Named of the Dragon

by Susanna Kearsley

  "Could you do me a favour?" The bathroom door opened and Christopher leaned round, bare-chested and damp from the bath. "Oh, sorry," he said, when he saw me, "I thought you were James."

  "What's the favour?" I asked him.

  "Well, I'm rather short on towels, here." He hugged the door for modesty. "And I think my dressing gown's still hanging on the back of my bedroom door, so I wondered if maybe ... ?"

  "Of course. Just a second."

  He thanked me and closed the bathroom door to keep the warmth in while I headed for the linen cupboard. Grabbing an armful of stiff folded towels, I pushed his door open to look for the dressing gown. I hadn't been in Christopher's room before. It was smaller than my room, square-walled and decidedly masculine, coloured in mustard and brown and rich walnut, with one window looking out over the slope of the dining-room roof to the dovecote and fields.

  It took me a minute to find the dressing gown, not where he'd told me it would be, but on a chair beneath the window. Folding it loosely I draped it on top of the towels and was turning back towards the open door when I noticed the book.

  He'd been reading it in bed, apparently, and had left it facedown, half-hidden by the tangle of the blankets. A large hardback book with a glossy white jacket and vivid green letters that spelled out its title: The Druid's Year.

  XXVII

  Moreover, that weird legend of his birth,

  With Merlin's mystic babble about his end

  Amazed me...

  Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Last Tournament"

  “Christopher did it." Owen pointed the finger of accusation as Bridget reached to take the empty plate. "He ate the last one."

  Christopher grinned. "Why, you lying old sod. I never did. And besides, there were two waffles left on that plate, last I looked."

  "Well, I can't stop here arguing." Owen stood, clapping one work-worn hand to his belly. "I've got gutters to fix."

  Watching him leave, I admired his energy. The rest of us sat round the table like sloths—the waffles had weighted us all to our chairs. Across from me James sat, eyes closed, still in ecstasy, smoking a cigarette. "So," he said, as the door to the garden banged shut behind Owen, "does anyone have any plans for the day?"

  Christopher glanced at the clock on the wall and reminded his brother the day was half over. ' 'We never do seem to get off our behinds till it's too late to do much of anything."

  "That," Bridget said, "is the whole point of being on holiday. But if you're so keen to do something..." She set the trap neatly, and smiled, and he wandered right into it.

  "Yes?"

  "You could give me a lift into town to buy coal."

  I couldn't think, at first, why she'd asked Christopher. Owen would seem the more logical person—he had, after all, been the one she had turned to for help with the Christmas tree. Christopher wasn't the coal-hauling type. And he couldn't be of much use information-wise to Bridget, now that she'd abandoned her pursuit of Gareth. Even so, I thought, watching her face, she was flirting, and flirting with purpose.

  And then I saw her steal a look at James, and I knew what she was doing. He'd been rather attentive to me over breakfast, refilling my teacup and telling me jokes, and Bridget meant to show him she could play that game as well. She watched with satisfaction as his eyes came open.

  "Why?" he asked.

  "Well, darling, I can't lift a sack of coal alone, you know. And my car's hardly big enough, and since you don't like getting dirty I thought Christopher—"

  "No, I meant why would you want to get coal? There's a shed up there full of the stuff."

  "No, there isn't," she told him. "Whatever we've got in the house, that's the last of it. Owen didn't know that we were using it, you see, so he didn't think to order any more, and now the coal man doesn't come again till next week, so ..."

  James exhaled a thin impatient stream of smoke. "But we don't need coal. We've got central heating."

  "Darling," crooned Bridget, "it's Christmas. And you can't have a proper Christmas without—"

  "All right," he waved his hand, surrendering. "You do what you like. You will anyway."

  "Actually," Christopher said, with another quick look at the clock, "I'm not sure I'll have time. I should probably check in on Elen, you know, and make sure she's recovered from yesterday."

  "I can do that." The words came out before I'd really thought them through, surprising me as much as anyone.

  Christopher looked at me strangely. "It's kind of you to offer, but..."

