Iron Chamber of Memory (13 page)

Hal had blown out the candle on the table here, so that he would not be tempted to pull out a smoke and light up. And it was easier to brood when sitting here, staring at the leaping flames of the wide fireplace that occupied the rear of the tavern opposite the bar.

He loved Laurel. That was the simple and terrible thing.

It was fortunate that she had no idea. All her thoughts were absorbed in Manfred, whom she loved and whose love she deserved. She would never guess, she must never be permitted to guess, his true feelings.

This meant he had to act normal, act natural, and neither arrive too early nor too late at the weekly dinners he had arranged with Manfred. But, of course (so the frantic squirrel of his thought ran and ran, as if on a treadmill) he could not always arrive exactly on time, because that might seem suspicious, too.

Hal heard the clomping of boots, then the rustling and shuffling of a trio of local men gathered into the booth behind him, smelling of hay and sheep and honest sweat. Hal smiled in surprise to hear them toast the Queen with a clink of noggins, before seating themselves for some serious drinking. It seemed the sort of thing that real men with deep roots did.

Manfred had once told him that the islanders with stubborn loyalty still toasted to “Le Duc”—the Duke of Normandy—who ruled the Channel Islands until the Fall of Rouen in 1206. Perhaps these were modern, forward-looking youths, who had caught up to the Sixteenth Century. Hal smiled, now straining to listen for other amusing or time-defying oddities.

The Sarkmen spoke in a patois of French, called Sercquiais. Manfred had insisted it was not a dialect, but its own language, and claimed, (but for what reason, he did not say) that this language could never be written down. Be that as it may, it was close enough to French to let Hal puzzle out their meaning.

After a round of coarse jokes, complaints about the market and the health and safety regulations, or other idle matters, the three lads dropped their voices to murmurs.

The first voice was raspy. “…from a penniless student studying old books, to the Lord of the Manor in a single forenoon? It’s not right…”

The second voice was sullen and thin, like that of an older man: “What old books, is my wondering. Who knows what the old heathens wrote down, back before the dark time?”

Hal froze, not daring to breathe. What was that? Had he heard that word correctly? The Sarks’ patois added a
dr
sound to some of their word endings. Had the farmer said
noir ans
(dark years) or
n’ouidr un
(not a yes)?

The third voice was more melodic, but dripped with sarcasm, “Lord Manfred’s not killed his aunts and cousins. He’d need to fear of the ghosts of the house.”

Hal was flabbergasted. Were grown men of this day and age taking about ghosts? He must have misheard. The patois was throwing him off. The word for
spectacle
or
spectrum
was nearly the same as the word for specters. Perhaps the farmboy only meant Manfred would fear the
sight
of the house, or the
extent
of the house?

The sullen second voice said, “He’s a studying one, reading the old ways from the old books. He knows the words to open and close. Coalblack dare not turn to the dogs…”

Hal was not sure what that meant. The word might have been a name: Colby rather than Coalblack. But what was that last part? Turn to the dogs? Turn away the dog? Turn into a dog?

The sullen voice: “…shots from the House on feast day of Joachim and Anne. Man’s gun.”

The raspy voice: “A bad day for our kind! The day of the Grandparents of the White Child is ill of star and stuck with frowning planets, for the older ghosts walk then.”

Older sights? No. The word was definitely
ghosts
this time.

“And what has become of Nightenthrope?” This seemed to be a fourth voice than had spoken before, a deeper voice. “He has not been seen since&hellip.. The new lord killed him dead, killed young Nightenthrope, just as he killed the old Dame…the Countess said she was one of us.”

But it was impossible. From the sounds, there had only been three who stepped into the booth, Hal was sure. Maybe one of the three men had simply lowered his pitch, or cleared his throat with a strong drink, or was doing a voice impersonation, or…or they were talking on a speakerphone, here on the island with no phone service! There had to be a reasonable explanation.

The smell from the booth seemed to be changing. Someone had brought in a big dog, perhaps. But there had been no sound of claws scrabbling on the floorboards. The stench of dog was unmistakable.

The fourth voice said, “Nightinthrope must have seen somewhat too much, or heard.”

