Chapter 7 – Marbles and Hawks
After the kings of England, in the library, came the real world, in my office in Peterborough.
I’ve never worked well under any routine. It makes me very bad at the whole mass of clerkish chores you find in any business. Believe me, I wish I were better but there it is. I’d taken on quite a lot of work, without the resources to do it, for the sake of Frances, while she still worked in my Peterborough office. It was the sort of work I don’t like, petty squabbling over accidents and grasping for money, I’m not good at it, but it was part of her training, and now I was stuck with it. What to do? Negotiations began to get rid of it.
You’ve no idea how hard it is to sell messy, unwanted business. The man who came to buy the work was only interested in money. It was like talking to someone from a different planet. I tried very hard but how could I show my costings when money was never the point of my practice?
This Monday, two days after that work in the library, I met my buyer. We met in a pub. in one last effort to come to terms. He was a thin faced, mean minded man; his suit a combination of slight fashion and high street economy, his tie a Christmas present given by someone without taste or thought. He came into control of his own family business quite young and on little merit, with a balance sheet in one hand and ambition in the other. Now he wanted to increase his business at the expense of mine, without effort or cost to himself.
Strange, when first we met I hadn’t noticed all these petty shortcomings; if I had I wouldn’t have thought of selling to him. My concern was for my clients, I hardly wanted to put them into the hands of someone with one eye on the clock and the other on how much he could bill.
I’d brought all sorts of records with me and had meant to do my best to convince him about Frances’ work, but now I found my enthusiasm fading away. He talked ungenerously, even as to what we ate and who should pay for it. We didn’t fall out, what would be the point? The negotiations broke down anyway. I was left with my unwanted reminder of Frances. Maybe my mind was still preoccupied with Edward, so soon after seeing his ancestors. It was an altogether depressing experience.
That night I dreamt. It was a restless, constantly circling set of dreams going round and round my head with no respite. As my eyes closed they were there. As I could stand no more and looked at the darkened room they left, only to return as weary eyelids drooped again. Constantly spinning in and out of consciousness I passed the night away.
(Past)
There was a small boy, Edward, no more than seven years old. I can still see him, sitting on the floor, it was a wooden floor, highly polished, reflecting the light that flooded the room. The room was large and imposing but there was no one else there.
Edward was all dressed up in fine clothes, as he had been on that day he was sent to stay with Lady Margaret. There was a small leather bag at his side and he was playing with unset jewels or crystals, there were about a dozen of them, all different colours. He was holding them up to his eyes, to see the sunlight streaming through them, making pretty patterns. Then he rolled them along the floor and back again, finding them delightful, fascinating. A new toy he’d just been given.
There’s no more to this, no other action. Yet… It’s strange enough to be presented with such an image on closing my eyes but there’s something else. For a young child to be given such gems is strange also, but there’s some other quality, a haunting quality, almost blissful and infinitely reassuring; that’s what struck me most.
There was another image of Edward, with the gems and a little girl, Eadie. They were playing with the jewels as if they were marbles; rolling them along the wooden floor. It wasn’t really a good idea; the gems were roughly round but facetted, not spherical. They didn’t roll quite true. It didn’t seem to worry the children, they played happily enough.
(Past)
In another scene I could see them playing at the same game but this time they were jabbering away. They’d decided to play two sides, de Stafford and Tudor, each gem representing a different person. They had to search about to find suitable people for their cast list and they finished up including two dogs, a servant and a cat. Otherwise the game was very much an ordinary game of marbles. I don’t remember which, if any, of the dramatic personae won the game.
Perhaps I only tell you about this because it happened. The children were happy, though I feared for the loss of the jewels. I couldn’t tell the importance of these images.
There was another vision, this time the King, actually King Henry himself, played with the children at the same game. He was a normal and ordinary visitor to the household and he was amused to see himself personified in such a way. He joined in. I can’t remember if he won, in any case, he was called away by more adult business after a few minutes.
It wasn’t surprising to find the King as a visitor; he came to see his mother often. The surprising thing was the easy and relaxed way he had with the children, and they with him.
These visions came that night one after another. When there was no other image I saw just the gems, and I called them ‘the Marbles’ after the children’s game. They floated, as it were, in empty space: round and round in a circle with one of them in the middle. They were always well ordered, always the centre of things.
They weren’t glass, nor stone, maybe quartz, more like some other crystal. They weren’t translucent, the light came through them as through nothing I’ve ever seen; it burst, it sparked, prismatic, alive. The dominant colour was white, but there were other colours too, all the colours of the rainbow but, on top of these colours, were others, astonishing washed out gold, shades of pink, turquoise, blood red, powder blue, there was orange and greens, almost infinite. My knowledge of physics is limited but those colours seemed to me impossible, never have I seen anything like them. The shape of all the gems was the same, and the size. They were many-facetted, there was no counting the planes in them, inlaid and underlaid, I went down and down into each one, almost to madness. They revolved around each other and around my mind, there was no peace and, always recurring, one particular damaged crystal. It had some white substance leaking from it like some liquid frozen in mid-flow.
Hanging between sleep and consciousness the Marbles pulled my mind to another vision and I can’t forget it. It troubled me with the same fear of being overpowered as when I saw Edward at Coldharbour and read van Dusen’s book.