  "I really don't mind. And anyway, if I'm meant to be Stevie's guardian, or whatever, I ought to at least pay a visit."

  "There you are then," said Bridget, "that's settled." Her gratified smile made it clear she believed that I'd said what I'd said for her sake. Bridget, being Bridget, wouldn't think that I could have another motive. Her wants, her needs, were such a focus of her life, it seemed quite natural to her that they should drive my actions, too.

  James wasn't totally convinced. "You know, you needn't feel compelled to play along with Elen's fantasies. She and Stevie got on fine before you came, and I've no doubt they'll both survive when you've gone home, and in the meantime you've come down to have a peaceful Christmas holiday. You shouldn't let them ruin it."

  "I am having a peaceful holiday," I lied.

  "Yes, well, I can't imagine that it's been too Christmassy, thus far." He stubbed out his cigarette, struck by a thought. "What we need is a party."

  Bridget stared at him as though he'd grown an extra head. "A what?"

  "A party. Oh, nothing big, nothing grand. Just invite a few people for nibbles and drinks, say tomorrow night."

  Bridget reminded him that tomorrow was Christmas Eve.

  "Yes, I know. That's why I suggested it. I thought we could have the party first, and then all go from here to the service."

  "The service ..." echoed Bridget, faintly dazed.

  "Well, darling, it's Christmas," he pointed out, benignly. "And you can't have a proper Christmas without going to the midnight service, can you?"

  And with that he rose and left us to get started on his writing for the afternoon, leaving Bridget staring after him, astonished.

  "It won't happen, you know," said Christopher wisely. "He'd have to spend money on canapes, drinks ... and I've never seen James in a church Christmas Eve. No, he's just temporarily mad." Turning to Bridget, he folded his arms and leaned back, eyebrows raised. "What on earth did you put in those waffles?"

  Elen came to the door in her working clothes, with sawdust clinging to her hair and flakes of old paint—pink and burgundy—splotched up one pale freckled arm like a rash. Beneath her denim smock she wore a T-shirt that had once been white, and her jeans were a canvas of colour, ripped out at the knees. Standing barefoot on the freezing tiles, she looked about fifteen.

  "Oh," she said, pleased to see me, "hello. Did you come to see Stevie? I've just put him down for his nap." She drew backwards, inviting me into the porch. "He normally goes down right after lunch, only Owen was pounding things outside the nursery for the longest time, and of course Stevie couldn't sleep with all that noise, so I couldn't get him settled until now. But he won't sleep long, he never does."

  The stained-glass windows made the porch feel warmer, streams of red and gold and amber shifting softly over Elen as she opened the door to the hall. "I was just stripping paint off some shutters for Gareth, that's why I'm such a mess."

  I couldn't smell solvent. "Do you work in the house?"

  "No, it wouldn't be healthy for Stevie to breathe all those fumes. I do most of my work in the back porch, or outside. Depends on the weather." She brushed off one sleeve. "Can I get you some tea?"

  She looked so pleased at the prospect of having company that I relented, though I wasn't sure where I would fit the tea. Since I'd eaten the waffles, an hour ago, they'd expanded to fill every inch of my stomach.

  "I'm afraid I'm out of biscuits," Elen told me as she led me down the passage to the kitchen, '
'but I have mince pies and Welsh cakes. Owen brought them by this morning. He always brings me treats, you know—just leaves them on the table."

  "Don't you lock your doors?" I asked her, lightly.

  "Yes, of course. But Owen has a key. He keeps the spare keys to the houses and the barns and things, when Pam and Ralph aren't here."

  "And you keep the cats," I said, stepping over a sleeping bundle of fur beside the doorway to the kitchen.

  "That's right. They're lovely, aren't they?" Scooping up the sleeping cat, a placid-looking ginger torn, she set him on a nearby chair and crossed to the sink, where she scrubbed like a surgeon. For someone so tiny, I thought, and with such a huge house, she kept everything spotless. The kitchen gleamed copper and pale oak and warm yellow tile, with braided rag rugs on the floor and potted herbs arrayed along the windowsills, by size.

