THE MURMURED JOKE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by the Long Gallery.

A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's Edition collection.

We are forty-odd portraits in the long, gloomy Gallery of Castle Bastable, and I will be honest with you, as the dead can afford to be: we are not good people. We lie. We contradict one another out of spite. We have spent whole centuries in a feud over whose frame catches the better light. I am Lord Grimmble the Third, dead since 1642, and in all that time the most useful thing I have witnessed this family do is leave.

But once a day — more, if a fresh face wanders in looking lost — we do the one decent thing we have left. We tell the Joke.

You must understand that no one of us can tell it. That is the whole point. It is far too precious to trust to a single mouth — and besides, we have learned the trick of it: a thing said in pieces cannot be pinned on anyone, and the chapel takes a very dim view of anyone caught manhandling the hymns. So it goes like this. Mad Earl Peregrine, three frames to my left, opens with the line as the hymnal has it — the grand one, the one every soul in the castle has droned a thousand Sundays running: "Our somewhat disinterested Lord, who watches over us as—" Then I supply the pause. I am very good at the pause; I have had centuries. And then, from behind the canvas at the dark end of the row, where the Nameless Regent hangs with her face long rotted off, a voice finishes it the way he always finished it — with the little words swapped smartly about at the front, so that our watchful loving shepherd arrives, every single time, as "a shoving leopard."

And Lady Agatha the Unforgiving turns the exact colour of a tax demand — she considers it blasphemy, and has considered it blasphemy daily since 1701 — and the whole rotten vine of us titters like a blocked drain, and somewhere a real leopard is presumably very offended, and the Lord Himself, being disinterested, has never once looked up.

The grown ones who hear it groan, every time, and pretend they were looking at the ceiling. The children who hear it laugh until they hiccup, decide we are senile, and run off to shove each other into the moat shouting "MIND THE LEOPARD." Both reactions are correct. That is the genius of the thing, and the genius was not ours.

It was his.

At the far end of the gallery, badly lit, in a frame too small and too cheap for the company it keeps, there hangs a man in faded motley. He is not a lord. He is not even a Bastable. He was the gallery jester — the one soul in six hundred years of this family who was ever funny on purpose, and who is therefore, naturally, hung in the worst spot, where the damp gets in.

The Joke was his. All of them were his. He could take any line this dreary house held sacred and swap its little sounds about until the sacred thing fell over — tons of soil for the sons of toil, a shoving leopard for the loving shepherd — and he spent a short, cold, brilliant life making this miserable family laugh at itself, which is the hardest magic there is. He was halfway through that very garble — the hymn, the pause, the swap — on the night he died, mid-breath, mid-grin, the way the truly unlucky go.

And here is the thing the family does not know, and would not care for if they did. His portrait never finished it. Look at him: his painted mouth is open on the setup and has stayed open for two hundred years, because he never reached the swap, and something in this house does not permit a thing to reach its end. The candle of him will not quite gutter out. The leopard will not quite arrive.

So we finish it for him.

Not because it is funny — it stopped being funny the night he stopped. We finish it because it is the last of him there is: one daft, perfect, upside-down little line, and forty bad people keeping it lit between us, passing the pieces hand to hand down the dark of the gallery so that no single draught can blow it out. When a new face wanders in, we do not perform it to show off. We perform it because performing it is the only way he is still, in any sense that matters, in the room.

You will not catch us being tender about anything else. We are portraits; we are awful; we will mock your shoes and your lineage before you reach the door. But the joke we will keep. We will keep it badly, and forever, and with the whole of whatever the dead have instead of hearts.

The daftest thing in the house can still be the tenderest — if it is all you have left of someone.