The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  “We could all do with a restorative,” he said. “Annie and I haven’t heard what happened yet, either. Come to breakfast. We can sleep in the morning.”

  “He won’t believe us,” Hazel said, eyeing the inspector scornfully. “He never does.”

  “He’s learning,” Bartlemy said.

  hen you have spent half the night partying, and the other half in a potentially disastrous confrontation with the forces of evil, there is nothing like the prospect of a good breakfast. They sat down about six in the dining room at Thornyhill—a long room with a big oak table that Bartlemy, who preferred small-scale entertainment, rarely used—to eggs fried and scrambled, buttered mushrooms, sausages, bacon, tomatoes. On the side there was toast and honey, toast and marmalade, porridge and cream, coffee, tea, fruit juice, beer. They ate, talked, ate some more. “Now,” said Pobjoy, unavoidably mellowed, “I want the whole story. From the beginning.”

  “Ah, but where is the beginning?” said Bartlemy. “The entire life of mankind is only a tiny part of the history of this planet, and this planet is only one of millions in a vast universe, and this universe is merely a handful of atoms spinning through the endless wastes of infinity.”

  “Never mind that,” said Pobjoy. “Start with the party.”

  “It was a good party,” Annie offered. “You should have come.”

  “I don’t go to parties.”

  “Get in the habit,” Annie said. “Then you can be on the spot for all the crimes that invariably happen when people get together in large numbers to have fun and drink too much.”

  “Can we keep to the point? When did you first realize Romany was missing?”

  “I didn’t,” Annie said. “It was Hazel.”

  Pobjoy duly turned his interrogation technique onto Hazel, who launched into an account of everything that had occurred from the moment she saw Nenufar in the mirror, culminating in the appearance of the mystery rescuer to save Romany. Pobjoy’s expression grew increasingly skeptical as the story progressed, but his accusatory questions— “How could you have seen her reflection if she wasn’t standing behind you?” —ran down, as if he felt himself defeated by her matter-of-fact tone and the others’ equally matter-of-fact acceptance of all she said. He knew much of the tale was preposterous, perhaps not a direct lie but some sort of bizarre juvenile exaggeration; Harry Potter syndrome, perhaps—there was bound to be one—a condition where children imagined they were living in a magical world populated by wizards and monsters. At the same time he, too, had seen the white ship, more than a year ago—he had run from the gnomons—he had felt the fear of that which is beyond science, beyond reason. He didn’t want to believe because it would overthrow his whole view of the world—a world he saw as dark and disorderly but at least rational, subject to fixed laws, the laws of physics, the laws of nature, the laws of men. That was a world where he had some control, if not much. But in a world of magic and demons a policeman was as helpless as anyone else.

  “This … person,” Annie was saying as Romany’s rescuer entered the story. “Describe him.”

  “I didn’t see much,” Hazel said. “It was too dark. He had a long tail, maybe horns. He moved a bit like an ape. But after we got away, when Nathan shone the flashlight on him, he just looked human. Except for his eyes.”

  “What sort of human?” Bartlemy asked. “Tall? Short? Skin color— hair color?”

  “Quite tall.” Nathan frowned with the effort of memory. “Not short, anyway. Dark hair, brown skin. Not actually brown like mine, more sort of tanned and roughened and weathered. There was something wrong with his forehead, like scarring: the flesh looked all red and kind of scrunched up. And he had a really cool jacket, leather, very worn and wrinkled.”

  “And his eyes?” said Pobjoy, like someone probing a wound.

  “They were red,” Hazel said with a certain malicious satisfaction. “Not bloodshot, before you ask. Just red. Dark red. No whites at all.”

  “Kal.” Annie was looking at Bartlemy. “I knew it.”

  “He said he was an old friend of yours,” Nathan recalled. “I thought he must be joking. Do you—do you really know him?” He stared at his mother as if she had just revealed a previous association with a leading Mafioso or international terrorist.

  Pobjoy’s face wore a curiously similar expression.

  “He came to see me the other night,” Annie said. For once, her son’s reaction had passed her by. “He’s kind of part demon, part human— which is meant to be impossible. He says he’s growing a soul.”

