by F. G. Cottam
Adam had never been bullied. He knew this was only the case because he was smart. He knew about Tall Poppy Syndrome, having been the tall poppy all his school life. So when he sensed confrontation, he was always several moves ahead of the biggest, most violent boys. It was a bit like chess. You could outmanoeuvre them. You could confuse their intentions before their intentions were properly resolved in what passed for their minds. You could, through suggestion and diversionary ploys, deflect them and nullify the threat.
One of the first signs that prompted this strategy in Adam was the gleam of spite in a would-be bully’s eyes. There was something wild and uncontrolled about it and it always signalled impending violence. When Adam saw it in the school playground, he always knew what to do. Mrs Mallory’s eyes had that look. They had it all the time. And they possessed it with an intensity he had never encountered before. There was a word, wasn’t there? He would have it in a minute. The word was feral. Mrs Mallory had an expensive haircut and a sophisticated bone structure a bit like a prima ballerina or a catwalk model and she wore a lot of jewellery. But her grey eyes had a feral look when she focused on him. And, even scarier, he had noticed that she did not blink.
‘What’s going through that bright little brain of yours?’
‘I was just wondering when I will get to see my dad again.’
She laughed. ‘Liar,’ she said. Then, ‘Don’t worry, Adam. You’ll see him soon enough.’
It was very smoky in the room they were in. Mrs Mallory smoked a lot. His dad had a friend from the regiment called James Preston and Adam had met him a few times and hadn’t thought it humanly possible to smoke more than James Preston had. But Mrs Mallory did. She smelled strongly of tobacco and some rich perfume and what he thought was the fur collar of her coat. It was real fur and still bore features of the animal that had provided it. It was as though the animal itself lay stretched across her shoulders.
‘Sable, Adam,’ she said.
He had heard of mink. In the old days people had worn mink and beaver and fox. He had not heard of an animal called a sable. But that was another thing. She seemed able to see into his mind as plainly as he might open a book and read the words printed on the pages there.
‘Did you kill it yourself?’
‘What?’
‘I mean the sable.’
She smiled. It was not the human smile of the snagged tooth that had made her look lovely in the photograph he had seen that morning in the magazine. It was her real smile and, though it was beautiful, it was as cold and deadly as a steel trap. ‘You wouldn’t be making fun of me, would you?’
Adam swallowed. ‘No, I’m not, not at all.’
‘Good. Doing so would be most unwise.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’
‘I didn’t kill the sable. I coveted it. I killed the cavalryman who owned and wore it first, because I wanted it for myself.’
‘Is it very old?’
‘You’ve no idea.’
But he thought he had.
Her car was only slightly less frightening than she was. It had been waiting at the side of the road. Mr Cawdor had pulled up gingerly in the falling snow and Adam had seen the looming shape of this monstrous limousine and known he was betrayed and trapped. The car had black and glossy curves and looked like some great, crouching insect amid the white drifts. He had no choice but to go where they wanted him to. He looked at Mr Cawdor’s expression in the cabin mirror of Mr Cawdor’s crappy runabout and knew that.
‘Get out, Adam.’
Mr Cawdor knew at some level that he had made a terrible miscalculation. Adam could see it in the turmoil on his face. But the petulant set of his mouth told him he would never admit it even to himself and that therefore pleading with him would be hopeless. Nor could he bolt for it. The car door was unlocked. But they were miles from anywhere. He had learned a lot about survival from his dad and he knew that without fuel and food and, crucially, some means of navigation and communication, these conditions could not be survived for very long. He had his mobile phone. His dad made him promise always to carry it. But he had run out of credit and could not remember the last time he had used the charger so the batteries were out. He wouldn’t have bet on getting a signal out here anyway. It was useless. Mr Cawdor reached across him and opened the door. Adam got out and slammed it behind him without saying goodbye.
He got into Mrs Mallory’s car and slid along the back seat. The leather was cold against his legs, even through his weatherproof trousers. She had no heater or, if she did, she had not bothered to switch it on. He could see her breath wisp and curl on the air of the gloomy interior when she twisted round and said, ‘It’s a pleasure finally to meet you, Adam.’