The sneering voice said, “He was always the peeking and prying sort. Peering here and there. Stuck his nose in too far this time, is all. Better off without him.”

The fourth voice, the deep one, spoke. “I say the new Lord is a murderer and kinslayer. Killed his own blood, that's what. The thing is, what are we to do about it? No outsider will help us, no Englishmen.”

What would Hal see if he stood up and peered over the partition separating the booths? A wild, irrational fear took hold of him, and he feared that he would see shapes no longer human slumped over their drinks, hairy-faced things, fanged things, with pointed ears poking out from under their caps.

The raspy voice said, “No. Wrong you are. The new one would not soil his hands. He is quality, he is. Too fine by half. The American did it. He has the killing look in his eye. I’ve seen those who come back from war. They have the look. Sure, there is a sword in his cane. Or a gun barrel. Why else carry it? Who carries a cane? He has no limp.”

The fourth voice said, “We must deal with the American first. The empty cave will tell us how. We will heed the empty cave.”

Hal felt cold sweat tickling him. Was he hearing men plan his own murder? It seemed impossible, something from a dark film with a sadistic director.

Empty caves? He must have heard wrong.

Cave was
grotte
. Maybe the thickly accented voice had said
grot
or
gueux
, which was slang for a wretch, a ragamuffin, or a beggar.

But that made less sense. Why would an empty beggar give them orders? On the other hand,
cruex
could also mean sunken, or gaunt, or vain. So these men who smelled like dog fur were getting advice from either a sunken cave, a gaunt wretch, or a vain ragamuffin.

Hal’s thoughts rattled in his head like dice in a cup. What was real? Perhaps he was hallucinating. It ran in his family, after all.

The sneering voice uttered a breathless sort of wheezing laugh, “It’s all in your bad dreaming, boys. Listen to your talk! Were the new Master a killer, why is he so open handed with his money? Mother Dove to cook his meals he hired. Those damned and rowdy Wolfhounds, got work up at the Wrongerwood House weeding and planting. Open the old gardens. Why them?”

The other voices mumbled and grunted, but did not contradict the sneering voice.

The voice continued: “Burt and Liam Wolfhound are the worst farmhands on the island! The Wolfhounds? Eh, think of that? Why them?”

But no, he was not saying
Wolfhound
. Manfred had mentioned hiring a man named Liam Levrier to do gardening and keep the grounds. Hal realized his ears had misled him.
Levrier
meant “wolfhound” or “greyhound”, but it was also a proper name. It was if a non-English speaker were to have overheard talk about a man named
Smith
and think the conversation concerned shooing horses or mending pots.

“The Levriers? Eh, think of that? Why them? ’Cause the folks is poor and wanting, what with their mother in hospital and all. Lord Hathaway is taking up here, on Sark, not away in London like the Dame.”

At that moment, the barkeep came bustling up to refill drinks and swap gossip, and the talk turned to hat day at school, or the visiting historian from St Ouen in Jersey who was writing a book on Commandant Lanz during the war years.

There was a commotion at the door as two of the local women came in, one of them calling crossly for her husband. Hal heard the farmhands saunter to the door to expostulate, excuse, and explain. He was not sure if there were three or four sets of footsteps, and an inner voice warned him not to be seen. A few feet from him, with a wall between it and the rest of the room, was a side door. It led him past the larder, wine cabinet, and privy and then out into the bright late-afternoon sunshine.

Here his fears evaporated, suddenly revealed as irrational indeed. There were no hairy monsters plotting, but there clearly was trouble among the locals, and evil suspicions to be allayed. He would have to warn Manfred. He almost turned back to see who those farmhands were, discover their names, and see if they had been four or three. But then the need to arrive on time without being early or late pricked him, and he strode up Rade Street, twirling his walking stick.

Before he entered the forest, Hal took out his memorandum book and made a note to himself. His memory had been rather spotty, and he was afraid of forgetting even simple things.

Warn Wolfhounds about the Talking Animals! The Gaunt Man has landed on Sark. His stronghold is in the sunken caves.

He chuckled at his outlandish wording. Phrasing it that way would certainly fix it in memory.

