Iron Chamber of Memory (2 page)

Hal stood in the snow. He wanted to follow his mother and comfort her, but he did not move. He shifted his soaked feet in the snow uneasily, his best shoes wetted, a fierce look on his square and simple face, as if he wanted to strike someone or break something.

He wanted an explanation from his sister about this sanitarium where his mother had been abandoned. Why was she not staying at Elaine’s apartment, as they had so often discussed? What sort of institution could it be, what sort of venal fools ran it that would so negligently send old ladies out to funerals in the snow without a coat?

He wanted to yell at his sister, but her absence robbed him of that release.

And more than that, he wanted an explanation from the priest about this world where his mother had been abandoned. Had Heaven forgotten mankind? What kind of world was it that so negligently, so cruelly, allowed a helpless woman’s husband to decline so swiftly, and die so suddenly, when he was so needed?

But Hal had a taxi to catch, holiday crowds with whom to wrestle, and an airplane to board, and a sea to cross. He stalked away from the cemetery with none of his questions answered.

“Should it be horribly
improper
were we to break in?”

From behind him in the wooded twilight, the voice of the green-eyed girl was dry and arch, a slow music in her throat. She was the fiancée of his best friend, Manfred Hathaway, who had been his roommate during their undergraduate years at Oxford. He had just inherited this island. He had been Hal’s only friend at school, and the only one to share his dreams and his solemn oath. When she came along, at first he resented her as an intruder, but soon she grew into a dear friend and the third member of their circle. Her name was Laurel du Lac.

He came free of the last trees of the forest path. Hal Landfall wondered why a thrill of disquiet ran through him as he beheld, through the stone pillars of the ancient gate, tall and angular on the crest above him, gigantic in the gloom, the High House of Wrongerwood. He had been so eager to come, to see the survivals from the period of late antiquity that he studied and so loved. In the dialect spoken by the islanders, the house was also called
La Seigneurie
, the Master-house.

This was the fastness and the residence of the Seigneur of the Island of Sark. Queen Elizabeth the First had granted letters patent to one Helier de Carteret, Seigneur of St. Ouen in Jersey, granting him and his heirs Sark as a fief in perpetuity, provided he kept the island free of pirates, and occupied by at least forty of her subjects.

All the windows were dark. The chimneys were unlit, free of smoke. Four towers, each of different shape and height, rose against the stars like the horns of a beast.

Hal Landfall felt that strange sensation called
déjà vu
, as if he had been here before, standing in a spot like this, staring uphill at the dark and oddly eclectic mansion, with a girl one half-step behind him.

Her voice was as gentle as the rustle of the young leaves beneath the caress of the scented wind of the early spring night, or the murmur of the waves caressing the beach. “I’ve never felt so very
felonious
before!”

Hal had waited nearly until sunset for Manfred Hathaway to keep his promise, and meet him with a horse cart, and show him the house and island he had unexpectedly inherited last year. The island was charming, and Hal felt strangely at home surrounded by this glimpse of living history, as he never felt in the streets of New York or London. Hal’s impatience grew unbearable. He wanted Manfred to come and introduce to him the treasures of this small island. Who knew what quaint and forgotten things, the flotsam of time, were here?

Neither the constable nor the seneschal, nor any of the villagers in shouting distance, seemed to know what could have become of Manfred, their new Seigneur.

Hal therefore left his luggage at the dock, under a tarp, with no one to watch it and no fear whatever that anyone would molest it.

A dozen times he drew out his little black appointment book (where he also jotted down notes and questions, as the thought struck him, for his dissertation), and checked the date. It was February, two months after his father’s funeral. The college was not in session, and this was one of the few trips he had been able to afford. The December flight to New York had wiped out nearly all of his stipend for the current semester, and only the urgency of the request from his friend had sufficed to summon him from his books.

In his appointment book he had jotted down the address of the manor house.
Le Seigneurie. Sark, Guernsey. Rade Street.

