Cast Not the Day (16 page)

But Lucretia was not concerned with the furniture. Her staring eyes were fixed on the space behind where, half in shadow, a trompe-l’oeil fresco filled the wall. Within a cascading border of creeper-twined columns and garlanded lyres, it showed an outdoor dining scene of couches and tables, set among shading cypress trees. The diners, having finished their banquet, had turned their attention from the overladen tables to one another. A man sat entwined with two adoring girls on one couch; two youths lay on another, with an older woman laughing in between, all semi-clad in falling silks and festive wreaths, while from the shadows on one side naked Bacchus looked on from a vast wine-krater, goat-legged and smiling.

It was a lush, sensuous scene, vivid and over-ripe; but there was nothing gross, nothing that was not human; and the work was, as the agent had protested, finely done.

But Lucretia would have none of it. ‘You told me the house was decorated with taste, but everywhere I look is an invitation to sin and debauchery. Why was I not warned?’

The agent made a helpless gesture. Clearly he saw nothing wrong.

‘I will tell the decorator to touch it up,’ he said.

‘Touch it up?’ she cried. ‘Touch it up? I want it chiselled off, all of it, chiselled off and buried. Every room is an offence.’

Balbus caught my eye and looked away. Albinus said, ‘What debauchery?’

‘Don’t start!’ she snapped, rounding on him. ‘Why didn’t you come when I called you? Anyway, the bedroom is far worse.’

She was right. In the main bedroom, opposite a large heavy bed-frame, another fresco had been painted in the same style, but this time instead of revellers there was Pan – hairy, horned, point-eared and priapic, pursuing an epicene youth.

‘Is that a girl or a boy he is chasing?’

‘Don’t be prurient, Albinus!’ She turned to the agent. ‘You see? Already my child is corrupted. It must be removed at once, all of it, cut away, filled in, plastered and painted over. I wonder that you recommended such a house – what kind of woman do you suppose I am? What kind of family lived in such a place?’

‘I believe the owner lived alone, madam.’

‘I am not surprised. See to the work, and get out of my sight.’

But in the days that followed, while the house was full of the sound of masons’ tools and the reek of paint, the previous owner seemed to prey on Lucretia’s mind. She cross-examined the servants; but they were slow, rural folk, made halting and inarticulate by her hostile questioning – or so they affected in her presence. The old Master, they said, had been a kindly man. He had removed to Italy, to somewhere near Naples, where the weather would suit him better. He had liked to entertain when he was younger; no, they could not recall a wife; certainly no wife had lived with him at the house, though there were many friends who came and went. He was often away, for he liked to travel. They could not comment on his religion, and her questions on this subject seemed to bewilder them.

‘But my dear, what does it matter?’ Balbus said to her eventually.

‘It matters to me,’ she retorted.

Balbus, who knew how to read the danger signs, said no more.

But Lucretia’s fantasy of country life had been shattered. From that day, everything was wrong. Each painted urn and ornamental border, each dancing figure or scene of woodland calm, carried for her some hidden hateful meaning which she strained to discover; and soon the meandering patterns, and dryads, and river vistas were lost under a veil of bland whitewash, or, if they were mosaics, of damp-smelling raw plaster.

Next she discovered a colony of ants in the atrium; then she complained of the silence, which unsettled her. The slaves, she said, were slow and stubborn, and she had already quarrelled with the housekeeper, who was, she declared, a stupid, vicious woman.

It was Albinus, with unusual insight, who revealed what lay behind her ill temper.

‘There is one thing,’ he said to me, ‘she did not think to bring.’

‘What’s that?’

‘An audience. Maria and Placentia and that old bitch Volumnia are not here for her to impress, and what pleasure is there without it?’

I laughed. He even laughed too, with his odd, braying fox-bark noise. No one could say he did not know his mother.

