The Sacred Combe Page 6

  ‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’ he said, in a deep, solemn voice. ‘Il fait beau, n’est ce pas?’

  ‘Here is your gardener, Mr Browne,’ said Rose. ‘This is Moan. Moan, this is Mr Browne, the archivist.’ I was so surprised by being so-called that I scarcely considered whether the man’s name was spelt ‘Moan’ or ‘Mown’ — the latter seemed appropriate to his profession. He touched his cap again, but did not smile.

  ‘Lying down on the job again?’ asked Rose, sharply. The gardener knitted his heavy brows.

  ‘I am pinching out the little sweet peas.’ He motioned to a row of tiny seedlings along the front of the flower bed.

  ‘Well, don’t let us interrupt,’ she replied, walking on. I followed, smiling up at him as I passed. He responded with a weird, mournful nod, his grey eyes intent on mine, and then began slowly to dismantle himself back down towards the ground, as though the earth itself were the only bed long enough to bear him.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to argue with him,’ I whispered to Rose.

  ‘This is the grove,’ she said, pointedly ignoring my remark. The stream meandered between a dozen tall beeches, whose fallen leaves and mast crackled beneath our feet. Beyond a stone bridge — a narrower relation of the one in front of the house — a faint path led across the level grove and mounted obliquely up the wooded hillside in a flight of broad, earthy steps. But Rose turned away from the stream and led me through another gate, back towards the house.

  We entered a grand but slightly dilapidated water garden, following a row of stepping stones across a long, formal lily pond, its surface now covered in fallen beech leaves. Sunlight filtered down through distant branches onto mossy statues and dry, leaf-filled fountains in alcoves along either side. Rose stood before a seat of carved stone and raised her face to the sky.

  ‘This is the star-tree,’ she whispered. Above us stretched a fine net of branches from an ancient hazel that crouched behind the seat. It was some weirdly contorted variety whose bare twigs curled and twisted like no others I had seen.

  ‘Why do you call it that?’ I asked.

  She gave a little impatient smile. ‘Come out here on a clear evening and see for yourself,’ she said. ‘But wrap up warm. Old Moan froze to death on that seat.’

  Before I could ask her to clarify this remark she was walking away towards an archway. We squeezed between two towering rhododendrons that had almost become one, and emerged at the foot of the lawn.

  ‘Here ends the tour,’ she said quickly, skipping down the steps and striding out onto the grass. ‘There’s plenty more to see — the kitchen garden, the paths in the woods, and so on — but you might like to explore them for yourself.’

  I thanked her, marvelling at this new view of the house, whose smooth, ochre-coloured stone glowed softly in the sunshine. The many lights of the windows flared and flickered as we approached.

  In the dining room, Rose raised her finger to her lips and ordered me into the library with a stern flick of her hand, as though we were a couple of truants. I smiled and obeyed, and, feeling physically refreshed but puzzled by our walk, resumed my labours.

  Rose joined us for dinner that evening. As usual, neither she nor M’Synder seemed to feel any obligation to make conversation. The cat threaded its way restlessly between our legs and those of the table, purring.

  ‘Rose showed me around the gardens this afternoon,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes,’ murmured M’Synder in acknowledgment.

  ‘What was that you said about someone — freezing?’ I asked Rose, in a concerned tone. She stared blankly at the wall, while M’Synder, with her gaze lowered, slowly laid down her knife and fork. There was a brief, helpless silence, and then the old lady spoke.

  ‘Monsieur Meaulnes, the gardener, died the winter before last, in the garden he loved.’ She pronounced the name with such dignity that I instantly realised its true spelling. ‘We called him the gardener, but he also managed the woodlands, the lane, the church grounds, the village green, and many other things besides.’ She spoke quietly and with great precision, as though she might thereby disguise her emotion.

  ‘The man we saw today is his son,’ said Rose, and then added, sardonically, ‘Le Petit Meaulnes.’

  I resisted smiling. ‘How did it happen?’ I asked. M’Synder sighed.

  ‘Monsieur was a very capable and worthy man,’ she began, hesitantly.

  ‘But he drank like a fish,’ put in Rose, coolly.

