Читать книгу The Dragon-Charmer - Jan Siegel - Страница 8

II

She felt it only for an instant, like a cold prickling on the back of her neck: the awareness that she was being watched. Not watched in the ordinary sense or even spied on, but surveyed through occult eyes, her image dancing in a flame or refracted through a crystal prism. She didn’t know how she knew, only that it was one of many instincts lurking in the substratum of her mind, waiting their moment to nudge at her thought. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel. The sensation was gone so quickly she almost believed she might have imagined it, but her pleasure in the drive was over. For her, Yorkshire would always be haunted. ‘Fern –’ her companion was talking to her, but she had not registered a word ‘– Fern, are you listening to me?’

‘Yes. Sorry. What did you say?’

‘If you’d been listening you wouldn’t have to ask. I never saw you so abstracted. I was just wondering why you should want to do the deed in Yarrowdale, when you don’t even like the place.’

‘I don’t dislike it: it isn’t that. It’s a tiny village miles from anywhere: short stroll to a windswept beach, short scramble to a windswept moor. You can freeze your bum off in the North Sea or go for bracing walks in frightful weather. The countryside is scenic – if you like the countryside. I’m a city girl.’

‘I know. So why –?’

‘Marcus, of course. He thinks Yarrowdale is quaint. Characterful village church, friendly local vicar. Anyway, it’s a good excuse not to have so many guests. You tell people you’re doing it quietly, in the country, and they aren’t offended not to be invited. And of those you do invite, lots of them won’t come. It’s too far to trek just to stay in a draughty pub and drink champagne in the rain.’

‘Sounds like a song,’ said Gaynor Mobberley. ‘Champagne in the rain.’ And: ‘Why do you always do what Marcus wants?’

‘I’m going to marry him,’ Fern retorted. ‘I want to please him. Naturally.’

‘If you were in love with him,’ said Gaynor, ‘you wouldn’t be half so conscientious about pleasing him all the time.’

‘That’s a horrible thing to say.’

‘Maybe. Best friends have a special licence to say horrible things, if it’s really necessary.’

‘I like him,’ Fern said after a long pause. ‘That’s much more important than love.’

‘I like him too. He’s clever and witty and very good company and quite attractive considering he’s going a bit thin on top. That doesn’t mean I want to marry him. Besides, he’s twenty years older than you.’

‘Eighteen. I prefer older men. With the young ones you don’t know what they’ll look like when they hit forty. It could be a nasty shock. The older men have passed the danger point so you know the worst already.’

‘Now you’re being frivolous. I just don’t understand why you can’t wait until you fall in love with someone.’

Fern gave a shivery laugh. ‘That’s like … oh, waiting for a shooting star to fall in your lap, or looking for the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow.’

‘Cynic.’

‘No. I’m not a cynic. It’s simply that I accept the impossibility of romantic idealism.’

‘Do you remember that time in Wales?’ said her friend, harking back unfairly to college days. ‘Morwenna Rhys gave that party at her parents’ house on the bay, and we all got totally drunk, and you rushed down the beach in your best dress straight into the sea. I can still see you running through the waves, and the moonlight on the foam, and your skirt flying. You looked so wild, almost eldritch. Not my cool, sophisticated Fern.’

‘Everyone has to act out of character sometimes. It’s like taking your clothes off: you feel free without your character but very naked, unprotected. Unfinished. So you get dressed again – you put on yourself – and then you know who you are.’

Gaynor appeared unconvinced, but an approaching road junction caused a diversion. Fern had forgotten the way, and they stopped to consult a map. ‘Who’ll be there?’ Gaynor enquired when they resumed their route. ‘When we arrive, I mean.’

‘Only my brother. I asked Abby to keep Dad in London until the day before the wedding. He’d only worry about details and get fussed, and I don’t think I could take it. I can deal with any last minute hitches. Will never fusses.’

‘What’s he doing now? I haven’t seen him for years.’

‘Post-grad at York. Some aspect of art history. He spends a lot of time at the house, painting weird surreal pictures and collecting even weirder friends. He loves it there. He grows marijuana in the garden and litters the place with beer cans and plays pop music full blast; our dour Yorkshire housekeeper pretends to disapprove but actually she dotes on him and cossets him to death. We still call her Mrs Wicklow although her Christian name is Dorothy. She’s really too old to housekeep but she refuses to retire so we pay a succession of helpers for her to find fault with.’

‘The old family retainer,’ suggested Gaynor.

‘Well … in a way.’

‘What’s the house like?’

‘Sort of grey and off-putting. Victorian architecture at its most unattractively solid. We’ve added a few mod cons but there’s only one bathroom and no central heating. We’ve always meant to sell it but somehow we never got around to it. It’s not at all comfortable.’

‘Is it haunted?’

