The older woman glanced crossly at Uta and quickly shook her head, starched toque bobbing. “Not me, my lord. I’ve not yet spoken to the girl. I would never disobey your orders.”
“So it was Jasper,” said the old man. Each word spat saliva. His lower lip, though wizened, hung loose, revealing yellow horse’s teeth in a jaw stubbled in sepia beyond the narrow trimmed beard. His black hair was lank and aged in silver smears. The fingers of his hand were so long they seemed grotesque. He reached out to me and poked at my breast beneath the bloodied white strips of linen. I felt the points of his nails press into me. I was forced to look up, and met his gaze but his eyes went nowhere. He said, “De Vrais has done this. No one else would dare,” and his breath in my mouth made me nauseas.
Uta flounced a little, pleased to know all the answers. She said, “Jasper’s downstairs with the boy.”
“But surely, there’s no harm done,” said the young man who was Uta’s cousin. He shrugged. “It’s kept the trollop alive. If she’d lost too much blood, she might have died before we could make use of her.”
The old man spat directly at the boy’s feet. His phlegm was green slime. “The slut would not have died, I would not have allowed it,” he said. “No one dies until I’m ready and I permit no one to interfere with my plans. I had her ready sliced, prepared for flaying. But now the breasts are closed again. I can smell his filthy magic on her. De Vrais will pay dear for this. I’ll make sure he pays for everything.”
“Then you’ll continue with the girl today?” asked another, panting with impatience and polished in sweat. “Has de Vrais set up barriers, then? But my lord, his barriers are surely not strong enough, not against your power, my lord. Will you still prepare the sacrifice?”
“No,” the old man said, turning with a sneer. “You all know what I’m waiting for. The Great Other will come when the time is right.” He looked down at me. He looked hungry and dribbled saliva from the drooping lip. “But perhaps we’ll play a little first,” he smiled. “De Vrais’ puny magic has no power over me.” He leaned even closer. I could see the red veins in his tiny eye balls and the grey hairs curled in his nostrils. His mouth was wet. He grabbed one of my wrists, wrenching my arm away from its clutch across my chest. He spoke two words I could not understand and then his fingers closed so tight, I felt my bones snap. With three fingers he had broken my wrist. I screamed. Then the man forced my hand into the flames of the fire and held it there.
I fell into black heat and I fell a long, long way. It was a tunnel, stone, narrow, lightless and violent with heat. I heard someone scream over and over and it echoed around me in a wail of terrible hopelessness. I had heard that scream before, several times. Now I knew it came from Tilda, and from me.
Time stretched interminable. But the pain disappeared into the distant unreality outside the safety of my tunnel. I floated in cool and peaceful light, feeling only gentleness. I expected a blistering return to the turret room and the fire, night visible through the arrow slits and the feather mattress soft beneath me, yet I saw nothing. The voices I heard came from very far away. A man and a woman were whispering somewhere above my head. Vespasian always whispered. His voice was always so low that the words barely brushed the air. Vespasian was speaking now.
It was a long time before I risked opening my eyes. But when I did, I saw Molly’s bedroom and it was Bertie and Sammie talking softly, and a small bald doctor whose name I could not remember. I looked at them and began to cry.
“Dear Mrs. Walding,” said the doctor, “please don’t be so distressed. The morphine will kick in soon.”
“I’m not Mrs Walding,” I sobbed, though managed to stop myself claiming Tilda. “I’m divorced,” I prevaricated faintly. “I’m Miss Susans.”
I watched Bertie look increasingly uncomfortable. “I apologise,” said the doctor with a bedside smile. “Molly Susans, of course, the name you write under. And don’t worry, we’ll have you out of bed and back at the typewriter in no time.”
I was floundering in misery and anger and I wondered if he was senile. “What’s a – typewriter?” I mumbled. Then I remembered again where I was. I forced myself back into the present, and prevaricated once more. “It’s all done on – computer – these days.” I knew I sounded silly, but claiming medieval ignorance would have been a damn sight sillier.
