by Iain Pears
Inside, however, was a revelation, and Jay exclaimed in surprise when he walked in and his eyes adjusted. The keeper smiled broadly at him.
‘It is … charming. Delightful,’ he said.
Indeed it was. The floor was of multi-coloured stones laid out in a pattern that matched the timbering of the roof, so that one echoed the other. The walls were whitewashed and a thick band was left uncovered by story boxes at about eye height. This was covered in paintings of the life of the village, a joyful and extraordinary depiction of men and women and fields and birds.
‘Good heavens! Isn’t that remarkable? So that’s what Henary wanted me to look at.’
‘It is old,’ she replied with pride. ‘We repair it when we have to.’
‘I’m glad to hear it. It must be unique in the world. At least, I have never heard of such a thing before. Many halls have floors, often elaborate ones, and I know that some have paintings. But I have never heard of anything so lovely. I’m glad I came now. Can you tell me what the pictures are?’
She was now in an exceptionally good mood, delighted with Jay’s delight, and proud to have impressed a student of Ossenfud. ‘It begins here, with the foundation of the village. You see these figures? They are the first families, from whom all descend. Then here we have the division of the land, and the building of the first Story Hall – it burned down, so the earliest stories were lost, except for those that were remembered and could be written down again. The second Story Hall, here …’
Jay stared, entranced. ‘Who painted it?’
‘We do not know,’ she said. ‘A traveller who wanted food. He listened to us talking round the fire and sketched out a picture of a tale, so it is said. He painted one small picture in exchange for lodging, and then the council offered to let him stay if he painted some more. It is said he stayed for a year, then moved on.’
‘When was this?’
‘Generations back. I do not know.’
‘So is he in the stories from that period?’
‘There may be mention of him.’
‘What was his name?’
‘I do not know. He was known as Fortune, as people thought he brought good luck.’
‘I would like to know more about him. If I got permission and came back …?’
‘We would have to put it to the council, but with my recommendation I am sure you would be received as an honoured guest.’
Then Jay remembered the task of keeping Henary happy. ‘First I will have to go back to Ossenfud and report my failure to find Jaqui.’
‘Some time ago,’ she began quietly, looking at him to see his reaction, ‘Jaqui came to me and asked a favour. He asked to leave something in the Story Hall.’
Clearly he had just passed some sort of test. ‘Really? He wrote his story? Was he ill?’
‘No, but he thought it of importance and was afraid that it might become damaged or lost. It was unusual, but he had recently assisted my eldest daughter through a difficult childbirth. I owed him a favour in return, and this was what he asked for.
‘It was a packet, wrapped up in strong paper and tied firmly. He said it would belong to the person who could make use of it. I doubt it is of any real value or importance. Jaqui was touched, you know. We learned to ignore these periods, but he would rave and talk in voices, fall on the floor and weep. He did not become violent, but he suffered badly and made no sense. I believe that he wrote at these times.’
‘In which case the writings would make no sense either.’
‘Perhaps not.’
‘May I see, at least?’
‘Please sit at the desk, and I will prepare the package for you.’
So Jay sat and composed himself until the woman returned and put the package on the desk in front of him, then backed away. Jay ignored her, for it was wrong to speak in the presence of another’s memories.
Slowly he undid the rough string that held the package together and opened it. Inside was a book, covered in leather, of beautiful design and manufacture.
On top was a piece of paper, written in a script that was perfectly legible, and all the more shocking for being so.
‘Read if you can, and a curse on him who will not understand. May he have my misfortune.’
Jay let out a cry of terror that echoed around the beautiful hall.
‘Do not approach,’ he said to the woman as she came running over. ‘The package is cursed.’
She retreated swiftly. ‘Are you all right?’
‘So far.’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know.’
He read the curse again and considered its wording. ‘Read if you can …’ Well, he could read, although a curse which could not be understood was of little power. A curse if you will not understand. Did that mean a curse if you do not understand, or a curse if you refuse to understand? What if he simply could not understand, because the script was meaningless? He would not understand, but not because he refused to do so. Besides, the curse might apply to the text he had just read, not to the content of the book. That he had read and understood, he thought, in all its possible meanings.
Jay thought, weighed the options, then reached for the book. ‘It is all right,’ he called out. ‘I have disarmed the curse. It can do me no harm.’
‘I think,’ he added in an undertone as he opened it.
The book was some forty pages long, written on both sides of the paper with a fine black ink which had not faded in any way, although it was difficult to tell the age. He peered at it carefully; evidently it was made up of letters, but few made any sense to him. He flipped through the pages one after the other, hoping that somewhere it would turn into something recognisable, but the manuscript refused to cooperate. Nor was there any explanation which would allow him to unravel the meaning. He needed to take it to Henary. He might understand it.
11
‘What’s all that stuff downstairs, Professor?’ Rosie asked after an absence of several days when, unaccountably as far as he was concerned, she had failed to drop in for tea and a chat.
