Iron Chamber of Memory (8 page)

“Don’t talk like that!” he snapped.

Laureline’s eyes grew wide with dismay, and her lip trembled.

He knelt where she was kneeling before the divan, and took her hands in his, and kissed her. “Sorry—I don’t mean to be sharp.”

“No, it is my fault. I don’t know what has come over me. I am so … so…”

“Darling, I know. Shush. I know. But maybe our wedding vows would break the spell. There is an odd power in those old sacraments. Then we can consummate our love, and we will be free.”

She rolled her eyes in scorn yet again. “Fine! You write a note to yourself to invite a minister into this chamber when I am here. And somehow talk me into bringing a wedding dress. But I think those notes will be ones your eyes will never let you read, once you are out-of-doors. They are too close to the heart of the matter.”

He glared at his scarred arm. “Maybe…”

Laureline said, “Do let me suggest a plan, for once. Let us try your new method. Write down in your little black book these words:
Buy diamond necklace
. Now in your memory palace, let us say in the swimming pool in the back, picture me wearing a black one-piece bathing suit, but with diamonds on a chain around my neck. See?”

He said, “What will that accomplish?”

“You are going to buy me a diamond necklace. When you see it on me, you will remember. Also, write down
Golf on Wednesday the 27th
.” She smiled, showing her dimples, her eyelids half-lowered, as she scribbled in her own little pink-leather notebook.

Henry said, “How is this going to work for us? There is no way Outside Me would buy a diamond necklace as a present for his best friend’s fiancée. For one thing, how can I afford it?”

But Laureline said, “If I tell you the whole plan, that might drive the memory too close to the forbidden memory of love, and you will forget it. But if you don’t know the details, well, you might recall just enough to do as I say. Trust me. We only have two months. I have written myself notes of very natural things for my Otherself do to, that will ensure you and I can meet here again.”

Henry said, “How is it that this lamp was lit, just in this one room, and you have the key to it?”

Laureline said, “I arranged it. Last time we were here together, I wrote myself a reminder note to ask Manfred to let me see to moving the furniture out of this chamber.”

“Out of the house?” asked Henry.

“The lawyers are forcing us to move materials left behind into storage until the ownership questions are cleared up. Naturally, every time I stepped into it intending to pack a box, I remembered myself, and left everything as it is. I was here earlier today, looking for Manfred. When I came in here, I remembered myself again, and lit the lamp, hoping it would lure us back in, once we found the house empty. I even arranged for this!”

And with a grin, she danced over to one of the hanging silk drapes, and pulled it aside. Here was an ice bucket and bottles of champagne. She smiled a most luxurious smile. “Why don’t you pry open one of these stubborn corks, while I slip into something more comfortable? I tricked myself into bringing something for an overnight stay. Nice in a naughty way.”

Like a man walking into the teeth of an arctic wind, Henry forced himself to turn away, and, step by leaden step, he walked toward the door behind which the upward stair waited.

She said, “Wait! What are you doing? There is no other place to sleep.”

“But with you?” He hefted the flashlight in his hand. He would be able to find his way back to the one inn on the island, with that light.

Her lips trembled, but she said nothing.

Henry gritted his teeth and turned his face away, knowing one look at her would shatter his resolve. “My love, I adore you. Believe that. That means I love you too much to be selfish, to demean you.”

She rushed up behind him, put her arms around him, put her cheek against his back. “I want to be demeaned, if it is by you. You may do what you’d like to me.”

“Don’t talk that way!”

“How else can I prove to you that nothing else matters, but us?”

Henry shook his head. “I will have you as an honest woman, or not at all. In the sunlight, not in the shadows. I will not betray Manfred.”

“But what if his life outside is as meaningless to him as ours are to us? To whom are you
really
being loyal?”

He turned, and with some difficulty, disentangled himself from her. “One day the spell will break. We will be wed. I promise it! One day, your happiness and mine will be complete. You will belong to me and you will own me. On that day, I will not look back and regret that I did not love you strongly enough. You are worth the wait.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You go out into that oblivion and you will forget your promise the moment your heart passes over that threshold. And I will stay here all night, alone, knowing that you walked away from me.”

He kissed her roughly, intending it to be goodbye, but she pulled him with her small hands back toward the center of the chamber, toward the divan, toward the champagne. He took one step in that direction with her, then a second, and a third.

