Sample chapters continued (2)

 Book 1, Chapter 3 – Rupert’s Land

By the time Rupert Carlos went up to Oxford in 1981, he was already a fastidious dresser. It was a symptom of unease rather than vanity – a scruple that had grown from an anxious desire to please his parents when he was a young child. The fact that his father was an English Earl and his mother a Spanish Countess complicated the task. They left much of Rupert’s early upbringing to his nanny, Rose, and it may have been Rose who unwittingly conveyed to Rupert that his parents’ approval was conditional on how he dressed.

“If only your mother and father could see you now,” she would gush when he was neat and tidy or especially “angelic”. She said the same thing, in a disapproving tone, when he was “mucky”. And he noticed that when she groomed him more obsessively than usual and dressed him in his more formal clothes, one of his parents would visit. To his young mind it looked a lot like cause and effect.

His mother’s visits confirmed the magical power of clothes. She might bring him something distinctively Spanish – an Andalucían ranching hat, an embroidered matador jacket or flamenco boots. When he wore them she would melt with emotion and smother him with kisses. The Spanish look, she said, set off his luminous brown eyes and shining black hair better than did the “dull smocks and swaddling clothes” of England.

Even his father seemed to be affected by dress. When Rupert was seven years old his mother gave him his first pony at Christmas. On Boxing Day the Heythrop Hunt assembled with horses and hounds to chase fox at Ardun. It was to be Rupert’s first meet – he was to follow the field at a distance with the other young riders.

Rose had dressed him in a perfect miniature of his family’s ancestral hunting costume – mustard yellow jacket with emerald lapels, black riding cap, cream jodhpurs and highly polished, black riding boots. A groom led him out to pay his respects to the Master of the Hunt. With a rare smile his father nudged his horse alongside Rupert’s pony and led it in a slow circle while the riders blew horns, whooped, hollered and cracked whips in appreciation of this iconic image of father and son. Rupert remembered the moment well. It was the first time since his christening in Seville that his father had publicly acknowledged him.

In August of that same year, when he was eight years of age, Rupert started at Summer Meadows – an exclusive, private preparatory boarding school for boys in Oxford. By then his working assumption was that for every role he was required to play in the drama of his life there was an appropriate costume and it was his duty to wear it well. If a boy dressed exactly right, he would be accepted, respected and even loved.

During the next five years at Summer Meadows he tried to observe the school dress code religiously. The results were inconclusive. He got on well enough with the house-matron and the masters and boys – and Rose remained a constant – but he saw less of his parents than before. As his final year ended, he looked forward to doing better at Eton College, where the relationship between dress, status and approval was made very explicit.

His most vivid memory of his first day at Eton, when he was thirteen years of age, was the excitement of finding his made-to-measure college uniform laid out in his room on arrival – the lightly starched shirt with wing collar and white bow tie, pinstriped trousers, waistcoat, black jacket and tails. The next act of the drama was about to begin. The script had been honed over hundreds of years by generations of his ancestors who had come to Eton for their own rites of passage. For the next five years all he needed to do to win his father’s approval was to speak the ancient lines, observe the ritualised choreography and wear the authentic costume.

“There’s no better preparation,” said his father, when he spoke to him about Eton for the first time on Easter Sunday earlier that year. “Go to Spain if you like, as your mother once suggested, or Switzerland. There are many fine schools to train your mind.” He searched Rupert’s face for a reaction. “But to be English,” he relished the word, “to be English – to learn patriotism, duty and honour – go to Eton.”

The advice was rhetorical. Rupert knew he had no choice in the matter. Soon after he was born, his father had reserved a place for him at Eton. Most of his age-set at Summer Meadows had similar reservations – if not at Eton then at Harrow, Winchester or one of the other elite private schools where Britain’s ruling class was traditionally educated.

***

Before that Easter Sunday, the Earl had never spoken to Rupert about anything important, as father to son. He had left matters of his personal development to the Countess and Rose. Yet on that April evening at Ardun he had come to the central forecourt to greet him. It was obvious that he had something important on his mind.

Extract 2

“Here we are,” he said triumphantly, “here’s our man, right here among the original Adventurers.” He steered Rupert forward by the shoulders to verify his discovery. Then he stood back, contemplating the document with satisfaction. “The King was right. What a Grand Adventure it was for England – and for us, Rupert – the best investment the family ever made.”

He resumed his tour of the library stopping by a polished, oak table on which there were two scale-models of small 17th century sailing ships, each in their own glass display-case. As his eyes lingered over their details, his expression softened.

“Can you hear the sounds, Rupert?”

“Sounds, papa?”

“The sails, don’t you know – cracking and snapping? And the wind,” he cocked his head slightly as though listening. “Can you hear it shrieking through the rigging, whistling and moaning through the cracks?”

