Haunted Castles (17 page)

“Please,” he said. “I am wide awake from this evening's triumph—I should not like to celebrate it alone.”

“But I am a stranger. Surely your friends—”

Cholodenko snarled bitterly. “Those vultures? They condescended to me when they felt me their inferior; soon they will hate me for being their superior. Here is my door—I entreat you—”

My face felt brittle as glass from the cold. With chattering teeth, I replied, “Very well, for a little while.” We went inside.

His apartment was small. Dominating it was a huge grand piano of concert size. Scores and manuscript paper were piled everywhere. Cholodenko built a fire. “And now,” he said, producing a dust-filmed bottle, “we will warm ourselves with comet wine.”

His strong thumbs deftly pushed out the cork and the frothing elixir spewed out into the goblets in a curving scintillant jet, a white arc that brought to mind, indeed, a comet's tail.

“Comet wine?” I repeated.

He nodded. “A famed and heady vintage from the year of the comet, 1811. This is a very rare bottle, one of the last in the world. Your health, sir.”

We drank. The wine was unlike any I have ever tasted—akin to champagne, but somehow spicy, richer; dry, yet with a honeyed aftertaste. I drained the goblet and he poured again.

“A potent potation,” I said with a smile.

“It makes the mind luminous,” he averred.

I said, “That heavenly wanderer, for which it is named, imbued it with astral powers, perhaps?”

“Perhaps. Drink, sir. And then I will tell you a little story, a flight of fancy of which I would value your opinion. If you find it strange, so much the better! For, surely, one must not tell mundane stories between draughts of comet wine?”

Of that story, and of its effect on me, I will write soon.

Your friend,

Harry

12 April

My dear Bobbie,

Forgive the palsied look of my handwriting—I scribble this missive on the train that carries me from St. Petersburg, and the jiggling motion of the conveyance is to blame. Yes, I take my leave of this vast country, will spend time in Budapest, and will return to London in time to celebrate your birthday. Meanwhile, I have a narrative to conclude—if this confounded train will let me!

The scene, you may recall, was the St. Petersburg apartment of Vassily Ivanovich Cholodenko. The characters, that enigmatic young man and your faithful correspondent. My head was light and bright with comet wine, my perceptions sharpened, as my host lifted a thick mass of music manuscript from the piano and weighed it in his hands. “The score of
The Brothers Karamazov,”
he said. “It needs but the final ensemble. When it is finished, all the impresarios in the country, in the world, will beg me for the privilege of presenting it on their stages!”

“I can well believe it,” I rejoined.

“After that, other operas, symphonies, concerti . . .” His voice glowed with enthusiasm. “There is a book that created a scandal when it was published three years ago—
Anna Karenyina
—what an opera I will make of it!”

“My dear Vassily,” I said, only half in jest, “I see a receptacle for discarded paper there in the corner. May I not take away with me one of those abandoned scraps? In a few short years, an authentic Cholodenko holograph may be priceless!”

He laughed. “I can do better than wastepaper,” he said, handing me a double-sheet of music manuscript from a stack on the piano. It was sprinkled with black showers of notes in his bold calligraphy. “This is Alyosha's aria from the second act of
Karamazov
. I have since transposed it to a more singable key—this is the old copy—I have no further use of it.”

I thanked him; then said, “This story you wish to tell . . . what is it?”

“No more than a notion, really. Something I may one day fashion into a libretto—it would lend itself to music, I think. I would like your thoughts, as a man of letters, a poet.”

“A very minor poet, I fear, but I will gladly listen.”

He poured more wine, saying, “I have in mind a Faustian theme. The Faust, in this case, would possibly be a painter. But it would be patently clear to the audience from the opening moments of the first act—for his canvases would be visibly deployed about his studio—that he is a painter without gift, a maker of wretched daubs. In a poignant aria—barytone, I think—he pours out his misery and his yearnings. He aspires to greatness, but a cruel Deity has let him be born bereft of greatness. He rails, curses God, the aria ends in a crashing blasphemy. Effective, yes?”

“Please go on,” I said, my curiosity quickened.

“Enter Lucifer. And here I would smash tradition and make him not the usual booming basso but a lyric tenor with a seductive voice of refined gold—the Fallen Angel, you see, a tragic figure. A bargain is reached. The Adversary will grant the painter the gift of genius—for seven years, let us say, or five, or ten—and then will claim both his body and his immortal soul. The painter agrees, the curtain falls, and when it rises on the next scene, we are immediately aware of a startling transformation—the canvases in the painter's studio are stunning, masterful! A theatrical stroke, don't you agree?”

