by Helen Slavin
“Who?” Ant snarled, his patience long lost.
“Me.” Charlie Way dropped out of the tree beside them. As Darryl screamed, Ant stumbled back with fright, landed heavily in the mud, and struggled to recover his bluster as Charlie’s boot pressed him down into the dirt. Darryl dropped to his knees.
“Get out of Havoc.” Charlie leaned down, as Ant scrabbled backwards to try to escape her gaze. “Get out of Havoc Wood. Get out now.” Her voice was hard and low, much scarier than if she yelled. Darryl was already crawling away and then thought better and reached for his friend’s hood to drag him.
Ant struggled to his feet, ripping his hood from Darryl’s hand, his shoulders suddenly hunching forward, his fist clenched and punchy in front of his face.
“Get out of Havoc,” Charlie repeated.
“Who’s gonna make me? Eh?” Ant feinted a blow at her face. Charlie did not blink. Darryl was uncertain what happened, only that there was a sound like lightning that cracked deep into his ears. The air bent and pushed at him, made his body turn without him thinking, made his feet pound one after the other. He must run; that was all he knew, survival of the fastest. A path opened in his sight line, a trodden way he had not noticed before, but which promised, if he ran like the number 67 bus, to get him out of Havoc fast.
It was past three in the morning when Charlie Way pushed open the door to Cob Cottage. She did not switch on the light, finding her way by moonlight, a soft shaft of which was angled through the kitchen window.
She washed her hands at the sink, her knuckles skinned. Mud splattered the lone mug, the single fork, the upturned solo plate, so she rinsed them quickly under the tap. The worst of the mud would rinse off her jacket. She hung it in the shower.
With the tap off, the silence mobbed her. Well, it couldn’t get her if she was asleep, and she was bone tired now. With a single movement she slid herself over the back of the sofa and the duvet folded itself around her. She fell, almost at once, into a shallow but dreamless sleep. She was still wearing her boots.
2
A Pint and a Punch Up
PC Williamson did not understand how it happened. At one moment he was sitting, enjoying a pint, and then there was the fist, clenched and aggressive, flying past his own face towards Matt.
Matt’s cheek crumpled beneath the blow, and he fell backwards with the violent momentum of it. From there, it was as if a fuse was lit that trailed across the room. Matt’s fall knocked into the tall bloke behind him, so that he spilled his beer. He turned on Matt and, as he did so, was grabbed from behind by the angry hands of the man in front of him, on whom the beer had been spilled. Then there was a group of women at another table close by the hearth who leapt up like a SWAT team and were fists flying and legs kicking because, it transpired, they’d just finished a session of Body Combat at the Moot Hall.
If this had happened in The Highwayman, no one would have been surprised, but this brawl spread like floodwater through the main bar in The Fiddle. The protagonists were fighting, it was evident to PC Williamson, by the Marquess of Queensberry rules, and the fists that flew were jabbed and hooked with an almost professional grace. Here, the golf club cronies Phillip Markham and Julian Crest were recognisable amongst others. Their designer gear was spattered with blood, cosmetic dentistry began to litter the floor as veneers and crowns were knocked and tapped by knuckle and thumb. Hair rose and flew, scalps were torn, earrings were ripped through lobes. At its peak, it was a deft and elaborate ballet, everyone in the pub moving with dynamism and fury, their breath hot, their armpits hotter; sweat like diamonds flung through the air.
At its epicentre was Aurora Foundling, she of the red hair and the haughty demeanour. She was sitting at the table closest to the hearth. Her hair was filled with static, fizzing and curling away from her, and she seemed to sit outside the melee. This seemed an impossible feat, as all five of the Monkton brothers were fists flying beside the table. Spit and sweat rained down, but not on her jacket, not in her hair. She was untouched. As he watched, PC Williamson thought it was like looking at someone through a tunnel. She did not seem harassed in any way; she stared out at the frenzy with interested calm.