Rupert had never seen his father playing let’s pretend, even when he had been drinking whisky. How should he respond? “Yes, papa, I can, I think,” he replied, with an uncertain smile.

“And the timbers – the yaw and creaking, especially at night. The waves crashing on the top deck in heavy seas.” The Earl swayed slightly.

Was it the whisky again, Rupert wondered, or the swell of the imaginary seas?

“Imagine! You’re in the Arctic Straits, Rupert, near Hudson’s Bay. It’s night. You’re below deck shivering in your bunk. What’s that?” His eyes rolled melodramatically and he stretched his arms as though steadying himself between support timbers. “Did you feel that thud? God help us, we’ve been hit by an ice floe! It’s grinding against the hull, trying to rip it open. And what’s that ghostly noise?” He cupped his hand by his ear. “Ah, it’s whales calling to each other!”

He continued to listen for a few seconds entranced by the imaginary sound. Then he straightened himself and adopted a more matter-of-fact tone. “Did you know a wooden ship is like a violin, Rupert? Its beams and posts reverberate to the songs of whales, sometimes for hours on end.”

“Really, papa?”

Rupert tried to imagine what it must be like to be inside a violin when it is reverberating. “It would give me a headache.”

His father seemed pleased to have impressed him. “There were no engines to make noises or vibrations, but there was the crew, God bless them. They were boys really, some not much older than you – urchins from the London docklands. You can imagine the din they made – the banter, the clatter of pans, singing, concertinas, drums and pipes…and the ship’s bells clanging…orders being yelled over the wind…” He appeared to have exhausted his list and for a moment seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation.

“It must have been fun,” said Rupert. He read aloud the names of the two ships. “The Nonsuch and the Eaglet. An eaglet is a young eagle, isn’t it, papa?”

Extract 3

His mother always called him Carlos, when she took him to Spain. She told him it was his proper Christian name because it was Spanish and Catholic. Rupert was nice, too, she said, but it was German and Protestant. It wasn’t that she disliked Germans or Protestants – she claimed to be “comprehensively ecumenical” – but Catholicism was part of the culture of her country and family. Besides, if you were going to be a Christian why not be faithful to the one, true Church founded by Christ?

Rupert quite liked the idea of being Carlos to his mother and Rupert to his father, of being Catholic with her and Anglican with him: it was like having the secret code to each of their constellations. For the same reason he accepted her strict rule that in Spain he was to converse only in Spanish. He had learned his first Spanish words from her and from the age of four had taken tutorials at Ardun and continued at Summer Meadows. The Countess was fluent in English. He knew it had been her second language since she was an infant and she had refined her accent in Geneva, during the war, and at a finishing school in London’s Chelsea, after.

As the aircraft at Heathrow prepared for take-off, Rupert was pleased that the steward addressed him as Señor and spoke in Spanish. Evidently the new clothes were working – his Carlos persona was credible.

From his window seat in the front row, Rupert watched the London suburbs and then the southern counties drop away, and he recalled what his mother had said to his headmaster earlier that day – that to travel from London to Seville in April was to change medium from watercolour to oil. She meant to contrast England’s thin, white sunlight, so often filtered through low, grey clouds, with the golden light of Andalucía’s arching blue skies. As the flight descended over southern Spain, he could see how the contrast also applied to the two landscapes.

Instead of England’s patchwork of dull, green fields and crowded, redbrick towns there were Andalucía’s wide, sweeping plains. Even at a height of two thousand feet he could see crowded crops of yellow sunflowers wrapped in bright green leaves trying to lift their faces to the sky, and clusters of scarlet poppies swaying and dancing in the grass. The orderly rows of olive and orange groves and the apple and cherry orchards in full blossom were part of a patchwork, fertile belt that enclosed villages of shimmering white buildings, huddled beneath mansions and castles whose turrets and spires crowned the pinnacle of hills that stood above the plains like watchtowers.

Later that day, Rupert stood with his mother in the roof garden of her 17th century mansion in a narrow Calle near Calle Penuelas in the centre of Seville taking in the sights and sounds of the city. As the bells from the several convents and churches of the district rang out, the evening light turned from gold to shades of peach and red, softening the architectural excesses of the city’s monumental civic and religious buildings and the sharp edges of its rectangular, commercial shacks and factories.

The ambience of his mother’s house was so different from Ardun’s. It reminded Rupert of the property room he had seen at the Royal Opera House when his mother took him back-stage at Convent Garden after a charity performance of Carmen.

Floors and walls were of coloured marble. Ornate crystal chandeliers from France, Italy and Austria centred the ceilings, and there were a few from Portugal, of painted wood and metal carved in the shape of flowers and fruit. The largest pieces of furniture were Spanish in dark oak, elaborately carved, and passed down through the family from as early as the 16th century. Great urns of lustrous porcelain from Shanghai were grouped with others from Baghdad. Squat, pre-Columbian gold figurines from Peru, Columbia and Mexico sat on tables alongside coloured glass vases from Venice. There were brass-and-silver kettles and water-dispenses from Morocco, and wrought-iron candlesticks from the Basque country and roughly beaten silver chalices from Mexico.

