Читать книгу Prospero’s Children - Jan Siegel - Страница 8

II

The summer holidays had arrived before they found time to return to Yarrowdale. Robin was seeing a fair amount of Alison Redmond, apparently in the course of literary collaboration; but Fern did not perceive any reason for undue anxiety. Although they dined out together almost every week he never brought her home, and in his daughter’s experience serious intentions always involved getting on terms with the children. On her own terrain, she could demolish all invaders: her sweet, aloof smile quelled both patronage and gush, camaraderie wilted in the face of her perfect manners, domestic aspirants blenched at her competent management and delectable cuisine. As a child, she had used a cultivated artlessness to undermine overconfidence; when she grew older, she honed her conversational skills at the dinner table until she knew to a nicety how to wrong-foot her opponents and expose, as if by accident, pretension, bossiness, self-importance—even when such defects were not really there. Will, an indifferent ally, usually left her a clear field. Robin was the charming, helpless type of man who invariably attracted forceful women wanting to mould him to suit their own inclinations, an ambition that would only work as long as he was unaware of it. Once these plans had been revealed, resistance would set in, and Fern, who had been moulding him for years, knew she had won another unobtrusive skirmish. She wanted her father to marry again eventually, but only to someone who would make him comfortable, whose authority would be gentle, who would refrain from pushing him down roads he did not wish to travel. She had almost decided in favour of Abigail Markham, a thirtysomething Sloane currently employed by Robin’s publicity department in a low-key capacity, who combined a certain serenity of outlook with a pleasant scattiness over dress and social engagements. But Robin’s penchant for her company seemed to have abated under Alison’s influence. Fern, keeping a routine eye on him, trusted the friendship would not outlast the germination of the book.

Attending a party at the gallery with her father, she noticed Alison greeting him with an extra inch of smile and a sideways glitter of her pale eyes. She wore several clinging, drooping, fluttering garments of some vague shade between beige and taupe which echoed the dark fairness of her hair, and her overfull mouth was painted a deep red so that it blossomed like a rampant peony against the whiteness of her skin. There was a bizarre fascination in her sidelong gaze, the point-edged smile that never came close to laughter, the sinuous fingers that punctuated her every gesture, the rippling motion of the material that wrapped her body, as fluid and as neutral as water. And her strange, dull, endless hair, veined with hues of shadow, enfolding her like a cloak: Fern wondered what treatment had made it grow so long—too long, surely, for European locks—and what had leeched the colours of life from its waving masses. It might almost have provided her with a mantle of invisibility, effective by dusk and dark, hiding her from wary eyes as she stole abroad on some unspecified but nefarious business. ‘Nonsense,’ Fern scolded herself. ‘What is the matter with me? I’m seeing too many ghosts lately. This is the West End, this is an art gallery, this is a room full of people drinking cheap champagne and chattering about the decline of the image. There are no spectres here.’ In passing, she glanced at one of the champagne bottles. Long after, she knew that should have warned her, evidence rather than intuition: the champagne was not cheap. She had been attending and sometimes assisting at such parties since she was fourteen and she knew quite well that no normal person wastes good drink on a crowd.

‘And what do you think of the pictures tonight, Fernanda?’ The voice at her side caught her unawares. For the second time.

‘It’s a bit difficult to study them properly with so many people around,’ she said after a moment, mentally putting herself on guard. She had not noticed the pictures yet.

‘Of course,’ Javier Holt responded smoothly. ‘The problem with a private view is that it isn’t private and nobody gets to view anything.’ His face looked like a mask, she thought, a perfect mask of some seamless metal with topaz eyes and hair of spun steel. The focus of her apprehension shifted. At least Alison Redmond was a living hazard, whereas Javier Holt appeared dead, suavely, immaculately dead, and the spark that animated him might have come from elsewhere, controlled by a pressing of buttons, a turning of wheels.

‘You seemed very intent nonetheless,’ he went on. ‘If not the pictures, what were you studying?’

‘People,’ said Fern coolly. ‘You have an interesting selection here.’

He smiled automatically. ‘Anyone in particular?’ He obviously knew who had claimed her attention.

‘Alison,’ said Fern with a pose of candour, a hint of defiance.

‘Naturally. Your father seems very taken with her. She is a most unusual woman.’

‘She moves like water,’ Fern said, ‘like a twisting stream, all bright deceptive reflections, hidden currents, dangerous little eddies. She might be very shallow, she might be very deep. She’s much too unusual for my father.’

‘I am sure she knows that,’ Javier responded with that faint mockery in his tone.

Fern was not entirely reassured.

It was something of a relief to be leaving for Yorkshire. Fern’s two closest friends were going on holiday early and although she would miss London it was hot enough for the country to have its attractions. Robin might spend part of the week in the metropolis on business but long weekends at Dale House, rifling among the hotch-potch of Ned Capel’s collection, would provide both distance and distraction from urban perils. He evidently anticipated the visit with a brand of schoolboy pleasure which even exceeded Will’s. Fern found it more difficult to analyse her own emotions when she saw Yarrowdale again: there was no obvious surge of gladness, rather a feeling of acknowledgement, a falling-into-place of her life’s pattern, as if she had returned to somewhere she was meant to be after a careless and unscheduled absence. The grim façade of the house seemed to relax a little; recognition peered out of the empty windows. She went up to her room and, with a doubt bordering on fear, scanned the hillside for that strange-shaped boulder. It was there in its place, a silent Watcher, maintaining surveillance through all weathers, unmoving as the rock it resembled. But it is a rock, Fern reminded herself, afraid to find she was no longer afraid; it was never gone; I imagined that.

