Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  “The gates of the Underworld, and those doorways separating times and worlds and dimensions,” said Sarah, “which must be kept open, of course, for you inspiring travellers.”

  I was silent. I knew nothing of Janus or the veleda, but I knew something about opening doors and the passages between times. Thomas said he had given me the secret grains for just that reason.

  “I could start by doing your astrology,” said Ruth, getting up. Behind her chair the small bookshelf held some thick papers. She pulled out a very large book. “Do you know your exact time of birth, my dear?”

  “Muriel Bunting used to do astrology,” I said vaguely. “She used to give lessons. Then she was killed and hung upside down in the church.”

  “A terrible, terrible thing,” agreed Ruth, flicking through the wafer thin pages, “though not a subject for tonight, I think. In fact, it was I who taught Muriel astrology originally, quite some years ago. Now, your date of birth?”

  I considered saying I had forgotten and then realised that I was being absurd. This was exactly what I had wanted. I was about to get answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of asking. “Is astrology connected to alchemy too?”

  “Oh, indeed it is,” smiled Thomas. “For perhaps a thousand years’ astrology and astronomy were considered to be the same thing. Astrology echoes the macrocosm in microcosm, as it is above, so it is below. I would guess that your horoscope makes up the perfect star, fire and water.”

  “Water,” I said. “I’m Pisces.” I gave the full details. I knew my time of birth to the nearest few minutes, for my mother had told me. She’d never forgiven me for the pain I caused her. I had taken my first breath just as the moon had shone through her hospital window.

  “Sagittarius rising,” said Ruth after a moment, “and the Moon four days past its peak in Scorpio in the twelfth house. How interesting, my dear.”

  “Very interesting indeed,” said Thomas, smile fixed. “As I expected, the perfect six pointed star of combined fire and water.”

  “But Tilda isn’t,” I said. “She was born in mid August sometime in the day, during a storm.”

  “Leo I suppose but my books wouldn’t give me the maths for her chart anyway,” said Ruth. “The calendar changed you know, and dates are different in medieval times, though I daresay I could work it out if I wanted to. But it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s you who controls all this, don’t you see, not her. You go into her body. She isn’t even really aware of you.”

  “How do you know?” I asked suddenly. In fact, Tilda was very much more aware of me these days. “How can you know anything about her?”

  “Well, of course, we don’t really,” Sarah smiled quickly. “Just from what you told Thomas, and Thomas has told us.”

  I was surrounded by smiles. “So what does my chart say?” I asked.

  “Leave it with me,” nodded the smiling Ruth, “and I’ll do your whole horoscope for you tomorrow.”

  “In the meantime,” said Thomas, “perhaps it’s time we were leaving.”

  It took us some time to get away after all. The sisters helped us wrap up, “It’ll seem so cold outside after being in a warm room like this,” and insisted on talking for ages on their front step, thus ensuring that we caught cold after all.

  “It’s late October so Scorpio now, isn’t it?” I said. “You said my moon was in Scorpio.”

  “Yes, and it’s nearly a full moon,” said Sarah, pointing up at the sky. The moon was huge behind the top of her bare branched Ash. “Though of course, this full moon will be in Taurus.”

  “Taurus,” said Thomas, “is my birth sign as it happens. I’m afraid that makes me much more of a plodder than you, dear Molly. Pisces is the sign of the psychic you know.”

  “I’m not psychic,” I said, shivering on the doorstep. “I may have strange adventures, but I talk to people who are very much alive, not those who are dead.”

  “That, “said Ruth, with her eternal smile, “can always change, you know.”

