Peter Dickinson - Tears of the Salamander

For a while, as he set off to explore, Alfredo seemed to be almost back in his dream. Surely the house had something to tell him of those vanished years. The upper floor was arranged on the same plan as the lower one. A wide corridor stretched from end to end of the house, with shorter corridors at either end running back toward the mountain. Only two of these upstairs rooms appeared to be used, his own and Uncle Giorgio’s. This wasn’t one of the grander ones looking out east over the Straits, but lay round at the northwest corner of the house, immediately above the study, with one window facing the mountain and another the trees. A bleak, bare room with a shabby carpet; a narrow, unornamented bed; two chairs; a huge, dark wardrobe and a plain table covered with books. A smaller table beside the bed held a lamp and several medicine bottles. On another small table was a birdcage occupied by a starling, smaller than the one in the study, and with stronger mottling on its breast feathers. It eyed Alfredo, standing in the door. It didn’t speak, but squawked as he left the room. There were no pictures, of saints or anything else. Not even a crucifix on the wall.

All the other doors on the upper floor opened onto shuttered rooms, about twenty of them in all, some with huge beds whose moth-eaten hangings glinted with gold thread, others completely unfurnished. All smelled of mice, and old mortar crumbling into dust from summer after roasting summer, but as he opened each door Alfredo could almost sense the movements of two faint figures just vanished through the connecting door into the room beyond.

The ground floor was more interesting. Four huge rooms faced the sea, two on either side of the central hallway. Bars of sunlight slanted through the cracks of their shutters. The northernmost one was a library, with shelves of great dark books reaching toward the ceiling. The furniture was swathed in dust sheets. Curious, Alfredo lifted the corner of a sheet covering a slab almost as large as the high altar in the cathedral and found an ornately carved desk. There was a litter of bird skeletons and feathers under its central tunnel, where a cat or something must have laired. It no longer smelled of rot, so that must have been years ago.

Next to the library was a reception room twice the size, with its furniture also sheeted, and on the other side of the hallway an equally enormous dining room. The two shadowy presences seemed just to have slipped through its farther doors. Unconsciously Alfredo quickened his pace as he walked along beside the table, counting the sheeted chairs as he passed. Twenty-four on either side, and two at each end. Fifty. He wondered when fifty ladies and gentlemen had last dined here. Oh, for a whisper of their talk, some whiff of that ancient feasting!

Last, in the southeast corner of the house, was a music room. There were three curving rows of chairs where the same ladies and gentlemen might have sat and sipped their coffee and gossiped in whispers as they half-listened to the tinklings of the two sheeted harpsichords, the thump of the sheeted drums, the whining of the fiddles and tweeting of the flutes and recorders that hung in cases between the windows. Alfredo took a treble recorder from a rack, breathed into it and fingered the stops. The scale came as sweet and true as if it had last played yesterday. But when he lifted the sheet from the front of one of the harpsichords and tried the keyboard, he got nothing but thumps and creaks.

Coming so soon after the recorder’s sweetness, the dismal sounds spoke to him.

No, they seemed to be saying. Those elegant evenings are gone, long gone. They won’t come back.

He closed the lid and pulled the sheet back over it, and as he left the music room he realized that the two ghosts he had been following had also gone.

The rooms on the other side of the central corridor were smaller. One still seemed to be some kind of estate office, two others were storerooms, the rest were shuttered and sheeted. He could not guess what they’d once been used for. Indeed most of the huge house no longer had any purpose that he could see or feel. How could this be his—anybody’s—home? How could he spend his days—his life—in this emptiness? Alone with a dumb woman and an apparent idiot. And Uncle Giorgio.

Uncle Giorgio. Something had happened in the study that morning. For a few moments—for a few words only— “Too late…and too soon” —there had seemed to be a different Uncle Giorgio. Different in what way? In…in thereness . This was something Alfredo hadn’t realized about Uncle Giorgio before. Normally, even when you were with him, he was somehow utterly alone. Only sometimes, faintly—when Alfredo had been singing to him, or when he’d just drunk the salamander’s tears and healed his throat—had he been there in the way he’d been there with Alfredo in the study for those few moments. But then, immediately afterward, he’d been alone again, and talking out of that loneliness in words that perhaps meant one thing on Alfredo’s side of the barrier and something quite different on his own. Perhaps that’s what he’d been smiling about—those different meanings. They’d amused him.

“The day will come when each of us loves the other as much as we love ourselves.”

But you didn’t love other people like that. You loved them from the outside . Perhaps Uncle Giorgio didn’t know very much about love. No, it wasn’t going to be easy. But who else was there?

He worked his way back through these lesser rooms to the corridor leading to Uncle Giorgio’s study. Reluctant to go farther, and desperate for human company, company of any kind, he turned back and along the similar corridor at the southern end of the house. The first room here was the one they ate in, and beyond that, presumably, the kitchens—at least the silent woman brought their meals from that direction. Yes, because the third door he came to was open, and through it he could see her standing in front of a grim old iron stove. At the sound of his footstep she turned, frowning.

“May I come in?” he said.

She nodded and turned back to the stove. By her movement and attitude he guessed that the frown had not been for him, and as soon as he was in the room he knew what the trouble was. The chimney was drawing well enough, but the fire itself was out of balance—“unhappy,” Father would have said. He crossed the floor and knelt beside the woman. As he opened the fire door she gave a warning hiss.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I know about ovens. My father’s a baker. Was.”

One sniff of the curious bitter reek of the smoke told him what the problem was. Elder is a mean wood, and always has been. No careful baker will have it in his stack, or anywhere near. There was a story that a smith once refused to shoe a pilgrim’s ass for charity, and St. Martin cursed the man, saying that the timber from the trees round his smithy would never again draw true. They were elders, of course. Even Father, who had little time for saint lore, almost believed the tale. The log would reek the kitchen out if he tried to remove it now, so he rose and rummaged though the timber stack behind the stove, choosing two billets of well-dried ash, always an easy-tempered wood, and better yet, a stout piece of old olive that would burn with a steady, golden heat right to its last embers. He eased them in round the elder and closed the door. Before he had finished adjusting the dampers he could feel the fire steadying to its work. A couple minutes later the woman sensed it too, for she turned to him, smiling, and bowed her head in thanks.

“My pleasure,” said Alfredo. He sorted through the stack, picking out the elder logs. When he’d found them all he showed one to the woman.