Voice of the Fire

Three floors. Three sides. Three windows made from triangles of glass on every side, on every floor. Great numbers, threes and nines, set in the brick, that signified I know not what, though I recall that once my father made great effort to explain their meaning to me.

‘They are dates, young Francis. Dates as reckoned from our true beginnings on this Earth, and Eden’s founding.’ As he talked, his great grey head rocked forward, nodding to make emphasis; the last exhausted peckings of a lame and ancient bird.

My father’s calculations hinged upon a calendar suggested by a certain Bishop (I do not recall his name) who had established to his personal satisfaction the specific date on which the world commenced. To my chagrin, I must confess this most important anniversary is also fled from recollection, one more memory eaten by the meatflies. I remember, though, that the Creation was accomplished on a Monday.

Thus far, while by no means sane in any ordinary sense, my father’s motives in the building of the lodge were at least still within my comprehension: he desired to raise up a triangular affront to all good sense, and in this fashion to commemorate the Holy Trinity in whose name he had suffered his incarceration. Further to this, he desired to date his edifice from that primordial Monday morn when the Almighty condescended to allow the Light.

However, this was not the limit of my father’s odd preoccupations. In addition to the massive numbers set out in relief upon his lodge, were also letters, most of them pertaining to quaint word-games played upon the family name, this being Tresham, which abbreviates to ‘Tres’, that is to say, to three, which brings us neatly back to Father, Son and their celestial pigeon.

(If I am allowed to venture an aside, and in some modest measure a rebuke, I must say that in all the months that I have waited to attain to the celestial realm, I have not once been visited by this aforesaid blessed fowl, although I wear a skullcap of his cousins’ dung.)

I’d stand within the arching door of Rushton Hall, watching my father while in turn he overlooked the building of his folly, there across the fields. He would strut back and forth and all the while call out encouragements to those who laboured on the lodge: ‘Pray, Cully, further to the right! Be sure to take your measurements in threes, sir, if you love me! Make the inclinations at the corner nice and not splayed out like whores’ legs!’

Here within Northampton is a church made in a round, raised to these blasphemous proportions at the time of the Crusades against the Saracen. According to conjecture, it is built this curious way that Satan may not find a nook wherein to hide himself. What of my father’s lodge, then? Surely he had fiends in every corner, devils on all sides, that drove him on through pride, through bitterness and into lunacy? What drives us all, that we engage ourselves in such catastrophes? Surely it was not the Almighty’s voice that guided him to such a sorry end, but rather that voice issued from the furnace, from the fire’s mouth, trailing spittles of white ore?

For all my loyal protestations that I shared my father’s creed since his conversion, still I found it difficult to countenance a God that would award Sir Thomas Tresham for his faith with house arrest and then direct him to pass his remaining days in the construction of a great stone wedge of cheese. (I make complaint here only for my father’s treatment at the hands of the Almighty. Note that I do not debate the Justice meted out to me, which I would say is fair, up to a point. That point, it must be said, is thrust uncomfortably up my ragged windpipe, whence it juts, not without pain, into my cobwebbed cerebellum. That aside, I must congratulate the Lord upon his widely mentioned lenience.)

The round church and my father’s three-faced lodge, these huge and simple solid forms set patiently upon the shire’s map; carefully, painstakingly arranged like children’s building-blocks across long centuries by slow, half-witted gods, too few pieces in place as yet to guess their final scheme, if scheme there be. Sometimes, as thoughts drift in the muddy, half-awake plane that alone remains to me, I know a sense of vast, momentous tumblers falling, somewhere far away; of an eventual unlocking there at Time’s rim, though of what I may not guess. If scheme there be, my present state tends to suggest that I am not considered vital in its outcome.

I decorate the North gate of the town. Though lacking eyes I yet observe they have not moved me while I slept and dreamt my sweet and silent dream of being dead. Moreover, it is plain that they have not replaced the watchmen billeted within the gate-house, John and Gilbert, whom I recognize both by their voices and by the distinct and separate perfumes of their water, which they make almost in ritual unison against the gate-house wall each morn when they arise.

It is like this: first Gilbert wakes with the full weight of last night’s ale upon his bladder and begins to cough, these hawkings low and gruff, much like his voice. Next, John is woken by his fellow watchman’s barking and begins his own, though in a somewhat higher register, being, it seems to me, the younger of the two. Meanwhile to this, Gilbert has leapt up from his cot, pulled on his trousers and his boots and stumbled out to piss. The sound of this seems to go on for ever and, as such sounds often do, provokes in John an awful sympathy so that he hurries out to join his fellow; adds his meagre stream to the tremendous gushings of the dam already breached. At the conclusion of their sprinklings, both men next break wind, first Gilbert and then John, the pitch again reflecting their respective age and temperament, one low, one high. A crumhorn and a penny whistle.

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Every day they do this, as unchanging as the bird-calls that announce the dawn, nor do their other functions of the day seem less routine. From light through dark they labour at their work or else they labour harder in avoiding it. Such conversation as they manage is repeated daily, phrase for phrase. I do not doubt the thoughts they have today are much the same ones they had yesterday and will have served again, re-boiled, upon the morrow. Willingly they entertain this vile monotony. One might, if unfamiliar with our situation, easily assume that it were they hung on a spike, not I.

My father, penned within his grounds and left to nurse his three-fold madness; Catesby, Fawkes, the rest of them, all caught up in their diverse fervours, in the circles of their habit and their reason; we are all of us thus hoisted on our own petard. Each of us has his sticking place, and to each man his nail.

