September Castle Read online

  ‘Yes. Until one day she thought she felt it stir in protest. And then she remembered a certain herb, which a magician called Aristarchos had given her in Corfu. It’s all in the Appendix. He had spotted her out as an odd one and persuaded her to make a full confession of her condition, in return for which he had given her some leaves of this herb, which she put away in a little onyx box. “Use this,” Aristarchos had said, “to command yourself. To command your true self, your true soul. If you give it to another, you may command his whole being. If you give it to yourself you may command your whole being, you may (which is given to few men or women) command your soul.”’

  ‘Where did this Aristarchos stand in the matter of the soul’s being dead?’

  ‘Nowhere. It would never have even occurred to him. As far as he was concerned that concept (if ever he knew of it) had died seventeen centuries before. But of course our little Princess from the Mani took a different view; and when Aristarchos gave her the herb, Xanthippe, while too polite to mention it, knew that it would be useless. She could not command a soul that was dead, so she put the leaves of the herb in an onyx box and forgot them. Until, that is, many days later, long after she left Corfu, long after she arrived in France, long after she left Rouen and came to Arques, a remarkable, an impossible thing occurred: she felt her soul stir in protest. If it could stir in its death, perhaps it could live. Perhaps Aristarchos’ herb, forgotten till now, could help it to live. It was, at any rate, worth a try. She would take the herb as instructed by Aristarchos, she would command her soul to come to life, and if it did she would then request it to cast out the daemon on his next appearance.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Ptoly. You are talking the most utter bollocks. When do we get to the treasure?’

  ‘Patience, darling. Unlike those Greeks, you must be patient. They were in too much of a hurry, and so they got things wrong and came unstuck. Calm, calm, calm.’

  At the mention of the Greeks, Jo-Jo turned her eyes guiltily to the floor. But Ptolemaeos, it appeared, had no idea that someone might have seen the Appendix in his own home, through the carelessness of his own niece. He explained to her that the leader of the Greek faction, having some notion of the wealth to be won, had decided that there might be more to be learnt from the museum Curator at Vezelay, who, after all, had the MS of the Chronicle in his keeping and could reasonably be supposed to be expert in this area. So the Greek had applied to him, had insisted that there must be more material than merely the official Chronicle, had bullied and pleaded, had rattled his sabre and clinked his gold. That makes sense, Jo-Jo thought: clearly that Greek who came here only got a very quick and nervous look at Ptoly’s copy of the Appendix; so he went to Vezelay, hoping for a long and leisurely read. Which, as Ptoly now told her, the Curator, part in duty and part in loyalty to his English chums, had persisted in denying him. In the end he had had to have him turned off by the police, after which he had written to Ptolemaeos to warn him of the man’s violent and excessive curiosity.

  ‘Too fierce, too unsubtle, too greedy,’ said Ptolemaeos now. ‘He gave his game away, and I’ve had Ivan deal with him – with the one that matters, the leader. He was the one who came here,’ he said to Jo-Jo. (As if, she thought, I didn’t know.) ‘I expect our manner of living gave him ideas above his station. But never mind him. Where was I?’

  Jo-Jo gave a sigh of relief at the safe passing of the topic, converted it quickly into an erotic mew, and said: ‘Xanthippe was going to use the herb to wake her soul from death. Or that’s how she saw it.’

  ‘And we must try to see it the same way if we are ever to understand.’ Ptolemaeos flexed his shoulders and signed to Jo-Jo to continue the massage. ‘However,’ he said, ‘before she tasted the herb she told two people of her intention: Hero, her old friend and senior maid-in-waiting, and also the avuncular Hubert. Hubert seemed uncertain about the idea. Hero didn’t like it at all.’

  ‘Ah-ha. I knew that Hero was up to no good.’

  ‘Her motives for opposing Xanthippe appeared to be strictly honourable. She told her mistress that it was dangerous, even a blasphemous thing to do – to try to arouse a soul which, as they both knew, was intended to lie dead inside her until she herself would die.’

  ‘What did Xanthippe say to that?’

  ‘She fell silent and started fretting. The daemon was on his way. They had been expecting him about now and a lamb which he had ordered was ready for him. So Hero went and fetc.hed the dildoe from the chest, and told one of the girls to bring the lamb. Xanthippe went through her bit with the dildoe – even more violently and noisily than before, Hubert tells us, and then started talking in the voice of Masullaoh.’

