Iron Chamber of Memory (17 page)

Henry nodded slowly. What if there were something like radiation, some influence, which existed in this chamber, which he could soak up? Could he acclimate himself to the chamber of memory? Grow up an immunity to amnesia like developing an immunity to poison? The wedding was soon. He had to try anything that might work.

“Very well,” he said. And it was agreed.

She wrote in her book with her magic pencil, kissed him lightly, took up the dark candle, and walked away in the dark. As he heard her heels click-clacking on the floorboards, that feeling of oddness came over him again. In the dark, blindly, he wrote in his own book.

Find out why Laurel never takes off her shoes?

He woke to the wonderful sound of the bells ringing in the eight-sided bell tower in the South Wing. He saw Manfred and Laureline, the few servants and gardeners from the house, and a surprising number of folk from the village and the south part of the island streaming into the chapel. Since there was a church in the middle of the island at a more convenient spot, he assumed Manfred had invited them there for some reason, perhaps to make an announcement.

An hour later the small throng streamed out, chatting, and entered the forest path to find their way downhill to the less strange parts of the island. Henry sat with his cheek on the windowsill, sighing, feeling like a boy playing hooky.

The time walked by with leaden steps. He wished now he had brought his books and the rough draft of his dissertation paper. There was nothing to do, and only one or two thoughts to think about. Henry was not a man well equipped for idle solitude.

There was one wine bottle left, which he nursed carefully. There was also water in the bottom of the bucket, which would last him a day or two at most.

Once or twice he heard a servant, Mr. Nodenson the Butler, or the Cook’s daughter Brigit, walking through the pentagonal corridor that ran past the head of the stairs, and he called up from the foot. At other times, from the eastern windows, he saw workingmen moving crates through corridors of the gallery, and he waved or shouted.

No one was able to hear him. He screamed bloody murder, whistled, and hollered. It was as if everyone in earshot were deaf.

Once he leaned out too far, and forgot where he was or what had happened—hadn’t he just been touring the house with Laurel?—But when the top half of his body was inside the Rose Crystal Chamber again, he recalled.

In the afternoon, he saw Laureline and Manfred walking in the tiny garden nestled between the gallery and the Square Tower and the Main Hall. He was showing her the stone quern. Their voices were clear, and Henry could hear each word. It was all love-talk, impish and saccharine, and it made him sick, because he knew that the false Laurel doing the talking was lying, playing a role, and the true Laureline buried inside her was drifting farther away. Whatever doubts Manfred had entertained seemed gone now.

As Henry watched, Manfred sat on the stone quern and pulled the dark-haired beauty, pretending to protest, into his lap. He nuzzled and caressed her, fondling the gorgeous girl, Henry’s girl, who blushed prettily, pretended to be scandalized, and asked what the servants would say. When she jumped to her feet, Manfred gave her a playful swat on the rear, and the girl took her skirts in her hands and ran away at a fair clip, while Manfred after a moment of gawping in surprise, gave a jovial laugh and set off in pursuit. The pair circled the quern once or twice, and sped off past the barren gardens and the apple trees toward the north lawns. A crest of the hill soon hid them from sight.

Apparently Manfred had been as easily habituated to follow Laureline’s wild tastes in the silly roughness of courtship as had Henry. It seemed terribly un-English; which was probably a great relief to Manfred. And why should he not be free with his lips and caresses? Why should he not put his hands where he liked? Had he not already violated his old fashioned oath of chastity? Manfred’s rebellion against the fashions of the modern world lasted until a busty Cornishwoman with long legs and kinky tastes mugged him in his study, it seemed.

A black hatred came over Henry then like a mist in his eyes. He daydreamed about dropping some heavy chair or flower pot from this window onto Manfred’s head and breaking his neck. It would be the perfect crime. No one could see him, could they?

Laureline, however, was true to her promise, and came to him after dark, dressed in her semitransparent nightgown and her high heels. She had forgotten to bring him a change of clothing or any food, or any way to wash up.

“I wrote it in my book,” she said, “but I must have been too direct. I have to give myself a reason to bring things in here.”