There was an appreciable pause before Fern answered.

‘Not exactly,’ she said.

They had been friends since their days at college, but Gaynor sometimes felt that for all their closeness she knew little of her companion. Outwardly, Fern Capel was smart, successful, self-assured, with a poise that more than compensated for her lack of inches, a sort of compact neatness which implied I am the right height; it is everyone else who is too tall. She had style without flamboyance, generosity without extravagance, an undramatic beauty, a demure sense of humour. A colleague had once said she ‘excelled at moderation’; yet Gaynor had witnessed her, on rare occasions, behaving in a way that was immoderate, even rash, her slight piquancy of feature sharpened into a disturbing wildness, an alien glitter in her eyes. At twenty-eight, she had already risen close to the top in the PR consultancy where she worked. Her fiancé, Marcus Greig, was a well-known figure of academe who had published several books and regularly aired both his knowledge and his wit in the newspapers and on television. ‘I plan my life,’ she had told her friend, and to date everything seemed to be proceeding accordingly, smooth-running and efficient as a computer programme. Or had it been ‘I planned my life’? Gaynor wondered, chilling at the thought, as if, in a moment of unimaginable panic and rejection, Fern had turned her back on natural disorder, on haphazard emotions, stray adventure, and had dispassionately laid down the terms for her future. Gaynor’s very soul shrank from such an idea. But on the road to Yorkshire, with the top of the car down, the citified sophisticate had blown away, leaving a girl who looked younger than her years and potentially vulnerable, and whose mood was almost fey. ‘She doesn’t want to marry him,’ Gaynor concluded, seeking a simple explanation for a complex problem, ‘but she hasn’t the courage to back out.’ Yet Fern had never lacked courage.

The house was a disappointment: solidly, stolidly Victorian, watching them from shadowed windows and under frowning lintels, its stoic façade apparently braced to withstand both storm and siege. ‘This is a house that thinks it’s a castle,’ Fern said. ‘One of these days, I’ll have to change its mind.’

Gaynor, who assumed she was referring to some kind of designer face-lift, tried to visualise hessian curtains and terracotta urns, and failed.

Inside, there were notes of untidiness, a through-draught from too many open windows, the incongruous blare of a radio, the clatter of approaching feet. She was introduced to Mrs Wicklow, who appeared as grim as the house she kept, and her latest assistant, Trisha, a dumpy teenager in magenta leggings wielding a dismembered portion of hoover. Will appeared last, lounging out of the drawing room which he had converted into a studio. The radio had evidently been turned down in his wake and the closing door suppressed its beat to a rumour. Gaynor had remembered him tall and whiplash-thin but she decided his shoulders had squared, his face matured. Once, he had resembled an angel with the spirit of an urchin; now, she saw choirboy innocence and carnal knowledge, an imp of charm, the morality of a thief. There was a smudge of paint on his cheek which she almost fancied might have been deliberate, the conscious stigma of an artist. His summer tan turned grey eyes to blue; there were sun-streaks in his hair. He greeted her as if they knew each other much better than was in fact the case, gave his sister an idle peck, and offered to help with the luggage.

‘We’ve put you on the top floor,’ he told Gaynor. ‘I hope you won’t mind. The first floor’s rather full up. If you’re lonely I’ll come and keep you company.’

‘Not Alison’s room?’ Fern’s voice was unexpectedly sharp.

‘Of course not.’

‘Who’s Alison?’ Gaynor asked, but in the confusion of arrival no one found time to answer.

Her bedroom bore the unmistakable stamp of a room that had not been used in a couple of generations. It was shabbily carpeted, ruthlessly aired, the bed-linen crackling with cleanliness, the ancient brocades of curtain and upholstery worn to the consistency of lichen. There was a basin and ewer on the dresser and an ugly slipware vase containing a hand-picked bunch of flowers both garden and wild. A huge mirror, bleared with recent scouring, reflected her face among the spots, and on a low table beside the bed was a large and gleaming television set. Fern surveyed it as if it were a monstrosity. ‘For God’s sake remove that thing,’ she said to her brother. ‘You know it’s broken.’

‘Got it fixed.’ Will flashed Gaynor a grin. ‘This is five-star accommodation. Every modern convenience.’

‘I can see that.’

But Fern still seemed inexplicably dissatisfied. As they left her to unpack, Gaynor heard her say: ‘You’ve put Alison’s mirror in there.’

‘It’s not Alison’s mirror: it’s ours. It was just in her room.’