Sammie interrupted before I made a complete idiot of myself. “Mol dearest, calm down. You’re probably a little light headed. I mean with the accident and then the pain killers. Just lay back and think of England.”
“What accident?” I demanded.
“It’s what we’d like to know,” muttered Bertie somewhere over everyone’s heads. “What the hell were you up to anyway? Playing with fire as usual, I suppose.”
I looked down to the concentrated source of the pain. My wrist and hand lay heavily bandaged on the blanket. I stared at it as if it didn’t belong to me at all. Which it didn’t, because it had to belong to Tilda. “I’ve broken my arm?”
“Darling,” said Sammie, sitting down on the edge beside me, “you must have fallen over the gas stove or something. You have been very vague lately you know, really distant some days. But Bertie says you get that way when you’re into a book. Anyway, we found you unconscious on the kitchen floor with your hand all twisted and the palm so badly burned, well the doctor has called for an ambulance. I’ll come with you to the hospital. You need X-rays of course. He says you’ve probably fractured your wrist. Third degree burns too, but he doesn’t think you’ll have to stay in overnight. You’ll be an outpatient at the Burns Unit.”
“Oh fucking hell,” I said wearily. “Fuck. Shit. Pissing bloody hell.”
“Yes, well,” said the doctor with a disapproving blink, “I suppose it must be an unpleasant surprise.”
“You’re damned right it is,” I said.
They bundled me into the ambulance even though I insisted on walking to my own front gate. I stopped there a moment, remembering. Visions of the hammock, the church, and Vespasian, once again, where he should not have been. I almost expected to see a wet daisy chain lying on the doorstep.
Sammie came with me and sat patiently as I was wheeled through one white tiled corridor into another. The X-rays on my wrist proved what I knew already for I had heard the little bones break. I was repulsed when I saw what the old man had done to my hand. It was burned beyond blistering, with seeping red muscle and gristle exposed. Serious, said the burns unit. Well, I could see that. They assumed I’d fainted over a gas flame, continuing to burn until Sammie found me.
And yet the old man had held my hand steady into the fire and his grip had never wavered. His own hand had not even scorched. He had smiled, staring at me, blank eyes glittering with the first glimpse of emotion. A hungry smile that made me shudder.
I let Sammie chatter on. Then I interrupted. “Has anything odd happened lately?” I asked.
“You mean apart from this?” she said, pulling a face.
“Like seeing ghosts,” I said.
“Oh God, Mol,” she said. “Sometimes you scare the living daylights out of me. How did you know about that? I never mentioned it. Not to anyone.”
“I saw it too,” I said which wasn’t an explanation and wasn’t true either really, but she accepted it. “How long ago was it?”
She thought a moment. “Two days.”
“And no more murders in the village?”
“You remember ghosts and you don’t remember murders?” She shook her head at me, telling me I was a lost case. “No Molly dear, no more. Just poor Wattle and little Miss Bunting. I hope to goodness you haven’t seen any more visions of future horrors. I never told anyone about that either you know.”
“Just as well. And no, I haven’t. But all the same – I think there will be.” I leaned over to her suddenly, in a sudden terrified panic. “Sammie, promise me you’ll be careful. No talking to strangers and don’t go walking on your own. Please, please, be totally and ridiculously careful all the
time.”
“I could say the same to you,” said Sammie, taken aback. “You’re always wandering off into the hills. Or sticking your hand into fires.”
“Nothing I do can actually make any difference,” I said, looking out of the long window at the sun over the trees. “Or at least, maybe it will. But then it will get worse. I don’t know how to make it better.”
“Oh dear,” said Sammie. “I don’t suppose you’d agree to come back to London with me? Away from all these nightmares? Away from – you know.”
“Well, London’s hardly risk free,” I managed to smile. “Anyway, no, not on your life. I have to stay put. At least, I think I do.”
“I shan’t try to understand,” sighed Sammie.
“And the police haven’t arrested anyone? Or made any headway at all? Any announcements? People helping with their inquiries sort of thing?”
Sammie shook her head. “Not a thing. Everyone says black magic, but no one says who. There just aren’t any logical clues by the sound of things. Poor Bertie is getting a bit stronger though. Fancy him getting a new girlfriend.”
