Mistress of Night and Dawn

by Vina Jackson

  Leaving the City behind, the crowds thinned as the rush hour passed and Aurelia’s attention turned to her surroundings, observing the stone walls of the ancient buildings, smooth and pale in stark contrast with the gaudy flower pots that hung from the awnings of the pubs geared for tourists.

  Waiting at a set of traffic lights by Holborn Circus, leading down to Fetter Lane, Aurelia paused, holding her dark-green cape coat tight to her chest, watching the traffic and three tall red buses riding bumper to bumper as they crawled along the road, and glimpsed a faint reflection of movement in one of the bus’s windows. She quickly turned round and thought she caught a shadow darting across the corner of a large office block into a side alley, as if fleeing from her quicksilver glance. Her heart fluttered and she accelerated her pace and headed for the Thames, looking back at regular intervals to see if she could spot any anomalies in the milling crowds, but was unable to do so.

  She entered the Inns of Court, sprawled like a peaceful oasis in the heart of the urban closeness, and relaxed. A gentle breeze was coasting in from the nearby river and animating the tree branches as she spotted the building she was searching for. A receptionist who looked like a carbon copy of her headmistress noted her name down in a register and led her to a waiting room.

  ‘Mr Irving is expecting you,’ the older woman said. ‘He shouldn’t be long.’ The airy and brightly lit room was like a doctor’s antechamber but without the traditional well-thumbed collection of out-of-date magazines. A carefully trimmed small bonsai tree sat on a thin glass shelf on the far wall. Aurelia adjusted her tight skirt and tried to compose herself, her eyes darting across the room in an attempt to take in all its details.

  The wait was a short one as a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit, dark-blue shirt, silver tie, red braces and polished black shoes walked in briskly and offered his hand. He was medium height and wore glasses and his grey hair stood in sharp contrast to the rest of his appearance, halfway down to his shoulders, lustrous, combed back, studiously inappropriate for his profession and age.

  ‘Gwillam Irving,’ he said, his hand firmly shaking hers. His palm was unusually cool to the touch.

  ‘Aurelia . . .’ she answered. ‘Aurelia Carter.’ She had chosen to use her godparents’ name a few years back, and not her birth name. They had brought her up and been so kind to her it had felt like both an acknowledgement and a vote of thanks.

  ‘I know,’ the lawyer said and, with his extended arm, indicated for her to follow him.

  His office was across from the reception area and so much smaller than she expected, crowded with piles of dossiers, papers and law magazines attracting dust on every surface. He bid her to sit down, after clearing some stray folders from the old leather swivel chair facing his cluttered desk. There was a quaint, benevolent kindness in his smile as he sat and faced her.

  He cleared his throat and gazed at Aurelia. ‘I have been instructed to contact you and make you an offer, Miss Carter,’ he said. ‘However, I regret to advise you I will be unable to answer any of the obvious questions that, I am sure, you will wish to ask later, and I apologise in advance. My instructions are quite clear.’

  Aurelia, puzzled, remained silent.

  ‘You have a very generous benefactor,’ Gwillam Irving said, sitting ramrod in his own chair.

  ‘A benefactor?’

  ‘I think that’s the best way of putting it,’ he answered.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Aurelia replied.

  ‘Irving, Irving and Irving, of which I am a senior partner, have been retained to set up a trust fund to be established in your name, which runs to a not inconsiderable sum, if I may say so. The principal will be available to you in full on your twenty-first birthday, although adequate amounts can be disbursed to you beforehand on certain conditions pertaining to your continuing your higher education.’

  Aurelia sat silently, processing the information.

  As she was about to open her mouth and begin asking a litany of questions, the grey-haired lawyer continued.

  ‘I am unable to reveal the identity of our client who has requested to remain anonymous.’ He awaited her reaction.

  Her mind was in a whirl. There was just no one she could think of who could have come up with such a scheme. Her godparents were always careful with money, but they only had a small pot of savings, and she had no other relatives she was aware of.

