Crouched, we move at a half-run between the bushes and trees down to the rear gardens. Isolated shots sound from inside the castle. We go first to the man fallen by the side of the steaming, hissing four-wheel drive. A man lies dead in the passenger seat, his uniform weltered in blood, his jaw half-torn off. The driver lying on the ground is still moaning; blood seeps on to the gravel beneath him. He is a tall, gawky young man with the spotted complexion of adolescence. Our lieutenant squats to slap his face, trying to get some sense from him but extracting only whimpers. Finally she rises, shakes her head, exasperated.
She looks from the wounded man to the soldier with the machine-gun, the one called Karma. He has taken off his steel helmet to wipe his brow; he is red-haired. ‘Your turn,’ she mutters. ‘Come on,’ she says to me, as Karma puts his helmet back on, clicks something on the machine-gun and points the weapon at the head of the man lying on the ground. The lieutenant strides off, her boots crunching over the gravel.
I turn quickly and follow her and the soldier with the rocket launcher, a strange tenseness between my shoulder-blades, as though vicariously preparing for the coup de grâce. The single, loud bang still makes me jump.
We stand, you and I, in the centre of the castle’s courtyard, by the well. We look up and around. The looters have done little damage. The lieutenant quizzed old Arthur - who chose to stay with the castle rather than come with us - and discovered the men arrived only an hour earlier; they barely had time to start sacking our home before our brave lieutenant arrived to the rescue. Now it is hers.
Her men are scrambling everywhere, like children with a new toy. They have a lookout on the battlements, another sentry at the gatehouse; they have mastered the castle’s main gate and the portcullis - a recent wrought-iron replacement, perhaps more decorative than effective, but it seems to please them all the same - and are now investigating the cellars, stores and rooms; our servants - surprised, confused - have been told to let them do as they wish; all the doors have been unlocked. The men - though now most of them seem more like boys - are choosing their rooms; it appears they will be our guests for longer than a weekend.
The two jeeps are parked here in the courtyard, the trucks sit outside on the far side of the moat, just over the small stone bridge; our carriage has been returned to the stables, the horses to their paddock. A few of the villagers camping on the lawns, who fled at the approach of the looters, are now returning, warily, to their tents.
The lieutenant appears at the main keep door, sauntering towards us, wearing a new tunic top; a vividly red jacket strung about with bright ropes of gold and studded with medal ribbons. She holds a bottle of our best champagne, already opened.
‘There,’ she says, looking around at the courtyard walls. ‘Not much damage done.’ She smiles at you. ‘Like my new outfit?’ She spins once for us; the red dress jacket swings out.
She fastens a couple of the buttons. ‘This was your grand-father’s or something?’ she asks.
‘Some relation; I forget which,’ I tell her evenly, as old Arthur, patently the most venerable of our servants, appears at the door with a tray and makes his way slowly towards us.
The lieutenant smiles indulgently at the old man and indicates he should put the tray on the bonnet of one of the jeeps. There are three glasses. ‘Thank you . . . Arthur, isn’t it?’ she says.
The old fellow - rotund, bespectacled, flush-faced, head sparsely yellow-haired - looks uncertain; he nods to the lieutenant, then bows and mutters something to us, before hesitating and walking away. ‘Champagne,’ the lieutenant says, laughing, already pouring; the ring which she took from you, now encircling her left small finger, clinks against the thick green bulk of the bottle and the long flutes’ delicate stems.
We take our glasses. ‘To a pleasant stay,’ she says, clinking crystal with us. We sip; she gulps.
‘Quite how long do you intend to be with us?’ I ask.
She says, ‘A while. We’ve been too long on the road, in fields and barns, dossing in half-burnt houses and damp tents. We need some leave from all this soldiering; it gets to you after a while.’ She swills her drink around, gazing at it. ‘I can see why you left, but we can defend a place like this.’
‘We could not,’ I agree. ‘That’s why we chose to leave. May we leave now?’
‘You’re safer here, now,’ she tells us.
I glance at you. ‘Still, we would like to leave. May we?’