  “He said that to us,” Hazel averred. “Like it was a plant. Weird.”

  “Why did he come to see you?” Nathan demanded.

  “It’s a bit complicated,” Annie said. “Bartlemy drew the circle—to find out something—and Kal showed up unasked, and disappeared, and then came to see me later at the shop. I don’t know why. He wanted me to invite him in.”

  Nathan understood the dangers of that. “You didn’t, did you?”

  “Yes, I did. So he told me some things—”

  “What things?”

  “It’s not important now. He told me things, he left, and now he’s helped us by saving Romany. Which proves that inviting him in wasn’t a bad idea.”

  “Do you often invite strangers into your home?” Pobjoy said, back in accusatory mode.

  “Only if they’re very sinister,” Annie retorted. “Getting friendly with demons and murderers is my specialty.”

  “You’re all living on Planet Zog,” Pobjoy declared, desperate to hold on to what he hoped was reality. “All this crap about spells and monsters—it’s a delusion. Did you take Romany yourselves”—he meant Nathan and Hazel—“then pretend to search for her and bring her back?”

  Annie gave a cry of protest, but Nathan responded with unexpected coolness. “We never left the party till long after she went missing,” he said. “You can check that. It’s called an alibi.”

  “Up yours,” said Hazel. “Why can’t we get rid of him? He’s so stupid he’s no use to anyone.”

  “We may need his help in the future,” said Bartlemy. “I suggest we call a halt to this conversation—before it implodes. We’ve had a long night. Unless you wish to arrest someone, Chief Inspector, I think we should all go home to bed.”

  “Not right now,” said Pobjoy, trying for menacing, and only succeeding in sounding grumpy.

  “Can I make a pipe-cleaner figure of him?” Hazel muttered.

  Bartlemy called a taxi and sent her, Nathan, and Annie back to Eade. To Pobjoy, he said: “Have some more coffee. Another piece of toast?”

  The inspector, who lived alone and rarely ate a proper meal, succumbed with little hesitation. After all, a crime had happened, or might have happened, or was probably happening somewhere, and after a fashion he was investigating. Sitting at the table with more toast, all oozy with honey from the beehives in the garden, he struggled to convince himself that Bartlemy was a lunatic, but it was no good. His host looked peculiarly and disturbingly sane. So sane, Pobjoy found himself wondering if the world was inside out, and he was the one going quietly around the bend.

  “Do you believe it?” he asked abruptly.

  “Believe what?”

  “The kids’ story.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, of course. It’s so much easier believing things than doubting them. And it was very coherent; I’m sure you noticed. All the bits fit together. Successful liars—and there are very few—have to construct such elaborate structures to support their deceits. They always make a few minor mistakes, and only get away with it because the generality of people are amazingly inobservant. But you are a trained observer; you would always be difficult to fool.”

  “They haven’t fooled me,” Pobjoy said stubbornly. “I know that rigmarole can’t be true.”

  “Naturally. You’re a policeman: you believe in the evidence. The evidence of your own eyes, your own ears. You have seen the white ship and the woman on board. You have—er—failed to see the g
nomons. Do you believe your story, James?”

  Pobjoy had forgotten telling Bartlemy his Christian name. He said: “Not really.”

  “I see. I’ve always understood that as well as evidence, policemen go in for hunches. Do you have a hunch about all this?”

  “Yeah, I have a hunch. I have a hunch as big as”—he groped for literary parallels with the uncertainty of someone who hasn’t read enough of the right books—“as the phantom of the opera.”

  “Quasimodo,” Bartlemy supplied. “The hunchback of Notre Dame.”

  “Yep. Him. I have a hunch about this village. It’s a quiet, sleepy little place with robberies and murders and kidnappings and serial killings, strange disappearances—stranger reappearances. I have a hunch there’s something big going on here, some crime so huge that nobody can see it, and all these bits and pieces are just the proverbial tip of the iceberg, the tiny visible part of this major unseen crime. But whenever I try to get a closer look, it all turns into fantasy, wisps of magic— ghosts—dreams. Like snatching at smoke. You can’t arrest smoke.”