She slept undisturbed by birdcall or badger and in the morning, encouraged by a lightening breeze and a brightening sun, they walked the half mile or so to the coast. Yarrowdale was not one of the Dales, being situated on the edge of the moors between Scarborough and Whitby, where a series of steep valleys wind down to a rocky shore buffeted by the storms from the North Sea. That day, however, the sea was blue and tranquil, the waves tumbling gently onto the beach and melting into great fans of foam, while a coaxing wind seemed to take the fire out of the noonday heat. The Capels strolled along the wide sweep of beach and smelt the sea-smell and removed their shoes to paddle at the waves’ edge—‘The water’s freezing,’ said Fern, and ‘Got to be careful swimming,’ Robin added. ‘Mrs Wicklow’s right: currents are chancy round here.’ There were few people, no litter. Scavenging gulls skimmed the shoreline in vain: their lonely cries sounded harsh as screams and desolate as the ocean’s heart. Yet to Fern they seemed to be a summons to an unknown world, a growing-up unlike anything she had planned, where her mind and her experience would be broadened beyond the bounds of imagination.

* * *

On Monday Robin set off for London with a car full of paintings which would undoubtedly prove to be worth a fraction of his optimistic valuations, something that would in no way damage his hopes for the rest of Great-Cousin Ned’s jumble. Mrs Wicklow had agreed to assist with cooking and housekeeping and Gus Dinsdale’s wife had promised to drive Fern to Whitby for essential shopping. Will had started on cleaning the ship’s figurehead. As Mrs Wicklow had said, there was a sizeable section of ship attached. ‘See,’ Will told his sister, ‘she’s got a name. When I’ve got the rest of those barnacles off we should be able to read it. I wonder how old she is?’

‘This is really a job for a professional,’ Fern remarked.

‘We haven’t got a professional. Anyway, I’m being careful.’ He proceeded to notch a kitchen knife against a particularly stubborn crustacean. ‘She’s been on the sea-bed a while. She must have survived much rougher handling than anything she’s getting from me.’

‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Fern, abandoning her careful indifference to succumb to the lure of a mystery.

After about an hour of rather awkward chipping the name emerged, semi-obliterated but legible. Fern had known what it would be all along, with the strange prescience which comes from that region of the brain they say is never used, a zone of thought still unconscious and untabulated. Seawitch, ran the lettering. The carving did not resemble Alison, for all its flowing hair and parted lips: the improbable bosom was outthrust, the belly a sleek curve, the face as knowing as Dodona. Nonetheless, Fern was unsurprised. Her awareness was touched with an elusive familiarity, but whether from the future or the past she could not tell.

‘She’s wonderful,’ said Will. ‘Those tits look like nuclear warheads.’

‘You’re much too young to notice such things,’ his sister said loftily.

‘You’re just jealous,’ said Will.

That evening Mrs Wicklow left around five. Fern made omelettes and they ate in the kitchen listening to Will’s ghettoblaster pumping out the latest from the Pet Shop Boys. Even when Robin was with them, they never sat in the drawing room: it was always a degree colder than the rest of the house and the stone idol squatted there wrapped in its secret gloating like a diminutive Moloch. Fern did her best to keep the door closed, hindered by Mrs Wicklow’s penchant for opening both doors and windows at every opportunity, in order, so she said, to let in air. ‘There’s air in here already,’ Will had pointed out, ‘otherwise we wouldn’t be breathing.’ But Mrs Wicklow believed air had to be specially admitted.

The sky had clouded over and by the time they went to bed the night outside had grown very dark. ‘We ought to have candles,’ said Will, ‘guttering in the draught, making huge spidery shadows on the wall.’

‘Don’t talk about spiders,’ said Fern.

Slightly to her surprise, she fell asleep immediately, untroubled by nightmares.

She woke abruptly in the small hours to find herself sitting up in bed, intensely alert, her nerve-endings on stalks. The curtains were half drawn but the space between was merely a paler shade of black, barely discernible against the velvet dark of the room. There was no wind and the absolute quiet, without even a distant rumour of traffic, was something to which she had not yet become accustomed. The silence had a quality of tension about it, as if the night itself were holding its breath, waiting for a board to creak, a pin to drop, the warning screech of a bird. Fern’s pulse beat so hard that her whole body seemed to shake with it. And then came the snuffling, just as she had expected, horribly familiar and so loud it might have been directly below her window-sill. The rasping, stertorous breath of some creature that left never a print, an incorporeal hunter who had no existence except to scent its prey. The reluctance that held her back she recognised as fear, a fear that was not only inside her but all around her, a dread that was part of the room itself: she had to thrust it aside like a physical barrier. The floor made no sound beneath her tread; the window, thanks to Mrs Wicklow, was already ajar. She leaned out into the night.

There was something at the foot of the wall, something that was darker than the surrounding darkness, a clot of shadow whose actual shape was impossible to make out. Not a badger: the white bands on its mask would have been visible at that range. Besides, although she had no idea how large a badger was supposed to be she was sure this must be larger, larger than a fox, larger than a sheepdog. It moved to and fro, to and fro, as if worrying at the wall; then suddenly it stopped, and the sniffing was accompanied by a furious scrabbling, the unmistakable sound of paws burrowing frenziedly in the soil, as though seeking to unearth the very foundations of the house. Afterwards, Fern knew she must have made some slight noise to betray her presence. The thing below her froze, and lifted its head. She saw neither form nor feature, only the eyes, slanting ovoids filled with a glow that mirrored nothing around them, a livid flame that came only from within. The terror that rushed over her was beyond all reason, a wild, mindless force not pushing her back but pulling her down, down towards the ground and the waiting eyes. With a vast effort of will she wrenched herself free—and then she was back in her room, latching the window with unsteady fingers, and the silence outside was unbroken, and a board creaked in welcome as she stumbled across to her bed. She thought of going to her brother’s room to see if he was awake and what he had heard, but a great tiredness overwhelmed her and she decided it could wait till morning. Now she needed to sleep…and sleep…and by daylight the horror would be a matter for nightmare and the flower-bed would be pocked with the tracks of some mongrel stray.

