Les Noyades

2: The City of Dreadful Night

Rumi was admitted to Errol House by the back entrance. His presence had become commonplace; the Culshawes, diminished as they were, had learned to either leave the key beneath a shrub or wait up and allow him in at a certain time. This evening he was warded in by Culshawe's elderly aunt, Pinnie. She was always kind to Rumi; he supposed she was happy to have a visitor to the house under such innocent intentions.

"Will you be wanting tea?" she asked as she escorted him down the grand hall.

"If that's alright," he replied politely. It had taken several months to drum up the courage to accept any such offer— until then he had declined even through the rumbling of his stomach.

Pinnie and Ernest Culshawe were convinced that Rumi was being neglected and had twice threatened to take it up with his father, however Rumi had begged them to relent; he did not want his father to know of the time he spent at Errol. Declan might start to feel that he was inferior in some way and Rumi could not bear to offend his father when he had enough on his mind.

"You look scrawnier than ever," Pinnie told him tonight, just as she always did. She took his arm in her hand and wrapped her fingers around his wrist. "You can come for lunch too."

Rumi hated when she said this— it made his visits feel like a charity case, which in reality they were, but in a very different way. Pinnie headed off for the kitchens and Rumi began to climb the stairs, wondering whom he might meet on the way, as he always did meet somebody.

This evening it was one of the tall, burly young men he often saw slipping down the street early in the morning. Rumi had always pegged this one as a rugby player, or perhaps cricket. The sportsman was tripping down the stairs looking in awe at the impressive marble carvings. He could not see the cobwebs building up under the eaves, nor would he notice the dust gathering on the carpets.

The sportsman did not smile as Rumi walked past him. He was still mistaken into being ashamed; a few more return visits to this house and he would forget all about the word 'shame'. It simply wasn't possible under the influence of Culshawe.

"Good evening," Rumi said obediently as they passed each other. "Is he in the Foyle Suite?"

"How should I know?" the sportsman snapped brusquely, barging impolitely past and slipping out the back entrance.

Rumi smiled and waved to him, aware that the gesture would go unnoticed, and entirely pleased with himself all the same. He took the stairs two at a time now and pattered down the landing towards the Grand Library. To have a library on the second floor was odd, but of course there was nothing conventional about Culshawe; the man was about as conventional as a purple lemon.

The panelled doors were as heavy as ever and he leaned his full weight against them, throwing them open to reveal the spiring shelves of literature; politics, philosophy, classics, poetry, novel upon novel organised into military regimes of genre. He breathed a fill of the damp, musty air and expelled it in a contented sigh.

His book was still where he had left it the last time. It was a dated copy of E.M. Forster's Maurice, and he was a good halfway through and enjoying it immensely. That it was set partially in the very university where he lived and his father lectured provided him with an immense notion of security— how could he be so wrong, after all, if it had been happening there for years? And the Greeks, too. And the Romans. Julius Caesar, Culshawe said. Caesar and DaVinci and Wilde and Byron and Sackville-West and all the others. He was in amongst friends and compatriots here; fellow people of the same ilk, born of the same blood, and forged of the same iron, and immersed in the same immoralities.

He removed the bookmark from amidst the pages and slid a finger down the spine to open up the book, and promptly settled himself in one of the large leather chairs to begin reading. His feet tucked beneath him, and his head against the high sides, he felt held close to the chair as if in the arms of some maternal energy. The words washed over him like a warm tide and already he began to feel the gentle pull of sleep, fraying his thoughts and enticing him into closing his eyes and curling up tighter. He blinked hard to dispel the sleepiness that came so suddenly over him but there was little he could do to battle it back. He would fall asleep whether or not he desired to do so. Culshawe would wake him to send him home at some point— and if not, Declan hardly noticed his son's comings and goings, thus nothing would be amiss if he were to not return for one night. He doubted that his father had any idea of what tales abounded of this place; Declan was remarkably impervious to these stories.