James Miranda Barry Read online

  ‘Thank you, James, for a very kind invitation. I should be delighted.’

  It was the first time that Barry had used their common Christian name. James leaped off the sofa and shook Barry’s hand. Psyche set up a frenzied barking.

  ‘Terrific. That’s all settled then. When shall we start? We must get out of this heat.’

  Barry went on staring, but he added a very small, ironic smile.

  ‘At dawn tomorrow. If you don’t burn the candles at both ends tonight.’

  * * *

  They spent most of the first day marvelling at the views. In the dull chill before dawn they crossed the irrigated plain beyond the town, trotting briskly down the soft sandy tracks between the green maize fields. Psyche wobbled unsteadily inside Barry’s coat, her nose black and wet, raised to the cool air. By the time they began climbing slowly on the rougher paths through the white rocks, the sun was upon them, baking their backs and heads. But they were already a long way above the bay, turning inland along the ribbon cliffs. Far below they could pick out the aquamarine thread close to the shore, outlining the port and the promenade, which anchored the island into the darker wash of blue. The air shifted its weight, exhaling hot breath against their faces. They dismounted and picked their way carefully up the uneven track towards a huge head of rock, cracked, jagged and stained with giant stripes of yellow ochre, buried in the rifts. The rock cast a twisted shadow across the rough scrub beneath. As they crushed the vegetation beneath their boots and the horses’ hooves, the green threw up the sudden smell of rosemary and wild thyme. Barry rubbed a twist of herb between his gloved fingers and sighed. In the rock’s shadow the air changed and drew away, but there was no water.

  Barry had a map.

  ‘There’s a spring about four miles further on and the path should get easier. Do you think we can climb up there by midday?’

  ‘Easily.’

  Psyche flopped down beside James. She was too hot to negotiate anything other than a truce with the handsome soldier, of whom she was intensely jealous. James looked at her warily.

  ‘Do you clip her nails?’

  Barry nodded.

  They sat silent, side by side, puffing with the horses, gazing at the empty vanishing line of blue.

  ‘Beats England, doesn’t it?’ said James.

  ‘Not for beauty,’ Barry replied. ‘Nothing could ever do that.’

  James laughed.

  ‘Never had you down as a patriot. You’re always so sharp about our fellow countrymen.’

  ‘That’s because their idiocies are magnified abroad. I don’t think that you will ever have heard me criticise the country itself.’

  ‘But what is the country other than the people and what they’ve made of it?’

  James was a little puzzled. He was attached to people rather than to places. He never did understand why he should venerate the flag. His regimental world was one in which honour and tradition were things about which you ranted with vehemence when magnificently drunk. He entertained no abstract ideas of England as a psychic entity which could be the object of nostalgia. But as it happened, neither did Barry. He was remembering somewhere quite specific. The doctor sat prim and serious, perched on a rock, smoking a thin cigar.

  He was silent for a moment, then he said, ‘I spent a significant part of my childhood in the country. My family and I were frequent visitors to Lord Buchan’s estate in Shropshire. After I had begun my studies I returned there every summer. From May to September I lived on the farm, in the kitchens, in the fields. Look out at those dry white rocks, James, where nothing grows, and think of the fresh dew on cow parsley, lacing the hedgerows. Think of purple foxgloves on the woodland floor. Imagine the squirrels racing across your lawns. Breathe the smell of cut grass. Remember the candles of the horse chestnuts, pink and white, jaunty and elegant, swaying above the green, this year’s green, the new spring leaves, folded like napkins, high above you. Think of that fine, soft rain, delicate as a woman’s silk sleeve, touching your face. Remember the late white frosts? Just a faint crust of white among the daisies. Hear the birds chanting the dawn. Remember those long summer evenings, of blue shadows and thick gold, that long, evening sun you only see in the north. See the hills, those soft, swollen, rounded bellies of green. And smell the water, clear water, spring water, ice-cold, battering the stream stones, the irises yellow against the green and the cows browsing in the shallows.’

  James sat up astonished.

  ‘Good Lord, Barry, you’re a poet, not a doctor! But I could certainly do with a drink.’

