Nonesuch

  Instantly the candles were extinguished and the room filled with an unsteady leaden light that seemed to issue from the air itself. Along with the light came a sensation Anna was quite unable to describe – a buzzing in her jaw, a metallic taste which filled her mouth. Both. Neither. The closer Eleanor’s hand approached the bones, the more pronounced this sensation became. Small motes of blue light began to leap between the objects on the table – as a kind of visual echo, splashes of much brighter light exploded soundlessly high up in the room like flashbulbs going off. In response, the design on the floor shifted and changed, the lines that composed it filling and increasing. After a moment, the space in the centre of the room was occupied by a knot of pulsing tubes each as thick as a woman’s arm and filled with a tobacco-brown substance the consistency of city fog.

  What is that stuff? Anna thought. It’s like smoke. Then, sadly. It’s been here so long. It’s alive. It’s alive. It’s supposed to flow, it’s supposed to be free.

  But whatever it was, it had long ago become static and gelid. Ages before the building of Nonesuch, something had turned it against itself so that it festered. Who knew what its proper purpose might be? You could only tell that it was some basic process of the world. Generations of terrified women, empowered by their ghastly little flint idol, had helped knot it up. Anything to hold back the flow, hold back time. She remembered John saying, ‘Those women! They all look so alike, as far back as you can trace them. And God knows how far before that. I bet they looked the same when they were knapping flints on the chalk downs. The genes of the Herringe women, raging out of the Stone Age long before they had a name!’ Now those women had trapped him somehow in this place. Worse, he had trapped himself.

  The knot tightened.

  John Dawe groaned and struggled. He was obscured.

  Anna bit her lips. ‘John!’

  ‘Izzie,’ whispered Eleanor Dawe. ‘I’m ready to come back.’

  She looked up.

  In its upper reaches the room now stretched away indefinitely, up through its own ceiling into a night no one observing from Ashmore would ever see. Up there, something moved, faint and huge. Eleanor kicked her legs in excitement. ‘Now, Izzie!’ she cried. ‘Now!’ She reached down, fumbled among the collected objects, and came up clutching the bone figurine of a crouching woman, which she banged repeatedly on the tabletop.

  ‘Izzie!’

  Smoke roiled in the flickering air. It writhed and contracted. There was a brief, sharp cry; an earthy smell, at the same time animal and metallic, which Anna remembered from the birth of Eleanor; a sense of pain. The figurine vanished.

  Eleanor, who had perhaps not quite expected this, stared puzzledly at her empty hand for a moment. Then she laughed. ‘And now,’ she said thoughtfully in the voice of an adult, ‘what am I going to do about you, my dear?’

  ‘You’re going to give me my daughter back,’ Anna said. ‘For a start.’

  There was a silence. The child stared at her. ‘Who do you think I am?’ it said quietly.

  Anna shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I never liked you when you were alive.’

  Stella Herringe’s laugh rang through the room. ‘Oh my dear! Hoity-toity. Do you think I care?’

  ‘You were a drunk and a snob, and terrified in case other people knew something you didn’t. Are you always like that underneath, whoever you’re pretending to be at the time? Whoever’s life you’ve stolen?’

  Stella gazed absently into the air in front of her. ‘Hoity-toity gets a disease,’ she said, after a moment, ‘Hoity-toity gets cooked in a pot.’ She arranged a coy smile on Eleanor’s face. ‘When I was Clara de Montfort, I killed my own baby,’ she continued proudly. After a moment’s thought she squeezed out a tear or two. ‘It was rather awful, dear. Still, after I’d killed her I had your husband every way I could think of. I wore the pony out.’ Another laugh. ‘I forget what your name was in those days. You were a dry little thing.’

  ‘I feel sorry for you,’ Anna told her.

  ‘A dry little thing. His words.’ Stella sighed. ‘His very words.’

  ‘Was it worth it, all of that?’ Anna asked. ‘Just so you could hang on and hang on like this?’

  ‘What else can you offer me, my dear?’

  Anna had an idea. ‘Can’t you help me, Francis?’ she appealed.

  Francis Baynes stood there awkwardly holding the baby, much as he might have done on the lawn at Nonesuch two or three months before. Anna remembered him then, eating cake with a fork, wincing away from the smell of Eleanor’s nappy, trying to hide his fastidiousness behind his smile. Poor Francis, she thought. You weren’t cut out for me and Eleanor, or for all the opera and mess and bad judgements and honest mistakes of the world. All you ever wanted to do was talk. You wanted to look at the sparks of sunlight coming through the cedars and ask me about my inner life so that you could tell me about your own. Look what it got you.