  “You’re doing pretty well,” Bartlemy said. “There is indeed something going on here, something big—it may even be a crime, though I doubt if you’ll ever get to charge anyone.”

  “It’s a crime,” Pobjoy insisted. “I can feel it.”

  Bartlemy smiled the smile of someone with superior knowledge; he was to remember this moment, much later. He said: “Maybe. Whatever happens, trust to hunches. And when you see the smoke, don’t snatch— just watch where it goes. And try not to inhale.”

  Pobjoy didn’t laugh. “What do I say to Annie?” he asked.

  “Well,” Bartlemy said, judiciously, “it would be a good idea not to tell her she’s delusional. The rest is up to you.”

  “But…”

  “But?”

  “What if she is delusional?”

  “What if she isn’t?” Bartlemy said.

  BACK IN Eade, Nathan and his mother headed straight for bed. Although she was exhausted, Annie found she had passed the point where she could sleep easily; her brain was still in overdrive, the events of the night running and rerunning in her mind as she struggled to work out what it all meant. Pobjoy’s attitude—He quite liked me once, she realized, too late for the knowledge to do any good, but now he just thinks I’m a total fruitcake—and the behavior of Nenufar, and above all, Kal. Was he good? Was he evil? Whose side was he on? Werefolk, Bartlemy had told her, were mostly neither all good nor all evil, and took no side but their own, yet she felt Kal was different, or trying to be different, though she didn’t know why. Sleep crept up on her in the middle of her deliberations, and when she awoke it was lunchtime.

  She went downstairs, looking in on Nathan, who was still dead to the world, if not to all worlds, sprawled on his bed fully dressed as he had been when they came in. In the kitchen she set about making coffee. And suddenly there was a footstep behind her, the draft from the opening of the garden door.

  She knew who it was even before she turned around.

  “Kal,” she said.

  In daylight his battered face looked paler and even more battered, like a sculpture in rough concrete. His eyes were no longer rubies but had darkened to the color of burgundy. There was mud on his clothes.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Annie asked. She was still frightened of him, but it was a reflex of her nervous system rather than her mind.

  He said “Thank you” after a long pause, as if unfamiliar with the word.

  She meant to say You saved Romany, but instead she found herself remarking: “I gather we’re old friends.”

  “By my standards,” said Kal. “I daresay you measure your friends by the years you have known them, but you’re wrong. Friendship is not measured in years.”

  “Fair enough,” Annie conceded. “But old is.”

  “I am old,” Kal said with something like a grin. “I’m the oldest person you know.”

  “I doubt it,” Annie said tranquilly. “Bartlemy was born in Byzantium in the latter days of the Roman Empire, or so he once told me.”

  “I date from King Arthur’s times,” Kal said. “I’ve no idea which came first. History never interested me, unless I was part of it. Do you deny our friendship?”

  “No,” Annie said. “Of course not.”

  “That makes you almost unique. I have very few friends. In fact, I’m not sure I have any.”

  “Your habit of tearing people’s heads off might have something to do with that,” Annie said, a little rashly.

  He laughed—a real laugh, without mockery. Human … humor, Annie thought.

  She said: “Do you take sugar?”

  He looked confused. Clearly coffee was something new and strange in his life. “Should I?”

  “Probably.” She added two teaspoons with cream, not milk. He sipped the resultant mixture doubtfully.

  “I had another friend once,” he said presently. “She gave me a soul to grow—and then she forgot about me. Humans are so fickle.” Curiously, he didn’t sound bitter about it.

  “I won’t forget you,” Annie said. “You saved Romany. Why— why did you do that, if you don’t mind my asking? Was it because of your soul?”

  “No,” he said, looking at her very steadily over the coffee cup. “It was because you invited me in.”

  Annie smiled the smile that lit her face, making her suddenly beautiful, though she didn’t know it. “You are always welcome,” she said, even more rashly, not completely sure if she meant it, but feeling it should be said.

  Kal swallowed the coffee hastily, hissing at the heat in his throat. “I am leaving now,” he explained. “I came to say farewell. But maybe I’ll come back, ten, twenty, fifty years from now. Your door is open to me for as long as you live. Will you still call me welcome when you are old and frail, if I stumble in here with bloodstained feet, seeking sanctuary?”

