by Manda Scott
‘I didn’t stop her either, Stell. If we’re going to fall into recrimination, we should at least split it equally.’
‘You were barely conscious. I don’t think—’
The nurse was there, swiftly kind. She held open the curtain. ‘Mrs O’Connor? Your brother’s here.’
‘My bro— Davy?’
He embraced her briefly, drily. He shook hands with a shocked and silent Kit. He said, ‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it. Nobody could stop Mother when she set her mind to something, you know that as well as I do.’ He nodded to the nurse. ‘Thank you. Can we be alone with her for a while?’
She stepped back, neatly. ‘I’ll let you know the blood results when we get them.’ He was wearing a white coat. The smile she gave him had a different quality from the one she gave Kit and Stella as she left.
Davy stood at the foot of the bed and studied the monitors and winced at what they told him.
Tonelessly, he said, ‘She’s damaged the endothel— the lining of her lungs. There was chlorine in the smoke. This wasn’t just arson, it was designed to kill whoever was in the farmhouse. Ursula – that is, my mother – seems to have realized the danger in time. I don’t think the firemen fully understood it when they brought her out to you, but apparently she had a linen tea towel over her face and she’d poured lemonade on it, to act as an acid barrier. It’s probably the only reason she’s still alive.’
He was speaking automatically, in the clinical rhythms of the medics. His eyes fixed on the monitor screen and never left it. Stella took his shoulders and guided him to a seat and pressed gently, until he sat. ‘Will she get better?’ she asked.
‘If she lives through tonight, she’ll probably survive. She may end up as a respiratory cripple dragging an oxygen bottle strapped to a Zimmer frame everywhere she goes, but she’ll be alive. I’m not sure she’d thank us for inflicting that kind of life on her.’
Kit said, ‘It’s not as bad as you think. Hope’s worth a lot.’
There was a moment’s hard, bright silence. Davy Law dragged his gaze from the monitors and looked across the bed for the first time. His eyes were rimmed red. His skin was yellow beneath the brown of the Kurdish summer. His hands shook, from nicotine famine, or grief for his mother, or the presence of Kit, or all three. He said, ‘I heard what happened in the cave. I’m sorry.’
Kit said, ‘So am I. But I’d rather be here, the object of everyone’s pity, than not be here at all.’
There was a gap when either of the other two could have contradicted him, protested the absence of pity, and did not.
Stella felt Kit’s knee against her own; for that reason alone, she held silent. She watched Davy Law take a breath and hold it and let it out slowly, shaking his head.
After a moment, he said, ‘I think I would rather be hated than pitied. But it goes hardest when there’s both together.’
‘I never pitied you, Davy.’
‘But you did hate?’
‘What else was left?’
That was when they faced each other fully, eye to eye, so that the past was laid bare between them.
The curtains contained them, soft veils that kept the world at bay while something broken was mended, or not; she could not tell. On the bed, Ursula Walker’s chest lifted and fell with the sigh of the ventilator.
Stella felt a change in the knee that pressed against hers. Kit said, ‘Why did we not know Ursula was your mother?’
Davy Law smiled crookedly, showing his bad teeth. ‘We don’t talk about it much. And you didn’t see the family resemblance.’
‘There isn’t any.’
‘There is.’ He leaned over the bed, turning so that his head was next to hers on the pillow with his bloodshot grey eyes fixed wide. With great care, he lifted his mother’s eyelid, so they could see the steely grey-blue beneath. It was possible to imagine his without the bloodshot and yellowing and to see them the same. He said, ‘The eyes have it.’
Stella said, ‘We should have seen.’
Davy shrugged. ‘Nobody else ever does. But if you want to beat yourself up about this on top of everything else, don’t let me stop you.’ He let go and sat up. ‘Beyond that, you’re right, I am the nightmare of my mother’s days. She wanted a beautiful, striking, intelligent child to carry on the line unbroken since before the Romans landed and what did she get but a runt of a son with teeth like a coypu on steroids and hair like rats’ tails.’
Stella stared at him. He grimaced. ‘I made that up. If Kit said it to you, he was plagiarizing.’
From her side, Kit said, ‘Guilty.’