  ‘My dear, please,’ scolded M’Synder, frowning. Rose shrugged.

  ‘Well, he did. Aren’t we all allowed our vices?’

  ‘I hope you won’t speak like that of mine, when I am gone.’

  ‘I shall,’ said Rose defiantly, before adding, in a slow, sincere whisper, ‘if I can think of any.’

  Later, when M’Synder had left the room, Rose filled in a few more details. The Meaulnes lived in the next valley, which could be reached by an old green track that continued up the combe from the meadow and crossed a low saddle of heathland. This explained why I had not encountered ‘Le Petit Meaulnes’ in the lane. Old Meaulnes had kept bottles of brandy in the potting shed, she said, concealed in particular pots that she had easily discovered. She spoke of him fondly, though without M’Synder’s reverence, and I got the impression that he had been a rather wonderful man. She did not mention his son again.

  ‘Arnold found him one morning,’ she said, in an odd, mechanical voice, ‘sitting on that seat beneath the star-tree, with a bottle beside him. His head was tipped back, and his eyes were wide open, looking at the stars. But of course there weren’t any stars left by then. There was frost on his eyebrows, and his moustache, and even his teeth.’

  ‘How do you know all that?’ I whispered, doubtfully. Rose shrugged and began to gather up the plates.

  ‘I asked Arnold about it, and he told me.’

  11

  By Thursday morning I had advanced so far down the enormous bookcase that my back began to ache from stooping, so I fetched a cushion from the window seat and continued the search on my knees. These have never been my strongest point, and they creaked audibly as I shifted my weight. My task, which beforehand had not seemed to present any great mental or physical challenges, assuming its sheer magnitude and repetitive nature did not cow the spirit, was, I now discovered, not only scrambling my brain but also taking a physical toll on each part of my body in turn. Moreover, the solitary and silent nature of the work made me keenly aware of my own body: every ache, every sensation of cold or stiffness, every creak of my suspiciously creaky young bones, gnawed insistently at my consciousness until I had to turn from the books with a sudden exhalation and throw myself into a chair.

  The lower shelves were dedicated to a field with which I was more familiar: the physical sciences — first chemistry, then geology, then astronomy and physics. It was not a large collection by academic standards, of course — perhaps four hundred volumes across all these subjects, with particular strength in astronomy — but all the most important works were present, up to about the nineteen thirties. The doctor seemed to keep most of the post-war collection in his study.

  It was mid-morning when I began on the astronomy shelf. Some of the books dated from the eighteenth century and must have belonged to the elder Hartley himself. In Robert Smith’s A Compleat System of Opticks, published in seventeen thirty-eight, I was thrilled to find, beside the text and on the diagrams, many annotations written in a crabby, indecipherable hand in faded ink. Beside one diagram of light-rays entering a narrow slit and projected on a plane beyond, Hartley (if it were he) had scrawled two exclamation marks — though whether these were meant to express excitement or derision, I could not tell.

  I was about to carry the two volumes to the doctor’s study in case he was interested in these notes, when in the gap on the shelf I noticed a slim volume that had been pushed back out of sight. It was entitled The Dawn of Astronomy: A Study of the Temple Worship and Mythology of the Ancient Egyptians by Norman Lockyer, and was p
ublished in eighteen ninety-four. My heart leapt when I encountered what could only be a folded letter tucked into the contents page. I laid down the book and carefully opened the letter.

  It was headed simply ‘Combe, Tuesday’, written in a graceful, sloping hand. ‘Geoff darling,’ it read, ‘Can you get here this weekend? Hartless is driving me witless. It will be warm, so bring bathers. On second thoughts, don’t bother. I’m awfully keen to see (and the rest) you.’ It was signed ‘Stel ’, with a hurried postscript: ‘Do make it Friday night if you can — it’s a full moon and there is something I must show you at the T.’ The word ‘must’ was underlined.

  The private immediacy of this lover’s plea caught my imagination, and I thought that had I been Geoff I would have moved mountains to satisfy it. I supposed that ‘Hartless’ must be the doctor’s great-uncle Hartley, and took the letter, along with the Opticks, to show him.

