Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  “Come in, come in young Sir. Cold night to be wandering about. Dark are the energies tonight. Fell are the whispers. The fair folk are urging us caution. But… what is this? Oh, you have a bright aura! What a spirit!”

  Henry’s grin got wider as her mother babbled on and Heather let the rage simmer inside her. Oh yes. He will pay. She re-focused as her mother was finished listing her arcane services. Henry answered at once, shuffling forward on his stool. “Oh, Crystallomancy if you please.”

  “You what?” her mother replied, her gypsy character discarded momentarily.

  “Crystallomancy… er… I mean the thing with the crystal ball,” Henry clarified.

  “As I thought,” her mother replied with mystical gravity. Heather heard her mother shuffle about, presumably looking for the Crystal ball that they had bought for a fiver in that garage sale last year. “And what would you like to see, young Sir? We can travel across all the planes of creation and even through the veil of death itself. Is there a loved one you would speak to? Some lover you would observe? Just tell me and I will enter the trance.”

  Henry cocked his head and seemed to think for a moment, then replied with his usual smirk of a smile, “I would like to see the key to my future.” Heather’s eyes narrowed. She would remember this. Lord Grenville would suffer for mocking her mother, she promised herself.

  Out of sight, her mother started to make strange and mystical sounds, sounds that did not in the slightest bring to mind a dying cow. “Lo!” her mother cried. “The vision is upon me!” Henry leaned forward, peering at the crystal and Heather feverishly scanned his face for excess mirth. Unexpectedly he leaned back, looking somewhat disappointed, which was confusing. Did he really believe that…

  Her thought was cut off as Henry glanced back at the crystal and leapt out of his chair.“Good god! It works!”

  “I see your… what? What did you say?” her mother responded, mid-trance.

  “That is incredible! Look how clear it is… hang on… I can’t believe it! It’s him! It’s the Warden! I thought I’d never find him again. I looked and looked but he is no longer in the place he was. Wait a second, that’s a Darkwells’ tie. Can that be possible?”

  “Alright lad, time to clear off. I don’t have druggies in here.”

  “I can’t believe it. I really can’t… he is right here! Right under my nose!”

  “That’ll be thirty five pounds for the vision and…”

  Heather had had enough. It was bad enough that her mother was a back street fortune teller but she would not have her suckering in poor, stupid, cripples - no matter how rich. She stormed around the stall and yanked back the curtain.

  “Mother! That’s enough! Whatever you’re doing stop it now!” she yanked Henry up by his elbow and marched him out of the stall.

  “Heather?” her mother asked, confused.

  “Wait! The Warden! I need to see…”

  “I’m terribly sorry Henry but I’m afraid you’ve been tricked.”

  “But…”

  “My mother means well and usually it’s harmless but… hang on… what are you even doing down here? Aren’t you supposed to be in your boarding house?” she asked, rounding on him. Henry stepped away. He knew a loose cannon when he saw one.

  “Ah. Well. Princes won’t miss me tonight, be sure of it. I came down to… well, it’s embarrassing.”

  Heather looked at him with pitiless ferocity. “Tell me.”

  Henry sighed and rubbed his face. “Alright. I felt terrible about what I said. Very thoughtless of me and I wanted to apologise. I have this brain defect that doesn’t allow me to realise when I am being an idiot until it is too late. I was only curious, you see, because the Roma fascinate me - but if I had used my brain I could have known straight away that you are not Roma. The problem is you are quite distracting. I mean. The problem is that I am quite stupid. Anyway. I wanted to apologise but there seemed no good plan. The drama people said you were finished and didn’t know if you were coming back to Darkwells and Watkins told me that our yacht would get stuck in the canal if I tried to nonchalantly moor up beside your boat… that is… if you had a narrowboat that I found out about in a non-threatening, non-stalker like manner, like by accident,” he ran out of breath and turned the colour of beetroot.

