Free This New and Poisonous Air by Adam McOmber Page B

olive branch, and Pieter portrayed a lesser deity, Anteros, who stood for requited love, the sort that is fulfilling and good and does not lead to a life of longing. There were, as well, actual knights taking part in the allegory, mostly lower-class men, all vying for the prized armor and a few words with the Duchess.
    Pieter as Anteros wore sleeves of crow feathers and painted his torso with lead and vinegar so he shone brightly in the sun. When Sir Stephen saw the young man for the first time, he stopped his fight and stood frozen, the chambers of his heart flooding with icy water as if a winter dam had burst. He thought something had gone awry at the Duchess’s allegory and in fact a truth had risen from her artifice. Was it possible that, as in ancient times, a god was paying visit to the world of men? “Wait there,” he managed to say to Pieter over the noise of the brawl. “Come tell me your name.”
    Startled because knights were not permitted to talk to the actors at the allegory, as such distraction would pierce the Duchess’s carefully planned illusion, Pieter ran off across the battlefield to gather with the other lesser gods. And for the rest of the tournament, Sir Stephen searched
for the young man—a pagan flower blooming on the icy banks of his humble Christian heart.
    But I think it was not this passage that Lord Weymouth chose to read that night. It would have been too obvious, perhaps, after our own meeting at the museum. “Wait there…come tell me who you are,” was the command hanging in the air whether we heard Sir Stephen speak it or not. Lord Weymouth gauged my reaction to his story, glancing up from the page from time to time. He may have read a passage closer to the end of Sir Stephen’s life. After Pieter had been killed at the Battle of Novara where Sir Stephen had been attempting to make a name for himself, the knight retreated in despair and burrowed alone in the tower of a flooded castle near a lake in Glastonbury, writing lines of poetry to his lost squire. Lord Weymouth read with deep compassion: “I could not keep myself from your hair—pulling at it and twisting it to make tendrils of flame. My hands ache for you. The centers of my palms. Fine straight nose, cleft of chin, tiny ears tucked close to the head. Where has all this glamour gone? The forehead has broken, hair turned gray and lashes come off. The eyes themselves are tarnished mirror glass, and who am I but a man of vanity left to sit and look? ”
    The Burning Armor was laid out on Sir Stephen’s table like a permanent funeral or a feast, never to be eaten. There was a hole in the suit of armor’s side, still ringed with Pieter’s own blood. The young man had been wearing the plating when he died at Novara, running ahead foolishly as if at sport. He and Sir Stephen were boys playing at war, and even when Pieter fell on an idle spear, driving the head through the weak metal, he looked at it with surprise, as if he could brush the shaft away and go on. Sir Stephen stripped off his own gloves and held Pieter’s
head. “The Burning Armor,” Pieter whispered, grimacing at the pain, “how could it not save me?”
    Without money or honor, Sir Stephen retired. Peasants from Glastonbury threw stones at his turret. He prayed for a danse macabre —for Pieter to pull himself from his grave all in silver and wings of black as he’d been on the day of their first meeting. He wished the squire would drag him to the underworld by the hair, asking why Sir Stephen had allowed such a death, begging with a throat full of dirt to know what sort of knight allowed his good helpmate to be erased, swept off into the circling ether? Weren’t they supposed to be printed together in the histories?
    My first evening at Longleat ended in drunkenness from the ever full cup of brandy, and I fell asleep in my chair by the fire, somehow already unafraid of Lord Weymouth. When the embers in the hearth had gone white, Mrs. Philips came to cover me