But it rained before dawn, and any prints there might have been were washed away.

Fern went to the window as soon as she got up, and there was Will searching the ground, still in his pyjamas and slippers: the latter would be soaked through. ‘Come in and get dressed,’ she called. And: ‘Have you found anything?’

‘No. The rain was too heavy.’ His upturned face was curiously solemn despite a lavish smudge of dirt. ‘You heard it too?’

‘Yes. Come on in.’

He disappeared through the back door and Fern’s gaze lifted automatically to the path straddling the hillside. In the grey morning light there could be no mistaking what she saw. The Watcher had gone.

‘It wasn’t a badger,’ said Fern over breakfast. ‘There were no markings. It was big, and dark: that’s all I could see.’ She didn’t want to mention the reasonless terror that had tried to drag her from the window. Fern disliked both terror and unreason.

‘A dog?’ Will suggested.

‘Maybe.’

‘A wolf?’

‘There aren’t any wolves left in Britain.’

‘It could have escaped from a zoo,’ Will theorised, ‘only…’

‘Why would it want to get into the house? An escaped wolf would be out on the moors killing sheep—supposing it was a wolf, which I doubt. Anyway, I don’t think there are any zoos near here,’

There was a short pause filled with the crunching of cereal. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible,’ Will pronounced eventually, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was a great believer in the supernatural. And that’s what we’re left with. There’s something strange going on, something to do with this house. I thought so all along. So did you really, only you’re so grownup and boring that you won’t let yourself believe in anything any more. Remind me not to grow up if that’s how it takes you. Did you know that they’ve conducted experiments in telekinesis in the laboratory? Did you know that there are alternative universes round every corner? Did you know—’

‘Shut up,’ said Fern. ‘I’m not boring, just sceptical. That’s healthy.’ And: ‘Did you know…did you know there’s a boulder on the hill behind the garden that’s shaped like a seated man, and sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t? It’s been there all weekend—always in the same place—and this morning it was gone. How’s that for a did-you-know?’

‘Perhaps it is a man,’ Will said uncertainly, baffled by the introduction of a new element in the situation. ‘Perhaps it’s a tramp.’

‘It’s a rock,’ said Fern. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. It sits there for days, in all kinds of weather, like a rock is supposed to. I think it’s watching us.’

‘Rocks don’t watch,’ Will pointed out.

‘This one does.’

‘It all centres on the house,’ Will reiterated. ‘It could be something to do with the stuff Great-Cousin Ned picked up on his travels. Maybe there’s a magic talisman hidden in the attic, or an amulet, or the green eye of the little yellow god, or—what about that chest? It must be in there—whatever it is.’

‘Too obvious.’

‘Well, we ought to look. The key should be around somewhere.’

An arrested expression appeared on Fern’s face. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant,’ she said slowly, ‘but Mrs Wicklow said there was a woman here asking about keys, before Great-Cousin Ned died. She was in the antiques business.’

‘She must have known about the chest.’

‘How?’

They spent the morning rooting among the jumble in the attic, finding neither talisman nor key but an assortment of items which Will at least considered promising, including an evil-looking curved knife, a devil-mask which was probably African, a hookah happily empty of opium, and an antiquated map of the Indian sub-continent with elephants, tigers, maharajahs and palaces drawn in where appropriate. Also a great deal of dust and several spiders, the largest and leggiest of which sent Fern into retreat, claiming it was time she checked out the study. Unfortunately, the most interesting feature of Ned Capel’s sanctum was a mahogany writing desk the top of which proved to be locked and, like the chest, keyless. ‘Damn,’ said Fern, who had been brought up to moderate her language. ‘I bet all the keys are in one place. The question is where.’ Her sweat-shirt, she noticed, had acquired several dust-smears as a result of her foraging, and she went to her room to change it. She had no intention of returning to the attic that day.

A routine glance out of the window showed her a sky of gunmetal grey and rain blowing in waves across the bleak landscape. Her gaze shifted—then switched back again. Seconds later she was running down the stairs, kicking off her sandals at the bottom with uncharacteristic carelessness. In the hall, she plunged her feet into an old pair of galoshes, snatched Robin’s Barbour from the peg, and crammed on her head a shapeless waterproof hat which had formerly belonged to Ned Capel. Then she ran out of the back door and through the garden to the gate. The latch was stiff from infrequent use and the wood had swollen in the wet: it took a hard thrust of her shoulder to open it. The oversized boots slopped around her feet as she scrambled up the path. The wind swept across the hillside unhindered. And then she was standing in front of him with the water dripping off her hat-brim and her unfastened jacket letting the rain soak through her sweat-shirt. He no longer resembled a boulder, though there was something rock-like about his absolute stillness and the patience it implied. He wore a loose, bulky garment with a pointed hood overhanging his face: the material was heavy and laminated with long weathering, its brindled hues at once earth-coloured and stone-coloured, moss-patched and grass-grimed. Under the hood she saw a countenance as battered as the coat, with sparse flesh on strong bones and wind-worn, sun-leathered skin gathered into wrinkles about the mouth and eyes, some of them for laughter, some for thought, many for grimness and sorrow. But it was the eyes themselves which held her: they were green and gold and brown like a woodland spring and they sparkled brighter than the rain, so bright that they seemed to pierce the walls of her mind and see into her very soul. And after the first shocked recoil her soul opened in response, and her life changed forever. It was as if the personality she had made for herself, matter-of-fact, positive, conscientiously hidebound, began to peel away like a chrysalis and a different Fernanda, wet-winged and shy, poked a tentative antenna into the unfamiliar air. In that moment she realised that she did not know herself, she never had, and all her certainties had been merely the pretence of a child afraid of maturity; but ignorance did not frighten her now, for he knew who she was, and what she was, and in that knowing she could be at ease. She said ‘Hello’, and he said ‘Hello’, and their greeting dissolved the walls of her little world, and let in the unimaginable from Outside.

