Bertie’s clothes and body disappeared into the blur of insubstantial memory. It was a woman crouched before me, a woman I had never seen before. I had not expected a woman. “No,” I whispered. “I don’t know you. I have never known you.”
She grinned and showed all her teeth, big mule’s teeth in front, huge tiger’s canines at the sides. Bertie had gone completely and was not anywhere there at all. The woman squatted before me, knees bent out, fingers balanced on the floor, spider like. Then she stood, looming upwards until she towered in black immensity. She wore a medieval cloak, embroidered in black pearls and gold thread. The clasp of the cloak was a goat’s head carved in gold. “You know me, whether you realise it or not,” and I recognised the harsh sexless voice of the woman in the night who had been present at my tarot reading and had threatened Vespasian.
“I know you now,” I said, cringing. “But I don’t know who you are.”
“I have used many bodies,” she said, “but they are only shells. They call me Lilith and adore me. They call me Baphomet and fear me. I have been Sekmet and Medusa. I am the monster of Bagdad; the giant of Saxony, and the vampire of Transylvanian. You cannot truly know me. No mortal can.”
“If you kill me,” I said, “I’ll go back to Tilda. I won’t feel your torture. You’ll gain no pleasure at all from me.”
“I have no intention of killing you,” she smiled, stretching gums. Her teeth clicked into the widening gaps. “You are the Gateway. I shall use you, not kill you. I enjoyed murder when that tired old body could be pushed to rape and kill the women he’d loved, but torture is a passing plaything. You are only useful to me fully alive.”
“What about Thomas?” I demanded. “Why did you kill him? Bertie never even knew Thomas, let alone love him. Thomas was much cleverer than me. You could have used him instead. Why did you kill him?”
“I did not,” said the giant woman, a low growl, the words coming not from the palate but from the throat. “Your lover killed Thomas Cambio.”
“I don’t have a lover. Bertie and I were divorced ages ago,” I yelled at her, clinging to sanity.
“Your dark lover,” spat the woman. “Your dabbler in alchemy. And tomorrow I shall kill him and eat him, and perhaps your child self too.”
“I know who you are,” I said. “You’re the devil. You’re Satan. Lucifer. Evil.”
She laughed at me, all genuine glee at my stupidity. She was still laughing when the face changed back. With a grinding of jaw and lips and eyes, Bertie came flooding into life and took back his face. Great tears were tumbling down his cheeks and collecting across the creases of his fear and pain. “You see,” he muttered, as if his tongue was only slowly becoming his own again. “I dream but the nightmares are all real. I killed them, those dear friends, but I don’t know how I did it. I have to be locked away before I can do anything else. You have to take me to the police. I have to be in an asylum, like your mother.”
“Like my mother?” I couldn’t grasp reality because there wasn’t any reality. “Bertie dear, for God’s sake, stop talking. It wasn’t you. Listen, and I’ll try and explain things.”
I had been desperate for someone to explain to me and now I had to explain to Bertie, whose nightmare was even worse than mine. We were both standing up now, shivering like idiots, staring at each other. I leaned forwards and hugged him, to console and reassure him, making myself touch what I was frightened to touch because within him somewhere was the creature who terrified and disgusted me. If she inhabited him at will, as I lived sometimes within Tilda, then perhaps it had indeed been Bertie who had murdered and tortured three women.
But not Thomas. The woman had denied killing Thomas. If she gloated over the other more visceral murders, then denial of one would likely be true. She said Vespasian had killed Thomas. It was something I didn’t want to think about.
“Explain? You can’t,” Bertie shouted into my face. “What in hell can you know about all this?” He wriggled away from my reassurance and reached out, quite slowly and deliberately, and picked up the pewter jar and the little bowl of green elixir. I watched him as if it was slow motion and I was paralysed.
“Don’t touch,” I managed to say.