I nodded, and drank avidly from my goblet, for my throat was unaccountably dry. I felt somewhat dizzy—was it only the heady wine?—and my heart beating faster. “Most theatrical,” I replied. “What follows?”

Cholodenko sighed. “That is my dilemma. I do not know what follows. I had hoped you could offer something . . .”

My brain was crowded with questions, fears, wild conjectures. I told myself that a composer was merely seeking my aid in devising an opera libretto—nothing more. I said, “It is a fascinating premise, but of course it cannot end there. It needs complication, development, reversal. Possibly, a young lady? . . . no, that's banal . . .”

Suddenly, a face was in my mind. The remembrance of it, and the new implications it now carried, I found disturbing. The eyes in this face were dead, as blank as the brain behind them; the smile was vacuous and vapid: it was the face of that living corpse, Balakirev. My thoughts were racing, my head swam. I set down my goblet with a hand that, I now saw, was trembling.

Cholodenko's solicitous voice reached me as if through a mist: “Are you well, sir?”

“What? . . .”

“You are so very pale! As if you had seen—”

I looked up at him. I peered deep into the eyes of this man.
They
were not dead, those eyes! They were dark, yes, the darkest eyes I have ever seen, and deep-set in the gaunt face, but they were alive, they burned with fanatic fire. At length, I found my voice. “I am quite all right. A drop too much, I fear . . .”

“Comet wine is unpredictable. Are you sure—”

“Yes, yes. Don't concern yourself.” I inhaled deeply. “Now then, this opera story of yours . . .”

“You must not feel obligated to—”

“Suppose,” I said guardedly, “that you invent another character. A fellow painter—but a man immensely gifted and acclaimed. You introduce him in Act One, prior to the appearance of Lucifer . . .”

“Yes?” said Cholodenko quickly.

“As the opera progresses, we watch an uncanny transferral . . . we see the gifts of this great painter dim, in direct proportion to the rate with which your Faustian painter is infused with talent, until the great artist is an empty shell and his opposite number is a man of refulgent genius.”

Cholodenko smiled sardonically. “The Devil robs Peter to pay Paul, is that it?”

“That is precisely it. What do you think of the idea?”

“It is arousing,” he said, his dark eyes watching my face intently. “It is very clever.” Then, waxing casual again, he asked, “But is it enough?”

“No, of course not,” I said, rising and pacing. His eyes followed me, flickering from left to right and back again. “There must be the obligatory finale, wherein Lucifer returns after the stipulated time, and drags the condemned painter to fiery perdition. Quite a scene, that! Think what you could make of it.”

“It's trite,” he snapped. “The weary old bourgeois idea of retribution. I detest it.”

I stared at him, mouth agape. “My dear boy, you needn't bite my head off. It's merely an opera . . . isn't it?”

He mumbled, “I apologize. But that scene has been done before—Mozart, Gounod, Dargomizhsky . . .”

I shrugged. “Then we will change it.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, almost desperately. “We
must
 . . . change it.”

“What would you suggest? That your Faust be spared?”

“Why may he not be spared? Must he be punished because he wished to bring the world great art? . . .”

“No,” I said slowly, “not for that.”

“Then for what? Why must he be damned for all eternity?
Why?”

We were facing each other across the piano. He was leaning forward, his hands gripping the instrument's lid, his nails digging into the very wood. When I answered him, my voice was even and low:

“Because,” I said, “of the man who was drained of his God-given genius to satisfy the cravings of your Faust. The man who was sucked dry and thrown aside. For that, someone must pay. For that, your Faust must burn in Hell.”

“No!”

The syllable was torn from his depths. It rang in the room. “Why must he burn for that? He had no way of knowing whence that talent came! Even if, later, he began to suspect the truth, if he saw the great master wane as his own star ascended, there was nothing he could do, no way he could stop it, the pact had been sealed! The Fiend had tricked him! Comprehend, if you can, the horror he would feel, the guilt, the shame, as he watched that blazing talent become cold ashes, sacrificed on the altar of his own ambition! He would hate and disgust himself, he would loathe himself far more than one would loathe a vampire—for a vampire drains only the blood of his victim, whereas
he
 . . .”

Cholodenko's voice stopped, throttled by emotion. His face was a mask of anguish. Then he took a shuddering breath, straightened, and summoned the shadow of a laugh. “But what a very good story this must be, indeed, to sting us to such passion. I fear we are taking it too seriously.”

“Are we?”

“Of course we are! Come, hand me your glass . . .”

“I have had enough, thank you. Perhaps we both have.”

“You may be right. It has made us irritable. I'm sorry I burdened you with my problems.”

