by Frewin Jones
Standing under the shadow of the porch, she watched as Sancha appeared. She heard the clump of fast-moving shoes—not Sancha’s. Someone on the pavement. Obeying Tania’s instructions, Sancha walked on past the gate. A few moments later a young man went past, plugged into an iPod, walking quickly with his head down and his hands in his jacket pockets. Fifteen seconds later Sancha reappeared and this time she came in through the gate and ran to join Tania.
Gradually they all arrived unseen at the house.
“No lights,” Tania warned them. She looked at Titania, suddenly realizing she had no idea how to address her. “Titania” didn’t sound quite right in the circumstances, “Your Grace” was too formal, but “Mother”? No, it was far too soon for that. “The others will show you where the kitchen is,” she said, managing to avoid calling her anything. “Maybe you could make us all some drinks? I’m going down to the basement with Edric. I won’t be long.”
At least in the windowless basement room, they were able to put on some electric lights. The basement was mostly filled with the usual piles of household items and discarded junk, but one large corner was given over to Mr. Anderson’s hobby. There were three complete motorbikes there, as well as a wide scattering of parts: Wheels and shafts and engine parts and mudguards and handlebars and other miscellaneous chunks of metal. A locked and bolted door at the far end of the basement led to a concrete ramp that Jade’s father used to wheel his bikes to and from ground level.
The oxyacetylene equipment was carefully stacked in a corner, and in the top drawer of a nearby cabinet they found an instruction and safety manual. Edric started reading it while Tania went back up to check on Titania and the princesses.
Tania sat on the living room carpet, her ankles crossed, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her shins, and her chin on her knees. She watched her Faerie mother and her three sisters sitting close together, talking about past times in Faerie.
“Do you remember the morning of Cordelia’s sixteenth birthday?” Sancha said. “How she came running to the breakfast table in her shift to tell us that a linnet had flown in at her window and wished her a happy birthday!”
Zara clapped her hands. “Yes!” she cried. “And she would not be persuaded to dress, but insisted on going out into the gardens as she was and speaking to every animal she met.”
Cordelia smiled at the memory. “I did not understand more than a few words of their languages,” she said. “They must have thought me a great fool!”
“Do all the different animals have their own languages, then?” Tania asked, eager to find a way into the conversation.
Cordelia nodded. “Some have only a few words, but others speak a language even richer and more varied than our own.”
“And you know them all?”
Cordelia laughed. “Indeed not,” she said. “That were a study of ten thousand years. But I can understand many of the beasts and birds of Faerie—those that will speak with me—and I know at least enough of their tongues to bid them good day and to ask after their well-being. And that is sufficient. I would not tame them with familiarity. They must remain true to themselves—they must remain…wild.”
Tania lapsed into silence. Things weren’t going quite the way she wanted. She had hoped that finding Titania might have helped her to find the lost part of herself. She had imagined that her Faerie self, all her Faerie memories, would come flooding back into her mind the first time she saw the Queen.
It hadn’t happened.
A peal of laughter from Zara broke into her thoughts. They were discussing a picnic by the lake that lay north of the palace, the lake where Oberon had built Titania’s mausoleum. Zara had been a toddler; she had tried to ride a swan, but the bird had swum away and she had been reduced to tears.
“And although Eden was but green in the Mystic Arts,” Zara continued, “she used such powers as she had to form the reeds into a boat shaped as a swan and I paddled my swan-ship on the lake till long after nightfall.”
“And you wouldn’t come when you were called,” Titania said. “I remember it very well.” She looked at Tania, and her eyes were troubled. “Is something wrong, Tania?”
Yes! Why don’t I remember any of this!
She managed a smile. “I was just wondering how Edric was getting on,” she said, getting up. “I think I’ll go and see if he needs anything.”
She opened the basement door. A sharp smell hit her, along with a wave of hot air and a fierce hissing sound.
Cautiously she walked down into the basement. The hissing noise got louder, becoming an intense roar.
Edric was crouching with his back to her in a cleared space on the concrete floor. He was wearing protective goggles and his body was in deep shadow, lit up all around by a corona of intense blue-white light that made his hair shine like spun filaments of silver. A metal cylinder stood a little way off with tubes leading from it. Plumes of gray smoke rose above him and coiled across the ceiling.
The crystal sword and the black amber stones lay nearby. It didn’t seem like a good time to disturb him. She walked quietly back up the stairs and came into the darkened hallway again. She could hear Titania and the princesses talking from the living room.
She had a sudden desperate urge to phone her mum and dad. To hear their voices, to reach out and make contact with something that made absolute sense to her.
Mum? Remember when…?
Yes, of course, dear.
So do I! Isn’t that wonderful! I remember it, too!
But she couldn’t call them, because then they’d know she wasn’t in Florida. For a moment, Tania felt more alone than she had ever been in her life….
She listened to the Faerie voices. Wishing…
Wishing without even knowing what she was wishing for.
To be Anita Palmer again?
No, not that.
To be Princess Tania?
“No!” she said under her breath. “That’s not it, either. I don’t know what I want.”
