Love and Sleep (65 page)
"There's an outside door in that room,” they heard Mr. Winterhalter call, who had not followed them here for some reason of propriety or the conservation of energy. “A door out. You'll want to keep that locked."
It was nearly the largest room in the house. Pierce circled Rose's shoulder with his arm, and guided her into it and out of sight of the view through the door.
"You remember,” he whispered, embracing her from behind.
"What. What."
They were both looking at an old iron bedstead with brass finials, narrow, penitential, its thin stained mattress still asprawl naked over it. He took her more tightly, his hand lifting her skirt from in front of her though her hands tried to keep it down.
"Don't,” he said.
Her resisting hands relaxed; his went inside her pants, searching, while he still held her, his mouth against her neck where the pulse beat. “You remember,” he said. “You must."
"Yes,” she said. “Yes."
"So it's nice,” called Mr. Winterhalter. “There's some things to explain."
With an effort Pierce turned away, left Rose to compose herself; hands in his pockets he came from the bathroom. “Yes?"
"The water,” he said. “Come on, I'll show you."
He took Pierce to the last door left unopened. It led to a dank earth-smelling basement. In the haloed light of a dim bulb, Mr. Winterhalter showed Pierce a squat machine, from which black plastic pipes ran in several directions. “The pump,” he said. “The water of this house comes from a well. You understand, a well?"
"Yes."
"It's off now. Nobody's here, why run it? But it brings water from the well, and ... Look here."
He showed Pierce where one of the pipes from the pump ran to a cobwebby window, out through a pane replaced with plywood.
"The overflow. This is very important."
Why was he here? How had he come here? He was not able to pay his full attention to Mr. Winterhalter's anyway weirdly minatory description of the pump's workings. Just because a world-age is governed by certain laws—the iron laws of tragic necessity, or the wooden ones of melodrama, or outlandish, constant Coincidence—does not mean we do not marvel to find ourselves subject to them.
"We'll go up,” Mr. Winterhalter said. “I'll show you the rest. The way it works."
Rose stood at the top of the cellar stairs, arms crossed before her, silhouetted by the window light behind her. Pierce climbed stumbling up the ladderlike stairs to where she stood.
"Outside,” said the old man.
He took them around to the side of the house and pointed to the ground near the stone foundation. In the yellow grass Pierce perceived a thick black hose, a python disappearing into its hole; it went down into the ground here and then presumably through the wall and into the pump.
"See?” said Mr. Winterhalter. He pointed out the just-discernible line of black piping running through the grass, upward toward the house, into the woods. “Come along. We'll climb up."
Rose didn't follow them as they went up along the plastic pipe, into a little yellow wood, up mossy rocks, the old man breathing hard but not slowing, and Pierce stumbling behind. They came then at length to a beautiful small well-house, its slate roof mossy and its stone sides patched with pebbly concrete.
"Now you see,” said Mr. Winterhalter. “Here's your water."
With a hand he invited Pierce to look inside.
"In the winter you let it run,” Mr. Winterhalter told him. “You let it run just a little. Flowing water doesn't freeze. It's physics. But just a little. Let it flow too fast, it empties the cistern, the water stops flowing, freezes in the pipe. Not too fast. Not too slow. You'll get used to it."
Pierce looked within, smelled sweet water. Amber reflections over the water's black surface were cast up, marbling the walls and wooden ceiling. A fragment from the well's lip fell with a resonant plunk into the water. It looked bottomless.
When they returned to the little house Pierce saw, through the open door, Rose standing in the dining room, his office or study as it would be, he didn't dine much. She lifted her hand as though to touch the wall, but then didn't touch it; she looked around the room, the house, not as though trying to remember it but as though she might at any moment be told what would happen to her here, and to him; be told, if she paid attention, what the story was to be.
"So it suits you,” Mr. Winterhalter declared, breathing hard.
"Yes,” Pierce said. “Yes, it really sort of does."
