by Imogen White
“Phhf.” Rose pulled up the damaged corner of her dress hanging down from under her coat, to stop herself tripping on it. “You’ve barely known him five minutes, you said you only met him on the boat over here, so how can you be so sure? Anyway, honourable or not, there’s no denying what we just seen.”
It was as plain as chalk to Rose, and she just couldn’t understand why Rui was being so difficult.
“Mr Gupta is a brave and honourable man. You know, he lost his hand on a mission for the Jaipur Museum. He was returning from Bombay by train, with some scriptures thought to be cursed, when a fire broke out on board. Despite his injuries he selflessly took charge of the rescue operation. His quick thinking saved a great number of stricken passengers. A hero, you see. The kind of valour he demonstrated is rare, Rose. He is no petty thief.”
“Look here,” Rose said, struggling to keep level with him, “all I know is, sometimes people do bad things what don’t make no sense.” Rose thought about the devilish Miss Gritt back at the workhouse. “But one thing I’m sure of, we need to find Enna and quick. She’ll know what to do.” I’m counting on it.
The pathway curved around a copse of trees, where the track stopped abruptly. Ahead, was a large horseshoe-shaped clearing, surrounded by mature trees and clumps of furze covered in yellow flowers.
And there, beneath a bough of weeping willow, stood the gypsy caravan, its large red cartwheels locked in place by bricks. It had an arched roof and green panelled sides adorned with a mixture of golden scrolls and colourful flower motifs. A broad wooden ladder led up to the closed doors. It looked deserted.
“I don’t think she’s ’ere.” Rose suddenly felt so deflated and tired.
Rui inspected the remains of a small fire in the middle of the clearing. Bunches of scorched herbs filled the air with a heady sweetness. He rubbed some of the ash between his fingers. “It’s wet; someone tried to put this out, and recently.” He stood up and looked around, but noticing something he bent back down. He ran his hands across some prints left in the mud. Rose leaned over him. “Animal prints,” Rui said.
“Monkey prints more like!” Rose pointed at the unusual shoe prints that ran alongside the monkey paws. “They’re pointed slippers of the Mr Gupta variety, I would say, Sherlock.” She dusted her hands together. “Them shifty travelling companions of yours have been up here already.”
“But why?” Rui examined the evidence, deep in thought.
Rose left him and followed the sound of running water to behind the caravan, discovering a strange red-coloured pool with mist clinging to its surface. Roughly circular, it extended to about ten feet across and brimmed over at the far end to fall as a brook that trickled down the hill.
Birdsong filled the surrounding trees. Rui stepped up behind her.
“This looks like the water Enna gave to Miss Templeforth!” Rose said.
Rui peered over the bank. “Red waters,” he whispered, dipping his hand into the water. “This must be where the spring starts – its source.” He dipped his hands in and closed his eyes. “In India, red waters such as these are sacred. Known as Amrita – the nectar of immortality fallen to earth as a result of heavenly conflict. This place is special. It feels magical. Can you feel it too?” Standing, he backed away.
“Nah,” she lied, feeling goose pimples on her skin. Nervously, she dipped her hand into the metallic swell. It’s warm! Even on a cold October afternoon.
In that very moment, a curious emotion swept over Rose. She shivered. An ancient but familiar sensation of deep belonging stirred inside her, something she recognized, something she craved – the pendant.
“Rose?” Rui asked, pulling her arm.
“Hang on.” She shook him off, trying to still her mind. Several faint voices called to her at the same time. She couldn’t quite work out their words, but she knew instinctively that the spirit of the pendant was calling her to find it… The voices faded away. “Wait!” Rose called out, her eyes wide. But it was too late, the feeling had gone. She slumped forward.
“What is it?” Rui whispered from beside her.
“It’s the oddest thing,” Rose began. “I think the missing pendant tried to speak to me, but I couldn’t hear what it was trying to say. But, Rui, it wants me to find it. It ain’t too far away. I can feel it in here.” She tapped her heart. “It’s like it’s scared too – like it needs me.”
“Extraordinary!” Rui said.
