The Whispering Swarm

  Was Alsacia a big lie? A scientific anomaly? If an illusion, what kind was it? Did anyone know its real history? How was it created? Would I find proof God actually existed? Could I get someone to sympathise with me? After the abbey I would visit The Swan With Two Necks. I wanted to see Prince Rupert. He was bound to be back. My anger was at Moll and Mrs Melody for their conniving. I felt no malice towards him. The prince was probably the only person who could actually answer my questions.

  If I found Prince Rupert at the Swan I was now determined to accept his request and help him rescue his king. Of course, I knew the plan wouldn’t work. History was clear. The king had died on the scaffold. By now, however, I was so irrationally upset with Helena I was willing to risk my liberty or even my life in order to get some questions answered. With those answers I might persuade Helena I had been telling the truth.

  Most of the time.

  37

  NATURAL PHILOSOPHY AT THE ABBEY

  When I reached the abbey’s heavy oaken door, I realised the monks might be at their evening prayers or doing any number of monkish things with which they routinely filled their time. But they were probably not going to allow me to disturb them even if they were engaged in something. So I lifted the lion’s head and let it fall a couple of times. If nobody answered I would go to the Swan.

  Silence.

  I knocked twice more.

  A few minutes passed. At length the little door in the grille opened. Dark eyes peered through. The door squeaked back a few inches. A monk I knew as Friar Eldred stood there. In his hand he held a beautifully burnished fencing foil, its guard bright with Moorish enamel work. I was surprised. ‘Are you expecting an attack?’

  He smiled. ‘We always expect that, Master Michael, but today we were merely at our practise.’ He stepped back to let me in. ‘Should the abbey ever be forced to defend herself again.’

  I thought this was almost charming, coming from a middle-aged monk.

  ‘Friar Isidore has talked about how he knew you were one of those who might ultimately help us.’ Friar Eldred put his foil behind his back.

  ‘So I’m famous,’ I said. ‘Well, Brother, I am very confused just now. I need to speak to someone, preferably the abbot.’

  ‘Wait here and I will see.’ Friar Eldred led me straight into the cool, dimly lit chapel. I sat down in a pew, looking around me at the ancient stained glass and the Latin memorials chiselled into the walls and floors. At some time kings and queens had come here to pray with the monks and demonstrate their piety. Now the altar was empty of furniture. I wondered where they kept the Fish Chalice, which I thought of as a living thing.

  Eventually, Brother Eldred reappeared and I followed him to the abbot’s study. The large room was less austere than I remembered. Grammaticus, that extraordinarily ancient yet vital man, sat on my right at the great desk which, it seemed so long ago, he had turned into a complex orrery. I sat across from him in a chair beside the fire and talked while he remained at his desk. His pale grey eyes seemed amused as I told him of my concerns, leading to the discovery a short time ago of Molly in the arms of a man I had come to imagine my mentor, and whom I now guessed to be her original lover. I’d anticipated her taking up with a man closer to her own age; not returning with someone older than me.

  I told him how I was so certain I’d found my heart’s desire, how everything in her corresponded to the woman I had dreamed about since I was a boy. I really had seen her in my dreams. I recalled one dream where I had rescued her from my own Viking kin! The image of us escaping together in a small boat was always with me. It wasn’t the sex or her looks; it was all these things and more. It was the sense of her I loved. I recalled Proust writing of Swann being in love with a woman who was neither his type nor did she attract him. Love at the deepest level? Then how was it that I still loved Helena?

  ‘We do not own another by virtue of our passion’s measure,’ said Grammaticus. ‘Your pain will grow worse before it passes. It affects the mind and spirit. I suffered such pain twice before joining this order.’

  It hadn’t occurred to me that such spiritual men might have had material lives before becoming monks. So I had after all chosen the right person to ask for advice.

  ‘I gather you cannot take pleasure in your partner’s pleasure.’

  I know now he was deliberately goading me. Of course I could take pleasure in giving pleasure. In fact I was sometimes accused of caring about that too much. But he continued in this vein. My heart was beating faster. He asked me again how I felt and seemed satisfied when I said: ‘I could be in shock. I’m numb. Numb in almost every way. Were you trying to anger me? Frighten me?’

