Torsade Literary Space The Folly: seventh arc
Push has come to shove, with the host and guest, and helpful friends gained along the way—popular author Virginia Keltenham, her dogsbody Trout, Colonel Llewellyn (resigned to it), and one or two from the Other Side—launching a campaign designed to menace and enrage the assassin Falco. At large, Falco has all Britain to traffic in. Each step he can be drawn towards destiny, however rash the proposal, limits the harm he may do to the innocent. The treasonous Atherleigh had been dealt with at the start. Falco may be, as well, to end it…
But there remains the faithful Krug.
Storms and Fires
Heneglwys
The Irrepressible
Snares
Approachable
Of Use
Storms and Fires
(one)
The hearth, riddled so, complains
The host has taken on a task he might have seen
was never to be ledgered done
Business as usual, for a time…?
I don’t know, he answers the airless remark
of the guest, That I can write today
Nor can I. A game?
Waiting feels like the wireless announcer had said
We are at war
And each chore weighs as the provisioning
Of a little kingdom under siege
If I go to market, will I be the first
To snatch at every loaf of bread?
Can I safely carry off a hoard?
The spirit callers are, at war with one man
They have moved their vulnerable to a safer home
They have need, posthaste, of a drawing card
And that lies undetermined
The folly
Sited not so foolishly, if its builder’s mad idée
Were vision, and his letters on the threat of moon-men
A canny ruse to provide him solitude
And all the while he had thought of things
Of storms and fires, and ordered the ring of trees
Well-culled, keeping shorn the mound he’d raised
On which to stand his tower
One of us, the host observes, not lifting eyes
from the laying of the Ludo board
There are three of us, Virginia says
Shall we ghost-play the fourth?
One of us, of course…
…must declare, by some means
Hostilities, to Falco
He puts a finger to his lips, to shush the writer of romance
I am aware you have the courage of ten
But Virginia, this is not child’s play
Our offence must be minutely mapped
Before we dare advance
Heneglwys
(two)
Sir,
In my researches into the vanished tribes
Which predate the era of Coel Hen
Who, I need hardly tell you, is known
to the modern reader of the nursery rhyme
A prelate of that village which calls itself Heneglwys
Whom my fellow in this enthusiasm is, had I but made
acquaintance with his own…his own scholarship, that is to say
prior to learning of a minor curiosity
his recent death prevents him to me imparting
The housekeeper he had employed
was a woman of Italian extraction
who had arrived—it is a charming story
Or parts of it may be said fairly—
To engage…
Arrived, I say, to instruct the widower’s daughters in ballet
She had produced a son (which rather cut the project short)
The guest wonders if this last will not be edited out
He sits back pensive and finds he has no idea of it
What the Pembrokeshire propriety allows, in this year of 1934
He must appear quite fond, taking the Shakespearean sense
of the word, dodder on…
Though he himself, born 1900, ages with the age
At some point in this slumbrous peroration, he must insult
And with a deadly delineation
The face and shape, and wastrel life, the parentage
(which he has done)
Of the man Falco
I have a name in my notes (he adds), of one Colonel Llewellyn
And nothing to point me why I’d written it down
I suppose him a retired officer who must know something
The Irrepressible
(three)
Jesmine, so much the counterpoint to her headstrong sister,
had kept to her tuffet by the fireplace, demure with her teacup.
Maude, as she would, spoke at once, the moment Mrs. Davenant rejoined them.
‘Oh, tell, Margaret! You can’t mean to leave us hanging!’
‘I ought not to have made the allusion,’ came the sensible Margaret’s reply.
‘Bad on you, then! But I understand these people aren’t…’
‘Anything to do with us.’ Jesmine finished for her sister, goaded to it.
‘For charity’s sake, they are, however,’ said Margaret Davenant.
‘And the son…? Some disgrace on the poor mother? But how can it be
when he fought at Second Marne and came home wounded?
Heroism, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, Maude! How young you are!’
‘How, wounded?’ Jesmine put in. Her curiosity, despite herself, was now genuine.
‘One doesn’t know such things.’
‘Please!’ said Maude. ‘One may not, but I’ll wager you do!’
Margaret sighed heavily. ‘The young man’s name was Tomaso. He enlisted as
Thomas, of course.’
‘Why of course?’ Jesmine asked, at the same time the irrepressible Maude
remarked, ‘A regular Tommy!’
It emerged, on the two young ladies’ further probing of their older cousin,
that Tomaso Falco’s mother and father had not been married; that he had
by deed poll changed his name to Thomas Hawk. And that the lasting
of his injuries had been the loss of an eye.
‘Discharged with a patch, but he seems at some point to have fitted himself
with a secondhand glass one. Rather sadly conspicuous, once spotted, although
that is not the reason…’ Margaret sank into an armchair. ‘Thomas has a vengeful
temper, by all accounts. He has taken against his mother receiving our support,
knocked her flat last time… Poor Mrs. Milburne hadn’t known him to be
in the bedroom.’
‘Gracious! And Tommy’s mummy wouldn’t have the bobby?’ Maude said. ‘Why,
if I had been Mrs. Milburne…!’
‘Never mind! Jesmine is quite right. It has little to do with us. We shall, naturally,
be to poor Mrs. Falco all the help we can.’
And on this note, part one, of ‘Maude and the Country Hens’, seems—
To Virginia Keltenham…not altogether. Fortunately, she is half-owner
of The New Woman’s Quarterly, and can publish an unsatisfactory thing
if she pleases.
