Serpent in the Heather

by Kay Kenyon

  As thunder rolled in off the sea, Awbrey shouted, “You hurry in. I’ll be comin’ behind with the bags.” He waved her toward the door.

  Once inside the castle, the Crossbow hunt for the youth killer would begin in earnest. At least Kim’s end of the operation. She must not presume anyone here was guilty, but neither would she relax for a moment in her pursuit of possible connections. It was for those murdered young people, Ewan, Rupert, Frances. She could not help but imagine how their parents, their brothers and sisters, must grieve. She knew, she did acutely know, how they must grieve. Her own mother, her anguish. That day they learned that Robert had died, and especially how he died.

  Kim tried the latch of the iron-encrusted door. It gave way, and stepping through, she found herself in a small vestibule with a stone stairway leading up. She ascended the stairs, coming out on an expansive stone porch where she spied a formal entry of arched double doors. As rain pelted down, she tapped the door knocker against the wood, and when no one answered, she entered. She found herself in a long gallery with lancet windows along one side. The castle was as quiet as a museum at night.

  In another couple of minutes Awbrey was puffing past her with her valise and camera box. “There’s the sittin’ room,” he said, nodding his head at a gaping doorway before disappearing down the hall.

  She wished that she had carried the camera equipment herself, for Awbrey, despite looking every bit of seventy-five years old, seemed to do everything in the greatest haste, and none too carefully.

  There was nothing for it except to go in and wait for her hostess or whoever was going to greet her. In the large salon, a fire smoldered in a fireplace big enough to park her Austin 10. She took a seat in an enormous wingback, removing her gloves and patting the rain from her hair. The room was lavishly appointed in brocade, silk damask and Indian carpets.

  Here she was again, in another grand British country home, another article to write. But this time, she need not lie that she was on assignment. She would write up her topic; she would have a byline in the London Register. The days when that alone would have been exciting seemed long ago. In her newspaper reporting days, the world had been morally straightforward. People must not experiment on dogs. The newspaper ought not put her on obituaries. One might be excused from telling the truth, but it must be a white lie. And now, deception was the essence of her undertakings. And she’d found it was not difficult, not difficult at all. It was what spies did, she thought with circular logic. Good enough logic.

  Rain pattered at the mullioned windows and thunder rumbled like the old castle clearing its throat. The lamplight quivered beneath the heavy Edwardian lampshades. She savored the moment. How excellent. I am alone in a castle in a thunderstorm.

  At that moment a shadow passed by her chair, and a figure in brown robes drifted through the room. Kim gave a start. But it was merely a slight, gray-haired woman in a calf-length brown knit suit. Moving past Kim, the figure knelt at the fireplace and began poking at the embers until a flame erupted. Rather than putting in more wood to take advantage, the old woman stood up and held the poker as she stared at the meager fire. When she turned around, Kim saw that she was even older than Awbrey, with a long, mournful face. By her dress—shapeless knit, but of good quality—this was not a servant.

  For an opening, Kim said, “You still have fires in August!”

  The old woman stared at her with a bland expression, as though Kim were merely one of many people in the room and in no need of special recognition. Then, placing the poker in its holder, she departed as quietly as she had come in.

  Kim certainly hoped this was not Dorothea Coslett. If it was, and she could not even be bothered to say hello, conversation, upon which Kim depended to ply her craft, could be hopeless.

  “Oh, there you are!” A man’s voice hailed her from the entryway. She stood up to meet the newcomer.

  “Awbrey said he’d left you here, but I thought at least Rian would come to bring you tea.” It was a tall, strapping man, perhaps in his mid-thirties, dressed in country tweeds. Striding into the room, he pushed back a forelock of thick brown hair.

  “You’re Kim Tavistock, I take it. Well, of course you are. We only have five guests a year and we know each one!” His smile was large and lit up his face, making it rather handsome. A whiff of eau de cologne. “I’m Powell Coslett.” They shook hands.

  This burst of energy was very welcome, and instantly dispersed the gloom of the place. Kim stepped forward. “So glad to meet you. I hope I’ve come on the right day!”