‘No,’ the lieutenant says, and sighs. ‘I’d like you to stay.’ She shrugs, makes to inspect her fine tunic. ‘It’s my wish.’ She adjusts a cuff. ‘And rank has its privileges.’ Her smile is quite, if briefly, dazzling as she glances about. ‘We are your guests, and you are ours. We are willingly your guests; how willing you are ours is up to you.’ Another shrug. ‘But however that may be, we intend to stay here.’
‘And if anyone turns up with a tank, what then?’
She shrugs. ‘Then we’d have to leave.’ She drinks, and moves the wine around in her mouth for a moment before swallowing. ‘But there aren’t that many tanks around these days, Abel; there isn’t much of anything organised, opposition or otherwise, hereabouts just now. A very fluid situation we have at the moment, after all this mobilisation and waging and prosecuting and attrition and . . .’ she waves one hand airily, ‘just general breakdown, I suppose.’ She puts her head to one side. ‘When did you last see a tank, Abel? Or an aircraft, or a helicopter?’
I think for a moment, then just nod to accede.
I sense you looking up. You grab my arm.
The looters; the three our irregulars discovered inside the castle. They surrendered after a few shots and the lieutenant has apparently been questioning them. Now they appear on the roof above, bundled on to the walkway from the tower above the winding-stair by a half-dozen of the lieutenant’s soldiers. The three have bags or hoods over their heads and ropes round their necks; they stumble and the way they move makes me think they’ve been beaten; I can hear what sound like sobs and entreaties from inside the dark hoods. They are being led to the castle’s two south-facing towers, whose bases flank the main gate and look over the bridge and moat towards the front lawns and the drive.
Your eyes are wide, your face pale; the gloved hand clutching at me tightens. The lieutenant drinks, watching you closely, something cold and calibratory about her expression. Then, while you still stare at the line of men on the stone skyline, her face animates, becomes relaxed, even cheerful. ‘Let’s go inside, shall we?’ She takes up the tray. ‘It’s getting cold out here, and it looks like rain.’
Above us, as we troop inside, a young man calls out for his mother.
The lieutenant tethers us in a wing, so that we may fly no more. We dine behind locked doors, on bread and salted meats. In the great hall, our captor entertains her troops with all our roaring kitchens can provide. Predictably, they shot the peacocks. I expected a night of wild debauchery from our new guests, but the lieutenant - according to the whispers of our servants, as they come, escorted, to deliver and remove our meal - has ordered a double guard, no more than one bottle of wine per man, and decreed that our staff and those camping on the lawns be left unmolested. She is wary of attack on this first night, perhaps, and besides her men are weary, with no strength for celebration, only tired relief.
Fires burn in grates, candles flicker before mirrors on many-branched candelabra, and garden torches, unearthed from an outbuilding, burn smokily on walls or stuck in vases, a graceless caricature of medievality.
Meanwhile our looters - their lives negated by a knot, and by that length shortened - swing in the air from towers, stranded in the evening air as a grim signal to the outside world; perhaps the good lieutenant hopes that their swaying will so sway others. To keep them company, the lieutenant and her men have raised a fitting standard on the flagpole; a little joke, they say. It is the skin of a long-dead carnivore they’ve found; stalked down some long-neglected corridor, hunted out within a dusty storeroom then final
ly cornered inside a creaking trunk. And so the old snow-tiger skin flies in the rain-troubled air.
Later, fuelled by their banquet, the lieutenant takes her most trusted men and goes down to those scarred plains we left, to search for what booty, matériel or men she can, far into a torchlit night.
CHAPTER THREE
The castle has a full reserve of memories, their living-on a special sort of death. The lieutenant stalks the night-black plains, the men she left here fall one by one asleep, our servants clean and gather what they can then retire to their quarters, and you, on a chaise with rugs, sleep fitful before a dying logfire. I cannot sleep; instead I pace the three rooms and two short corridors we’ve been restricted to, carrying a small tricerion to light my way, restless and unsure, and looking from moat to courtyard. On one side there is a moon, half veiled by ragged clouds, shining on the damp sheen of forested hills where mist is gathering. On the other side I see the fitful flicker of a spitting garden torch reflecting on the stone-surrounded cobbles and the well. Even as I watch, that last torch splutters and goes out.