  His inner life had led him here, then abandoned him. The short and bitter journey from Ashmore rectory had worked dirt into his clothes and his pores. His skin had a bluish, exhausted pallor. His fingernails were filthy and broken, and his eyes had the empty look of someone whose immune system has collapsed, someone who has fallen away from everything warm and supportive and ended up, without ever really knowing why, living in a cardboard box.

  ‘Francis?’ Anna said.

  Eleanor laughed. ‘Franciiis!’ she squealed. Then in another voice altogether, ‘I seen his little secrets.’

  At the sound of Anna’s voice, though, Francis seemed to recover something of himself. He gave the child in his arms a startled look, as if he wondered how he had come by her, then gazed vaguely about the room. The great pulsing knot made him pause and blink, but he showed no interest in anything but Anna. Despite this, she wasn’t entirely sure he recognised her. ‘I’m not very good with babies,’ he said. Then he shuddered, passed one hand rapidly across his face and shouted, ‘I won’t do it!’

  Eleanor giggled. ‘Oh yes, you will.’

  ‘It’s all right, Francis,’ Anna reassured him. ‘It’s all right.’

  He looked at her again. This time his eyes were clear and direct. All his intelligence and delight in the world, all his sense of it as an essentially benign place to live a life, shone out through them. He was the Francis Baynes she remembered. He smiled sadly. ‘It isn’t all right,’ he said. ‘And it never will be now. But we can’t have this, Anna. We can’t have all this.’ He stared at the knot. ‘What is that thing?’ he asked himself.

  Eleanor Dawe grasped at his face with her cruel little hands. ‘Oh yes, you will,’ she repeated.

  ‘Oh no, I won’t,’ he replied with a laugh.

  Eleanor shrieked angrily. She squirmed round in his arms until she could face him. She bit and kicked.

  ‘Silly girl,’ he said in a preoccupied voice. ‘Silly baby.’ He approached the knot and examined it for a moment or two. Almost as if it sensed his presence, the knot pulsed. The longer Francis looked at it, the more its ugliness seemed to puzzle him, until puzzlement was replaced by a kind of mild irritation, as if he had discovered something unpleasant in the nave of St Mary’s one morning before his favourite communion. ‘But this is completely monstrous,’ he said to Anna. He tucked the screaming Eleanor securely under his left elbow, knelt down and began to pray, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven—’

  For a moment a light seemed to shine on his face and he looked like a twelve-year-old boy.

  Eleanor stared around anxiously. ‘Izzie!’ she cried, redoubling her efforts to escape, ‘Izzie!’

  In response, something picked Francis Baynes up and threw him carelessly into the nearest wall.

  He fell at the base of it as limp as a doll, with his hair and coat on fire. ‘I don’t think I can do any more,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’

  He dropped the baby, who began to crawl rapidly away from him, calling, ‘Norty! Norty!’

  Alice Meynell, who had watched these events unfold with the numb incomp
rehension of a dreamer stuck inside her dream, shook herself and shouted, ‘Anna! He’s let her go!’

  ‘It’s not like that, Alice,’ Anna began to say.

  Too late. Alice had dashed forward, wincing away from the knot, and swept the baby up in her arms. ‘Come on, Anna! Let’s get out of here!’

  Eleanor writhed and screamed, ‘Izzeeeee!’

  In some way, Anna now saw, Izzie was less a goddess – spiritual mother or precursor of all those ancient, nameless Herringe women – than a sour and arrogant dream of the earth itself. Something that had lain here under the ground since the beginning of time, musty and yet full of appetites, savage with its own desires, savage with the desires of others. A permission, a carte blanche, an invitation that fed on all the insecurities of the human world. Izzie had tied her knot long before human beings came along to claim it as theirs and make it the living metaphor of their fear of age and death, their refusal to move on. Izzie was the knot; she was as much its substance – its meaning – as she was its caretaker.

  So when Eleanor called, she came, condensing out of the air as a mist until she hung, surrounded by black space and the cold lights of the stars, feet placed squarely apart as if for purchase on an invisible floor, her eyes staring but unfocused, her mouth open as wide as it would go on a silent roar of triumph and loss. From one angle she was the flint figure from the downs; from another she was the ghost of Ashmore graveyard, the woman in the muslin dress; from a third they were only aspects of her and she was something else altogether, something huge, the bones of the earth, clad in earth.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ exclaimed Alice Meynell.

