Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  She was cold and there was ice down her back. She hadn’t thought about the bearded man for a long time. She had forgotten him almost entirely. Yet now the disgust of his presence crept back in such detail and I knew there was no mistake. I didn’t even know his name, but it was the same man.

  We all moved back from the window. Now unable to see, we heard the shuffle of someone dismounting slowly and coming towards us. The knock on the door was slow and deliberate and the door frame shook. We were standing in the hall now, scared to breathe, staring at each other.

  A harsh voice, muffled within the invisibility of the forest outside, said, “Where is the boy, child of de Vrais? Which one of you is his son?” I recognised the voice. We remained silent, mouths open, frightened and confused. “I bring you back one of your own,” said the voice. “I will give this one to you and in exchange you will give me de Vrais’ child, the son of Vespasian.”

  Stephen looked around, wild eyed. “If we can get Richard back –”

  “Hush,” I whispered. “It’s a trick. Poor Richard’s dead.”

  “Vespasian hasn’t got a son,” mumbled Gerald. “It’s a mistake.”

  “Come out and face me,” said the voice from beyond the door; a sour, sombre voice, slow and unpleasant. “See what I have brought you.”

  Still we didn’t answer. There was another echoing thud on the door, so that it shook but it did not open. The figure remained outside but another noise sounded like the dropping of a weight on the doorstep.

  The night sounds began to rustle into the growing gloom. The owl shifted from her hole in the oak tree and hooted softly before flying off into the darkness. The wind shuffled low in the leaves. The scamper of small animals was reassuringly familiar. The bats, squeaking like tiny birds, began to leave the rafters of our main outbuilding where once we had kept the horse. Our ducks and chickens slept under their wings and behind doors locked against weasel and fox. We also stood behind locked doors, but it wasn’t the locks that kept our troubling visitor out, it was the herbs woven and spell bound.

  I understood nothing of the magic that now poured black around me. My books had not prepared me for this and Tilda knew only superstition and fear. We stood in the hall and listened as the footsteps faded, retreating from our door step. Then we heard the horse ride away. “So quickly? So easily?”

  We ran into the kitchen again, a flurry of pushing children, rushing to the window. We watched the horse become part of the distant gloom under the trees.

  “Why would someone come all this way, and then go off with nothing? Why wouldn’t he try harder? He could break the door down, couldn’t he?”

  “It’s a trick,” I said. “He hasn’t gone far. He can’t break through the door, it’s protected by the magic and herbs Vespasian told us about. But the old man will stay out there, waiting until we go outside.”

  “We have to open the door,” said Walter. “We have to see if it’s Richard’s body on the door step.”

  “Not until the morning,” I said. “Poor sweet Richard can’t be helped now. We can bury him then.”

  Hugh glared at me and shook his head angrily. “What if Richard’s still alive? Maybe just barely alive? But we leave him there in the cold all night to die and get eaten by wolves? We can’t do that.”

  “Tilda’s right. Richard’s dead,” whispered Stephen.

  But we couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t ready yet to cry over Richard and I knew we could no longer help him. I was haunted by the rider’s words. He had spoken of Vespasian’s son. None of us believed Vespasian had a child, and if he did, it wasn’t one of us. But the dark rider had been so sure. We knew the danger must be terrible but none of us understood what it might be and that made it more dangerous.

  “I’m going out to get the body,” said Gerald. “At least see if it’s Richard and if he’s dead. If he’s still breathing – it would be like killing him myself –”

  “You’re the last one should go,” I said at once. “Vespasian was so adamant at the end about you. You had to share his bed. You couldn’t go to the market. It was you he kept protecting.”

  “All the more reason for me to do something to help now,” insisted Gerald. “I was sick of being treated like a baby. Perhaps it was because I was the first child Vespasian took in, you know. I was just little then, before any of the rest of you. Perhaps he had this secret affection, well – I don’t know. But I’m not a child anymore.”

  Something clicked in my head, but not in Tilda’s. “Alright. Perhaps. So he protected you the most because you’re the favourite. Me because I’m a girl. And maybe Stephen because he’s the youngest. Not that he ever seemed the sort of man to be sentimental like that, and when he was angry he got just as angry with Gerald.”

