Fair Weather

by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  I wondered if he was telling me the truth and then decided that whatever else, it was now always the truth he told me. “Does it all matter so much?” I said. “It wasn’t as if I chose the card, it came to me as I touched it. The woman told me she kept you out of the way so that I had to cut the cards myself.”

  “She did,” said Vespasian. “I had no choice, though it seems this time you needed neither my presence nor protection. The Tarocchi Fool is your true card, Tilda, and you chose it because it recognised its mistress. The next situation is unlikely to be so benign. When I next demand the right to act in your stead, it will be to save both our lives.”

  I should have questioned his ability to travel into my dreams but instead I took a very deep breath. “I know my life’s in danger. But yours too?”

  Vespasian smiled and a glint of the old malice was back. “Though Arthur would cause my death if he could,” he said, “it is you who are my principle danger. You may easily take my life, Tilda, before this night is out.”

  I thought it absurd. “I don’t suppose you’ll explain that,” I said crossly.

  “Quite right,” he said. “I won’t. Now, your own clothes are once again ruined and there are no woman’s garments in this house. There’ve been few servants left here for some years and certainly no lady of the estate. I’ve therefore borrowed some clothes for you, if you call it borrowing. However, few if any may fit. You must do the best you can.” He had tipped a pile of assorted materials into my lap. He had not asked me how I felt. “Dress quickly now,” he said. “We must leave soon.”

  Wherever he had stolen these from, it was a very odd assortment and in spite of his having removed my clothes on several occasions, it showed that his actual knowledge of woman’s attire was sadly lacking. I struggled to dress, still stiff with the ache of the burns, but it was the fire in my head that slowed me most. A ragtaggle collection of half understood information chased itself around my mind. I thought of Bernado and the foul thing he’d somehow conjured, then the far greater evil of the woman who had possessed Bertie, murdered and tortured in my own world, and now forced herself into my dreams. I did not understand the relevance of the tarot pack. To me it seemed childish as if playing with paper could influence a life. What Vespasian had done remained with me like heaving nausea, but in spite of the horror that surrounded him, he was still my only protection within an increasing threat of manic power.

  Gerald had explained the mundane things that Vespasian would never stoop to tell me, of his history and how all this had begun. At least Tilda could now feel the earth solid beneath her feet. So I concentrated on Gerald’s tales while dressing, squeezing out the darker shadows from the edges of my mind.

  Vespasian’s step-son had sat on my bed and whispered to me all the things that he had discovered, and which excited him so much. He hadn’t lit the candle. We sat together in the dark, telling stories as once all of us had in far greater innocence, back around the fire on long evenings. I felt a sweet nostalgia and a terrible sadness for lost simplicity, which at first spoiled Gerald’s enthusiasm.

  “All these years,” Gerald told me, “before you came of course, for I was with him at the first, I thought of Vespasian as a remarkable man. I always loved him. He was my father and my hero and my saviour but I never thought he might truly prove to be my father. He seemed such a powerful man, but he actually had no power at all. That was the puzzle.”

  “So,” I had whispered into the darkness, clutching my bedcover up around my neck, “I suppose you were too much of a baby to remember anything before the London house. But we know some of it now.”

  “That he’s the Baron de Vrais and my step father. Yes, that’s right.” Gerald had brought me wine from the estate’s cellars. We had a cup each, sitting there in Gerald’s great house on the bed with its soft expensive mattress, sipping Greek Malmsey and whispering in the dark. “He was the only child of the old Norman Baron de Vrais, and his mother was the lady Bianca, Italian nobility from Venice. I expect he was always unusual and terribly clever. He was sent off to university in Italy at Bologna when he was fourteen and spent a couple of years there studying, but then he took off travelling far and wide. Do you know he speaks a hundred languages?”

  “A hundred?” I smiled. “How enterprising of him.”

  “Well,” grinned Gerald, “French and Latin and English of course, like all the noble lords. But he speaks Italian and Castilian and Greek as well, - and Persian and Arabic too because he spent years in all those countries and he’s translated all sorts of learned documents from one to the other. He spent months with the Arabs in the libraries of Toledo. Do you know his works are still held in monasteries all across Europe?”