‘She tampered with it…’

Gaynor left her bags on the bed and went to examine it more closely. It was the kind of mirror that makes everything look slightly grey. In it, her skin lost its colour, her brown eyes were dulled, the long dark hair which was her principal glory was drained of sheen and splendour. And behind her in the depths of the glass the room appeared dim and remote, almost as if she were looking back into the past, a past beyond warmth and daylight, dingy as an unopened attic. Turning away, her attention was drawn to a charcoal sketch hanging on the wall: a woman with an Edwardian hairstyle, gazing soulfully at the flower she held in her hand. On an impulse she unhooked it, peering at the scrawl of writing across the bottom of the picture. There was an illegible signature and a name of which all she could decipher was the initial E. Not Alison, then. She put the picture back in its place and resumed her unpacking. In a miniature cabinet at her bedside she came across a pair of handkerchiefs, also embroidered with that tantalising E. ‘Who was E?’ she asked at dinner later on.

‘Must have been one of Great-Cousin Ned’s sisters,’ said Will, attacking Mrs Wicklow’s cooking with an appetite that belied his thinness.

‘Great-Cousin –?’

‘He left us this house,’ Fern explained. ‘His relationship to Daddy was so obscure we christened him Great-Cousin. It seemed logical at the time. Anyway, he had several sisters who preceded him into this world and out of it: I’m sure the youngest was an E. Esme … no. No. Eithne.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a romantic mystery attached to her?’ Gaynor said, half ironic, half wistful. ‘Since I’ve got her room, you know.’

‘No,’ Fern said baldly. ‘There isn’t. As far as we know, she was a fluttery young girl who became a fluttery old woman, with nothing much in between. The only definite information we have is that she made seed cake which tasted of sand.’

‘She must have had a lover,’ Will speculated. ‘The family wouldn’t permit it, because he was too low class. They used to meet on the moor, like Heathcliff and Cathy only rather more restrained. He wrote bad poems for her – you’ll probably find one in your room – and she pressed the wild flower he gave her in her prayer book. That’ll be around somewhere too. One day they were separated in a mist, she called and called to him but he did not come – he strayed too far, went over a cliff and was lost.’

‘Taken by boggarts,’ Fern suggested.

‘So she never married,’ Will concluded, ‘but spent the next eighty years gradually pining away. Her sad spectre still haunts the upper storey, searching for whichever book it was in which she pressed that bloody flower.’

Gaynor laughed. She had been meaning to ask about Alison again, but Will’s fancy diverted her, and it slipped her mind.

It was gone midnight when they went up to bed. Gaynor slept unevenly, troubled by the country quiet, listening in her waking moments to the rumour of the wind on its way to the sea and the hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The owl-cry invaded her dreams, filling them with the noiseless flight of pale wings and the glimpse of a sad ghost-face looming briefly out of the dark. She awoke before dawn, hearing the gentleness of rain on roof and window-pane. Perhaps she was still half dreaming, but it seemed to her that her window stood high in a castle wall, and outside the rain was falling softly into the dim waters of a loch, and faint and far away someone was playing the bagpipes.

In her room on the floor below, Fern too had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deep to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple-drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. ‘I must go back!’ she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly lustre of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to weigh her down, the spirit that breathes in every creation and at the nucleus of all being. An emotion flowed into her that was as vivid as excitement and as deep as peace. She wanted to hold on to that moment forever, but there was a voice calling, calling her without words, dragging her back into her body and her bed, until at last she knew she was lying in the dark, and the owl’s hoot was a cry of loneliness and pain for all that she had lost.

An hour or so later she got up, took two aspirin (she would not use sleeping pills), tried to read for a while. It was a long, long time before exhaustion mastered her, and she slipped into oblivion.

Will slumbered undisturbed, accustomed to the nocturnal smalltalk of his non-human neighbours. When the bagpipes began, he merely rolled over, smiling in his sleep.

The next day was spent mostly on wedding preparations. The girls having brought the Dress with them, Mrs Wicklow exercised her royal prerogative and took charge of it, relegating Trisha to the sidelines, personally pressing it into creaseless perfection and arraying it in state in one of the spare bedrooms. Will had unearthed a rather decrepit tailor’s dummy from the attic, formerly the property of a long-deceased Miss Capel, and they hung the Dress on it, arranging the train in a classic swirl on the carpet, tweaking the empty sleeves into place. He even stuck a knitting-needle in the vacancy of the neck and suspended the veil from its point, draping it in misty folds that fell almost to the floor. Fern found something oddly disquieting in that faceless, limbless shell of a bride; she even wondered if Will was trying to make a subtle point, but he was so helpful, so pleased with his and Mrs Wicklow’s handiwork, that she was forced to acquit him of deviousness. It was left to Gaynor to offer comment. ‘It looks very beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’ll walk down the aisle all by itself.’

‘Up the aisle,’ said Fern. ‘It’s up.’

