Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land Read online

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: [email protected]

  Subject: Smith, etc.

  I guess the reason I wrote to you was because it was a secret. I couldn’t think of how to ask anybody else without giving it away. That’s all. I’m not a scholar or a historian really. I’ll send you the Ada note pages when I scan them. It doesn’t hurt them. I wear these little white gloves.

  Almost everybody I know calls me Smith. Partly it’s because of the college. A long while after I dropped out of my first school I went there on a special program to get an MA (the Ada Comstock program, how do you like that). And also partly ’cause I once joked that I wanted a last name for a first name, like all those cool movie stars and so on with names like Parker and Drew and Reese. Why not Smith, said I. So it, you know, stuck.

  I hate thinking the papers are fake. I’m going to start looking. Thanks and I’ll let you know.

  Alexandra

  From: [email protected]

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Smith, etc.

  You know for the last six months of your prenatal life you were going to be named Haidée, for a girl in Byron’s Don Juan. Your mother was okay with that, but then changed her mind. I couldn’t fight her. Smith is fine. You were never really Alexandra to me. Alexandra is a cold regal beauty. Alex is butch. Sandy is a cute kid with pigtails (and a dog named Annie…). I don’t know why your mother liked it.

  I should point out that no one is really a historian, all the way through, just as no one is really a writer, or really a saint. Those things can only be what you do, not what you are: you write, or you conduct historical investigations, or you do good, etc. Let other people call you the big words—Robert Frost says “poet” is a term only other people can apply to you. Believe me you can go through life unsure if any such a title truly applies to you, the you inside. Poet. Star. Genius. Criminal.

  Lee

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject: Hey

  Thea

  I’ve scanned the mathematical tables and I’ve sent them to you on a CD FedEx, it would take 4ever in download time, it took me all day and night to scan and copy them so you could even see them. I think it’s crazy we can’t ask somebody here to look at them but Georgiana is so spooked about anybody finding out about the stuff till we can make a big announcement. She thinks too much in my opinion—I don’t think people care as much as she thinks. She even worried a little about you but I told her you were my bondage love slave and so it’s safe.

  Lee wrote. I wrote back. Okay so far. Well it’s weird but somehow not weird the way you expect. That’s what’s weird. I guess we’ll have to really say something sometime. It would be weirdest of all if we didn’t.

  From: “Thea”

  To: “Smith”

  Subject: RE:Hey

  you will believe me and then we will see i do not approve of this but I will not send the fbi his email address they have it anyway or they dont care i dont care either about him i just want you not to be hurt

  spring break at the college and so the THEMS have gone home or to fla and here i am alone at night with only my v aw shucks

  t

  From: “Smith”

  To: “Thea”

  Subject: v

  I’ll bring you a new v, love. The Sporty Spice Special.

  I’m going to go look at the Ada papers at Oxford. Georgiana wanted to come too—we’d motor down together, dear—but then she had a family thing. I’m not sorry. But I’m a little afraid to go alone. Oxford. I feel like a Country Mouse, only without a City Mouse to show me all the goodies, and the dangers too. Like I might get eaten alive. I had a dream last night about that: going in someplace huge and dark and angry (like places can be in dreams) and not finding a way out, and nobody telling me or caring at all. I think they must come from childhood, those dreams, where adults pay you no attention and you can’t say why you’re afraid.

  Write me. Tell me I’m brave, and I will be.

  Smith

  • THREE •

  Of Ali’s Education, in several subjects

  BY THE SOUTH-WESTERN coast of Scotland, between the ocean and the mountains, the ruins of an Abbey stand, join’d incongruously to a house of the last century, and fronted by a Park where once noble trees consorted, and deer cropped grass and ate apples. A small lake, bounded by granite works, the plaything of a former Lord who liked to float miniature fleets upon it, and engage them in mock battles, no longer spouts from its centre the glittering pillar of water it was wont to show. This pretty piece of water was the smallest of a linked series of lakes, where Waterfowl congregated in their season, set in a wide oakland that once sheltered game and fed pigs even-handedly. The woods being cut down, the lakes overflowed their bounds and spread into a marshland, of barren aspect and forbidding.