I had no idea but I wasn’t going to admit to that. “Well, he’s always needed his sexual status injections and a good dose of reassurance. Wattle wouldn’t blame him, I’m sure. Me – I’m delighted.”
“I wish you’d get a boyfriend, Mol,” she said, turning to me with a cousinly glint. “Now that would really do you good. It would be exactly the tonic you need.”
I shivered. Something wet and cold moved into my head, like the coils of a snake behind my eyes. I forced myself to smile. “No thanks. You couldn’t drag me – not even kicking and screaming – well, not unless you can introduce me to Johnny Depp.”
Sammie’s smile seemed reluctant too. “Sorry. I think he’s busy elsewhere. But I know this gorgeous man in London, Mol. Honestly, he’s an architect and just your type.”
“Sammie stop it. I’m really, truly not interested and don’t you go fixing something up behind my back because I’ll shoot you and him too.”
We were waiting for the doctor to come back. My wrist and hand were now in a neat white cast, and the cast in a sling. The pain came in small dizzy waves but I expected to be allowed home once the doctor had lectured me on being more careful in future. Sammie had already written her name with heaps of kisses on the side of the plaster. I sat and stared at the little black crosses. I felt sick. I wanted very much to go back and look after Tilda. I even wondered if she was dead.
Chapter Twenty
With my wrist in plaster, I was more handicapped than I had expected and it was not until the first proper bath I felt strong enough to take, two days later in fact, that I realised something else about my condition. From mid belly to shoulder, my body was marked by scars. Like faint silver threads, they striped up from my stomach, over the navel, around my chest and thickly across the swell of my breasts. I peered at this alien tattoo on my skin. I was deeply thankful that the hospital had been given no reason to strip me off completely or demand an X-ray on anything other than my wrist, for they would have been amazed at these indications of torture. No doubt I would have been back for questioning by the police, black magic as the subject.
The bath water seemed troubled, ebbing into turbulence, the seas of a huge swell instead of the small soap scummed waters of a bath tub. I sat still, waiting for my mind to calm and my heartbeat to steady. As I drifted into acceptance and relaxation, so the water became my own bath again. I pulled out the plug.
I was becoming so entirely confused between two identities that Tilda’s scars marked my body, her injuries appeared in my life, and now I could no longer rely on any part of my own sanity. But at least there was one thing that pleased me. My merging with Tilda did not stop Molly from functioning. In some way, even if vague enough to worry her relatives, Molly could carry on without me. I smiled. Showed how dispensable I was. Hardly anything to smile about. But it brought up another and most uneasy thought. If Molly could continue her life without me and if Tilda was not me either, then who the bloody hell was I?
I slouched around with a broken wrist for a couple of weeks and panicked privately over Tilda. I was sure I would know if she was dead. She was sort of me for God’s sake. If she died, then I might too. But it was absurd, because she had in fact been dead for nearly a thousand years, and I was surely tumbling into insanity.
If I was, Sammie didn’t seem to notice. She told me I’d always been eccentric even as a kid and after all, I’d had an extremely eccentric childhood. I knew she’d always felt sorry for me, but I’d admired her and never resented her pity. She hadn’t ever patronised me for the tragedy of my mother. Now we walked together up on the hills under the sun. Sometimes Bertie tagged along but he had a new interest now to absorb him and sped over to Oxford at weekends to wine and dine the lady while I stayed with my cousin. We had picnics with wine from a battered thermos and cold chicken in foil, and I remembered Tilda’s walk through the forest with Hugh’s cloak in her bundle and wedges of chicken wrapped in its folds.
I believed Tilda was being systematically tortured. I had no wish to share her suffering but I felt I’d deserted her when instead I might have helped. My dreams continued to be disturbing echoes of another world but I remained staunchly Molly. I even returned to writing, one finger to the keyboard. The palm of my left hand, though healing, remained so scarred that the flesh was withered and puckered into weeping furrows. I had been treated by a modern burns unit in a modern hospital and I wondered what pain and deformity Tilda endured, or if – since her injuries marked me – my healing helped heal her.