They met the vicar, Gus Dinsdale, in the church that afternoon and retired to the vicarage for tea. Gus in his forties looked very much as he had in his thirties, save that his hair was receding out of existence and his somewhat boyish expression had been vividly caricatured by usage and time. On learning that Gaynor’s work was researching and restoring old books and manuscripts he begged to show her some of his acquisitions, and when Will and Fern left he took her into his study. Gaynor duly admired the books, but her mind was elsewhere. She hovered on the verge of asking questions but drew back, afraid of appearing vulgarly inquisitive, a busybody prying into the affairs of her friend. And then, on their return to the drawing room, chance offered her an opening. ‘You have lovely hair, dear,’ Gus’ wife Maggie remarked. ‘I haven’t seen hair that long since Alison – and I was never sure hers was natural. Of course, I don’t think they had extensions in those days, but –’

‘Alison?’ Gaynor nearly jumped. ‘Will mentioned her. So did Fern. Who was she?’

‘She was a friend of Robin’s,’ Maggie replied. ‘She stayed at Dale House for a while, more than a decade ago now. We didn’t like her very much.’

‘You didn’t like her,’ Gus corrected, smiling faintly. ‘She was a very glamorous young woman. Not all that young really, and not at all beautiful, but … well, she had It. As they say.’

‘She looked like a succubus,’ Maggie said.

‘You’ve never seen a succubus.’

‘Maybe not,’ Maggie retorted with spirit, ‘but I’d know one if I did. It would look like Alison.’

‘My wife is prejudiced,’ Gus said. ‘Alison wasn’t the kind of woman to be popular with her own sex. Alison Redmond, that was her full name. Still, we shouldn’t speak harshly of her. Her death was a terrible tragedy. Fern was completely overset by it.’

‘She died?’

‘Didn’t you know?’ Gus sighed. ‘She drowned. Some kind of freak flood, but no one ever really knew how it happened. Fern was saved, caught on a tree, but Alison was swept away. They found her in the river. Dreadful business. I’ve always wondered –’ He broke off, shaking his head as if to disperse an invisible cobweb. Gaynor regarded him expectantly.

‘There was that story she told us,’ said Maggie. ‘I know it was nonsense, but it’s not as if she was a habitual liar. She must have been suffering from some kind of post-traumatic shock. That’s what the doctors said about her illness later on, wasn’t it?’ She turned to Gaynor. ‘But you’re her best friend; you must know more about that than we do.’

What illness? The query leapt to Gaynor’s lips, but she suppressed it. Instead she said – with a grimace at her conscience for the half-truth – ‘Fern doesn’t discuss it much.’

‘Oh dear.’ Now it was Maggie’s turn to sigh. ‘That isn’t good, is it? You’re supposed to talk through your problems: it’s essential therapy.’

‘That’s the theory, anyway,’ said Gus. ‘I’m not entirely convinced by it. Not in this case, anyway. There was one thing that really bothered me about that explanation of Fern’s.’

‘What was that?’ asked Maggie.

‘Nobody ever came up with a better one.’

Gaynor walked back to Dale House very slowly, lost in a whirl of thought. She had refrained from asking further questions, reluctant to betray the extent of her ignorance and still wary of showing excessive curiosity. Fern had never spoken of any illness, and although there was no particular reason why she should have done, the omission, coupled with her distaste for Yorkshire, was beginning to take on an unexplained significance. If this were a Gothic novel, Gaynor reflected fancifully, say, a Daphne du Maurier, Fern would probably have murdered Alison Redmond. But that’s ridiculous. Fern’s a very moral person, she’s totally against capital punishment – and anyway, how could you arrange a freak flood? It ought to be impossible in an area like this, even for Nature. I have to ask her about it. She’s my best friend. I should be able to ask her anything …

But somehow, when she reached the house and found Fern in the kitchen preparing supper, hindered rather than helped by Mrs Wicklow’s assertion of culinary by-laws, she couldn’t. She decided it was not the right moment. Will took her into the studio drawing-room, retrieved a bottle of wine from the same shelf as the white spirit, and poured some into a couple of bleared glasses. Bravely, Gaynor drank. ‘Are you going to show me your paintings?’ she enquired.

‘You won’t understand them,’ he warned her. ‘Which is a euphemism for “you won’t like them”.’

‘Let me see,’ said Gaynor.

In fact, he was right. They were complex compositions in various styles: superficial abstractions where a subliminal image lurked just beyond the borders of realisation, or representational scenes – landscapes and figures – distorted into abstract concepts. A darkness permeated them, part menace, part fantasy. There were occasional excursions into sensuality – a half-formed nude, a flower moulded into lips, kissing or sucking – but overall there was nothing she could connect with the little she knew or guessed of Will. The execution was inconsistent: some had a smooth finish almost equal to the gloss of airbrushing, others showed caked oils and the scrapings of a knife. Evidently the artist was still at the experimental stage. She found them fascinating, vaguely horrible, slightly immature. ‘I don’t like them,’ she admitted, ‘in the sense that they’re uncomfortable, disturbing: I couldn’t live with them. They’d give me nightmares. And I don’t understand them because they don’t seem to me to come from you. Unless you have a dark side – a very dark side – which you never let anyone see.’

