The Pendragon Legend (17 page)

“I know,” he said.

“You know? Were you in the tower at the time?”

“No. It’s not important where I was. I also know that you went down into the crypt. And I believe you solved the mystery of Rosacrux’ identity.”

“He and Asaph Pendragon were one and the same person, were they not?”

“Yes. Asaph was the Master. The others were mere disciples—including Fludd, who was by no means the outstanding pupil. He wasn’t from a very good family, and he was desperate to publish everything he knew. That’s why he wrote so much that now looks so ridiculous. Every explanation falsifies the original truth. Real scholars don’t express their knowledge in words. Asaph hadn’t the least desire to acquaint greengrocers with his discoveries.”

I felt he was trying to evade the main question.

“Then where is Asaph’s body? The tomb is empty … ”

For a long time he made no answer.

“He might have been removed to some other place. Possibly to the park here in Llanvygan. The tomb was opened by John Bonaventura, the thirteenth Earl.”

John Bonaventura! I’d come across the name before, reading the family history in the British Museum. And even then I’d had the feeling I encountered it somewhere else before that. Suddenly I remembered where.

“That’s right. He opened the tomb because the hundred and twenty years had passed.”

“How do you know about that?” the Earl exclaimed.

“I read it in the memoirs of Lenglet du Fresnoy.”

“Lenglet du Fresnoy? Who wrote that history of the alchemists, around 1760?”

“Exactly so.”

“What else is in those memoirs?”

“I don’t recall … but there was something rather strange. Something about Asaph Pendragon not having died at all … but the details have escaped me.”

“How did you come by du Fresnoy’s memoirs? Where are they?”

“The manuscript was a bequest of the Viscount of Braedhill. We catalogued it about a year ago. That’s when I came across it. It’s now in the British Museum.”

“What are you saying? In the BM? That’s horrible!”

He was pacing back and forth with his huge strides. I suddenly grasped that the dimensions of the room had been calculated for just those strides. The floor reverberated and the
half-dressed
old worthies on the shelves were trembling and nodding furiously.

“We must do something, Doctor; we must do something. I can’t bear the thought that every Tom, Dick and Harry should have access to the most carefully guarded secrets of my ancestors. I feel as I would if a public promenade had been driven through the family crypt … And besides, I have to know what is in those memoirs. We must get hold of that manuscript … But right now I can’t go to London … those gangsters … I have it! Doctor, you must go to London on my behalf.”

“With pleasure, My Lord.”

The Earl grew calmer, and returned to his seat, like the great wave that follows the storm.

“The BM is to some extent in my debt. When I succeeded to the title I presented them with a number of interesting volumes. You must call on the Director of the Reading Room and offer him an exchange. What do you think we might put his way?”

“One of the Persian codices, perhaps.”

“A splendid idea. Tomorrow morning we’ll draw up a list of
everything
we have in that line. You can tell him they are free to choose. Any one of them, I should think, is worth ten times the Fresnoy. If there are any problems, refer to my solicitor, Alexander Seton, of the Inner Temple. Call on him anyway, and talk the whole
business
through. I’ll go and write the letters straight away—one to him, and the other to the Director.”

“My Lord,” I said, with real feeling. “I shall be very proud to mount the Museum steps as the emissary of Llanvygan.”

There was a knock at the door, and Rogers entered. He handed my cartridges to me.

“I saw nothing suspicious in the park,” he intoned.

“Take another close look at all the doors,” the Earl replied. “And set a guard on the stairs going to Cynthia’s and Osborne’s rooms. Since that business with the trapdoor you can never be sure … ”

I took my leave and went off to bed.

I was sitting in my room, smoking a cigarette and feeling
generally
agitated. On a night like this it was hard to imagine how a pipe of peace could bring philosophical serenity to the human countenance.

Tomorrow I would be on my way to London, on a commission for the Earl of Gwynedd. And how much had happened today! Rosacrux’ tomb, the trapdoor, Maloney’s sudden revelations and subsequent disappearance; the secrets buried in those books like so many winding subterranean passages. Who could sleep at such a time, between walls as changeable as theatrical backdrops?