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  The dawn poured over my valley like a rose pink promise. I scrambled out of bed. At some time during the night I had been injected with energy and optimism. I clattered downstairs and then slowed at the halfway mark. It was early and Bertie was still asleep. He hardly ever seemed to work anymore and had let his private insurance brokerage lapse during all the depression, but he still needed his sleep. So I tiptoed outside, put the front door on the latch, and went to sit in the hammock under the chestnut tree. The leaves had almost gone though some curled brown foliage still clung to the safety of their branches. I swung a little, dew bottomed and damp but uncaring. I thought about Sammie who had loved to sit here, and I thought about my mother and whether there was any point in visiting her. She didn’t recognise who I was any longer and it only left me depressed and weary for the following week. But my dream had sent me yearning. I had loved her, even if she had never been capable of loving me. I even wondered where my father was all these years later and if he was finally dead and at peace. It certainly couldn’t have been any fun being married to my mother and I suppose he had only stayed for me, stubbornly silent regarding the shame of mental illness and raging violence. After the police had committed her to the asylum outside London, I had been sent to a foster home in the West Country, which I had adored. It had been bliss. I still associated bliss with these windswept hills and wind trapped valleys, with the dry stone walls and the thatched cottages, tiny streams and tourist beloved villages. So I lived here now and was successful, whatever that meant. Except that I didn’t write anymore because I had forgotten how to. I lived it all instead.

  It was the bright, cold morning of October the twenty eighth and I felt very well indeed.

  I made breakfast and coffee and the smell of frying bacon should have woken Bertie but it did not so I knocked on the door of my spare bedroom and called him. There wasn’t any answer so I pushed open the door and peeped in. He wasn’t there and his bed hadn’t been slept in, unless he had risen even earlier than I had, and uncharacteristically made his bed before leaving the house. It was a surprise but what Bertie did wasn’t my business anymore so I went back into the kitchen and ate what I had cooked, double helpings.

  On the kitchen table my laptop sat smart black and unused. My agent didn’t ring anymore. As far as he was concerned I was still having a nervous breakdown after the murder of my cousin and I wondered if I actually was. Then I wondered, not for the first time, if I had inherited my mother’s illness. The police had surely considered that too although they’d tried to be subtle about it, but before being thrust into the care of the counsellor, they had sent me to the police psychologist. I assumed he had decided on my sanity. He could have been wrong.

  I hadn’t done any housework in days and little enough for weeks. Bertie had tried to help but he had masculine dust blindness and didn’t know how to work the vacuum cleaner. It was autumn but I began to spring-clean. I was blowing the cobwebs from my own brain. Symbolism perhaps. I even vacuumed the stairs, which I hated doing because of all the little corners. In the bedroom I had to crawl around and collect the tarot cards that I had scattered the day before. I searched in the fluff under the bed and behind the cushions of the window seat and in every possible shadow. Then I boxed them neatly and counted them out before returning them to their container. Number eighteen of the major arcana, the card of The Moon, was missing again. All the others were there. I made the bed and then brought the cards downstairs with me and put them back in the bookshelf, squashing them in hard, and deciding they would stay there.

  I looked at my wall above the mantelshelf where Vespasian’s small ouroboros hung. I reached out a finger and smoothed it along the carved wooden surface. It didn’t frighten me anymore and now I saw its beauty instead of its ugliness. Its eyes watched me back. They should have been blank. They weren’t. I was delighted that Ruth and Sarah had one similar, presumably the one from the antique shop which Bertie said he nearly bought me. I was glad
he had not, because seeing it in the little William Morris cottage had been my sign that these people were truly safe and to be trusted. Vespasian had said. And Vespasian talked of symbols. So I knew.

  I wondered who I should visit first, Thomas or the sisters. I decided I would start with Thomas and only go directly to Ruth and Sarah if Thomas was not at home. We had made no particular appointment the night before, but meeting again was a natural assumption. By nine o’clock I decided that it was already a reasonable hour to go visiting and I put the dishwasher on, brushed my hair and grabbed my coat.

  My excitement was like a scurrying mouse, the flutter of butterflies or the unfolding of magnolia petals. I now had three people whom I trusted in my own world and who wanted to help not only me but Tilda too, and who knew the secrets of the magic that had possessed me. They were, slowly perhaps, introducing me to the knowledge I needed. Today I expected to find out a great deal more.