Of late, Gilbert and John have (when they speak of me at all) begun to call me ‘Charlie-Up-There’. ‘Francis’, a more upright-sounding name, is obviously not so suited to the slouching rhythms of their speech as ‘Charlie’: ‘Which way blows the wind, young John? You take a look at Charlie up there and take note of where what bit of hair he has flies out to!’ Once I had such lovely tresses, now a weather-vane for idiots.

Still, in all it pleases me to think that I have yet some function and some purpose to my being, slight and mean though it may be. Not only weather-cock am I but also trysting place, an easy landmark where young lovers may arrange to meet. Their brief and oft hilarious couplings against the bird-streaked wall below awake in me a phantom pang, much like the pang induced on hearing Gilbert’s loud, torrential micturitions every morn. Though my equipment to accomplish such be gone, I too would like to poke a wench or piss against a wall from time to time. In truth, I cannot say which of these satisfactions’ passing is the most lamented, though I wish that I had taken more time to appreciate the both of them while I was yet in life. Ah, well.

Besides my use as totem to the fumblings of young men, so also am I able to provide my services as target for the missiles of their infant siblings. Usually they fly wide of the mark, although on coming to my senses at this last occasion, I discovered that one of the more accomplished little hell-hounds had contrived to lodge a piece of coal big as a knuckle in the socket on the left. I must confess I am quite taken with it, fancying it lends my mask a roguish and yet gallant lack of symmetry as might a monocle, opaque and lensed with jet.

Upon reflection, a great while has passed since last I was Aunt Sally to the children’s stones. No doubt they are away about some new, more seasonal diversion now. If I were not a mask then I would call them back.

It seems to me that this has always been my stumbling block, that I may not speak out for whatsoever I myself desire, yet only turn to people the compliant face they wish to see. If truth be told, my father’s Catholic vision was not mine, yet when he put the proposition to me all I did was nod in puppet acquiescence. Nor did I do differently with Fawkes and Winter and the rest, unfolding their phantasmagoric insurrections in the gate-house there at Ashby. While they ranted, all I did was make mild protest at the heedless optimism of their course, and never once said ‘No’. While rotting in the Tower, afflicted with a dreadful rising of the lights, each day I would politely thank my gaolers when they brought the slops I could not eat, and in this manner put a face on things. Putting a face on things was thus the principal endeavour of my mortal span, whereafter, justly, am I made a face that others put on things. Beware, ye that are loath to make commotion! Shudder, ye who would not bring attention on thyself, and see what shyness brought me, with even my gizzard now become a public spectacle. Behold, ye meek: this prong of iron is all the Earth ye shall inherit.

Testing my remaining senses: it would seem whatever curds of brain are crusted round this bone-bowl’s rim have fallen further into disrepair, so that I am more sluggish in my thoughts and doze more now; brief intervals of sleep shot through with bright and foolish dreams.

I do not dream about the life I had. In all my dreams I am as I am now, hung fixed and without sight. In one, I hang outside an older town than this, although in some queer way the feeling of it is the same. I am in company with other body-scraps hung there to dry, but to my disappointment they are only torsos, mine the sole head set amongst them. In that comic style things have in dreams, I learn the headless, limbless relics are still capable of speech, but through their lower parts. I strike up a companionship with one of them, a woman’s trunk whose talk is filled with plans and tricks and cunning, although insufficient, it would seem, to spare her from her grisly end. We hatch a plan between us to combine our best resources, with my head to be somehow set up atop her ragged neck. She tells me, grumbling through her loins, that she has heard of legs and feet that may elect to join with our conspiracy. Alas, the dream is over ere we can pursue this charming notion of completion and escape.

Another dream is simpler: I am set upon a low, flat rock, still warm from daylight’s heat although the night breeze swirls about me, howling over endless distances and heavy with the scent of desert. I am wrapped around with chanting voices, circling through the darknesses without, as if of slow, gruff men that walk about me widdershins. There is the whispered crunch of trodden sand; the creak of armoured joint. The words they moan are foreign to me, strange and barbarous names that I may not recall upon awakening to the roar of Gilbert’s dawn deluge.

‘Tis a pity. I had hoped the dreams we know in death might have more sense about them than those borne in life. These night-starts have no meaning that I may make plain, though I would note that all of them seem sprung from distant times, no doubt the Tuesday or the Wednesday that came after Father’s surely hectic Monday of Origination.

Thus I doze, and dream, and dangle, and decay.

The hour is later now, and I have company.

I was disturbed some while ago by something heavy, scraped against the stonework just below me in a clumsy fashion. An accompaniment of John and Gilbert’s gruntings from beneath allowed me to conclude at last that they were struggling to erect a ladder by which means they might climb up to join me here upon my lofty perch. At first this gross intrusion woke a panic in me, for I feared that they were come to take me down, where I would be subjected to some fresh indignity. After a time, however, their thick-accented exchanges made it plain that this was not to be the case.

‘Set ‘im aside old Charlie up there, so they’ll make a pair.’ This was from Gilbert, down upon the ground and no doubt holding fast the ladder’s base while trusting the ascent to the more nimble John. The youth’s response was come from closer by, his winded panting almost at my ear. There was a puzzling scent of rancid cheese which I at first supposed to be upon his breath.

‘I’m trying to, but this one’s fresher than what Charlie were, and not as easy in the puttin’ on. You ‘old me steady now, I nearly fell.’

This went on for a while until at last the youth called down to Gilbert with report of his success.