The Emperor of All Things - By Paul Witcover Page 0,87

at the sumptuousness of the furnishings and other appointments; he had never seen their like, not even in the guild hall. Everywhere was colour and the shine of metal in candlelight; he felt like a savage stumbled into the midst of a civilization he could only marvel at without understanding. There were some objects here he had no name for and whose purpose was as far beyond his grasp as the moon, though their beauty was equally evident. Even the many things he did recognize – the oil paintings and tapestries on the walls, the gold-embroidered curtains hanging before the tall windows, the trompe l’oeil scene of receding clouds and cherubs upon the ceiling, the silk-upholstered chairs and settees, the great four-poster bed – seemed different from similar items in his experience not just in quality but in essence, as if he had entered a realm of Platonic ideals.

After descending through the trap door in the rooftop, he had found himself in a different part of the house entirely from the attic workshop that had been his destination two nights ago. This confused him, but he kept his questions to himself, trying to take everything in as the two servants Lord Wichcote had assigned to him bustled him down a set of stairs, along a sequence of branching corridors and thus into the rooms that, he was told, had been prepared for him; though whether that meant Lord Wichcote had always planned to bring him here, the men would not say.

He could hear them now, moving about behind the flimsy Chinese screen that did not confer privacy so much as the illusion of it. The unfolded panels depicted a vertiginous, mist-shrouded mountain landscape whose gentle colours and sinuous lines appeared drawn from dream rather than nature. It seemed to Quare, made drowsy by the scented waters of the bath, from which tendrils of steam rose like extrusions from the painting itself, that he might, by some small effort of will, drift across whatever boundary separated this world from that one, and thus make his escape. He closed his eyes and imagined himself standing upon those lofty crags, gazing into the fog-patched depths of a strange country.

But though the illusion was a pleasant one, he could not long sustain it; the noise of the servants as they arranged things in the room, and the gradual cooling of the water, kept Quare from entering fully into the peaceful reverie that lay almost but not quite within reach. At last, after he heard the servants leave the room, he rose from the bath. A towel had been laid on a nearby table; he took it and rubbed himself dry, in the process returning welcome heat to his body. He could see from the state of his bandages that his wounds had not started bleeding again.

Wrapped in the towel, he stepped from behind the screen. A fire blazed in the hearth, and fresh clothes had been laid out for him on the four-poster bed; of his old clothes, including Mr Puddinge’s mangy second-best coat, there was no sign. There were a number of clocks in the room – what he had seen so far of the house suggested a quantity and variety of timepieces that rivalled the collection of the guild hall. However, no two were in agreement; each kept its own time, and Quare felt a strange disorientation as he crossed to the bed, as if he were traversing a score of tiny intersecting universes in which different measures of time held sway. Parts of his body seemed to be surging ahead or falling behind; more than once on that epic journey of a dozen feet or so he had to pause and catch his breath, wait for his head to clear. He had intended to dress himself and go to demand answers of Lord Wichcote, but when he reached the bed, he fell into it, and was at once deeply asleep.

Quare woke with a start, shivering atop the bed. The candles in the room had burned low, and the fire was a feeble flickering. His thoughts were thick and muddled, as after a night of drinking. Yet he had not had a drop … which led him to wonder if he had been drugged somehow. His deep and dreamless sleep had not been a natural one, or so it seemed to him now. And how long had he slept? The clocks in the room gave no answer, or, rather, too many answers,