‘You took your time.’ the Watcher went on. He studied her thoughtfully, seeing a girl with a raindrop on her nose—a very young girl—small for her age, her face heart-shaped, her features delineated with the precision and clarity of a pen-and-ink drawing. The wind slipped under her hat-brim, tugging it back from her forehead, showing hair that was leaf-brown and close-cut, the would-be fringe dividing obstinately into a widow’s peak above her brow. Her eyes were wide and wide-set, their grey veined with celadon, and even in that instant of her mind’s opening he glimpsed depths that were incalculable, an intelligence that would always be wary. He had made her trust him, an elementary manoeuvre, but she would not hesitate to return to doubt if—and when—he let her down.

‘You looked like a rock,’ she said accusingly.

‘It’s useful,’ he replied. ‘Nobody wonders what you’re up to, if you’re a rock. No questions, no trouble. There’s nothing as unremarkable as a rock.’

‘It isn’t possible,’ said Fern, but the conviction was gone from her voice. ‘I saw the rock.’

‘Appearances can deceive,’ the Watcher said. ‘You see many things which are not there. A mirage, a reflection, a star that died thousands of years ago. You should trust your instinct, not your eyes. You knew me long before today.’

Fern did not attempt to answer that. ‘You’ve been spying on us.’

‘Observing,’ he corrected gently. ‘Fortunately, I am still an observant man, whatever else I may have lost. I seem to have spent centuries just watching.’

She was not entirely sure he was exaggerating. ‘That’s how I thought of you,’ she said. ‘The Watcher.’

‘It’s appropriate,’ he said. ‘I have grown very tired of it, over the years. There are too many things that need watching, and far too few of us to keep watch. Have you found it yet?’

‘Found what?’

‘What you are looking for.’

‘I don’t know what I’m looking for,’ Fern pointed out.

‘A profound philosophical statement. Not many people do, and if they did, it would be far worse. To find what you seek would be an anticlimax, to fail, a tragedy. But I am talking concepts, which is beside the point. Here, there is clearly something specific to be found. There has been a certain amount of attention focused on this house for some time: callers who were not what they seemed, prowlers by night, some human, some less so. Which reminds me, next time you hear noises in the dark, curb your curiosity. It would be safer.’

‘You saw it,’ Fern said. ‘That creature last night. What was it?’

‘Something which should not have been there. Whoever sent it made a thoroughly unsuitable choice of instrument. Don’t worry too much: even if it finds an opening, it can’t come in, not without being invited. The ancient law still stands. Ignore it and it will go away.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No. It would be rash to be too sure. But this thing was ill-chosen for our hunt: the sender may well have selected it simply to show that he—or she—has the power to summon such beings.’ He rubbed his finger along the crooked bridge of his nose in a gesture of reflection. ‘His next move should be more practical. I hope.’

‘Whose next move?’ Fern demanded.

‘I don’t know. I know very little right now. There are so many possibilities. It could be someone working alone, seeking self-aggrandisement, personal power—alas, we all want those. It could be an agent or emissary. It depends what we’re looking for. There are certain indications.’ His eyes seemed to dim and then brighten again, their light fluctuating with the vagaries of memory. ‘Something was lost, long, long ago, before the beginnings of history: few remain who would recognise it, fewer still who would know the secret of its use. When it was recovered the recipient thought it an object of no value, the symbol of a cheat; his family kept it as they would keep a grudge, passing it on with legend and moral attached, until a young bride traded it to a tinker for a knot of ribbons. He stole a kiss as well, which was not part of the bargain; they said she looked coldly on her husband ever after. The tinker took his purchase to a collector of such things, sensing its mystery if not its power, a backstreet alchemist one eighth sorcerer, seven-eighths charlatan. They studied it, he and his apprentice, scanning the smoke for visions and peering into crystal balls, learning the sort of things that you learn from staring at smoke and Venetian glassware. The alchemist also dealt in love potions and poisons—not very successfully: his potions were over-optimistic and his poisons half-hearted. Unfortunately, a dissatisfied client among the warring nobility decided to take his revenge: the alchemist was beaten senseless, his lodgings ransacked, his possessions commandeered. The object was lost again, and never found.’ He paused, sighed, as indifferent to rain and wind as the rock he had chosen to imitate. Fern was reminded of a venerable hippy, beyond the reach of marijuana or hallucinogen, looking back with cold eyes on the psychedelic phantoms he once pursued. She was damp and chilled; but she did not move. ‘We searched for it,’ he went on, ‘long after, when we learnt its importance, but it was too late. The feuding families of that time had hidden their treasures so efficiently that even their descendants could not find them. They left clues, and ciphers, but the clues were mislaid and the ciphers indecipherable. The trail had vanished. And then, about twenty years ago, a famous chalice was sold at auction—one that had gone missing during the relevant period. Apparently it had been retrieved in the last great war when a bomb demolished the wall concealing a secret vault. I could not trace the minor items which might have been found with it, but I imagine a traveller collecting flotsam could well have bought one of them for a few pounds from a market stall. It seems a likely theory.’

