The Poisoned Crown: The Sangreal Trilogy Three

TWO Terror Firma

For a place where a murderer had lived, Riverside House seemed to Annie, as ever, curiously lacking in atmosphere. The round towers which had formerly been oast houses were joined by a two-storey building with all mod cons, currently littered with boxes – boxes sealed or opened, half unpacked or collapsed into folds for re-use – and assorted furniture, often in the wrong place. There was a sofa in the kitchen and a double bed in the living room. Daubs of paint on the walls indicated experimentation with future colour schemes. Much of the kitchen had turned lemon yellow, decorated with random stencils of art nouveau vegetables. The Rayburns were bringing their own atmosphere, Annie thought, but there was nothing underneath. Several murders and the residence of a dark enchantress had left little impression.

‘Have a seat,’ said Ursula Rayburn. ‘No – not there! Sorry. That’s Gawain’s school project.’ She picked up a fragile construction that seemed to consist mostly of paper, feathers and glue. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? I think it’s meant to be a phoenix.’

‘I’m sure it’s just like one,’ Annie said obligingly.

‘Those pink fluffy bits look awfully like Liberty’s feather boa. She was wondering where it had got to. Oh well, it’s such a tiny sacrifice for her to make for her brother’s artistic development. All my children are so creative.’ She sighed happily. ‘Except Michael, but he’s a sort of mathematical genius, so that’s all right … I hear Nathan’s frightfully brilliant too?’

‘He does okay,’ Annie said, feeling uncomfortable. She had no desire to boast of Nathan’s genius or creativity. All she wanted was for him to be as normal as possible – and under the circumstances, that was difficult enough.

‘Did you get hold of a plumber?’ she went on, changing the subject.

‘Oh yes,’ Ursula said. ‘Some firm in Crowford – but he said he couldn’t find anything wrong, and I said, there’s got to be. We keep finding water on the floor. So he said, maybe the roof leaks – it has rained a lot lately – but I said, then it would be on the top floor, and it isn’t, it’s downstairs. Anyway, he thinks it could be sort of funnelled down somehow, but I don’t believe it. I haven’t found any damp patches on the walls or ceiling.’

Annie asked, a little hesitantly: ‘Could I see where—?’ She expected Ursula to find her curiosity bizarre, but her hostess clearly thought she was just trying to be helpful.

‘Of course you can.’ She led Annie through into the ground floor room in one of the towers, which had once been a study. ‘This is going to be a sitting room,’ she explained. ‘I love the shape. At the moment, Romany’s sleeping here—’ a vague gesture encompassed a mattress on the floor ‘—and Michael and Gawain are upstairs. Jude and Lib are too old to share so they have their own rooms. The murder room’s going to be a guest bedroom – but only when I feel it’s been completely purged of bad vibes.’

Annie grinned. ‘So when people come to stay you can tell them: We’ve put you in the haunted room…?’

‘Actually,’ Ursula said, ‘I haven’t really sensed any ghosts. It’s a bit disappointing. At least, not exactly disappointing, but when a house has a history like this – well, you’d expect more than just vibes, wouldn’t you? It isn’t that I want to see an apparition or anything, but I did think … You know, a bloodstain that won’t scrub out, or – or perhaps moaning in the night. Something.’

‘And all you’ve got is a puddle on the floor,’ Annie said thoughtfully. In the middle of the room was a large damp patch where the carpet still hadn’t dried out.

‘There’s nothing ghostly about that,’ Ursula retorted. ‘It’s just a bloody nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to get someone to look at the roof next. I tell you, I’m going to sue that surveyor …’

They went back into the kitchen and she poured coffee.

‘We had an awful fright last weekend,’ she went on. ‘The kids wanted a boat so much, so Donny got them an inflatable – it’s on the bank now, down by the jetty – and they were messing around with it, and Romany fell in. I don’t know how it happened – that river is dodgy, isn’t it? She must’ve gone right under, and then she popped up again, and we got her out somehow, and she was fine, but it absolutely terrified me. I mean, she’s eight, she can swim a bit, but she kept saying how the weeds pulled her under. I told them all, they’re to stay away from the river, but of course they won’t.’