‘All my sides are light,’ Will said.

Gaynor was still concentrating on the pictures. ‘You’ve got something, though,’ she said. ‘I’m no judge, but … you’ve definitely got something. I just hope it isn’t contagious.’

As they talked she considered asking him some of the questions that were pent up inside her head, but she dithered too long, torn between a doubt and a doubt, and they were interrupted.

Later, after an unsuccessful session with the plastic shower attachment jammed onto the bath taps, Gaynor retired to her room, shivering in a towel, and switched on both bars of the electric fire and the television. She was not particularly addicted to the small screen, but she had not seen a daily paper and at twenty past six she hoped for some news and a weather report. There seemed to be only the four main channels on offer, with reception that varied from poor to unwatchable. The best picture was on BBC 1. She left it on, paying only cursory attention to the final news items, while trying to warm her body lotion in front of the fire before applying it to the gooseflesh of her legs. Afterwards, she could never recall exactly what happened, or at which precise moment the picture changed. There came a point when she noticed the bad reception had ceased. She found herself staring at an image that looked no longer flat but three-dimensional, as real as a view through a window – but a window without glass. Her gaze was caught and held as if she were mesmerised; she could not look away. She saw a valley of rock opening out between immeasurable cliffs, many-coloured lakes or pools, blue and emerald and blood-scarlet, and a garden mazy with shadows where she could hear a faint drumming like dancing feet and the sound of eerie piping, though she could see no one. She did not know when she began to be afraid. The fear was like fear in a dream, huge and illogical, aggravated by every meaningless detail. A fat yellow moth flew out of the picture and looped the room, pursued by a gleaming dragonfly. For an instant, impossibly, she thought its head was that of an actual dragon, snapping jaws bristling with miniature teeth, but the chase had passed too swiftly for her to be sure, vanishing back into the garden. Then there were pillars, stone pillars so old that they exuded ancientry like an odour. They huddled together in a circle, and spiky tree-shadows twitched to and fro across their grey trunks. But as she drew nearer they appeared to swell and grow, opening out until they ringed a great space, and she could see thread-fine scratchings on them like the graffiti of spiders, and sunlight slanting in between. The shadows fled from her path as she passed through the entrance and into the circle, beneath the skeleton of a dome whose curving ribs segmented a fiery sky. ‘The light only falls here at sunset,’ said a voice which seemed to be inside her head. ‘Wait for the dark. Then we will make our own light out of darkness, and by that darklight you will see another world. We do not need the sun.’ No! she thought, resisting she knew not what. She had forgotten it was only a picture on television; she was inside the image, a part of it, and the idol leaned over her, gigantesque and terrible, its head almost featureless against the yellow sky. It was a statue, just a statue, yet in a minute, she knew, she would see it move. There would be a flexing of stiffened fingers, a stretching of rigid lips. Suddenly, she saw the eye-cracks, slowly widening, filled with a glimmer that was not the sun. She screamed … and screamed …

Somehow, she must have pressed the remote control. She was in the bedroom, shivering by the inadequate fire, and the television was blank and dark. Will and Fern could be heard running up the stairs towards her, with Mrs Wicklow faint but pursuing. Will put his arms round her, which was embarrassing since she was losing her towel; Fern scanned her surroundings with unexpected intensity. ‘I had a nightmare,’ Gaynor said, fishing for explanations. ‘I must have dropped off, just sitting here. Maybe it was something on the news. Or those bizarre pictures of yours,’ she added, glancing up at Will.

‘You had the television on?’ Fern queried sharply. She picked up the remote and pressed one: the screen flicked to a vista of a fire in an industrial plant in Leeds. Behind the commentator, ash-flakes swirled under an ugly sky.

‘That was it,’ said Gaynor with real relief. ‘It must have been that.’ And: ‘I can’t think why I’m so tired …’

‘It’s the Yorkshire air,’ said Will. ‘Bracing.’

‘You don’t want to go watching t’news,’ opined Mrs Wicklow. ‘It’s all murders and disasters – when it isn’t sex. Enough to give anyone nightmares.’

Will grinned half a grin for Gaynor’s exclusive benefit. Fern switched off the television again, still not quite satisfied.

‘Have you had any other strange dreams here?’ she asked abruptly when Mrs Wicklow had left.

‘Oh no,’ said Gaynor. ‘Well … only the bagpipes. I thought I heard them last night, but that must have been a dream too.’

‘Of course.’