‘Great-Cousin Ned,’ Fern said. ‘And then? How did you find him?’

‘He was found: I don’t know how. A chance meeting; a spell—it doesn’t matter. The interest of others drew me. This thing could be here—may be here—if it is, you must get to it first.’

‘I must?’

He ignored the interruption. ‘In the wrong hands, it could be put to the wrong use. What would happen I’m not sure—and I don’t want to find out. I’ve been watching the investigations very carefully: they—whoever they are—know hardly more than we do. So far. You have to stay ahead of them. You have to find it.’

‘What is it?’

The answer came slowly, softly, as if the Watcher feared to be overheard, there on the empty hillside without even a bird in sight. ‘A key,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you guess? It’s a key.’

‘Of course,’ said Fern. ‘We’ve been looking for the keys to open the writing desk and the chest in the attic, when all the time…it was the keys themselves which mattered.’

‘Just one key. It’ll be smaller than the others, made of stone or something that looks like stone. You’ll know it when you see it. Hide it from everyone.’

‘And then…I give it to you.’ The doubt crept back, darkening her mind. ‘And then what? What will you do with it?’

For the first time he smiled, an unexpectedly impish smile which dug punctuation marks in his cheeks and buckled the lines round his eyes. ‘That’s the question, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ve been at this search for decades—centuries—and when I find it, if I find it, I won’t even know what to do. It could prove the ultimate jest—if we get the chance to laugh.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked, suddenly aware that she was very wet, and cold, and Mrs Wicklow was calling her in to lunch, and she was standing on a barren slope talking to a rock.

‘Who am I?’ The mischief faded; what was left of his smile grew ghostly. ‘That is a short question with a long answer, and we haven’t the leisure now. Who do you think I am?’

Fern shrugged, striving to sound flippant. ‘A Watcher—a wizard—a trickster—a tramp.’

‘Mainly just a tramp. You can call me Ragginbone, if you need a name. They called me that a long while back, when all this—’ he indicated his dilapidated garb ‘—was merely a disguise. Now, it’s my only self. And how should I call you?’

‘Fernanda,’ she said. ‘Fern will do. I thought you would know that already.’ There was a shade of disappointment in her tone.

‘I read your mind, not your birth certificate,’ he retorted. ‘You’d better go now, Fernanda. Your lunch is waiting, and you should change into dry clothes. I’ll be here tomorrow. Or the next day. Remember: find the key. You must…find the key…’

The wind snatched at her hat and as she turned to recapture it the rain seemed to swirl around her, blurring the landscape, and when she looked back up the path there was only a rock—she could see it was a rock—shaped like a seated man with his hood pulled forward over his face. She ran on down the hill towards the house.

For the time being, Fern said nothing to Will about her encounter with Ragginbone. It was not that she expected disbelief: on the contrary, Will was only too prone to believe in the improbable or even the impossible, while dismissing probabilities as too dull to merit his faith. But Fern needed a while to assimilate her own reactions and come to terms with what she had learned. In any case Will, she told herself, was still very young, obviously imprudent, easily carried away by overenthusiasm; oblivious to real danger, he would see this shadowy world into which they had strayed as merely an adventurous game. And she was sure there was danger, lying in wait, a little way ahead of her: she could sense it even as the hunter senses the tiger in the thicket.

Will had struck up an unlikely friendship with the vicar and over the next few days, when not rummaging in the attic, he accompanied Gus on leisurely rambles up on the moors, identifying wildlife and listening to local folklore. Fern declined to go with them, beginning a methodical search for keys, turning out drawers and emptying cupboards to no avail. ‘He’ll have put them in a safe place,’ opined Mrs Wicklow. Fern, who had done that herself on occasion, was not encouraged. She wanted another talk with Ragginbone but the hillside was bare again, leaving her oddly bereft, and it was small consolation that no snuffling disturbed her slumber. The most disquieting incident was when the black-visored motorcyclist passed her and Will on the road one evening, cutting in so close that they had to leap for the verge. But this, surely, could only be an act of mindless bravado, a young tough out to terrify and impress; it could have no connection with the mystery of Dale House.

On Friday morning, Robin telephoned. There was a lot of background noise and although Fern could hear him he didn’t seem to be able to hear her very clearly. He said he was at the airport, about to emplane for New York: an urgent business trip, Alison Redmond had given him some contacts, an American historian working on witch-trials, all very exciting. He might be gone some time. ‘But, Daddy—!’ Anyway, she wasn’t to worry. He’d arranged everything. Alison would come and stay with them, take care of things, help fix up the house: she had a real flair for interior design. He knew Fern would get on with her. (Robin always knew Fern would get on with his various girlfriends.) Over the phone she heard the tuneless tinkle that precedes an announcement over the tannoy. ‘Must go, darling. I’m awfully late—’ and then the line went dead and Fern was left clutching a silent receiver, a pale anger tightening her face. Gradually, it drained away, to be replaced by bewilderment. Accustomed as she was to her father’s erratic behaviour, this level of impetuosity appeared extreme. ‘I detect Ms Redmond’s Machiavellian hand behind the whole business,’ she declared over lunch, putting Will and Mrs Wicklow in the picture. ‘What I don’t understand, is what she’s after.’