‘Eh? Oh, that all belongs to Mrs Meerson,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Just wondering. I went down there to look for Jenkins. Who is she? A friend of yours?’
‘Angela? A very old friend, yes. She mainly lives in France, and is storing all of that stuff until she takes it there, although she never seems to get around to it. I inherited it from Tolkien when he retired and needed space for his library.’
‘Who is he?’
‘Another friend. She was keeping it in his garage, and didn’t know what to do with it all when he moved, so I said she could have the cellar. It’s not as if I ever use it.’
Lytten looked at Rosie curiously, but did not press the matter. ‘Now, what are we going to do about Professor Jenkins? I confess I am quite worried about him.’
The Mysterious Affair of the Missing Cat was indeed a concern. It was most unusual behaviour. Even how he had got out of the house was unknown.
‘A locked room mystery,’ Lytten pronounced. ‘Someone broke in and stole the cat, carefully locking the door as they left, in which case – why no ransom note? Or the cat has learned to fly, and escaped up the chimney on its own. Or – and here I fix you with my piercing gaze and force a confession out of you – it was you, Rosalind Wilson, who stole the cat, constructing an elaborate story to throw me off the scent. Means, opportunity.’
‘But no motive,’ the girl said. ‘I mean, Professor, really. Who on earth would want your cat?’
‘Very true. No one in their right mind would want Professor Jenkins. That’s what comes of taking your plots from books. Life, alas, is always new and different and rather more complicated. We must be looking for a lunatic. Or, of course, the idiot animal just wandered off, got confused and is now hopelessly wedged under a piece of furniture, too fat to move, too lazy to cry out, like Winnie the Pooh in the rabbit hole. It will no doubt wait until I am fast asleep and then start yowling unt
il I rescue it, foul night-waking cat.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Shakespeare, my dear. The Rape of Lucrece.’
Rosie blushed.
‘A fine poem, although not his best. Based on the Roman legend. Do you know the story? It is very famous as a tale of the consequences when the powerful abuse their position …’
This gave Lytten an opportunity to discourse while he made the girl some tea, ranging from Ovid right the way through Shakespeare and Hogarth, then on to a recent opera he had seen and thoroughly disliked.
‘We are our past, my dear, and if you want to know the future you have to know what has already taken place. The past is everywhere in us. Even in little things, like names. Take yours, for example.’
‘What about it?’ Rosie did not like her name. It was the sort of name grandmothers had. She wanted a modern name. Like Sandra.
‘You are named – accidentally or on purpose I could not say – after the most perfect character in all of English literature.’
‘Really?’
‘You are. Rosalind, in As You Like It, is by far the finest of Shakespeare’s inventions. She is bold, witty, intelligent, kind, beautiful and not at all soppy. Often enough his women are either silly or murderous. Rosalind is magnificent in all respects, so much so that I am sure she must have been based on someone he knew and admired greatly. So, my dear, you were once Shakespeare’s beloved. Not many young girls can boast of such a thing.’
‘I should say not,’ she replied, greatly impressed.
*
When Rosie received a message a few days later saying that Lytten had been unexpectedly called away and asking her to keep an eye open for Jenkins in his absence, she was delighted. She was worried about the cat, but excited because it meant she would have a free run of his cellar for a while. She had had a very bad fright in Lytten’s house. She did not like to be frightened; it happened only very rarely, and she was now suffering from an overwhelming, burning curiosity. She had lain awake at night, thinking. Dancing in her head as she stared at the ceiling were the jumbled memories of the cellar, the dank, gloomy squalor, the smell, the dust. Then the birds, the soft wind, the beauty …
The more she thought, the more she doubted her own sanity. Psychological disturbance, the Professor had called it. How could it have happened, after all? She was a reasonable girl, and had tried to come up with an explanation, although she was hampered by a reluctance to tell anyone what she had seen.
The only thing she could think of that made any sense was that Lytten had in his basement – or this Mrs Meerson had – a new and terribly clever cinema machine, or a new type of television. But she was pretty certain that neither had mastered the art of making you feel the wind, or smell pine needles in the heat, let alone creating young boys who offer to serve you.
No. It was either a delusion or it was real. The former might mean she was insane, which would distress her parents, so she felt obliged, for their sake, to establish the truth. As Poirot himself was fond of saying, she needed more evidence before the mystery could be solved.
The first opportunity came a couple of days after the delivery of Lytten’s note. She told her mother she planned to stay on for an extra choir rehearsal, which was entirely believable. Rosie sang well, and this year they were going to perform Zadok the Priest with (as a concession to what teachers considered modernity) some catchy numbers from The King and I for afters. Rosie – whose burgeoning tastes were beginning to drift far from Broadway musicals but who could still appreciate a good tune – was quite happy to sing anything. Ordinarily rehearsals took place on Thursday, but an extra one would not be queried. This gave her a blank couple of hours in which to settle the matter of the cellar once and for all.