“Not at all. It is stimulating to collaborate with a fellow artist. But it is really very late, and I must go.”

I reached for my greatcoat, but he gripped my arm. “No, please, Lord Stanton. Stay. I beseech you. Do not leave me here . . . alone.”

I smiled courteously, and gently extricated my arm from his grasp. I put on my coat. At the door, I turned and spoke. “That final scene,” I said. “You wish something different from the usual plunge to Hell. Here is something that might prove piquant, and is certainly theatrical . . .”

Although he did not respond, I continued:

“Lucifer drags your Faust down to The Pit, but the opera does not end, not quite. There is a little epilogue. In it, those lustrous paintings fade before the audience's eyes and become empty canvases—I suppose that might be done chemically, or by a trick of lighting? And the poor chap whose gifts were stolen is restored to his former glory. As for your Faust—it is as if he never lived; even the memory of him is swallowed up by Hell. How does that strike you?”

I do not know if he heard me. He was staring into the fire. I waited for a reply, but he said nothing and did not look at me. After a moment, I left.

Please pass on to Maude the enclosure you will find herein. It is the piece of music Cholodenko gave me—Alyosha's aria from
Karamazov.
Bid her play it (I am sure it is beautiful) and you will be the envy of London: the first of your circle to be granted a foretaste of a bold new opera that is certain to be greeted as a masterpiece.

Your friend,

Harry

Lord Henry Stanton's account of his Russian sojourn ends there. The other letters of his in the packet purchased at the Beverly Hills auction are interesting enough to possibly justify future publication, but all the material bearing upon what I may call The Great Cholodenko Mystery is contained in the three letters you have just read. To them, I can add nothing about Cholodenko, although I can supply some peripheral data available to any researcher willing to spend a little time digging into the history of Russian music:

In the years following Lord Stanton's visit to Russia, Mily Balakirev enjoyed a miraculous recovery. He returned to his abandoned
Tamara,
completed it, and in 1882 saw it produced to acclaim so tremendous that it secured for him, in the following year, a coveted appointment as Director of the Court Chapel. He again became an active host, filling his home with musicians and others eager for his friendship and guidance. He composed his Second Symphony and worked on a piano concerto. He conducted. He organized festivals in homage to Chopin and Glinka. He personally prepared a new edition of Glinka's works. He energetically composed and edited music even into his retirement years, and outlived the other members of the
koochka
(with the single exception of Cui), dying in 1910 at the age of 73.

A final curiosity: a yellowing sheet of music paper, presumably the one Lord Stanton mentioned, the page he said contained Alyosha's aria from
The Brothers Karamazov
in Cholodenko's own hand, actually is folded into his April 12th letter—but, except for the printer's mark and the orderly rows of staves, it is blank.

The runaway lovers were captured just before they reached the border of the duchy.

They were dragged immediately before His Grace, the Duke, whose noble mien and halo of snowy curls lent him the aspect of a painted angel; and his face was sad as he looked reproachfully at his errant young wife, then at her troubadour lover, and then, with a great sigh and tears brimming in his soft old eyes, paid their captors in gold and turned the two prisoners over to his warder.

The Duke's curt instructions to the warder were surprising, for he enjoyed a reputation far and wide as a clement and a pious lord:

The lovers were to be taken to the dungeons and severely punished for a total of seven days—one day for each of the cardinal sins—finally to be irrevocably demised upon the seventh. During this time, they were to be prohibited, by the most direct of means, from looking upon or speaking to each other, from proffering solace by either words of courage or glances of love.

“The most direct of means,” chattered the genial warder as, keys jangling, he led the unhappy pair down into the subterranean dungeons. “Aye, that would be to remove your eyes and tongues.” They howled in outraged protest, but he laughed merrily and assured them it was a simple operation, done with pincers and hot irons in a few seconds.

Still, all the world loves lovers, and the warder was a merciful man. He chose to postpone removing their eyes and tongues until the morrow, allowing them the night in which to see and speak to each other. See and speak, but not touch or fondle, for after stripping them he stuffed them into separate cages, tiny cages designed for minimum ease. Leaving one smoky torch flickering in a wall sconce, the warder took his leave of them. The lovers, squatting on bare haunches, their toes gripping the hard iron of the cages' floors, were free to console each other as best they could with words and looks.

The woman was the first to speak. “See to what a sorry state we have come,” she said through tears. “And all because of you.”

“Of
me?
” the youth replied. “It was I who insisted you remain with your husband the Duke, for we could easily take our pleasure of each other under his sanctimonious old nose and he be none the wiser. But no—you had to run away.”

“Any other course would have been ignoble. Running away was the only decent thing to do.”