Fern and Will followed the housekeeper, leaving Gaynor to dress, but as the door closed behind them she was sure she caught Fern’s whisper: ‘If you don’t get that little monster to shut up, I’m going to winkle him out and stuff his bloody pipes down his throat …’

At supper, thought Gaynor, at supper I’m going to ask her what she’s talking about.

But at supper the argument began. It was an argument that had been in preparation, Gaynor suspected, since they arrived, simmering on a low heat until a chance word – a half-joking allusion to premarital nerves – made it boil over. Without the subject ever having been discussed between them, she sensed that Will, like her, was unenthusiastic about his sister’s marriage and doubted her motives. Yet he had said nothing and seemed reluctant to criticise; it was Fern, uncharacteristically belligerent, who pushed him into caustic comment, almost compelling him towards an open quarrel. On the journey up she had listened without resentment to her friend’s light-worded protest, but with Will she was white-faced and bitter with rage. Maybe she wanted to clear the air, Gaynor speculated; but she did not really believe it. What Fern wanted was a fight, the kind of dirty, no-holds-barred fight, full of below-the-belt jabs and incomprehensible allusions, which can only occur between siblings or people who have known each other too long and too well. It struck Gaynor later that what Fern had sought was not to hurt but to be hurt, as if to blot out some other feeling with that easy pain. She herself had tried to avoid taking sides.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ Fern said afterwards, on their way up to bed. ‘I shouldn’t have let Will provoke me. I must be more strung-up than I thought.’

‘He didn’t provoke you,’ Gaynor said uncertainly. ‘You provoked him.’

Fern shut her bedroom door with something of a snap.

The owl woke Gaynor, calling in its half-human voice right outside her window. She had started up and pulled back the curtains before she really knew what she was doing and there it was, its ghost-face very close to her own, apparently magnified by the glass so that its enormous eyes filled her vision. Its talons scrabbled on the sill; its wings were beating against the panes. Then somehow the window was open and she was straddling the sill, presumably still in her pyjamas, and then she was astride the owl, her hands buried in its neck-ruff, and it was huge, huger than a great eagle, and silent as the phantom it resembled. They were flying over the moors, and she glimpsed the loop of a road below, and the twin shafts of headlights, and the roofs of houses folded as if in sleep, and a single window gleaming like a watchful eye. But most of the landscape was dark, lit only by the moon that kept pace with their flight, speeding between the clouds. Above the grey drift of cirrus the sky was a black vault; the few stars looked remote and cold. They crossed a cliff and she saw the sea wheeling beneath her, flecked with moon-glitter, and then all detail was lost in the boom of wings and the roar of the wind, and Time rolled over her like waves, maybe months, maybe years, and she did not know if she woke or slept, if she lived or dreamed. At one point another face rushed towards her, a pale expanse of a face with a wide hungry mouth and eyes black as the Pit. There was a hint of smoke in the air and a smell of something rotting. ‘This is not the one,’ said a voice. ‘Not the one …’ The unpleasant smell was gone and she felt the plumage of the owl once more, and the wind and the cloud-wisps and the dying moon flowed over her, and sleep came after, closing the window against the night.

She woke fully just before moonset, when its last ray stole across the bed and slipped under her eyelids. She got up to shut the curtains, and was back between the sheets when it occurred to her she had done so already, before she went to bed.

Fern, too, was dreaming. Not the dreams she longed for and dreaded – fragments of the past, intimations of an alternative future – dreams from which she would wrench herself back to a painful awakening. This dream appeared random, unconnected with her. Curious, she dreamed on. She was gazing down on a village, a village of long ago, with thatched roofs and dung-heaps. There were chickens bobbing in farmyard and backyard, goats wandering the single street. People in peasant clothing were going about their business. A quickfire sunset sent the shadows stretching across the valley until it was all shadow. One red star shone low over the horizon. It seemed to be pulsing, expanding – now it was a fireball rushing towards them – a comet whose tail scorched the tree-tops into a blaze. Then, as it drew nearer, she saw. Bony pinions that cut up the sky, pitted scales aglow from the furnace within, blood-dark eyes where ancient thoughts writhed like slow vapour. A dragon.

Not the dragon of fantasy and storyland, a creature with whom you might bandy words or hitch a ride. This was a real dragon, and it was terrible. It stank like a volcanic swamp. Its breath was a pyroclastic cloud. She could sense its personality, enormous, overwhelming, a force all hunger and rage. Children, goats, people ran, but not fast enough; against the onset of the dragon they might almost have been running backwards. Houses exploded from the heat. Flesh shrivelled like paper. Fern jerked into waking to find she was soaked in sweat and trembling with a mixture of excitement and horror. Special effects, she told herself: nothing more. She took a drink of water from the glass by her bed and lay down again. Her thoughts meandered into a familiar litany. There are no dragons, no demons … no countries in wardrobes, no kingdoms behind the North Wind. And Atlantis, first and fairest of cities, Atlantis where such things might have been, was buried under the passing millennia, drowned in a billion tides, leaving not a fossilised footprint nor a solitary shard of pottery to baffle the archaeologists.