  “Couldn’t you just come for coffee?” Annie said.

  “I will … bear that in mind.” He set down the cup, turned to the door.

  “Goodbye,” Annie said. “And good luck, wherever you go.”

  “You, too. I fear you may need it. There is trouble in the air. You hadn’t told me your son’s name. Still, he is not like the other. Nor are you.”

  “No, I’m not,” Annie said.

  And then he was gone.

  He could’ve shut the door, Annie thought prosaically, shivering in the icy air. Presumably werefolk didn’t feel the cold.

  She closed the door herself and took her coffee into the bookshop, switching on a small radiator by the desk and settling down with her laptop for a while.

  Upstairs, Nathan was no longer there.

  HE WOKE up conscious of cold, a cold far colder than December in the south of England. An open-air cold, ice-tipped and dagger-sharp. He had dropped off in his sweater and quilted jacket, and happily was still wearing his shoes; otherwise he thought he would have frozen to death in minutes. He was lying on snow—powder snow mantling a surface of ice. A pale winter sun had evidently just lifted over the horizon, hollowing blue shadows in the snow and making a diamond glitter on the nearby sea. A few yards away a huge gray-brown hump shifted slightly, making the snorting, bubbling noise of someone who has half woken and is determined to go back to sleep. The walrus, Nathan thought. What was his name? Burgoss … He walked over to the big sea mammal and sat down beside him. He smelled of the sea, a salty, wet-fur smell with a tang of fish. It wasn’t something that, under normal circumstances, Nathan would have wanted to smell from close up, but he realized immediately that the walrus was warm, or at least warmer than his surroundings, and sharing his body heat seemed like a very good idea. He leaned his back against Burgoss’s sunward flank and decided that, like this, he might not die of cold just yet.

  “I know you’re there,” the walrus mumbled from the other side of his huge bulk. “Impertinent cub! Lost your mother?”

  “Not exactly,” Nathan said. “But I suppose I am lost.
And it’s too cold for me here.”

  “Too cold!” The walrus started to roll over—Nathan had to move quickly in order not to get squashed. “What is he talking about?” And then, as the boy came into view: “Who are you? Come from the south, did you? Spy of the merfolk?”

  “No, of course not. I’m not a merman. I’m human.”

  “Human, eh? Human. I never heard of such a thing. No human has been seen on this planet for two hundred years. Some say they’re a myth. You don’t look like a myth.”

  “I’m not,” Nathan said. “I come from another world.”

  “Hrrmph! My great-aunt told me about other worlds. Said they would break off ours like bergs off an ice floe, float away, and evolve all by themselves. Can’t say I ever believed her—she was mad as a puffin, poor old dear. So what’s this world you’re from?”

  “Warmer,” said Nathan. “A l-lot warmer.”

  The walrus lowered his big head, peering into Nathan’s face. “You are a chilly little thing, aren’t you? No fur at all. What’s all this?”

  “Clothes,” said Nathan shortly, determined not to get sidetracked. “That’s not important. P-please—”

  “Lean against me,” Burgoss said grudgingly. “Before you freeze to death. If you’re a spy, you’re a bloody inefficient one.”

  “I told you, I’m not a spy. I’m a friend of Ezroc’s.” The walrus’s body generated enough heat to stop Nathan’s shivering, and the smell, like all such smells, disappeared when you got used to it.

  “Are you indeed? That I can believe. Ezroc would make friends with a two-headed shrimp if it told him there was a land beyond the sun. Where did you meet him?”

  “I have to see him,” Nathan said, ignoring the question, since the answer was too complicated. “Rhadamu’s shaman-priestesses are telling him to go to war. I don’t think he’s that keen—it’s all Nefanu—but he’ll do it. If we don’t stop it there’ll be a bloodbath. And Denaero’s in terrible danger.”

  “Sounds like you’re a spy of ours,” the walrus said. “Didn’t know we had any. Where d’you get all this? You seem pretty well informed for someone from another world. And who’s Denaero?”