“You speak of decency?
You?”
he cried. “All hot and hungry mouth you were from head to foot, burning with thirst, parched from an old husband's neglect, bold, unquenchable, depraved—”

“Shut your vile lips!
You
are to blame for our foul fortune. I would not be crouching here naked, like a plucked peacock in a parrot cage, awaiting seven days of torture, if you had not made advances to me in the first place.”

“Your memory is as tarnished as your virtue! It was
you
made the first sign toward me!”

“You are a liar!”

“You are a trollop!”

She wept. Repenting a little of his words, he grumbled, “It well may be it is no fault of ours but of your hoary hymn-singer of a husband . . .”

“Whorey? No, that is the very rub, he did not—”

“You misrender me. His fault, I mean, to wed a wife whose years are but a third his threescore span. His fault to let her languish unslaked. His fault to throw the two of us so much together, telling me how much you loved my songs, telling you how much I loved your singing of them. His fault for living in such purblind holiness, such ignorance of fleshly wants, such idiot innocence that he could not foresee the natural outcome of it all. Yes,
his
the fault! All his! Ah, damn him for a prating prig!”

She murmured tonelessly, “It was of latter days the Duke eschewed my bed. When first we wed, my youthful flesh so kindled him that his silver locks and holy ways were quite forgot, and he was less like monk and more like a monkey, or, as one might say, like goat or bull or stallion, what you will. Then, for reasons never understood but which I took for sad depletion of his aged energies, he grew mild and no more than a brother to me . . .”

“Brother?” the troubadour scoffed. “Grandsire!”

A dank draft of air tinkled the bones of an old skeleton that hung by dry wrists from rusted ceiling chains. It drew their eyes and their unvoiced wonderings: who had it been and how long ago and was it a man or a woman? For what had it died and how had it died—strung up with grim simplicity to starve, or had there been other things, less simple? The man shuddered and the woman wept afresh and both were silent for a while.

Then he said, “Let us think clearly. In all his long life, has the Duke ever been feared for harshness? Has he condemned to torture even the most black-hearted malefactors? Has he so much as flogged the lowest churl? Is he not laughed at by lackeys for his softness? Sneered at as a weak and womanish wight? Is not his meekness the mock and marvel of the land? Is he not praised by priests and prelates for his piety, his charity, his unending orisons, his saintliness? Well? Do I speak true?”

A stifled “Yes” escaped the crouched woman in the neighboring cage.

He resumed: “How, then, can it be that such a man could visit hideous torments upon two human creatures, and one of them his comely wife?”

She sniffled, her head crammed between her knees, her tears running in rivulets down her bare legs to glisten on her toenails. “You grasp at straws,” she moaned. “You heard him. Seven days of torture—”

“Of
punishment!”
he crowed. “And what, pray, does
he
deem punishment, that lily-livered nun of a man? Fasting and kneeling and praying and mortifying the flesh? Hair shirts for seven days? Stern sermons, righteous rhetoric?” He laughed. “A little discomfort, humble show of repentance and a deal of yawning boredom!
That
is the ‘torture' you fear!” He laughed again, rocking back on his heels as far as the cage would permit.

The woman delivered herself of a despondent sigh. “You are a fool,” she said without rancor, as a plain statement of fact. “On the seventh day, we die. That was his command.”

“Demised!”
he said. “We are to be
demised
upon the seventh day!”

“The selfsame thing . . .”

“Not so! A word of many meanings! Chief among them: to be
released!”
He laughed louder. “Released! Can corpses be released? Can cold cadavers be granted freedom? No! We will but genuflect and beg forgiveness for seven short days—one day for each of the cardinal sins, you heard the pious dotard—and then we will be set free. Free! ‘Irrevocably demised'—released without revoke! Our worries are for naught!”

Her eyelids, puffed and pink from weeping, opened slowly and her eyes sought his, scornfully, piteously. “Do you so soon forget? Is that thing within your skull of no more substance than a fishnet? Has fear so much unmanned you that your mind does not recall what else was said? A thing about our
eyes and tongues?”

He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it. Sick horror shadowed his face once more.

She sneered, “Equivocate your way out of that!”

Soon, he smiled. “For your unkindness and unpleasant words, I should allow you to continue thinking we will lose those necessary and delightful organs. Why should I comfort you, when for my pains I reap but snide rebukes?” He chuckled. “And so I will be mum.”

A long silent moment passed. At length, she cried out, “Speak, wretch!”

He laughed triumphantly. “Because I love you, sweetmeat, I will speak. And you will hearken. Call back to mind those dreadful words about our eyes and tongues. Recall who spoke them. Was it your saintly husband? Or was it a somewhat lesser lord, a slavering menial, none other than our lackwit turnkey?”