  I was out of the house and half way down the street when I heard the sirens.

  Three police cars screeched past me and up into the narrow road behind my cottage, going in the same direction as I was. I stood very still for a moment and then started to run. I got to Thomas’s house and found the cars parked in a clump outside his door. I saw Constable Peterson, whom I recognised, trying to keep the neighbours back. Amongst the twitter of horrified onlookers were Ruth and Sarah Ableside, still in their rosebud nightdresses and hugging their dressing gowns around them, tear stains on their little round faces. I couldn’t get close enough to Thomas’s house to see what had happened. I was so lost in panic that I thought I’d be sick. I was already heaving when Ruth saw me and pushed over to my side. She put her arm around my shoulders. “Sometime this morning,” she gulped. “We were still in bed. We didn’t hear a thing.”

  “It’s Thomas?”

  She nodded, still hugging me. “In the front garden. Right in full view.” The knot of police and forensic experts now hid everything from the street. An ambulance squeezed up into the remaining space, shuddering to a halt on the cobbles, doors flung open. Everyone moved back.

  “Is he like the others?” How did you say something like that? “I mean, was he murdered? Tortured?”

  “He was murdered,” said Ruth, “that we know. As for the details, well, I’m not sure and I don’t think I want to know yet.”

  “Then it’s my fault,” I said.

  Ruth stared at me through her tears. “What makes you think such a thing? That’s a terrible thing to think. And it certainly isn’t true.”

  “I open doors,” I said, though my voice didn’t obey my mind. “You said it yourself, last night. I never mean to, but that’s what happens. I open doors. I open windows. Evil gets through. Them.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes, them,” I said.

  I hugged Ruth and told her I’d come back and see her later. She went back to Sarah and the police. She was Thomas’s closest and longest surviving friend she said, and he had no living relatives. She would be spending all day at the police station. I expected a visit from the police myself. I had spent all the previous evening with Thomas, Ruth and Sarah and the whole pub had seen us leave together. The police would certainly want to talk about that. I would tell them that we had gone on afterwards to Ruth’s house and spent almost two hours there and that then Thomas had walked me home before going home himself. Worried for my own safety, he had pressed me to let him stay the night, but I had refused and now I was sorry. I was the last person to see him alive except for the murderer and the police would certainly be wanting to talk to me. I doubted if they would be quite so sympathetic this time. This was the fourth murder and I was linked to three of them.

  I walked back around the corner and sat on my front doorstep waiting for the police. They didn’t come for some time and it started to drizzle so I went indoors and put the kettle on. Bertie hadn’t come home. I presumed he had found yet another girlfriend.

  My house was all bright and shining and polished clean and reminded me of my early scrubbed optimism. Now I felt guilty, as if I had been dancing around the house with a feather duster at precisely the same time that someone had killed Thomas Cambio. The dishwasher was just finishing its cycle and spitting steam. I took my mug of tea into the living room and put it on the mantelshelf. Then I took down Vespasian’s ouroboros and held it tight. I wished it had been Thomas who had bought the other one, instead of the Ableside sisters. He had needed the protection after all, he who had seemed to need it the least. With all his amazing powers and experience, he had died before me. All his knowledge and magic was dissipated into nothing, lost to me, who needed his answers, and to the world which had few precious souls like him.

  I was thinking about Vespasian when the police turned up. I had left my front door open for them. They knocked and I called out, “Please come in. I knew you’d be coming.”

  I offered them tea but they wanted me down the station, so I took my coat back off its iron peg in the hall and put the little coiled serpent, which I was still clutching, in the pocket. Whether I understood it or not, the ouroboros might be my only hope of safety. A street of neighbours watched as the police held the car door open for me. I sat in the back with my coat collar turned up and my eyes a watery pink. I wondered if the curious and concerned would think I was being arrested and I wondered if later I actually would be. Wanted for questioning, helping the police with their inquiries, would they offer me the proverbial one phone call and what on earth was my solicitor’s name. Come to think of it, he wasn’t a criminal lawyer anyway, he’d helped sort out my legal affairs from time to time, publisher’s contracts, selling my mother’s house, complications with her committal, my father’s continued non-existence and my divorce. No use at all with murder and accusations of black magic. I huddled into the back corner of the car and felt that I had been better off as Tilda after all. I wished with all my heart that Vespasian would come and rescue me again but I was in the wrong world.