He smiled, not his own smile, and he had mule’s teeth all yellow grained and tiger’s canines huge and curved behind. “The jar is mine,” he said, though it was not his voice, and he put it in his pocket. He drank the liquid and licked his lips with a tongue tip that was long and thin and blue. Then I watched the animation quickly disappear from his face and body and he tumbled at my feet like an empty coat. I was crying and screaming and choking altogether. The glass marmite jar fell and smashed on the tiles of the hearth. I bent down over Bertie’s sagging unconsciousness but I could see he was still breathing. I knelt beside him but the room spun like dust in a storm. I had not drunk the elixir but I was leaving. I hung onto my head with both hands as if it might be left behind. I felt sick and dizzy.
Thomas’s recipe which I had prepared and Bertie had drunk, still smelled rank and sulphurous and the stink of it swelled, infecting me too. Then I welcomed it and breathed it in because its effect was taking me back to Tilda. It was slow but I sat still and small on my own hearth rug and let it swim into me, breathing deeply now and aware of one world leaving as the other moved in. I did not feel I moved or changed but my surroundings leapt into silhouette and then back into swirling colour.
I was sitting on the hard earth floor of our old house in medieval London. The chicken was clucking in the corner and I could hear a small scuffle in the wattle and daub, rats scurrying up to the thatch. The fire was lit huge and blazed in a rage of scarlet heat, spitting soot from the logs and flinging vast shadows across the room. Neither Bertie nor the monster within him were in the room. Opposite me, beside the fire and on his old straight backed chair with the carved arms and the threadbare padding, sat Vespasian.
I swear he actually saw me enter Tilda’s consciousness.
“Welcome home,” he said, stretching his legs. “We have a lot to talk about and then there is a lot to do. There is only one day left.”
Chapter Forty
Tilda sat cross legged, folded her hands in her lap and looked up at him. His boots were stretched beside me and his face was lost part in dancing shadow, part in the distortion of reflected flame.
As usual, his voice was soft, like a breeze among leaves, but carrying the first threat of storm. I had to strain to hear him above the crackle and spark of fire. “There are few gifts I am free to give you,” he was saying, “but some comprehension and coherence is one that I owe you. I avoid explaining myself when I can, but this time I will answer some of your questions should you have any.”
I felt Tilda’s heart beating in my chest, or perhaps it was mine in hers. She was both frightened and excited. He had come to get her. She had wanted him to for so long, yet had not expected it. But out of the darkness he had come, just for her. “I have a thousand questions,” she murmured. Now I wished I could speak for her. She had a thousand questions but I had a million.
“It is late,” answered Vespasian. “Far too late, but we must use what time we have. Ask what you wish of me and then we must sleep for the few hours that we need. When we wake again, I shall take you back to the convent.”
Tilda looked down at her lap, playing nervously with her fingers. It was only then that I realised she was holding Vespasian’s ouroboros. It was nestled in her palm, curled neat into shadow, her thumb through its central circle. “This,” she began. “I thought Malcolm had sent it but now you say it’s yours. I was so frightened of it. The Abbot didn’t want to touch it.”
“When I sent it to you,” he said, “I didn’t know exactly where you were. I believed it likely you’d gone directly to the London house, and stayed here. It didn’t matter. It would have found you, wherever you were. I had something to do, and to arrange for Gerald, which could not be delayed. So I sent you the purest symbol of protection I had, to keep you safe until I cou
ld come myself.”
“How?” she mumbled, “do you send a thing – like this,” and she held it up, “through the air? And say it will reach the right person, wherever that person is?”
Vespasian’s smile was very faint, just a tuck in that dark suntanned skin. He said, “My dear child, do you expect me to explain something like that at a time such as this? I have a power – as I think you know. But it took many years to hone, and cannot be explained in minutes. Perhaps, on the way to the convent, I can tell a little more.”
She looked up at him suddenly. “I don’t want to go back to the convent,” she said. “I want to stay with you.”
He smiled again, this time a rare smile that touched his eyes. “No. I must take you to a place of relative safety. Where I am going will be the most dangerous of all.” He leaned forward unexpectedly and flicked a long tangled curl back from my face. “You’re a forgiving child, Tilda.” He smiled again. “I’m sorry I hurt you so much before, but there are some things I cannot explain and that is another of them. Now, ask what else you wish. Then we must rest.”