Her hair mesmerised him. For several moments, he saw the way it flared and sparked, matching the flames in the hearth behind her. It was a thing of beauty, drawing the eye and the hand. It was important to him, suddenly, to touch that hair, to wind his hands tight into its curled locks. Then she looked at him, a fierce glare that broke whatever spell the hair held. PC Williamson was suddenly on duty, his police instincts overruling any more primal urges.
He didn’t arrest everyone, though he tried. He remembered all his conflict management training, even after being hit over the head with a bar stool, but, if he was honest, it was Yolanda and her air horn behind the bar that really hushed things up.
3
Date Night
Aurora Foundling did not often go out on a date with anyone from Woodcastle. This was due to the fact that she had very high standards.
“Skyscraper standards,” her mother said, and Aurora agreed.
She did not care for dating. The idea of attempting to get to know someone by going to sit in a cinema with them and not talk for three hours seemed stupid. The other scenario of a “meal out” was worse. No one wanted to eat with a stranger, not really. God help anyone who went dancing, and as for sports, frankly, Aurora was too competitive. There was the time when she had gone on a kayaking-adventure day with a tall thin young man, who she thought might have been called Alistair. Or Alexander. That wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was that she was driven and good at kayaking, as it happened, and in a rather white-water section of the Rade — a mile or so past the Knightstone Bridge — Alistair, Alexander, or whoever he was, had run aground or something and dislocated his shoulder because “she was too competitive”. She had told him he was a wimp and paddled off, only stopping at the lagoon at Far Reach. It would have been such an exhilarating ride, if he hadn’t been so whiny. She’d never seen him again. Thank goodness.
She rather surprised herself by consenting to go out for a drink with Finlay Monkton. She had been creating the floral displays for the golf club gala dinner and Finlay, who happened to live in Woodcastle, suggested they might enjoy a drink at The Fiddle. He was very handsome. Very rich. If she didn’t like him so much, he had three, or was it four, other brothers. Eeny meeny, she thought to herself as she primped her hair.
This was probably not the best mindset with which to go on a date, but Aurora rather liked The Fiddle from the few occasions she had been there. It was a beautiful historic building.
She was uncertain at which point it had all gone wrong. Finlay had been there, and then two other brothers — Dimly and Ugly were the names she recalled, though she knew they weren’t their actual names — had rolled in and some sort of argument started. She recalled Finlay’s red face and a bit of spit gathering at the side of his mouth, and she wondered if he expected her to kiss him in that state. She wasn’t sure, had she said that out loud? Whatever, the door to The Fiddle swung wide once more and let in the other brothers Fatly and Smugly to join Dimly and Ugly. Fatly was supposed to be muscle, but Aurora doubted that. Possibly out loud. He was too fat to sit in a chair with arms, whatever he might say, and Smugly, ah yes, that was where it might have started. Something she said about Smugly. To do with his teeth, which looked like bathroom tiling. Was it his fist that flew first or Finlay’s? Whatever, she’d dodged the blow. It landed on some innocent but clearly angry bystander, and then it was like dominoes.
This, she reasoned, was why she didn’t go on dates.
She walked home the long way at the edge of Rook’s Hill. She tossed her hair into the night air and felt empowered. There was something deeply, deeply thrilling about having five brothers fight over you.
There ought to be an alteration here; her thinking should take a different angle, one where it bothered her how an argument, a brawl in fact, could spring up where she w
as. She had often been at the heart of a conflict, often petty. Her schooldays had been fraught with girlish battles. She didn’t have many friends; she didn’t like anyone she’d been at school with.
Or was it that they didn’t like her? There it was again, that different and more obtuse angle on her life.
She walked on in the quiet dark. Woodcastle was not that bad; you could walk home in the dark without fear of being hurt. Although that hadn’t held true in recent months. Hadn’t there been that incident, no, in fact a couple of incidents, where women had been attacked? She recalled one of them had been in the car park at The Highwayman, so all bets were off. Anyone spending time alone there was asking for trouble. Perhaps she ought to go there for a drink sometime. Part of her was laughing, a wild, raw sound deep inside her that was familiar and yet strange.