  Barry laughed. He seemed surprised by his own oratory. He went to pull the water flask from his saddle-bag. The huge bay snorted hopefully and dipped her head down towards her master. He peeled off his gloves, poured a little water into his bare hand and wetted her nostrils. She blew a damp blast of heat into his ear and stamped twice. He rubbed her head gently. James stared at him. The doctor had to climb rocks to mount the creature, which he did a little self-consciously but with aggressive dignity. Yet the animal, which Harris had described as hell on four legs, trotted out for Barry like a seaside donkey. All Barry’s animals appeared enchanted. They bit anyone else who approached. It was very peculiar.

  ‘The mare goes well for you,’ said James, puzzled. There had been some merriment in the colony at Barry’s expense when the Governor had first proposed the gift. The bay had been intended to take the doctor down a peg or two.

  ‘Yes, she’s a good horse,’ Barry answered absently. He looked out at the sea. ‘Don’t you miss England, James?’

  ‘Not at all. Or at least I’ve never thought about it. I grew up in Berkshire. But I can’t say that I thought about the country like you do. I just remember flies and mud. And Father shouting. I couldn’t wait to get to town. See the world. I hated school. Didn’t you hate school?’

  ‘Never went. I had tutors at home.’

  ‘Lucky you, like my sister.’

  Barry looked down sharply at the soldier sprawled beneath the shadow of a great white rock. But there was nothing more than idle chat behind the remark. Barry handed over the flask.

  ‘I didn’t know that you had a sister. Here, drink up. Let’s move.’

  The water ran over James’s fine moustache and gleamed on his red underlip. Barry watched a drop fall onto the front of his uniform. James flopped back against the rock, groaning. Barry was fitter than he was. The soldier looked like a marionette with the strings sheared.

  ‘My God, Barry. Pull me up.’

  ‘Consider which one of us is likely to win a tug of war,’ laughed Barry, suddenly dapper, merry, game for anything. They grasped each other’s wrists and pulled like children, James winning easily against Barry’s slender weightlessness. He noticed once more the doctor’s fine, cold hands, each nail cut short, each oval cuticle pale, perfect, unbroken. He understood why all his patients spoke of the doctor’s light, tender touch and the gentleness of his authority. He gazed down at the other man’s hand, resting in his own. Cautiously and slowly, Barry withdrew his hand.

  ‘Shall we go on?’ he asked quietly, looking up into the young soldier’s confused and bewildered face.

  * * *

  At sunset they stopped to watch the giant glowing ball, illuminated like a Chinese lantern, sink with all theatrical splendour into the black pit of the orchestra. The heat was sucked out of the air. They found the mountain hut easily enough. It stood directly in their path and they would have had to struggle round it to go on upwards in the closing dark. The distances between the hut and two of the local monasteries were written in Greek on the wooden wall, but with no indication of directions. James found the stones where the last visitors had lit their fire and began to grub about in the dark bush for sticks. There was nothing to hand, so he set off over the rocks. When he returned, bitten by mosquitoes, scratched and cursing, Barry had already lit the fire from the neat little pile of brushwood stacked inside the door of the hut. He was sitting on a rock, calmly slicing a sinister sausag
e.

  ‘You try my patience, sir,’ said James, laughing at himself and flinging down the hard-won sticks.

  ‘Regard it as one more piece of evidence that James I was more successful than James II,’ smiled Barry.

  ‘And had more luck. Both the doctor and the king.’

  James flung himself down beside the fire, almost crushing Psyche, who was too exhausted either to growl or to move.

  ‘And you’ve no doubt hobbled and fed the horses, discovered a pile of hay and refilled the bucket from the spring.’

  ‘Indeed. But the spring is merely a trickle. It’s fifty yards away up a rather dangerous track and I would not advise it in the dark. I propose that we put up with each other’s stench tonight and wash in the morning.’

  ‘A vos ordres, mon général,’ murmured James, stretching out. ‘And are you as competent at cooking?’