  I didn't wonder that the social workers yesterday had failed to find fault with her. They'd seen a healthy, happy baby and a clean, well-ordered house. Hardly the mark of an unfit mother. Or a madwoman.

  I had the feeling Owen might be right, that Elen simply used her fantasies to help her cope with what she'd lost. That underneath all her talk about Margaret and Merlin and dragons, she knew exactly what was going on around her, what was real.

  She went on talking, brightly. "Chance—that's Gareth's little dog," she said, "he doesn't like the cats at all. He chases them and worries them and barks and makes the biggest fuss. So Gareth doesn't bring him any more. Have you met Chance?"

  "I have. He's quite the character."

  "Like Gareth. Chance and Tony used to have a thing— they used to fight each other. Well, pretend to fight. Like boxing. Chance would bring his paws right up, you know, and Tony would make fists, and they'd pretend to have a fight." She smiled, and dried her hands, and turned away to put the kettle on. I couldn't see her eyes, but her voice had a catch in it. ' 'Tony liked dogs. We were going to get one, before he ... well, one of the places where Gareth was working had puppies, Jack Russells, and Tony thought maybe he'd get one. I sometimes wish he had, you know? But maybe not. My hands are full enough, with Stevie."

  I'd got stuck a few sentences back. "I thought Gareth worked from his home."

  "Well, he writes there, if that's what you mean, but he can't pay his bills just from writing, he says, so he does things with horses for people."

  "And what does he do with them?"

  She shrugged. "That depends on what people want done. Sometimes it's just plaiting and clipping, you know, for the hunt. But mostly he breaks them and trains them and takes them to the shows at Tenby."

  "Ah."

  "He's very good," she said. "Everybody wants him, and he's always telling people no, he hasn't got the time."

  I had no doubt that he'd be good at breaking horses— he was stubborn enough, and one look at that jaw would make any horse throw in the towel. But I hadn't come round here to talk about Gareth. "Elen," I said. "You remember the night when you heard that noise in the nursery?"

  "Yes?"

  "What sort of noise was it?"

  She wrinkled her nose as she tried to remember. "Well, the window rattled—I was just coming out of the bathroom, then, and I thought that was strange so I went to look into the nursery, you know, and just before I got there I heard a sort of scrabble sound, like something clawing at the wall. And that's when I got scared, because I'd heard that sound before," she said. "The night before you came."

  "I see." I pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, and the cat rose and arched and came on to my lap as I tried to decide how to phrase my next question. "And why do you... what makes you sure it's a dragon?"

  "There's always been a dragon in that tower. My mother told me all about it, growing up. I just didn't know it was a white dragon until Merlin told me."

  I nodded the same way my mother had nodded when I had gone on about Truffles, my imaginary pig friend who lived in our garden. I took pains, as she had, not to appear patronizing. "Does Merlin talk to you often?"

  "Not really," she said, stretching up on tiptoe to get teacups from the cupboard. They were china cups, expensive, and stacked on their saucers they rattled precariously in her hand. "He goes away for months, sometimes, without a word."

  I'd rather suspected as much. I waited till the teacups had been lowered safely to the counter. Then I asked, ' 'He doesn't sound like Christopher, by any chance?"

  She thought the question curious. "Of course not. Merlin has an old man's voice, you know. And he doesn't have an accent."

  "Oh, right." I nodded again. "So, these conversations that you have—"

  "They're more like lectures, actually. He tells me what to do for Stevie, what I ought to teach him, things like that. He tells me Stevie's future."

  ' 'Really?'' Absorbing this, I stroked the cat, who sighed and stretched and rolled on to one side to test his claws against my knee. ' 'What does he say?''

  "That Stevie's going to be a leader, an important one, and people are going to come from everywhere to hear him and to follow him." The kettle boiled. She made the tea, an ordinary act, and yet when Elen did it somehow it took on the air of ritual. "I didn't understand, at first. I was angry with Merlin, because he had tricked me, but then I remembered how Arthur was born and I thought, it's no different, really. It happened the same way to Igraine."

  "I'm afraid you've lost me."

  "Igraine," she said, "Arthur's mother. She thought that the man in her bed was her husband, you see, but it wasn't. Her husband was already dead."