I saw so many dances here. Each ball brought every one of note from counties upon counties away; from each great house, from each plump farm, from over the wooded hills around and across that fertile plain they came, like iron filings to a magnet drawn: sclerotic grandees, rod-backed matrons, amiable buffoons ruddily ho-hoing, indulgent city relations down for a little country air or to kill for sport or find a spouse, beaming boys with faces polished as their shoes, cynical graduates come to sneer and feast, poised observers of the social scene cutting their drinks with their barbed remarks, dough-fresh country youths with invitations clutched, new-blossomed maidens half embarrassed, half proud of their emergent allure; politicians, priests and the brave fighting men; the old money, the new money, the once-monied, the titled and the expleted, the fawn-shy and just the fawning, the well matured and the spoiled . . . the castle had room for all of them.
The great hall resounded like a skull, abuzz with wheeling thoughts, dissimilar and same. The patterns of their music took them, held them, there in its gloved hand, at once fused and confused, and scattered them about the brighter hallways, their laughter like the music for a dream.
The halls and rooms are empty now; the balconies and battlements hang dim, like handholds in the voided dark. In the darkness, in the face of memory, the castle seems now inhuman. Blocked windows mock with the view they no longer afford; here there is a stair’s stone spiral disappearing into a blank ceiling where an old tower was levelled, long ago, and here cramped rooms open randomly off one another, implying a passageway, centuries abandoned and reshaped, an appendix within the castle’s bowels.
I sit in a tall open window overlooking the moat, watching a rising tide of mist flow up and round to engulf the castle, a great slow wave of star-obscuring darkness upon darkness that unfolds itself from out the forest with a geological inertia and then pushes down upon us.
I recall we danced, those many years ago, and left the ball to see the night, together on those lit battlements that faced the airy dark. The castle was a great stone ship abright and cruising on a sea of black; the plains sparkled with lights, quivering in the intervening air like strings of stars.
We took the air there, you and I, and by and by, took each other’s breath, and more exchanged.
‘But our parents . . .’ you whispered when that first kiss gave way to allow a mutual gasp for air and the incitement to the next. ‘But if somebody sees . . .’
Your dress was something black; velvet and pearls if I recall, scooped brocade to its front which, cupping your bosom, gave way beneath my hands. Exposed to the night and my mouth, your breasts were moon-pale and down-smooth, their aureoles and nipples dark as bruises, raised, thick and hard as a little finger’s topmost joint; I sucked at you and you leant back, clutching at the stones, drawing the night in sharply through your teeth. Then, in a tiny, unexpected flood, a thick sweet taste came upon my tongue, like a premonition, like some involuntary resonance with the male’s expected donation, and in that pallid light two shining beads of your milk shone, one tipping each of those tiny blood-raised towers.
I devoured those pearls, slaking a thirst the more achingly intense for my utter ignorance of it until that moment. You gathered up your gown and skirts yourself, insisted that the winding-stair door be bolted, then I laid you across the slates, beneath the stars.
Was it then I really loved you first? I think it was, my sleeping one. Or perhaps it was later, in a calmer state . . . But I’d count that less; I’d prefer it was just lust. That seems more creditable, simply for being so helpless in the face of its own blood-charged demands.
Love is common; nothing’s more so, even hate (even now), and - like their mothers - everyone thinks theirs must be the very best. Oh, the fascination with love, art’s profitable fixation with love; ah, the startled clarity, the revelatory force of love, the pulsing certainty that it is all, that it is perfect, that it makes us, that it completes us . . . that it will last for ever.
Ours is a little different, by consent. We became by all accounts - and they were many, and various and frequently creative - notorious; unwilling if unbowed outcasts long before our failed attempt to become refugees. It was our decision, though. Not for us that tawdry fascination, the cosy comfort of the crowd, their bedded warmth in shared exclusion. We see the world with two eyes, tuned for its ambivalence, and what arrests the eye of the small-minded, liberates the mind of those with a broader view. This castle makes its mark upon the earth by being no longer part of the world from which it’s raised; these stones inflict themselves upon the air with hard demand that’s free to join that higher level only by not joining any rest. We took that as our premise; what else?
