She shrugs, frowns almost prettily. ‘Oh, I’d be awfully upset.’ She drinks from her glass, studying me over its rim. ‘You’ve never seen me lose my temper, have you, Abel?’
I sigh. ‘Perish the thought.’ I glance up the rising spiral of stairs. ‘Please tell Morgan not to worry, and I’d ask you not to force her to come down here if she doesn’t want to. She can be shy with people sometimes.’
‘Don’t you, worry, Abel,’ the lieutenant tells me, patting my shoulder. ‘I’ll be nice as nice.’ She nods to the loud ballroom and presses me on the back. ‘Off you go, now,’ she says, then turns on her heel and skips upstairs.
I watch her go, then reluctantly enter the ballroom. Saturnalian, I wander amongst the revellers, topping up their glasses, emptying one bottle and taking another from the supply on a sideboard. By the state of the floor, as much is being spilled as drunk. Performing this duty, I am alternately thanked with camp extravagance, or just ignored. In any event, not everyone requires my services; some of the men clutch their own bottles and drink straight from them. Their partners are at first cajoled, persuaded and bullied into drinking their share, then gradually, swept along by the music, dance and the men’s boisterous bravado, some start to relax, and dance and drink for their own enjoyment.
Next door, in the dust of the partly demolished dining-room, also damp underfoot, trays of savouries, meats and sweets are being laid out and almost as rapidly demolished. A surprising amount and variety for such short notice; I suspect the castle’s supply of canned food will not last out the night.
A shout, and from beneath a dust sheet the ballroom’s grand piano is revealed. A soldier drags its stool out from underneath, sits, cracks his knuckles and - as the music is turned down, then off - launches into some plodding, jangling, sentimental song. I grit my teeth, and take another pair of bottles from a refilled tray. A guitar is produced, and a woman volunteers to play. A drum, draped in regimental colours, is torn from a wall and young Rolans is persuaded to thump its well-worn skin. The band of soldier, servant, refugee plays as one might expect, inaccurate, loud and wild.
The lieutenant reappears, leading you. I cease in midpour, watching. You have dressed in a sea-blue satin ballgown, arms clad in long topaz gloves, your hair gathered up, a glittering diamond choker at your throat. The lieutenant has changed too, dressed in dinner jacket, trousers and black tie. Perhaps she could not find a top hat and stick. One of my suits, it sits a little large on her, but she does not seem to care. The music hesitates as the piano player stands to watch you two enter. The lieutenant’s men hoot and yell and clap. She bows with low exaggeration, acknowledges their jeers, takes up another glass of wine, hands a second one to you, then bids us all continue.
The woman playing guitar is hauled up to dance; the band takes an extended break and the recorded music resumes. The bottles of wine are shuttled up from cellar to tray to hand and their contents sloshed into glasses and throats. The room grows warm, the music’s turned up, the piles of food shrink, the soldiers lead their women into dance, some lead them off upstairs, others play like huge clumsy children, disappearing to bring back some new toy discovered elsewhere in the castle. Trays hurtle down the stairs with shrieking soldiers hanging on; an old, wood-brown globe depicting the ancient world, removed from its stand, is rolled into the ballroom and kicked about; two pikes are ripped from a wall display, cushions tied over their ends and two men take one each, sitting on serving trolleys while comrades push them up and down the Long Room, jousting, laughing, falling, smashing vases, urns, ripping up carpets and tearing down portraits.
The lieutenant dances with you, in the centre of the room. When the music pauses and she leads you to the side to take up your glasses, I approach to serve. A huge crash, followed by much laughter, sounds from somewhere above. There is a thunderous noise of something heavy rolling overhead, audible even when the music resumes.
‘Your men have become vandals,’ I tell the lieutenant over all the noise as I refill her glass. ‘This is our home; they’re wrecking it.’ I glance at you, but you look unconcerned, and stare wide-eyed at the dancers capering, clapping, whirling on the floor. One soldier is drinking what smells like paraffin, spitting it out, blowing fire. Beside a window, half hidden by the curtain, a couple are copulating against the wall. Another crash from overhead. ‘You ordered them to treat the castle well,’ I remind the lieutenant. ‘They’re disobeying you.’