Davy shrugged it off. ‘But she let me come back home to the farmhouse when I screwed up so badly at Cambridge that I couldn’t go on with medicine, and she opened doors for me in anthropology, so in the end I followed in her footsteps after all.’
He reached out and smoothed a single finger down her cheek. ‘She took me with her to Lapland. It’s the one place left on earth where they don’t judge a book by its cover. My mother and I found a degree of mutual respect out there in the ice and the snow and the reindeer piss, which is more than we’ve ever had before. I would like for it not to be taken from us just yet.’
Shorn of all irony, wrapped in grief, the profile of his face was quite different. Through a tight throat, Stella said, ‘I have the heart-stone. If there’s anything we can do with it …’
He shook his head. ‘All you can do is find the heart of the world and take the stone there at the right time. Her whole life has been pushing towards this.’
Kit said, ‘The time appointed is dawn tomorrow, but we still don’t know the place. Unless someone else can translate the last two volumes, we’re finished. Can you read Mayan script?’
There was a window beyond the head of the bed. Davy looked out of it into the dark night. ‘I can, but not without my mother’s dictionaries and they were all in the farmhouse. There are copies in the Bodleian Library. It won’t be open before dawn.’
The urine bag was nearly full. Davy reached for an empty measuring cylinder and filled it. Briefly, the curtained space smelled sharp.
He read the volume, wrote it on a chart and held up the cylinder. ‘I’ll go and empty this and then we can work out a game plan for the next few—’ It was the second set of ring tones that stopped him. His eyes flashed wide. ‘Please tell me one of you hasn’t left your mobile on? You’ve never seen vengeance till you’ve met an ICU nurse who thinks her monitors are in danger of electronic interference. She’ll slaughter us and we’ll deserve every bit of— Stella!’
‘It’s not mine,’ she said, ‘it’s yours. It’s a text.’ His phone was in his coat, which he had taken off and hung on the back of her chair. She lifted it out and handed it to him, and saw the moment when the blood fled from his face.
‘Davy?’ She reached for his arm.
He sat down heavily. ‘It’s from my mother. I didn’t know she had my number.’
‘Is someone else using her phone?’
‘Doesn’t look like it.’ He thumbed down the screen. ‘It’s timed at 10:27 this evening. You called the fire brigade at 10:23 and they pulled her out at 10:51. She must have sent this when she was still in the house.’ He was speaking woodenly, not truly thinking, staring at his mother with the green lights of the monitors casting ugly shades across his skin.
Gently, Kit said, ‘What does it say, Davy?’
‘Now is the time to open that which was closed in the fire’s heart. Please.’ He was weeping and had not noticed. ‘I have to go back to the farmhouse.’
‘You can’t. It’s an inferno. The whole sky was orange when we left. And it was crawling with firemen.’
‘They’ve gone. I listened to the short wave on the way here.’ He was already reaching for his coat. ‘I still have to go.’
‘Then we’re coming with you,’ Stella said.
There were no firemen, no flames, no orange sky at Ursula Walker’s farmhouse, only a dark night, lit by half a moon and shar
p stars and the smell, everywhere, of smoke and ash. Stella parked the car where she had on the first afternoon. She and Davy helped Kit out. They walked together down the hill, through air that became thicker and hotter the closer they came to the house.
White limewash showed grey through a smear of soot and ash, but the frame was intact. At the gate, they stopped; a single band of yellow and black tape blocked the way. Where there had once been posters announcing The 2012 Connection was a new notice: SAFETY HAZARD, DO NOT ENTER.
Stella said, ‘Do we need to go inside?’
‘I do,’ said Davy. ‘You can stay out here if you want, it might be safer.’ He was more on edge than she had ever seen him. Looking past her into the night, he said, ‘Does either of you think we were followed?’
Kit stood between them, where he could lean easily on either shoulder. ‘No, and I was watching,’ he said. ‘Ursula was in the kitchen when the firemen found her.’
‘Best try the back door, then.’ Davy forced a grin. ‘Less of the house to fall on our heads as we go through.’
They went slowly down the path, past the debris of the garden fence. From the dark, Davy said, ‘I don’t suppose you happened to bring a torch?’