Better yet, Hal took a moment to shut his eyes and picture the talking animals gathered at the doors and windows of his memory mansion, fangs bared and claws upraised, carrying torches and clubs. For some reason, there was also an image of Laurel diving into the fish pond behind the house. She was wearing a black one-piece bathing suit of sealskin leather, very dark and shiny, and did not seem worried about the talking animals gathered at the front. The diamond necklace like a circle of cold fire was around her kissable neck.

What had he meant that to remind him of?

Mnemonic devices did no good if you could not remember them.

This was his first time seeing the Seigneurie House by day. Before going in, he took the opportunity to walk around the main house, retracing more or less his footsteps of the first visit, when he had broken in.

The great house looked smaller in the sunlight, but not any less impressive. The craftsmanship of architecture was astonishing, and the artistry of images in stone corbels or stained glass windows. Each detail was impregnated with the weight of time.

The simple and masculine lines of the South Wing with its chapel and signal tower betrayed an Edwardian influence; the romantic flourishes and eccentricities of ornament of the North Wing were Victorian; the classical portico of the West Wing and many brick chimneys betrayed Georgian tastes; the square and austere Main Wing to the East was Stuart; the uppermost dome was intricately Gothic, a phantasmagoric display of flying buttresses and leaning drainpipes shaped as gargoyles; the Cloister tower beneath it was Anglo-Saxon in its sparse stone dignity.

Thunderstruck, Hal realized that this house was the memory mansion of England. Each period of history back to the Battle of Hastings was represented here.

And who knew what earlier and older things might be buried beneath, from the age of Arthur, or Caesar, or the prehistoric Picts who raised massive monoliths and henges in high places or dark vales and danced and sacrificed and committed abominations to wild and maddened beast-masked gods whose names no scholar can unearth?

To the rear, he saw half a dozen men in work clothes hoeing and ditching in the barren brown square of what had once been the gardens. Two more lads, armed with ladders, were in the apple tree arbor. He wondered if these were the Levriers, whom he had heard called the worst gardeners on the island. He saw one of them digging with his hands rather than a shovel, and suspected it might be so.

Something winking and shining in the grass at the foot of an apple tree caught his eye.

Hal came closer, and saw the sunlight reflected off a small metal object as big as a man’s finger. He stooped and plucked it from the grass. It was a spent shell from a heavy-caliber rifle.

He looked, and saw this tree was marred and scraped with claw marks. The bark was peeled away in long parallels, and the living wood beneath was scarred. Hal stepped under the tree, knelt down. Here were dozens of spent shells where the grass was trampled, and a broken twigs overhead. The number of shells was frightening to him. He was not sure why, but his heart was pounding madly.

Preoccupied, Hal jumped when a huge dog behind him spoke. “What’ve you got there, sir?”

Hal found himself on his feet, back to the tree, walking stick raised high like a weapon. A stalwart and scruffy-looking freckle-faced red-haired man in a full beard and a brown smock was reeling back, saying, “Hold on, hold on, sir! I meant no harm!”

Hal blinked, wondering what he had just seen. Was his mind playing tricks? The man was about his age, give or take a year, and burly like a linebacker. His hands were horny with hard work and looked like he could crack walnuts in his knuckles without resorting a nutcracker. “Sorry! I was just thinking you were a—that is, I am startled. Are you Levrier?”

“Liam’s my name, sir.”

Hal pointed at the ground, then at the tree. “What do you make of this?”

“That’s not my fault, sir.”

“No one is blaming anyone for anything, Liam. You asked me what I have. Here.” Hal tossed him the shell.

Liam sniffed the shell. “Fired not today, but not long past. No rust. A week or two.”

“Fired by whom?”

“England has pretty strong laws about guns, but hunting is still allowed for some lords.”

“Fired at what?”

“Hm. I don’t know what you’d shoot with this. Maybe a yak. But ain’t no yaks in these parts. There is Red Deer in the woods yonder.” He gestured toward Wrongerwood. “But they belong to the Queen, and no one hunts them.”

“Are there still Red Deer in England?” Hal asked, feeling a moment of delight. “But how could they be on this small island?”

“That I could not say, sir. Island is bigger than it seems. And your eyes would be big as saucers, if you knew what can come out of them woods.”