  But Tilda was naive. I knew something terrible had to happen. In a way it didn’t matter. After all, it was already so far gone into the past. Tragedies from a thousand years ago. How do you care about people already dead a thousand years? Even when you are one of them?

  So Gerald went slowly back into the big hall and opened the door. The hand took him at once.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I set out the next day. Walter and Osbert came with me. Hugh lent me his heavy fox trimmed cloak since mine was threadbare, but it was high summer and the sun steamed in a golden mist across that night’s scattered dew.

  Hugh stayed to look after Stephen and the house; the oldest to look after the youngest, though Stephen would have come if we had let him. And if Vespasian came back, well - someone would be there to explain. Hugh did not want to come but he gave up his cloak which was the thing he was most proud of in all his small world. They would bury Richard after we had gone. His sad little body lay on the kitchen table. I kissed his cheek before we left.

  He had been decapitated but we laid the head in its rightful place on the dark stump of his child’s neck, closed his frightened eyes and wiped the dried blood from his brow and chin. Hugh went out early and brought back fresh water and we washed him and put Hugh’s little twig cross on his breast.

  I had cried so much, I had been sick in the small hours. Mostly I had cried for Richard, but there was Gerald to cry for too, and then the tears for myself. Tilda was so frightened. Her heart churned and her eyes were burning and red as torn poppy petals. But her determination was stronger still. We had a long way to go.

  “The tracks are easy to follow,” Hugh told us when he came back with the water from the stream. “That horse was heavy laden with two bodies to carry. You can see its hoof prints clearly in the mud. And look there, in the wet undergrowth. But they’ll stop later on. The sun will dry them up.”

  “So we leave quickly,” said Osbert.

  “The prints don’t go back down to London,” nodded Hugh. “I’ve looked. I followed them a bit. They go the other way.”

  I said, “I expected that.”

  “We’ll bury Richard this afternoon,” said Stephen. “But it won’t be consecrated ground.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said. “The church never saved him. It was magic kept out the creature last night and magic took Gerald. Bury Richard by the little silver pool, under the big ash tree. There’s magic there too. It feels more holy than any dreary churchyard.”

  Hugh frowned at me but Stephen was crying; sniffing and wiping his nose onto his sleeve. I had to leave quickly before Tilda broke down again.

  I walked bare foot with my shoes in my pack, saved to put on dry once we reached a safe roadway. Each of us carried as much as we could and Walter was laden so his back was bent but he wouldn’t give up any of the load. “Food and blankets,” he said, “and especially fresh water from the stream. When we leave the forest, there won’t be any clean water for who knows how long and we can’t afford ale.”

  We hadn’t found Vespasian’s never ending supply of money. Once we knew what we had to do we stopped worrying about anything else, so we searched Vespasian’s mattress, under the wooden frame of his bed, in every chest we could force
open, even in the old copper cooking pots we’d never used, still stored on the high kitchen shelves. We found nothing but dust and dead flies.

  I loved the forest. Richard’s face all bloodless chalk and glazed staring eyes remained constantly in my mind but I also saw the flutter of leaf under sun and the dash of a bird’s flight through the upper branches. There was the sudden curiosity of a squirrel, small red and bushy busy over my head. Beneath my feet was the march of ants and huge shining beetles in the undergrowth. A golden spider hung in unmoving ambush from its dew sparkled tapestry. Walter led. Osbert followed behind me. They kept me in the middle.

  The indentations of the horse’s hooves were so distinct that I felt it unnatural. I believed they were markers, purposefully left, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs leading to the candy house and the waiting witch with her hungry oven. Although she knew nothing of Grimm’s fairy tales, Tilda felt so too. She expected the candy house and she expected the witch though she had different names for her fears. She expected a sorcerer too, for the conviction that she knew who had taken Richard and Gerald grew steadily stronger. When Vespasian had been wounded, she had suspected him, finally and sadly, of simple roadside robbery. She had felt a bitter disillusion. But she knew now it had not been that. He had attacked the creatures who had now slaughtered Richard, and they had waited patiently for their revenge. So if the night rider knew where we were all hiding and about the house in the forest and who Richard and Gerald were, then Vespasian had also been taken. Gerald was now in danger for his life, and impossible though it seemed, so was Vespasian. They might both already be dead.