  Heather put him out of his misery and laughed. “I accept what will henceforth be described as the world’s most rambling apology, Lord Grenville.”

  “Good,” he said, recovering himself, “because I remembered the other reason I wanted to find you. I have a couple of fantastic instruction books on costume design I thought you might want to look at. Very rare. My great-aunt was into that sort of thing. I told Watkins to bring it down from Hawksworth Hall, it should be here by tomorrow. I wondered if you might want to look at them?”

  Heather stared back at him. What sort of boy could get a book driven down from his distant country house on a whim to strike up a friendship with an unknown townie girl like her? Sean, she knew, would be outraged and call it an ostentatious and vulgar display of wealth. As she looked at him, leaning on his cane and watching the stall with intensity, she decided that it was more the act of a friendly, lonely boy who had no concept that what he did was any different.

  “I’d love to Henry, how thoughtful.”

  Chapter Ten: Natives

  There was something soothing in the rhythmic crunch, crunch of her purple boots on the freshly fallen snow. It was still coming down, although not in the savage flurries of a few hours ago, as Heather made her determined way up the Main Drive on her way to the Performing Arts centre. She was behind on two of the more complex pieces and her trust in her ‘colleagues’ was not all consuming.

  “Bloody Jets,” she mumbled to herself as she pulled her hat down over her ears. “Bloody useless.” The snow was falling with dreamlike slowness that made Heather's arms feel disconnected. The sky behind Darkwells was brightening up and the first rays of the rising sun were catching the edges of the last lingering clouds and turning them into golden hems against a velvety blue sky. The four stone towers were as dark as ever and stood like solid shadows, as if ancient Darkwells carried the weight of all creation.

  Heather squeezed through the chained gate to the court-yard and wove her way between groups of students who all looked chilled to the bone despite the expensive long dark over-coats and cashmere scarves.

  Henry had explained it to her. “Amazing, isn’t it? The British Public School system. I tell you, if you can understand this then you understand everything about it. I dread to think what my step-father pays to send me to this child-prison and yet they refuse to alter the central heating patterns regardless of the weather. On at quarter past eight, off at eleven thirty. I doubt that they would change it if we were buried under ten foot drifts. I’ve heard on the news that energy prices are high but there has got to be a limit, surely? It is like they are actively trying to cull the weak and sick. I think they would rather let one of us die and face the litigation than change some arcane tradition in a dusty notebook somewhere in the caretaker’s office. I wonder if anyone has died?” This little rant had taken place in the Green Room in the East Wing of Divinity as Henry rubbed his hands together and blew on them piteously. It was quarter to nine and the heating was having almost no effect in the cavernous room. Heather, being of hardier peasant stock, gave short shrift to his whining and advised him to spend a winter on a canal.

  The thought of that day brought back memories of the books that Henry had shown her. They were remarkable. They outlined techniques and designs she had never come across before. Her keen mind had built on them with the newer materials now available and she found that she was now making more radical, imaginative designs than ever before. She threw herself into these new concepts with fervour and managed to bribe a few of the books away from Henry via promises of a weekly meeting in a tea-house.

  The last of these had been yesterday and Henry had spent most of it trying to buy her mother’s crystal ball an
d then trying to find out everything he could about where they had bought it. She had refused the first on principle, telling him that she had no intention of selling a horse to a friend, and had been disappointed him with the sparse on information she had on the second. He took it well though, shrugging it off with the same carefree attitude she had begun to admire in him.