But then he firmly, but gently, put her aside, and turned, and walked out the door.

When Hal and Manfred met next, it was at a pub called the Old Granary in Dorset. They sat on a balcony with the River Frome chuckling and sliding on below, and beyond was the green view of the Purbeck Hills. Hal drank the Tanglefoot ale, brewed by a family of brewers who had been in business longer than his home country. Manfred drank the Kronenbourg Lager.

At first they spoke seriously, as friends do, about their progress and obstacles with their dissertations, but as the ale flowed freely and the afternoon progressed, the talk turned to more frivolous and exotic topics.

Hal looked at Manfred over the rim of his ale cup. Manfred was thirty years old, with a square brow hanging over deepset eyes. This gave his face an aspect of brooding and scowling which receded when he smiled, but never entirely vanished. His cheek bones were high and definite, his nose like the beak of a hawk. His jaw jutted, his lips were thick and red as those of an Assyrian. His hair was so dark as to seem almost blue. At all hours, even when he had just shaved with a close razor, his chin and jawline was shadowed with the hint of dark, coarse hair. He did not have the height of Hal, nor his wide shoulders, but he was thick through the chest, as stout as an old oak barrel, and his neck and arms were surprisingly muscular.

“I am surprised you drink a German brew, you being a lord now, and such,” said Hal with an easy grin. “Surely love of Queen and Country demands otherwise? Surely there is some law from the time of Henry the Second, or something, demanding true Englishmen drink only their own true England beer?”

Manfred, as always, seemed to be glowering under his close-knit brows, but a slight smile touched his lip. “This lager is from France, and in the time of Henry the Second, we ruled France, or part of her. Brewed by a German family, of course. Trust the Huns with hops, the Gauls with grapes. Everything fine and good among the English came from the Continent. This was a haunt of giants before Brutus came, you know, and Caesar saw nothing but savages painted blue, Picts and cannibals, and druids burning slaves alive in wicker men on the moor. England is like a dark house of forgotten things, with basement, cellar, bunker and dungeon leading down to ever darker things no one remembers. Sometimes it is a mercy to forget.”

“That is a glum attitude!” protested Hal.

“So says the Yank, whose country is hardly old enough to wipe its own bum. You Yanks still berate and bewail the bad deeds of yesterday, your one and only civil war, your slave-trade, driving off the Indians. When were those deeds done? Mere moments ago. We have had nine civil wars or more, and our slave trade since the time of John Hawkins swelled to encompass the world entire! Christendom was shipwrecked on this stony-hearted island in 1536, split in two, never to be whole again. All the subsequent wars in Europe spring from that, for without Henry and good queen Bess, the Reformation would have been suppressed like every other heresy before it. Without the divide between Catholic and Protestant kings, perhaps one contender would have eventually led the Holy Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains, and world wars never been invented. Earlier, the troubles of Ireland started in 1192. Earlier still, Arthur in 518 fought the battle of Badon Hill, where he slew eightscore men singlehandedly: and the grief of that still haunts the Badbury Rings, through green turf covers the Roman stones. What are the ills of your measly two hundred years compared to that?”

“Haunts as in
haunting
?”

“Of course. The locals say the shades of Arthur and his knights appear there on moonless nights, fighting ghostly foes. In 1970 the spectral armies drove away an archeological expedition, who fled in panic from the clamor of an unseen battle in the air. And a ghost of a knight with a hideously scarred face was seen at night there, as recently as 1977.”

“A real ghost?”

Manfred smiled again. “I am glad you did not say
a real, live ghost
.”

Hal laughed with joy. Manfred was the only man he’d met in Oxford who took the older tales and yarns completely seriously. Even the other students of history and ancient literature seem to regard the past as dead, or, worse, as absurd. They almost seemed like amnesiacs, unaware of the true glory of their ancient and richly-fabled island even while they vivisected the records of it.

Not Manfred. He seemed to Hal to be a living relic of the days of yore, of the times of myth, like a wizard who had stepped out of an enchanted sleep into the modern world.

Manfred was by far the most open-minded man Hal had ever met. Hal could have an honest conversation with him without ever once having to worry about stepping onto the invisible landmines and pitfalls of forbidden topics and unspoken thoughts with which every other man he knew surrounded his conversation.