  To this house, after a month’s travel from the South, came Lord Sane and his son Ali—now his son by English law as well as by Nature’s; for Sane had taken care to sojourn a time in London and there have all necessary writs of adoption prepared, and other papers, with their seals and witnesses, their Whereases and their Subjunctions in proper form, duly signed and registered. Thus was a flaw in his marriage to the Lady of this manor healed—as Sane himself perceived it. For, drunk as he had often been during the brief Courtship by which he had won that Lady’s hand, he had not fully understood her estates to be entail’d upon her heirs—that, absent an Heir of Lord Sane’s own getting, all would revert, upon the Lady’s death, to distant Cousins still in their infancy, her husband to retain but a portion (already borrowed against and spent) of the Lady’s money. Lord Sane, having more soberly and with the aid of solicitors examined all the encumbrances upon the estate, had determined that the heir of the family being the legal child of the Lady, it need not be the child of her body; and thus by his papers and his writs his own son became heir to his adoptive Mother’s lands, albeit with the same entailments. How often we entangle ourselves in our own dark futures, merely as a consequence of not reading with care what our agents and our solicitors have sent us, and explained to us, and begged us to attend to! Life—our life—is in them, as plots are in novels; we reach our last page in peril, if we have skipped over them!

  A further obstacle to Lord Sane’s ability to do exactly as he pleased was harder to remedy: not all the lands and titles in question together produced sufficient income for the ancient manor’s upkeep, especially when diminished by Lord Sane’s early debts, and the interest upon them, and the Jews and middlemen (and middle-women, worse than any of these) who held his bonds, and who had granted him Annuities, which he was still obliged to pay tho’ the income obtained was long gone. Thus Lord Sane when not engaged in profligacy, was perforce engaged in the raising of money wherewith to pay its costs, and the race was not always equal. He could not sell the ancient seat—but he could sell all that it contained, and had for some years been doing so. In former times the rooms had held gilt mirrors and feather beds, book-desks and their books, firearms in cases, china-ware from China as well as from France—Lord Sane could see no difference in a Cup, or cared to see none, but Messrs Christie did, who also sold the house’s Reynoldses, its Canalettos, and its Knellers, tho’ they scorned the rest. At last, having sold all those unnecessaries, he proceeded to sell the brass locks from the doors, the lead from the window-panes, the chimney-pieces from the chimneys, the tattered rugs from beneath the sleeping dogs.

  When Ali came to the house, it was thus spoliated and denuded: but the youth could not truly perceive this, who had never lived amid fine things—even his godfather the Pacha had had, except for his carpets and his weapons, nothing of display or munificence about him or his habitations, where he lived as in the tents of his Anc
estors, ready to move at any moment—of pictures that gentleman had had none, and the Koran forbade the representation of his forebears, had he known who those worthies were. What Ali felt then, when the great doors were thrown open, and those few servants still attached to the estate came forth to greet their Laird, and by them he was escorted within the Great Hall where once an hundred Monks had broke their fast together, was a species of awe—which emotion, reflected in his features, was evident to his sire, and not displeasing to him.

  Lord Sane took his son through the empty galleries and the uninhabited cloisters—the cells where once those holy men had prayed, or had not—their ancient kitchen, now but ruination, its fireplace as large as many a cot in Albania. He bore him downward, into close passages of mouldered brick, vaults once broken into by the Laird in search of buried treasure, which as everyone knows only the good will be directed by Heaven to find. No treasure therefore having been found, the breached walls were left in that condition, the tools abandoned. In the roofless chapel, vegetation sprang from high cornice and ogee, and fallen stones, some of them the faces and limbs of saints and angels, impeded the foot. All these sights—taken as the sun set, and darkness swept over the ancient demesne, and an owl was heard from its place in the crannied stone—which might in an English breast have started the most Gothic shudders, and emotions of sublimity and dread—affected the young Albanian only with curiosity, and wonder, and a sort of vacancy, that he knew not whether he stood here, or not, or what he might be, if he be a he at all, and not a mere wisp of spirit lost.