  ‘To a degree.’

  ‘I told you. I don’t feel anything.’

  Again, he smiled. ‘And the man?’

  ‘Prince Rupert? I can’t imagine betraying anyone so badly!’

  And to my utter surprise I burst into tears.

  He was direct in his kindly response. I suspect he had intended to make me cry, to release my emotions. He left his desk and came to pat my shoulder. He rang a bell and when a monk appeared, told him to fetch a pot of Darjeeling. I forget the words he used but his voice comforted me. I felt considerably better by the time the tea arrived. Indeed, within a few minutes I was so cheerful I wondered again if Father Grammaticus had slipped something into my drink.

  I said rather lamely, ‘She really is the girl of my dreams!’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘we are permitted such dreams. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find a person who seems to step from our dreams. Who says they want to spend their life with us.’ He told me of a girl he had known in Crete who was his ‘dream woman’. She was pledged to another man, whom she loved. Yet she had fallen in love with Grammaticus. For a few days they had experienced a passion which seemed bound to last all their lives. They planned to be together forever. She went to tell her fiancé. And never returned. ‘She realised, I am sure, that our dreams were impossible. She didn’t have it in her to hurt the other man. It was as well she cut things off before they developed.’

  I thought of the cards I had played for Lou and myself. The Lovers. The other cards came back to me. Knight, Queen, King of Swords. I saw them more clearly. They had almost all been trumps and the Fool had been dominant. That was me and no mistake. Now I recalled what the cards had been telling me. Because of my confusion, I had let myself think I was laying out cards for Lou and myself. But those cards were really for me and Molly. The story was a warning.

  I tried to check myself. I was giving in thoroughly to superstition and fantasy. I told him how, since the time I was able to read, I had looked for escape through fiction and make-believe worlds. I invented stories for my friends to act out. I had my mother’s gift for fantasy. I was popular at school because of my creative skill. I had almost been expelled more than once because I distracted the other children with tall tales. From the age of eight I had filled magazines with my own writing and drawing. My first magazine was done when I was nine.

  Father Grammaticus spoke without malice. ‘She’s had to create a good counternarrative. A story strong enough to allow her to take independent action. She probably told herself that she was strengthening your union. Are you familiar with that logic?’

  Of course I was. I had used it myself! Had she really convinced herself that a fling with her ‘cavalier’ would make our relationship stronger? Had she begun to slip into a darkness running with spilled blood and bitter tears? Unfamiliar waters? No doubt all she’d wanted was a brief affair. Some test. Then the narrative she created had grown more aggressive. ‘Look to your cards. Have you confused the Fool with the Knight?’

  Slowly a void was opening within me. I filled it with physical pain which nothing could ease. His questions were not comforting! They sent my mind in all directions. I wasn’t sure what Father Grammaticus was doing. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘We have to find the place of maximum virtue,’ he replied. ‘Find that centre of balance
in yourself, and you will learn how to control time. In controlling time you control memory. Time and Memory are the names of silver roads. I think it might be the right moment to mention the larger design.’

  I began to think that there were too many abstracts in this. Father Grammaticus now sounded like any other spiritualist quack with a vocabulary at odds with common reality. My impulse was to ignore him completely. I needed more tangible ideas.

  ‘This feels like betrayal,’ I said, ‘and reminds me of other betrayals.’

  ‘Who betrayed you?’

  ‘Certainly not my mum or any of my other relatives. I’m not really sure. Molly once accused me of being genuinely altruistic. I have a sort of insane loyalty to my friends. It goes beyond common sense sometimes. She can’t accept altruism as being anything but näive. The nearest she gets to it is the concept of enlightened self-interest. You know, Disraeli’s two nations and so on.’

  ‘Isaac D’Israeli?’

  ‘Benjamin, his son. Isaac died sometime in the 1840s. The direct line died out. Benjamin’s sisters married, I think.’

  ‘The son became a Christian? Not so? I might have known the father…’

  ‘To have known him you’d be a hundred and twenty now at least!’

  ‘I have a very strong constitution.’