  I remembered the package that Vespasian had demanded from Bernado before the place burned. He had mentioned papers with some Arabic name. “He started studying alchemy, not languages,” I said.

  “He won’t talk about the magic,” said Gerald. “I suppose everything went together. He knows how to make gold from iron.”

  “Did he show you?” I asked, greatly intrigued.

  Gerald laughed. “Not even a peep. He says I’m never to have anything to do with alchemy. But I won’t need to anyway. My family are terribly rich if I can claim my lands back from Arthur. Then there’s Vespasian’s real wealth, which he’s lost but he says he’ll leave everything to me if he ever gets it back.”

  “He might have children of his own one day,” I said without thinking.

  “He says he counts me as his own child,” said Gerald proudly. “He really loved my mother you know. She was Ingrid, Baroness Tennaton and she and my proper father were one of the few families with real Saxon blood, instead of being Norman descent like Vespasian. You are too, aren’t you?”

  The question had taken me by surprise. After all, I was Molly and my lineage was probably as bastard as any modern Englishwoman. “Saxon? Yes, I suppose so,” said Tilda. “But my parents were serfs.”

  “Well, that’s because of the Normans too,” said Gerald with a sniff of sympathy. “Anyway, Vespasian says his family wouldn’t keep serfs. They made them all freemen. Mind you, I don’t think it was all kindness. He says they worked harder that way, because it wasn’t grudged.”

  “So Vespasian came back from all his travels and got married.”

  “My real father was killed in a sword fight resisting Arthur, who was the man who’d married my mother’s mother,” Gerald told me. “So my mother was widowed with this little baby who was me of course, and already under Arthur’s control. He took over all the lands and property she inherited and practically locked her up in his house. My grandmother, that’s Joanna, she helped him do it. I thought she was so kind and beautiful when I met her, but she’s a terrible woman. How can anyone kill their own daughter?”

  Vespasian had told Gerald a lot about his parents and what had happened to them. As he had once given me the gift of answers to my questions, so he had given Gerald the gift of all the information due to him regarding his heritage. Now Gerald buzzed with the knowledge of his own rightful importance. He was to be Baron Tennaton and if Arthur and Joanna died, then the probability of a brilliant future might come back into his hands.

  “When we were living in London,” Gerald went on, “Vespasian started stepping back into the King’s good graces. Do you remember? All that was for me.” Gerald was grinning and even in the dark I could see the flash of his teeth. “He was incognito of course, and called himself Vespasian Fairweather instead of Jasper de Vrais, but he started building up the reputation of an honest man, going to fight with the King and getting known for his courage, so that King John would accept him and then knight him, and that would open doors for me again. I bet Vespasian hated being summoned for silly hunting trips and things, but he went, didn’t he? If he’d had a little longer, his plan would have worked and he could have helped me claim my title.”

  “The king didn’t recognise him?”

  “No, he hadn’t known the king before, no
t personally. As Jasper, he’d only known the old King Richard. The other court nobility, well I think many of them knew and either turned a blind eye, or actually encouraged it. I expect lots of them were really pleased to see him back, whatever he called himself. You know how overpowering Vespasian is. He could influence people just with a smile.”

  “He never smiles, except when he’s being nasty.”

  “Alright, just by looking down his nose at them then,” said Gerald.

  “I want to know about your mother,” I told him. “Tell me about her.”