  As I walked, my shoes protected in my pack and bare toes curled into the tangled wet bracken and moss, I wondered how Gerald could be Vespasian’s son. Gerald was all blonde thatch and eyes like sapphire crystals, pale lashed like wheat in the sun. He was a little short for his age, but wide shouldered, stocky and strong. He was also good and kind and surprisingly innocent. And so very noisy. Clearly Gerald was of Saxon lineage. There could be little more contrast to Vespasian’s taut muscled height and glossy black hair, black onyx, black pitch, all shadows, hooded eyes and light olive skin. He was menacing elegant arrogance. So Norman heritage, or even further east. Yet Vespasian had told me there had been a wife. Could a golden wife have given him a golden son?

  We stopped to eat under a hazel tree. The goat’s milk Osbert carried was still warm from the udder. Stephen had milked Cecily soon after dawn and the leather flask was sweating already. It made a good lunch. We picked tiny sweet red apples and there was a wedge each of cold chicken wrapped in oak leaves in my pack; the last of the market pullets we’d broiled several days ago. We wouldn’t need to eat again that day.

  That night we slept under an oak tree. Its spread was nearly as great as the thatch of our house and I knew the tree must be ancient. The cooling shade of its whispered memories was a song for sleep, but we didn’t need a lullaby. We were exhausted. Having planned to stop once the dark hid the footprints we were following, we then discovered a moon as bright as the sun. Everything had turned to luminescence and alchemy. So it was deep into the night when we finally rested, and only then because the moon’s halo slunk into mist and confusion.

  I dreamed of strange things. A body hung in ragged, writhing agony from the pillar of a little church but the woman’s dead face turned into Richard’s lost childishness and I leaned over to touch him and kiss him and tell him I was sorry. Then I heard someone behind me. Vespasian stood there, all dark shadow and his face stern. “You must come no closer,” he said, though I could hardly catch his words, his voice was so low and threatening. Then I saw Bertie leaning over me and Sammie clutching at my hand but I shook them off. I refused to be dragged back to Molly yet. I had to help Tilda. She couldn’t do this without me.

  Then there was someone else. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was there. I could smell his breath all rancid as if it had already decayed within him. “No,” I shouted. “Give him back. Gerald doesn’t belong to either of you.”

  I sat up and found myself clutching desperately at Hugh’s cloak which I was using as a cover. The dawn was a pink shimmer through the leaves. “Time to get up,” said Walter, “before we lose sight of the last tracks through the forest.”

  Osbert was already on his knees. “We’ll have to go slower today, so as not to make mistakes. Look, the signs are already indistinct.”

  “We’ll find them,” I said, sitting up. “We won’t make mistakes. We’re meant to find the right way. We’re being led to the candy house.”

  “What’s candy?” said Walter in surprise.

  But Tilda didn’t know. She had no idea why she had said it.

  I combed my hair with the only comb Tilda had ever owned, lacking in teeth now, but it scraped through the tangles like a rake through ivy. I winced. We used green hazel twigs for toothbrushes and washed our hands in the dew wet shrubs at our feet. I folded Hugh’s cloak back into its bundle. The sun was still gentle but promised golden fire. This time Osbert led and I followed close with Walter at my side. The path was open and wide beneath a flurry of beeches and willows. A young roe deer darted between the tree trunks. I felt a churning excitement and optimism. My dark dreams had somehow made me strong. Both Molly and Tilda knew we had to go this way. I would avenge Richard and Wattle, Isabel and little Muriel Bunting. I would find Gerald. I would do everything that I owed to them for having brought magic through the gap between the worlds. Then Vespasian would find me. What he would do with me when he found me, I wasn’t sure. He might kill me. He might love me. He might be dead already, lying slack and cold in Gerald’s arms. I swallowed back the panic and walked on.