‘Likewise,’ he said, reflexively, drilled by his dad to respond politely whenever people were polite to him.
‘No,’ she said, releasing the clutch and easing them away, ‘I think you’ll find the pleasure is all mine.’
She braked. She put the car into neutral. ‘There’s one more thing I need to get Mr Cawdor to do,’ she said. ‘Excuse me for a moment.’ She got out and Adam watched her walk away. She was dressed with no concessions to the weather. She should have sunk to the calf at least into the snow. She was wearing high-heeled shoes. But she seemed able to step across the crust. She tapped Mr Cawdor’s window and he rolled it down. Whatever she said was said very briefly. She walked back and got in, smiling to herself. There was a squeal and then a crump as the tyres rolled and the limousine moved forward.
‘Snow chains,’ Mrs Mallory said.
In the small room they were now in, Adam said, ‘Where are we?’
‘Where do you think you are?’
‘I think I’m in some corner of a foreign field,’ he said. His voice sounded very young and forlorn.
‘You really are every bit as bright as everyone thinks you are,’ she said, smiling at him.
At the house, Mark Hunter took his sharpened sword and put it back in the scabbard. The sword they had given him at Hereford was a sabre. It bore the royal warrant, stamped into the blade where it met the hilt. Hundreds of years of tradition and craft had gone into its manufacture. The steel had the pure integrity of the finest it was possible to forge. He had fenced at Sandhurst. He had won a cup. The épée, rather than the sabre, had been his weapon of choice in competition. He had never thought to wield a sword in anger. He smiled to himself.
‘Do you think she will have her retinue with her?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t. She’s used Adam as a sort of conduit. In his orbit, she’s always known what’s going on. She had me followed in Switzerland because it was the way to keep track of me when I was out of Adam’s orbit, and because she was cautious about Miss Hall. I think part of her feared and maybe even respected Miss Hall. But Miss Hall is dead now and she has no fear of us.’
‘What made you smile just now?’
‘Oh, I was reminiscing just then about Adam. When he was three I bought him a plastic suit of armour with a sword and shield. I strapped him into his breastplate and he put on his helmet and marched with me to the park. I carried the rest of the stuff because he wanted his hands free to play. When we got to the bottom of the climbing frame a boy a bit older than him at the top looked down at him and sang, I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal. And Adam reached his arm back to me and in his best Arthurian voice said, “Dad, my sword.”’ He paused. ‘There are so many happy memories, Elizabeth.’
‘And many more to add to them,’ she said. But she did not really believe it.
The phone rang. Hunter picked it up. He listened. Without speaking, after less than a minute, he put it down.
‘That was her,’ Elizabeth said.
He nodded. ‘She’s at your cottage. She wants us both to go. We’re to arrive just after dusk. She says that if we try to alert anyone else or attempt to bring anyone else along, she will act accordingly. She says that Adam is alive, and I believe her. I know I seemed to be despairing of t
hat hope outside, earlier. But I think I would know if my son was dead.’
‘Do you have a plan?’ They were in the Land Rover. The snow was still falling and even the four-wheel drive struggled on the big, slippery banks and odd ice patches on the treacherous descent of the hill.
‘I’ll tell you something about plans,’ Hunter said, his eyes intent on the cloaked landscape in his headlight beams. ‘They are always formulated for situations that have changed by the time you try to put them into practice. It’s a truism of military life. You know my old regimental motto?’
‘Who dares wins.’
‘It sounds like a barroom boast, I know. It’s the sort of bluster a braggart might come out with. But it’s very largely true. Nerve and momentum usually carry the day.’
He was much better now, with the promise of impending action. The odds did not matter to him. It was black and white, very simple. He would save his son or die. She said, ‘Was that just a long-winded way of telling me you don’t have any plan at all?’
‘Pretty much.’
In her pocket, in their leather cup, Elizabeth rattled the dice she had taken from the shelf in Adam’s room just prior to their departure. ‘Do you remember, Mark, Miss Hall telling you once that Mrs Mallory was nothing if not a woman of her word?’
