Serpent in the Heather

by Kay Kenyon

  “Who’s there?” came the dowager’s wavering cry. “Who?”

  Idelle flattened herself against the stairwell wall and gave no signal as to whether Kim should proceed or leave. Kim climbed past her, up to the first landing. A large door lay open, and inside a massive bedroom a figure moved in the dim lamplight.

  “Hurry, you great sow,” moaned the dowager.

  A woman in a nightgown bent over the prostrate figure of Lady Ellesmere on the bed. She administered an injection, and the dowager fell back onto her pillows.

  Noticing Kim, the nurse, elderly and rotund, barked from beside the bed, “Who are ye?”

  “I’m a guest. I heard screams. I thought someone had been hurt.” She started to back away. The nurse ignored her then, bending over her charge. The room, heavy with the smell of vomit, had been converted into a hospital ward, with tables containing bottles and equipment.

  Idelle came into the room, carrying folded blankets and began stripping the top coverlet off the bed.

  “Ye’d better go,” the nurse said. “Her ladyship will be quiet now.”

  The patient groaned, “Is it the girl?”

  Kim came to the near side of the bed. “It’s me, Lady Ellesmere, Kim Tavistock.”

  The baroness looked in her direction, her eyes watery and vacant. “You’ve come back.”

  The nurse shook her head. “Her ladyship dinna know you’re here.”

  As though to contradict the nurse, the dowager grabbed Kim’s hand. Her grip was weak but insistent. Not knowing what else to do, Kim sat on the edge of the bed. The room was filled with a miasma of decay and chemicals. From the dossier she knew that Dorothea Coslett had an advanced cancer, but that idea was hard to reconcile with the robust woman she had seen earlier that day.

  The nurse loaded a tray with cups and various implements and carried it from the room as Idelle went to the curved wall of windows and opened large French doors. To Kim’s relief, fresh air fanned into the room. Idelle stood in the doorframe, looking out on the sea, where moonlight silvered the calm surface. When Kim’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, she saw a portrait of Adolf Hitler hanging over the mantelpiece. He was dressed, as was his habit, in a brown uniform with a swastika armband, a stern expression on his face.

  From the newly smoothed covers, the baroness whispered, “I can’t go yet.” She had opened her eyes and reached for Kim’s hand, gripping it forcibly. “Not yet!”

  “You must rest,” Kim said.

  “Not until his gift comes, you see?” The old woman’s eyes were keen, the last vestige of what the woman must once have been. “No son of mine can be common. How dare he be common!”

  Idelle was watching them now, her face troubled.

  “Your son has become a fine, strong man,” Kim said softly.

  “Oh, all grown, then?” she whispered, her eyes open but unfocused. “Time he took my place. Did he ever marry? He’s not supposed to. How can he be receptive to his gift if you’re always hanging on him, Margret? I thought you were gone for good!” With surprising strength, she pulled Kim toward her, hissing, “You promised. I paid you, didn’t I?” From behind small yellow teeth came her fetid breath. “Only the gifted can rule. It’s the ancient law.” Her fingers dug into Kim’s hand, and Kim endured it, wondering if a woman demented by painkillers was more or in fact, less, capable of a spill.

  She yanked her hand away from Kim’s. “The King was here, how do you like that, you wretched girl!”

  Lady Ellesmere’s face was drawn into a pronounced sneer, her eyes darting across Kim’s face, looking for a point of entrance. “Oh, yes! Edward himself. The summer solstice, that time of power. If you don’t leave, I’ll tell the King.” She produced a hideous smile. “He’ll make sure you’re gone for good.”

  Idelle crossed the room to the door and held it open, a clear invitation for Kim to leave. Kim would have liked to stay, but she moved away from the sickbed, passing Idelle, who avoided her eyes.

  The nurse returned and insisted that her ladyship could not be further disturbed. Reluctantly, Kim left and wound her way down the stairs, finding that the lights had come on in the corridor.

  Powell hurried up to her. “Kim! What the devil are you doing about?”

  “When I heard cries, I thought someone needed help.”