  As she neared the gate at the end of Rowan Way she heard a loud thud followed by a strangled yelp and a chorus of rough laughter coming from the front of Divinity. A small crowd was gathered there and at its front was a tall muscular figure that she, with a sinking heart, recognised: Max Bolton, the rags to riches wonder. His mother had propped up the bar in the Bear and Bishop with far more dedication that Heather’s had ever managed, before she somehow snared her east-end city boy. The tempestuous romance turned into a shotgun wedding which turned into a golden ticket for the feral boy as his new step-father made it big with a series of miracle deals. Max Bolton: too rough for a series of Comprehensive schools - who had all excluded him - now found himself at Darkwells. Heather had known him, when he was just a wild boy running down the tow-path and shooting at the ducks with his catapult. Now he was the so called ‘Prince of Dukes’ and had discovered that his natural size and penchant for violence translated with perfect ease into being Captain of the First Fifteen. Rugby Captain at Darkwells, a clearer gentrification of thuggery Heather could not imagine.

  He was living up to his name now, crowing to his gang of lackeys with his arms outstretched like a gladiator. “Top step is for colours ties Hop-a-long, you know that,” he goaded to the struggling figure in the snow. “Being an Earl doesn’t mean nothing here. We have rules.”

  Heather froze as she heard the word Earl. The figure on the ground managed to turn on its back and work its way to its knees. Max casually thrust it back into the snow. “This is the twentieth century, M’Lord, and we don’t care nothing about old fancy titles. This ‘ere is a… Johnny, what did you call it?”

  “A meritocracy,” one of his lackeys supplied.

  “That’s right. We only care about what you’ve done. And you ain't earned one of these,” he said, pointing at his striped red and white tie. “So you can’t stand there,” he said pointing at the top step of the Divinity stair case.

  Henry stirred from the snow and managed to pick himself up to a kneeling position. Heather gasped as she saw his grimace of pain. His hair was plastered to his face and he looked blue with cold. His breath came in fast, shallow breaths. “My mistake, Max,” he wheezed as he patted the ground for his stick. “I’ll not do it again.”

  Rage washed over Heather and she took a determined step towards the scene, resolved to give Max bloody Bolton a piece of her mind, working class style. As she took her second step she saw Henry, who had not been facing her at all, thrust out a hand towards her in a gesture for her to stop, which, in surprise, she did.

  Max, though, noticed her straight away. “Oh well, well. Lost are we, pretty? Say… don’t I know…” he said edging nearer to her with a confused look in his eye.

  She was on the point of opening her mouth when Henry sprung to his feet and thrust out his hand towards Max’s back with a strange, shouted word. Heather’s eyes widened, thinking that he was going to hit the much larger boy, but his hand stopped a long way short. Max, however, was flung across the courtyard like a skittled bowling pin. The gathered crowd gasped as Max crashed into a pile of snow. They think he punched him, Heather thought, mute.

  Henry swirled and stared at her, his blue eyes pleading. “Go! Please!” He staggered. “Get out of here!” He raised a hand and a wall of snow and wind appeared ahead of her in a howling gale, driving her back towards the gate.

  She saw Max pick himself up out of snow with a slow, terrible purpose. As she retreated she saw his looming shadow close with the fleeing, hobbling figure of Henry and tackle him to the ground. She cried out and then turned, hurrying out of the courtyard and down the Player’s Walk. Darkwells - if this is how the other half lived they were welcome to it.

  #

  She didn’t see Henry for the next few days, which she spent in a daze of sewing, cutting, and measuring. The first set of fittings was upon her and she wanted to make sure that alterations were kept to a minimum. The weather remained arctic and the landscape she observed out of the wide panorama of modern glass was a tourist post-card of an English winter: virgin snow on wide lawns with a slow moving stream and ancient buildings in the distance. Only the Tor, with its eerie mystery and commanding vista could beat it.

  As she pulled the needle through the fabric over and over she started to notice that she could see the same figure making its way every day from the distant rugby pitches, around the curve of the Rhetoric building. It would stand, pensive, staring along the river on the bridge on Player’s Walk.