She walked a little faster. It wasn’t that she was afraid of the dark. Aurora was not. Tonight, as she walked, as her hair crackled with static, and she felt her heart race with delight at the trouble she’d caused, she felt the dark might be afraid of her.
Who could blame it? Let’s face it. She was afraid of her.
4
Peacocks on a Crimson Ground
At their mother’s funeral, there had been a moment, at the driveway of Cob Cottage as the hearse pulled in, when Anna’s memory ceased recording. At least, if the event itself was recorded there, she did not at any point play it back to herself. Archive. Repository. She had too many memories to hoard in the dark.
It had all been arranged, of course. Their mother had organised all the details, and this time they were not minded to change the running order. Anna was not certain how her sisters recalled the day, as they had made an unspoken pact that they would not talk about it.
Instead Emz and Anna had thrown themselves at The Pop-Up Tea Room project in The Orangery at Hartfield Hall. Charlie had come along at first, arriving after work to help with the scrubbing of floors and replacing of windows, but now she was absent. She was the one in Havoc Wood, keeping it ticking over.
“Someone’s got to patrol.” She had made the statement a few weeks ago. “Might as well be me.” She shrugged into her jacket and left Anna, Emz, and Winn to the putty and stepladders. Now Anna thought about it, that might have been more than a month ago. Six weeks? Eight even? She stopped thinking.
They had pitched in. Here and there, one or two nights where she and Emz had gone on patrol, but there had been that night when they had been busy in The Orangery all day, and it was getting late, and Anna had been the one to say, “It’s late. We could just stay here for tonight.” She looked to Winn. “If Winn doesn’t mind?”
“Not at all. Take your pick of the bedrooms,” had been Winn’s welcoming reply, and she’d bustled them through the hallway. At the top of the stairs, she’d looked east, to the suite of rooms occupied by the terrible Mrs Fyfe, her most recent and most troublesome tenant, and so the three of them had, instinctively, turned west.
Anna chose the Chinese room, decorated as it was with Art Nouveau peacocks against a deep-crimson ground.
Emz trailed further upstairs to the servants’ quarters and a camp bed for the double reason that bats were roosting in one of the gables and owls in the other. Each night following there was always an excuse to stay at Hartfield, to not go home to Cob Cottage, and Winn was kind and accepted both of them with no question.
This morning, Anna was in need of a change of clothes, and so she had to return to Cob Cottage. She had set out early, and it would have been easy for her to take any number of short cuts from town; she knew the in roads and bridleways. She could have taken the path out from the walled garden at Hartfield. She might have crossed the Hartfield lawns, a drifting swathe of last year’s grasses browned by winter, and cut into Havoc via the thin lane that picked its way between Leap Woods and Havoc itself. She might have, she could have, but she did not. She walked out of Hartfield to Great Road and The Terraces into town. Cars buzzed past in the early morning rush hour, and sirens sounded their banshee cry into the crisp March air. The bus wheezed past as Anna trudged onwards.
In town proper, she avoided passing Seren Lake’s shop so that she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone and was relieved, while standing at the crossing on the junction with Long Gate Street, to see Charlie trundle by in her little runabout on her way to work at Drawbridge Brewery. Charlie’s headlights flashed a greeting, and Anna responded with a nod and a wave.
Anna felt better for that. She had not wanted to find Charlie at Cob Cottage, but it felt good to have the small exchange of greeting in the neutral territory of town.
She walked up past The Castle Inn and was aware of the planning notice plastered to the door of her former workplace. She didn’t care to read it. She’d heard that Ivan Herald had big plans and big pockets, which he was letting the planning office in Castlebury rummage about in for spare change. He’d been spotted bribing the councillors with a promise of funding and grants for the Castle itself, for the Moot Hall, and for the conservation area properties up at Spenser Place. Lella, of course, had not spoken to her since she quit her job as chef at the inn, and Anna did not blame her.