“You love the decorations, and think this should be your honeymoon suite. You do not want the cook or the butler around during the honeymoon, since you might be embarrassed if they heard the noise. You’re a bit of a screamer, you see.”

“That's droll,” she said, raising an eyebrow. “In any event, embarrassment is for servants. I answer to no one, or soon shall.”

“Fine. You are convinced he is embarrassed, and so you want to pack this room with food stuffs, so you can feed yourselves while the staff is on a holiday. And a chamber pot! And damn! Am I thirsty!”

“Now you are swearing like Manfred. I wonder what his problem is, with that mouth of his.”

They puzzled and fretted over the exact wording of her notes to herself, trying to find a way to make them indirect enough to escape the curse. She promised to go to the cellar and get him some bottles to drink, and, once again, to force herself to return, she slipped off her nightgown, and stood there before him wearing nothing but her stockings.

The sight inflamed him; heat coursed through his veins as if his blood were flaming brandy. Her body was flawless in every line and curve. His mouth was suddenly dry, he forgot to breathe, and his heart was thunder in his chest. She pressed her body up to his for a lingering kiss, and then she was gone.

He waited, holding the nightgown to his cheek, and savoring her perfume, but she did not return.

Through the windows, he saw her, nude, rapping on the door to the master bedroom. Of course. Once she woke up to the amnesia of the outer world, what other explanation could there be for stealing naked through the mansion at night?

The black hatred returned when he saw the door open. He closed the window and drew the drapes and took up a chair, and smashed it to bits, and threw it in the fireplace.

That was the first day.

On Monday afternoon, he saw her once again in the small garden enclosed by the gallery and the Main Hall. She was dressed in a white blouse with a high, starched collar and long skirt, and a wide belt, as ever, cinched too tightly. She wore high-topped shoes, with a long skirt and straw hat, her hair tied back with a blue ribbon at the bottom of the bangs so that the whole mass was a lozenge rather than a pony tail. She looked like something out of a picture album from a century ago. Henry felt sickened and weak with hunger, thirst, and longing.

She took up a seat on a stone bench directly below his window, her legs crossed, reading a book. After a while, she took a bit of bread crust out of her skirt pocket, and tossed the crumbs to birds that gathered, while his mouth watered and his stomach growled.

He screamed and cried and reached out with his hand, but she did not hear. He dropped rose petals on her head; she did not look up.

That midnight she came again, dressed in a new nightgown, this one black and lacy. Her underwired bodice emphasized her cleavage dramatically. It could not have been comfortable enough to sleep in.

And the nightgown was not enough to dissuade him from his anger at her when he discovered she had once again forgotten to bring him anything to eat or drink.

“At least I keep remembering to come!” she said in protest. “I saw the note about the honeymoon, but that is after the wedding, and the food would go bad! I thought it was a reminder for two weeks from now. You cannot expect me to remember my true love is hiding in the house! Manfred and I believe you went away to catch up your paper once you realized how slack you’ve been about it.”

“Actually, I could work on it now if I could think of a way to get you to go to Mr. Drake’s smoke shop and retrieve my books. It is maddening here. How do hermits do it? There is nothing to think about except for every drop of water I have ever seen.”

“What happened to the potted roses?”

“I’ve been chewing the flowers for moisture. Hold on! Write yourself a note saying you have to water the flowers!”

She said, “This time, this time for sure, I can go get some wine bottles out of the cellar for you. I’ll take off my–”

“Is that your answer to everything? I am in love with a crazy exhibitionist! It’s a wonder you manage to keep any scrap of clothing on you at all!”

He saw her shocked face, and wondered if he had gone too far. But the anger and frustration was still strong in him. Two days without water, and two nights of poor sleep and vivid nightmares, was making objects seem to swell and recede in his vision. He gathered up her white nightgown and tossed it at her roughly. “Here! No more running around naked for you! It does not help. And what is it with you and your shoes? What girl wears silk stockings to bed?”

She sighed in exasperation. “I am staying in a guest room, and did not bring everything I own. My slippers are at home, and I have to wear shoes to walk around this drafty mansion at night because the carpeting is installed yet. And you cannot wear these shoes without stockings. These are the only pair in my closet that I can tell by touch match each other. I can’t see anything in there because I have to leave the room to go to the closet to find a candle.”