  He grinned sheepishly. “Yes, you might wonder. We are a tad disorganized. Mother isn’t feeling well, and we are all tiptoeing about, I’m afraid. And I see you’ve met Idelle.” He looked behind him where the women in brown had floated off. “I hope you didn’t think her rude. She doesn’t speak.”

  He charged over to the fireplace and pulled on a cord. “Well, tea, shall we? You’ve had a long trip. Unless you’d like to freshen up?”

  “Did you say her ladyship is unwell? I didn’t realize . . .” She knew very well the baroness was ill, but as the family kept this private, she must pretend to be surprised.

  “She has good days and bad. But I shouldn’t worry, Mother said I’m to fill in for now. Poor you! But I tell you what, if you don’t get what you want from me, we’ll get you an audience with Mother so that at least you can have a smart quote. She’s rather good at the cogent phrase!”

  He led her out into the gallery. Thunder shook the long row of windows.

  “Sounds like the Scots using their cannon, doesn’t it?” They walked down the hall and up a flight of stairs curving around what must be one of the four towers. “Mind you, Sulcliffe has never seen a battle. I think it’s because, with these walls, and with our back to the sea, we would rather overwhelm any invaders. One might as well ravage the countryside and leave the castle high and dry!”

  “I hope my visit won’t be disruptive, Lord Ellesmere. With your mother unwell.”

  “Please do call me Powell. And you mustn’t think of leaving. Besides, you can’t escape now. The drawbridge is up.”

  She pretended not to find this a bit ominous. “And the hounds are loose?”

  He nodded. “That too.” He steered her up the stairs with the merest pressure of a long arm. His enthusiasm helped to counter her first impressions of the rather forbidding castle, more isolated than she had imagined, and with the bizarre treatment she had received from the woman in the sitting room. They stopped on the first landing, where Powell opened a door.

  Her room was enormous and filled with overstuffed furniture, heavy red drapes and carpets, the whole scene an alarming shade of raspberry.

  Powell put her valise on the four-poster bed piled with dusty pillows. A tray with cakes and tea occupied a footstool. Powell frowned. “I’m afraid the tea is cold. Rian does her best, but she’s getting on a bit. I’ll send her up with fresh.”

  “No, don’t put her to trouble, really.” Out the windows in the curved wall of her tower room she saw black, craggy rocks and a silver strip of the sea beyond.

  She turned back to him. “I’ve never spent the night in a castle.” She noticed his jacket had an emblem on the breast pocket. Perhaps a coat of arms.

  He squared his shoulders. “Tell you what, we’ll have our talk while taking a tour of it. You do write-ups of British grand houses, don’t you?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, Mother looked you up. We know all about you.”

  His face lit up with a wide, spontaneous smile. She would have to remember that technique. One could say anything one pleased and make it go down well if followed with a dazzling smile.

  So, Dorothea Coslett wasn’t too ill to check up on her. She trusted the investigation produced the right story, the witless American one.

  Powell looked around the room. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. Mind you, the electricity can be dicey. There’s a flashlight on the mantel if the lights go out.”

>   “Is there a telephone I might use?”

  “Yes, in the sitting room. Connections fail at the worst times, but you’re welcome to try it.”

  Of course. She would expect no less of Sulcliffe. If it wished to keep you, it would fill the moat, douse the lights, and kill the telephone.

  The pipes clanged as though being attacked with a pickax but eventually produced a hot bath. Washrooms were obviously an afterthought in old castles, and this one was barely large enough for a claw-footed tub and toilet. As Kim bathed, it struck her that, in her short career as a spy, this was her second time in close company with an eligible lord of a manor. Like Lord Daventry at Summerhill, Powell was charming, but not in Hugh Aberdare’s insouciant way; more artless and unaffected.

  She wondered if agents very often fell for people who, in the eyes of the service, they oughtn’t. Not that she found Powell Coslett such a candidate; she had just met him.