  He was standing at his window with a cup of coffee, gazing out across the drive towards the wooded hillside. It was raining. He set the steaming cup on the mantelpiece, took the first volume of the Opticks and leafed through it, nodding: he had already seen it. I began to despair of finding anything that would be new to him, but when I handed him the letter, he frowned and held it for a long time, apparently lost in thought.

  ‘Very good,’ he said, rather distantly. ‘It’s from my mother to my father, if you hadn’t guessed.’ He laid it carefully on his desk, and then raised one faint eyebrow and smiled. ‘You are thinking that my mother was a rather spirited young woman,’ he said, and I laughed dismissively. ‘It’s certainly what I was thinking,’ he added.

  ‘What does the postscript mean, do you think?’ I asked. ‘What’s “the T”?’ Temple, I thought suddenly, even as I asked the question. Temple.

  The doctor went to a side table in the corner, poured a second cup of coffee and handed it to me. Then he slowly dragged his work chair around his desk, waving away my offer of help, and positioned it by the fire, which he stirred up with a very long poker that spared him the necessity of bending. He indicated the armchair for me, and we sat down.

  ‘Stella, my mother, was born here in nineteen hundred,’ he began. ‘Her father had married late in life, and died when she was a young child. She, her elder brother Samuel, and their young mother were utterly devoted to, and dependent on, each other.

  ‘In nineteen fifteen, Samuel went up to Cambridge as an organ scholar. Two years later he was killed at Arras. A year after that, Catherine, my grandmother, still in her early forties but aged and broken by her loss, died of influenza. My mother was eighteen, and alone.’ He paused, sipping his coffee and then gazing into the curling steam.

  ‘Like Rose,’ I suggested, cautiously. He nodded, perhaps, or just stirred his head a little, without lifting his eyes.

  ‘My mother’s uncle, Hartley, moved back in,’ he went on, ‘and the Combe became, for eleven years, a rectory. He was not a sympathetic guardian to my mother, attributing her unabated grief to a lack of faith. She spent most of her time alone, in her room or, more often, in some quiet corner of the gardens that still guarded happy memories of her childhood.

  ‘One day she discovered in the woods a steep flight of steps leading up the hillside, half-buried by earth and leaf litter and concealed under brambles. She traced its path up to where the precarious trees give way to heathland, but was there defeated by a wall of ferocious western gorse. The next day she returned with gloves and shears, and fought her way up onto a small, steep-sided promontory that juts southward from the plateau, but that is screened from below by tall trees, and cannot be reached, or even seen, from above because of the massed gorse and bracken.’

  Here he paused again, reached his empty cup up to the mantelpiece, and took a long breath with his hands on his knees.

  ‘There,’ he began, slowly, ‘my mother found the Temple of Light, consecrated by the elder Hartley Comberbache in seventeen seventy-nine, which had by then stood entirely forgotten for nearly a hundred years.’

  ‘It was — some kind of folly?’ I asked, hesitantly — I had seen the temples at Stourhead and Castle Howard. The doctor looked particularly pained at this suggestion.

  ‘No,’ he replied, sternly. ‘It was a temple: a place of reverence and sanctity — of worship, even.’

  ‘The worship of what?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘Of light?’

  The doctor shrugged. ‘If you like,’ he murmured patiently, and then quickly continued: ‘Part of the roof had collapsed, and a birch tree was growing up through the floor. Crowberries crept up the walls and sprouted along the roof, which was home to a small colony of long-eared bats. It was however sufficiently intact for my mother to realise its beauty and strangeness, and it became her secret retreat.’

  ‘Is it still standing?’ I interjected.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied, smiling, ‘and now it is rather more easily reached. Even I still manage the climb sometimes, when my knees allow it. We have reclaimed the stair, and the temple itself, from the long fingers of nature — as you will see for yourself. It could be described as an observatory, too, I suppose — high above the valley, just as you suggested.’

  ‘And did your uncle Hartley never discover it?’

