A Convergence Of Birds (6 page)

Put out by having to share a space with Father Oldcorne (this the safest in the entire house, Habington says), Father Garnet tries to collect his wits, damaged by the fall on the ice. He feels hollow and brittle, crouched in a space he cannot stand in or stretch out in: almost a torture in its own right, inflicted by friends. He tries to fix his mind on some old Roman words, first discovered in childhood and treasured as jewels, but they will not come as once they did, when he was in a better mood or circumstances were less drear. It is as if the shock of falling on the ice, as well as making his head ache and feel sore to the touch at one point in his left temple, and upsetting his stomach too, has wiped out his memory, at least the verbal one. Come back, he says, trying an old trick to bring something to mind, catching himself in the act of naming it before he even tries to retrieve it. But only tuli, latum, come, and they in severed, broken form. He is not that much of an old Roman after all, he decides; all it takes to rattle him is a patch of ice and a household in a hurry. If he weren’t who and what he is he would be inclined to say damn them all, but he refrains, wishing instead he could have an accompaniment from Byrd, of Byrd’s music performed by any of them, himself included, but there is so little time. Byrd, he notes drily, feels no need to hide; why does he not happen to be on the poursuivants’ list of undesirables?

Making matters worse, even as he poises on the brink of darkness at noon, there is the standard cooking smell of Hindlip, the savory aroma of beef and gravy familiar from his childhood, when he lurked by the big kitchen table with his sisters and they sampled various tidbits of the meal. A small spoonful of gravy would set him up, or, better, a square of Yorkshire pudding, crispy brown on the outside, soft yellow within, a substance designed to replace meat when meat is hard to come by. None of that, though surely it might have been prepared. A hot cup of almost anything would serve, he thinks; it does not have to have much taste, only be hot, so that the warmth will linger after he has descended into the hole. He gives up, still wrinkling his nostrils at the cooking smell, almost as if he could eat with them. It is later than lunchtime, but who is watching the time? The absent sun is no guide—only his aching, volcanic stomach. No small ceremony, then, with a few chaste words in any language softening the bleakness of the moment, as language, the dominator, mostly does, converting the worst of situations into an interpreted something. In an ideal world, “real” in the sense that Anne Vaux uses the word, he would be escorted (he loves the dignity and finesse of that word) upstairs to a small quiet room with clean sheets, there to sleep off the impact and stretch out his testy body. A pitcher of hot water would be there when he woke, and sundry other helps; a snack from the kitchen would set him to rights—it would not even have to be Yorkshire pudding or, if later, a wondrous trifle with custard and cream, peeled almonds, and sponge cake or gingerbread drenched in fortified wine. No such perfection needed, neither ambrosia nor ichor. He is willing to go dry, he tells himself; it is a mark of his courage, as one going to punishment, which is bound to come later—Fathers Gerard and Briant have already been through that particular honor. If only, throughout this process, he could sagely sleep, putting his feet where directed, scooping himself up with the expended smile of a man shoved past his limit.

What he does feel, rather than witness, is a host of hands nudging and easing him, pressing him this way and that, raising and lowering, prodding him to buckle left or right, palming his head forward as if it stuck out too far, and with gentlest toe tip of their own urging his feet to tuck themselves in better or he will never get all of himself into place. He nearly chokes, being adjusted into so strait a place, but he lifts the top of the moment off, as if dealing with boiled milk, tossing away the skin that says he might better have been naked for this, and oiled even, converted into a performing animal for the sake of safety. With muscles only a little more willing than not, he inches his way into the already established, pungent gloom that clings to Father Oldcorne, always a man of no great conversation, who twists and hunches as best he can while another human pushes into his space. The special aroma of the cancer-ridden Father Oldcorne is familiar to him; perhaps it is the bouquet of the self-flogger, the man who punishes his tongue as if it were some live, lascivious beast, corrupted by language. Father Oldcorne smells of burned leather, he decides—at least in close quarters he does—but this might be an effect of brief confinement; the smell is more that of rotting cauliflower, not a human aroma at all but direct from the kitchen’s anteroom, where discarded celeries and crozzled leftovers are put, often tempting a mouse into the open. Father Oldcorne is not his choice of traveling companion, or even for sitting still with through the dismal watches of the priestly night; the man’s hangdog, punished look, not visible in here, thank Jesus, puts him off, as does his constant need for praise for having subjugated his body to a greater degree than Garnet and Garnet’s free-flowing, almost flamboyant friends. Oldcorne has a dun, grievous quality that restores those who have overlooked it to the miserable side of life; no one, listening to him or inhaling him, will want to live too long.