  I was all day at the station. I heard the rain pelting outside and bouncing off the vine that clambered around the windows. I was given take-away egg and tomato sandwiches for lunch which I didn’t eat because the bread was soggy white cardboard and my throat was closed with fear and unhappiness. By the evening I was still sitting on the same chair with my bum going numb and my head throbbing. I was given a tin plate of atrocious food for dinner and several mugs of very stewed tea. Constable Peterson went out and got me a donut which was sweet of him even if I didn’t like donuts. Finally, at ten past ten, they drove me home. Bertie still wasn’t there. I crawled into bed and dreamed of Vespasian.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  It was still raining when I woke and I still had the headache. I was also starving since I had eaten nothing except a burnt sausage and half a donut since yesterday’s breakfast.

  I scrambled eggs and ate them standing up. Then I slung on my coat and hurried off to Ruth’s. I went the long way around and picked up a Cotswold Daily Express from the newsagents by the bridge. I was served by the marijuana smoking son who was scratching his pubescent pimples and had blood under his finger nails. It made me feel suddenly ill. “Getting exciting, isn’t it?” he said, pointing to Thomas’s photograph on the front page.

  I didn’t answer, took the paper, and went back over the bridge to Ruth and Sarah’s house. I began to read the article as I waited for someone to answer their front door. The police had told me very little yesterday. They had been asking questions, not answering them, so the details in the newspaper were mostly new to me. Thomas Cambio had been found in his own little front garden, killed sometime the previous night. The exact time of death was hard to judge since hours of cold and rain had obscured the evidence. There was no doubt that he had been murdered. He had been killed by six deep wounds to the chest and neck. The murder weapon was presumed to be a very heavy bladed knife of some kind, possibly a double edged sword of antique design. Mysteriously, he had been discovered – by the postman at eight thirty in the mo
rning – wrapped in an ancient cloak, in excellent condition in spite of being rain soaked. Several people had been questioned but no arrests had been made.

  Sarah answered the door. She was still in her nighty and looked as if she had been crying since the previous morning.

  “He wasn’t tortured,” I said. “It sounds like a quick death.”

  “We don’t know if the police are covering up any of the details,” sniffed Sarah. “You know, to help catch the killer, the way they often do. They wouldn’t tell us much yesterday. Come in anyway, my dear, Ruth’s making boiled eggs and soldiers. Would you join us? Here, I’ll hang your coat up for you, it’s very wet.”

  “I’ve had breakfast already,” I said, shrugging off the coat and holding it out to her. She reached out to take it and then seemed to change her mind, rather suddenly. She withdrew her hand, shuddered slightly and retreated a step. I smiled. “Sorry, yes, it’s dripping isn’t it? Shall I put it in the bathroom?”

  Sarah pointed to the curly carved coat and umbrella rack in the little hall. “It’ll be alright there. Just hang it up and it’ll soon dry off.”

  I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. A condensation of steam hung under the ceiling. The little toaster rattled, the saucepan of dancing water jangled on the spotless old cooker and the kettle was boiling with a faint whistle. Ruth was buttering toast. I watched their aging innocence, wondering just what sort of danger we might all be in.

  “I haven’t known Thomas long,” I said. “It must be terrible for both of you. You’ve known him for years, haven’t you? He said you were his oldest friends.”

  Ruth nodded, nibbling on her toast. “He was our dearest, our very dearest friend. Just like a brother. Of course, we share the same interests and shared knowledge too, although he had such tremendous power and we do not. “