The trees above them shook suddenly, and hundreds of birds took flight from the overhanging canopy. Rose shielded her face with her arm. The air thickened with beating wings. “S-starlings,” she stammered. The birds gyrated in the sky above her, like a living thing of one mind. She scrambled to her feet and turned to Rui, but he’d gone. She spotted him running to the caravan.
“Hang on!” she shouted, rushing towards him, pulling her bonnet down with both hands. “Wait for me.”
Rose jumped up the steps leading to the closed caravan doors, and joined Rui as the swirling mass of starlings overhead flew out towards the sea.
The two doors to Enna’s caravan creaked apart without being pushed. At nearly four o’clock, the late afternoon light outside cast Rose and Rui’s silhouettes across the floor of the windowless interior. The fragrance of lavender drifted out.
“It’s bigger than it looks.” Rose examined the sparsely furnished room, a brown tapestry pinned all around the walls.
“Shall we go in?” Rui offered, already stepping inside. “We can wait for her here.”
Dried bunches of lavender hung at intervals from a high shelf of knick-knacks.
“Do you s’pose this is where Enna lives?” Rose noticed the raised area at the back. “There’s a bed up there.”
Moving forward, she ran her fingers across a central table, its top crafted from a slice of polished tree trunk. On it sat a solitary candle, a box of matches and a strange bowl carved from a lump of black rock. “She don’t own much, does she?”
“No.” Rui spun in a circle, taking it all in.
“Well, if we are going to wait here for a bit we may as well make ourselves comfy,” Rose suggested, reaching for the matches.
The candle sparked into a lively flame as Rui shut the doors, extinguishing the afternoon light. As he swung back around his mouth fell open. “R-Rose,” he stammered, looking about.
Rose blew out the match and followed his gaze, holding the candle in front of her.
“Well I never!”
The dull tapestry now shone in the light, awash with deep reds, greens and blues and flecks of golden thread, as a multitude of previously hidden details sprang to life as if responding to the candle’s flame.
“Look, Rui, the cup!” She ran her fingers over a small stitched red cup set in the tapestry. Hovering next to it, on either side, shone the two pendants. One she recognized as hers – golden amber with the central darker dot. And the other as Verrulf’s, a dark disc but with a centre of orange. The cup looked quite simple, small, with a round base and a handle, it sat upon a rock.
“It looks like an ordinary teacup, dunnit?” Rose watched spellbound as the gilded threads glowed and throbbed in the light. “But it looks alive!” Just like the pendant did when I held it.
Rui hovered by her shoulder, his brown eyes glittering in the flame of Rose’s candle. “Yes, it must be the Amber Cup. And look, it reappears all the way along.”
He was right. Its image peppered the tapestry. Rose moved the light of the candle along the strange landscape, noticing a girl with black curly hair who kept reappearing beside a blond boy who held the cup.
“It’s the story of the cup, Rose. Just as Miss Templeforth told it. Look over here – the trees look dead.” He studied a blackened copse, with trunks all willowy and broken.
“Those.” Rose pointed, the image took her back to her vision. “Those ain’t trees, Rui. They look like dead trees, but they’re things like what came at me in my mind when I held the pendant.” Their elongated black bodies lurched skyw
ard and their shadows dripped beneath them, in what seemed to be blood.
“Creeplings, Rose! And who is that?”
A giant figure hovered in the night sky, with stag antlers branching from his head. Ape-like arms dangled by his sides, and he was totally shadow-black apart from his eyes, which glowed red like the cup.
“I dunno, but I don’t like the look of him,” Rose muttered.
Rui went to touch the image, but changed his mind. “It must be Albion’s half-brother. This must be Verrulf.”
Rose moved along and studied a hillock set back from the sea.
“Ah, the burial mound,” Rui said joining her.
Rose nodded, tracing her fingers over the people who stood linking hands around it. She stopped as she reached the girl with black hair. Except, she wasn’t a girl any more, she was a young woman. Her blue eyes matched the sea behind her. She stared out at Rose, as if she had been waiting to be recognized.
