‘Carrie,’ she said. ‘Who was Carrie?’
‘Oh,’ and ‘I never found out,’ he lied, ‘I never tried,’ no reason, but already he felt the need to guard those odd details of his confessions, scraps of truth, trifling charms. Hoarding an empty purse, when all the coins have gone to beggars’ hands.
‘Ah,’ she said and Silas looked too quickly back to the things in the crate, pilfered treasures come halfway around the world to him, and it was a long time before he felt her eyes leave him.
Pollepel Island: uneven jut of rock above water where the Hudson gets wide past the Northern Gate, Wey-Gat, the long stony throat of Martyr’s Reach, greenscab at the foot of Newburgh Bay; white oak and briar tangle, birch skin over bones of gneiss and granite. Bones of the world laid down a billion years ago and raised again in the splitting of continents, divorce of lands; birth of the Highlands in the time of terrible lizards, then scraped and sculpted raw, made this scape of bald rock and gorge during the chill and fever of ice ages. And Pollepel Island like a footnote to so much time, little scar in this big wound of a place.
Silas Desvernine already a rich man when he first came here. Already a man who had traded the Captain’s ragtag ferries for a clattering empire of steel and sweat, Desvernine Consolidated Shipyard, turning out ironclad steamers, modern ships to carry modern men across the ocean, to carry men to modern war. And Pollepel chosen for his retreat from industry, the sprawling, ordered chaos of the yard, the noise and careless humanity of Manhattan. First glimpse, an engraving, frontispiece by Mr N.P. Willis for American Scenery: tall sails and rowboat serenity, Storm King rising in the misty distance. The island recalled from his trips up and down the river and the Captain had shown him where George Washington’s soldiers sank their chevaux-de-frises, sixty-foot logs carved to spikes and tipped with iron, set into stone caissons and dropped into the river off Pollepel to pierce the hulls of British warships.
And this valley already a valley of castles, self-conscious stately, Millionaire’s Row decades before Silas’ architects began, before his masons laid the first stones, since the coming of the men of new money, the men who nailed shining locomotive track across the nation or milled steel or dug ore and with their fortunes built fashionable hiding places in the wilderness; cultivated, delusory romance of gentleman farmers in brick and marble, iron spires and garden pools. But Silas Desvernine was never a man of society or fashion, and his reasons for coming to Pollepel Island were his own.
Modest monstrosity, second-hand Gothic borrowed from his memory of something glimpsed on a business trip to Scotland, augmented with the architect’s taste for English Tudor, and the pale woman he married, Angeline, his wife, never liked the great and empty halls, the cold and damp that never deserted the rooms. The always-sound of the river and the wind, restless in the too-close trees, the boats passing in the night.
If he’d permitted it, Angeline Desvernine would have named the awful house, given a name to tame it, to bind it, make it her home, maybe, instead of whatever else it was. But No, Silas said, stern and husbandly refusal, and so no poet ostentation, no Tioranda or Oulagisket or Glenclyffe on his island, just Silas’ castle, Silas’ Castle.
His dream, and the long night on the Storm King is never precisely the same twice and never precisely the way things happened. And never anything but the truth. The dream and the truth worn thin, as vellum-soft, streampebble-smooth, these moments pressed between the weight of now and then and everything before, and still as terrible.
Younger but not young, reaching back and she takes his hand, or Angeline takes his hand, neither of them, but an encouraging squeeze for this precarious slow climb up and up, above the river, while Prof Henry Osborn talks, lectures like the man never has to catch his breath, ‘Watch your step there. A lot of loose stone about,’ and Silas feels sixty instead of forty-five.
Somewhere near the summit, he lingers, gasping, tearing water eyes and looks down and back, towards his island; a storm coming, on its way up the valley and so twilight settling in early, the day driven like dirty sheep before the thunder-heads, bruisebelly shepherds and the muddy stink of the river on the wind.
‘A shame about this weather, though, really,’ Osborn sighs. ‘On a clear day, you can see the Catskills and the Shawangunks.’
Of course, Osborn wasn’t with him that day, this day, and he knows that dimly, dim dream recollection of another history; another climb mixed in with this, the day that Osborn showed him a place where there were broken Iroquois pottery and arrowheads. Osborn, man whose father made a fortune on the Illinois Central and he’s never known anything but privilege. The rain begins, then, wet and frying noise, and Henry Osborn squints at the sky, watches it fall as the drops melt his skin away, sugar from skeleton of wrought iron and seam welds; ‘On a clear day,’ he whispers from dissolving lips, before his jaw falls, clank and coppertooth scatter, and Silas goes on up the mountain alone.
No one ever asked him the why of the collecting, except her. Enough whats and wheres and hows, from the very few who came to the island. The short years when Angeline was alive and she held her big, noisy parties, her balls for the rich from other castles down the valley, for gaudy bits of society and celebrity up from New York City or Philadelphia or Boston. Minor royalty once or twice. The curious who came for a peek inside the silent fortress on Pollepel. Long nights when she pretended this house wasn’t different, and he let her play the game, to dull the edge of an isolation already eating her alive.
Later, new visitors, after The Great War that left him more than wealthy, no counting anymore, and Angeline in her lonely grave on the western edge of the island, their son gone to Manhattan, the yard run by so many others that Silas rarely left the island. Let whatever of the world he had need of come to him, and never more than one or two at a time, men and women who came to walk his still halls and wonder at this or that oddity. All of them filled with questions, each their own cyclopedia of esoteric interrogations, lean and shadowy catechists, a hundred investigators of the past and future, the hidden corners of this life and the next. Occultists, spiritualists, those whose askings and experiments left them on the bastard edges of science or religion. They came and he traded them glimpses of half-truths for the small and inconsequential things they’d learned elsewhere. All of them single-minded and they knew, or mostly thought they knew, the why, so no point to ever asking.
That was for her, this one thing he’d brought back to Pollepel that he was afraid of and this one thing he loved beyond words or sanity. The conscious acquisition that could question the collection, the collector.
‘I have too much money,’ he said once, after the purchase of a plaster replica of Carnegie’s Diplodocus skeleton to be mounted for the foyer and she asked the sense of it and ‘It’s a way of getting rid of some of the goddamned money,’ he said.
She blinked her owlslow, owlwise blink at him, her gold and crimson eyes scoffing sadly.
‘You know the emptiness inside you, Silas. These things are a poor substitute for the things you’re missing.’ So he’d drawn the draperies on her cage and left them drawn for a week, as long as he could stand to be without the sight of her.
Nineteen eighteen, so almost three years after his son was pulled screaming from his wife’s swollen body, pulled wet and blind into the waiting, dogjawed world; helpless thing the raw colour of a burn. His heir and Silas Desvernine could hardly bear the sight of it, the squalling sound of it. Angeline almost dying in the delivery nightmare of blood and sweat, immeasurable hours of breathless pain and there would be no others, the doctor said. Named for father and grandfather’s ghost, Eustace Silas, sickly infant that grew stronger slowly, even as its mother’s health began to falter, the raising of her child left to indifferent servants; Silas seeing her less and less often, until, finally, she rarely left her room in the east wing.