In Greville’s hand
The Ceiling
F-M has asked me to set down what we know about the library ceiling, on the grounds that I am the one who went through the freight accounts and he is the one who would otherwise have to hear about them. What follows is everything the papers will support. I have marked where they stop.
The ceiling is Spanish. It came from a Hieronymite house in the hills above Córdoba, the name of which the invoice spells three different ways, so I give none. The community was dissolved under the Liberal government in 1821 and the house was sold off, and Sir Philip Voss bought the vault of its church, the whole vault, for a figure the account books describe only as “a sum concluded privately.” Where the papers stop, I suspect, is where he intended them to.
It was taken down rib by rib and boss by boss, each stone numbered in red lead, and shipped from Cádiz in the autumn of 1823 in two hundred and sixty crates. The freight account is particular about the number, if about little else. It was put up in Hampshire the following winter by a Spanish mason and four English ones who did not, the household accounts suggest, get on.
The staircase is another matter. The freight account lists it as a single item, “one stair, in its entirety,” crate two hundred and sixty-one, and beside it is a note in a different hand, evidently the mason’s: Do not take it apart. It has been tried. It left the church whole, on a wagon built for the purpose, and it went into the library whole, and the library wing was raised around it rather than the other way about.
As to who made it, the monastery’s records credit a wandering carpenter who appeared, built it, and left before anyone thought to pay him. Visitors tell this as if it were rare. I have now found the same carpenter in a mission chapel at Santa Fé and in two of the family’s letters about houses that no longer stand, and I have come to think he is not a man at all but a kind of apology: what is said when no one remembers who did the work, and the work is better than anyone can account for. I have not said this to F-M, who prefers the carpenter.
I should add something that is not in the papers. The staircase is now closed to use, by a little brass chain and a card in Lady Margaret’s hand that reads Please refrain from using, on the reasonable ground that it is old and must therefore be fragile. In the interest of research, on a wet afternoon when the library was empty, I stepped over the chain. I went up slowly, one hand on the rail, listening for the sound a fragile thing makes, and I reached the top, and I came down again. It was as solid as any staircase in the house, and a good deal more solid than the one to my own room.
I admired it the entire way. The treads are let into one another with a joint I could not name, so close that I could not have slipped a visiting card between them, and the whole climbs like a single piece of oak that has made up its mind to turn. There is nothing under it and nothing holding it, and it behaves as though it knows where it is going. I came down convinced that the carpenter, wandering or not, was the finest joiner I shall ever stand on. I have told no one, and I would be obliged if this page were not read aloud.
G.