  ‘And what had he got to say for himself?’

  ‘That he had a particularly exacting task ahead of him and required nutriment of a particularly delicate yet sustaining kind: he didn’t want the lamb after all; he wanted Hero.’

  Some time after the dawn broke, Ivan realized that he was being followed. A powerful Lancia was pacing the Land Rover at a distance of about a furlong. He knew that the driver of the Lancia was deliberately tracking him, as opposed to dawdling fortuitously along the same route, because twice he made detours from the main road into villages on the shore, and twice the Lancia turned off after him, drew a little closer, then attended him through the village and back on to the road north. From repeated scrutinies of his mirror in the rapidly improving light Ivan eventually ascertained that the Lancia contained four men as well as the driver.

  All of which, Ivan now told himself, suggested two questions. First, how had these people come to be on his trail so soon? The sea captain, even if he had early recovered from his swoon, and had been rendered immune by it from the power of the herb, simply could not have escaped from the chapel, through the deadly patch of salt-marsh, and so back to the Campo (stark naked at that) quickly enough to raise an alarm that would have brought this Lancia – a maroon Lancia, the morning now revealed – on to his heels so soon. Again, he was certain that no one had followed him and the sea captain out to the chapel. He must conclude, then, that a general watch was being kept for him and his Land Rover up and down the coast (and probably up and down the inland road north through Belgrade and Zagreb) as a result of an alert broadcast by the friends of the dead Greek, and that almost certainly these men in the Lancia knew nothing yet about the excursion to the chapel and the unedifying fate of the sea dog. They were looking for him quite regardless of all that: they were looking for him, and had been for some time, because they needed him to tell them what the dead Greek could no longer tell them about the nature and whereabouts of the treasure which he had promised them. Which being the case, he came to the second question: how would they proceed?

  They wanted him alive, to start with at any rate; they wanted him to talk. So the thing was very simple: they would loiter along behind him until he ran out of petrol or stopped to buy some more; and then, surrounding and outnumbering him, they would quickly and quietly escort him to the maroon Lancia and convey him to a place where they could put the question at their leisure.

  ‘But why Hero?’ said Jo-Jo. ‘Hero was on Masullaoh’s side. Or at least she helped him to come to Xanthippe, and she was opposed to Xanthippe’s trying to rouse her soul, with that herb, into making resistance. So why should Massulaoh wish to destroy his ally – in that particularly revolting way? Hero had deserved much better than that.’

  ‘Massulaoh wanted Hero dead,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘because he had a special task for her soul – and she was the only person around of the calibre to do it.’

  Ptolemaeos swept back the curtains. Dawn struggled with a yellow fen-mist at the bottom of the garden.

  ‘Still, she must have felt a bit hard done by when he announced that she was the next item on his menu?’

  ‘No. He reassured her, through the mouth of Xanthippe, that he would be in touch with her to comfort and command her on another plane. Then he bade Xanthippe fall to. And a very messy business it was.
Apparently Xanthippe started on Hero’s jugular, and “the blood issued like a great fountain gushing crimson.”’

  ‘Hubert was watching, of course?’

  ‘Hubert was watching. He’d been there when her fit started, while they were discussing her intention of taking Aristarchos’ herb. So of course he stayed on for the rest of the show – absolutely powerless, he assures us, to stop it.’

  ‘But by this time they were all at Arques. You did say that?’

  ‘Yes. They had been at Arques some weeks.’

  ‘Then where was the Castellan while all this was going on?’

  ‘Minding his own biz-whacks. His job was to keep Xanthippe in the Castle and admit Henri de Longueil into her presence. He’d done exactly that. He had nothing with which to reproach himself. He couldn’t be held responsible for characters like Masullaoh, who were in any case unstoppable. So the Castellan just didn’t want to know. Hubert, he thought, would see him in the clear with the Villehardouins, and that was all he cared about. Obviously the wretched girl was possessed, and if anything nasty happened to her then as far as he was concerned it would be good riddance.’

  ‘What about Henri de Longueil then? Was he taking any interest?’