I said, avoiding his eyes, “That – about what you said – and what you did – would be the most important question.”
He shook his head. “I cannot answer you, nor will I, only to assure you that I do little without purpose, and my purpose was neither lust nor cruelty. Ask another.”
“The abbot told me to leave,” she said, plaintive, “but you want to take me back there. The prioress hates me.”
“Abbot Bernado,” said Vespasian, his voice drifting into the slow murmur of memory, “was a pupil of mine many years ago in Italy. I taught him the fundamentals of alchemy. He was an eager student. Although he returned to orthodox Christianity, he remains grateful to me for what I taught him. And very wealthy. Riches bring power. He has used his power within the church.”
“You taught him how to be rich?” Tilda was intrigued. “If you knew how to be rich, why we were always so poor?”
“I taught the good Bernado how to turn base metals into gold,” smiled Vespasian. “A useful trick and one of the basic principles of alchemy which he has utilised now for many years. That’s why the prioress, whose name I have forgotten and who is without interest, will not denounce him although she hates him and is terrified of the dark powers she assumes that wealth involves. Power corrupts. All that is utterly unimportant. Bernado will take you back if I ask him personally, and you’ll be safe there. True Christianity creates an aura which cannot be breached by evil, and in spite of his greed, the convent remains within a strong ring of sacred protection.”
“You never seemed very interested in Christianity,” said Tilda wistfully. “I thought you followed the old religions.”
“Yes, alchemy is far older than the Christ,” said Vespasian. “That doesn’t mean that the son of the Father is not the holder of a power greater than the enemy. I don’t mean the slaughter and wanton cruelties of the crusades or the rigidity and wilful misrepresentations of the growing church. I speak, as the Christ taught, of the power of love. Those who understand these things are already uniting alchemy with Christianity. They call it the Grail. But that is not my path. I do not have the time.”
I shivered. “That sounds so final.”
He was still smiling a little, patiently waiting for Tilda’s questions. I knew it was kind of him. It was the only gift he felt he could give her. She said, “So why don’t you make gold for yourself? Why weren’t we rich in London?”
He took a deep breath, holding it for a moment before speaking. “Arthur murdered my wife,” he said, and his eyes glazed, shutting off warmth. “She was his step daughter, Joanna’s child. They tortured and murdered her and left her in my bed.” He wasn’t looking at me anymore, but into the depths of the fire. Then he looked back briefly at me and frowned. “This is not your story and not something I intend to tell you in any detail. Suffice it to say I was accused of her death. I had to disappear. King Richard’s justice was no more inspired than John’s and at the time, John was regent. I gave up my title and became Vespasian. To then become a wealthy man would have attracted attention. I chose to live in the shadows. Only once, in the forest house a few months ago, did I finally make gold and then only enough for the existing emergencies.”
“You adopted all the children,” I wondered. “Was that simple kindness?”
He smiled again, amused. “Does that seem so unlikely?”
I shook my head. “No. Well, yes. I mean, you taught us to steal.”
“Gerald was very young,” he said. “He was my step-son, my wife’s child from her first, arranged marriage to a man already within Arthur’s circle until his death. Arthur and my wife’s mother intended bringing up Gerald according to their beliefs. I owed it to Ingrid to save her son so I extricated him from them and took him away with me. It was necessary to live in anonymity, watching them but unseen. Never having trained as a useful man, I had few ways of making money without drawing attention to myself. I stole. Not being a good Christian follower of the Ten Commandments, I found this made us a reasonable living.”
I smiled too. I couldn’t imagine Vespasian worrying about breaking such a minor thing as an entire moral code. “And then you found a hoard of orphaned brats, begging and stealing across the city. You already had one boy. So you took in others.”
