulty. There was the question of where I should sleep. Mrs. Philips had prepared a room, but Lord Weymouth insisted that I take the spare bed in his own chamber, so we might talk well into the night. He stayed up late telling me stories of Sir Stephen, instances he recalled from the diary. Sir Stephen and Pieter had briefly joined in the search for the Grail; they’d been taken aboard a ship of plague victims and narrowly escaped through the cunning of Pieter who’d fashioned a rowboat from barrel sides; they’d found what they believed to be the tomb of Lancelot in a quiet grove and had knelt to pray to him as if he were a god, and on and on. Then there was my friend Marie, who wanted to visit, an event which Lord Weymouth forbade, saying he could not stand the thought
of her childish laughter ringing in his house. He did not like me to go to the taverns or even to the museums. His moods became excruciating—roses of anger blooming his cheeks. A man who’d lived alone for so long had no business inviting someone to lodge at his home. He would leave the supper table, knocking his plate to the floor if I made a misstep in etiquette. He would chastise me if I left for my morning constitution without saying goodbye. Lord Weymouth was dragged beneath waves of poetry and despair, turning again and again to Sir Stephen and Pieter and entreating me to sit and listen, as if some education were taking place. On certain days, his sadness became a ceiling, and Mrs. Philips and I labored beneath the weight of it.