But she would not think of Atlantis …

Drifting into sleep again she dreamed of wedding presents, and a white dress that walked up the aisle all by itself.

‘What’s happening?’ Will asked the darkness. ‘Even allowing for circumstances, I’ve never known Fern so on edge.’

‘I dinna ken,’ said the darkness, predictably. ‘But there’s Trouble coming. I can smell him.’

The following morning was devoted to thank-you letters, which Fern, being efficient, penned beforehand. Then there were long phone-calls – to the caterers, to prospective guests, to Marcus Greig. Will, not so much unhelpful as uninvolved, removed Gaynor from the scene and took her for a walk.

‘What do you make of it all?’ he asked her.

‘Make of what?’ she said, her mind elsewhere. ‘You mean – that business of Alison Redmond? Or –’

‘Actually,’ said Will, ‘I meant Marcus Greig. Who’s been talking to you about Alison? Fern tries never to mention her.’

‘Gus Dinsdale,’ Gaynor explained. She continued hesitantly: ‘I don’t want to be nosy, but I can’t help wondering … Was her death really an accident? You’re both rather – odd – about it.’

‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

Gaynor stopped and stared at him, suddenly very white. ‘N-not Fern –?’

Will’s prompt laughter brought the colour flooding back to her cheeks. ‘You’ve been thinking in whodunits,’ he accused. ‘Poor Gaynor. A Ruth Rendell too many!’

‘Well, what did happen?’ demanded Gaynor, feeling foolish.

‘The truth is less mundane,’ Will said. ‘It often is. Alison stole a key that didn’t belong to her and opened a Door that shouldn’t be opened. I wouldn’t call that an accident.’

‘Gus said something about a flood?’

Will nodded. ‘She was swept away. So was Fern – she was lucky to survive.’

Gaynor felt herself becoming increasingly bewildered, snatching at straws without ever coming near the haystack. ‘I gather Fern was ill,’ she said. ‘They thought – Gus and Maggie – that she would have told me, only she never has. Some sort of post-traumatic shock?’

‘Shock leading to amnesia, that’s what the doctors said. They had to say something. She was gone for five days.’

‘Gone? Gone where?’

‘To shut the Door, of course. The Door Alison had opened. The flood had washed it away.’ He was studying her as he spoke, his words nonsense to her, his expression inscrutable. She could not detect either mockery or evasion; it was more as if they were speaking on different subjects, or in different languages.

‘Can we start again?’ she said. ‘With Alison. I was told – she was a girlfriend of your father’s?’

‘Maybe,’ said Will. ‘She slipped past Fern – for a while. But she wasn’t really interested in Dad.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She stole a key –’

‘I mean, what did she do for a living?’

‘She worked in an art gallery in London. At least, that was what you might call her cover.’

‘Her cover? She was a crook?’

‘Of course not.’ He smiled half a smile. ‘Well, not in the sense you mean.’

‘In what sense, then?’

‘She was a witch,’ said Will.

She looked for the rest of the smile, but it did not materialise. The narrowing of his eyes and the slight crease between his brows was merely a reaction against the sun. His expression was unfathomable.

After a pause that lasted just a little too long, she said: ‘Herbal remedies – zodiac medallions – dancing naked round a hilltop on Midsummer’s Eve? That sort of thing?’

‘Good Lord no,’ Will responded mildly. ‘Alison was the real McCoy.’

‘Satanism?’

He shook his head. ‘Satan was simply a label of convenience. Mind you, if Jesus had come back a few hundred years later, and seen what had been done in his name – the crusades, or the Inquisition, or even just a routine schism with heretics burning at the stake over a point of doctrine – he’d probably have given up on all religion then and there. The atheist formerly known as Christ. He might even have decided it would be best – or at least much easier – to corrupt and destroy the human race instead of wasting time trying to save it. You get the gods you deserve.’

‘You’re wandering from the point,’ Gaynor said, determined the discussion was going to go somewhere, though she had no idea precisely where. It occurred to her that his outlook – she could not think of a better word – must have something to do with his paintings, or vice versa, but it didn’t seem to clarify anything. ‘What kind of a – what kind of a witch was Alison?’