She crossed to the other side of the street to avoid any possible sightings. To all intents, The Castle Inn looked closed up, displaying that dank coldness of any abandoned building. Thoughts prickled into Anna’s head. She could not take any further losses and, in an effort to keep going, she visualised the thoughts being crumpled up like paper and thrown out of her ear onto the pavement.
She turned in, more than half an hour later, at the tarmac road at the edge of Old Castle Road. Before long she was on the gravel, letting the sound beneath her feet grind away any thoughts that were not to do with her list of clothing requirements. Then, the soft clud of the dirt track altered her perspective again. She felt something give in her chest, and it was not a sob. She looked up. Cob Cottage sat and waited. Patient.
Once inside, she was swift to change her clothes and put some washing on. Part way through the cycle, she could not take being in the cottage any longer and headed out across the porch and down to the shoreline.
It was bitter cold. Her memory replayed the icy music of the water freezing on the night her mother died.
She could not pick it apart. Their mother had come to them that last night, talking in an odd way, but there, alive. Except that it was impossible. As Pike Lake froze, and their mother was taken away on the Great Grey Horse, a beast that had come out of Havoc to find her, she had already been dead for several hours, killed in an experiment at the De Quincey Langport Laboratory campus, where she was amongst the chief scientists.
Anna breathed in deep. She had been right. It was too hard to be here, in Havoc. She walked back inside at the siren call of the washing machine beeping that it had finished her laundry. She shoved the clothing into a carrier and made her way quickly back to dirt, gravel, and tarmac, and it was no time at all before she was walking back up the driveway at Hartfield, distracting her mind with plans for paint and flatware.
The Hartfield Orangery pop-up was a lifeline.
“We need to draw up a proper contract. I can’t have you working for nothing,” Winn fussed. Anna shook her head, as if this was of no consequence. Their mother’s estate had left them provided for. She had organised every detail; even Half-Built House had been held jointly in their names.
“I’m a volunteer.” Anna resisted her attempts at contracts and agreements over a pot of tea in the newly spruced-up kitchen. The place had regained its heart, the shelves filled with crockery from the cupboards and cabinets in other rooms. No one cared that they were valuable antiques; they had been brought down because they were pretty or practical or both.
“No, no, your sister pulls that one. I feel the need to reward you both,” Winn persisted, quite as stubborn as any Way sister. Anna could see that the situation made her anxious.
“Can you pass me that to-do list from the counter?”
Winn spun round, located t
he floral notepad with the copperplate lettering. Anna tore off the first scribbled-on page and started afresh. She kept the words brief. Winn spotted “partnership” and “10%”.
“No, no, a partnership must be fifty-fifty.” She pointed at the paper. Anna raised her eyes from her task for a moment. Winn matched her gaze. There was a brief battle of raised eyebrows, and Anna conceded and scribbled in “25%”. Winn opened her mouth to protest, but Anna held up a hand.
“Twenty-five, Winn, because I’ll be doing the cooking, but it’s your property.”
Winn was not convinced.
“It’s your manpower. And we’ve all put something in the kitty for refurbishments, decorating…” Winn said, unfooled.
Anna could see her searching for further points of debate. She acted quickly.
“We’re junior partners.” She fixed the notion and watched the anxiety fade from Winn’s face.
“Ah. Oh. Good. Good.” Winn stirred her tea. “You must be rewarded for your work.” Winn faffed about with the milk jug and the saucer, and Anna wondered if anyone had ever rewarded Winn for anything.
“You’ve done a lot for us, Winn,” Anna said, her voice holding steady despite her stormy emotions. Winn shook her head, reached to pat Anna’s hand. As she did so, there was a glimmer, nothing so definite as a Flickerbook, more like a door opening a crack, letting daylight shaft through, and shutting as quickly. It startled Anna.
“You must stay as long as you need to,” Winn reassured her. “It’s better to have somebody living in the house. Lord knows I don’t use the old place. Now, I have to go and rescue those hens.” She bustled up from the table, reaching deep into her pocket for her car keys.