This New and Poisonous Air (10 page)

He waved his hand. “No need for all that trouble, Kenton,” he said. “But I
am
glad you’re here.” He looked at me carefully, and there was a pinched expression on his
face that I’d never seen before, as if there were a straight pin sticking him from the cushion of his chair. “I want you to take Sir Stephen’s diary,” he told me.

“I couldn’t do that,” I replied. “Lord Weymouth, I couldn’t.”

But he was already attempting to hand it to me, and in his weakness, he dropped it to the floor. The book fell open, revealing its pages to me for the first time, and we both stared down at the stark whiteness of them, utterly blank. It was a journal of some sort, made to look antique, but certainly it had never belonged to a Medieval knight. It was the sort of thing that could be bought at Bainbridge’s. I quickly gathered the book and closed it, putting it beneath my coat. “I’ll take the diary,” I said. “I’ll keep it safe in the suburbs.”

Lord Weymouth laughed. “What would Sir Stephen and Pieter make of the suburbs?” he said.

“I’m sure they’d find adventures there,” I replied. “Now please, we should talk seriously for a moment about your plan.”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t need the book anymore,” he said, “because I have
that
.” He gestured to the wooden crate sitting near the fire. “Each of us, Kenton, is building a collection in life, piece by meager piece. There are many men who do not realize what they seek and would not even know how to look for a capstone—an object that completes the collection. You, for instance—what do you collect?”

I thought of my home in Maiden Bradley. I’d collected nothing in those rooms; Amelia had made most of the decorations.

“What’s the capstone?” I said.

“I’d been tracking it for nearly a year,” he replied. “It surfaced at a Turkish bazaar, believe it or not. A collector
there purchased it and knowing of my interest, contacted me. I had to give him most of my artifacts in trade just to acquire this piece, but it completes the story after all. It’s necessary.”

“What?” I said. “What completes the story?”

He put his hand on his brow, as if even the dim light from the fire were too much for him. “The Burning Armor,” he said softly. “Both their skins, Sir Stephen’s and Pieter’s, will have been inside it. There could be remnants of the boy’s blood even. It is there inside that crate. And here I sit too frightened to open the thing. Aren’t I a ridiculous old man, Kenton?”

“No,” I said. “No, you’re not. But Lord Weymouth—Thomas, the book—”

“Yes,” he said. “You’ll take the book. I know all the stories by heart. And at any rate, I will have the men themselves. I haven’t told you everything, you know. Would you like to hear the end of Sir Stephen’s tale?

“Yes,” I replied, thinking of the empty book beneath my jacket. I certainly could not read the end of the story there.

“The finale then,” he said. “The Duchess of Burgundy came to the flooded tower near the end of Sir Stephen’s life, no longer the powerful woman who’d held the allegory. Her strength and authority had diminished since the rise of the Hapsburgs, but she still dressed the part, wearing heavy robes colored like the skins of ripe plums and her hair was tangled with talismans. She looked more like a witch than an alchemist when she came to the flooded castle, and she sat with the old knight, Sir Stephen of Sorrows, holding both his hands. She was silent for so long, he wondered if she would reveal herself to be some specter, but when she spoke, her voice was thick with living care. She told him she was sorry for the poetry of the allegory. Sorry for the
theater. She’d heard what had happened to his squire—to
Pieter
, for she knew the boy’s name—and she was to blame for the Burning Armor. ‘It was a foolish thing to make,’ she said. ‘Mere simulacra—layers of protection that did not protect, but I bring you a final gift.’ She produced a letter from the pocket of her robe. ‘The boy wrote to me years ago,’ she told Sir Stephen, ‘telling me of all the wonderful adventures he’d had at your side and how much he’d grown to love you. Pieter knew it was safe to say a thing like that to me. Listen here to his lines. And she read from the letter in the flooded tower, her voice echoing beautifully toward Glastonbury:
My knight has two hearts, one of iron to keep me safe and one of wax—so soft and warm. He presses me to that second heart and makes a mold of me. I know that I am there in him—a copy that will be loved even when I am gone.
’ With that the Duchess folded the letter and leaned over the Burning Armor, kissing it on its Saint Andrew’s cross. So you see, Kenton, even a part of the Duchess is there. All of them there in that box.”