Absently, Annie found herself murmuring the familiar lines:

‘Cloud on the sunset

Wave on the tide …’

‘What’s that?’ Ursula asked.

‘It’s a sort of local folk-rhyme,’ Annie said. ‘About the river.

Cloud on the sunset

Wave on the tide

Fish from the deep sea

Swim up the Glyde.

The river’s tidal, you see.’ She didn’t go on with the poem.

‘Does that mean you can get dolphins and things? Like in the Thames?’ Ursula looked enthusiastic, then dubious. ‘Surely not – this river’s far too small. I expect that’s just fanciful.’

‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Fanciful.’ She gazed pensively into her coffee, unsure of her own thoughts – or fears. Unsure what to say, and what to leave out.

Water on the floor – in the room where Romany slept. And it was Romany who fell in the river …

‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should keep an eye on her.’

‘On who?’

‘Romany.’

‘I always do. Though in the main, she’s such a good child. A bit solitary – always inventing her own games, making up imaginary friends, going off on adventures with them. Of course, she includes Gawain sometimes – he’s her baby brother, after all. I expect she’ll grow up to be a great novelist, or playwright, or something.’

As long as she does grow up, Annie thought.

Or was she being paranoid?

She would have to discuss it with Bartlemy when the opportunity offered.

Hazel thought too much of her time at Thornyhill Manor was spent on school work. She didn’t know quite how it had happened, but in the last few months she had begun re-doing her lessons with Bartlemy, and although a tiny part of her was secretly pleased that her grades had gone up, the stubborn, awkward, Hazelish part still told her lessons weren’t exactly her thing, and she would never do really well, so it was all a waste of effort. Besides, school work was boring, and she was supposed to be there to learn about magic. Despite her stated aversion to it, magic wasn’t boring.

‘Could we try the spellfire again?’ she said one day, off-handly. ‘I’m sick of maths. I never get it right.’

Bartlemy’s mild gaze narrowed with a hint of amusement. ‘You’re doing fine with that geometry,’ he pointed out. ‘Maths teaches you to think. If you do magic without thought you’ll end up like your great-grandmother. Do you want that?’

‘N-no. But I’ve done enough thinking for one day …’

‘As it happens,’ Bartlemy said, ‘there is something with which I need your help. But it could be dangerous. I want to be sure you won’t lose your head.’

‘Dangerous?’ Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience, grownups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then, Bartlemy was unlike any other grownup.

She said: ‘It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.’

‘This time it’s you,’ Bartlemy said.

‘What is it?’

‘The behaviour of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.’

‘I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,’ Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket – a number originally made to go on the door of a house – which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. ‘But I haven’t seen – sensed – them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail – or Nathan.’

‘So did I,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog which will turn on its owner – or a person. They have to be neutralised.’

‘How?’ Hazel asked bluntly.

‘If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium – the smell is inimical to them.’

‘What’s silphium?’

‘A herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odour which gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.’

‘Who does the luring?’ Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.

‘That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.’

Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles and a rhomboid. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is I have to do.’

‘I have a plan,’ said Bartlemy.

Afterwards, when she had gone, he poured himself a drink from an ancient bottle – a drink as dark as a wolf’s gullet and smelling like Christmas in a wine cellar. A woodfire burned in the hearth, an unmagical fire whose yellow flames danced their twisty dances above the crumbling emberglow and bark flaking into ash. The dog lay stretched out in front of it, pricking one ear to hear his master speak.

‘You will take care of her,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I don’t want her in real danger. But she needs to feel valued – that’s the important thing. She needs to know she can make a difference, if only in a small way.’

Hoover thumped his tail in agreement or approbation, or possibly in the hope of a morsel of cake from the plate at Bartlemy’s side.

‘There was a time when I thought nothing I did would change the world,’ Bartlemy continued, in a reminiscent vein. ‘I was too busy looking at what they call nowadays the bigger picture. But big things are made up of small things. Move one particle and you alter the shape of the universe. Perhaps Hazel will remember that, as the decades go by and disillusionment sets in. Meanwhile, you and I will alter the shape of her universe just a little – if we can.’