  ‘Henri was sorry for the girl, but you remember that he didn’t much like her and had been dismissed by her. He too was minding his own biz-whacks – in Longueil, most probably. As I told you, he’d been keeping in touch with the situation, but only from a distance, and he didn’t turn up at the Castle again until he had news that she was dead and buried. He was told a relatively anodyne and quite plausible version of the whole thing, which he turned into a ballad.’

  ‘He forgot that “another had looked at him from behind her eyes.”’

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t choose to remember. It probably suited him to believe what he was told. At any rate, he just wrote his pretty poem, and later on he took Xanthippe’s ladies-in-waiting back to Greece…the five that were left of them. But I’m jumping too far ahead. Back to the death of Hero.

  ‘By the time Xanthippe had finished there was nothing left of Hero except a pile of bones, which Masullaoh, still speaking through Xanthippe’s mouth of course, ordered the girls to hide, for the time being, in one of Xanthippe’s trunks. Xanthippe then went off into a deep sleep.

  ‘When she came to, she told everyone, speaking in her own voice, that she had dreamed of a lake in her own country, a lake far from Ilyssos but nevertheless in Greece. While she was swimming in that lake, she said, a great hand had drawn her down and a voice had told her not to be afraid, as she was about to receive a highly privileged revelation. She was going to be introduced to Satan in person, and he was going to make her a gift which would prove, to herself and to all men, that Satan was not a fallen Angel originally created by God, but another and equal God in his own right, like God self-created, as powerful as God if not more so, and thus representing principles which had as good a title to paramountcy as the so-called Christian virtues. Well, Xanthippe was fairly used, by now, to hearing such pronouncements from Masullaoh and others, but she had never yet been offered an introduction to Satan in person and was expecting rather a lot of him. She was rather disappointed therefore, when she was taken into an underwater grotto and shown a small black stone, ovoid in shape.

  ‘Now we know, of course, that this was probably the Primal Atom which exploded to produce the Physical Universe – Satan’s creation, you recall. And not merely his creation: there was a sense in which the physical Universe was Satan, was of his substance; so that at least part of himself must have gone to make up the Primal Atom before it exploded. Now this, of course, had happened aeons before, but it is reasonable to assume that Satan was still capable of taking the same form, in retrospect so to speak, and chose it now as being more convenient than most for presenting himself to Xanthippe. After all, if he had appeared as his real self he might have dazzled her to death, as Jove did Semele. Anyhow, there was this black ovoid, the egg of Satan’s Universe and in effect Satan himself; but of course poor Xanthippe’s physics weren’t up to understanding any of this, and she was horribly disappointed – as indeed she was at first with her present. For she was given, by a hooded attendant, a basket which contained what she thought was an enormous lobster but which she soon recognized as an Écrevisse or fresh-water langouste. Since the only remarkable thing about it was its colossal size – far more freakish in an Écrevisse than in a lobster – she could not imagine for the life of her, how this creature was going to prove the independence of Satan and his parity with God.’

  ‘I’m glad about that Écrevisse,’ said Jo-Jo; ‘I was impatient for its promised appearance.’

  ‘There you are then. When Xanthippe woke up and started telling the story, she kept looking around as if she expected to see the Écrevisse somewhere about the place, being accustomed to find that her dream-gifts had assumed material shape. And sure enough, in the ewer of water which stood near her bed, was a gigantic crustacean – not a real one but one made, according to Hubert’s Appendix, “of gold and enamel and all manner of rare jewels and precious metals, being two cubits in length by nine inches in width and six in height, most deliberately wrought and dightly carven, and of most curious mechanism: for when a small key or lever in the tail was turned thrice this wondrous toy would crawl slowly along the ground while from within an instrument of tiny chimes would play an elegy or dirge – I know not what – that did entice the soul at once to delicious melancholy and to wanton fancy; the former soothing the soul and acquainting it that all the world is transience and there can therefore be no need of earnest striving or weary prohibition; the latter inviting the flesh to delights unspeakable, as to lie in lewd sport with our mothers or newly bosomed daughters or tender sons, all of us together, pleasing each other about and about without cess or shame, laughing and throbbing in quenchless joy, for that Satan has ordained that lust as soon as satisfied shall straight return.”’

  ‘A very enviable state of affairs,’ said Jo-Jo.