  ‘I told you,’ said Eleanor. ‘You silly bitch.’

  Alice let go of her, stumbled backwards and fell down, knocking over the card table as she went. Many of the objects Eleanor had so painstakingly collected over the last few weeks were lost immediately. The doll’s head spun and danced, then rolled to halt in the shadows, its eyelashes fluttering. Baby bones rattled across the floor. The music box, which had been quiet for some time, started up again out of nowhere – a few tremulous notes filled the room and were gone.

  ‘Izzie’s here,’ observed Mark conversationally into the silence.

  ‘Yes,’ agreed his brother. ‘Yes, she is.’

  They seemed reluctant and shy. They glanced furtively up at her, and away again. Then something passed between them, in a look and a shrug, and they began to climb up into the shadows between her massive thighs. She absorbed them as if they had been part of her all along and they were lost to sight, though for some time they could be heard calling in progressively more muffled voices, ‘You first.’ ‘No, you.’

  Eleanor, meanwhile, had got herself carefully to her feet. She stood for a moment in her OshKosh dungarees and maroon jersey, bottom stuck out for balance, then tottered over to the fallen card table and began to root around on the floor beside it, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. ‘No good,’ Anna heard her say. ‘No good.’ She bent down precariously and picked up the music box. Waving this in one hand, she approached Izzie. ‘I earned my name,’ she said.

  She raised her pudgy little arms, as if she expected to be picked up.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘I earned my name.’

  The bone goddess squatted and roared in silence, her image wavering in the black air.

  Eleanor looked puzzled. She rattled the music box next to her ear, looked at it, rattled it again. ‘Norty,’ she said. She stared up at the thing that called itself Izzie. ‘I earned this,’ she repeated, in Stella Herringe’s voice. ‘I earned this and I want it.’ Silence. ‘I’m as good as you.’ When nothing happened, she threw the music box at the goddess and turned to walk away.

  Something shifted slightly in the room. It was nothing you could describe. A kind of settling of the light. Then, while Eleanor’s back was turned, Izzie and the knot slumped into one another suddenly and quite silently, like two drops of oil merging. Eleanor’s objects were drawn from all over the room, to be absorbed one by one. When the last pathetic brown fragment of bone, Clara de Montfort’s dead child, had been taken home, a curious, rubbery sphere filled the space which had been occupied by the knot and Izzie was nowhere to be seen.

  Eleanor turned. ‘Aaaaah,’ she said.

  The sphere shrank steadily, until it was two or three feet in diameter. Oily patterns roiled across its surface, flickered, became clear pictures in which the same three people could be seen again and again: Stella, John and Anna, dressed in the costumes of every television historical Anna had ever watched, and tied together in the same miserable knot of manipulation and betrayal. They were at Nonesuch. They were in the Painted Room. They were struggling and panting together in some bed, or on some floor, or in the knot garden in the middle of the afternoon. Stella laughed. Anna cried. Now Stella cried. John turned his back on both of them and sullenly walked away. Stella walked and John cried. Anna cried and cried.

  ‘I’d rather die than go through that again,’ said Anna.

  ‘Would you, dear?’ asked Eleanor in Stella Herringe’s voice. ‘How brave of you.’ She tottered towards the sphere, reached out a little hand, as if she could touch the pictures on its surface. It dimpled beneath her fingers, shrank a little further. ‘I love it, actually,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to start again.’

  ‘Leave my daughter alone!’ Anna shouted.

  Stella laughed sadly. ‘I can’t, dear. I wish I could.’

  She seemed to be preparing to step through the surface of the sphere and into the past – or, worse, into the present – when the air in the chamber ripped apart and several huge creatures leapt out.

  *

  The first was a lion, its mane a vast dark halo round its head. Muscle braided its chest and forelegs like a demonstration of anatomy. Its brassy orange flanks smoked with heat, as if it had run through a furnace to arrive there. You could hear the air go in and out of its lungs. It roared and the chamber reverberated with the sound. Everyone shrank away from its primal grace; everyone but Anna who, recognising it instantly as the great cat she had encountered at Cresset Beacon, felt no fear, only a kind of elation. Immediately behind the lion came a leopard, not yet full grown but gleaming with power and vitality. Last of all came a dusty-looking wildcat with a grizzled face and wicked-looking claws.