‘She had the Gift,’ Will explained. (She could hear the capital letter.) ‘The ability to do things … beyond the range of ordinary human capacity.’ He did not appear to notice the doubt in Gaynor’s questioning gaze. ‘When the universe was created something – alien – got into the works, a lump of matter from outside. They called it the Lodestone. A friend of ours had the theory that it might have been a whole different cosmos, imploded into this ball of concentrated matter, but… Well, anyhow, it distorted everything around it. Including people. Especially people. It affected their genetic makeup, creating a freak gene which they passed on even when the Stone itself was destroyed. A sort of gene for witchcraft.’ He gave her a sudden dazzling and eminently normal smile. ‘Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. I just think you ought to know. In case anything happens which shouldn’t.’

‘Do you think something is going to happen?’ asked Gaynor, mesmerised.

‘Maybe. I’d whistle up a demon if I could, just to stop this idiotic wedding.’

‘Idiotic?’ She was bemused by his choice of adjective.

‘Can you think of a better word? Fern’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, probably as a gesture of rejection. That seems fairly idiotic to me.’

‘What is she supposed to be rejecting?’

‘The Gift,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole problem. Don’t you understand? Fern’s a witch too.’

Gaynor stopped abruptly for the second time, staring at him in a sudden violent uncertainty. They had walked quite a way and she was aware of the empty countryside all around them, the wind ruffling the grasses, the piping voice of an isolated bird. The wild loneliness of it filled her with an upsurge of panic which nudged her into anger. ‘If this is your idea of a joke –’

And then normality intruded. The dog came out of nowhere, bounding up to them on noiseless paws, halting just in front of her. Its mouth was open in a grin full of teeth and its tongue lolled. Will bent down to pat its muzzle but the yellow-opal eyes were fixed on Gaynor. The man followed briskly on its heels. He too gave the uncanny impression of appearing from nowhere. But this was normality, or so Gaynor assured herself. A man and his dog, walking on the moors. The dog was friendly, the man, dressed like a tramp, at least unequivocally human. Will evidently knew them.

‘This is Ragginbone,’ he told Gaynor. The man, not the dog. And: ‘This is Gaynor Mobberley. She’s a close friend of Fern’s.’ A firm handclasp, bright eyes scanning her face. He looked very old, she thought, or perhaps not so much old as aged, reminding her of an oak chest her mother had inherited recently from an antique relative. The wood was scored and blackened but tough, unyielding, half way to carbonisation. The man’s face seemed to have been carved in a similar wood, a long time ago, scratched with a thousand lines which melted into mobility when he smiled at her. His scarecrow hair was faded to a brindled straw but his brows were still dark and strong, crooked above the bright bright eyes that shone with a light that was not quite laughter but something deeper and more solemn. She wondered about his name (a soubriquet? a nickname?) but was too polite to ask.

‘And Lougarry.’ Will indicated the dog. A shaggy animal without a collar who looked part Alsatian and all wolf. But Gaynor had grown up with dogs and was not particularly deterred. She extended her hand and the dog sniffed briefly, apparently more out of courtesy than curiosity.

‘And how is Fernanda?’ asked the man called Ragginbone.

‘Still resolved on matrimony,’ said Will. ‘It’s making her very jumpy. She picked a fight with me last night, just to prove she was doing the right thing.’

‘She has to choose for herself,’ said the old man. ‘Neither you nor I have the right to coerce her, or even advise.’

Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back towards Yarrowdale, following a different path which plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.

‘Was this where Alison drowned?’ Gaynor said suddenly.

‘Yes and no,’ said Will. ‘This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Further down from here.’

Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.

Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.

‘You’ll stay around, won’t you?’ Will said to him.

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘I know, but …’

‘Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?’

‘There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.’ He appealed to Gaynor. ‘You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’ She remembered her nightmare in front of the television, and the owl-dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. ‘It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.’

‘We’ll be here,’ said Ragginbone.

He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. ‘I suppose he’s a wizard?’ Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.

‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘Not any more.’

Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow-bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twentieth-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualised something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with pre-marital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. ‘I’ve run out of stamps,’ she announced. ‘I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘The older generation would be offended. Etiquette hasn’t caught up with technology yet.’

‘Shall I go and get the stamps for you?’ Gaynor offered. ‘I can find the post office. I saw it yesterday.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Fern said warmly, ‘but you’ve only just got in. Have some coffee first. The pot’s on the stove. I made the real thing: I thought we might need it. Instant doesn’t have the same kick.’

Gaynor helped herself and replaced the contents of Fern’s mug, which had begun to congeal.

‘How are you getting on with my brother?’ Fern enquired, scribbling her way automatically through another note.

‘I like him,’ Gaynor responded tentatively, thinking of the row the previous night.

‘So do I,’ said Fern. ‘Even if he is a pain in the bum.’

‘He lives in a world of his own, doesn’t he?’ Gaynor said rather too casually, seating herself on the opposite side of the table.

‘Not exactly.’ Fern’s head was still bent over her work. ‘He lives in someone else’s world – a world where he doesn’t belong. That’s just the trouble.’