In The Library Ch 14

It is the shortest day and the longest night, and I have come of age this day. Yet I grieve also, and the woman for whom I grieve I had thought to be my mother all my life. But now I find that she was not my mother, and now I am motherless. My name is Alex Cain, and I am motherless, and I swear to find my mother.

The funeral cortege wound its way to the mausoleum, and the woman who was my mother but was never my mother is buried there. Catherine is dead. She lived a good life and I was her son. But on her death bed her last words to me, to anybody, were, "sweet boy, I have loved you all your days, but I am not your mother. You must seek her and find her, for we have made a mistake, your father and I, and we should not have broken the blood."

I did not know of what she spoke. I did not know my father, for the woman whose name was Catherine lived in the house with just her maids, the groundsmen, and the damned cat. The fucking cat is big and ancient and an evil fucker. With its glinting yellow malificence, the brute circles around me always, stalking and watching, and I hate it. There is some visceral loathing between us, but I could never do anything about it, because Catherine loved the accursed creature like it was her lover. I could never understand it, she was a proud and magnificent woman who could have had any man she pleased, but no man ever came down from her room in the morning.

And there were certainly men at the house. She would regularly have men and women to the house, in ones and twos, threes and fours. They would arrive from London in their finery and top hats, and the coach and four went regularly back and forth. And when the latest motor cars arrived, she was the first in the area to purchase a charabanc, and it too was seen carrying her house guests to and from the railway station.

The house had many locked rooms and corridors, and as a small boy I was forbidden to explore. As I got older and my night seed started to flow, I found more to interest me in the shape of the girls in the village, and I lost interest in the house and my mother's guests. But she was not my mother.

Returning to the house, I kept puzzling over the last words from this woman I had loved as dearly any boy could love his mother, but now I must make sense of them. She has left me a key, but she has left me also a mystery. If Catherine was not my mother, who on this earth is, and why did she leave me? Who am I?

There are parts of this house that I have never seen, corridors I have never been down, and doors I have never been through. So there are mysteries here that I need to uncover, and stories that need to be discovered. Catherine, I must remember her now as Catherine, not my mother, she has clearly lived a hidden life, or perhaps I have been sheltered. Or perhaps I am just stupid, unobservant, an idle boy and then a lazy youth. I don't know. Maybe the girls in the village just took my eye away from the house, and all I cared about were their long limbs and their big breasts and ripe bellies, their lustrous hair, their hot cunts. Lucy, Jenny, Molly, bounteous wenches all of them, and all of them keen for a hard prick and a good rutting. But I think I should have paid more attention to what went on at the house, not what went on down in the village.

The key then. A lock to be found, a door to be opened, a room to be inspected, some clues to be found. For I suspect the woman named Catherine has not left me silence, I suspect she might have left me something more, even quite a bit more. What she has done is left me money. It would appear that the estate is to be sold, and she has made provision for her faithful servants as might be expected, and she has then split the estate between me and her brother. But only once her damned cat has died. She has given directions that her brute of a feline is to be kept in the estate until he dies, so I'm hoping that he is fast using up his remaining lives. The cat has always been there, as long as I can ever remember, so he must be ancient indeed. Octavius - always thought it was a ridiculous name for a cat. What, can't the fucking thing count to nine!

But the key. I had to find a door that had been kept from me, and I had to go through it. Her bedroom was on the top floor of the west wing, but I had never been in the rooms beneath her chambers. I simply didn't know what was there. I really must have developed my taste for quim at an early age, because I had always spent more time exploring the alleys and bedrooms of the village than I had ever spent exploring this house.

Once I started to really look closely, I started to notice things. The floor down this hall was much cleaner than other areas of the house - lots of feet passing by, maybe, and long dresses preventing the dust from settling? So this door, then. Yes, the key fitted, and the lock was well oiled, the hinges also. The big door swung open, and on the other side of the room I could see floor length curtains against three angled walls - so big windows, then. Of course, the end of the west wing looked over the long lawns down to the lake, a huge three window bay, curving around. And the two adjacent walls, opposite each other, floor to ceiling bookshelves. Above my head, a gallery hidden by elaborately carved screens. To my right and left, on each side of the entrance door, two ante rooms, the stairs to the gallery running off from one, and doors to other rooms on the other side.

And what in God's name is this device, this wooden horse thing, in pride of place in the middle of this ornate room? It looks like some kind of elaborate restraint, straps and loops where someone's hands and feet might go. And levers and hinges. I realised that a person could be strapped to this thing, trapped, and the device could be raised and lowered. Damn, this thing would present every orifice of the body at just the right height for anybody, no matter how tall or short they were. Did this explain Catherine's endless parade of visitors? Had she put on some kind of strange spectacle, some unusual plays, some titillation perhaps, or something more refined?