Hoover pricked the other ear and lifted a shaggy eyebrow.

‘Cake is bad for dogs,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Even my cake.’

Nathan had the accident about a week later. He called it an accident but he knew, as soon as he was capable of knowing anything, that it was his own fault. He was by the indoor pool (Ffylde Abbey had both an indoor and an outdoor swimming pool) with a group of boys, and Ned Gable was vaunting their prowess at diving in Italy that summer. They had visited a little bay a few times, and had taught themselves to dive off a low promontory into the sea, turning a somersault in mid-air on the way down. One of the boys looked sceptical and made a casually snide remark which Nathan would have ignored, but Ned rose to the bait, asserting the truth of his boast.

‘Okay, show us,’ challenged the sceptic. His name was Richard but he liked to call himself Rix. His father owned a merchant bank.

‘I can’t,’ Ned responded, looking both discomforted and angry. ‘Not with this ankle.’ He’d torn some ligaments in a rugger scrum and was banned from most sport for at least another fortnight. ‘You know that.’

‘Convenient,’ sneered Rix.

‘Nathan could do it,’ said a supporter, with a surge of misguided loyalty.

‘I’m not sure about that,’ Nathan said. ‘The rocks in Italy were higher than this diving board, and the sea below was really deep. It would be a bit chancy here.’

‘The pool’s two metres at this end,’ Rix said. ‘Tom Holland, who left last year, he did all sorts of fancy dives off that board. I saw him.’

‘Tom Holland was the Inter-Schools Champion,’ someone else pointed out. ‘And he was dead short – about five foot nothing. He could’ve dived into a puddle.’

‘Of course,’ Rix said, with a little smile tweaking at his mouth. A smile at once patronising and faintly knowing. ‘Don’t worry, Nat. I understand.’

Nathan didn’t like anyone calling him Nat.

‘What do you understand?’ Ned growled, picking up his cue while Nathan was still trying to let it pass.

‘Oh, it’s easy to be chicken when you’re so tall people are too scared to tell you the truth.’

There was a short pause, then suddenly Nathan laughed. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m the class bully. Everyone’s really scared of me.’ Since he was notoriously tolerant and had never bullied anybody most of the group laughed with him, and the tension of the preceding moment was defused.

Rix took the laughter personally. He was the sort of boy who would take it personally if it rained on his birthday or his favourite football team lost a match. ‘So what you’re saying,’ he resumed, ‘is that Ned here is a big-mouthed liar.’

Ned balled his fist. Nathan, who had thought the whole stupid exchange was over, said: ‘What?’

‘He says you did the dive when you were in Italy. You say you can’t show us now – the pool’s too shallow and all that crap. Excuses. You’re calling him a liar. Your best mate, right? Some friend you are.’

One or two of the others laughed at this piece of sophistry – not a relaxed sort of laugh, the way they had laughed with Nathan, but the uncertain kind that tightens up the atmosphere. If the teacher had been around he might have noticed something amiss and put a stop to it, but he had gone to the infirmary when one of his pupils started a nosebleed. Nathan had no fallback position; he knew he should call a halt himself, but Ned was looking at him with absolute confidence that his friend wouldn’t let him down, and Nathan couldn’t fail him. The dive wasn’t safe, but he had done many far more dangerous things, in the otherworlds of his dreams, and somehow he had always come through, protected by chance, by fate, by whoever watched over him – the Grandir, or the sinister forces that shielded the Grimthorn Grail. He had been plucked from the jaws of desert monster and marsh demon, from the spelltraps of Nenufar – he had lifted the forbidden sword, defeated the unknown enemy. Perhaps, on some subconscious level, survival had made him complacent. He shrugged, not looking at Rix, only at Ned.

‘I’ll do it.’

Then he climbed up the steps to the diving board, stood poised on the edge.

Dived.