‘Use your phone,’ Stella said and took her own out and switched it on.
Along two faint beams of light, between scorched and sodden roses, over fallen slates from the roof, they picked their way round the side of the house. The back door was gone. The door frame was warped and scorched.
Davy Law ran one hand down the ruined wood. ‘Whoever did this knew what they were doing.’ He dusted his hands on his jeans. His face was still and hard as stone. ‘Breathe shallowly. If you feel anything bad, get out fast.’
Stella followed him in over the threshold. She swept the poor light of her phone in an arc across the remains of the oak table, the bent-wood chairs, the charred and pocked walls and floors, the broken fireplace.
Kit came after them, taking his time, watching where he placed his feet among the debris. He stopped in a smear of moonlight. ‘Davy, you don’t need to see this. Why don’t you tell us what you’re after and you can stay in the car while we get it.’
‘Hardly. You forget, I’ve spent the past five years in war zones.’
‘They weren’t burning the house you grew up in.’
‘Even so … There are things only I can do.’ He stepped in and stood by the table. More faintly, he said, ‘I didn’t do much of my growing up here. We fell out too soon for that.’ He turned on his heel, looking for something. Absently, he said, ‘Can you wait here a moment?’
Wraithlike, he was gone. They waited in the dark with the noise of settling timbers going off like firecrackers about them.
‘Scared?’ asked Kit.
‘Terrified,’ Stella said. ‘Do you trust Davy?’
‘Yes. You?’
‘I always have. From the moment I met him.’ A sound came from the broken doorway. She looked up. ‘Davy? What’s that?’
‘A lump hammer. There’s been one in the garden shed for as long as there’s been a garden shed, which takes us back to 1588, or thereabouts. Martha Walker had the first one built, the woman who married Francis Walker to found the dynasty. She’s my great-great-great-several other greats grandmother and she left a rather strange instruction in her will that the hammer was never to be beyond reach of the kitchen. I had an idea why this might be when I was a teenager and tried to use it. My mother was … not impressed. That was the day I moved out to live with cousin Meredith.’
‘Meredith Lawrence?’ Stella asked, surprised. ‘He’s been helping decode the ledgers.’
‘Of course. The obsession runs in the family. You must have noticed.’ Davy turned the hammer over in his hand. In the light of their phones, the mass of metal that was the head gave off a dull blue sheen. He said, ‘He was a good man to grow up with and we all learned to speak to each other after a while. I took half of his name, though. I thought Mother had never forgiven me for that. Maybe I was wrong. She’s never said please to me before in the whole of my life.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Kit asked.
‘What she told me to do, open that which was closed in the heart of the fire. It does make sense, but you have to know the family history fully to understand, which was why it was safe to put it in a text. If I didn’t get it, nobody else would figure it out.’ He lifted his head and smiled quite beautifully. ‘Could you do the thing with the mobile phones, and shine the light here, on the hearthstones at the back of the inglenook?’
He swung the hammer even as he spoke, not hard, but with focused precision, aiming it at the solid stone floor at the place where it met the wall in the heart of the inglenook fireplace.
Three times, the hammer rebounded off solid stone. On the fourth, the sound was different; stone ground against stone. Davy turned the hammer over and used the handle to crack the mortar, then spun it again and rained softer, more precise blows against the opening gap. Between each one, he said, ‘This is the … second secret of the fire. Cedric Owen’s ledgers were … found in the bread oven a century after his death but … nobody has ever opened this … for the obvious reason that my family’s history required that it not be until the time of … final reckoning, which my mother … clearly considers to have— Damn. Could you make more light?’
‘Can’t,’ Stella said. ‘The mobiles are running low. Kit, kill yours. We need to keep the batteries for later.’ He did and they stood in darkness lit by stars. She said, ‘Davy, are there candles?’
‘Under the sink. On the left, with the dusters. There’s a box of matches on the shelf above. If we’re lucky, the stone of the sink will have protected them from the fire. If not, we’re stuffed.’
Stella felt her way there and found a pack of six misshapen candles and the matches, not yet burned in the heat. ‘We’re lucky,’ she said. She took three, set them in a triangle on the floor and lit them. ‘Did you ever see this done in Lapland?’
