Recovered from: “Fugitive Memoirs Volume I”
Longing for times past is hardly a novel sentiment, and it isn’t hard to agree with those who count reminiscing as a base form of discourse. Still, with so much time on my hands it is often difficult to avoid a bit of nostalgic reflection. Many of my memories are distasteful, even tending to revulsion in places, but somehow when it comes to the estate, the only associations I can pull from the fog of time are positive.
Over several generations the borders of the estate were carved out of, and expanded into, the interfaces between a fertile valley to the Southwest, rugged forest in the centre, and the foothills to the North. As a consequence my family’s central land holdings were comprised of over two thousand hectares containing a remarkably diverse set of terrain, flora, fauna, a number of ruins of old fortifications or buildings, two crumbling old chapels, the dark marble edifices that made up the family mausoleum, and even hot springs in the valley to the South.
The more recent renovations and modernisations–for an estate of this sort must be attended to regularly with sometimes bracing expenditures lest it fall into decay and, eventually, ruin–had been made during the early years of World War II, and then again with the onset of the Cold War. These efforts had been overseen by my grandfather, a keen student of strategy, logistics, and international affairs.
My father, my grandfather’s first born, arrived not long after the surrender of France to the Nazis. The wartime birth of his male heir and the advice and counsel of my great-randfather–a teenager when the Armistice of 1918 was signed–instilled in my grandfather a healthy distrust of the stability of civilisation and no faith at all in “civilised men.” My father’s attitudes were little different.
What in others would seem like raving paranoia was to the two of them merely good sense. As a result, the estate was diligently but quietly imbued with the ability to ride out even the longest bouts of isolation or civil unrest. The stores of emergency canned goods, water, ration kits, and batteries were complimented by diesel generators in the basement and an impressive bomb shelter. The bomb shelter was eventually converted to a much more modern “fallout shelter”–all the rage during the Cold War–with sleeping space for twenty and a sophisticated air filtration system.
Self-sufficiency and independence were not just individual traits to my father and my grandfather, they were attributes expected of their lands and homes as well. Owing to their prominence, many of these attitudes and principles rubbed off on me in my formative years, but I do not mean to suggest that I grew up inside a fortress full of harsh edges or the dark metal and concrete of wartime bunkers, quite the contrary.
Long before I was born the manor was already surrounded by Italian gardens. These were the inspired addition of my great-grandmother, who, lacking any other purpose in life once she had produced the required male heirs, devoted herself furiously to the beautification of both the lands and the structures on them for as long as she lived.
Much as my father followed my grandfather’s lead in modernisation, my mother followed my grandmother’s example in beautification and with even greater ambition sculpted a landscaping tour de force featuring fountains burbling softly into man-made streams and intricate Koi ponds, two sculpture gardens, and dozens of paths winding through it all, bordered everywhere by a dizzying array of flora and colours. When I was older she even commissioned a small but frighteningly intricate hedge maze with walls three metres tall. By itself it required a nearly full-time landscaper to maintain. Quite obviously my mother rarely watched films for I should shudder to think that she would have built such a thing if she had ever seen The Shining. Even if it didn’t intimidate her, certainly I would never be caught alone in the maze when my brothers were about.
The far side of the gardens were something of my mother’s private sanctuary, but one which she grudgingly deigned to permit others to sample now and again, even if only to bask in the glowing praise her curation universally elicited.
One season in the period when Professor Lechner was responsible for my education, for four solid months a flurry of educators descended on the estate and saturated me with lessons and study plans. Towards the end, I was chided for completing an assignment to describe some of the fauna on the Estate by writing of the “dip and delight of hummingbirds’ flight.”
“There are no hummingbirds in Europe,” I was reliably informed. I insisted earnestly and repeatedly that I had seen them, much to the growing irritation of my instructor. Distressed at being accused of lying about the birds, I let the matter escalate until I was made to write “I will not tell lies to my instructors” until the sun was low in the sky and my fingers ached. Years later I learned that my mother had imported several hummingbirds and had, in fact, created one of the only self-sustaining hummingbird charms on the continent, though they finally died off one particularly harsh winter many years later.
While the gardens may have been her signature creation, my mother’s touch was everywhere on the estate. She sought even to brighten the dolorous environs of the fallout shelter, which, after a clandestine redecorating operation concealed from my grandfather with great skill, meant that the survival supplies were supplemented with a small wine collection and the interior adorned with tasteful paintings, sculpture, a wide shelf of English–and even some French–literature, and even fake windows with perpetually closed drapes.