Much of this Anne knows, can divine from what Henry Garnet fails to say as he vanishes bit by bit into the architectural trap devised by Little John Owen who, thanks to the emergency of Sir Henry Bromley’s squad impending, freezes out in the martin-house stuck in pond ice. Anyone finding him will turn into a purple martin. One hug and Henry Garnet is gone. She wonders how many hugs there have been: two or three, this by far the most final, seeing that once again they are gambling with their own lives and those of priests, actually standing here to marvel at the completeness of the disappearance when the hiding place should have been sealed off, the upstairs water tank shoved back into place by eleven pairs of hands. With so many in league, she thinks, how keep a secret as bizarre as this? Only in a recusant household habituated to such scenes can you get away with it. Perhaps we will. It is assuredly one of John Owen’s most decisive inventions, with the one priest’s toes beside the other priest’s head, for hygiene’s sake. She scoffs at the very thought of hygiene, knowing they had better hygiene in the Ark, and this is a Greek word come down from a people who, professing it, loved the word because they achieved nothing of the kind. The voice of Father Oldcorne, rattled, comes from behind the tank, which actually seems to amplify any sound they make. “A devil in hell,” he is saying, always partial to the extreme view of things. Not a sound from Henry Garnet, who has never felt more like a parcel of dirty clothes stuffed into a moldy drawer by a feckless washerwoman. Henry Garnet has never made a fetish of answering Father Oldcorne, whose self-directed rhetoric implies the coldest reaches of the universe, the most fearful moments of any human life. He is not exactly a misery, but one who exaggerates, Henry thinks, the dark side of the human antic. Well, when he gets out of here in a month’s time, he will have cause for complaint. No, not a month, a week will do; even less, once Sir Henry Somebody has performed his sullen chase through the enormous house and gone his truculent way, his commission from the Privy council fluttering in his hand. Father Garnet does not know that the Bromley team has been promised “a bountiful reward” for its best efforts, so that when they come they will screw their gimlets into the elegantly paneled walls with avaricious zeal—wherever a priest may be hovering (a favored word of the Privy Council, whose notion of priests involves a paradoxical angelic component that makes their lives difficult until they manage to combine angel with harpy). Everyone at Hindlip is familiar with the sounds of probing as, once again, the poursuivants, some recruited only for the day, sedulously go about the business of ruining good panel work, much to the distress of Maestro Owen. Such grinding and scraping suggests a house full of rats, which in a sense it is whenever these busybodies show up. Mostly from hovels themselves, they delight in the spoliation of luxury, delighted to bore holes in the eyes of the faces in portraits (who would hide behind them?) or next to an old borehole so that the two, plus another on another occasion, will form a peephole. By now, the house has a much-penetrated look, as if musketry practice of the wildest abandon has taken place in the dining room, the bedrooms, even lofts and closets. Father Garnet thinks of Hindlip as the punctured house, practiced upon by dunce doctors trying to let the blood out of it to no purpose—nobody has ever been found here, never mind how vehement and specific the official proclamation borne in the hand of the poursuivant who leads. John Owen is far too clever for them, and Hindlip gives him more scope than almost any other country house. They might as well look for actual faces in the coats of arms proudly displayed on the walls.