“This woman looks exactly like your gypsy friend, Enna Lee!” Rui’s words cut into Rose’s thoughts. “The same lady who delivered Miss Templeforth’s note to me at the station. The likeness is uncanny! Extraordinary.”
“I—” Rose couldn’t form a sentence. “P’raps…I don’t know. It can’t be?” No number of excuses could hide what Rose knew deep inside. “But how could the same person be alive today that was alive then?” Rose recalled how Enna had described knowing Miss Templeforth since she was a child, even though she looked a quarter of the old lady’s age.
“That’s how Miss Templeforth could recount the detail of the story with such authority, Rose. She’d been told it by someone who was there.”
“Yes, I mean, I don’t know, I—” Rose looked to the end of the tapestry, which she realized told the ongoing story of the cup. Her uneasiness grew. Would it tell them more about the pendant holder – or provide more clues about where the pendant might be, and about Mr Gupta?
Other images flashed out at her as she looked. A giant pile of broken metal. A young boy standing with a top-hatted man dressed in black. Further along still, the mound being removed by workmen. The cup again. Then other people she did not recognize. Rose stumbled around the wooden trunk, impatient to see the last part of the embroidery. It showed the half-completed face of a girl. Rose gasped.
“Rose,” Rui stammered from behind her. “That face looks exactly like yours!”
Rose swayed as she focused on the image in front of her. Her unfinished, unwritten future stretched down one side of the caravan to the door where the tapestry was blank.
“Just one half of your face, Rose? Do you think that’s significant?” Rui said, inspecting the tapestry. “And where am I? I feel rather cheated.”
“I need a seat.” Rose slumped onto the stool and placed the candle on the table in front of her. She stared back at her face in the tapestry, wishing it could tell her more. She felt trapped, like a pea sealed in a drum that rattled and bounced about to the beat of someone else’s tune.
Suddenly, the caravan doors burst open and a flurry of leaves blew in from outside. Rose jumped up. A pale face peered through a tangle of black curls.
“Enna!” they both said together.
Enna rushed forward, and the caravan shook a little as she pulled Rose into a warm embrace. “I have been so worried. I left for the house but found it empty, and—” Enna glanced at Rui. “You weren’t followed, were you?”
Rui shook his head. “I kept constant vigilance. If I had spotted anyone I would have shaken their trail. No self-respecting detective would fall foul to such a trifle, Ma’am.” He executed a bow.
Rose didn’t want Enna Lee to stop holding her. In her arms she felt cocooned from everything, but she knew Enna had to be told the terrible news. “M-miss Templeforth is d-dead.” The thought of that kind old lady’s body stuck in the cold morgue filled Rose with sadness.
“I know.” Enna shut her eyes and drew a deep breath. Gently releasing Rose, she turned away for a moment to compose herself. “Lucile Templeforth was my faithful friend and a strong guardian.”
“A-and the pendant’s gone as well. And everything’s messed up and I didn’t know what to do. So we came here to find you and—” Rose’s words ran dry.
“Things are happening quickly –” Enna sat at the small table and Rose joined her – “time is running away from us. We must find the pendant. Do you know where it might be?” Enna placed her hand softly over Rose’s.
“Well, the pendant called to Rose,” Rui interrupted, waving his arms about, encouraging her to speak.
“Rose?”
“Well, yes. I think it did. When I sat by them waters outside. I heard it, from far away – it was like it wanted me to find it. Like it was – scared.” Which is how she felt now. She stared up to the ceiling of the caravan to stop her tears from falling.
“Rose, if it wants you to find it, it will show you the way.” Enna’s broad smile didn’t reach her eyes, which remained etched with worry.
Rose suddenly remembered Mr Gupta with a start. “Has a man with a monkey been to see you up here?”
“No.” Enna shook her head. “Why?”
Rose’s mouth opened and closed, but she didn’t know where to begin.
“There are some prints outside your caravan,” Rui cut in, “consistent with theirs. It would seem that perhaps they tried to pay you a visit?”
“No? Do you suspect he may be involved in the pendant’s disappearance?” Enna leaned over the table.
“Yes!” “No!” Rose and Rui cried together.
“We don’t know.” They shrugged in unison.