  ‘Now,’ said Lord Sane, when the two had refreshed themselves with a Scotch woodcock (that is, a dish of eggs, all that the kitchen afforded) and the contents of an exceptional bottle of Claret—for the cellar, of all that house, was left undespoiled—‘now, you will please me, if you will go and pay your respects to your lady mother, in her apartments above. My man will conduct you thither.’

  ‘The lady is not my mother,’ said Ali.

  ‘What do you say, Sir?’ asked his father, surprised, for he had not been crossed by the youth before: all that Ali had endured, he had endured silently—not till now had he found it impossible not to speak.

  ‘The lady is not my mother,’ Ali repeated. ‘I am happy to pay my respects, but not as to a mother; for I had a mother.’

  ‘Dead,’ said Sane. ‘Well dead.’

  ‘I shall honour her memory,’ said Ali, ‘and not call another by that name I must reserve for her alone.’

  ‘You are too nice,’ said Lord Sane, colouring. ‘Her death being the condition of your coming to be, and of your coming to be here, she has done what she might; you had best look to another for more.’

  ‘How do you mean,’ Ali said, ‘the condition of my coming to be?’

  ‘Why, in that your engendering was counted a capital crime by her people,’ his father said, and struck the board. ‘As soon as ever you were known about, her death was certain; the sky should have fallen, rather than such a blot on the escutcheon remain. I should be dead too, save for the chance of my being, by your people’s determination, blood-brother to your mother’s husband, and therefore unassailable.’

  Ali—who, if his young soul had still a childish fault, it was a slowness to believe evil of those among whom he found himself, and therefore to draw the right, that is to say the worst, conclusions from their actions—only now saw clearly what his case was, and what his mother’s had been. ‘You knew, then,’ he said, ‘that you condemned her to death.’

  ‘Ah! Who can know to what any adventure may lead? Let us have enough of this old business.’

  ‘Knew that you had so shamed her husband, that he must take her life—she who but for your ravishment might be alive today!’

  ‘Your regrets are misplaced,’ said Lord Sane. ‘It mattered not to them. Women are as cattle among your people; if the woman had not died so, she would have been worked to death soon enough—a life of toil was all she did not live to see.’ He drained his glass, and then added: ‘If the story I had from the Pacha be true, my brother drew the knife across her throat himself.’

  Ali now, as by an involuntary spasm, reached for the Pacha’s sword, which he had belted at his side—his father himself had insisted he wear it, on the long Northward highway where brigands still roamed—and gripped its handle, his eyes flashing.

  ‘Do you draw on me, Sir?’ said Lord Sane, arising, in a voice where fury and contentment strove incongruously. ‘Do you? Then draw! You see I have but a stick, but I will strike you down if you offer me offence!’

  For a long, an endless moment, the two men stood on either side of the table, the great frame of the Lord, the slight one of the son, and neither moved, nor took his eyes from the other’s—nor did the footman move, nor the Valet, nor the serving-girl in the doorway.

  What now would he do, our youth? Seeing clearly his condition—engendered in Sin and Murder, abstracted from his home, friended only by the man before him, who seemed as willing to slay him as he had been to bring him hither—what could he do? Without a further word, but unbowed, he took his hand from his weapon; he stood down from his posture of opposition. He would do as he was asked, or commanded, because he had for now no choice: but never again would he acknowledge any duty to the man before him.

  ‘Permit me to point out the hour,’ said Sane, in all consciousness of his triumph over the youth. ‘Her Ladyship is early to bed, and late to rise. It were best if you go now. She will be expecting you.’ And with a nod he set in motion his Valet, who came gravely to take Ali away. ‘You may bring her my compliments,’ said Lord Sane, ‘but do not promise, nor suggest, that I shall visit her. Not this night, nor on the morrow either.’