  “They met in England after he came back from his travels,” continued Gerald. “He was called home when his father died, and his mother died very soon afterwards I think. So Vespasian, I mean Jasper, he was the baron himself and terribly rich and powerful and into all this alchemy stuff. I’m not sure, I mean – he isn’t going to tell me all that, is he? – but I think he was sort of getting into the blacker side himself when he met up with Arthur. Vespasian was much younger so perhaps he was impressed with Arthur, or maybe it was the other way round. Anyway, he joined him and all the others too. There’s this foul man called Malcolm, well he’s Arthur’s son by his first wife. Then there’s a whole brood of both commoners and nobles, and Vespasian became one of them. He wanted dark power I expect, but he wouldn’t do everything Arthur wanted him to. He wouldn’t obey and insisted on going his own way. Then he met my mother Ingrid, who was hidden away in Arthur’s house, and they fell in love of course and got married. Chivalry and romance in the middle of the wickedness. That trapped Vespasian – I ought to call him Jasper – and pulled him further into the clan.”

  “There seems to be a great deal of variety between practitioners of alchemy,” I sniffed. “Vespasian believes in the old Earth Magic. Arthur follows black magic and that’s not really alchemy at all, though I suppose it’s related.”

  “Well, Vespasian knew so much, he taught the others,” said Gerald, “so they kept him and tried not to let him go. But then he discovered they were into some really brutal stuff. He found out Arthur had killed my father. So Vespasian took my mother and me and they ran away. Being Baron de Vrais, he had all these estates but they were up in the north and west of England and too near Arthur’s lands which were north east so they came down south to the estates my mother inherited from her father. My grandfather had been a rich merchant, and one of the first to bring cotton in from France. He was Joanna’s first husband and a good man I think. He went down with his ship outside Calais.”

  The small castle on the river where Arthur had taken Gerald and where I had gone and then been imprisoned and tortured, had in fact been Ingrid’s home. Much of the adjoining land, not at that time classified as royal forest, had belonged to Ingrid and therefore passed to her new husband. What belonged to a wife became her husband’s property so Jasper, Baron de Vrais, his young wife and his step son travelled south and took up residence on her estate. They built a smaller house among the trees where they often stayed to keep out of the way of any unwelcome visitors when Arthur was looking for them. They opened a leper hospital in the woods, introduced new practises on their farmlands and freed their serfs. Vespasian refused to join the crusades but they travelled a little, to Normandy and Anjou. They had, perhaps, a few short years of happiness together.

  Eventually, feeling safe at last I suppose, they moved north and went to live on the grand de Vrais estates in Staffordshire. Then Arthur and Joanna came one dark night, just like Arthur came later on to take Gerald. Vespasian was called away on a royal summons at court. He found afterwards there wasn’t a summons. It was falsified by Arthur. But when Vespasian returned, he found his step-son taken and his wife murdered in their bed.

  Ingrid had been killed in exactly the same way that later they had murdered Isabel, except that Ingrid lay on the velvet majesty of the huge marriage bed, so blood soaked that Vespasian could smell it and knew what had happened as soon as he entered the house. The servants knew nothing. Arthur had grown in power.

  Vespasian found his beautiful wife with her eyes blinded and knives stabbed through each. Her nose had been sliced from her face. Her naked body had been sliced down with the sternum split. One small hand and one delicate foot and ankle had been flayed with all the skin peeled back from the flesh. Her stomach had been cut open to see whether she was carrying Vespasian’s child. Vespasian never knew how much agony had been done to her before she died. Such torture would have taken a long time, unless achieved purely by magic. Hopefully she was already dead before such pain.

  Joanna and Arthur publicly accused the Baron de Vrais of murdering his own wife and the Regent John, never having known Vespasian personally, accepted the expediency of the accusation. Arthur was financing many of John’s own luxuries, so his word held authority. Vespasian stayed only to bury his wife and burn the bed. Then he travelled east to Arthur’s estates. He stole back his step son and immediately went into hiding. For some years, no one heard what had become of the wicked Baron de Vrais, sorcerer and magician, who had committed murder most foul.

  Arthur, in Joanna’s name, claimed Ingrid’s lands which had all been confiscated by the crown in Vespasian’s absence, and the woods around the leper hospital were designated royal forest. Vespasian was left in absolute poverty, exiled and wanted for murder and unnatural practises.