  “I was just going up. I can’t bear to see her suffer. But the nurse will administer her shot. . . . You must go to bed. There’s nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do.”

  With that, he charged up the steps to his mother’s room, disappearing around the bend in the turret stairs.

  15

  CRACOW, POLAND

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 15. Gustaw Bajek was a man not easily concealed. He had long ago been promoted out of surveillance, but a man standing six foot and two draws attention everywhere. Here in the Jewish quarter, old men in prayer shawls and women in their knotted headscarves stared at him in his tailored jacket and pressed trousers.

  Carrying his package, he walked down Na Przejsciu to Bartosza, each turn bringing him deeper into the industrial sector. The Tilda Mazur case had given Polish intelligence their best lead: the man who had been following her was one who appeared to be an expert in antique dolls. Also, Tilda thought that he was Dutch, a characteristic common now to two Talent murders in Poland.

  He made his way down a rutted street, past a building materials factory and a redolent slaughterhouse. Workers’ houses clustered along an open canal, looking as though they had been sucked into a cyclone and deposited again. But this was the place where the antique doll seller lived.

  Gustaw’s asset had said that the doll seller’s home could be identified by its blue-painted door, but in this neighborhood painted doors and lintels sprouted everywhere, like poppies growing from cracked cement. He knocked on a blue door.

  “Moriz Henschel?” Gustaw asked when it opened.

  The occupant of the shanty, a gnome-like man with a full, dark beard, stared up at Gustaw. He noted that the visitor had his hat in his hand—proper manners—and nodded. “I have the honor of being Moriz Henschel. Some days, more honor than others.”

  “My name is Gustaw Bajek. I have come to ask a question.”

  “A question. Ah.” Moriz nodded, wrinkling his lips as though already considering his answer. “It is not about taxes?”

  “No. It is about dolls.” Gustaw smoothed his bald head in a mannerism left over from the days when he had had hair.

  Moriz opened the door and gestured for Gustaw to enter.

  Gustaw sat on the hut’s only chair, his package wrapped in twine at his feet. Moriz took a place opposite, on a chest draped with a white cloth framed by a crocheted edge. A bronze samovar crouched on a stove within reach.

  “So,” Moriz said after Gustaw had stated his business. “It is not a doll you are interested in but a man. I remember the one you describe, the man with the spectacles. He had a crooked light in his eyes.”

  Gustaw brought the teacup to his lips and slurped gratefully. The stench from the abattoir was strong enough to tint the air green. It had taken two weeks for Polish intelligence to find Moriz Henschel. The man had not returned to the square with his kiosk of dolls, having nursed a boil on his foot.

  “Did you know the man?” Gustaw asked. “His name, perhaps?”

  “No. He was a foreigner, maybe German. But the young woman, ah, that one! She had been to my stall before, patting the dolls with the tips of her fingers, like she would caress a baby.”

  “How were the man’s eyes crooked?”

  Moriz made a fist and then released his fingers in an exploding gesture. “Like a glass ball shattered. Blue, cracked eyes. I never forget such eyes.” He picked up the samovar and replenished Gustaw’s tea, but not his own. Tea was precious, perhaps saved for guests.

  “The young lady,” Moriz said, his brow furrowing, “did she come to harm?”

  “I do not say that she did.”

  “You are police, then?” Moriz suddenly looked more
ingratiating, and slightly regretful for having offered tea.

  “No. Border security,” Gustaw supplied at random. He flicked a glance in the general direction of Russia.

  “What security? You cannot fill a torn sack.”

  “This is true. Now I come to Cracow, and perhaps I will do a better job of things. So, tell me, Moriz Henschel, was this man a collector? Perhaps a collector of very old dolls such as yours?”

  “No, no collector. He did not love my dolls.” Moriz stood up and lifted the cloth off the trunk. Opening the aged chest, he exposed an arrangement of neatly stacked dolls. Like a family, the dolls varied, large and small. Some were clad in pressed but shabby smocks with aprons, and some in old silk and lace.