As I was contemplating this construction in front of me, I became aware of a movement in the room. I turned, but had not heard a thing, and saw the figure of an old man moving towards me and then around me. There was something familiar in his movement, but I could not place what it was. He was old, silver and grey hair long down his back, fine boned and I suspect, in his youth, he would have been a handsome man. Even now, in his age there was a pride and a grace to his look. But I had never seen this man, and what was he doing in my mother's, but no, not my mother, in Catherine's house?

"Who are you, what are you doing here?"

He looked at me, and his look was one of puzzlement. "Thavius." His voice was raw and malformed, as if he could not shape the words. I could not make sense of him.

"What do you do here," I repeated.

"Atherine. 'Stress is dead. Thavius is broken." So he knew Catherine? And I saw tears on his cheeks, and indeed he had the look of a truly broken man. But still I could not fathom who he was. But he reached out a slender wrinkled hand and pulled at my sleeve, tugging me towards one of the ante rooms. Again something in his movement was familiar, something niggling at the edges of my mind. I followed him to a room with a strange couch along one wall, a high silled window in the other wall, the wooden casement curiously scratched, old worn scratches and newer ones also. He reached to a shelf and brought down a box, brass cornered and carven. Inside, there were a number of wrapped objects, and what appeared to be a photograph. He carefully took the image from the box, and placed it on the table between us.

He pointed to me, and again his voice was harsh and unnatural, "Aalex," a long accent on the first syllable.

"Yes, I am Alex," I replied.

He pointed to the photograph, and two girls stood there, and the background of the tableau was the bay window in the library. His finger gently caressed the image of one of the girls, a tall buxom thing with a tumble of long hair to her waist. "Dette. 'Dette oved me." And he pointed to the image of the other girl, and his finger was more tentative. "Lexanda. Lexanda oved you," And he pointed to me, and nodded, once, firmly, and I could see that an affirmation was made. I studied the image, and was astonished, for she could have been a daughter or a sister of the woman who was no longer my mother but was Catherine. The girl had the same elfin grace and darkness of that woman, who even as she aged was a dark, graceful beauty. Her long dark hair surrounded her pale, beautiful face.

"Who are they, these girls? Who is she, this girl who looks as a young Catherine would have looked?"

"Lexanda, oved you," he repeated, and again pointed to me, and then mimed something being rocked in two arms; and then something small, no higher than his thigh; and then he mimed a hand rising from the height of a small thing by his side, up, growing up to a man's full height.

"Are you trying to say I was a baby, and then a boy, and then a man? Are you saying this girl is my mother?" And he furiously nodded, and his voice more excited, "Lexanda, you, mothher," and another definitive nod of his head. I looked at him, spellbound, trying to digest what he was saying, in his unformed and broken words. He then reached into the box once more, and pulled out a small golden locket, two sides hinged, on a long chain. And he handed it to me. I flipped the locket open, and one side was a tiny photograph of a baby. And on the other side, under another hinged circle of glass, were two tiny feathers, feathers from the tiny breast of a bird.

This strange man, passionate with some emotion that I could not make sense of, but powerful; he pressed the locket into my hands, and then placed his own, as if he were clutching some precious thing, to his own breast and held his clutched fingers there, as if holding something truly rich, and truly precious. And another glistening tear rolled from his cheek, and I knew that this strange man who clearly was not some normal man, this broken voiced thing whose own language was from some different throat, this man was forever touched by this child and these two women. And he was desperate in his own strange way to communicate something to me. The locket was a gift from him, and the images were of some lost truth that he knew but could not communicate.

So I placed the locket into my pocket, and placed the photograph back in the box, the images of both young women graven into my mind and forever seen in my eye; and I took his two hands in mine and clasped them in my own two hands, in thanks. His hands had a curious warmth to them, and his skin a curious soft feel, and I sensed somehow, from some deep edge of my mind, that this man was aged and strange and had a curious knowledge, and was something not quite human. I could not make any true sense of him, and he was a strangeness. His powerful amber eyed gaze, for he had eyes with a colour of no human I had ever known, held my own eyes for some long, powerful seconds. And then he turned from me and lay on his couch, like some lean creature, and he curled and turned and almost immediately, was asleep.

I left him there, asleep. He was strange, and I could not fathom him. But it was clear that in this house, in this house's past, two girls had arrived from somewhere and had departed somewhere, and one of them had left me behind as a child. And the one identified as my mother could have been my mother who wasn't my mother, Catherine, for the image of the girl could have been the older woman when she was much younger. My head was spinning with the visions of this family, because it was becoming clear that I did indeed have some blood link with the woman Catherine, even if now I did not know what it precisely was. Somewhere in this house I would surely find more clues, if I searched methodically, carefully, slowly.

I had plenty of time. I had all the time in the world to find my mother. And I flipped open the little locket one more time, and with the tip of my finger, I stroked the tiny, soft feathers that were there.

My name is Alex Cain, and I need to discover who I am.