She ran up the stairs. In the dark of the upper landing she opened the door to Jade’s room and went in. She sat at the desk, pressing the button that would start up the computer. She felt that her sense of her own identity was somehow slipping away from her.
Crazy, really, she thought, considering I’ve had more lives than anyone!
But she wanted those past lives to become more real to her. Maybe she’d have a firmer grip on her own identity if she could find out about her previous selves. And she thought she had a way into at least one of them.
She went into a search engine and typed: ERNEST LLEWELLYN.
She gave a breathless laugh of surprise as the results showed over two hundred thousand hits.
“What are you doing?” The voice startled her. Sancha was standing in the doorway.
“I told you about the flashback I had of the Victorian family when Zara and I were on our way here,” Tania said. “I’m seeing if there’s anything about them on the Net.”
Sancha moved into the room and stood behind her, her hands on Tania’s shoulders. “I see,” she said. “And this ‘Net,’ will it help you to catch this family as the net of a fisherman catches the fish in the sea?”
Tania smiled up at her. “That’s exactly how it works, like a big electronic fishing net.”
“I would learn more of this electricity,” Sancha said. “It is strange and perplexing, but you do not fear it, so neither shall I.” She took the chair from in front of Jade’s dressing table and drew it up to the computer desk. “Show me wonders, Tania; teach me how this mortal marvel fishes for knowledge.”
“Okay,” Tania said. “First of all I’ll have to narrow the search parameters.” She typed ERNEST LLEWELLYN LONDON and pressed SEARCH.
95,7001 hits.
“See that?” she said, pointing to the top of the page. “That’s how many times those words have been found.”
“It is a vast ocean, indeed,” Sancha said.
“And getting bigger
all the time,” Tania said. “But I think this might be the one we want.” She moved the curser to the third name down on the list.
A new page came up. White with blue writing.
Ernest Llewellyn
1831–1869
There was a block of text alongside a faded black-and-white photo of the man in the attic room. In the photo the man’s face was set and severe, and he was holding a stiff, unnatural pose, but she could tell it was the same warm-hearted man who had swung little Flora up into his arms.
“That’s him,” she said breathlessly. She began to read aloud.
“Respected amateur scientist and inventor. Born the son of a blacksmith in North Wales, Ernest Llewellyn had little formal education, but his family moved to Kent when he was ten years old where he became apprenticed to a London chemist. He acquired a store of scientific and chemical knowledge by voracious reading and by attending the lectures of the prominent men of science of his day. Llewellyn’s experiments yielded some of the most significant principles…” She turned to Sancha. “There’s a lot of stuff about his work and all that, but I really want to know more about the family.” She scrolled down the page, ignoring the line drawings of various strange scientific devices and bypassing boxes that contained complex chemical formulas.
“There!” she said. “That’s them.” It was a family portrait. Again, the people were posed in a slightly awkward and very formal way, but they were all there, photographed in what looked like their very best clothes against a painted backdrop of trees and fields. Ernest stood with one hand clasping the lapel of his frock coat and the other on his wife’s shoulder as she sat in front of him with a toddler in her lap. The oldest son stood in front of his father—he had been the boy that Tania had seen on the couch with the sleeping toddler across his knees. Two younger children stood side by side on the other side of the mother’s chair—the boy and girl who had been lying in front of the fireplace.
Sitting cross-legged in a foam of white lace at her mother’s feet was little Flora Llewellyn, staring intently into the camera with her hands clasped in her lap, her impish face full of life and curiosity. It felt strange to see her from the outside, knowing how it had felt to be behind those sparkling eyes.
“Yes, that’s exactly how they looked,” Tania said.
“Tania?” Sancha’s voice was subdued. “Have you read the words beneath the picture?”
“Not yet.”
“Read them,” Sancha said. “Read of the fate of this family.”
Puzzled by the tone of Sancha’s voice, Tania tore her eyes away from Flora’s face and read the caption below the photograph.
The Llewellyn family, a portrait taken in the studios of Laporte & Hudson in July 1869. It shows Ernest; his wife, Charlotte; their eldest son, George; the twins, Arthur and Dorothy; their younger daughter, Flora; and the baby, Henry. This was the last photograph taken of the family before the tragic house fire that claimed all of their lives. It was believed that the fire started late at night in Ernest’s attic laboratory, but so ferocious was the blaze that his sleeping family were unable to escape, and all perished.
A biting coldness seeped into Tania’s chest.
No! They couldn’t have died. Not all of them.
“You knew the child could not have lived to adulthood,” Sancha said gently. “Do you not recall what our mother said? That you had never before reached the age of sixteen.”
Tania’s throat hurt and tears were stinging her eyes. She slammed her hand on the computer’s main control button, so upset that she didn’t even bother to shut it down properly. The soft hum of the machine died instantly and the photograph vanished as the screen went blank.
“Not all knowledge brings joy,” Sancha said. “But in the Mortal World is death not made endurable by new birth?” She lifted her hand to Tania’s cheek and gently turned her face toward her. “That child needed to die so that you could be born.” She gave a faint, sympathetic smile. “I would not have you different from who you are now, sweet sister, and you are only that person because of what happened in your past—both the good and the bad, the joyful and the sorrowful.”