  He was joking. But here was something else at once baffling and obvious. I was on the point of taking myself off to the Bin to be committed. But, from what I had seen of friends in the Bin, there wasn’t a lot of curing going on. They just filled people up with Largactil so that they were sluggish and lost the will to do anything but kill themselves. ‘I suppose you’ve been watching the Shangri-La story a time too many!’

  The joke fell flat. Clearly the old abbot had never heard of Lost Horizon. He smiled at me, mildly puzzled. I gave up trying to tell him who Ronald Colman or James Hilton were. I simply said: ‘Family tradition says Dizzy was our ancestor.’ I preferred this topic to that of Molly, my inconstant love.

  ‘And a fine man, too, no doubt. I think I see a resemblance. He visited us several times. Curious to see our Treasure.’

  I thought for a moment he was going to reveal the nature of their Treasure. Instead he said: ‘If it comforts you, I can find the old records…’

  ‘That’s all right, Father Grammaticus. We appear to be at cross purposes.’

  ‘Your feelings are not unusual.’ He shrugged. ‘You love your wife. She’s your children’s mother. You want her to be happy. Your instincts and your reason tell you that what Molly and you were doing will lead to unhappiness. Anticipating a general misery, you now intend to forget it by sacrificing your other responsibilities to help Prince Rupert and his friends rescue the king from the axe.’

  I said nothing. He smiled gently. ‘Perhaps she merely needed to know if she is still in love with him. It is not uncommon. He might have proved a disappointment. Has she said anything to you?’

  ‘She never talked about him much. Obviously she didn’t want me to guess who he was. I’ve done the same to Helena.’

  ‘And perhaps for the same reasons.’

  ‘That could be self-indulgence, not a virtue.’

  I think he agreed. ‘You are not thinking clearly, young man. Could you spare a few days to stay with us at the abbey?’

  What was he offering? The idea was suddenly very attractive. I nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  The abbot leaned forward. ‘What does the number nine mean to you?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’ I was flippant in the face of his obvious seriousness.

  ‘Do you think it has strength?’

  I looked up into his deep, grey eyes. He was leaning forward with an expression of extraordinary intensity. Half out of his chair, he listened eagerly to my response. Like so many of Rupert’s contemporaries, he was as interested in numerology, astrology, graphology and alchemy as in the true sciences.

  ‘Strength? Well, yes. Nine is a strong number.’ I was surprised.

  ‘Strong numbers are important to us. Nine is a complex number, too. Nine strands. They bind together the so-called Nine Planes of Existence. Nine offers six and twelve and twelve is the strongest number. Nine plus one is the leader and his heroes. Twelve plus one is the number of greatest strength. Christ and his disciples.’

  ‘Is this numerology? I’ve never…’

  ‘Not the kind employed by charlatans. Understand the fundamentals. Reason. Reproduction. Regeneration. We speak of numerical resources. Like music. We order our minds with numbers. Numbers are narrative. Music. Painting. How we order the world is as important as ordering itself. All order is an act of imagination. To imagine that the numbers have power irrespective of what we give them is probably folly. The act of ordering is a quality of all forms of intelligence, whether animal, vegetable or mineral. Reproduction is fundamental to nature. Numbering is part of the act of reproduction. The mathematics of similarity. Numbers bring order to chaos, far more than words can, and give us control over it. They allow us understanding, to visualise. Once you can number the silver roads and hear their music, then you can walk them.’

  I was scarcely following him. Yet his voice carried a strange reassurance which went beyond his reasoning. I thought of the cards, both the regular deck and the tarot. All the ways of reading them. And reading them depended on our ordering our minds. We had to run ‘in tune’ with the numbers and symbols they revealed. I couldn’t play a guitar until I’d tried it. Silver strings. I think Father Grammaticus was trying to help me isolate my grief, to take a kind of ownership which might even help me control my pain. I was returning to the discipline of my boyhood when I learned how to channel my migraines. I no longer had to lie in a darkened room while waves of agony zigzagged different colours across the spectrum. I had ascribed numbers and names and other qualities to the colours and shapes. Some I revisualised as easily defeated creatures. This allowed me greater control over them. But before I could reject a migraine, I first had to relax. Relaxing could become a near impossibility when the pain grew too intense.