  * * *

  The doctor slept close to the door, wrapped in his cape, with Psyche tucked against his shoulder, like a warm, curled cushion. James got up to relieve himself in the middle of the night. He had to step over the doctor’s legs. As he did so he heard the sudden unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked, and the poodle’s low growl.

  ‘It’s all right, Barry,’ he whispered, a little dazed, ‘it’s me.’

  When he came back into the dark space, which reeked of goats, he was wide awake from the night cold and the apprehension of being shot. Barry’s accuracy was no doubt still invincible, even in the luminous dark.

  ‘I say, Barry, are you asleep?’

  ‘Not now, my dear, I’m talking to you.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  James lay down again.

  ‘I wasn’t asleep.’

  There was a comfortable pause.

  ‘Barry?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘So far as I know we aren’t surrounded by brigands and we haven’t been followed. Do you always sleep with a loaded pistol on your chest?’

  Barry chuckled.

  ‘I do indeed, sir. I have my honour to defend.’

  Then they both fell asleep.

  * * *

  The monastery was attached like a leech to the upper edge of a perpendicular precipice. They could see the stone walls growing out of the rock: οικος αγιος Πνευµατικος, The House of the Holy Ghost. It was a fortress against all comers, pilgrims and pillagers alike. Everyone was equally unwelcome, both the terrestrial invaders and the heavenly hosts. The doctor and the soldier were descending from the north through the pine woods. They had seen no one for days. But now, as they looked out towards the hotter, dryer peaks of the southern range, they could pick out a steady trail of pilgrims, some on donkeys, others on foot, creeping up towards the Holy Mountain. This was not in itself an unusual sight; but the numbers were astonishing. A long caravan, seemingly without end, toiled onwards and was lost to sight around the rising curve of the crag. It was still early in the day.

  ‘Looks like they’ve got visitors.’ James wondered aloud, ‘Do you think they’ve got space for us?’

  Barry stared at the endless trail of veiled women and bare-headed children far below them. Some of the wanderers were old, poor, crippled. Some were being carried on makeshift stretchers. There were wealthy men on fine horses, surrounded by attendants. Bearded priests mingled with the flock. As they came closer they could make out camps and groups of pilgrims, clustered in tiny pockets of woodland or secreted in ravines. Some had lit fires. They saw the pale blue smoke rising in the early light. Others were simply resting before beginning again the long climb upwards in search of holiness. Barry picked out a bishop in full array, surmounted by a parasol, and entire families, calling to each other, accompanied by a Noah’s ark of animals, scuttled over the rocks, up the slithering paths. It was like the last pilgrimage, the medieval dance of death, strung out across the mountains.

  The first person they passed was a ragged herdsman, seated on a rock, surrounded by a dozen goats. Barry addressed him in Greek. The old man gurgled out his reply from a toothless mouth.

  ‘What’d he say?’ demanded James, who, despite three years’ residence on the island, had never learned a word of the language.

  ‘He says there’s been a miracle.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A miracle.’

  ‘What sort of miracle? One worked by God?’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that there were any other kinds of miracle.’

  ‘Dammit, Barry. Explain.’

  ‘An icon of the Virgin is shedding tears for the world on a regular basis.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Barry. All these people can’t be climbing three days’ worth of mountain on the off-chance of seeing a damp piece of painted wood.’

  The herdsman peered into their faces, trying to decipher their words and ascertain whether they were quarrelling.

  Barry smiled faintly and offered the man a few coins.

  ‘Spoken like an Englishman, my dear James. I’m proud of you. But these people have the kind of faith that makes three days’ journey up a precipice a mere step towards heaven.’

  James shrugged. He was not in fact an unbeliever, which would have required an intellectual effort of which he was quite incapable. His God was a decent sort of chap with inexplicable preferences, who did not operate abroad and who certainly never interfered with the world. He should be invoked on the occasion of births, sicknesses, marriages and deaths. Not otherwise. The icons at the House of the Holy Ghost were very famous indeed. The sanctity of the monastery had been preserved for centuries. No woman had ever seen them. All these veiled creatures carrying their sons to be blessed would be left, derelict of benedictions, waiting at the gates. Books had been written about the icons by travellers James had heard of and he had expected to enjoy their beauty and antiquity without being surrounded by a mass of illiterate and smelly peasants, weeping with devotion. He said as much to Barry.