Anne Vaux knows she cannot stand any more of this, so she goes downstairs, unable to believe she has just ridden cross-country to entomb the dearest priest in the world. She has not so much participated as lent an ear, an eye, a heart. Now her stomach, always upset by riding sidesaddle—or any saddle—begins to come back to normal, less afflicted by the devious fragility of her robust-looking life. She is not that strong, she knows, what with eyes, womb, and—no, there is nothing else save the acid swilling about in her stomach. Not because she wants it, but because she associates it with conventional everyday conduct, she asks for an unusual lunch: ham and eggs, a dish often favored at Hindlip because the makings are always fresh. Gradually, overpowering the reek of cauliflower and the bouquet of roast beef, the companionable wideawake aroma of ham and eggs bubbling in hot lard ascends the stairs and seeps through the structure, reaching Henry Garnet and actually bringing a tear to his eye; why, this is the most exquisite torture, he feels, and surely Anne could stop it. Who on earth—no, he stops. It is no use getting into a swivet about a wrongly timed breakfast he would give his folding leather altar to devour. The smell will endure for at least a day; no windows open in November, and over the decades the house has brilliantly captured and fused its own smells, like a prisoner inhaling himself, until there is always a fused aroma—faint corky oversweet strawberry infused with an acrid spume of boiling vinegar—that serves as background to the smells of the moment. Against both delight and abomination, Henry Garnet decides to hold his breath, but he can do so only in upsetting spasms, and he soon gives up, at once rhapsodic and revulsed.

Anyone with a developed sense of coincidence, such as may be acquired after reading a great deal of Dickens, will wish Father Garnet never to have arrived, but instead to remain circling with Anne Vaux in some nondescript, drab field until the end of time. By the same token, one does not want to have Sir Henry Bromley arriving within half an hour of Garnet’s reaching Hindlip. As zealots go, Bromley is fairly civilized, although his arrival coincides also with break of day; Henry Garnet’s feeling that it is dinner time shows how exercised his mind has become (he’s being previous as almost never), but Anne Vaux’s craving for the ritual of ham and eggs reveals her attunement to a daily round, a regimen that both pleases and steadies. Amid the panic of their confusion, no one is saluting the dawn except the kitchen staff, who time their work by daylight and need only to be consulted once about, well, not so much time as the phase of the day. Sir Henry Bromley is too eager, having risen well before four in the morning to get his posse on the road.

So here they are, a motley team, some adorned in butcher’s smocks with big tool pouches in front containing awls and spikes, boring-tools of all kinds, and little listening tubes with funnel ends. Some of them have teak mallets with which to tap on hollow-looking panels. They also have with them kindling to test the chimneys with, knowing full well that a lit fire in a fake chimney soon proves the case. Hargreaves is among them, but dragging a leg—he too from a fall on ice—but this time he kowtows to Sir Henry, who can make or break him depending on the skill with which he exposes the priests. They do not even recall who tipped them off about priests at Hindlip, but the word is out; perhaps it has always been out inasmuch as there has almost never been a time when priests were not at Hindlip.

Joseph Cornell

THE CALIPH OF BAGDAD

c. 1954

20.4375 x 13.75 x 4.5 in.

Box Construction

The rumor and the event match each other, but to no advantage for the poursuivants, who have found no one at all during their previous searches. As it happens, Thomas Habington is not at home when the inquisitorial rabble arrive at the main door, but his return prompts some lively exchanges between him and Bromley.

“Do not brandish your proclamation, man,” he bellows at Bromley. He speaks as a man who has already been in the Tower once. “I take your word for it. I will gladly die at my own front gate if you find any priests in here. Lurking under my roof! You will as soon find fish folded in among the tablecloths. We are who we are, Sir Henry.” His vehemence cuts no ice; Bromley has seen it all before, the bluster and the indignation—he would cavort in the same fashion if he were hiding Jesuits. It goes with the suit, and Habington is not a “bad” man, just a misguided rebel with a taste for punishment: hence his impassioned cry about dying at his front door. There is no need for emotion, Bromley knows; either the priests are here or they are not, and he does not intend to go until the house has been ransacked, and indeed made to pay. It will take three days, he estimates, with his men rampaging around upstairs and downstairs, ignoring the protests of the Habington family and enigmatic visitors such as Mrs. Perkins, whom he has met before. The grinding, drilling, boring, go on all day, with naps taken in the big public rooms, nothing provided by way of food, but the kitchen raided until the staff feel demented, unable to function according to the strict rules of the house. That they mean to spend the night appalls Anne Vaux, who detects in their behavior a new resolve: Gone are the days of the lazy, casual, gentlemanly search; this is the work of plebeians eager for profit, and she works on her disdain, doing her best with stare and sniff to embarrass those who seem intent on taking the house apart.