Lucretia’s irritation was increased by Balbus. He had not wanted to be parted from his work, but now he seemed to be enjoying himself. He made light of her complaints; and then, one day, he announced that he intended to go hunting, like a country gentleman.

‘Hunting? Whatever for? Can’t you send one of the slaves? I shall not go.’

‘No, my dear, of course not. You stay and see to the decorating. The house is looking much better; I told you not to fret.’

And so, one morning at dawn, he assembled a team of footmen and set out on an aged stubborn hack, which the agent had sold to him. I watched from the top of the honeysuckle wall as he lumbered off, with the men spread out around him, holding nets and sticks to beat I know not what wild animal out of the tall grass.

Before midday he was back, with dirt in his hair and grazes on his elbows. The horse, when he had encouraged it with a switch, had cast him off into a bramble thicket. I saw it following some way behind, led in disgrace by one of the grinning bright-eyed beaters.

There was no more hunting.

Most of my days I spent swimming in the clear water of the dam-pool, and dozing afterwards on the bank beneath the willow branches.

It was here, one afternoon, when the shadows were lengthening, that something happened for which I have tried to seek answers since. But still I have none. So I tell it as it was.

I had swum, and was lying naked on the slope, when I was roused from my half-sleep by the sound of footfalls kicking through the dry leaves. I listened with half an ear for Albinus’s reedy voice summoning me; but no one called, and soon the footsteps ceased.

Somewhere above, a bird stirred in the branches. Then, close by, a female voice said, ‘Greetings, young satyr.’

I bolted upright. A crone was gazing down at me, her face dark and weathered like old wood, her sharp green eyes appraising me like a hawk’s. She had spoken in British – the ancient language of the land.

I looked for something to cover me, but my tunic was still on a rock beside the water. She chuckled at my confusion and eased herself down beside me, laying her rough-wood walking-stick across her lap.

‘Who are you?’ I demanded, embarrassed, and angry at being disturbed.

She looked over my naked body shamelessly, dwelling on my chest and legs and groin. She seemed ancient beyond measure; yet her eyes were quick and young, and oddly luminous, like moss caught in sunlight.

When she was ready she spoke, saying, ‘I keep this place.’

‘You do not. It is the property of Lucius Balbus the merchant, or have you not heard?’

At this she merely laughed, which annoyed me.

‘Where do you live?’ I said sharply. ‘Where have you come from? Are you a servant of the house? I have not seen you there . . . Well? Why don’t you answer?’

She spat casually on the ground beside me.

‘It is you,’ she said, ‘not I, who is the intruder here.’ She paused. ‘Whom do you serve, satyr of the woods?’

‘Why do you call me that?’ And then, when she did not speak, ‘I serve no one. I am a free man.’

She laughed, and in a gesture that was almost girlish flicked her long grey hair back over her shoulders. ‘Then think again, child. We all serve, if we are wise. What matters is whom, and how.’

‘You talk in riddles,’ I cried.

But she ignored this, and began casting her eyes about among the shadows. ‘Have you seen her?’ she said.

‘Seen who?’ I turned and stared uneasily at the trees. ‘Who else is here?’ It disturbed me to think I was being watched, when all the time I had supposed I was alone.

‘Why, the nymph whose pool this is. She comes and goes, but perhaps she has not yet shown herself to you.’

I had had enough of these ramblings. Clearly she was some wandering madwoman. With an angry gesture I made to stand and get my clothes. But as I moved she placed a restraining hand on my arm.

‘No? Then you have not looked, or perhaps she is hiding from you. That would not surprise me, when I see how full of rage and movement you are. Will you not be still, and learn to listen and to see? The place is sacred, or have you not sensed that yet?’

She peered into my face, and after a moment nodded, adding, ‘But I see you have.’

She was right, and her insight tempered my anger. Now that she had spoken the words, I knew what it was that drew me to this hillside and this pool. Some ancient presence hung all about, like the scent of the soil and the old leaves.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you understand.’