She stepped into his arms and whispered softly. “And when I wake up in the dark, and I go roaming, it is almost as if I am hoping to see my someone I love. A girl wants to look nice. I am wandering the dark halls, looking and looking for something, unable to sleep, but not knowing what I seek!”

“It will not be long now, darling!” he said, his anger subsiding.

She smiled sadly, “So you say. It might be forever.”

“Then I will die in this room! I will not forget you again. In here, you love me. Outside, you do not love me!”

“Oh, but I do!” she said. “I realized it on the golf course, when you walked out on me! That is why I wanted to show off the house to you, rather than have you study. To be alone with you, to look at you, to find some excuse to stumble so that you would put out your hand! You do not know how ashamed I am, or how foolish I feel.”

“I see you flirting with Manfred. You do not look ashamed.”

Her eyes darted to the window, and, from the thunderstruck look on her face, it was clear that only now did she realize all he had seen. “I’ve explained before,” she said smoothly, “Without you, I have no courage. Without you, my choice is between a fine income with a rich lord for a husband, or living with my mother downwind from the fish cannery in her freakish house on stilts, and maybe doing small theater roles for pin money, with no real chance for a career, for independence, for freedom. I’ve mentioned the state of the British theater these days? I am trapped. Trapped!”

“You could work in a shop in London and rent a flat!”

“Spoken by a man who has no idea what London flats go for, or what shopgirls have to do to keep their jobs these days. I’m penniless. I don’t even have enough to put down.”

“If you married me, you’d still be penniless.”

She twined her arms around his neck and stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. “The wife of a scholar! You get meals free in the dining hall or something. Besides, you are rich enough to buy a motorcar two weeks ago, buy it outright, without a bank loan. Why? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t remember doing that.”

“You loaned me the car at the golf course. You left it for me. The man at the front desk of the club said so.”

“Yes, yes, I remember that, but–what am I doing in this room? I should be talking to a psychiatrist. There is something wrong with my brain chemistry. Why do we think this is a curse? Is there a witch after us?”

“My mother is a witch,” said Laureline, “but perhaps not in the way you mean. You mean a fairy-tale witch. A cunning woman is what witches are called in the old stories. Listen. This is no ordinary madness. How is it influencing both of us? Did your brain chemistry leak into mine?”

He said, “Never mind. Write yourself these two notes: first, you have to store some wine bottles here in the Rose Chamber to see how well they keep in this temperature, meaning you have to check every day. Second, you’ve realized that you keep waking up at night because you are hungry, so ask the cook to fix you a snack for midnight, wrapped up in wax paper or something, and you want to eat it up here … uh … because this is where the wine bottles are, and you need to check to see they are not going flat or stale or whatever. Got that? And remember to water the flowers. And oil for the lamp. It is dry.”

The look in her eyes told him, more profoundly than words, how she admired the sacrifice he was making, and how she pitied his suffering.

“I’ll try to remember to bring paper and ink next time,” she said. “So you can write a letter to your smokeshop owner, what’s his name.”

“Mr. Drake.”

She tried to leave the candle with him, but could not. Each time she stepped out into the darkened hall, she turned, saw the candle burning in the room, and went back to get it. After the fourth repetition of this, he broke the candle in half, lit one half, and gave her the other.

She left, and he watched the tiny yellow reflections of light dwindle and vanish from the staircase as she ascended, and then he watched the reflections of reflections from the unseen hall above, until all was black as pitch.

He carefully watched the distant window across the courtyard that framed the master bedroom door. But the bobbing light appeared and disappeared though other windows, and went elsewhere.

That night he dreamt of howling wolves trying to climb the south wall and force themselves in through in a large double-arched window, wolves wearing jackets and caps, and one large black wolf who carried a lantern. In the dream, his walking stick somehow caught fire, and he thrust the terrible wolf-things out the window, while Manfred stood on the round signal tower, and fired the Spanish cannon at a cloud, which so angered the cloud that it shot back lightning in forked bolts, which Manfred deflected with the little green book he carried, and threw the bolts on the ground, to burn the wolves.