The amount of time she had spent reading detective stories now proved its worth. She did not have to break in, as she already had the key, but she did have to establish that the basement was empty and set up a warning system in case the mysterious Mrs Meerson appeared. She raided Professor Lytten’s kitchen for a length of string and some empty cans. These she strung together and tied at ankle height across the doorway, invisible in the darkness. No one could get in without tripping over them and making a noise. Rosie would have a couple of minutes’ notice, she thought, if anyone did come back to the house.
Her preparations made, she opened the door to the cellar and tiptoed down the stairs. She checked that the place was indeed deserted, and went over to the rusting piece of ironwork in the corner. It was most certainly there; at least she hadn’t invented that. She did not know what she wanted to happen next. It might, after all, be safer if she was deluded. That at least could be explained. There’d be nothing except a couple of old spades and a metal bucket. She would laugh, feel stupid, then go home, glad she hadn’t mentioned it to anyone.
But she didn’t really want to be wrong. She didn’t want to spend her time wondering if she was seeing things every time she noticed something slightly unusual or unexpected.
She stepped to the curtain, shut her eyes against the disappointment, and pulled it back.
A sudden light penetrating her closed eyelids was all she needed to be reassured about her sanity. While before there had been a glorious view across a valley bathed in sunlight, now there was a wooded landscape; clumps of trees and brushwood mainly, no river and no valley. It did look sunny, though; she could see small white clouds in an otherwise perfectly blue sky. There was only the slightest wind, judging by the way the branches and leaves were moving.
She took a deep breath and walked through.
It felt like a spring afternoon, but much warmer and drier than she was used to. The leaves on the trees were young and not all properly opened. There was a thick mass of bluebells in a patch a few hundred feet away, and she knew that meant spring, even if she didn’t know much about plants.
So what now? She had established that this was real. Now if she were sensible she would go straight back through the iron thing – which on this side was merely a faint patch of light, rather like looking through a window that had slightly steamed up. You could see through it perfectly well, but the image beyond was a little blurred. She should do exactly as she had done last time, take a look around, then get back to safety. She was a cautious, sensible girl, she told herself.
The smell of that dank kitchen, the cold of the autumn weather and the prospect of a shepherd’s pie for dinner, followed by English homework and a list of French irregular verbs did not appeal, though. Who would want to learn another speech from Julius Caesar when she had a sunny wood to explore? Who could not want to know where this place was, and what it was? It was not as if it looked dangerous, or anything like that.
‘What I’ll do,’ she said to herself, ‘is just have a look around.’ Being a practical girl, she took off her coat and draped it over a bush, so she would be able to find the way back easily. She reached in her pocket and brought out a supply of sweets. Theseus in the labyrinth, she thought. Drop the sweets and leave a trail back to safety. Doubly secure and cautious.
‘Now,’ she continued in a conversational vein, speaking to no one. ‘Where am I? In a wood, obviously. But it’s not just a wood. It’s warm, for a start. And it’s in Professor Lytten’s cellar. Perhaps it’s magic?’
This was a tricky question. Had it been posed a year or two earlier, Rosie would, undoubtedly, have said yes; it would have been the first explanation to come into her head. Had it been asked a year later, she would have scornfully refused even to contemplate such a silly idea. But she was in between these two blessed states of certainty, so she left the question unanswered.
To her right was a gap which, if not exactly a path, at least offered the possibility that she might squeeze through without getting her legs scratched by brambles. She walked off, turning back when she got to the line of trees to make sure she could see her coat. It was still there, hanging on the branch, looking a little peculiar in its surroundings. She had read about forests in her childhood. Little Red Rid
ing Hood had a red cloak, too, and look what nearly happened to her. Rosie walked as quietly as possible, cursing her refusal to join the Girl Guides. She was sure that tracking and approaching things unobtrusively was part of the training. But the uniform! All those dreadful songs! Never.
The path did a sharp left-hand turn and opened out into another clearing, much larger than the first.
Rosie stopped dead, suddenly cautious and quiet in her alarm.
In the middle of the clearing there was a low stone wall enclosing a broad oval patch of rough grass. At the far end was a stone structure that looked like one of the bigger graves in the cemetery where she had to go once a year, when her mother put flowers on her grandfather’s grave. That was not the cause of Rosie’s caution, however. She stopped, her heart pounding, because a young man was leaning over it, tracing the letters written on the side with his finger. One foot was on a lump of rock and in his other hand he rested his weight on a long pole. His clothes were the most striking thing about him; he was wearing a light blue cloak, although it was quite old-looking and threadbare, some form of shorts underneath and a tunic, with sandals of a sort Rosie had never seen before, a flat sole laced up and over the feet, then up the ankle to keep them in place.
He didn’t look dangerous but still, he was so odd in appearance … Rosie moved, ever so slightly, to get a better view, and the foolishness of failing to join the Girl Guides was amply demonstrated. She stood on a twig, which broke in two with a sharp crack.
The young man looked up at the noise, and saw her.
12