I settled once more, forgetting my nakedness.

‘Was it you,’ I said, ‘who put the flowers on the stone?’

‘Was it you,’ she echoed back, ‘who broke them?’ She smiled, then said, ‘But no; it was not you. It was your friend who lives at the house, the Christian one . . . But you are not Christian.’

‘No,’ I said, though she had not spoken the words as a question.

In London, Ambitus, who believed in nothing but the coin in his hand, had once said, when I asked him, that there were no gods but man’s invention: foolish night-charms to ward off simple people’s terrors. I had thought these words clever and true at the time. Now they seemed somehow callow, incomplete, a statement of more than I knew.

‘I am sorry about the flowers,’ I said.

She touched my hand. Her old fingers were soft, like a girl’s. ‘I have seen the darkness you hide from; your guardian spirit, your
daimon
, has brought you here . . . Ha! No need to give me that city-boy look, as if the world had no surprises for you. You have much to learn.’

‘I do not believe such things,’ I said.

‘Believe?’ She blew through her nose. ‘Now you talk like a Christian. What does the lamp-flame care if the moth does not believe; or the mountain if no man ever climbs?’ Suddenly she took her stick and stood, supporting herself on my shoulder as she pulled herself up. ‘Your daimon is waiting. It is woven into your destiny. Think on it, and come later to the hilltop.’ She fixed my eye and added, ‘But come tonight, or do not come at all. There will be no second chance.’ And with that she turned and scrambled off up the ridge, like some woodland creature.

Afterwards I sat still, glancing about at the deepening shadows, feeling myself observed. But I saw no one, and heard only birdsong, and the bubbling of the stream.

Eventually I padded down to the pool-edge and pulled on my tunic, then set off back to the house.

As I went, I tried to recall the crone; but somehow it was only her green eyes I could remember.

I woke with a start to light shining on my face. I was on my bed, fully clothed.

I blinked. For a moment I thought it was dawn; but what had woken me was the beam of the rising moon, shafting through the open window. I sat up and rubbed my face. It was time to go.

The window of my room let out onto a yard behind the ramshackle stables. I climbed onto the sill and eased myself down, then stepped along the gully between the house and stable wall.

The main gate had been locked for the night. There would be a watchman there. But I had already planned my route, and turning off the path I climbed onto an upturned cart that lay abandoned in the long grass beside the outer wall. From here it was easy to hoist myself onto the ledge and let myself down into the darkness on the other side.

I had known from the start that I should go. I had reasoned with myself, saying it was an ambush, that the harmless-seeming crone was a lure for bandits hiding somewhere in the woods, who planned to kidnap me for ransom, or sell me to the Hibernians, or merely kill me for the joy of it.

So I reasoned. But all the time I knew these arguments counted for nothing against the deeper undertow of mystery and promise.

Her words kept coming back to me, that she had seen the darkness in my soul. How did she know? It was the place I dared not look, the place beyond the hidden door. Yet she, a stranger, had seen. It was that which drew me on, like the moth she had spoken of, drawn to the flame.

A cloud crossed the disc of the moon. I hesitated, listening. The breeze stirred the undergrowth. Somewhere far off an owl called. I went on, moving silently, following the familiar track.

When I came to the clearing on the hilltop, where the mighty yew was, and the stone altar, I paused in the moon-shadow, scanning the open ground. No one was waiting.

I shook my head, thinking, ‘She is not here; did you suppose otherwise? You have come out to no purpose, searching after a madwoman.’

And yet I remained. The air was heavy with summer scent – clover and wild thyme and moist tree bark. I drew a breath and stepped out into the exposed open of the clearing. If, as I half supposed, I was to be set upon, then this would be the time.

But nothing stirred. Beyond the yew the altar-stone shone like blue crystal in the moonlight. The wind had picked up. It moved in the high branches, sighing and shifting. Then, somewhere behind me, a voice said, ‘So you have come, young satyr.’