"Could that really be true?” Rose asked as they drove away, Pierce lighter by the amount of a deposit. In his rear-view mirror Mr. Winterhalter still waved, Time's pander, unwitting of course, though even that Pierce would come to doubt.
"Could what be true?"
"About the water. Not freezing, lying out on the ground like that."
"It seemed convincing to me,” Pierce said. “Flowing water doesn't freeze.” He remembered, with sudden vivid completeness, standing in the bathroom of the bungalow in Kentucky on a winter night and setting the drip of the faucets. Flowing water doesn't freeze. In the bathroom window a ghostly feral face.
In that age the real connections between things—pattern, repetition, inversion, echo—were actually known or sensed at times, but only in odd moments; were come upon as though in the dark, and felt by wondering fingers. What is patent now was hidden then, hard to say, let slip as soon as caught.
They turned at the gate to go out.
"And how in the snow will you get all the way in?” Rose asked. Pierce didn't answer, not having thought of that. Hire plowing. Snowshoe in. It didn't matter. Except that Mr. Winterhalter had locked the door again behind him, no key for Pierce until a lease was signed, Pierce would have turned down that way again now, taken her into that bedroom again, and bent her at last over that sordid bed.
"I'm glad you're by the river though,” she said. “I like the water. So much."
"Rose,” he said. “That time last year.” But he had become just then absurdly afraid, and unwilling to trust his memory, too highly colored suddenly, unlikely. You can't step in the same river twice. The river is not the same. You are not the same.
"Summer's almost over,” she said.
A wind had arisen. As though borne on it they drove through the tunnel of roadside trees, whose riddled fallen leaves were swept before them across the asphalt. The road was new-laid, it seemed, for it was deeply black, striped in bright white and dashed with endless yellow oblongs, and it curled through the pale restless woods smartly, purposefully. Pierce, moving his Steed along it, felt his hands turned by the wheel as though the car knew the way of itself.
It is a very curious thing:
After the great Armada that Philip of Spain sent against England was defeated, both winner and loser naturally attributed the victory to God. Among the English the story began then to be told which would become a staple of triumphal British History from then on, the story of the wonderful “Protestant wind” that sprang up in the nick of time to save the beleaguered island and its people from the towering galleons and orgulous grandees.
Te Deum
and
Non nobis
were ordered to be sung in churches from Penzance to Scotland. To Thee and not to us O God the victory.
Philip of Spain seems to have agreed, that the victory could not be credited to men's arms and men's ships, even though he had a very different idea of what God had wanted upon this occasion. “I sent them to fight against men, and not against the wind,” he is famously reported to have said on hearing of the defeat.
What is curious is that there was, apparently, no wind.
A number of Spanish ships were at length blown by storms against the Irish coast, the survivors becoming incorporated into Irish legend. But that was on the long bitter journey home, after the battle, after defeat. During the days of June when the great encounter raged, the winds were mostly mild, and mostly favored the Spanish. In the dispatches from the ships at sea on both sides sent during the fighting, there is no mention of any great wind, saving or destroying.
What is to be said?
Perhaps there
was
a wind, and it somehow left no trace in the primary records of the time. For if there was no wind, would not the English have preferred to credit
themselves
with the triumph, aided (of course) by God? If there was not a wind, for what reason would Philip have invented one, and given God the blame for the defeat of what was supposed to be God's own Navy?
Or perhaps there really was no wind—until the awesome fortunate power which commentators attributed to it belatedly conjures it up. Only when the myth of the big wind (bringer-in of the new British Empire, blower-away of Spanish hegemony over the old history of the world) settles firmly on the humps of historians’ pens does it begin to blow backward from the later time to the earlier, where kings, popes, and ambassadors can feel it, though sailors and ships do not.
There had been a great stillness in the Imperial City of Prague during the whole of the month of May, as the Spanish ships maneuvered in the Narrow Seas and the Prince of Parma prepared his landing-craft and marshaled his invasion forces. The city seemed more beautiful than ever before to the Emperor, the bright buff of its stones, the red cobblestones jewellike, translucent under the dome of blue, the air so clear he could hear laughter rise from the city streets below the Hradschin tower where he sat, the laughter of happy citizens.