In truth, Rose didn’t feel she knew anything about anything. She rested her elbows on the table and gripped her head, trying to hold her thoughts still. She glanced at the image of Enna by the burial mound on the tapestry. Enna followed her gaze.
“Who are you?” Rose murmured, wiping away a tear. “I mean, who are you really?”
“Were you truly with Albion all those years ago?” Rui asked creeping forward, his eyes hungry.
“Yes.” She paused. “I have been around for a very long time, and have a deep connection with Hove. I watch over it.” Enna sighed and pulled her shawl more tightly around her.
“I knew it! So you are immortal?” Rui’s eyes ignited as he dragged his stool next to her.
“But how?” Rose whispered, trying to straighten out her impossible thoughts.
“A long time ago, back when magic existed in everything, I was a human like you, and the High Priestess to the red waters here.”
“Them waters outside?” Rose managed.
Enna nodded. “I offered up my own mortality to protect this place from Verrulf. I used dangerous magic to ensure I remain here until the threat of his world passes.” Enna exhaled and watched the dancing candlelight, her thoughts seemingly far away.
“My body tires so of this world. To live for ever, to watch the people you love and care for die, is a heavy burden. The pain of loss is not something that lessens with the passing years – the passing millennia. But I stay to guide the guardians to Albion’s pendant.”
“And how do you know who the pendant chooses?” Rui asked.
“The waters guide me.” Enna gestured to the strange black bowl set before them on the table. Rose stared at it, puzzled.
“Hang on!” Rose gripped the table’s edge. “Why can’t you be the pendant’s guardian then? You’d be better than me, better than anyone?”
“No.” Enna shook her head. “Albion and I—” Enna cleared her throat. “We had a daughter. Our daughter’s ancestral line carries forward the guardianship of his pendant. I cannot handle it, only one chosen from his bloodline can. You, Rose.”
“So, you and Rose are…” Rui began.
“Related?” Rose blinked.
“Very distantly,” Enna smiled. “Over a great number of generations.”
Rose stroked the back of her neck, trying to calm the self-doubt needling her.
As if sensing Rose’s
uncertainty, Enna reached over and cradled her hand, and the metal of her many rings felt cold. “These are dark times. Verrulf is trying to come back; he has people helping him who must be stopped. The black sun – the symbol you saw tattooed on that man’s wrist. It is connected to Verrulf. The symbol his followers use in this world. It is a symbol of their loyalty to him.”
“The black sun?” Rui interjected, looking at Rose.
“Enna,” Rose began, “that last girl that came to be interviewed in the library. The one with the blonde ringlets.”
“Yes, Rose, I remember her.” Enna frowned.
“Well, I watched her leave in a carriage. And that sun sign, just like the tattoo, was on the luggage hold.”
“You’re certain of that?” Enna gasped. “The pendant had the most violent reaction to her in the library. I sensed a darkness in her, of the sort I have rarely before encountered.”
“I’m sorry I never said anything about it earlier,” Rose added.
Enna’s eyes widened. “We always thought Verrulf’s guardian would be unable to resist sending someone. And it seems the plan worked. They believe we’ve not found our champion. You, Rose, remain undetected.”
Relief flooded through Rose. Not just because Enna thought she was safe for now, but because she hadn’t messed up by not telling anyone sooner.
“But someone has taken your pendant, Rose, and it must be found,” Enna said, her eyes fierce.
Rose nodded. Enna was right, but who had it? Was it Mr Gupta? Was he really something to do with the black sun?
Rui’s fingers tapped his lips. “When did you last encounter this black sun symbol, Miss Lee?”
“My last meeting with them was when the Amber Cup was removed from the burial mound. A clever boy helped me and Lucile Templeforth overcome Verrulf’s guardian when he attempted to take possession of the cup.” Enna walked over to the tapestry, and the caravan shook a little. She pointed to the image of a top-hatted figure, standing next to a young boy. “Verrulf’s guardian back then used the insignia of a black sun, just as they do now. Verrulf’s pendant simply vanished after that. It is an object with great cunning… But now it has resurfaced, and with its new host, they are growing strong.”