‘Happen she’s looking for a husband,’ said Mrs Wicklow sapiently. Her dourness had long been revealed as purely external and she had evidently ranged herself on the side of the young Capels.

‘Well, naturally,’ said Fern. ‘That was what I assumed from the start. I’ve never had any problems dealing with that kind of thing.’

‘Cunning little lass, isn’t she?’ Mrs Wicklow almost grinned.

‘But,’ Fern persisted, ‘if it’s Daddy she wants, why send him to America? It’s almost as if—’ She stopped, closing her mouth on the unspoken words. It’s almost as if she were interested in this house. It was not cold in the kitchen but Fern felt a sudden chill.

‘What’s she like?’ Will asked. ‘I haven’t met her, have I?’

Fern shook her head. ‘She’s clever,’ she said. ‘I think. I don’t really know. She has a lean and hungry look, like Cassius in Julius Caesar. But…there’s something there you can’t catch hold of, something fluid. She can look all bright and glittering and slippery, like water, and yet you always feel there’s a hardness underneath. I can’t explain it very well. See for yourself.’

‘Is she pretty?’

‘Sometimes,’ Fern admitted dubiously. ‘She can exude a kind of shimmering fascination one moment, and the next she’s just a thin ugly woman with a big mouth. It’s not looks: it’s all in her manner.’

‘Those are t’ ones you have to watch out for,’ said Mrs Wicklow.

‘You’ll take care of it,’ said Will. ‘You always do.’

In the afternoon Fern, annoyed with herself for not having thought of it earlier, rang the solicitors to enquire if they had the rest of Mr Capel’s keys. Her brainwave, however, failed to bring results; a man with an elderly voice suggested that she search in drawers, cupboards, and so on. ‘I already have,’ said Fern.

‘He’ll have put them in a safe place, then,’ said the solicitor comfortably.

‘I’ve been afraid of that,’ said Fern.

She tried vainly to stop herself looking out of the window every few minutes; Ragginbone’s continued absence might be irrelevant, but it provided an extra irritant. At tea, Will startled her by remarking: ‘That rock’s gone again.’

‘Which rock?’ The question was a reflex.

‘The one that looks like a man. It’s been gone for several days now.’

You’re imagining things, ‘said Fern.’ Forget it.’ She was still reluctant to talk about the Watcher.

Will studied his sister with limpid detachment. ‘This woman who’s coming here,’ he said, ‘do you suppose she could be part of it?’

‘How could she?’ said Fern, without pretending to misunderstand.

‘I don’t know,’ said Will, ‘but I can see you thinking.’

Alison Redmond arrived later that day, driving a Range Rover loaded with paintings, samples of carpet and furnishing fabrics, several cardboard boxes taped shut and three or four items of Gucci luggage. She was wearing her point-edged smile and a passing flicker of sunshine found a few strands of colour in her dim hair. She greeted the Capels with a diffidence designed to undermine hostility, apologised to Mrs Wicklow for any possible inconvenience, and demanded instantly to be taken over the house, praising its atmosphere and period discomforts. She did not say ‘I do so hope we’re all going to be friends’, nor scatter kisses in their vicinity: her gestures were airy, tenuous, almost filmy, her fingertips would flutter along an arm, her hair brush against a neighbouring body, and Fern knew it was paranoia that made her fancy these feather-touches contaminated her. Alison managed to adore everything without quite crossing the line into effusion, drawing Will out on his attic researches so skilfully that his sister grew anxious, throwing her arm around him with unaccustomed affection and digging her nails into his shoulder to silence him. The only thing that checked Alison’s flow, just for a moment, was the main drawing room. She hesitated on the threshold, glancing round as though something were missing, her smile blurring; and then she seemed to regain her self-command, and the charm was back in play. Afterwards, pondering that temporary glitch in her manner, an explanation occurred to Fern, but she discarded it as too far-fetched. Alison had never been in that room before. She could not possibly be disconcerted because the idol had been moved.

‘I’ll help you bring your things in,’ Will offered, clearly reserving judgement.

Alison, just grateful enough and not too grateful, passed him a valise and a book of carpet patterns and began hefting the boxes herself. ‘Most of the pictures can stay in the car,’ she said. ‘One of our artists lives in York: I picked up a load of stuff on my way here to take back on Monday. There are just a couple of mine I’d like to have in my room; I never go anywhere without my own pictures.’ The sweep of her smile deprecated affectation. ‘Some people won’t travel without a particular cushion, or a bag, or an item of jewellery. With me I’m afraid it’s paintings. It’s disastrous on planes: it makes my baggage so heavy.’

Fern went to assist her, largely out of curiosity. The paintings in question were propped up against the bumper, shrouded in a protective cloth. Alison vanished indoors and Fern lifted the material to steal a glance at the topmost canvas. She had been expecting an abstract but this work was representational, though it struck her as strangely distorted, not for effect but because of some clumsiness on the part of the artist. It showed a horse’s head peering over a stable door, a conventional enough subject, but there were bars impeding it and an odd discoloration creeping in from the borders of the image like mould. The horse’s mane was unnaturally long and tangled and its forehead seemed somehow misshapen, as though its creator had made no real effort for verisimilitude, yet its eyes were intensely alive, heart-breakingly real, dark wild eyes gazing out at Fern with a mixture of pleading and defiance. Being in London most of the time Fern had had few opportunities to ride, but she loved horses and still dreamed of having the chance to learn. She found herself reaching out to touch the canvas, her hand going instinctively to the lock on the stable door; the paint felt rough and hard, like metal, like rust. ‘Leave it!’ The voice behind her was Alison’s, almost unrecognisable in its abrupt alteration.