She looks around, grey eyes twinkling. ‘The spoils of war, Abel,’ she murmurs lazily. She gazes at you, then smiles at me. ‘They have to be let off the lead now and again, Abel. All the men you were with today probably thought they were going to die; instead they’re alive, they won, they got the prize and they didn’t even lose any friends, for once. They’re high on their own survival. What do you expect them to do; have a cup of tea and go early off to bed with a good book? Look at them--’ She waves her glass towards the crowd. Her words are slurred. ‘We have wine, women and song, Abel. And tomorrow they may die. And today they killed. Killed lots of men just like them; men who could have been them. They’re drinking to their memory, too, if they only knew, or to forget them; something like that,’ she says, frowning and sighing.
The soldier trying to blow fire sets his hair alight; he yells and runs and somebody tries to throw a white fur-coat on him, but misses. Another man catches the burning man and empties a bottle of wine over his head, putting the flames out. There are shouts from outside the ballroom, and the sound of something coming clattering, crashing down the spiral of stone steps, smashing halfway down and tinkling.
‘I’m terribly sorry they’re causing a bit of a mess,’ the lieutenant says, looking from me to you. She shrugs. ‘Boys will be boys.’
‘So you won’t do anything? You won’t stop them?’ I say. One man is climbing up the side of the great tapestry facing the windows. Outside, in the hall, another is trying to stand on the shoulders of a comrade and grab hold of the chandelier’s lowest crystal pendant.
The lieutenant shakes her head. ‘It’s all only possessions, Abel. Just stuff. Nothing with a life. Just stuff. Sorry.’ She takes the bottle from my hand, tops up her glass and hands it back to me. ‘You’ll be needing to go and fetch some wine,’ she says, putting the glass back on the sideboard. She reaches for your glass, puts it aside too, then takes your hand. ‘Shall we dance?’ she asks you.
You go with her, led out on to the floor, made way for by the other dancing couples. The fellow climbing the tapestry slips, tearing at it, shouting out as it divides in a great long rend that splits the fabric top to bottom and sends him crashing and laughing into a trolley packed with glasses and plates beneath.
I refill glasses in the dining-room and hall, watching the treasures of the castle gradually wither and fragment around me. The rolling noise overhead and crash upon the stairs was a huge ceramic urn, two hundred years old, brought from the other side of the world by an ancestor - another spoil of war, now sundered, smashed to shards and dust and lying in a glinting series of heaps and piles of debris, spread down the bottom half of stairway like a frozen waterfall of powder and glaze.
They have started taking down some of the portraits from the wall, cutting out the heads and sticking their own reddened faces through. One tries to dance, lurching unbalanced, with a white marble statue; a shining perfect nude, a fourth Grace; they scream for joy to see him trip and lose his purchase, so that the statue falls, its snowy serenity going unprotesting with him, to hit a window ledge and shatter; head rolling away, each arm breaking off. They pick the soldier up and stick the statue’s marble head on a helm-less suit of armour. One stands on the chandelier’s broadest rim, swaying on it in a tinkling pendulum of glittering light, making it creak at its anchor-point high above.
The once outraged maids and matrons from the camp outside now stagger and whirl, squawking inebriately, opening their unproud mouths and legs to accommodate the lieutenant’s men. More men are fighting drunkenly with swords, some sobe
r instinct in them having led them to use weapons still sheathed. In the courtyard, watched by the pinched faces of the twice dispossessed men staring through the dropped portcullis, soldiers smash a bottle of wine on the barrel of the artillery piece and christen it ‘The Lieutenant’s Prick’.
One of their number loses a tray-race down the stairs and is carried head-high through the opened gateway - the concerned husbands and parents outside scattered by a sky-directed shot or two - and thrown into the moat. The women are thrown into our guest-room beds; bellyfuls of wine and food are thrown up into the courtyard, toilets, vases and trays.
A remote presence at the feast, the generator hums. The lights flicker, the music swells and washes over all and the bright and dusty hall resounds, full of a vacuous, aching enjoyment.