It was not hard to navigate. As he strolled through the tiny town, with its stone houses and clay chimney pots and horse-drawn carriages, Hal saw rustic men doff their caps to their womenfolk, or greet with a bow the parish priest. That worthy raised his hand in a gesture of blessing Hal had ere now seen only in images in tapestries or stained glass. From the sight of things, these folk were closer in their works and ways to the days of yore than any recent generation. It was as if the common people from the time period of his studies had been preserved, but not the knights and ladies, holy hermits, wise men nor sacred kings. What was knighthood now in England, save an honor paid successful rock stars for being filthy rich?

Here, the jeering vulgarity of the modern age seemed absent. The timelessness was enchanting to him. The forgotten world seemed but a step or two away. He wished he knew in what direction that step lay! He resolved to stay here, rather than in Oxford town, while doing the onerous work on his dissertation; he hoped the surroundings would inspire him when his willpower flagged.

The island’s one inn, a refurbished sixteenth-century farmhouse owned by the Stocks family, was within view of the dock at Port du Moulin, and there was only one main road from which every other path branched, running over steep green hills, tall standing stones, past sheep pastures, apple orchards, and farms, running south to north along the spine of the island. The north end of the island was rougher ground, unsuitable for farming, and covered with a few acres of wild trees as old as the last Ice Age.

All the coastline to the north was interrupted by looming rocks, narrow coves, and booming caves. The south was crisscrossed under the earth with mining tunnels. It would have been a smuggler’s paradise here, and Hal wondered how the first seigneur had kept his promise to clear the pirates away.

It was remarkably dark under the trees. The path as it climbed grew tricky and rocky, in places like a staircase, with stones and ruts harder to see as the sun failed. Hal was unnerved when he thought he heard soft, light footsteps padding after him in the deepening gloom.

He waited, gripping his walking stick, wondering at his sudden, unexpected sense of fear. There was nothing dangerous on this small and rustic island, surely. But why were the footsteps so quiet, and so stealthy? And what had happened to Manfred?

So he hid himself behind the bole of an ancient oak by the side of the path, waiting. When the sound of the stealthy, half-inaudible footfalls passed him by, he stepped out suddenly behind his pursuer.

She gave a yelp of surprise, and then burst into a merry laugh, seizing him around the waist. Hal found himself suddenly in the strangely familiar embrace of a girl in black silk. Reflexively, his arms closed around her, tightening as if to protect her. She clung to him, as if in fear, even though she had been the one pursuing him. She buried her face in his chest, as if she was a woman crying, but his shirt remained dry. The movement knocked the wide straw hat she had been wearing from her head and it fell silently to the ground. As the evening breeze blew over her hair, a burst of well-known fragrance, like honeysuckle after a spring rain, assailed his nostrils.

Suddenly remembering himself, Hal released her. With a lingering squeeze, Laurel let go of him as well, and she stepped back, breathless.

Her hair was dark as a thundercloud. She currently wore it up, but Hal knew that when it was unbound, it fell well past her hips, brushing the curve of her calves. Her eyes were green as glass, and glinted in the dark like the eyes of a she-wolf, large and expressive. Her skin was the fairest he had ever seen, free from moles or freckles, eerie in its porcelain whiteness. She was not an outdoorsy girl, though she had the vivid, high-cheekboned features that spoke of Spanish or Italian blood, or perhaps of a long-lost ancestor from Araby. Her lips were wide and full, and her smile was full of mischief.

Like Hal himself, she preferred to dress in a modest and old-fashioned style. Her wanton masses of hair were pinned up high in a Gibson, a coiffeur so large it made her head seem small in comparison and exposed a graceful neck. She wore a high, starched collar, a blue bow tie, a dark blouse of silk with opal studs, a dark sash nearly as wide as a man’s cummerbund, and a long skirt that brushed her black-leather, high-topped buttoned shoes. The vintage, narrow-waisted style she affected could have been designed with her in mind, so elegantly did it frame her timeless charms.