I pace these corridors while you sleep by the empty fire (the ashes like a pool, the furs and rugs that cover you the same colour). The clouds roll quietly in around us, damp smoke of what liquidic fire I cannot say. A transient current within the air brings the sound of a distant waterfall from the hills, and only the night finds final voice, in that black space a white noise booming; meaningless.
Morning finds the lieutenant returned to the castle; the mists disperse like a crowd, dew hangs heavy on the forest and the sun, late rising above the southerly hills, shines with a wintery weariness, tentative and provisional as a politician’s promise.
The good lieutenant takes her breakfast in our chambers; an old flag - I imagine she does not know it is our family’s own arms - has been thrown across the oak table to provide a cloth. She looks tired yet animated, her eyes red and her face flushed. She smells a little of smoke and intends to sleep for a few hours once she has eaten. Her roasted, toasted fare is served on our finest silver; she holds and uses the sharp and glittering pieces of cutlery with a weaponly dexterity. The gold and ruby ring upon her little finger duly sparkles too.
‘We found a few things,’ the lieutenant replies when I enquire how went the night. ‘What we did not find was as important.’ She gulps down her milk, sitting back and kicking off her boots. She puts her plate on her lap and her grubbily stockinged feet on the table, selecting and spearing morsels from on high.
‘What was it you did not find?’ I ask her.
‘Many other people,’ the lieutenant tells us. ‘There were a few refugees, camped out, but nobody . . . threatening; nobody armed, nobody organised.’ She picks a few more mouthfuls from her plate of meats and eggs. She gazes ceiling-wards, as if to admire the painted wood panels and embossed heraldic shields. ‘We think there may be another group around. Somewhere, ’ she says, then narrows her eyes as she looks at me. ‘Competition,’ she says, smiling that cold smile of hers. ‘Not friends of ours.’
A soft egg-yolk, surgically isolated from its surrounding white and the bed of toast it lay upon by previous incisions, is lifted - intact, yellowly wobbling - on the lieutenant’s fork and directed towards her mouth. Her thin lips close around the golden curve. She slips the fork out and holds
it vertically, twirling it as her jaw moves and her eyes close. She swallows. ‘Hmm,’ she says, collecting herself and smacking her lips. ‘The last we heard of that happy band they were in the hills, north of here.’ She shrugs. ‘We couldn’t find any sign of them; it may be they’ve headed east with everybody else.’
‘You still intend to remain here?’
‘Oh, yes.’ She puts the plate down, wipes her lips on a napkin, throws it on the table. ‘I like your home very well; I think the boys and I can be happy here.’
‘Do you intend to stay long?’
She frowns, takes a deep breath. ‘How long,’ she asks, ‘have your family lived here?’
I hesitate. ‘A few hundred years.’
She spreads her arms, ‘Well then, what difference can it make if we stay a few days, or weeks, or months?’ She digs between two teeth with a ragged fingernail, smiling slyly at you. ‘Even years?’
‘That depends on how you treat this place,’ I say. ‘This castle has stood for over four hundred years, but it has been vulnerable to cannon for most of that time and, nowadays, could be destroyed in an hour by a large gun and in a moment with a well-placed bomb or rocket; from inside, all one might need would be a match in the right place. The effects of our tenure here as a family unfortunately has no bearing on yours as occupiers, especially given the circumstances prevailing outside these walls.’
The lieutenant nods wisely. ‘You’re right, Abel,’ she says, rubbing one index finger beneath her nose and staring at her smudge-grey socks. ‘We are here as occupiers, not your guests, and you are our prisoners, not our hosts. And this place suits our purposes; it’s comfortable, defendable, but it means no more to us.’ She picks up her fork again, inspects it minutely. ‘But these men aren’t vandals. I’ve told them not to break anything and if they do it will assuredly be clumsiness rather than insubordination. Oh, there are a few extra bullet-holes about the place, but most of any damage you might see was probably caused by your looters.’ She wipes something from the tines of the fork, then licks her fingers. ‘And we made them pay quite dearly for such . . . despicable desecration.’ She smiles at me.