There are times when everything seems to take on a deeper significance. Through the open window drifted a subtle blend of scents and aromas: the fragrance of flowers, the altogether more solemn exhalations of the trees, the rank odour of straw and
stables
, and something quite bitter that I could not identify. At times like this we feel the melancholy of the sixteen-year-old in despair at ever finding love, mingled with an anxious hopefulness about the days to come; we drink to great achievements we have yet to
accomplish, and we register every tremor of noise within a radius of ten miles.

We become aware that there is a stir and bustle in the kitchen below, and that someone—a belated gardener?—is walking beneath the window. The light is still on in Cynthia’s window: how I would love to go to her now. She is, no doubt, typing a letter. Every other day she writes a twenty-page epistle to her mysterious woman friend.

It is summer, yet I am intensely aware that it will again be
winter
—white-robed Christmas, when even tea has a somehow
different
taste. How I would love to be on a boat in the emerald lagoons of a coral island … How I should savour the experience, and surrender to all my desires.

People die on days like these.

Poor Joe, for example. I was feeling very much like this the night he took poison. Or again that morning just before I read in the paper that Jennifer Andrews and her party of holidaymakers had drowned at sea. We never know when our souls will meet their fate (my thoughts: the words are Madach’s).

Sleep was out of the question, so I considered a walk in the park. But an indefinable fear smothered every impulse.

Eerie images attract one another. The less you want to think about them, the more they clamour for attention. My mind kept returning to the Earl’s weird animals, the huge axolotls, and their deathly-white, gelatinous bodies cruising among the
long-stemmed
water plants. Some of them must have died ten times … if one escaped now, and got into my room …

I switched on the main light and paced up and down.

The eerie anxiety that filled me was some sort of reaction of nerves inflamed by a day in which too much had happened, more than enough to fill several months.

This rustling I can hear … must surely be an owl? Strange bird, able to see in the dark, like the Connemarans.

That call … must be the call of some bird, woken suddenly. If I knew anything at all about birds I might have been able to identify it …

That sharp crack—a stout branch in the wind?

Those velvet footsteps … no doubt one of the huge dogs. There
are two of them, one called Maxim, the other a St Bernard called Emir. Strange that such large creatures should walk so very quietly.

And those muffled noises … as though someone were prodding my head with a pole wrapped in sponge … Someone is walking about in the Earl’s room above my head. No doubt he can’t sleep either.

The moon is like a … like a … but who nowadays could invent a new simile for the moon? The moon is the moon.

And now this noise, like someone scraping on the masonry. Perhaps the guardian angels of Llanvygan are polishing the walls to make them glow brighter in the morning sun?

But, Doctor, something really is scraping against the walls!

Then a horrible, utterly inhuman scream ripped the night to shreds; followed by a muffled thud, somewhere down below, in some unfathomable depth.

I rushed to the window. Below me, a dark body lay writhing. Above, out on the balcony, someone was standing. Or floating? I really can’t say, the whole scene was so improbable. He was dressed in black—perhaps the millstone ruff was something my
imagination
added? Or was the entire figure a phantom of the mind, born of that strange night and its charge of secret significance?

The apparition remained there for a moment, then vanished.

Then reality returned in a triumphant explosion of noise: the slamming of doors, the pounding of feet, voices
questioning
loudly on all sides. Down in the garden people were running about with torches.

I dashed out into the corridor and down the steps to join them. I was again myself. The witching hour was over.

We stood around the body: the Earl in his dressing gown,
looking
dishevelled, Osborne in a raincoat; everyone looking
altogether
strange.

Someone raised the corpse’s head and turned its face to the light. We recognised it at once. Maloney.

When someone dies everything becomes clear and simple. Alive, he was full of wiles and sinister intentions hidden behind his fantastical yarns. And here he lay. Having established a
suitable
alibi by escaping on the motorbike, he had returned, hoping to make his way up the wall and into the Earl’s apartment. He had
fallen—or been pushed by unknown hands. When they fall from a height of two storeys, even Connemarans die.