  ‘How much?’ she queried.

  The sum he quoted silenced her for a moment.

  Seeing her lost for words, Gwillam Irving added, ‘The interest alone, and we will be careful to arrange for the best possible interest to accrue until your twenty-first, will suffice to cover your cost of living through university and much more, I can assure you.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ Aurelia protested.

  ‘There are two important conditions attached, I am obliged to point out – and I will of course provide you with a written copy of the proposed arrangements before we part – and they are that you begin your university education, in a place of your choice, before the aforementioned twenty-first birthday and also that you . . .’ He hesitated. Aurelia stared hard at him. ‘. . . that you should not enter into marriage before that date.’

  Aurelia felt her throat tighten. This was all so absurd. Not that she had any intention of entering into wedlock for the foreseeable future; there was not even a man, a boy, anywhere in her life.

  ‘Were any of those conditions broken, the trust fund set up in your name would automatically be rescinded, I must make it clear.’

  Her mind was crowded with questions but she already knew each and everyone of them would be pointless and that the lawyer would not prove forthcoming.

  Irving talked her through the minutiae of the fund that would now be hers and the arrangements awaiting her agreement for the way it would be set up. She signed pages and pages of legal documents in a daze, not even bothering to read most of the details.

  The lawyer escorted her to the door of the chambers and shook her hand.

  ‘Congratulations, Miss Carter. You are a very lucky young woman.’

  The breeze from the river had lifted, the leaves on the trees dotted geometrically along the Inns of Court barely fluttered now, and the whole world felt unreal to Aurelia.

  She retraced her steps to the train station, moving in a daze through the busy London streets and crossed into the City. On the corner of Bishopsgate, she felt a pang of hunger in her stomach and stopped at one of the fruit stalls that dotted the street and picked up a punnet of strawberries. As she did so, she once again felt someone’s eyes on her, drilling into the back of her neck. She abruptly turned round, submerged by that unsettling if illogical feeling she was being followed or watched. But there was nothing she could focus on. She bit into one of the plump red fruits, still observing the passers-by with uncommon attention. This was real life, not a thriller, no one could be following her, surely. Why would they?

  She tucked the remainder of the berries into her handbag and walked down the steps into the train station.

  Her train to the coast was already on the platform and half empty. Aurelia settled in and reviewed the morning in her mind in an attempt to make sense of it all. There was an announcement on the Tannoy, the carriage’s doors closed and the train rumbled off. She glanced through the window and noticed the dark silhouette of a man standing at the entrance to the platform, receding in the distance with every passing second.

  Aurelia looked away distractedly, and hunted through her purse for a tissue. The tips of her fingers were still red, stained with the juice from her strawberry.

  Aurelia began to spend more and more time walking along the estuary. She had not yet told her godparents of her new wealth. Perhaps it was her way of clinging to the past, knowing that change was now inevitable. Siv often joined her, and it became their regular Sunday-afternoon jaunt. They would walk along the waterfront to Old Leigh and stop for fish and chips and an ice cream in a cone and sit together looking out
at the white sails that dotted the gentle waves and the thread of smoke that bloomed into the sky from the Canvey oil refinery across the water.

  They talked about the future, but never with any particular certainty. The topic often turned to Aurelia’s trust fund, and what she might do with it. Siv tossed possibilities into the air at random like a juggler.

  ‘You could buy a zoo,’ she said. ‘And become a lion tamer. Or a big yacht,’ she added, ‘and we could sail to Madagascar. I’ll be your first mate, of course.’

  Aurelia paused with her chip halfway to her mouth and pursed her lips, considering these fantastic new suggestions, never quite sure whether her friend was being serious.

  ‘I’m not allowed the money, though, until I finish my education.’

  ‘You’re allowed to spend some of it on your education, right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what the lawyer said. Part of it is for university and then once I’ve finished that, I’m allowed the rest, to do what I like with.’