  “The torture,” I asked Gerald. “Why? Is it part of black magic?” I had never told Gerald exactly what had been done to me, but he must have known some of it. All the boys in the forest house had talked about it.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Gerald had said. “I told you, it’s that sort of thing Vespasian won’t talk about. But he told me other stuff about Arthur and that group. They’d been searching for Vespasian for ages when they found out where he was. Then Malcolm secretly made advances to Isabel. Well, you know what she was like, poor Issy. She was silly and vain and I suppose she was flattered by Malcolm’s tricks. After all, he’d have seemed awfully grand to her, a fine young lord who might have wanted to marry her.”

  “How wretched,” I sighed. I had grieved so much for all the others, but I was suddenly conscious that I’d never truly mourned Isabel. “After all, Vespasian might have bedded her, but he certainly never gave her any hope he’d marry her.”

  “Oh well, you know what she was,” nodded Gerald. “Or perhaps you don’t, you weren’t around. Well, Vespasian found her whoring outside the Cock Tavern when she was just nine years old and such a skinny little thing and brought her back to the house. There was just him and me and Walter and Issy for ages.”

  “Then Vespasian shouldn’t have taken advantage of her,” I said primly into my blankets, trying not to sniff.

  “You have some awfully funny ideas sometimes, Tilda,” said Gerald, eyeing me with suspicion. “You’re not going to cry, are you? You can hardly accuse Vespasian of improper seduction, knowing Isabel. He certainly never touched her for years till she grew up, I can tell you that. And it wasn’t as though he was hard up. Didn’t you ever notice? I suppose you were too much of a kid. Well, women of all kinds used to flock around.”

  “You think that’s an excuse?” I demanded. “I suppose you think it’s normal for a man not even bothering to be faithful?”

  Gerald sighed. “I’m not getting into that sort of argument now,” he said. “Especially with you. Anyway, listen, if you want me to finish the story. Vespasian soon knew what was going on but he admits he didn’t stop it because he wanted to find out exactly what Malcolm and Arthur were up to. I don’t suppose he cared much what Isabel did, as long as he could get to Arthur. She was trapped in the middle, poor Issy. But it was her own fault really.”

  “My God, she didn’t deserve what she got,” I said in horror. “So Arthur murdered her in exactly the same way as your poor mother, to send Vespasian a message?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Gerald.

  Which was why Vespasian had been following Isabel that day, and had found her body at the same time I had. I had co
llapsed into his arms and he had been kind to me and horrified at Isabel’s fate. But he had been partially responsible for her death, as he had been for most of what had later happened to me, the torture and the pain, whether he had done it personally or not.

  Chapter Forty Five

  But Gerald knew even less about what was to happen next than I did. Vespasian would face not only Arthur, but mystery, sorcery and greater powers of which Gerald knew nothing at all.

  And that ignorance, though I could hardly tell Gerald, was less true for me. I’d faced evil and knew something of its terror though nothing of its origins and less of its meaning. But I knew that I myself was one of the dangers. Vespasian had made that frequently clear. But even before he had spoken, I had begun to guess. Tilda-Molly, the holder of the portals, as they’d called me in the dream. Gatekeeper. I opened the way between worlds, not only for my own passage but for the thing which followed, and killed. Vespasian had long guessed, but Arthur had only recently recognised it. Gerald was Joanna’s blood and forfeit to their cult but now they wanted me for a whole different reason.

  The other boys stayed at the forest house and Vespasian had left them a good deal of money but no guarantee that he would return. If he was not back within the week, he told them to divide the money between them, go back to London and make their own fortunes. Gerald, of course, had promised to take them all as brothers onto his estates if he ever officially became Baron Tennaton again. If he was even alive to claim the title. Stephen had promised to find wolves and do battle at last and impress Vespasian when he came back, and Walter had passed a message for me, sending his regards and saying he wished me well and would willingly do me any service in the future that I might call on him to do. Osbert and Hugh were itching to be off and make their own way in the world but they had promised to stay for the week and mind Stephen and the house. Then Vespasian and Gerald had ridden off into the night and the forest had whispered around them like warnings in the wind.