He knew, immediately, that he’d miscalculated. Everything happened at once very fast and very slow – the world arced as he completed the somersault – he tried to straighten out, to cut the water cleanly – hit the surface at the wrong angle – felt the sting of the impact, the rush of bubbles as the pool engulfed him. He needed to tilt his arms, curve the dive upward, but there was no depth beneath him, no time to manoeuvre. He’d opened his eyes under water and for a long slow millisecond he saw the bottom of the pool coming for him like a moving wall. Then it struck, knocking the air out of him, and he was breathing water – his lungs clenched – the world spun away into darkness and pain …

It was Ned who got him out, jumping in fully dressed despite his sprained ankle, heaving him out of the water while the other boys reached down to haul him over the edge. They’d done life-saving techniques earlier that term and someone managed to pump at his chest while someone else tried mouth-to-mouth. Ned said: ‘Get Mr Niall,’ meaning the games master, but no one did and it seemed an incredibly long time before any adults appeared on the scene to take over. There was blood on Nathan’s head, on his arm, blood fanning out across the wet floor-tiles. Rix stood back from the rest of the group, looking pale and uncomfortable.

‘This is your fault,’ Ned said, struggling to evade his own guilt, knowing Nathan would never have reacted to Rix’s taunting if it hadn’t been for him.

‘He was sh-showing off,’ Rix stammered, determined to convince himself.

Later, in the headmaster’s study, he said the same thing.

Annie was informed and drove to the school in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, exercising all the self-control she possessed in order not to go too fast. By the time she got there they were able to tell her Nathan would be all right: he had concussion, a dislocated shoulder, severe bruising, and what the doctor called ‘extensive physical trauma’ but no broken bones or internal damage. His first words to her were: ‘Sorry, Mum.’ She sat by his bed in the infirmary, holding his hand until it occurred to her that might embarrass him, torn between standard maternal anxiety, pointless anger (why was he always doing dangerous things, even when it wasn’t necessary?), and the sneaking paranoia of other, deeper doubts. Romany Macaire, tumbling into the river … Nathan, diving into a pool too shallow for him … Water, water, everywhere… Was it mere coincidence, or some dark supernatural plot?

‘Don’t overreact,’ Bartlemy said when she confided in him. ‘We’re surrounded by water, all the time. It’s essential to life. Don’t start seeing demons in every raindrop. Teenage boys do rash and often stupid things. Children fall into rivers. Accidents happen. It’s a very human weakness, that we need someone to blame.’

Ned blamed Rix, at least to his classmates. To Nathan, he blamed himself, saying awkwardly: ‘It was me. I made you do it. I shouldn’t have—’

‘Forget it,’ Nathan said. ‘It was my own stupid fault. I knew the dive wasn’t possible there but I didn’t want to admit I couldn’t do it.’

He, too, was blaming himself, not just for his recklessness but for that seed of unthinking arrogance which had made him believe that whatever he did, no matter how foolhardy, somehow he would get away with it. His guardian angel (or devil) would always take care of him.

But the devil had let him down, and now he knew he was vulnerable, and a tiny germ of fear grew at the back of his thought, not the fear of danger but the fear of fear itself. He could be hurt – he might be killed. Knowing that, would he be able to explore the otherworlds as boldly as before, doing whatever he needed to do, or would his newfound fear hold him back?

He couldn’t talk to Ned about it, or any of his other classmates, because they knew nothing of the voyages he made in his dreams, and would only think him nuts if they did. He couldn’t talk to Annie, because she was his mother, and he knew she worried about him too much already. He couldn’t talk to Bartlemy, because although his uncle came to see him once he was back home, they had no privacy for confidences.

In the end, he talked to Hazel. Just as he’d always done.

‘You think too much,’ Hazel said. ‘Like what’s-his-name in Shakespeare who wanted to avenge his father’s murder and kept messing it up and killing the wrong people.’ She’d been on a school trip to see Hamlet the previous term. ‘He got rid of nearly everyone in the play before he killed the right person, didn’t he? The point is he spent too much time agonising and making long speeches to himself instead of just getting on with the job. You’re starting to do that. Picking your feelings to bits and worrying about them. It’s a waste of time.’

‘I don’t make long speeches,’ Nathan objected.

‘You’d better not,’ Hazel said grimly. ‘The play was quite good but the speeches were boring.’