  The doctor sighed. ‘Hartley was, as we know, a narrow-minded man, but also, fortunately for irreligious lovers of truth and beauty, a parsimonious one. The objects of his purges — the Taboni painting in the parlour was the first to go — were not destroyed but hidden away with the intention of discreetly selling them later, and after his death my mother discovered the ignominious hoard and reinstated everything. The temple, however, thanks to my mother’s ingenuity, he never discovered. Had he done so, and had he comprehended its purpose, he would undoubtedly have demolished it. But no,’ he added, rising from his chair with a quick smile, ‘I suspect he would not have comprehended, and would have had it restored as a summer house for his wife’s tea parties.’

  ‘Or as a chapel?’ I suggested, rising also. The doctor seemed to consider this possibility for a moment.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he said, returning to the window, where I had found him. ‘The advantages of its position would be quite wasted.’

  So I returned to work, wondering when I might get to see this temple, and what other secrets I might uncover. Well, not exactly secrets, I reflected, since the doctor gave straight answers to my questions when I asked them. Mysteries, I might call them — mysteries that he preferred to let me unravel for myself, enlightening me only when my enquiries gave him no alternative. We seemed to have embarked on a game whose rules I now began to understand: if I earned my questions, they would be answered.

  I thought about what I had just learned. Was the doctor’s adoption of Rose, if one could call it that, motivated by the story of his mother’s lonely grief, and her uncle’s failings? It seemed a neat parallel, but I was not so foolish as to be satisfied with it.

  For the rest of that day I worked my way through the astronomy and physics collections. Some of the books took my breath away: for example, next to the collected works of Galileo in three immaculate volumes, dated seventeen eighteen, stood a third edition of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, rather more battered, printed in seventeen twenty-six when the author was still alive. When the doctor entered, slowly climbed the staircase and began to consult a bookcase on the gallery, I asked him why such precious books were shelved along with the others.

  ‘This library has traditionally been organised according to the books’ contents,’ he said, sharply, ‘not their market value.’ He cautiously descended the stairs with a slim volume under his arm, and added, in a softer voice, ‘They are very precious — you are right. Be gentle with them, won’t you?’ Then he walked out without waiting for a reply, and closed the door.

  12

  It was almost five o’ clock by the time I slid the last book back onto the bottom shelf with a satisfied stroke of the palm of my hand. I rose creakily to my feet and stepped back: over four days I had searched — d
iligently, painstakingly searched, as promised — sixty-four feet of books. The hunted letter was not there.

  I stepped onto the long carpet and looked up at Hartley Comberbache, still half-turned from his work, frozen in a moment of indecision — never our most glorious moments — his lips parted, his dark eyes intent on mine, holding my gaze even as I moved my head so the reflected lamplight glistened softly over the varnished canvas. I wanted to take his arm and raise him gently from his desk, untwist that wrought-up body, lead him away, pour him a drink, make him smile. What was he working on — what words might not have been written if I could really have taken his arm? And would it have mattered?

  Two piercing sword-thrusts of strings burst into the silence. It was Bach again: this time the violin concerto in A minor. The doctor was already standing in the doorway, holding a tumbler in each hand.

  ‘Finished the first case?’ he asked. I nodded, by now accepting his uncanny timing, and he handed me one of the whiskies. ‘To be honest, Mr Browne,’ he said, drawing back his mouth and cocking an eyebrow, ‘I didn’t think you’d find it in that one.’ I gave a protesting laugh and threw back the spirit with a flourish, while he sipped at his mischievously.

  ‘Why not?’ I demanded, my throat burning.

  ‘Reasoning can only work against us,’ he reminded me. ‘It was just a hunch. Now, where next?’ I eyed the left-hand end of the gallery, next to Hartley’s portrait and above the door to the dining room. ‘I might as well explain,’ he added, before I could reply, ‘that if you want continuity in your journey through civilisation, I think you might leave the gallery until the end. Here —’ he turned to the case to the right of the door, beneath the gallery ‘— you will find engineering, architecture, and archaeology. Advancing to the right will take you through foreign travel and topography, and then —’ he moved to the other side of the staircase and the study door ‘— ancient history, European, British, American history, politics, philosophy and — a man’s last resort — religion.’ He turned. ‘Here in the folio table resides the law collection — five hundred volumes, remember I am descended from a lawyer to Queen Anne — and along the far wall you will find biography and letters.’