She gave it thought. “My husband said . . .”

“Your husband said we must not look upon or speak to one another. This is to be done, said he, by the most direct of means. Well, then. Gags and blindfolds! Are they not more direct than pincers and hot irons? Our stupid jailer was but wool-gathering, unlawfully elaborating upon your husband's orders. Those orders, when they are carried out, will be no more stringent than the rapping of a child's knuckles. Believe this, my saucy chuck—fear is a phantasm born out of air; it has not dam nor sire. Fret no further, dry your tears. A week of sackcloth and ashes, and we will be absolved, forgiven, and most magnanimously
demised.”

His words contained a certain logic. She began to be assured. “I pray you are right,” she said.

“Trust in me,” he replied. “Your husband would not allow us to be either tortured or slain.”

A little later, the warder, that kindly man, returned and greeted them with a cheery smile and sat down near them to eat a bowl of gruel, his meagre supper. Between slurpings and smackings, he spoke:

“His Grace, the Duke, he says as how 'twould be unjust for you to dwell in ignorance of what is soon to come. Fair's fair, he says, being no cruel man, no tyrant like some I've served, no fiend who would allow poor gentles like yourselves to fear that worst of all bad fates—that is to say, things unknown. Far better, says he, for them to know what lies in store for them, and certain it is there's truth and wisdom in that, by bloody Christ's own hooks, if my lady will forgive the language. So go, good man, he says to me, go back to them and tell them both each single thing that will be done to them, the seven things in seven days, and be not chary of detail, he says, for it is good they know the most, that they may fear the least and in serenity consign their souls to Heaven. Aye, he's a fine man, a Godly man, is His Grace.”

Wiping his lips and setting aside his empty bowl, the jolly fellow said, “Well, now, tomorrow is the first day of the seven, is it not, so at the brink of dawn, after the good night's sleep I hope you'll have, this is what will be done upon the pair of you . . .”

When he told them of the First Day, they paled. When he told them of the Second Day, they groaned. When he told them of the Third Day, they cursed. When he told them of the Fourth Day, they wept. When he told them of the Fifth Day, they screamed. When he told them of the Sixth Day, they retched. When he told them of the Seventh and Final Day, a day that took almost a score of minutes in the telling, they fainted in the middle of it and he had to douse them into wakefulness with cold water, in order to finish it out. “And that be the whole of it,” he smiled, “after which there will be no vile heathen disrespect for the remains but decent burial and Christian obsequies for both. So said His Grace. Good night to you, then, my lady, young sir. Sleep well.” Humming a tune, he left the dungeon, closing the metal door with a dismal clang.

The youth, maddened by despair, rattled the bars of his cage, beat his fists against them, clawed at the lock until his fingers bled. At length, he collapsed into a lump of quivering, whimpering flesh.

She, her eyes blank with shock, mouthed disjointed words in a voice no stronger than a whisper. “Obscene . . . disgusting . . . more loathsome than I could ever dream . . . more horrible than all the agonies of Hell!
Seven days!
Each day unending! Oh God! To suffer thus? To undergo such foul abominations for a few moments of pleasure? No! No! . . .”

Her lover looked up at her with a slackened face. He blubbered: “You must beg him, plead with him, entreat him! Tell him it was
you
who tempted me, and I, poor human clay, was sucked inexorably to the lodestone of your lust. Tell him that! Why should we
both
die so horribly? Why should I suffer for your unfaithfulness?”

She shrieked at him: “Coward! Serpent! You would see me ripped and broken, to save your own skin?
You
must seek his mercy, tell him you snared my soul with devilish tricks and necromantic arts, rendering me a helpless slave to your cravings!”

“I? Scream my throat to shreds for seven unthinkable days and nights—all for a wench? A pair of lips, and eyes, and—and—and—”

His stammering tongue was impaled by something he saw outside his cage. He blinked. He licked dry lips. “Look,” he said, pointing with an unsteady hand.

She looked. There on the stone floor, near the empty bowl, not far from the cages in which they were bent double, lay a heartlifting circle of hope: the warder's keyring.

“The k—”
she began to shout, but “Shhh!” her lover cautioned, his finger to his lips. He whispered hoarsely: “Not a word. Not a sound. This is the Hand of Providence itself.”

Also in a whisper, she said, “Stop prating holy hogwash like my husband and
get it.”

He stretched his arm out between the bars of his cage, but his reach fell far too short. He squeezed his naked shoulder painfully between the bars, extending his reach, but still his fingertips raked empty air, inches away from the ring of keys. Finally, exhausted, he went limp.