I turned to look at the crate again. It danced with shadows in the firelight, and I could indeed imagine all their ghosts crouched inside, attached to the Burning Armor, dragged by it through history. “Yes,” I said. “You were right to buy it, and I thank you for the stories.” He nodded in a gentleman’s way, and because I knew he wanted nothing more from me, I clutched the empty book beneath my coat, shored myself against the cold and made my way toward the foyer and the snowy night. But I found I could not leave in that manner, knowing I might never encounter Lord Weymouth again, so I turned back and saw that he’d slouched in his chair, believing our scene complete. “Thomas,” I said, “I want you to know that there was never a problem between us—even when we argued, even when I left you, it was all part of the good.”

He attempted a smile, an air of levity, but could not raise himself from the chair. “We walked together didn’t we, Kenton? For as long as two men could.”

I don’t remember leaving Longleat that night—returning to my carriage, traveling down busy streets of Christmas Eve revelers and finally recovering my wife. I must have done these things—yet it seems to me, in fact, I walked through a forest of long ago with the sun warming my skin, making me feel as if I were made of wonderful fire, a tilted cross carved upon the plating at my chest. I could hear singing. And yes, I was surprised to realize it issued from my very own astonished throat.

FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR, I stood at the locked and painted gate of an unmarked graveyard, watching spotted hens and ducks of some ancient variety pick their way between fallen headstones. I’d slipped half inside a dream, charmed by the birds. They were black-eyed and mute, moving gently across the grass, sometimes grouping in the shade of a worn monument or at the perimeter of the fence.

Children had thrown clods of dirt at me earlier in the day for trespassing in what I believed to be a graveyard but turned out to be their mother’s washing yard. I wanted to explain that I was an official, an emissary of the Queen, yet they were so angry and chiding, I could not speak. They believed perhaps I was the embodiment of some cruel woman they’d heard about in a fairy tale. My book and my dark dress, the creases around my mouth and eyes—all of
this betrayed me. When had I become such a distasteful creature? Over what line had I stepped?

It was pleasant to simply take leisure with the ducks and hens, where I knew I would not be attacked. Apparently, this yard had been turned into an aviary years ago by some urban peasant, and I thought the dead should like to watch the comings and goings of animals, as I myself have often preferred the lower beasts to their supposedly evolved counterparts.

It is the will of the Metropolitan Gardens Association, my new employer, that all such consecrated grounds should be located, labeled, and preserved. Mrs. Octavia Hill, head of the board and fierce proponent of urban renewal, imagines these yards transformed into what she calls “outdoor sitting rooms,” and the notion conjures curious pictures: a sofa of dewy lichen, a hearth that burns with untended violets. The difficultly is that the yards themselves have floated free from the churches and institutions to which they were once tethered; fires and the shifting tides of urbanization have razed those structures, yet the graves remain.

Before my deployment, Mrs. Hill, with the high and regal voice of a clarion, provided a collection of cautionary tales—hidden graveyards destroyed by property-hungry industrialists during the boom. Carbolic acid was used in many cases to dissolve the bones so no record of exhumation remained. “We must mark these grounds,” she said. “Save the dead and save ourselves, Miriam. And it’s women like you—childless and without other occupation who shall lead the way. You will become mother to our ancestors and therefore mother to us all.”

And so I persist in my survey, mothering and dreaming, carrying the accordion-style grid map provided to me by the board and labeling it carefully as I have been hired
to do. And I
am
thankful. Mrs. Hill is correct; women like me—nearly forty and without husband or station—are rarely allowed such new beginnings.