  ‘Quite so. But Xanthippe would have none of it. Masullaoh had gone – but not before he had made her devour her childhood friend and had presented her with this insidious oracle of Satan’s indulgence. Though it might well prove the existence of Satan, she now affirmed, it did not prove his parity with God. She must and would hold by God, the supreme King. In any case whatever, Masullaoh was a torment and temptation of which she would have no more. She would wake her dead soul to fight for her: where was the onyx box containing the herbs which Aristarchos had given her, the herbs that enabled a man to command his own true soul and which, she hoped, would now empower her to revive and activate hers?

  ‘Gone. Nowhere to be found. Briefly Masullaoh returns to explain, through Xanthippe’s mouth, that just as he can conjure dream-objects into the material world, so he can take real objects, like herbs and onyx boxes, back with him into his own ethereal one. Let Xanthippe cease to resist; only let her do his will without further fight, and all will be well.’

  ‘Ptoly… O Ptolemaeos, Angel of Evil, is the Treasure which you seek this monstrous toy crustacean?’

  ‘Yes. Yes… BUT. We have to find it, to make sure of finding it, in certain prescribed circumstances or conditions. If the circumstances or the conditions are wrong, then the Écrevisse will be useless and worthless. It will have no meaning.’

  ‘You can hardly hope it still plays a tune.’

  ‘That is exactly what I hope, if only metaphorically. And all depends on the conditions and circumstances of which I speak. Listen and learn.’

  Ptolemaeos beckoned her to come and stand with him in the window. Together they looked down the lawn to the ochre mist which oozed from the fen beyond it.

  ‘And now back,’ said Ptolemaeos, ‘to our little Princess. She mistrusted the gift, she feared its message. She wanted to fight Masullaoh; but the special herb which might have helped her to rouse her soul to combat had been stolen. Day after day she walked on the walls of the Castle and found no comf
ort anywhere. Not even a sight of her beloved sea. And then she succumbed.’

  ‘Succumbed? To death?’

  ‘Not just yet. First she succumbed to temptation. Satan’s gift had been well chosen. To start with it was of extreme beauty and immense value –’

  ‘How can you be sure of that? You’ve only Hubert’s word for it.’

  ‘Patience, girl. All will be made plain in due time. As I was saying, not only was Satan’s gift a most beautiful and glittering toy, it was also the image of a creature which dwelt in water, not indeed a creature of the sea, but of lakes and rivers, the next best. After a time Xanthippe sent for the Écrevisse, looked long at it, and was delighted by it. She listened again to the tune it played and was intrigued by its message. Soon she was inseparable from it. I must have something to please me in my misery, she kept saying, something dainty and beguiling to look at, something sweet and tuneful to listen to. And who is to say this image is evil? Perhaps the voice in my dream spoke truth: perhaps Satan is indeed the Peer of God; and then who is to say what is sin and what is virtue? Or who is to say that the tune of enticement from the little bells within the Écrevisse is not the voice of true wisdom which announces the true happiness?

  ‘One stormy day in October Xanthippe went to bed at sundown, complaining of a slight headache. The senior maiden attended her. This was now a girl called Lalage, a plump, merry hoyden, very different from the statuesque and taciturn Hero. As was now the custom, Lalage placed the golden Écrevisse on a table near her mistress’ bed, leaving a lighted candle nearby which made of the bright gems and enamels a fantasy of colour amid the surrounding darkness. Lalage kissed the Princess goodnight and left her just as the sun dipped beneath the western rampart. Some hours later, while Lalage and the other four girls were preparing for bed in their dormitory, there was a hideous scream from Xanthippe’s chamber. Lalage, who, as Hubert tells us, “had left her companions for a while and been at stool in the Tower jakes”, came rushing down into the dorter, grabbed a candle and called to the others to follow her. She led them down a stone corridor which ran inside the western rampart for some ten or fifteen yards and then into Xanthippe’s bedroom. Xanthippe was lying quietly on her back, holding the giant Écrevisse in her left hand. As they approached, they saw by the quivering light of the candle that her hand had been ripped, as by sharp metal, and that her throat had been most horribly clawed. The poor little Despoina was dead. There seemed to them to be no possible explanation other than that the Écrevisse had somehow come to life and attacked her, had opened her throat with its scales and its tail, and had also savaged the hand with which she had tried to prise it off.’