Broken Music: A Memoir (41 page)

The house was built in the reign of James II by a powerful wool merchant named George Duke, Esq. The Duke family, having fought on the side of the royalists in the English Civil War, found themselves not only defeated but also dispossessed of their property by the victorious parliamentary forces. After Cromwell’s accession they were transported to the West Indies as indentured slaves, and would live there in exile until the Restoration, when Charles II
would restore them to their former stature and their ancestral home. They continued to live at Lake House until the end of the nineteenth century.

The facade of the house is grand and rather eccentric with its checkerboard face of stone and flint, five gables, and two-story bay windows on either side of the entrance, and topped with discrete faux battlements. The inside of the house is dark, gloomy, and drafty, a rambling series of dingy rooms, murky passages, and creaking staircases. There is a kind of architectural schizophrenia between the house’s confident exterior and the labyrinthine and puzzling folly inside. That I feel at home here shouldn’t surprise anyone.

The river is brimming with gilded trout hiding in the swaying reed grasses that billow beneath the surface like a pre-Raphaelite dream of a drowned Ophelia. Following the riverbank and around a stand of horse chestnut is a large empty meadow, which is overlooked by a steeply wooded escarpment of primary uncut forest. There is a strangely neglected and melancholy atmosphere that pervades this stretch of land where a few isolated cows graze, and whenever Trudie and I “beat the bounds” of the property, like all first-time landowners, we rarely linger there.

It is on one of our early morning peregrinations that my partner has one of her regular brain waves. She wants us to dig a lake. A lake, she says, would bring some much-needed light to this gloomy meadow, and we can stock it with trout at the same time. She points out that there is some irony in living in a “Lake House” without a lake and even though, as I pedantically remind her, the word
lake
is Anglo-Saxon for “running stream,” which we do have, and not a standing body of water, which we don’t, her logic does not escape me.

My real objection to the endeavor is the mess that such a project
would cause. Excavating tons of earth, relandscaping, finding somewhere to deposit the displaced soil. This in addition to the legal permits needed in an area as archeologically sensitive as this one, which includes hundreds of Neolithic burial mounds and sacred earthworks. The prospect of dealing with such bureaucracy fills me with a paralyzing dread. But my partner is not one to be easily deterred, and I have learned from experience that it is usually to my benefit to trust her instincts and for some reason she is adamant about this.

The legal and archeological protocols are indeed complex. A public tribunal opens us up to many objections, some fair, others downright potty. One national broadsheet reports a claim that we are chopping down an entire forest to accommodate the lake, when in fact there have been no trees on the site for hundreds of years. The story is indignantly reported as if it were the hubris of a guitar-shaped swimming pool we were building in a cathedral close and not a discrete lake in a neglected field.

Finally, there are no substantive objections, and the tribunal grants permission for a one-and-a-half-acre lake to be excavated during the summer of 1995. The only proviso is that we have an archeologist on the site at all times, just in case anything is turned up, which we happily agree to.

That night I sit bolt upright in bed after being woken by a macabre dream. Trudie and I are pulling a bloated white body from the lake and laying it out among the bulrushes. It is a startling image, and a frightening one. Despite a passing interest in Jungian psychology a number of years before, I am not given to the exhaustive interpretation of dreams. I accept their presence and recognize they may have some significance, but more often than not will have forgotten them by the following morning. This one seems no different, plucked at random from the subconscious and most likely
prompted by the turbulent events of the day. I will think no more about it.

Months pass. I am in Los Angeles in the middle of a long U.S. tour, when I receive a phone call from Katie Knight, our assistant at Lake House.

“I have some bad news about the lake.”

“What?”

“They’ve had to stop the digging.”

I have an uncomfortable foreboding. “Why?”

There is a slight pause on the line. “They’ve found a body!”

“A what?”

“A body.”

I am now reduced to a monosyllabic stutter. “Wh—Wh—Who is it?”

“It’s a woman, and she’s been ritually murdered.” Katie is now beginning to sound like a coroner.

“What do you mean, ritually murdered?”

I have to admit I’m panicked and inexplicably searching for alibis, as if I’m about to become the prime suspect in an appalling murder.

“She’s had her hands tied behind her back, and whoever it was that murdered her has thrown her facedown in the mud, placed a heavy piece of wood on her back, and stood there until she drowned.”

I now feel like a character in some Hercule Poirot mystery.

“Do they have any idea when this might have happened?” I ask, silently counting the days since I arrived in America.

“About four hundred A.D.,” she replies, without missing a beat. “The archeologists have taken her away to do some tests but they estimate it was sometime after the Romans left.”