Her motions and gestures were poised and graceful, as if she were a ballerina. The footfalls that had pursued him had been light, not due to any deliberate stealth, but rather to a naturally fawnlike gait.

“You so startled me.” In the deepening twilight, her voice sounded unexpectedly close and low, almost a whisper.

She explained that she had been waiting in the inn for Manfred since yesterday. “He was supposed to meet me, to show me the new house he inherited. But he forgot. When I saw you from the window walking up the Rue de Sermon, I called out, but you did not hear me. I trotted after you this whole way, waving, but you never turned to look. And once you were in the woods, the path bent and twisted, so you were never in sight. But I am not one to give up so easily!”

“My apologies,” he said gallantly, inclining his head.

He was extremely glad to see her. In part because a familiar face was always a comfort when one was alone in a strange place, but mainly because, upon seeing her, he was struck by the cheering thought that while Manfred might conceivably forget one of them or the other, he was hardly likely to forget them both!

Hal had known her over the last two years, as she and Manfred had been seeing each other steadily. The two of them had put off their wedding until after Manfred’s dissertation was due at the end of the spring term. Hal had been selected as best man, and he took his duties seriously. He determined to be as fiercely loyal to Laurel as he was to Manfred. When at the University, he made it his mission in life to keep other students and professors from coming between Manfred and Laurel.

They spent a few moments looking for her dropped hat, gradually circling out from the path as they searched, but the did not find it. It seemed the wind had taken it away and hidden it somewhere among the trees. He found the size of them oddly disquieting, rather like seeing a cow taller than a man. They were giants; it was an old-growth forest. It was amazing to him that in all the years back before the reach of history, despite all the boats and ships that sailed forth from France and from England, no mariner ever cut down these mighty boles for ships, no crofter for planks, no shepherd for firewood.

He called off the search, saying the two would have to come back in daylight. She took his hand playfully.

“Now you have to lead me there. I don’t know this path. I’ve never been here, not at night, I mean. Small wonder they call it Wrongerwood! Everything about it is wrong.”

He said, “Is that really the reason for the name?”

“No,
Wronger
is a corruption of the French. Like most things English, I suppose. It comes from
Rongeur d’Os
. It means Wood of the Gnawer-of-Bones. Lovely name, don’t you think? After the ghastly hound which supposedly haunts this forest. But perhaps we can we talk of something more pleasant?”

He agreed to change the subject, and they walked under the trees together as the world grew darker.

He asked her about the house and the island, and she told him what she knew.

The island of Sark rose sharply from the sea eighty miles south of England, between Jersey and Guernsey. It was small, inhabited by less than a thousand souls all told. Magdalen College, where Hal and Manfred first met, was more populous. He tried to recall how many people lived in his dormitory; it was entirely possible that there were more people living there than were now present on the island.

There was one abandoned silver mine on the south spur of the island, called Little Sark, and one manor house to the north, on Greater Sark, perched on a promontory rising three hundred feet above the sea. The two segments of Little Sark and Greater Sark were connected by an isthmus called
La Coupée
, a bridge of rock as tall and narrow as a wall. It was three hundred feet long, with a dizzying drop of two hundred sixty feet or more to either side. Before railings were put up, children were wont to crawl across on hands and knees, fearful of being thrown over the side by the powerful winds that often rushed out to sea.

The island’s single village held exactly one inn with rooms to let for travelers, whose lower story, which had once been a livery stable, was the public alehouse fronting the road. This macadam road, the only one on the island, had been paved by German prisoners of war. The post office was in back, where the postman, who was also the volunteer constable, and something of a local hero as well, kept his bicycle.

Sark was not just an island in the Channel, it was also apparently an island in the stream of history, stubbornly unchanging. It was the last feudal government in Europe. The seigneur held it as a fief directly from the Crown, and the island landowners held their parcels from him in return for their ceremonial vows of service, duly and properly sworn. The parliament of the isle, called the Chief Pleas, consisted of the Seigneur, the Seneschal, the forty Tenants and the twelve Deputies.