THE HEAT WAS LIKE A CEILING on Staining Street, and I struggled to remain upright. My newfound friend, Alain de la Tour, did not fair as well. He collapsed dramatically in the shade of a poplar tree, pale and dripping in his fashionable suit. Hand at his chest, he moaned comically, “Miriam. Oh, Miriam.” He suffered from palpitations, and I told him that if he could not keep up with a rheumatic woman, he was clearly not taking enough morning exercise. He waved a porcelain hand, telling me the French did not exercise as the English. It was crass to even mention such a thing. “And you, my dear, are not as rheumatic as you seem to think.”

I’d made his acquaintance at one of the new coffee palaces that have sprung up in the city’s finer neighborhoods—glowing bargelike buildings full of girls in hats who believe they are made beautiful by lantern light. M. de la Tour approached my table in all his threadbare regality, and after a brief introduction, explained that he had arrived in London to make himself known to society, believing it would bring him either fame or wealth. Despite my wish to hurriedly dismiss him, I found that he possessed a magnetism—not animal but mineral, glittering like a sulfide extracted from the earth. A pyrite, lovely despite the fact that it played at being gold. He admired my map, asking if I were planning an invasion of some kind. When I explained my appointment at the Gardens Association, his polished eyes widened. My dress, he said,
was not unlike Ruskin’s storm cloud—a wind of darkness and my hair was a fall of ashes. Even at a distance I had appeared macabre.

“Is that flattery or insult?” I asked.

He ignored my question, sitting at my table without invitation and nearly spilling my demitasse. “I would like to take you to a party—a celebration of Regent’s day,” he said. “I am in need of a lady, and you are clearly in need of cheer.”

I laughed politely. I had not attended a party since I was quite young and did not intend to take up the habit again. Even as I refused, I found myself wishing I was the kind of woman who
could
go to a party—not an actual English gala of course—which would certainly be of the same dull breed I remembered. No, I would have liked to attend the party the young man was imagining. Society as conjured by Alain de la Tour. I studied his poorly cut hair and provincial nose, features that seemed to indicate a lonely but hopeful mind, and I wondered what sort of place he’d come from. Certainly not a city. Alain only pretended at sophistication. A small village was more like it; something near the water with stony beaches.

I COVERED MY MOUTH AND NOSE with my shawl to prevent the smell of the nearby meat packing house from making me ill. Alain had tied a red silk handkerchief over his face and looked like a petite outlaw of the American West. As we walked, I related a story I’d been told during an interview with the abbess of St. Benet Sherehog. A gravedigger and his young apprentice had recently expired from bad air after climbing into an open pit grave of the sort still used in some of the country yards. “Bodies are wrapped
in rugs or cloth,” I said, “and with little ceremony they are dropped into the pit, jumbled together and sprinkled with lime until the space is full. Terrible gases are released from the corpses—what the diggers call ‘poisonous air’.” Alain reacted with picturesque disgust, asking why the diggers had gone down into the grave to begin with.

“To steal, most likely,” I said. “People will brave poison for money these days. And it is exactly such mistreatment of the dead that I am working to prevent.”

He swore an oath and said that in his country, the dead were respected. Cities were built to hold them—rows of grandiloquent tombs that verged on the Egyptian. “There are fog-laden boulevards” he continued, “and reflecting pools. Music is played and tragic tableaux enacted on stages by youths dressed in crepe.” I had seen sketches of French cemeteries, of course, and knew they were similar to our English yards. Père-Lachaise was lovely but in a completely natural way. I was pleased though to hear Alain tell his stories. The right sort of lie, I found, could serve better than the truth.

The abbess of St. Benet Sherehog who’d directed me to Staining Street said she believed there had once been a church in the area attached to a burial yard. The church had burned (as did many of the churches) in the great fire of 1701, leaving the yard and its few monuments adrift. Houses had grown up around the yard, perhaps even over the top of it, though I hoped that was not the case.