Fern jumped. Her hand dropped; the cloth slipped back into place. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said with exquisite politeness. ‘I wasn’t aware the pictures were private.’

For a second, she thought Alison was discomfited; then both curtness and awkwardness melted away and a thin veil of warmth slid over her face, leaving it as before. ‘The paintings are old,’ she explained, ‘and very fragile. If you touch the paint you could damage them. I’m keeping them for restoration work: my own personal project. As a matter of fact, I think that whole scene has been applied on top of something else. The layers have to be removed very carefully. As you saw, I’ve only just started.’ The area that looks like mould, Fern thought, only half satisfied. ‘A lot of stolen masterpieces get painted over to make them easier to hide or transport. I keep hoping I’m going to come across something special.’

She carried the pictures upstairs herself. They had installed her, by common consensus, on the top floor—‘Out of the way,’ said Will—in a room that felt chill and gloomy from long vacancy. Alison, however, professed herself delighted with the crooked ceiling, the balding velvet of cushion and curtain, the smoky mirror above the mantle. ‘I trust you won’t think me obsessive,’ she said, ‘but if I might just have the key? I have this thing about privacy. My own space is vital to me—I can’t help it, it’s just how I am. I grew up sharing with three sisters: I expect that’s how it started.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fern blandly. ‘We only have the house keys. Great-Cousin Ned seems to have put all the others in a safe place.’

‘We’ve looked everywhere,’ Will added. ‘At least, Fern has.’

Watching Alison, Fern was convinced there was another flicker in her expression, a momentary freezing-over. ‘I’d be obliged,’ she said, ‘if you didn’t come into my room when I’m not here. I’m sure you understand.’

Do I? thought Fern.

She and Will went back downstairs, leaving Alison to unpack.

‘She’s very nice,’ said Will, ‘if you like niceness. It’s hard to tell how sincere she is. She seems to be working at it—but if she’s keen on Dad she would, wouldn’t she?’

‘The niceness is all on the surface,’ declared Fern. ‘All sparkle, no substance. It’s called charm.’

‘Like tinsel,’ said Will, ‘on a shoddy Christmas tree. I don’t think I trust her. I haven’t quite made up my mind.’

‘I have,’ said his sister. ‘You don’t.’

In the hall, Mrs Wicklow was putting on her coat. ‘I’ll be off now,’ she said. ‘There’s a pie in t’ oven. I daresay Madam won’t eat it, she’s too skinny to eat pie: probably lives off brown rice and that muesli. Still, I know you two appreciate my cooking.’

‘We do,’ Will concurred warmly.

‘Queer thing about her,’ she added, glancing up in the direction of Alison’s room. ‘Odd fancies you do get sometimes.’

‘What fancy?’ asked Fern.

‘Miss Redmond comes from London: that’s what you said?’

Fern nodded. ‘She works in an art gallery in the West End.’

‘There was a young woman over from Guisborough, three…four months before t’ Captain died. Happen I mentioned it. Something to do with antiques. I didn’t get a good look at her, of course, and she didn’t have all that hair—I think she had a kind of bob, just about shoulder-length—but I could swear it was t’ same woman. Heard her, I did, chattering away to t’ Captain, sweet as sugar. She didn’t notice me, mind: she’s t’ sort who sees them as interest her and doesn’t bother to look at t’ rest of us. I’d have bet five pounds it was your Miss Redmond.’ She gave a brisk shake, as if throwing off a cobweb. ‘Must be my fancy. Still, you take care. Third house from end of t’ village if you need me.’

‘Thanks,’ said Fern, smiling, making light of the matter. But the smile vanished with Mrs Wicklow and she went to check on the pie with a sombre face.

Dinner was a polite meal. Alison kept the conversation going by discussing her ideas for the house. ‘I think we could do something really exciting with that barn,’ she said, having duly admired the Seawitch and her current residence. ‘Your father’s very keen to have my advice. Hell be calling from the States in a day or two: I’m going to ask him if I can make a start. I have a friend in the building trade who specialises in these sort of commissions. I thought I’d get him up here to give us an estimate. Of course, we must take care of that wonderful boat. It should be all right outside for the time being, if we cover it in tarpaulins. After all, it is supposed to be summer, even if it hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet.’

‘We like the Yorkshire summer,’ Will said. ‘It’s bracing.’

Fern sucked in her cheeks to suppress a smile. Will had never been noted for appreciating a bracing climate. ‘We only need to tidy the place up before putting it on the market,’ she pointed out. ‘Daddy doesn’t want to spend any money on it.’

‘It would be a good investment,’ Alison insisted. ‘Convert the barn and you can sell two properties instead of one. I’ll discuss it with Robin when he calls.’

The inference was unmistakable: Fern was a child, it was none of her business, financial matters were beyond the zone of her responsibility. The hairs bristled on her nape; her small face set in lines that might have been etched in steel. But for the moment there was little she could do: final authority rested officially with her father, and while he was in America it would be difficult for her to counteract Alison’s influence. She had a suspicion the telephone would not lend itself to an assertion of filial control. She was conscious of a frustration that bordered on panic, but she fought it down.

‘Delicious pie,’ Alison said, pushing the pastry to the side of her plate.