The lieutenant dances with you, leading you. You laugh, ballgown flying out like cool blue flames or silky water frothing in insubstantial air. I stand watching, taking no part. My gaze follows you, faithful, dogged, only straying to others. The oafs come up and slap my back and shove a bottle of better spirits into my hand, bidding me drink; drink this and this, smoke this, dance now; dance with this, with her, here have a drink. They slap me, kiss me and sit me at the piano. They pour a glass of wine over me, perch a plumed helmet on my head and bid me play. I refuse. They assume it is because the recorded music is still pulsing out, and with shouts and arguments have it quieted. There. Now you can play. Play now. Play something for us. Play.
I shrug and say I cannot; it is a skill I lack.
The lieutenant appears with you on her arm, both bright, glowing with a shared, emollient elation. She clutches a bottle of brandy. You hold a scrap torn from a painting; a representation of a vase of flowers, looking dull and foolish in your hands.
‘Abel, won’t you play?’ the lieutenant shouts, bending down to me, her flushed face sheened, flesh as reddened by the wine within as her white shirt is stained without.
I quietly repeat my excuse.
‘But Morgan says you are a virtuoso!’ she shouts, waving her bottle.
I look from her to you. You bear an expression I have come to recognise and which I think I fell for and was ensnared by even before I knew of it; lips articulated just so, a little parted, corners tensed and turned as if with an incipient smile, your eyes hooded, dark lids drooped, those aqueous spheres lying easy and accepting in their smooth surrounds of moisture. I look for some apology or acknowledgement in those eyes, the minutest alteration to the pitch or separation of those lips that might enunciate regret or even fellow feeling, but find nothing. I smile my saddest smile for you; you sigh and smooth your spilling hair, then look away, to regard the side of the lieutenant’s head, the curve of her cheek above the tall white collar.
The lieutenant punches me on the shoulder. ‘Come on, Abel; play us something! Your audience is waiting!’
‘Obviously my modesty has been of no avail,’ I murmur.
I shake a handkerchief from my pocket and as the men and women still left in the hall gather around the piano, wipe the keyboard free of scraps of food, ash and spots of wine. Some of the wine has dried on the white keys. I moisten the handkerchief with my mouth. The smoothly gleaming surface of the ivory has gone the yellow shade of old men’s hair.
My audience grows impatient, shuffling and muttering. I reach into the instrument and pick a wineglass off the exposed strings and hand it to someone at my side. The men and women clustered round the piano snort and giggle. I place my hands upon the keys that are the lever-ends of tusks ripped from dead things, an elephant graveyard amongst the heart-dark columns of wood.
I begin to play an air, something light, almost flimsy, but with its own lilt and delicate poise, and moving by a natural sequentiality, an inherent and unforced progression, to a more thoughtful and bitter-sweet conclusion. A silence comes upon those gathered, something settling over their energetic desire for fun like a cloth thrown over a cavorting songbird’s cage. I move my hands with studiedly careful, stroking motions, the gentle dance of my fingers upon the keys a small and beautiful ballet by itself, a hypnotic feathering of flesh-enclosed bone caressing ivory with an appearance of natural fluid grace it takes half a lifetime of study and a thousand arithmetically tedious repetitions of sterile scales to acquire.
At the point where the structure of the piece would by its own implicit grammar lead to a sweetly beautiful solemnising of the main theme and a gentle resolution of the whole, I change it all completely. My hands have been a pair of gentle wings flowing over each individuated particle of air above the bed of keys, solemn and sweet. Now they become lumpen talons, great arched locked paws with which I thump the pavement of the keyboard in a fatuous, one-two, one-two, one-two marching step. At the same time the melody - in its form still identifiably related to the elegantly limber figure of before - becomes a brainless, mechanical automaton of jangling discords and crudely linked harmonies crashing and lurching through the tune, and whose lumberings, in echoing that earlier beauty and reminding the ear of its dulcet fitness, mock it more flagrantly and insult the listener more thoroughly than a total change of strain and beat could ever have.
A few of my audience are so far down the road of tastelessness they just gawk and grin and nod along, puppets to the strings I play. More, though, stand back a little, or glare at me, make tutting noises and shake their heads. The lieutenant just reaches out and puts her hand to the keyboard lid; I get my fingers out of the way before it comes thudding down.