  And then it sank in, and I knew what she was telling me—what the gossips had already told me.

  "I thought it was Tony," she told me, quite innocent. "But it couldn't have been, could it? Because the coroner's report said Tony died at eight o'clock—this woman was walking her dog on the beach and she saw him on the rocks, and when she came back he was gone, that's how they fixed the time. And it was later, near eleven, when..." She stopped, and slowly poured the tea.

  I thought of what Owen had said that first day, about guilt, how it twisted a person's mind, and I wondered whether guilt had twisted Elen's, whether she'd been having an affair and Tony's death had left her feeling so remorseful that she'd had to wrap the whole thing up in legends, myth, and fantasy, to cope.

  "It couldn't have been Tony," she repeated, setting out our teacups on a tray. "But sometimes, I like to let myself believe it was. Does that sound very mad?"

  I looked at her, the small face and the large eyes turned so hopefully towards me, and I gently shook my head. "No."

  "It's only that I miss him," she said, simply. "Does it ever stop, this missing someone?"

  I was thinking, not of Martin, but of Justin—of the empty cot, the grave beneath the churchyard yew, the smile I'd never see. No, I could have told her, but instead I answered truthfully, "It changes."

  "Good." She added the plate of mince pies to the tray and lifted it carefully, stepping away from the counter. "Let's go have our tea in the sitting-room, shall we?" she said, switching subjects. "I do want to show you my Christmas tree."

  XXVII

  The gale and the storm keep equal pace;

  It is the work of the wise to keep a secret.

  The Red Book of Hergest (trans. W. F. Skene)

  “Well, I can't see how it could be better than our tree," said Bridget. Behind the upraised magazine, her posture was defensive.

  Even the tree seemed to bristle, indignant, its fairy lights twinkling more sharply than usual. Kneeling beneath it, I centered a book in the bright square of gift wrap and sighed. "I didn't say that hers was better. I just said that it looked rather nice, the way she had it done, with all the ornaments from nature, and the ribbons, and no lights. It's very rustic."

  Bridget sniffed, to show me what she thought of all things rustic. "Anyone who makes a crib from bits of twig and nuts ..."

  "She's creative."

  "She's something, all right." Shifting round in her chair, Bridget swung her
legs over the arm and lay back, shaking out the pages of her magazine. "Such a shame she won't be coming to the party."

  "I thought she told James maybe."

  "She won't come. She'd never leave her precious boy with someone else."

  I couldn't resist. "Perhaps she'll bring him."

  "Oh, that," Bridget said, "would be brilliant. A baby at a cocktail party. That would ... what are you laughing at?"

  "Nothing." I straightened my face, looking down.

  "I can always switch agents, you know."

  "I wasn't laughing."

  "I hear Ivor Whitcomb is taking new clients."

  James chose that moment to enter the dining-room. "What's that about Ivor?" he asked.

  "Nothing," Bridget said, mimicking me. Looking over her shoulder, she watched James start opening drawers in the sideboard, with purpose. "What is it you're wanting?"

  "A pen that works."

  "Well, darling, I should think this is hardly the right room to—"

  "Ah." He pulled the fourth drawer out and smiled. "The mother-lode." Rifling through the contents of the drawer, he selected a handful of pens and wandered over to inspect my work. "Is that for me?"

  "Don't tell him," Bridget said. "The man is horrible with gifts. He pokes and rattles."

  "I do not."

  "You nearly broke your birthday present last September."

  "A fine French brandy," he informed me. "Smashing stuff."

  "Yes, well, you nearly did smash it," said Bridget.

  "But this one won't break." He looked down at my gift. "It's a book."

  I smiled at his persistence. "It's not for you. It's Christopher's."

  "Ah yes, my baby brother." Eyebrows raised, he turned to Bridget. "What the devil have you done with him, by the way? I haven't seen him anywhere since you came back."

  She shrugged, not looking up. "He helped me put the coal into the shed and then took off again. I don't know where."

  "How odd."

  "No odder," said Bridget, "than you making plans for a Christmas Eve party."