  There was something lonely and yearning about the figure that intrigued her. Soon she was staring out with her mother’s long abandoned bird watching binoculars and found that the figure was of a exotic looking boy. He was tall and broad but looked close to Henry’s age, younger than Max and yet close to being the same size. He had jet black hair and a darker complexion, like he had a perfectly even tan. He always wore the same rain cloak that had beautiful symbols running up the hems of the hood and down the arms. He would stand stock still and stare over the bridge and along the water with a mournful gaze before setting off again back towards Dukes. There was something in his posture that put Heather in mind of the twin statues down the Main Drive where she had first met Henry.

  The snow cleared up and was replaced by driving rain and gusty winds. Henry was late to their tea-house and Heather worked herself up into a lather before she saw his gently limping frame come through the door. His face was a patch-work of bruises, over which she fussed.

  “Please, please. It’s not that bad.”

  “Henry, what he did, you should tell…”

  “No. It’s nothing, honest to god it isn’t. You don’t understand how things work in schools like Darkwells. He didn’t mean anything by it. He doesn’t know any better. He thinks that it is what is expected of him,” Henry threw up his hands. “I don’t know. Maybe my bloodline has had the tradition literally beaten into us, but mindless bullying appears to be a part of Darkwells’ DNA.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I have ever heard.”

  “It used to serve a purpose, once, in a way. It used to be about reigning in the wilder ones. About teaching kids the real truth of the world – that no-one will help you; that the world is a cruel, hard place. Remember, the people that went to Darkwells were the pampered sort,” he laughed, “like me. Our hardest tasks were to ring the bell for the servants. So it was to break us in, so to speak, into what the real hard world was about.”

  “Are you actually coming up with a defence of bullying?” Heather asked, incredulous.

  Henry shrugged. “But these days. Well. It’s not about anything anymore. I suppose he feels insecure and unsure but I think it just comes from boredom and opportunity. That’s what makes him dangerous, you see. He can do it. With me, it’s just a beating, but with others… well, his family might be richer than mine.” Henry took a drink from his tea and held Heather’s eyes. “Do you understand?”

  #

  The fitting was exhausting. Heather and her Jet companions were run off their feet by the demanding cast. Prospero’s robes trailed to the floor. Miranda’s dress was too see-through. Ariel’s wings drooped. Caliban didn’t even turn up. Heather felt like she was an air-traffic controller as she tried to bring order to the chaos while scribbling frantic notes and taking measurements from bored, uncooperative members of the cast. The Director was impatient and annoyed that she was losing a full session of rehearsal. Heather was glad to see the back of the lot of them.

  The workshop was empty of people when the Director re-appeared. “I found our Caliban, Heather, you better get him before he shoots off to training. Speaking of which, I’ll have to go now, I’m sure you can
take care of it, right?”

  The feckless woman vanished before Heather could respond, leaving her alone in the workshop with Max Bolton. Heather decided that speed was her friend and started to take measurements in a brisk, professional manner.

  “I didn’t know they were hiding sexy ones like you in here,” Max began as she started. Heather remained silent and tried to ignore the burning feeling of his eyes all over her. “Hey,” he said in a tone of voice that made her stomach sink, “don’t I know you from somewhere?” he asked, peering at her.

  “We knew each other when we were young, Max, a long time ago,” Heather mumbled. She could see him think about it.

  “Oh yeah! Heather, right? The river-rat. You were, what’s-his-name’s mate, Sean? Right? God, that was a long time ago, wasn’t it,” he said, his eyes roving over her once more. “I’d have been nicer if I’d known what a fox you’d turn into.”

  Heather suppressed a shudder. Remember who he is now, Heather reminded herself. Remember Henry’s warning.

  “Hey,” Max protested as Heather finished up measuring his chest, “shouldn’t I have my shirt off? It’ll be off in the production.” He didn’t wait for her to object but whipped off his shirt and then stepped out of his trousers to stand in his boxers. “You should get much better measurements now,” he said, smirking.

  Heather’s skin crawled as she ran the tape-measure across his bare chest, their faces just inches apart. She dropped into a crouch and started on his inside leg measurement when she felt his hands wrap around her head and she jerked away with a yelp.