I turn to her, swivelling on the stool. ‘I thought you’d like that,’ I tell her, my voice and eyebrows raised in a tone and picture of innocence. The lieutenant reaches quickly out and slaps me. Quite hard, it has to be said, though it’s done with a sort of passionless authority, as an able parent of a large brood might strike their eldest, to keep the rest in line. The noise stills the assembly even more effectively than my attempt at musicality.
My cheek tingles. I blink. I put my hand to my cheek, where there is a little blood. Drawn, I’d imagine, by the ring of white gold and ruby on the lieutenant’s hand. She gazes levelly at me. I look at you. You appear mildly surprised. Somebody grabs my shoulders from behind and a draught of fetid breath washes over my face. Another hand grips my hair and my head is pulled back; the fellow growls. I try to keep my gaze fastened on the lieutenant. She holds up her hand, looking at the men behind me. She shakes her head. ‘No, leave him.’ She looks at me. ‘That was a shame, Abel; to spoil such a pretty tune.’
‘You really think so? I thought it an improvement. It’s just a tune, after all. Nothing with a life.’
She laughs, throwing her head back. Gold glitters at the back of her jaws. ‘Well, right, Abe,’ she says. She waves the wine bottle at the keys. ‘Play on, then. Play whatever you want. It’s our party but it’s your piano. You decide. No; a waltz. Play a waltz. Morgan and I will dance. Can you play a waltz, Abe?’
I watch you, my dear. You blink. I try to find a glimmer of understanding in your eyes. Eventually I give a small bow. ‘A waltz.’ I stand, open the piano stool and leaf through the sheet music inside. ‘Here we are.’ I open the lid and put the music on its stand. I play the music, following the stated notes. I read, play, and add the occasional pedestrian embellishment, a mere conduit for the marks on the paper, the sounds in the head of the composer, the form of the work; an excuse to hold, a soundtrack to flirtatiousness, courting, mating and fortune finding.
When I am finished I look round, but you and the lieutenant are gone. All the soldiers and their swaying conquests applaud, then the men converge on me, pin me down, tie my hands and feet with the embroidered lengths of bell-pulls and stick the helmet from a suit of armour upon my head. My breathing sounds loud, enclosed within the helm; I can smell my own breath and sweat and the metallic tang of the armour’s antiquity. The view outside is reduced to a series of tiny portholes, single perforations through the ancient steel. My head clangs against the metal inside as they bear me up and carry me, trussed, outside i
nto the courtyard where - as I am tipped and rolled about and the view gyrates wildly - the gun glints in the light of arc and flame and the cobblestones glisten. They open the black iron grating over the mouth of the well, pull up the well’s bucket, rattling chains, balance the bucket on the rough stone rim then set me in it, legs folded in so that the lip of the bucket digs into my spine and my knees are at my chin. Then, laughing, they push me out over the hole, hold me on the rope then let me drop. I go light; the chain rattles and the wind whistles.
The impact knocks the world away, slamming my head back against the wall then cracking it forward again, first igniting a line of fire across my back and then thrusting a spear of pain through my nose.
I sit, stunned, as the water gurgles in around me.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I am dimly aware of pain and cold and the taste of metal. Grazed, dazed, trying to shake my head, I sit here in my little wooden throne, perched within the muddy remnant of the hole’s departed water, poised on a hidden platform of rubble that’s choked this ornament for a century or more, still wearing my metal crown and dressed in the torn robes of a lowly calling. Water seeps in around me, beneath me, icy and and sapping.
I look up, sight constrained by my iron mask.
I was here once before, much younger. A child. Trying to see beyond the sky.
I had read somewhere that from a sufficiently deep hole, one could see the stars, if the day were clear. You were there, brought on a rare visit. I had persuaded you to help me with my scheme; you watched, eyes wide, fist to mouth, as I winched up the bucket, steadied it on the wall and then climbed in. I told you to let me down. The descent then was scarcely less violent than that the lieutenant’s men subjected me to. I had not thought to allow for the bucket’s much increased weight, your lack of strength or propensity for just standing back and letting what would happen, happen. You held the handle, taking some of the strain as I pushed the bucket off the side of the well’s stone surround. Freed of the wall’s support I plunged immediately. You gave a little shriek and made one attempt to brake the handle, letting it jerk and lift you on to your tiptoes, then you let it go.