  As she dressed, she indulged the fantasy of being a titled married woman. She imagined three happy children, several dogs, a French governess. And oh dear, perhaps a domineering mother-in-law who would rule the roost. Well. She had no ambition to live in a castle, though a country house—say in York—came to mind. She wondered what a husband would make of the line of work she was in. He would certainly have to make do. Lately, she had tried to imagine the sort of man who would.

  In a wool skirt and sweater set she made her way down to the parlor, where she put in her call to Knightsbridge and Nash Photo Finishing. Someone from the Office answered appropriately and said her photo prints would be ready on Wednesday. Her sign-of-life call complete, she turned to find Powell had entered the drawing room.

  “I was just checking on the prints from my last job.”

  “Oh yes, you’re quite the photographer, aren’t you?” He glanced at the camera case slung over her shoulder as he led her into the gallery. “I should tell you that Mother isn’t keen on snaps of the place, though.”

  “Well, I do hope for one of her. My editor will expect that, and I’d hate to come away without it. Perhaps one of her on the battlements, hair blowing a bit in the wind?”

  When his ready smile faltered, he looked rather lost. “You might not want to go in that direction. It’s easy to see us as a fringe group—not that you do—but we’re quite used to being dismissed.”

  “Oh, I didn’t mean . . .”

  “Never you fear. It’s where most outsiders start with us. We’re used to it.”

  He led her into the window-flanked hallway and around a corner, where a stone balustrade separated them from a large hall below. They looked down on it, a cavernous room with trestle tables lined up in rows.

  “It can seat two hundred for dinner,” Powell explained. “Not that it ever did. I think the king and queen dined here in the sixteenth century. The food must have been frightful, because royals haven’t been back since.”

  He pointed to a shield over the fireplace. “The Sulcliffe emblem.”

  Kim took note of the green and yellow. Around a castle representation in the center field were two symbols, one of waves, one of a flower. Stylized swords jutted from the castle, dividing the spaces like pieces of pie.

  “Lovely,” Kim observed. “Your own coat of arms, then.”

  “No, it’s not an official coat of arms in the heraldic sense. My father designed it as a symbol of the estate.”

  She pulled her notebook out of her pocket, jotting a note. “Bowen Coslett, wasn’t it? I believe I read he died in the Great War.”

  “Yes. That was his sister you saw in the sitting room. My aunt Idelle. She took a vow of silence not long after he was killed. We’re all quite used to it. And she and I have always had a knack for understanding each other. She has trouble these days with her memory and concentration. Hard to watch, I must say. Though she remembers the old days as though they were yesterday! Her silence doesn’t make a lot of sense to outsiders, I suppose, but it’s how she was able to keep going.”

  “Some losses are too much to bear without . . . effects.”

  He looked grateful. “You don’t seem old enough to know that.”

  She flashed him a solid smile. “Where’s the chapel?”

  Powell led her onward through wood-paneled corridors with dressed stone floors, a mixture of country manor and fortified keep. Deep in the castle, a heavy chill descended.

  They stood outside an archway leading to the chapel. “Our Ancient Light fellowship doesn’t hold with Christian dogma,” Powell said. “Some of your readers will be shocked by that. But when you pull away the embellishments of two thousand years of idolatry, one is left with the grounding of it all, of our lives: the landscape, the earth itself. If we go back to pre-Roman times, people were connected with those things. That’s where we take our inspiration.” He made it all sound four-square, the essence of reason.

  The chapel was a plain affair, oddly dour despite an attempt at tracery and vaulting. Hewn ribs marched down the peaked ceiling like the rib cage of a stone beast.

  “We don’t use the chapel, obviously. Mother had all the statuary taken out, and did try to reclaim the place, but really, it still keeps its papist form.” He watched as she took down a note. “I expect that you’re not a believer, are you?”

  “A Christian?”

  “A believer in earth mysteries.”

  “I’m not, I’m afraid.”

  “I didn’t think so.” He regarded her intently. “But you do have a practical aura about you. I hope you’ll keep an open mind.”

  “Oh, leave the girl alone, Powell.” A woman’s voice from the chapel doorway.