  For a moment they stood there in the middle of the chamber, illuminated by the bizarre blue light like a mirage or a Fata Morgana. A moment later the great cats had gone and in their place stood a marmalade tomcat, a half-grown female and a geriatric brindled cat. These three fanned out to surround the child.

  The sphere wobbled away from them, borne up out of Eleanor’s reach by the waves of hot air generated by the rank energies of the new arrivals.

  Ellie stared at them with a trembling lower lip. ‘Bad cats!’ she said, trying to back away.

  The animals showed her their teeth and lolling tongues the colour of a rose. Then the air crackled with heat again. Concentric rainbow-coloured rings spread out across the roof and walls, and something else tumbled into the chamber.

  ‘Orlando, the dream!’

  The humans there were able to comprehend the sound as a wild and raucous ululation, but Orlando recognised the speaker at once. He spun around.

  It was the fox; and with him were a lynx and a white tiger.

  With a leap of his heart Orlando recognized Millefleur in her wild form. ‘Millie!’ he cried ecstatically, his attention fatally distracted. ‘He rescued you!’

  ‘No one rescued me,’ Millie retorted. ‘I escaped—’

  The fox ran at Orlando. ‘There’s no time for this, no time at all! Don’t guard the child; take down the dream, you fools!’

  With a roar lion, leopard and wildcat sprang upon their prey.

  Eleanor sat down suddenly. Anna ran forward and scooped her up. The cats floated over both of them in a short steep arc, so close Anna could feel their tremendous heat and mass, smell the rank, savage smell of them. They cam
e down with the full weight of their three bodies on the iridescent sphere, which now somehow contained both Izzie and the Great Knot. It writhed beneath them, pulsing with some delirious awareness of itself: dream within dream, within dream, within dream. It was like nothing Orlando had ever previously encountered, on or off a wild road: its texture was more slippery, yet at the same time more defined than the usual dream globe – less of a membrane than a skin – as if time itself had wrapped itself up again and again to congeal into this one tangible, solid mass of images and experiences. It seemed to be impossible to get a grip on it. But it was not as if the sphere was resisting them; it was more that it was shrugging them off, uninterested in their attentions, all its sentience turned inwards in complete selfabsorption.

  He tried to bite it but his teeth slipped agonizingly across the surface. On the opposite side of the thing he saw Caterina and the Besom working in unison, arching their backs and digging all four paws in with a vengeance. The thing hunched and gave beneath them before repulsing them again. Orlando swiped at it with all his might. He felt a claw snag into the globe; then a second; and another. He gouged harder and the dream, as if waking suddenly from itself, gave off a jet of sulphurous gas that made his eyes water and his gorge rise. A wrinkle appeared in the previously slick skin. Seizing his opportunity, Orlando bit down hard and got the fold between his teeth. He worried at it like a terrier, twisting his head back and forth until his neck muscles ached. The sphere gave out another stinking emission that engulfed both cats and onlookers; then it seemed to gather its strength. With a lunge, it distorted, quivered and shot away. Orlando hung on for grim life. He tried to call to Cat and Ma Tregenna to help bring the sphere down to the floor of the chamber, but he dared not open his mouth for fear of losing his grip on the thing altogether, and his cry emerged as a muffled growl that only served to enrage the dream globe further.

  He brought his hind legs up and started to scrabble at the iridescent surface. The glistening pictures of the lives trapped and knotted within writhed away from his mauling claws. They floated beneath his nose: first Anna, pale and austere in a high-necked robe, a white shift, a shroud; then John in a stiff frilled collar and a single pearl earring, a tall hat, a khaki uniform; and over and again the witch, green eyes blazing with the sheer desperation of maintaining her hold on life and on this grim eternal triangle. Her black hair wreathed about her head like roots, like snakes, like a deadly anemone, latching on to the other two figures wherever it could noose them, so that the three of them, in all their different configurations, were yoked together by black tentacles of the stuff. Orlando bit down and made another hole in the skin. Fluid gushed out, followed by a rope of hair which – as if it had a mind all its own – struck unerringly at its attacker and wound itself tightly round his neck. In the ensuing struggle he became aware of a number of things: the way the dream globe bucked and dived as Caterina and the Besom leapt heroically and attached themselves to it; how the air was filled with the bubbling and hissing of furious cats; how more hot liquid spouted out of their prey, followed by the scents of times long gone and never buried; how the hair wound itself more and more tightly about his throat; how his limbs began to feel as soft and heavy as waterlogged wood, and his vision speckled away into scintillas of black…