Oil paintings depicted scenes from the Spanish Conquest of the New World, featuring the native Indians. Medieval triptychs and renaissance oils featured Christian martyrs. Ancient Russian icons of the Virgin hung alongside abstracts of women and bulls by Picasso. There was a small sculpture of praying hands by Rodin, sketches of Madrid scenes by Goya, a miniature Henry Moore and busts from archaeological sites of Roman villas in Spain and carvings of the Virgin and Child from the Philippines.

The façade of the house had wooden balconies on the second and third floors. The main door from the street was made of massive wooden beams and planks, with big iron hinges, bolts, studs and handle. Although there was a bell and letterbox, there was neither name nor street number.

The door was set back only two feet from the thoroughfare. It opened inwards unto a square courtyard with a marble floor and an ornate, stone foundation at its centre. Sprays of bright flowers spilled from hanging baskets and from boxes fixed under all the windows that overlooked the courtyard.

On the far side of the yard was an arched exit that led to a rear garden protected by a high outer wall and an inner, ornamental enclosure of Moorish arches. The garden was full of sweet smelling herbs and roses, and trees bearing oranges, figs, nuts and dates. Six plump, white doves fluttered sporadically between a dovecote set on a high pole, a variety of palm trees and a water basin covered in blue Moorish ceramics and fed by a small fountain.

On the flat roof of the four-storey house was another small garden that could be covered by tarpaulin awnings in the summer. The roof garden was an extension of a large sitting room that also served as the anteroom to the Countess’s bedroom.

***

In Rupert’s mind, Easter and Seville were inseparable. He had been baptised in the Cathedral of Santa María de la Sede on Easter Sunday in 1963 and had returned to celebrate at Easter every year since he was born. In his early years, Easter was also the time his mother would take him to her ancestral hacienda towards Cordoba. There was good company there. He played football with the children of the workers on his mother’s estate and from the local village school. They wore the colours of Sevilla, Barcelona or Real Madrid, and when they weren’t playing football they practised the rituals and movements of the bullfight. At other times, he and his mother would ride together – he on his chestnut pony and she on her black Andalucían thoroughbred – through groves of cork trees and fields of wild flowers, up to the cool, higher slopes of the hills. He was sorry that his mother had stopped going to the hacienda in the last two years, except on occasional weekends. She stayed in Seville most of the time to be near her doctors.

Extract 4 

“How do you learn to be a natural priest, mama?”

“Ah, now you’re asking the question I asked, Carlos. That’s what I set out to discover – what techniques…what power switches can one use to focus and direct energy?”

“Yes,” said Rupert, as though agreeing that was the question.

“A power switch might be a form of words, like a spell or a prayer, or a song…it might be a dance. It could be a sacrifice, or a good deed, or a dream, a ritual or just a focussed thought. Usually, if a natural priest wants to switch on the power he or she would go to a special sacred location…a mountaintop, a riverbank, a tree, a rock formation, or a ring of stones. Then they might use an object to help focus their minds and emotions to channel the power. That’s what a sacred object is, actually – it’s a power switch. The crucifix is a power switch, too.”

Rupert waited to see if she would continue. He could see how much it meant to her. Her eyes were burning bright.

“Did you find any power switches, mama?”

She nodded slowly. “Yes I did, Carlos.” In the tone of a person revealing a confidence, she said: “I looked everywhere for holy people who might be natural priests. Some were in the Church, but many were not. Some were tribal shamans and medicine men – or spiritual people of other religions. They all had their holy places and sacred objects. In most cases, their power switches had been passed on to them from other natural priests. It didn’t matter that they could not explain how they worked – it was enough that they did.”

She rose, wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and led Rupert to her bedroom. It was spacious. In a corner was an octagonal table made from a mosaic of purple heart, green heart and other hard woods from the Venezuelan rain forests, lacquered to simulate a high polish.

“These are a few of my power switches.” She pointed out some of them – a large crystal from Mexico in the shape of a human skull; finger cymbals from Tibet; a miniature pyramid carved in ivory and engraved with hieroglyphics; a piece of amber from the Baltic which had formed naturally into the shape of a mother and child; a Moorish prayer mat; a statue of Buddha; a conch used by Siberian shamans to call the spirits; the sacred bundle of a Sioux Medicine Man. There were pebbles and rocks from different countries, tubular roots from the Australian desert, and from Oxfordshire a chip of weathered limestone that had broken off one of the large megalithic standing stones at Rollright. Rupert had dug the chip from the ground the first time he visited the site with his mother.

Want to Read More?

Go to Chapter 4 – The Acorn Project

Go to Chapter 5 – The Foxhunt