I breathe an audible sigh of relief and then I remember the
damned dream. I don’t have prescient dreams, and I’m thankful not to be gifted in that way, but the connection between the dream and the fact that our meadow is a murder site, albeit a six-teen-hundred-year-old murder site, has an irresistible logic.

Upon my return, the archeologist tells me that the skeleton, though discolored brown by the mud, has been perfectly preserved. That the female victim was probably nineteen years old, had all of her teeth, and that she now officially belongs to me.

I am somewhat taken aback by this new and unexpected responsibility. When I ask him why she may have been murdered, he shrugs and tells me that the Dark Ages were so called because that’s exactly what they were, “dark.” No one knows what was going on between the withdrawal of Pax Romana and the Middle Ages apart from the countless invasions by the Saxons, Jutes, and Danes and a few Arthurian legends. The girl could have been killed by a raiding party, or have been punished as a suspected witch or even an unfaithful wife. The circumstances do not indicate a normal burial, fully prone on a north—south alignment on the riverbank. The ritual significance of water to Celtic peoples is well documented, pools, springs, and rivers being regarded as entrances to and from the after-world. Individuals selected for such treatment were viewed as being special cases. She may have been sacrificed willingly or unwillingly, perhaps to treat with the spirit world on behalf of those still living. We shall never know, but the reality of her death was particularly gruesome, and it would be impossible to imagine any crime that could have warranted such punishment. But perhaps the dark energy of this event has somehow lingered, and this feeling of melancholy that pervades the narrow strip of land between the river and the woods is her only memorial.

The archeologist asks what we are going to do with the body
when she returns, and I tell him we are going to bury her with due ceremony.

We stand on the little island we left at the center of the lake, Trudie and myself, our neighbors from the valley, and Vicar John Reynolds, who married us. Our lady of the lake is lying in an open coffin with her face up to the sky for the first time in two millennia, her perfect bones like those of a child, with some bright yellow flowers on her chest. Across the mists on the far shore stands a lone piper, and the skirl of his mournful dirge floats across the still water. The coffin lid is secured and as she is lowered into the ground again, the priest prays that her soul will be granted its final reward.

My two sons, Joe and Jake, shuttle everyone back to the shore in a wooden rowing boat. It takes some time and I am the last to leave the island. Tonight we shall throw a party in the house with a traditional Irish band providing the music. There will be dancing, feasting and celebration, but for now I want to be alone for a few moments with the lady of the lake.

I have to wonder if it is significant that it was our particular family that uncovered her. The field has been worked for centuries, a water meadow since the Middle Ages, with waterways and sluices excavated in order to flood and drain the land following the rhythm of the seasons. But our lady has lain here century after century, undisturbed. Perhaps others would have found the bones and ignored their significance, carried on with their work, thrown away the remains, and never given them a second thought. There is a romance in me that she may have been waiting to be discovered, to be honored, and for things to be put right somehow. But along with this idea, I can’t help thinking about my parents, how I hadn’t attended either of their funerals,
that ritual hadn’t been served, and asking myself if I wasn’t trying to put something right here, in this symbolic way.

Around the fresh soil of the grave are a profusion of wild irises, speedwell, and a cluster of tiny blue flowers whose name escapes me although I have seen them before. Kneeling down in the grass for a closer look, I see that at the center of the five blue petals is a five-pointed yellow star, and I am reminded of the tiny flower I witnessed in the Brazilian jungle so many years ago, yearning for light in the darkness between some stones on the steps of the church.

I pluck a stem from the group with three flowers that now sit delicately in the palm of my hand and I make my way across the lake and walk back to the house.

Preparations for the party are well under way. The band are tuning up in the hall, there is the smell of delicious food from the kitchen, the house is decked with flowers, and candles are being lit as the evening draws in. I find Trudie in the library.

“You’re a country girl, tell me what these are. I can’t remember,” I say while offering her the posy of tiny blue flowers in my hand.

She looks at them thoughtfully, turning the stem between her fingers, as the tiny blue-and-yellow flowers dance in the light from the garden window.

“You’re funny,” she says.

“Why am I funny?” I ask puzzled.

“Because they’re forget-me-nots, aren’t they?” she says, laughing. “That’s what they are, forget-me-nots.”

She hands them back to me. “Why do you want to know?”

“Oh, it’s a long story,” I say, smiling, unable to articulate a host of memories that swirl around the room like ghosts.

The meadow is a happier place now, and the new lake is a haven
for waterfowl, and ducks and Canada geese and the swan nest on its banks in the springtime. From the shore you can see the mound in the grass where our lady lies beneath the hanging willow among the wild irises and the speedwell and the blue-and-yellow forget-me-nots. I like to think she is at peace at last and that whatever was broken was somehow mended.