  ‘I don’t expect it will come to that,’ replied Barry ironically, ‘but we shall have to join the flow.’

  Their uniforms guaranteed that the crowd parted before them like the Red Sea, but, to James’s amusement and surprise, Barry was frequently hailed by his regular patients. The doctor was well known, both to the people he had actually treated, and by reputation, among the native populations. His healing skills were, in any case, regarded as little short of miraculous. So it was considered entirely suitable that one miracle worker should pay homage to another and that the doctor had come to call upon the Virgin.

  The monks had not yet opened the church for the evening’s viewing of the miracle when the two dusty soldiers trotted through the gates. Obsequious and sinister, the black figures poured forth a smooth welcoming patter in Greek. Barry nodded, but said very little. James handed his horse to a small boy who was already clutching the bridle with one hand and holding out the other for payment. One of the monks slapped the outstretched hand.

  ‘Let’s take a look at the bloody Virgin,’ James snapped irritably, ‘and then see if they’ve got anything that we can eat, rather than worship.’

  The interior of the church smelt of incense and damp. It was like entering a decorated egg. There was a wooden screen, smothered in icons, which divided the space in half. James stumbled over the clawed feet of a huge lectern, surmounted by a mass of intricate gold turrets on the corners with a huge leather Bible laid out upon it. The scriptures were locked with ornate gold clasps, as if they were a box of jewels, and bound to the lectern by two solid golden chains. Everything was locked, shut or kept behind bars, as if the monastery was perpetually expecting an incursion of raiders from the valleys below. James tweaked the golden chains with his riding whip and they clattered against the wood. One of the monks twittered in Greek. Barry peered at the dusky icons littering every surface. There was one representing the Virgin that was supposedly painted by St Luke himself, and was so holy and efficacious that it had to be covered with a curtain. James bent down to read the text beneath the magic icon, then caught Barry’s s
leeve flirtatiously.

  ‘It says here that St Luke, being a master physician, put all his healing powers into the icon and that it has cured many men of rattling in the body, fits of the evil thing and the bloody flux. I thought only women suffered from the bloody flux. You should prescribe icons, Barry.’

  ‘It says nothing of the sort! You can’t read Greek. And I do prescribe icons. Frequently. They are exceedingly effective with the malades imaginaires.’

  Barry wandered off round the dusty interior of the church with its oppressive blackened pictures leering through braided pearls and coloured stones. He loathed all the paraphernalia of religion, and could not understand why they were tourist attractions. So far as he was concerned, religion transmitted nothing but fear and ignorance, like a contagious disease. The miasma of superstition rising from the smoking icons was palpably visible, smouldering with medieval prejudice and the spectral presence of the Holy Ghost itself. Barry never underestimated the power of religion to heal bodies, arm nations, destroy lives. He simply longed to see it abolished in his lifetime.

  A tiny priest with arthritic, freckled hands stood at the back of the church making fluttering gestures towards the wall of icons, one of which was supposedly weeping with contrition. This was the miracle! James strode over to look, curious to see how it was done. Barry hesitated, peering at the other icons, which rested propped against the walls. Outside he could hear the indignant murmur of the crowd, who had been excluded while the colonial rulers took their time. The locked doors, old wood shot through with nails like the body of St Sebastian, shook slightly with the presence of accumulating bodies.

  Barry stood staring at the icons.

  Some of them were in poor condition. The paint was cracked and flaking, the colours obscured by smoke from the devotional candles. Some were clearly being consumed by woodworm, others buckled with damp. Yet there they had stood for almost a thousand years, a rogues’ gallery of saints and bishops, some of whom he recognised easily: St Catherine clutching a tiny wheel, St Agnes presenting a plate with two breasts, St George, ubiquitous on a geometrical horse, with the dragon indignant beneath his hooves, laid out flat, without any perspective. Some saints had bishops’ mitres. The faces gleamed, contented with power, from behind their ornate, grey, curling beards. Barry’s upper lip curled slightly with contempt.