  ‘Well then. You’ll have to have an extra extravagant education. The School of Rock? Space Camp? Why not somewhere abroad?’

  Aurelia shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I like it here, though. I’d miss the sea.’

  Siv sighed. ‘The money is wasted on you,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t care less, could you?’

  ‘Well, what would you do with it?’

  ‘Circus school. There’s one in America. But, even if I could afford it, my parents would never let me. They want me to do something practical. My mum thinks I should be a nurse.’

  Aurelia snorted. ‘You’d make the worst nurse in the world. Ginger could be a nurse. He already is, isn’t he?’ She glanced pointedly down at Siv’s palms and knees, which bore the proof of multiple falls from her makeshift trapeze.

  Siv ignored the jibe. ‘Why don’t you come with me? You’ve always said that you wanted to go to America. See where you were born.’

  Aurelia fell silent.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ Siv said, guessing correctly that her friend’s thoughts were still fixated on the stranger from the fun fair. ‘You didn’t even see what he looked like, never mind get his number.’ She kicked a rock into the ocean, hard, to emphasise her frustration.

  It was Ginger, in the end, who unknown to either of the girls suggested to Siv’s parents that Siv might have a chance at entry to the School of Performing Arts in Berkeley. Though she was new to swinging on a trapeze, years of forced ballet and tap dancing lessons had given her the necessary prerequisites and if she could come up with a unique enough act for the audition, she might scoop a scholarship place.

  Ginger had given up the fascination that he had first held for Aurelia the moment he had seen Siv take her first sip of hot chocolate, leaving a cocoa moustache on her top lip. He had leaned forward and kissed it from her mouth, and when all of his senses were overwhelmed by the taste of cinnamon and spices, he was smitten, and he had silently agreed with Aurelia, who had said that the drink tasted of love.

  Siv was the girl for Ginger. There was an essential vitality in her that attracted him, a magical quality to her physical movement, as if she were part person and part sprite. He suspected that if Siv were cut open, doctors would find that her blood ran hotter and redder than the average human. But he sensed her restlessness, and he knew that all the things he loved about her would be the things that would take her away from him. She was far too full of life to spend the rest of it in a drowsy village by the coast.

  Aurelia was the opposite. There was a coolness to her, a softness and languor that was evident in everything from the pallor of her skin to the auburn tone of her hair that ran like water straight down her back. The two of them together were like Yin and Yang.

  And so began a long series of discussions between Siv’s parents and Aurelia’s godparents, and it was decided that if they did not encourage Siv to go, she was likely to take off anyway, and that if Siv was to go, Aurelia ought to go with her.

  One month later, the girls’ tickets were bought and their cases were packed. They planned to take a gap year, after which it was expected that Aurelia would finally settle on a subject that she wished to study, and Siv would apply to audition at the School of Performing Arts. Her parents gave her one chance to make it, and agreed that if she were unsuccessful she would enroll in medical school, or another, ‘practical’ subject of her choice.

  Board for both girls and extra tuition for Siv was arranged in the San Francisco suburbs with a retired dance teacher who Ginger knew of through his funfair connections, and who had once tutored at the prestigious School of Art and Dance in St Petersburg. Aurelia and Siv would contribute to their stay by assisting with providing lessons to the teacher’s few remaining pupils, and taking care of the old mansion that she lived in, on the Oakland outskirts.

  Siv sniffed. They were in her parents’ garage, where Ginger was working on carving a series of tiny figurines from pieces of scrap wood, and Siv was hanging upside down from a thick rope like a bat. The air was fragrant with the scent of wood shavings.

  ‘Are you going to come with me to San Fran?’ she asked him. A tear was trying to run down her cheek, but gravity and her upside-down position sent the salt water flowing back into her eyes. She blinked.

  Ginger paused and tightened his grip on the brass-handled pocket knife that he held in his left hand.

  ‘We talked about this,’ he said.

  ‘You could catch a boat,’ she replied.

