‘No, my dear, it is I who must apologise; we have been so locked up in conversation that all else faded.’
‘We?’ sniffed Ghertrude, only then realising that they were not, in fact, alone. Her eyes transcended Cyrena’s shoulder and found the face of the stranger; it took far too long for her to be certain. She frowned calculations at the mangled face, which returned her gaze apprehensively. Pushing herself back from Cyrena, she examined her friend’s expression before looking again at the man with long, black hair and two, independent eyes.
‘Ishmael?’
He relaxed his doubt and smiled. ‘Yes, Ghertrude. I have come back much changed.’
She moved past Cyrena, who allowed their reunion a respectful space. With one hand still grasped by her friend, her other reached out and rested on his chest; he gently covered it with his own. The three of them stood, wordless, welded into a silent tableau which slowly softened and flowed, through the yard and into the house.
Mutter was just arriving as they got to the front door. They turned to acknowledge him and the young man waved. He frowned back and nodded, attempting to smile while groaning inside. More strangers in the house. More odd-doings and unpredictable relationships. A stunted root of defensive jealousy started sucking at the earth of his foundations. Who was this new boy, and what did he want with his ladies? Why had they picked another one up, after all they had been through? Could they not be contented with what they had and let him take care of them, make sure that they were safe from intruders and parasites? He had never quite seen them in the same way since his wife had confessed her anxiety about his desirability to them. In the months since, he had come to see her point of view, that she could have been right all along; it was only a matter of circumstance that the growing carnival mite was a stranger’s and not his.
Their conversation was long. Though they sat close to one another, the spaces between them were growing and flexing in all directions. Cyrena and Ishmael did their utmost to conceal their intimacy; Ghertrude and Cyrena did not speak of the baby, and Ishmael did not seem to notice its obvious presence. He had mated with both women, and, in each other’s company, both felt possessive and maternal about him in very different ways, and to varying degrees. Surface tensions crackled and buzzed, building a static charge between their words and shaping the conversation into irregular troughs and peaks. Doldrums of reflection mingled clumsily with elated memories; lows of tongue-biting were interspersed with highs of overly jovial camaraderie.
Cyrena ached to be closer to him, to touch and be touched again. She wanted to be at home with him, but her duty was here: she had pledged her presence.
Meanwhile, Ghertrude tried desperately not to stare at his new face and to fight back her overreaction at seeing their blatant love. She did not want him – indeed, she never had – but his distance was proving to be too much, too soon.
Ishmael sensed the women’s hunger and felt suffocated by it. He felt deeply for Cyrena, but he longed to breathe freely, and he made a bid to escape.
‘Ladies, would you excuse me for a short while? It’s been a long time since I have been in this house and there are so many memories. Ghertrude, would you mind if I roamed around for a while and reconnected with my past?’
Ghertrude and Cyrena exchanged glances. Ghertrude nodded her assent, and he took his leave, closing the elegant, tall doors behind him on a conversation that he had no desire to hear.
He immediately bounded up the wide stairs to where his room had been. The proportions had changed again, another reflection of recollection, rather than scale. So much had happened so early, shunts of life that suddenly revealed themselves to be ill-matched and opposite.
His room was unlocked and unchanged. He touched the bed and opened the wardrobe to see his history hanging there: so many textures and smells, so many memories of isolation. He went to the window and thoughtfully traced his finger along the spot where he had picked the paint off the shutter.
‘What will you tell him?’ said Cyrena.
‘I don’t know. Nothing will be known until the birth. I don’t want to raise a false alarm for him; he has already been through so much.’
Cyrena nodded her agreement. ‘You are right, I’m sure. Until we are certain, it’s probably best to say nothing.’
‘We are becoming very good at saying nothing.’
Cyrena agreed again in silence.
In the attic, he opened the shutter into the breeze and the courtyard below, leaning out to get a better view. He saw Mutter moving back and forth, changing the straw in the stables. He looked towards the cathedral and watched the jackdaws circle over the spires.
He needed to see more. He climbed into the tower and opened the swivelling eye of the camera obscura, observing the activity below, changing lenses to see inside it. The curved, white table flooded with his memory of Ghertrude, the exposed parts of her body made whiter by the table and the squeezed light. He remembered watching her confusion turn into annoyance, then transform into abandonment and, eventually, satisfaction. He recalled the same transformation in himself, only in reverse.
‘You mean you intend to live together as man and wife?’ Ghertrude sounded disapproving and a little horrified.
Cyrena said nothing.
‘Do you really feel so much for him? You hardly know each other. What about his past? I have told you something of his dubious origin, doesn’t that concern you?’
Cyrena’s eyes were changing colour and shape, bracing themselves to protect what sheltered behind them.
‘There are many things that I have not yet told you,’ Ghertrude continued, ‘things you would not believe.’
‘I don’t want the details about how he made love to you,’ Cyrena blurted.
‘Not that; things before any of that happened, when he was kept downstairs.’
‘Ah yes! The mysterious teachers who lived in the basement, those who you saved him from.’ Cyrena was turning on her friend, disbelief becoming her advancing weapon. ‘And then they disappeared, vanished into thin air. Am I right, is that not what you said?’
‘I boarded and locked all the cellar rooms after I got him out…’
‘You mean they might still be living down there?’ said Cyrena with a dismissive, unpleasant laugh. ‘Or did they vanish like Hoffman?’
Ghertrude glared at the question, feeling the restraints of their friendship being pulled taut.
‘Well? Did they? Did Mutter spirit them away?’ pushed Cyrena, the bit between her teeth, her tastes changing from defence into attack. ‘How many others have you removed to have him for yourself? Am I next?!’
The truth instantly quenched the rage flaring between them.
‘It wasn’t as simple as that,’ said Ghertrude. ‘They weren’t human, they were machines; puppet-like machines.’
He was tightening the strings, softly strumming them to adjust their pitch. The task gave him a place to think and recollect. The matter-of-factness of balance and modification separated his mind and let him wander back into the Vorrh. Nothing had happened to his memory. He had suffered no adverse effect. Was he immune to its legendary influence? Certainly, Tsungali had been confused and Oneofthewilliams had seemed positively deranged by it.
Cyrena’s jaw was hanging in astonishment. Ghertrude had told her everything, in great detail, with a delivery that was sparse and without emotion. There had never been the opportunity before, and she was finally released from the burden of her own disbelief. The naked facts of the impossible sounded firm and clear in the air, rather than forever tumbling around in the depths of her uncertainty, where they nagged and clotted, shifting focus into possible delusion.
When she had finished, both women sat in silence, a quietness unexpectedly gilded by sounds that seeped in from above. Wafts of celestial chords rolled and hovered down through the house, their beautiful eeriness making Ghertrude’s tale all the more strange. The tang of disquiet was smoothed out by the poignant resonance and they sat in bemused silence, while Ishmael set more and more of the Goedhart device into action. The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.