Then one slow morning as late summer drifted into its downward plunge and I was sitting alone by the village stream making daisy chains, a cold trickle of wind blew so sharply down my back that I knew something had happened. I got up and started walking. My instinct had been to go home but soon I realised I was actually walking in the opposite direction, taking neither the path back into the village nor my usual track up into the hills. Instead I followed a little used lane behind the old cemetery to the first trees of the bluebell woods. I had not meant to come here but then, I had not meant to come at all. I continued, and knew I was led.
The trees grew closer. There were openings where the wild roses still blossomed pale tawny under the filtered sun, but soon I was clambering over knots of root and bracken, snagging my skirt on thorns, lost deep in shade. I walked due east and far away from the older groves where, some miles off, Wattle had been butchered. I was still nervous of being alone among the trees. I wondered at my own stupidity in coming here, and yet I still walked on as if I had no choice at all.
The natural pathway was winding, then began to slope steeply and I started to slip. I was wearing sandals and their rubber soles weren’t sensible in thick undergrowth. Then below me I saw the great yew tree. I had no idea I had come so far, though I had often been here before, visiting the rare and ancient beauty. The ravaged trunk twisted into strange shapes within the pitted bark. Its branches created its own massive canopy, as if it was a forest within itself. It must have been home to many birds and other creatures, yet it was entirely hollow. It was dying from its own aged weight.
I walked around it and sat at its roots on the far side. Below me were the silver shallows of a small pool and the yew tree was reflected there. On the banks among the thickening ivy, stretched Vespasian. His hands were clasped behind his head and he looked up at the wisping summer clouds. I looked down at him and he smiled.
I sat beside him. He didn’t move or seem surprised. I watched his smile gently lift the corners of his mouth and deepen into his eyes. It was such a defenceless smile, far more benign that I had ever seen from him in his own time.
I looked down at my own reflection in the water at his feet, my face partially obscured by floating weed and summery green algae. It was deliciously balmy. I tugged off the old pink cardigan I wore and wriggled out of the rubber sandals. I was wearing an old flowered skirt and a pink T-shirt. B
eside me, still watching me, Vespasian wore the white linen shirt, narrow belt and deep green hose that I had seen him wear before. His cotte was crumpled as a cushion, his hands clasped beneath his head. He cast no reflection in the pool at all.
“Do you know me?” he asked.
The right voice in the wrong place. “Yes, I know you,” I said. “At least, I know your name and I’ve met you before. I don’t really know you at all. Does anybody?”
He continued to smile. “Perhaps not.”
“Sometimes I’ve visited you in your world,” I said. “This time you’ve come into mine.”
“I sent someone here, and then followed her,” he said. “But I’ve come into many worlds, many times. I travel, when I will and when I must. Which name of mine do you know me by?”
That surprised me. “I know you as Vespasian.”
“Ah.” It was a breath, or a sigh. “Then certainly, you do not know me at all.”
“Then tell me now,” I said, leaning forwards. “There might not be time for fencing and puzzles. You could disappear any minute. So tell me who you really are. And then tell me about Tilda.”
“My Tilda? Yes, I knew there was something –” he paused, watching me intently. “Can I expect any answer so explicit? Perhaps I can. So tell me first who you are.”
Well, it wasn’t going to help him at all, but I answered anyway. “I’m Molly Susans and this is the forest we call the Bluebell Woods, in England’s West Country. It’s the year two thousand and fourteen so you’ve been dead for a long, long time. Interesting, isn’t it?”
His smile deepened into a grin. I had never seen him smile with such genuine amusement. “It would seem so, though I am not conscious of having died. Well, Madam Susans, I am Jasper, Baron de Vrais and that is who I am, whether I choose to use that name or not. I am Vespasian Fairweather because I invented a mask when my birth name became – let us say – inconvenient. If you are who I believe you are, you know about that already. I have no intention of explaining myself further – even in dreams. Come back into my own world if you dare, open the gates once more at my command, and find out for yourself.”
Fair Weather Page 15