“Against the possibility that the infernal thing might actually have to be used, rather than serve as a merely ornamental and self-congratulatory monument to your grandfather’s preparedness,” my Mother had said–quite defensively I felt–of her efforts when I asked her about the paintings.
Spring and summer were glorious, but in a way I always felt was cliche. In October, thick, fantasy-inducing fogs that threatened to cut the already isolated grounds of the Estate off completely from the outside world would close in and bathe the facade of the manor in an impenetrable, grey miasma.
By day the jutting architecture would stand silhouetted in the midst of earth-bound cloud like some sort of secret fortress hidden from unworthy eyes by powerful forces bent on keeping my father’s many secrets. By night the estate was transformed into something even more dramatic; a beacon of yellow and white light beaming rays into the cold and enduring mists–mists that often persisted well into the next morning.
So thick was the milky-grey plasma in those fall months that only rarely did the sun emerge victorious in its daily battle against the vapour. Even when it did, the fog gods were unrelenting, and on those rare days when the winds had contrary intentions and blew ever the wrong way and downhill, wisps of torn cloud pulled from their bases by the ridges upwind from the manor would part now and again around the structures of the estate.
If you had the courage to climb up among the spires it seemed almost as if you could reach out and–if you stood on your tip-toes and reached high enough–just touch the bases of the clouds of fog. Then you could watch them as they glided along, hugging the slope while they boiled and rolled downhill across the grounds before drifting down, now disrupted, disintegrating, and melting away as you looked on.
Nestled among the battlements and the crows nests in the upper spires, huddling under two or three quilts, I would spend hours imagining these puffs as living creatures. Big, gentle organisms trying to escape the estate and reach the calm safety of the valley below without first dissolving. There, sheltered from the wind, an opaque, still layer of fog pooled like some great white sea watched over from–but untouched by–the commanding heights of our grounds above.
When I was younger, and, in fact, even as I approached adolescence, I often looked forward to those months on the estate and employed every artifice and ruse to find myself unattended after dark so that I could walk through the mists, feel the cold prickle of the dew on my closed eyelids, and dream that I was a character in one of my favourite books. I would imagine I was lost in the fogs of a foreign land and desperately searching for a patch of sun so that I might find a recognisable landmark and recover my way. Or, perhaps, that I was banished to a prison of fog for eternity, immortal, but gripped by steely pangs of loneliness. That I should aspire to the environment that evoked these feelings seems quite alien now, but in those years, isolated as I was on the estate, it never occurred to me that there might be happiness in some form that would suit me. I was, after all, a deeply solitary creature.
My head filled with the giddy gloom of such fantasies I would wander the grounds, seek out the tree into which, as a much younger girl, I had carved my initials backwards in a bored and not particularly convincing effort to cast a spell of protection on myself. Or perhaps I would try to remember the many trails I had navigated on horseback so many summers before.
It is often remarked of the very wealthy that they live in a bubble; isolated from the reality of the outside world and, thus, develop strange, even delusional notions as their solitary confinement festers. Not that it was possible to reasonably consider the estate small, but in the way that everything seems larger than life when you are young, for years I had the impression that the grounds constituted the whole of the universe, a cosmic system which I could wander at will.
It seemed inconsequential then that I had been so isolated for so many of my early, formative years. The estate was a world unto itself and I would dart about the grounds alone for hours in the fog until, as the chill finally began to nag at my ears and my fingers, I would return like a comet from a widely elliptical orbit to what eventually became the gravitational centre of my life at home: our library.
I heard it said once that an estate of such stature is a living, breathing thing, and if this is so then the heart and lungs of my family’s holdings were most obviously the Grand Dining Hall, and the library. It was in the former that the more astute wives of the patriarchs of our dynasty guided its intercourse with the world and held grand fetes to entertain the ambassadors and diplomats of other great families, and in the latter that the patriarchs crafted and executed their plans and stratagems to preserve or, indeed, expand the influence of our house.
It was simply understood, or so I was once told, that the women of my family found their interests–even their occupations–within the confines of the Grand Dining Hall, the salons, and the gardens; and the men in the library. It is as perhaps as good an introduction to me as any to say that I rebelled against this convention immediately and permanently.