This was the year in which his Empire would fall, or be altered beyond recognition. Prophecies made a hundred years ago, but whose roots ran far deeper in time than that, said so, almost clearly, only as darkly as any prophecy perforce must that describes the unlicked bear-cubs of time, still shapeless.
The Emperor (whose horoscope had been cast by Nostradamus) regarded most prophecy as probably true but uselessly ambiguous: as ambiguous as the world whose future it claimed to describe. The only certainty lay in numbers, whose operations every man's reason could agree on. Catholics were enjoined from the practice, but Protestants in the Emperor's employ had combed Revelation, the Book of Daniel, the Book of Isaiah, and certain other books as sacred as these but without canonical standing, manuscripts of which were kept in the carved chests that held the Emperor's treasures.
The computations were growing ever clearer, like frost-writing etching itself on a winter glass. The numbers in Scripture hinted at a series of epochs succeeding one another from the beginning of time, each forming in its turn like a drop at the spout of a clepsydra, forming forming until pregnant with its own fullness it falls, and another begins to form. The next-to-last epoch in the series running from world-creation to world's end had, according to these accumulating and indisputable numbers, ended in 1518, when Martin Luther had defied the Pope, and all Christendom felt the vertigo of freefall. From that time to the judgment, when the Seventh Seal was opened and the Dragon flew, was ten times seven years. The Emperor had been invited to add up the numbers himself. There was no need. It was self-evident. Fifteen hundred and eighteen plus ten times seven years reached right to this transparent afternoon, clear spherical drop too big to hang any longer.
Then there were the Capuchin friars, busy with prophecies of their own, who also made their secret reports to the Emperor, not on the same days as the Protestant scholars were smuggled in.
The Capuchins (or a certain sect within them, whose members were known only to one another) had for a hundred years and more meditated deeply on the revelation of Abbot Joachim da Fiore. Joachim had long ago determined that the Universe made by God occurred in three parts, just as the Godhead itself did: the first age was the age of the Father, and the Law was the law of the prophets, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; the second age, that of the Son, which began when Christ died for our sins and the curtain of the Temple was rent in two, was ruled by the Church and the Law of Love. Last would come the age of the Holy Spirit, when Christ's Church would pass away, unneeded, lovely idea Rudolf thought; then there would be no law, there would be Perpetual Peace, until the stars fell from their spheres and God shut up the world for good.
When would that age begin?
There were those among the Joachimists who already lived in the Third Age, who had withdrawn in their hearts from the superannuated Church and empty sacraments, and lived inwardly free. So the Emperor heard. Free.
His confessor taxed him with listening to heretics, but the Emperor said that heretics could compute as well as good Catholics, and the truths of Scripture are there for all to read, however wrongly they might be interpreted. He did not say, but he remembered well, how his revered father Maximilian had said, before Christendom was rent in two, that all men might be saved by their own lights, the Turks might be saved by their prophet and even the savages of the New World might be saved by their own saviors as we are saved by Christ. Even the airy spirits and other intelligences, the Emperor imagined, might be saved by the precepts of their own religion, whatever it was.
No: they would not be saved, they were of that lucky middle kind who would not be saved or damned, for they would not be judged. Tears rose to the Emperor's eyes.
The tower room from whose windows the Emperor looked out over the city was workroom and study and retreat. Here with his assistants (the three monks and the shaven novice now patiently watching as the Emperor contemplated) the Emperor built and re-built clocks, ground lenses and studied catoptrics, sat up nightlong to measure the stars’ movements. The Emperor painted here; his grandfather Charles had once stooped to pick up Titian's brush, but Rudolf learned the art himself, and worked tirelessly (and fruitlessly, he knew it) on his canvases.
He loved clocks, as all the Hapsburgs did; Charles had spent his retirement in the mountains of Spain trying to get all his clocks to chime at the same time. He loved clocks, but he didn't believe in the time they counted.