“I felt a little sympathy, perhaps,” he admitted, almost as if it were a confession. “Gerald’s identity could be more easily hidden within a crowd. Besides, the streets of London can be a dismal place for a small child to live and starve. I’d recently undergone some experience of misery myself. I was more susceptible, perhaps, to the difficulties of others.”
“We all hero-worshipped you,” stuttered Tilda, embarrassed. “The boys still do.”
He looked down at me and stretched out his hand, lifting my chin so that he looked into my eyes. “But not you, meus carus?” he asked softly. “Not anymore?”
She couldn’t say that it was no longer hero-worship but something much stronger. I felt her cheeks flush but in the bright firelight hoped it wouldn’t be noticeable. “It’s confusing,” she said. “It’s all to do with what’s happened. I just don’t understand about alchemy and torture and magic. It’s like trying to peer through fog and just when you think you can make out shapes, then the smoke moves in and it’s hidden even deeper. Will you explain all that? Can you make me understand?”
“I cannot,” sighed Vespasian, “not entirely. Symbolism is the reason for everything, as I’ve told you. You try to see in terms of solid fact, but that’s not how the world turns. Facts only exist because symbolism shaped them. That’s why you’re frustrated by what you call confusion and riddles. I speak not in code but in the only truth which we can grasp on our level, which is the symbolism of spirit.”
I stared. “I still don’t understand,” said Tilda.
“I would frighten you further,” said Vespasian, “if I told you the greater truths.” His voice had faded again into lost murmurings and the pale reflections of moonshine. “And now I believe it’s time we rested. There is a lot to be done when we wake and a long road for both of us.”
“Oh, please,” Tilda sat up straight, gazing up at him with a desperate determination. She sat at his feet and the heat of the fire was calming, but now she wasn’t calm at all. “Not yet,” she pleaded. “Sleeping isn’t important and I don’t want to go back to the convent anyway. First you have to tell me more.” It seemed miraculous that Vespasian was talking at all and I valued it as much as she did. The ouroboros still lay in her lap and she continued to clutch and finger its curves. “First tell me about Arthur and Malcolm and who they are,” she begged. “Why do they do the terrible things they do? Is evil so mindless? You were there, in the house. Joanna and Arthur, they talked as if you were one of their group. What you did to me – so you won’t explain that – but you saw what they did and you were with them. Did you want to hurt me too?” Tilda was dizzy and utterly miserable. As she choked back her
tears, for a moment I was myself and able to speak quite clearly. I saw Vespasian narrow his eyes as he watched me. He recognised my presence. “I wonder which of you is the devil,” I said, “and which the saviour. Or if there are two devils and no saviour at all.”
He knew at once they were Molly’s words. He leaned towards me and his face became stone. “Answer me first,” he said, emotionless, “and then I will decide whether to answer you.” I couldn’t look away from him. His eyes, or something behind them, gripped me. “And you will tell me the truth,” he continued, “or you will discover I have more power than you can possibly imagine.” I couldn’t even blink. “Now tell me,” he said, “are you the veleda?”
The spell snapped like stretched elastic and Tilda gulped. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “You know who I am. I know no one called Veleda. You frighten me.”
Vespasian relaxed. “There’s no need to be afraid – not yet,” he said. “Since you cannot understand the absolute truth, I shall speak in terms of the distortions you call reality.” He sighed, and put his hand gently on my shoulder. “The veleda was the seer who lived during the Emperor Vespasian’s reign in ancient Rome. She studied alchemy and was a great sorceress. When I took Vespasian’s name as symbolic of inspirational peace within power, I called to her. She has come many times, and she has opened the gates.”
I stared. It was me he meant. He thought Molly was the opener of gates. Now I believed he was possibly, probably, quite right. I’d been the gatekeeper for the thing that had taken Bertie and killed in both worlds. I wished I could push Tilda aside long enough to ask Vespasian about Thomas Cambio. But Tilda was crying. I wanted to hold her and comfort her myself. She seemed so very young. “I’m sorry,” she was whispering. “I’m so sorry. I know I don’t understand anything even though I should. I’d help if I knew how.”
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