  Three nights I dreamed the same dream and three times Vespasian came threat-voiced into the shadows of my moonlit confusion. “Come no closer,” he ordered me. “Stop now. Return the way you have come.” Then, “It is forbidden to follow me.” Each time I woke shivering and stiff, cramped on the damp hard ground, though it was summer and the air mild and softly balmy.

  I had always obeyed Vespasian in the past, yet not once did I consider obeying these dreamtime commands. Nor did I repeat them to the boys. Something stopped me. Sometimes, walking in the safety of sunshine and watching the beauty around me, I tried to make logic of my decision. Vespasian’s dream-shade warned me away. The hoof prints led us on. So this was not a situation where logic ruled. Magic was the only law that mattered anymore. And if Vespasian was in danger, then I didn’t care if he wanted me or not. I’d try and save him anyway, like he’d saved me more than once. Besides, it might not be Vespasian speaking at all. It could be the sorcerer’s trick.

  It was six days before we came to the end of the forest. For six days we followed tracks that never faded. Even though it had not rained for a week, fresh mud still held the marks of a horse’s passing. And the tracks were so deep and so precise, we could see them through gloom and shadow. Sometimes I thought I could probably still see them with my eyes closed.

  Only once had we met people. There was a leper colony; a hospice beyond a wide stream. Two men were collecting water, holding the cauldron between them. It must have been heavy and the men were barely able to stand. They backed away when they saw us. They wore long black gowns, patched with white to mark their contagion. One turned his head, ashamed. His nose had been completely eaten away. I smiled at them and one of them, lips deeply scarred, smiled back. We didn’t have anything to give them so we kept walking. All our food was gone by now but we had refilled our water sacks from streams almost every day and often found unripe fruit or hard little berries in the forest. I kept herbs in my purse.

  Then the forest began to change. From the yellow-green of summer leaf we scurried along a narrow pathway between dark whispering spruce into a glade, a nemeton of watching trees. I imagined wolf eyes between the trunks but we saw none. The glade troubled me and the feeling of being watched troubled me. I started to run and escaped into thicker cover. But soon the trees thinned again, sparse ac
ross a slope leading steeply downwards. The grass was striped in buttercups and wild thyme. Pockets of perfume rose into the sunshine as we walked. The heat rushed in as the cooling shade retreated behind us. We had come to the end of the forest. Way below, a narrow river coiled black curves into the depths of valley shadow, and beside the river was a house.

  More a small castle than a house, three narrow towers in mossy yellowed stone, tall and turreted, stretched upwards while leaving their reflections pooled in the river water. Osbert and Walter and I stood tight together on the hillside and looked down and sighed. “That’s where they are,” I said.

  I sat down on a stone to buckle my shoes back on. The boys sat down beside me, tired and a little sweaty, pushing hair back from shining foreheads. The horse prints we had followed for a week were still clear on the ground, etched into the springing grass as if they had been burned there with a blacksmith’s iron.

  “What do we do now?” said Osbert, voice tentative on the breeze.

  “I don’t know.” But I did know. I owed it to all of them and especially to Gerald who might still be alive. I had come to save them because I believed I had let the demons in. I owed them salvation, both the dead and the living.

  Walter said, “Then we go on down. We knock on the door. We’ve come all this way. There’s no sense being afraid now.”

  It didn’t seem dangerous. A gilded beetle was scuttling in the thyme flowers. A tawny butterfly was drinking sunbeams. But I said, “Something’s not right.”

  Walter looked at me. “Nothing’s right. That’s why we’re here. For God’s sake, Tilda, Richard is dead. Isabel was murdered too. Some sorcery has taken Gerald. Vespasian has disappeared. Of course something isn’t right.”

  “But that’s it, isn’t it?” whispered Osbert. “What you said – sorcery. It’s not that I’m sorry we came. Without Vespasian, we had to try and get Gerald back. Someone had to anyway.”

  “It’s just that you’re frightened,” Walter nodded, not unkindly.