They went to bed early. Inevitably, Fern lay sleepless for an hour or more before drifting into an uneasy doze. Suppressed anxieties surfaced as garbled dreams: she was at a private view in New York trying to reach her father who was on the far side of the room, but a huge crowd of people impeded her, and her father saw her, and waved and smiled as if there was nothing wrong at all. He was talking to a woman who had to be Alison Redmond, but when she turned round it was a stranger, and Alison was right next to Fern, wearing a dress that rippled like water, and her hair rippled as she moved, so you could not tell where the hair ended and the dress began. ‘Come,’ she said, laying a long-fingered hand on Fern’s shoulder, and there was Javier Holt, standing beside the etching of the Lost City, and the door was open, and the streets unravelled below her, and the drums were beating in the temple, and she knew she must not cross the threshold, but she couldn’t remember why. She awoke from a jumble of colour and incident more vivid than life, but recollection faded even as she tried to hold onto it, and there was only her heart’s pounding and a disproportionate sense of loss. The night-noises that were growing familiar came to her ears: the endless sough of the wind; sudden and startling, the screech of a bird. She was floating back towards sleep when the snuffling began.

Despite the fear that seemed to invade the very air around her she felt a flicker of indignation. She cultivated it, gritting her teeth, smothering cowardice, not forgetting but rejecting Ragginbone’s advice. This was her place, her home, if only temporarily, and no intruder, canine or feline, mongrel or monster, had the right to terrorise her here. She had not formed any specific plan for driving it off but she was determined at least to see it, to face it down, to prove to herself once and for all that it was merely a stray dog, half savage maybe but solid, flesh and blood and smell, and no bodiless hunter from a dimension of shadows. She sat up, picking up the torch which she now kept beside her bed. She thought she had closed the window but it had to be open: the snuffling sounded so loud and near. And then she froze. The noise wasn’t coming from under her window. It was outside her door.

She sat absolutely still, all resolution forgotten. It can’t come in, Ragginbone had said, but it was in. In the house, in the passage; she could hear it scraping at the floorboards, rucking the worn drugget. Her thought stopped, her limbs seemed to petrify, but she could not control the violence of her pulse: it must be audible even through the barrier of the walls. The door was not locked: something which had no hand to grasp rattled at the knob. For a few seconds, Fern ceased to breathe.

It moved on. She heard the gentle pad-pad of stealthy paws, receding down the corridor, the guttural hiss of hoarse panting. When the sounds had died away she sat for what seemed like hours, waiting and listening. The thudding of her pulse did not abate. Gradually, the tension in the air around her appeared to diminish: the house settled into a nervous quietude. Fern got out of bed so cautiously the duvet barely rustled, feeling her way to the door without switching on the torch. It took an effort of courage that made her sweat to turn the handle and peer into the passageway. Her vision was well-adjusted to the darkness and for an instant she thought she saw something, not a black animal shape with glowing orbs but something much smaller, furtive, skulking in a corner by the end window, shrinking into invisibility even as she caught its eye. Her heart leaped into her mouth—but whatever it was, it had gone. The corridor was empty. She could sense its emptiness. She groped her way along the wall to Will’s room and entered without knocking.

‘Who is it?’ He was awake.

‘Me. Shush.’ She closed the door carefully, switched on the torch. ‘I don’t want to make too much light. Move your legs: I’ll sit on the bed.’

‘Did you hear it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It was inside. How could it be inside? Did we leave a door open?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Fern said. They were talking in whispers and the torch was on the table; little light reached their faces. She found she was holding his hand for mutual reassurance, something He would never have allowed if he could see it. ‘It can’t come in unless invited. That’s the ancient law.’

‘What law? How do you know?’

‘Never mind. I just do.’

‘Laws can be broken.’ Will sounded sceptical.

‘Maybe.’ Ragginbone, after all, had not been sure. ‘Maybe not.’ She glanced upwards towards Alison’s room; Will saw the whites of her eyes gleam, followed her gaze.

‘You think she—?’

‘It’s too much of a coincidence. The day she arrives, it comes inside. She invited it in. She must have done.’

‘What are we going to do?’

‘There’s more,’ she persisted, adhering to her train of thought. ‘There was something in the corridor when I came out of my room—something else, I mean. It was quite small and it vanished very quickly but there was definitely something there.’

‘It’s too much,’ Will said. ‘Alison Redmond and the Sniffer and the Seawitch and the chest and the rock that isn’t there and the missing treasure…and now this. Whatever it was. It’s too much. I can’t cope. Do you think…do you think we should try to tell Dad?’ She knew from the note in his voice even more than his words that he was struggling not to betray the level of his terror. Despite her own fears, she was comforted to feel herself the stronger. If she could only be strong enough.

‘Pointless,’ she said. ‘For one thing, there’s a limit to what you can say over the phone. For another, what would we tell him? That we heard some unknown creature sniffing inside the house and we can’t find the keys to the treasure chest and we think his girlfriend could be a witch? He’d probably assume we were both on drugs—or raving. And even if he did come home, there’s nothing he can do. Alison’s a lot smarter than he is. We’ll have to handle it ourselves.’

Will’s soft gasp might have been sudden laughter. ‘You’ve dealt with all Daddy’s girlfriends to date,’ he said.

‘This might be a bit more difficult,’ Fern admitted.

There was a short pause. She reached for the torch but did not move from the bed. ‘I think you ought to stay here for the rest of tonight,’ Will said with an air of selfless chivalry which deceived neither of them. ‘We’ll be safer together.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Move over.’

The bed was large but they curled up, back to back, each warmed by the other’s nearness, falling swiftly and unexpectedly into sleep.