‘She isn’t a woman at all.’
‘But you do remember?’
‘Yes. She said the same thing to you herself when she predicted the two of you would meet.’
‘I think it’s meant literally,’ Elizabeth said. ‘You spoke once about the dismal creatures with which she’s consorted in her life, the bargains she’s struck in confounding nature for so long. What if she really is nothing if she doesn’t honour her word? What if honouring her word is a precondition of her existence?’
Hunter did not answer. He did not really believe all that greatly in plans. But Elizabeth thought that a plan of sorts was forming in her own mind. It was not so much a plan, she knew, as a ploy. She would resort to it only if things became so desperate that she had to.
They were there. Hunter switched off the ignition. He turned to Elizabeth. ‘I might be better doing this alone,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen up close what she can accomplish. She is powerful and her cruelty is monstrous.’
‘She said I was to come.’
‘I’m going to go in there and do everything I can to kill her,’ he said. ‘This is not about etiquette. If we follow her protocol, we’re finished.’
Elizabeth opened her door and jumped down to the snow. ‘She’s in my fucking home,’ she said. ‘She’s sitting on my fucking furniture with your abducted son. What the hell are you waiting for?’
Mrs Mallory was lounging on the sofa in Elizabeth’s sitting room with Adam’s sleeping head in her lap. She teased the tresses of his hair between long, lacquered nails. There were no lights lit. But the snow outside bathed the cottage interior in a pale luminescence. She looked up as they appeared on the threshold. ‘Colonel Hunter,’ she said. ‘It’s been ages. And you’ve brought the Bancroft spinster too.’
Hunter did not break stride. He hauled his son by a fistful of his jacket on to the floor and took out the taser Jimmy Preston had obtained for him. He jerked the woman to her feet, tearing open the clothing that covered her chest, and shoved the taser into her bared sternum knowing it would put sufficient volts through Mrs Mallory’s convulsing body to disable her. The weapon had only two settings. They were stun and kill, and Hunter had chosen the latter. He squeezed the trigger with a grunt. And nothing happened. A slight odour of singed flesh ghosted through the chilly room. The taser crackled, impotently. Mrs Mallory began to laugh. ‘Manners, Colonel,’ she scolded. The taser was in his left hand. His right had gone to the hilt of the sabre on his belt, behind his back. He had assumed, in his lack of a more subtle idea, that he would use it. She looked at him. And he made the mistake of returning that look.
‘Kneel,’ she said. And he found he was compelled to do so. He knelt over the sleeping body of his son on the rug and groaned. But he could not look at Adam. His eyes were held rapt by those of the sorceress. ‘Take a seat, Dr Bancroft,’ she said.
‘You’re not human,’ Elizabeth said.
‘That’s a value judgement. Sit down.’
Elizabeth slumped into the chair next to her own unlit fire. She saw Hunter drop the taser on the rug next to where he knelt. ‘You’re supposed to be vulnerable to electricity.’
Mrs Mallory sat back down herself. She adjusted her torn dress to cover her bare chest. She lit a cigarette. But her eyes stayed locked on Hunter’s. ‘I sometimes speculate on how many hours poor, fat, talentless, self-taught Rachel Hall spent toiling over her spell books to inflict that particular vulnerability. I’d have to concede she did the work craftily and well. It surprised me. And it almost succeeded. But it did not. And after Magdalena I had to take the necessary steps to eradicate the weakness she had imposed upon me. You do not live as long as I have by being idle.’
‘And you have your tilt to put upon the world,’ Elizabeth said, ‘like you did before, in 1933.’
Mrs Mallory smiled. But her eyes stayed locked on Hunter’s. ‘Only about ten good years,’ she said, ‘the blink of an eye. This time it will last much longer. Not that you will live to experience it.’
‘Brooke puzzles me,’ Elizabeth said. ‘I would have thought Yeats much more your thing.’
‘Slouching towards Bethlehem? You think in clichés, Doctor. Brooke was cute. Berlin was pretty. I was bored. And your efforts to divert me are pathetic.’
‘Do you really intend to kill the boy?’