  A generously built elderly woman appeared there, framed by the gothic arch. As she stood motionless, with her broad outline and heavy shoulders, she looked rather like a dwarfish spirit emerging from a cave.

  “Mother,” Powell said, in obvious surprise. He went to the dowager, taking her arm.

  Dorothea Coslett leaned on a cane on one side and Powell on the other, slowly moving forward to greet Kim. So, here was the target. The woman with the close Nazi ties. And a person who might have a strong Talent, even the spill. A ripple of anxiety traveled through Kim.

  The baroness wore a fur-trimmed vest over a dark green dress with her hair pulled high on her head and arranged in a circular braid rather like a crown.

  “Mother,” Powell said, “may I present Kim Tavistock. Kim, Lady Ellesmere.”

  The dowager extended her hand, and Kim grasped it lightly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Lady Ellesmere.”

  “Is it? Most people are unnerved by me.”

  Kim smiled. “It’s the burden of being a strong woman. One gets blamed for it.”

  Lady Ellesmere brightened. “She has opinions, Powell. Mark that. This might be more agreeable than we first thought.” Her lively blue eyes assessed Kim’s appearance. “You’re younger than I expected,” she said in a loud and slightly wavering voice. “They said they were sending an experienced journalist, and here they’ve sent us a wisp of a girl, Powell.”

  “I think she knows her stuff, Mother. From the London Register.”

  She looked at the notebook Kim held. “Writing it all down, are you?”

  “Yes. I had just got to the part where you had . . . redecorated the chapel.”

  “Oh, he told you that, did he?” The dowager beamed at her son. “He might not have said how I ripped out the horrid crucifixes and statues of saints.”

  Kim had an image of Dorothea Coslett in her younger years taking a sledgehammer to the walls. “What did you do with them, if I may ask?”

  Lady Ellesmere turned to Powell. “Bring my wheelchair, would you, my dear?” As Powell left them, his mother turned to Kim. “I regret not being able to greet you on your arrival. I hope you will excuse the lapse.”

  “Of course. Powell has been showing me about.”

  As her son approached, pushing a wheelchair, Lady Ellesmere frowned. “You started without me, dear.” He helped her settle into the chair. As they
left the chapel, she stabbed her lap blanket around her legs. “You shan’t get rid of me as easily as that. I’m not dead yet!”

  Powell raised an eyebrow at Kim, sharing a moment of it happens all the time.

  “I have my devotees,” Lady Ellesmere snapped. She clutched her cane across her knees as they passed down the gallery. “I’ve done everything for them, and they’re grateful, of course. Someday, Powell will lead them. But not yet. Not . . . yet.” At this, she reached back and patted her son’s hand.

  As they bumped along the uneven floor, she held forth. “Only the gifted can rule. Think of Germany’s chancellor, how far he has taken that poor, shattered country. He has called people to a cleansing nationalism, giving the common man an alternative to Communism. It would not have been possible without his gift of persuasion.” She glanced up at Kim. “From your reading of history, wouldn’t you agree it is essential?”

  “Well, in the States, we’ve had a few simply dreadful presidents. Voters can make mistakes.”

  Lady Ellesmere made a disgusted face. “Oh dear, now we are talking about democracy. In any case, if Powell can’t make the grade, dear Helena is waiting in the wings to guide the faithful. She is a most efficacious young woman with a strong spiritual gift, you may be sure.”

  Interesting. So, there was competition for the cult’s leadership. Likely a sensitive topic for Powell.

  They were just passing the sitting room. Shaking the subject off, the dowager pointed her cane toward the main door. “Have you seen the view from the high terrace?”

  “No, it was raining when I arrived, and I came straight in.”

  Powell said, “It’s cold, Mother. Oughtn’t it wait for morning?”

  She turned a tender look at him. “Oh, darling, you mustn’t coddle me. But if you would fetch my wrap?”

  When he left, Lady Ellesmere struggled to get out of the chair. “It’s rather trying, being seventy-eight years old. Everyone thinks one is likely to topple over at any moment.” She stood, planting her feet firmly, then gestured with her cane at the door.