Best of all, he was as deeply interested in the topic of Hal’s dissertation as Hal was in his. It was a joy to converse with someone who valued all the old, strong, beautiful things that Hal himself so cherished.

There was one other topic upon which they agreed, as well; they were the only two men either of them knew who still believed in the wisdom of chastity.

“Surely such things are just stories told by hysterics?” said Hal, returning to their conversation after emptying his ale.

“All of them?” Manfred looked skeptical. “Every story ever, even those told by sober men with nothing to gain by it? That may be more farfetched than believing in ghosts.”

“What else could ghost stories be?”

“Something mankind has never seen before, or, far more likely, something our ancestors lived with daily, but which we forget. Perhaps a ghost is an echo from that time: a psychic residue. Perhaps it is the senility of the world trying to remember old and terrible tragedies and crimes, but not able to bring them clearly enough into focus to materialize them.”

As if a small, inner voice were urging him, Hal said, “That reminds me! I just read a fascinating book on mnemonics. It is the art of building a memory mansion so that nothing is ever forgotten. You simply must read it.”

“I am rather busy, between my schoolwork and my legal tribulations–”

“It is fascinating! It will help with your schoolwork—how could it not?” Hal was half surprised to see his hands had, as if without consulting him, unzipped his rucksack, and pulled the book out, proffering it across the table. “Please! For me! I insist!”

Manfred looked puzzled. “You seem rather keen on–”

“You must read it! It is that good!”

Manfred eventually agreed to take it, to make the time to read it. But he muttered, “I am not sure abolishing forgetfulness is a help. Perhaps we should be grateful that the world has amnesia.”

“To the contrary! If the world could recollect Arthur in all his glory, manifest his ghost as a physical reality in broad daylight, surely he would set to rights all the wrongs of England of which you so complain. In any case, why list the victory of Arthur as an evil akin to the Invasion of Ireland?”

“I did not call it an evil, but said it was a cause for grief.”

“Why would anyone be grief-stricken at the victory of Arthur?”

“Surely Mordred, for one.” Manfred smiled again, and again it seemed to be an ironic smile, a mocking smile. “As for who else, you are the one writing the paper on Arthur. Who did he overthrow?”

“The pagan kings of Saxony.”

“And did they practice polygamy, pederasty, slavery, and human sacrifice, and all the other delights of the true and honest pagans of yore?”

“Of course.”

“Now, tell me this, who keeps a grudge longer? Good men who forgive and forget? Or wicked men who every day dream about returning to the sins and brutalities that civilization, sanity, and Holy Mother Church forbid? Which ghosts linger longer? Those of criminals and monsters, eager for blood, or those of kindly men, eager to escape this vale of woes for the paradise above all stars? I say that everything in England, when you dig down deeper, has a dark past, one that is best unrecalled. Our only escape is to forget!”

Hal turned and stared across the river. “You are in a grim mood. Let us forget the past for the moment and enjoy the day.” He raised his walking stick and gestured like a stage magician sweeping aside a curtain to reveal his shapely assistant, uncut by any saw. As if at his signal, the sun peered through cloud, and scattered a dancing path of brilliance across the water.

Manfred nodded at the waters below their balcony. “Ah, the River Frome! You think it is fair and pleasant? I will tell you the tale.”

Manfred leaned forward on the wood table, his eyes dark and piercing beneath their heavy brows, and he spoke in grim tones.

“Near Wool is the ruined Cistercian monastery of Bindon Abbey. A boy who once served the monks there would dawdle and frolic on his errands, and swim in this river. His name was Lubberlu. Well, once from between the bulrushes appeared a maiden whose eyes sparkled like sunlight on blue water, and whose silver hair was like a flowing waterfall. They dallied and kissed and laughed, and the boy day after day finding any excuse to be sent on errands, always found his way to the waterside as the summer days turned toward autumn, and the feast of all souls drew nigh. Lubberlu approached one of the monks of the abbey, and said he wished to marry the girl. But the monk knew she was no mortal maiden, and forbade it, warning him of the murderous ways of the daughters of the river water, the nix, the mermaids. In tears the boy fled, vowing to bring the girl to a proper Christian wedding, and turn her from her ways. The next day his drowned corpse was found floating face up in the river, tangled among the bulrushes.”