  “This man with the crooked eyes,” Moriz went on. “He looked for defects. He picks up one, then the other, squinting at them. He settled upon a fine Kestner Heubach. It was this one.” Moriz picked up a doll and held it at arms’ length. “He said it would be very nice, but the head, it is not original. Not a Kestner Heubach head.”

  Moriz shrugged. “My response: ‘Perfection belongs to God.’ And he: ‘Or to a gifted restorer of dolls.’ ‘Such as yourself,’ I say, though I am guessing.

  “He answers me: ‘Yes.’ He said he was not working that day, that he was on holiday.”

  Ah. So, now confirmed. The Dutchman was an expert indeed, a restorer of antique dolls.

  The doll seller nodded to himself, remembering. “Then he looks after the young lady, who hurries away.” He shook his head gravely. “If she had not come to my stall, she would have been better off, is that not right, Gustaw Bajek?”

  Gustaw wondered. Had she been betrayed, or did the Dutchman stumble upon her? “She loved old dolls, there could be no harm in that.”

  Moriz looked at the package at Gustaw’s feet. “Old dolls such as are in your parcel?”

  Gustaw unwrapped the doll that Tilda Mazur’s uncle had let him borrow and handed it to Moriz.

  The old man nodded, smiling. “She is lovely. A Mein Liebling doll, this one. You know the German, Mein Liebling?” Gustaw shook his head. “ ‘My darling,’ it means. Kammer and Reinhardt, thirty years old, very good condition. Except.”

  Gustaw nodded. “The arm.”

  “The missing arm, alas.” Moriz gazed intently at his guest. “But she can be repaired.”

  “Yes,” Gustaw said, rewrapping the doll.

  Moriz nodded meaningfully at his guest. “It would take a gifted restorer, though.”

  Gustaw rose, smiling at Moriz. “Yes. I will be most particular.”

  16

  THE SULCLIFFE ESTATE, WALES

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 15. “You say it’s a sea henge?” Kim asked as she and Powell hiked across the headland. “I haven’t heard the term.”

  “Just wait! You’ll understand immediately, once you see it.”

  The day had dawned with a fresh, blue sky and a few scudding clouds sharing the channel between there and Ireland. Nothing was said at the breakfast table about the previous night’s events. Idelle, quiet of course, was perhaps mournful. Kim wondered if Idelle could possibly be close to Dorothea Coslett; it had seemed last night that she was helping to minister to the baroness. Curious as well, the cryptic note of “Flory Soames,” delivered with such stealth when Powell was out of the room. All filed away for further thought.

  Though Kim had hardly slept and was still mulling over the disturbing nighttime commotion, Powell was in high spirits. “You’ve come at an especially good time. If the tide table doesn’t lie!”

  She looked at him inquiringly as they scrambled up a draw to another shoulder of rock overlooking the sea. As he handed her up the last rise, his cologne mixed with the breeze off the sea.

  Powell seemed invigorated by the fine day and the view of the estate, massively green and rippling with vales and hills. But it could not dispel the disquiet Kim felt about how the baroness cast such a dark shadow over her family. She alternately put Powell forward and then belittled him. Her control over her son extended to an apparent bribe to a woman to stop seeing him. Perhaps worst of all, her conviction that only the gifted can rule, a dictum that allowed her to criticize her son for something he could not remedy and that kept him from the future leadership of Ancient Light, which he obviously was keen to have.

  “Powell, who is Helena? When the baroness mentioned her yesterday, she implied the woman had an important role with the group.”

  “Well. That’s Helena Cumberledge, a woman of the fellowship. She’s got her hooks into Mother. Supposedly has the qualities I lack.” He stopped, mopping his forehead, looking disconcerted.

  It was certainly candid. Inwardly, she smiled.

  “A perfectly nice woman. People think she has quite the knack for emotional persuasion. Nothing to write up, mind you.”

  Perhaps a conceptor; certainly helpful for a leader. “No, no,” Kim said. “I was just wondering.” They resumed their walk.

  In the little valley that nearly bisected the headland, they crossed a field that Powell said was used for Ancient Light encampments. A stream cut through it, and on the far side of the field large irregular stones formed a ring.