‘But Trout, I say it needs punch. My cliff looks barely a bluff.’
He yawns. The hurly-burly has rendered him a more worldly creature,
a change not wholly to Virginia’s liking.
‘Time in the world to write the next. Have your Milburne rush in and say,
“Awful news!”’
Snares
(four)
The woodland affords the falcon—
Where hedgish undergrowth shoots in voluntary tangle
augmented year by year from half-digestions
spat or shat by avian lodgers, nesting
a thicket permitted by the landowner
(Said to be the blighted Rory Tebbs)
to wax untrimmed
Has wove itself a Briar Rose’s castle
of clinging burs, of stabbing spines and thorns
Good for the grousing, good for the pheasanting
Good for whatever sport…as God alone can fathom, might appeal…
(To such people!)
Yet a worthy poacher stealthily has carved
away the lowest growth athwart a trickle
unable to decide if it be brook or spring
And hidden where success may favour him
are his snares… Falco trips them each
The woodland affords the falcon cover
and his spyglass scopes the undulous terrain
and his patience feeds on the contents of a Crispo tin
Dusk will do
Falco is a famous man; he is on society’s lips
The spellbindings of rumour weave beyond
Such nets as governments may knit
The Milburne is not clever
Yet like others, who will make no plea to expiate their guilt
She may be found as she deserves being left
Where is that? His mind falls into trance
(And what this trance invites, if he could guess!)
It lies far from coincidence
‘A thing like this…if it’s not against the law, I can’t see why!
What does she mean, using our names! That Miss Keltenham.
Her magazine’s nothing but sedition. She says if there’s war…
Here. And there, her picture. See the hair!
That wasn’t taken anytime too recent. If there’s war…here, Teresa…
the women ought to go, and the men stay at home!’
His mother said (nothing to this proposal): ‘Parish records. Or
something printed in the newspapers. They do print them, the deed polls.
And Thomas, when the army let him go, they printed that.
Miss Keltenham has not realised it matters. She thinks
it’s like pulling names out of a hat.’
Approachable
(five)
Rain falls, a light and misty one, the best of sorts
As they of the night patrol who require the pull of it
Have medium to prowl the grounds in broader swaths
Simon Tattersby, avoiding Lady Gimple and Roscoe
Matey and inseparable, those spectral reprobates
By no means yet induced to vacate
(Poltergeists, to the serious spiritualist, almost a burlesque
to an oratorio—and they know it)
The inmates, with Virginia and Trout, being mortal all
Will post to the outer rings, first weaponing themselves
‘Falco, of course, is a man and can bleed…
It happens I’ve a lovely little pistol that I carry in my bag.’
‘I’m of two minds,’ the host replies. ‘But leave it, I think, Virginia.’
‘Whyever…?’
‘He is trained as a soldier; he is desperate and ruthless.
He may wrest it from you…and frankly, his hope is
to kill the most of us.’
Hence from the curiosities, the guest has drawn a stick with a blade
that springs at the depression of a lever
I would be depressed, if I were a lever, says Roscoe
A tepid laugh, and: ‘You are forgiven’
For these are the words that sting
The whole enterprise is terrifying
The sparkling Lucille has said barely a word
Only: ‘Gracious, I think I love you all! Tell me you’ll none of you be harmed.’
‘What signal?’ asks Simon
‘Why, tackle him, sir, if you spot him.’
‘Ah. Shall I ever learn? I don’t feel that I can frighten anyone.’
Virginia to make east, with a flare, for hurtling
(While resolved to get fully in the assassin’s face, if need be)
Trout to make west, tucked under his arm
a sturdy crossbow, like an idyllist’s lyre
The host will go north, a bright torch his defence
‘I shall play decoy, if you’ll lend me the dog.’
‘Oh, my poor Robbie is no use…’ Virginia begins
‘To walk, my dear. Merely to exercise on a lead.’
Of Use
(six)
To a life of unkind treatment
Toast a prayer—
any person with a heart
As to Krug it can’t matter, who you are
where
He had not had a father
Stray girls are placed in homes to bear the sufferings
The girl had been his mother
Twice, but only once
Twice, but only once—
Because they’d wanted him to live in loneliness…
Murdered for his constancy, as the workhouse chit
apologizing for the child at her skirts, whom she would agree
Mein Herr, surely, yes, to have sent
When old enough to be of use
‘He is only three’
Mouth-breathed through chores, her midriff marked
With an iron-shaped pain
…the sacrifice almost a bonus
Less Krug, in a world one Krug to the surplus
They had wanted him to help
And she, the second human touch he’d felt
If Agnes had not loved him, in so short a space
He had died for her
Yet understand, ye of little faith
Observe.
The falcon is turned panther, stalking the dot
of a torch, a distracted voice chides a dog
It has found…the story makes itself plain…some object among leaves
And sniffs, and carries on sniffing
‘Get on with it,’ says the man
I shall, thinks Falco, but I wish you were not a disappointment
Keltenham, her I want, though you know it, sir, yourself
what she’s done
If I spotted her, I’d fling her down the ravine
And while she lay broken, bury her
So she’d count the minutes…one tossed stone at a time
And slow
It’s carrion the dog’s after, he thinks, inapropos
Close by, close by, foul and reminiscent
But crouching, the war come vividly again
Falco hears a gait…a limp, a dragging shuffle
He almost fancies he hears his name
(more to come)