But then, as I’ve said, it had been impossible ever to see the house, either from the roads or hills about. From the outside the whole estate was entirely enclosed by its tall belt of beech-trees and I could see these now, from the inside, forming another complete circle round the parkland, leaving the house at the centre inviolate, unknown.
I had Spinks’s Army fieldglasses with me, but the sun was low in the west behind the house and I could make few other details out except the thorny pyramids and spirals of masonry all about the top, the clusters of elaborate chimney stacks. It was just a soft charcoal silhouette on the hill, a fantasy like a Rackham drawing as the light waned behind it.
There was, I could just see, a huge conservatory jutting out from the end of the wing nearest to me, two storeys high, a graceful glass arch over the top and what looked like a walled vegetable garden to the right of this, at the back of the house, where there must have been a big yard as well, together with a lot of other outbuildings. There was no sign of life and no lights on anywhere, though it was nearly dark now.
And then, just before I moved away back down into the woods, a lot of surprising light did suddenly occur — in the big conservatory. It seemed as if a series of bright spotlights were being moved around inside as I put the binoculars on to it. Shafts of light illuminated great vague dark fronds, climbing plants, and even whole trees beneath the great crystal arch. I was too low on the ground to see anyone inside. There were just these mysterious lights, coming from beneath, playing up over the foliage, rhythmically patrolling the greenery, crystal fingers moving slowly up and down and around, as if someone was conducting some kind of horticultural theatre, or creating a mysterious ballet, a dance of white lines against the gathering dark. I watched it steadily for ten minutes or more, but could find no rhyme or reason to it, to these questing searchlights in the night.
I had Spinks’s torch with me, going down the hill into the valley, hurrying back to my tree before total dark. But its beam was feeble and I didn’t want to use it anyway. And thus I fell, missing my footing about halfway down the steep hill — falling headlong at first, then slipping madly through the undergrowth as I tried to pull myself round and get a grip on things. But it was no use. I thundered down most of the last part of the valley, cutting and bruising myself all over again.
A root or branch had caught me as well, I found, when I got to the bottom, hitting me somewhere just over the eye, a solid blow that I didn’t really feel at first but which made me gasp with pain, almost crying out, when I came to a final halt near the lake. I lay where I was, not moving. I found I couldn’t move in any case. I was practically unconscious — though I’d heard the racket I’d made coming down through the undergrowth clearly enough. And I hoped then that someone else had heard me, up at the house perhaps, that I would soon be found. For all I wanted at that moment was some sort of professional attention, a warm bed, comfort. My forehead was damp, there was blood there and the cloudless night sky above the lake moved round and round in my eyes when I looked up, with the trees forming a spinning margin around it: I was at the bottom of a dark whirlpool. Then I passed out.
When I opened my eyes again it must have been the middle of the night, an hour or more later, for the stars were clearly out now, in the circle of sky above me, quite still in their courses. I was alive. The blood had caked over my eye. No one had come. I was still free. I found I could move myself a bit; no bones seemed to be broken.
The woods about had resumed their nocturnal calm, an almost total silence, except, when you listened very carefully, after minutes on end, for odd sighs and crackles in the undergrowth that might have been the breeze. Then something definitely moved, a little way along the lake edge. Was it a water bird or some small thing fleeing from an owl on soundless wings? Was it a fox, a badger, a mole? I lay where I was for another ten minutes, wondering, letting the peace sink into me. A moon had come up, I saw then, which explained the gauze of faint white light in the air, a broad scimitar just above the trees on the other side of the water.
I stood up at last and hobbled painfully to the edge of the lake where I could see the ruined footbridge to the island in the moonlight. Next to it was the old boathouse and the half-sunken jetty. Moving out along this I found a place where I could kneel. I bent out over the water and washed the blood from my face, trying to leave the scab intact, and then, cupping my fingers, I drank great handfuls of the liquid. It was cool, cool on my face and in my throat, with nothing brackish about it.
In luck again, I thought. I might have been blinded, with a broken leg: instead, just a few more cuts and bruises, a bad graze on my head and my legs feeling as if they’d been shot out from under me once more. Yet I was certain I didn’t have the strength to get back to the beech tree at the far end of the lake, least of all pull myself up into its middle branches where my hammock was.
But then, as I leant back from the water, wondering what I might do, I saw something man-made rising up from the edge of the island in faint silhouette against the moonlight: man-made because it rose upwards, in an exact straight line, from beyond the branches of the willow, at an angle of 45 degrees. It was the edge of a roof, I thought. Was it a folly or a bower, some Gothic summer house that I’d imagined the island supported earlier in the day?
When I had come this same way earlier in the evening I had seen nothing on the island other than the rhododendrons and the willow flowering out above it like a yellow fountain. But here, certainly, was a building of some sort. I could see it more clearly now: the edge of a roof jutting out over the water.
The channel was about ten yards across at this point. The ruined footbridge wouldn’t bear my weight. But by walking out into the stream and using the old wooden piles and arches for support I found I was able to wade across onto the island without too much difficulty. The channel had silted up here and the water never came above my waist.
Pushing up through the bushes on the far side I first stumbled on some steps: a rise of half a dozen moss-covered steps. Beyond was a bramble-shrouded doorway, I saw, with a stab of Spinks’s torch, covered by a metal grille like a tall garden gate. When I touched it the rust came away in great flakes in my hand. But it opened readily enough.
Inside I found myself in a small octagonal space, with cut stone all round in the walls, well made originally, but cracked in places now, I saw by the faint torchlight, where the ivy had come rapaciously in, ivy and bramble that had crept in from the door, and ferns that had risen between the flagstones from the earth beneath. In front was a small terrace, edged by a stone balustrade looking out over the water, and the sloping roof which I’d seen from the shore above that.
It was indeed some kind of summerhouse, a little pleasure-haunt, contrived, it seemed, in rather the same eccentric Gothic manner as the house in the parkland above. And since the island was set in the middle of the lake, with few trees to cloud the sun, the place was still almost warm inside, the stones retaining the heat of the day. I took off my trousers and finding a stone bench of some sort at one side of the summerhouse I laid myself flat out on it and was soon asleep.
When I woke there was a faint smell of roses in the air, the bright morning light reflecting off the lake making queer watery patterns on the white stuccoed ceiling immediately above my head. It was a conical roof, built in a series of stuccoed fan arches, the delicate Gothic tracery partly crumbled away and the paint badly flaked, though I could see it had once been blue like a sky, with the remains of flower garlands and cornucopias and cherubs here and there in the corners. There was a faintly ecclesiastic air about this heavenly tracery above me. And when I at last got up from the stone bench I saw why: I had spent the night sleeping on the flat top of a large raised tomb.