  ‘We’ll see,’ he answered, and continued to chip delicately away on the face of his wooden model.

  Ginger was utterly terrified of heights. He had never left England, and nor had he any desire to take the path that most of his friends in the funfair did and move from ticket collecting to either performing on stilts or working on the highly paid maintenance crews who looked after the Ferris wheels and other machinery whilst balancing on cherry pickers or dangling from harnesses in mid-air.

  It was this fear that drove him to improve his skill working with rigging, but only from the safety of the ground. He was an expert with knots and with tossing coils of rope to his colleagues who worked above him.

  ‘Some friends of mine from the fair are having a party next weekend. In Bristol,’ Ginger continued, adeptly changing the subject. ‘A few performers who studied in America will be there. They’re doing a UK tour. Why don’t you both come? And you could make it a sort of farewell party, also?’

  Siv began flipping her legs back and forward rhythmically so that the rope began to swing.

  ‘I’m not sure that being around funfair people would help Aurelia,’ Siv replied. ‘It will just make her think of Mr No Name.’

  Without school to distract her, and with work only on Saturday mornings and one afternoon during the week, Aurelia had gradually sunk further and further into a sort of lethargic depression. She feared worrying her godparents by telling them about her mystery benefactor, so instead she had arranged for Gwillam Irving, the lawyer, to call Laura and John and convince them that they had inherited a sum of money from a much distant, now-deceased relative from a side of the family Aurelia knew they had both totally lost contact with. It was a white lie, possibly not even far from the truth. On learning the news, the elated pair had immediately set aside a substantial part of the money for Aurelia’s travel and university fees, and cancelled their plans to remortgage to cover the expense of sending her abroad.

  The kindly old lawyer had been delighted to carry out the deception, and the trick had cemented Aurelia in his mind as his favourite client. Not only was she young and pretty and the whole situation intriguing, but the girl was a refreshing change from the usual egotistic, stuffy bores that he normally dealt with when tasked with the tedious problem of administrating wealth to heirs and other beneficiaries.

  Aurelia, though, was uncomfortable about lying to her godparents, and she continued to flit indecisively between excitement at the upcoming trip abroad and an unsettling feeling that she should stay in England, as i
f the stranger’s kiss had somehow anchored her here.

  ‘Do you think the two are connected in some way?’ Siv asked Ginger when Aurelia was out of earshot. Besides Siv, Ginger was the only person who knew about both Aurelia’s mystery windfall and the kiss.

  ‘But surely the money must have been donated by a relative,’ he replied. ‘Her real parents, perhaps. And that would make the kissing guy her . . . well, that just wouldn’t be right. At any rate,’ he concluded, ‘it would do her good to take her mind off it all.’

  Siv agreed, and Aurelia allowed herself to be talked into attending the party, although she was still feeling strangely out of sorts.

  It was already dark when they left for Bristol. Both had spent considerable time packing their chosen outfits, as it was to be fancy dress.

  ‘Fairy tales? What kind of theme is that for a bunch of dudes?’ Siv had asked Ginger, when he had advised her of the dress code.

  ‘They’re not your typical dudes,’ Ginger replied.

  Siv had gone as one of the Lost Boys from Peter Pan, in a pair of cut off-brown leggings and her short hair gelled up into a mohawk. Aurelia had opted for Little Red Riding Hood, although it had taken her most of the afternoon to curl her hair into ringlets.

  ‘Damn,’ she said, frowning at the mirror, ‘I look more like Goldilocks.’ The heat seemed to have brought the blond out of her normally auburn hair. Or perhaps it was a trick of the light that made her curls appear to be a paler shade.

  ‘I could have been one of the three bears,’ Siv replied, ‘but that wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun.’ She pulled open the window and fired one of her fake arrows towards Ginger’s rickety old car as he pulled into the driveway to collect them. He had travelled down from London to pick them up and they had planned to take a scenic route, mostly by the south coast, to their destination, making the whole weekend something of a special event.