‘I don’t think so.’ For the first time, she heard Davy Law sound cautious.
The skull-stone tingled in her hands, more than it had done when she held it over the sunlight. She held it over the triple flame and caught the centre point, where the firelight became blue heart-light, shining softly from the skull’s eyes.
‘God,’ said Davy Law reverently.
Stella took care not to shine it at him, or at Kit, but at the chipped place on the floor where the hammer had hit. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Finish it.’
He did, swiftly, chipping into the gap.
‘Done.’
He smelled of brick dust now, as much as smoke. He was shaking all over. Where he had worked, in the deepest shadow at the back of the fireplace, was a rectangular gap. Carefully, he pushed against the stone at its edge. ‘I should be a gentleman and let ladies go first, but in this particular instance … Could we have more light inside, please?’ There was a sound of stone falling on stone. Davy stepped forward uncertainly, and angled the light of his phone into the hole.
‘Oh, yes. Oh, very, very yes.’
From the denser dark, from amidst the dust and the ash and the broken flagstone, he drew a roll of parchment tied about with a scrap of linen, and a small notebook.
Stella said, ‘Tell me that’s a map?’ She laid the stone down. The yellow candle flames changed the colour of the night.
‘I think so. I hope so.’ Davy knelt, and began to push back the ash and debris from the floor. ‘Can we clear a space? And perhaps look in whatever’s left of the pantry? There were plastic bags on the floor under the stone shelf. If there’s one left intact, we could open it up and spread it out. I think this’ – he held up the parchment – ‘was old when Cedric Owen was alive, and if it’s not a map, or, at least, proof of where to go, I’ll eat the kitchen table. While this’ – he held up the book – ‘was hidden for a very good reason and I badly want to know what it was.’
Stella found a roll of bin liners in a corner where the fire had
not reached. She swept a place on the floor and unrolled them to make a clean bed.
She reached for the bundle. Kit said, ‘You need to be wearing gloves. If it’s that old, we can’t get finger grease on it.’
‘But—’
‘Marigolds,’ said Davy. ‘Also under the sink.’ They were all shaking now.
She found them and came back and fumbled with the knots in the linen that bound the scroll together. It came undone suddenly, in a snap and flurry of old threads. With unsteady hands, she eased it open. ‘I’ll break it.’
From somewhere in the dark to her left, Davy Law said, ‘Stella, we have less than six hours until dawn. If we can see where it shows, breaking it doesn’t matter.’
She did break it, but only in one place. Laid out together, the two pieces made a whole – a charcoal-drawn sketch of a landscape, dyed here and there with patches of old, worn pigment. The lines were nearly gone, just enough to show a landscape, a circle of stones with a grassy mound inside and a shaped stone gateway. Trees swayed behind, and a quarter-moon stood overhead, with the sun sketched as a curved arc on the horizon. Stella squinted and stared and looked up at Davy Law, who was pale as glass and plastic-faced, as if all the feeling had drained into his fingertips.
‘Do you know where it is?’ she asked.
He barely heard her. He made a small, desperate noise in the back of his throat.
Quietly, Kit said, ‘It’s Weyland’s Smithy. It’s been there since before the Romans came. The Saxons believed that if you left a horse there overnight with a silver piece, the god-smith Weyland would have shod it again by the morning.’
‘And it’s a grave mound,’ said Davy Law hoarsely. ‘Where else would you take the stone that mirrors the head of your ancestors?’
‘Is it near?’
‘Ten minutes away.’ His eyes were shining. ‘We’ll make it before dawn, no problem at all. And we still have time to look at the book.’
He laid the notebook alongside the curled edges of the parchment. As Cedric Owen’s ledgers had been, it was bound in dull red leather. Unlike them, it bore the letters BT, YULE, 1588 on the front cover in spidery capitals. Davy opened it with a finger’s end, touching only the corner. Inside, the writing angled steeply across the page, barely more legible than the Mayan glyphs. He said, ‘They never found Barnabas Tythe’s first diary.’ And then, ‘Read it for us, Stella. You’re the one with the practice reading Elizabethan script.’