‘No. I intend to have his father do that. And I require that you watch.’
Adam slept. The sleep was not free of dreams. But it was free of Mrs Mallory’s dreams. He felt restful and secure. He did not mind dreaming. He honestly preferred it when the dreams were his own and this one was not, was it, entirely? But at least it was not a dream imposed upon him by the witch. There was kindness and warmth in this imagined landscape. There was urgency, but it was a calm and deliberate sort of urgency. The orchestrator of his dream was patient and good. He did not trouble himself in his slumber with their identity. He took what rest and refuge he could simply in being asleep.
Elizabeth watched, unable not to, as the point of Hunter’s sword scraped at the stone flags of her cottage floor and he brought it out of his belt and raised it high. It descended slowly. Adam’s head and chest were visible to her to Hunter’s left, the rest of him concealed by his father’s kneeling shape. Mrs Mallory stared and smoked. The sword touched Adam’s throat. Beads of blood gathered on the keen blade at the point of contact.
‘Cut,’ Mrs Mallory said.
Elizabeth heard Hunter groan. She heard the tendons strain and crack in his arm and shoulder with the force of his will and defiance. He was far stronger than Cawdor. Perhaps he was stronger than Rodriguez too. Certainly he was, she realised. She heard muscle tear and something snap that sounded like his wrist and then a loud crack as his shoulder blade broke with the stubbornness of him and he cried out in raw agony.
‘Transfer the sword to your other hand,’ Mrs Mallory said. Her cigarette was smoked almost down to the touch of her skin. Her voice was growing impatient. The sword skittered between Hunter’s trembling fingers on the rug. He clenched its hilt in his left hand. His body was convulsing with resistance and his right arm hung as hopelessly as Elizabeth considered their cause to be by his side. She slipped the cup and its cargo of ivory dice from her pocket and spilled the dice on to the floor in front of the cold hearth where they chinked and shivered and stopped still. Mrs Mallory glanced towards the sound and her eyes switched back to Hunter. ‘Rest,’ she said. Hunter turned the hilt of the sword in his hand so that the flat of the blade lay on Adam’s throat. He shivered and groaned.
Mrs Mallory flicked her cigarette stub into the fireplace. She looked at the dice. Elizabeth thought that her pupils had grown larger in the snowy light. She was someone who l
iked to gamble. There had been a card table at the centre of the canvas cathedral. Adam had dreamed of her windowless games room at the house in Cleaver Square. ‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Surely you would not wish to play against me?’
‘The curse on the boy,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s entirely of your making?’
‘What concern is that of yours?’
‘You serve someone. Or you serve something, don’t you, Mrs Mallory?’
‘Whether I do or not, the curse you speak of was inflicted entirely for my own entertainment.’
Elizabeth thought there was a bit more to it than entertainment but did not want to labour the point. ‘So you can lift it without repercussion?’
‘You are beginning to irritate me,’ Mrs Mallory said. ‘You can die well or you can die very badly indeed, Doctor. Irritating me is most unwise.’
‘Three throws of the dice,’ Elizabeth said, nodding at the two pale cubes of ivory on the stone of her cottage floor. ‘We play the best of three. If the total scored on the face of the dice is six or below, I win the throw. A score from seven to twelve and you win.’
Mrs Mallory chuckled, her eyes on the ivory cubes. She lit a fresh cigarette. ‘I win nothing I don’t already have,’ she said.
‘But can you resist?’ Elizabeth raised her arms, widening them at the cottage interior. They felt stiff and the gesture forced. Her stomach was cramped with fear. He voice sounded like that of a stranger to her own ears. ‘This is a dull evening in a drab little location. Surely a momentary diversion would be welcome?’
Mrs Mallory smiled. The smile broadened into a grin. Her teeth were very white against lips that looked almost black in the moonlight reflecting off the snow through the cottage windows. ‘What if I lose? You want me to lift the curse on the boy? You expect mercy from me?’
‘I expect more than that,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If you lose I want your word you will go into exile.’
Mrs Mallory laughed again. But she was still staring at the ivory cubes on the floor.