Once again the Earl was the great commander, soldierly and impersonal, giving orders for the disposal of the body.

But as it was lifted, I noticed how very oddly the poor chap had fallen. His neck was twisted round and his face turned backwards, the fate of sorcerers in the
Divine Comedy
.

As Osborne and I moved slowly away, I overheard the strange eulogy the Earl made over Maloney’s corpse:

“He was the most amiable assassin I ever met.”

That night I again heard the clatter of hooves. I never do sleep deeply, but as the hours ticked away the excitements of the
previous
day kept me in a constant state of tension. Every five minutes I awoke, then threw myself with a great groan back into the
nightmare
unfolding on the other side of the bed.

It was at around 3am that I heard the hooves. I ran instantly to the window and saw the rider, with the torch in his hand,
galloping
towards Pendragon—just as I had on my first night in the castle.

The Earl was present at breakfast the next morning. He had also invited the Rev Dafyd Jones. Everyone else bore signs of
sleeplessness
, especially Cynthia. The black rings around her eyes and her extreme paleness against the dark dress made her intensely attractive to me. She was again the legendary Lady of the Castle, hounded by the strange misfortune of her family.

The Earl told the vicar about the events leading up to Maloney’s death: the deep suspicion he was under, his inability to produce any defence, his escape on the motorbike and secret return by night, his attempt to break into the Earl’s rooms, his fall from the second storey and the horrible manner of his dying. Though no one knew what his religious affiliation was, the Earl ordered an Anglican burial, to take place that very day, and delegated the arrangements to Osborne. No one knew of any family or friends, as Maloney had never mentioned any, and Rogers advised that he had received no letters during his stay at Llanvygan.

The Earl also repeated his request to me to carry out what we had agreed the day before, and to do so without delay. It then occurred to us that we couldn’t catalogue the Persian codices, as planned, since neither of us knew Persian. We could understand nothing beyond the pictures. He suggested that I should select the five that seemed from their illustrations to be the oldest and most valuable, and take them to London.

I did this, and packed my bags. We had lunch, and I took my leave of the Earl, promising him that I would return with the manuscript as soon as I could.

Next came the touching farewell to Cynthia. It was our first
parting
. Choking with emotion and British reserve, she stammered:

“I do hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us … ” And we were both overcome by an embarrassment that conveyed more than eloquence.

I arrived in London that evening, at my little hotel among the endless rows of similar establishments around the British Museum. Having unpacked, I went down to the dining room to face the compulsory roast beef and the gruesome vegetables that always accompanied it.

After the meal I sat gloomily stirring an orange liquid and debating whether the inability of the English to make a decent cup of coffee was the result of Puritanical Methodist inhibition, when a hand—the heavy hand of a stone statue—descended on my shoulder.

I looked up and discovered an old acquaintance standing over me. I felt mildly pleased to see her. It was Lene Kretzsch, who was studying history at Oxford on a Prussian state scholarship. Her vacations were usually spent in London, working in the British Museum, during which time she would stay at my hotel. As a fellow-researcher in the Reading Room I was a sort of colleague, and we were good friends.

However, I also went in some trepidation of her. If I felt low I would avoid going back to the hotel for supper in case she joined me for a beer afterwards. It wasn’t that she was ugly. On the
contrary
, she was quite a handsome woman in her own substantial way, and she was always a hit with men. You might even say she was attractive, but she belonged to that class of girl whose
stockings have just laddered, or who has just lost a button, or whose blouse has burst open, giving a chap the impression that she was in a state of non-stop physical development.

The awe she inspired in me was the result of her personality. Lene Kretzsch was
Gemütmensch
—thoroughly genial—and really just a large lump of kindness and generosity, but at the same time she was a totally modern woman, always two weeks ahead of the latest thinking. She hated sentimentality and romantic slush, and was a militant advocate of the
Neue Sachlichkeit
—the ‘New Objectivity’.