The Lightning Cage Read Online Free

started to read, but warily, taking care to suppress any mention of the moon in the text in case he should find himself destined once more for the star-machine. Parker could make neither head nor tail of any of it, and nor could Pelham fathom this sudden aggressive beneficence, from a man whom he barely recognised and who had not initially recognised him at all. When Parker reckoned that he had enough information to make a good impression, he explained to Pelham that he was to be transferred to the care of Lord Chilford, who had a particular interest in his welfare. Parker described the location of Chilford’s villa.
    â€˜An asylum by the river then,’ Pelham said, almost smiling.
    â€˜Yes. You would like that, Richard, wouldn’t you?’
    The villa had been completed only two years before. It was in the neo-Palladian style, which had already been made popular at Chiswick House, Marble Hill and, in a more modest way, with Alexander Pope’s own home. Lord Chilford had as a young man been sent off on his grand tour, and had sketched antiquities in Rome, along with the façades of Renaissance palaces. He had marvelled at churches and cathedrals in towns the length and breadth of Italy. But when he arrived at Vicenza, something changed. With his first sight of the Villa Rotunda, as he wrote excitedly in his journal, ‘Classical antiquity ceased to be a curiosity in a dusty cellar, and became the purest spirit of beauty and proportion translated into the present. I resolved that upon my return to England I would create something in the style of that unparalleled genius, Palladio.’ Chilford Villa was the result.
    Parker took Pelham to Twickenham in his own carriage. Lord Chilford’s letter to Blount describes the scene.
    I had no real idea what to expect in terms of the physical appearance of Pelham, except that by prejudice and assumption we expect a man of great gifts or even great torment to bear some physical sign of distinction too. The slight and dishevelled figure who climbed down from the coach alongside Parker I at first assumed to be a manservant. It was only when he was introduced to me that I realised I was beholding our poet. A little more than five and a half feet in height with a sallow face, a small nose, a slow-moving, slightly feminine mouth, but the eyes are extraordinary. They have about them a haunted intensity unlike anything I have ever before seen. There is also a scar across his forehead, quite severe, of which I made a note to enquire further regarding the causes. The man stared at me, but said nothing. He had if anything the look of something which has learnt over the years the manner of being hunted. Also his hands are extraordinarily slim and expressive – indeed they have an eloquence entirely their own, and sometimes when Pelham himself remains silent, it is as though the wordless shapings of his fingers would speak for him. I showed him the whole house, but he said nothing. It was as though his spirit sank with each fresh room we encountered. This is probably connected with his condition, as I hope to establish over the next months.
    That evening, newly settled in his quarters on the rustic level, Pelham wrote the following lines:
    A Goth made furious by Rome’s luxury
    Smash’t a household god and freed a spirit
    It had once inshrin’d …
    It took him a week to understand that he had the free run of the house and grounds; that he could come and go as he pleased; that he had access at all times to Chilford’s library. This represented an extraordinary change after his previous confinement. It is hard to establish now what terrified him the more: the unimpeachable geometric perfection of the villa, or the hybrid garden statuary, like the black basalt sphinx, which Chilford had gathered on his travels. And then the following week Lord Chilford began the first of his experimental treatments using tincture of