“But they were so happy,” Tania whispered. “It’s horrible to think that they all died…maybe only a few days or weeks after I saw them.” She stared in horror at her sister. “Maybe even on that same night. If Flora had been able to persuade him to stop his work, the fire might never have happened.”
“My poor sister,” Sancha said. “Such a burden you bear! Such a heavy weight!”
Tania threw her arms around Sancha’s neck and buried her face in her dark hair, sobbing and sobbing as the agony of her past lives broke out of her like a great churning flood of dark water. All those children! Weak, sickly Ann Burbage. Poor drowned Gracie. Flora Llewellyn with her golden hair and her angel face. And how many others? How many more lives had been lost before Anita Palmer had been born?
In time Tania’s tears had finally dried up. Sancha had suggested that she might sleep for a while. But sleep wasn’t any kind of comfort to her, not with Gabriel Drake lurking in the darkness behind her eyelids.
She was in the basement again now, sitting with Edric on a pile of old carpets. She had made him a sandwich and they were talking as he ate.
“You look tired,” he said. “Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll wake you when we’re ready.”
She shook her head. “Everyone’s telling me to sleep,” she said. “Bad dreams, remember? Anyway, I want to be with you. I want to help.”
He smiled. “I thought you’d want to be with the Queen. Can you get your head around that yet, having two mothers?”
“I’ve stopped trying,” she admitted. “It’s too weird. I suppose it’s a bit like finding out you’ve been adopted, that there’s a whole other family out there that you don’t know about. Except that it’s worse, because they keep talking about things I was involved in, but I don’t remember any of it.” She leaned forward and kissed Edric’s dirt-smudged cheek. “At least I have you,” she said, wrapping his arm in both of hers and resting her head on his shoulder.
“You know what’s weird?” she said quietly. “I was so intent on finding Titania that I never actually stopped to think about her…as a person, I mean.” She looked up at his face. “She’s been alive in London for five hundred years. She was here when they cut off King Charles the First’s head; she was here when half the city burned down in the Great Fire. She was here when Nelson defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, and through two world wars, and the millennium, and…and everything else. And for all those years, all those hundreds of years, she was just waiting for the chance to be with me.” She pulled away and sat up. “And now we’re together, and I don’t know what to say to her. Do I say, ‘Hello, Mum, thanks for not giving up on me’? Or do I say, ‘It’s really nice to meet you, Your Queenship, but I already have a mum, thanks’?” She looked at him. “Have you any idea how freaky all this is for me?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t. I’m not torn apart like you are. I know where I want to be.”
“In Faerie, you mean.”
“No—with you.”
“So, if we survive all this, if we defeat the Gray Knights and save Oberon, if, after all that, I decide I want to live here rather than in Faerie, do you mean you’d be prepared to stay here with me?”
Edric gave a weary smile. “Let’s work on staying alive for now. If we can’t find a way to beat Lyonesse, choosing a place to live isn’t going to be an issue.” He stood up. “Okay,” he said, picking up the crystal sword. “Let’s get this finished.”
“What do you want me to do?”
He pointed. “There are spare goggles and protective gloves over there,” he said. “Put them on and bring over the tongs you’ll find with them. You’ll need them to hold the sword steady.”
She pulled the goggles over her head and tightened the leather strap. The round lenses of the eyepieces were scratched and smeared, but she cou
ld see well enough through them. She drew on the heavy leather gauntlets and stooped to pick up the long metal tongs. She walked back to where Edric was crouching, goggles covering his eyes and the torch in his hands.
She knelt in front of him and watched as he fired up the torch. The flame was like a slim white leaf in the heart of a hissing blaze of bright blue light.
Edric laid the sword on the concrete floor between them and carefully placed one of the black stones onto the blade.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll need you to use the tongs to keep the stone still. Can you do that?”
“Yes.” Tania opened the tongs and carefully brought the heavy metal jaws down on either side of the jewel. She closed the jaws so that the stone was held between them.
Slowly, Edric brought the roaring flame onto the black stone. When the hissing tongue of flame hit the stone, it jerked out of the tongs, bouncing off the sword blade and rolling across the floor.
“Sorry, sorry,” Tania muttered, annoyed with herself. “Give me a moment.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Edric said gently.
“I wasn’t holding it tightly enough.” She took the stone between the jaws of the tongs and replaced it on the sword. “It’ll be okay now.”
Again, he brought the flame onto the stone. This time the metal jaws held it steady. She watched the fierce white flame as it played over the black amber jewel.
For a long, long time, it seemed as if nothing was happening.
“Is it working?” Tania asked.
“I don’t know. I think it’s going to take a while. Are you okay holding it like that?”
“I’m fine.” Tania’s arm and wrist muscles were beginning to ache from the strain of being in the same position for so long, and of maintaining the grip of the tongs on the stone.
Long minutes passed. Tania saw that the metal jaws were beginning to glow red—but still there was no sign of anything happening to the stone.