  “A sacred stone circle?” Kim asked.

  “No.” An ironic smile. “Not every circle has power, you know.”

  “How can you tell which ones do?”

  “Mother and I rely on the ancients. That’s one we made, actually. It isn’t authentic, but our people like to have a circle for our gatherings.”

  They ascended a rocky hillside and reached the summit, where the panorama of the silver-green sea unfurled before them. From there it was a short walk over deeply folded bare rock to the cliff’s edge. He pointed down. “There it is!”

  She joined him, looking down on a cove with a generous crescent beach. It was protected on three sides with black shale cliffs. He pointed at the cove. At the tide line, a series of stones was revealed, too regular in their occurrence to be quite natural.

  “I see it,” Kim said. “A line of stones like shark teeth.”

  “But it isn’t a line, it’s a circle, you see.” They watched as the tide receded rather swiftly, revealing first a crescent and then a nearly full circle of upright stones. It looked from this vantage point to be some forty feet in diameter.

  “And the stones are only visible at low tide?”

  “That’s right, and it’s what has prevented people from desecrating the stones. If you were to rush out there now, you wouldn’t make much progress in dislodging a stone before the tide came in again. It’s ancient, possibly over two thousand years old.”

  “But how could it have been built if the tide had it underwater most of the time?”

  “That’s the wonderful part. When they built it, this headland had a permanent beach. Over the millennia the builders gradually lost their henge. Mind you, it isn’t really a henge, which is a ditch and a bank. But these days people like to call any ancient circle a henge.”

  A bracing wind slapped at their cheeks. “The tide comes in fast. It’s why Mother always has fretted about my coming here. It disappears at high tide. The whole beach.” He flashed his high-wattage smile at her. “There is something profound and enduring about all this. And my mother is a part of it, almost as adamantine as the cliffs.”

  “You admire her very much, don’t you?”

  He looked out to sea. The sand around the henge was starting to lose its saturation of water and turned a creamy brown in the morning sun. “Yes. I want to measure up, to continue her work.”

  “Surely, though, you have the work of the estate to carry on.”

  “Well, there’s not much of a resource there. Mother has given most of her fortune away on charitable causes, and although the estate is mine, I’ll need a position with an income. I’ll need Ancient Light. Its supporters are very generous.”

  She’d known it wasn’t just ambition. He needed the money.

  He went on. “It would be so much easier if my gift came to me
. I’ve been told it’s struggling to find expression. It’s why I come here and make visits to places of power. To be receptive.”

  He buttoned up his jacket further against the brisk wind. “It really isn’t fair that some people have great success, almost automatically. They just burn brighter than others do.”

  “I think you could burn brightly.” If your Mother let you, she wanted to say. Instead, she finished, “If you let yourself.”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “The fault is in the stars, in fate?”

  A smile started and faltered. “Something like that.”

  From around the headland came the muffled sound of waves crashing against the rocks. “Last night—”

  He interrupted. “That was one of Mother’s bad ones. I’m sorry you were distressed. We have to ask you not to make that public, of course.”

  “We don’t need to mention it.”

  He nodded gratefully.

  “You are very watchful for her. With her poor health, it can’t be easy.”

  “Well, we have a live-in nurse to care for her. I can’t claim to do much, and I have a demanding travel schedule, to appear at fellowship gatherings here and there.”

  “You have some important people among your devotees. Even the King, Lady Ellesmere said. He came for an observance of the summer solstice, she said.”

  He looked surprised. “She told you that? His Majesty would like his privacy. It was not a visit the palace announced.”

  “Of course. I won’t mention it.”

  “Awfully good of you. The King’s expected to be Church of England, but his interests range rather wider.”

  “An impressive friend for Ancient Light, I must say.”

  A rueful smile. “He does what he can for us. We are very grateful.” He gestured toward the cliffs. “Shall we go down to the beach before it’s gone? It’s a bit of a slog, I warn you!”

  “Oh yes, I’m game.”

  “That’s the spirit,” he said. “I’ll lead the way so that you can follow my footholds.”