The Bedlam Stacks
Natasha Pulley
PART ONE
ONE
Heligan estate, Cornwall
August 1859
Although I hadn’t been shot at for years, it took me a long time to understand that the bang wasn’t artillery. I sat up in bed to look out of the window, half-balanced on my elbows, but there was nothing except a spray of slate shards and moss on the little gravel path three floors below. There had been a storm in the night, huge, one of those that takes days and days to form and gives everyone a headache, and the rain must have finally worked loose some old roof tiles. In its bell jar, which kept damp from the mechanisms, the clock thunked around to twenty past seven. I sat still, listening, because I’d been sure the noise had been much louder than a few smashed tiles.
The bunches of plants drying in the rafters were pattering seeds into their paper bags. Somewhere above them, on the roof, the weathervane squeaked. Nothing else fell. Once my heart was convinced there was no gunfire, I tried to slide my cane out from under the dog.
‘Gulliver.’ I gave it a tug.
She rolled over and lay at an unnatural angle while I got dressed, paws crooked under their own weight. When I stroked her ears, she bumped her nose into my stomach, trying to herd me back into bed. Gigantic anyway and overfed, she was as heavy as me and almost managed it, but even with a cane I could still just about outmanoeuvre a sleepy St Bernard.
‘No, sorry. Time for a walk,’ I said. ‘Let’s see if the greenhouse is still in one piece.’
She snorted at me but padded through the door when I opened it for her, my head bowed because the rafters were low. Outside were six steep steps which she took at an old lady’s pace, although in fact she was quite young. The way was so narrow that her sides touched the walls. There were polished parts on the wainscoting that represented a year of morning and evening passages, by far the most looked-after section of wall anywhere in the house. I eased down after her. My leg hurt but I got down four steps before I had to pause, which was a big improvement on six months ago.
Along the corridor were dislocated views over the gardens through windows whose panes had been made from patchworks of older stained glass, full of truncated bits of Latin and saints’ robes, all of them rattly on the windward side. The cold and the damp seeped in round the edges. When I came home after a long time away it was always freshly horrible that there were happy slugs and moss in the inside grooves, but I’d been back for long enough now to have lapsed into a hopeless effort not to see it.
Down the dark stretch on the next stairs – ten steps, none quite the same height – I ran my hand along the wall to keep my balance. The door at the bottom stuck fast at less than halfway open. Gulliver had to squeeze through and I turned sideways. Though the landing looked just as poky as the last, it led out suddenly on to the main staircase, where all the portraits of previous Tremaynes and Lemons hung down the left-hand wall. Nearer the top were people in army uniforms and nicely rumpled silk whose names I didn’t know, and down near the door of Charles’s study were the few I would have recognised out of context: a couple of our mother’s brothers, and the aunt who’d taught me to shoot. Last was our grandfather, who looked like me, blond and fast-ageing. A still-life of some fruit hung where our father should have been.
Now, there was a carpet of pine needles and broken bits of timber over the middle of the floor. I twisted round to see upward. Although there were, on my side, three floors to the house, on this side it was just galleries off the staircase. The ceiling was the roof. Being windowless, it was usually gloomy, with deep shadows between the vaults of the rafters, but now there was quite a big hole. Hanging down through it was a rotten branch still attached, just, to the old pine tree. It had been defying gravity for months.
I slid down the banister rather than bother with the stairs, and Gulliver lolloped down next to me. Through the hole in the ceiling, the old pine kept up its rain of needles. I watched it for a second before I went underneath, but nothing creaked.
Gulliver opened the front door by walking into it. She knew where she was going and trotted round to Charles’s study window, where she swept her tail to and fro over the gravel and sprayed me with rainwater because the path was full of puddles. So was the lawn. They were reflecting the sky, lavender and grey. From outside, the tree seemed more or less all right, except for the rotten branch still suspended over the hole in the roof. I still had no idea what it was, the tree. Some kind of sequoia, but it was white, like a silver birch, and it had grown monstrous. Despite its size, it had a stunted list that suggested it ought to have been ten times bigger, the white bark full of awkward knots and abortive half-grown branches with no needles on them. Up in the canopy was a whole parliament of nests. Although it was noisy in the mornings usually, the crows must all have been out doing crow things for now.
I tapped on Charles’s window. His shadow struggled up and swung across between his crutches. When he lined up with my reflection in the lilac morning light, we almost looked alike.
‘I’ll get some gardeners to go up and cut down that branch before it falls,’ I said through the glass, then leaned back as he shoved it open. The frame stuck and it needed some force. ‘What are we doing about the roof?’
‘We’re not doing anything about the roof,’ he said, ‘and I’d rather not have gardeners in the house.’
‘I’d rather not have a tree in the house,’ I said, ‘so stay there and don’t look.’
I heard a saw. There were gardeners by the tree, just beginning to cut the trunk. I hadn’t seen from the front door, which stood at the wrong angle, but they had already tied ropes round the far side to guide the fall.
‘What are they doing?’ I said slowly.
‘Cutting it down. You’re right, it’s not safe. And this way we can have some firewood we’re not paying for.’
I didn’t say that making firewood from that tree was like using pound notes for kindling, or worse, given the effort it had taken to bring it here. It was from Peru and our grandfather had built one of the greenhouses specially for it. But I knew what Charles would say. He would say it wasn’t pound notes; it might have cost a lot to bring and to grow, but the tree wasn’t worth anything now it was here. It would be like burning rupees if you never intended to go to India again and didn’t know anyone else who would.
‘Charles, you can’t,’ I tried, with no heart.
‘We’re past keeping things from sentiment.’
‘As opposed to the ten generations’ worth of rubbish taking up eighteen of twenty rooms inside—’