  ‘Our number is nine.’ Father Grammaticus’s voice was sharp and distant. ‘Your number is nine. Three times three. Complete. Three into three. Three and three is thirty three. Eleven and one. One here is the rogue number. It is the hinderer of success. Four is the strongest combination. One here increases the strength. Four plus four plus one. Four times three plus one.’

  ‘She told me eight,’ I remembered suddenly. What had Moll said? ‘She insisted that eight was the strong number. I remember. That number would protect us and bring us success.’

  ‘She is poorly informed. Eight can be strong. But there are nine planes.’

  ‘Nine planets?’

  ‘If you prefer. That, however, suggests a simplification. Nine worlds. Nine personae. Nine names. Nine rules to preserve the worlds. Nine stages of existence. All divides and multiplies by nine. Nine by nine and twelve by three, these decide our history. First we hear and then we find. Nine by six and twelve by nine, these our movements do define. Twelve is the web and twelve the node. How an adept finds the silver roads.’

  He seemed to be breaking into rhyme. I was struggling. ‘Nine what—?’ I thought nine drinks might help the pain go away. But I was terrible at burying my troubles with drugs. Christina said I had an unsleeping mind. I could never let anything just go. Analysis and understanding were part of my trade. Simple math gave me form. ‘Nine—bowling pins? I’m serious. I’m looking for it—then I can look for a metaphor. Nine monks…?’ This was still baffling me. ‘Nine will take the pain away?’

  ‘No. But it will help you take control of the pain.’

  ‘Nine trumps?’

  ‘Ah, now you are referring to your own discipline, not mine. Threes and twelves. The Fool.’

  My aunt had told me: ‘You can’t just be the Fool or say you’re the Fool. You have to become the Fool.’ She meant the tarot, of course. The Fool is instinctive wisdom, God’s fool. The Jinglecap, as I’d called him in an early poem
about myself. He will dance for you, not well, but with vigour. Pierrot. Identifying with the Fool of the tarot was an indication of what I’d like to be, not what I was. My character Jerry Cornelius as Pierrot. Before he becomes Harlequin, the street smart, the cynical. Yet at the same time both Helena and Molly had identified me with the Fool. They never could make up their minds about me. ‘The Fool is the piper leading the band,’ I said. He looked at me and chuckled.

  ‘Perhaps? Perhaps that’s the secret whose answer we all seek. Peering into the fog.’ In front of me a patch of dark grey mist had formed. As I stared into it I heard the abbot’s gentle, rhythmic voice.

  ‘Think of nines and threes and twelves. Think of the cards with those numbers. Think of the Fool. The child rides from the sun. The wheel turns. Nine Swords pierce the hanged man. Nine Wands support him. His queen is the Queen of Pentacles. See her?’

  It was coming back to me. My queen was the Queen of the Moon. My king was the King of Swords. My knight was the Green Knight. I was consumed by memories of that first séance with the abbot. His Cosmolabe. It was still there. He had no need to show it to me. Was this astonishing concoction of alchemy and misguided cosmic theory actually created to reach deep into my inner self? Had I needed to believe I owned a soul before I could see it at all?

  If I had been asked how I felt at that moment, I should have said my heart was broken. My heart and my sense of self. I was lost within my own mind. His vision did nothing to stop my sadness. I tried to break the connection by imagining the tarot deck. How could I escape? All I saw in my mind’s eye were the cards. The Swords and the Cups, the Wands and the Pentacles became webs and rods and planets and suns whirling before my eyes.

  I still heard Father Grammaticus’s faraway voice speaking to me. Radiant Time, he said. The Black or Second Aether. A greater darkness lies within the familiar darkness of the void. ‘Here the black sun sits, drawing us all in to its insatiable orbit. But on the other side of that sun are the anti-worlds thrown out by a blazing light bursting fresh. And so it turns, throughout Creation!’ There were so many kinds of light: crystalline, fiery, gaseous, sharp. He passed his hands through the orrery again. I felt powerless to look at his face. I saw the Queen of Pentacles dancing with the High Priestess and the Emperor dancing around the Sun. I saw the King, Queen and Knight of Swords form a circle. And in the middle of all was the Fool. The Fool, poor Pierrot, who had let his Columbine dance off with her Harlequin.