Isis - Douglas Clegg [8]
2
In summer, I had no fear of the Tombs.
In winter, I grew sad watching it from the upstairs windows, for it made me think of death, as did the storms and my mother’s sorrows.
On rainy days, I explored my grandfather’s immense and musty library, with its volumes of strange and wonderful books. It had no windows at all, so I could forget the gray wintry world outside. Its ceiling looked like elegant chocolates from a London confectionery, and it had bookcases so high that I had to climb ladders to see it all. I crept over to the hearth rug with several books and lay there in front of the huge stone fireplace to begin my escape from Belerion Hall through the pages of novels and histories.
3
I worked my way through the Latin texts and through many of the classics that I could find. Other treasures were also buried here, including love letters my grandfather wrote my grandmother when they were both young, and drawings that my father had made as a boy in the margins of primers that had been saved.
My grandfather had kept a small pile of nude photographs of women, tucked behind an oversized 1835 edition of the Bible with a dark snakeskin cover. I sifted through these pictures, marveling at this secret wickedness of the Gray Minister. I looked upon these figures as if they would teach me what being a woman was within the world of men. I made up names for each of the girls—Biblical names like Delilah and Rahab and Ruth and Naomi and Jezebel, of course. I did not see them as lascivious in the least, for they seemed as my mother and I had in our pageant—works of art posed by a photographer who gave them flowers in their hair, or a tasteful hand drawn over their private parts.
Even Jezebel, the naughtiest of them, had a garland of daisies across her small belly, and though her head was cocked back slightly and her legs parted, she seemed to be contemplating eternity as she lay there. I knew this was a gentlemen’s collection, but there was something pristine about these women, who, as nudes, could have been statues in great museums.
I located the page in the Bible where each woman was mentioned and pressed the corresponding picture of the nude into that page. I drew Harvey to the library to show him the pictures. He acted shocked at seeing them, and told me they were not meant for delicate young ladies. But I showed him Rahab and Delilah and asked him, “Do you think she is lovely?”
He blushed and shook his head. “No, not at all. Not lovely at all. Put those away, Iris. We really should burn them.”
As I wandered deeper into my grandfather’s library—for behind every book was another, and behind every bookcase, another could be drawn out if the latch were located—I also found books of a very different nature.
My grandfather’s old library still contained his books on the occult, for though he beat the Good Book with one fist, he studied demonology in order to learn the names of the devils he wished to cast out of the world. I spent many hours, unnoticed by even my governess, in the old mahogany-lined library and delighted in the wicked books. I read grimoires and the medieval texts as I learned Latin in the morning and the tales of witch-finders and demon-raisers before tea.
I shared this with Harvey, who was—at first—aghast at my grandfather’s extensive occult collection, but soon joined me in delight as we began writing secret notes to each other, left around the house, in some ancient coded language supposedly created by the Chaldean Demon-Raisers or the Medieval Witch Alphabet. Harvey left little jokes for me that I then had to translate from the strange symbols of the codes, and I left brief notes of “Spence on warpath” or “The Gray Minister knows your sins” under his tea saucer, or folded neatly into one of his favorite magazines.
4
One night, after supper, I began crying for no reason that I knew. Harvey took me for a walk along the stone-hedges of the sunken gardens