  So Ali followed the spectral Factotum from the hall, and through the door and chamber, and up stairs. The Valet paused to light a candle-stick at a lamp that burned on a landing, and then proceeded upward till a painted door was reached, and there he turned to Ali, and seemed upon the point of speaking—for his lip curled, and his fish’s eye lit dimly—but then he only knocked, and hearing something from within that Ali could not, he opened the doors, and announced Ali in a dusty whisper.

  It seemed to Ali as he entered that the room was empty. It was more fully finished than other chambers and halls through which he had passed—its drapes had not been pulled down, its paper’d walls were not so stained with water, the carpets upon the floor were whole, and a great bed retained its tester and its clothes. From within this bed Ali now heard a small voice, and at the same time the doors behind him were closed.

  ‘Art thou the boy?’ repeated the dim voice of a personage unseen—and Ali, stepping farther into the dimness of the chamber, now perceived through the bed-hangings a large figure, in white, as pale nearly as the sheets—a figure who now lifted a hand, in welcome, or in weak defence—Ali could hardly tell.

  ‘Madam,’ said he, and inclined his head, as he had seen his father do.

  ‘Lord Sane has sent thee to me,’ said the Lady—for it was she, or her great ghost, lifting itself from the pillows. ‘That I might give thee my blessing.’

  ‘I should be glad of it,’ said Ali.

  ‘Come closer,’ said she, ‘that I may see what son I have been given. Come.’

  Ali came as he was bidden, and approached the bedside of Lady Sane, who now closer to him, was revealed to be, though pale and somewhat indeterminate, a cheerful personage, with a kindly smile, and a mass of curls that escaped from beneath her snood. ‘What is thy name?’ she asked.

  ‘Ali.’

  ‘Ali! Did he not give thee a Christian name, then?’

  ‘No, Madam, he did not, though his advisors thought he ought, and urged him to have me christened, as it is called. Lord Sane thought not so. It amused him—he said so—that his son bear always the name he was given at birth.’

  ‘And has he been kind to thee?’ asked the Dame, as though she had reason to think quite otherwise. ‘Has he given thee what thou art in want of, at the least?’
/>   ‘Madam,’ said Ali, ‘he has given me all that I asked of him.’

  At that she fell silent for a time, perhaps understanding what Ali had said, as he meant it. Then, seeming more to marvel at, than to object to it, she said—‘So I now have a son who is a Turk.’

  ‘No, Madam,’ Ali said again—and for the first time his strange career seemed to him comical, and his situation fit for laughter:—‘No, I am no Turk. I am half an Englishman, if my father’s tale be true, and half a man of the Ochridan people, who have among them killed many a Turk. Indeed I am nothing, or a part of something and a part of something else. Yet I do not think I am parts—I think I am whole—or may be whole—and all one.’

  As he spoke, the bedclothes about the figure of Lady Sane were stirred, as frothy ocean-pools are stirred by waves inpouring. Her head she lifted from its pillows, and her eyes—gentle and young as a faun’s, which Ali thought remarkable—widened, and took him in. ‘Why, indeed you are, dear child,’ said she. ‘You are but one, and all one. And yet’—here Lady Sane touched her chin thoughtfully—‘if you are no Turk,’ said she, ‘and have no Christian name—are you then a Christian?’

  ‘I am not,’ said Ali. ‘I have just begun to make myself understood in English, and to wear English clothes—I have no other English qualities about me.’

  ‘Well,’ Lady Sane reply’d, ‘I have not thought it an English quality to be Christian—and you are not now among that nation—and you have a soul, have you not?’

  Ali knew not what answer to return to this question; he believed it to mean that he had that within him which was not his flesh, yet was the true self, the one he was, or might be. ‘I think I may have,’ he said.