Advent

  A habit of secrecy, a close-mouthed character, seemed to pass down through them, inherited from one to the next along with the woods and pastures. The river was a busy thoroughfare in those days, unrecognisable from the wind-ruffled strip of silence Gawain contemplated from the ferry dock. On any day it was cluttered with masts as if another spindly wood were trying to take root there, and all along its inland banks there were wharves and quays with tracks leading up the valley side, noisy with hooves and straining wheels. But where the south shore angled out towards the sea, under the windows of the house at Pendurra, the comings and goings always stopped short. Yellow-flowering gorse and stunted blackthorn covered the higher land, impassable. Where the valley folded the lower slopes away from the salt wind, the greenwood grew dark and thick.

  The family divided, married, spread, dwindled, left, returned, until the now antiquated house that faced out towards the sea was separated from the rest of their possessions and left to one of their remotest and humblest branches, along with the wild corner of land it overlooked, while the life and vigour of the estate moved to the finer mansion upriver. A civil war convulsed the country, the county and the family, the old connections were entirely severed at last, and the house and its woods were all but forgotten.

  The kingdom grew rich. The whole continent grew rich. Its currencies were the laws of matter and motion and circulation. It was an empire of things. Manufacture made them; commerce exchanged them. Theories were written to govern their movements, from the greatest of them to the smallest, planets to pennies. When those laws reached their limits, telescopes and microscopes discovered still greater and still smaller things. But no one ever found the box with its silver clasp, carried by the currents until it lay wedged in a drowned fissure of rock beneath the low cliffs at the mouth of the river, holding inside it the forgotten magic of ages now condemned as barbarous, superstitious and fearful.

  The magic, however, could not entirely forget itself. The powers that the drowned magus had commanded, and that thousands and thousands of far lesser charmers and blessers and shamans had dimly invoked, could not simply die. Their shadows haunted the place where the ring lay. They were drawn around its tomb like mourners, or pilgrims, or simply (since neither grief nor reverence had any meaning for them) like iron shavings to a magnet. The water that trickled from the spring in the Pendurra woods was the only fresh water in the whole empire of reason and commerce that was not just water, but something else too, something Johann Faust would have understood as the meaning or the virtue of a spring: something cleansing and life-giving. The house that stood there was not just an artefact of materials pinned and mortared together, but something else too: a haven, a mark of dwelling and permanence.

  Anything that grew on this unvisited and backward slope of land grew among the echo of magic and might be touched by it; anything that left the place lost it. The house was empty sometimes and changed hands more than once. Living in the half-presence of these old, abandoned influences was by no means a blessing, and the older they became, the harder it was. What had first been mystery became superstition, then silliness and then something literally unthinkable and impossible. Nevertheless the house at Pendurra never decayed, the spring never failed, the orchard planted in the lee of the woods flourished even when it was untended, the beds of oysters spread where the river met the sea, the crows and gulls never robbed seed from the long field that was cleared on the higher slope.

  The place sustained itself, but, by the same token, it kept itself apart. Because it needed nothing from outside its gates, it had almost as little to do with the wide world beyond as did the prophetess’s ring in its long concealment. The swifter the world became, the more Pendurra lagged behind. The mines that burrowed all over this furthest corner of England never touched the rocks on which the house stood. Less than a mile from its door, bulky wharves received taller and faster ships, and they floated downriver with their cargoes of tin or gravel or slate right under the shores where, according to legends that no one now read, the Magdalene had walked, but they had no reason to stop. Inland, beam engines rocked on every hilltop. Water and fire made steam, and steam drove Europe faster. Whole nations hitched themselves to its power and rode it forward, into the age of speed. But the faint powers that shrouded Pendurra were embedded in rhythms that could not hasten or change, the rhythm of what came to be called ‘nature’ because it was no longer the same as the world. It was where no one lived. It was an imaginary country.

  Nothing rapid, nothing accelerated, could take hold at Pendurra for long. No one bothered any more to try and change the house and keep it up to date. It was like ‘nature’: you recognised it by its retrograde, nostalgic changelessness. Sons and daughters of the estate saw how the engines pumped wealth and brilliance into the hands of those who drove them, and left to join the rush, leaving the house and its lands in the care of whoever was willing to live in the modest lodge they erected for the purpose at the gates. Increasingly often, the whitewashed or wood-panelled rooms of the old house were empty. But even if an owner returned after years, or decades, there were no beetles in the wood, no cracks in the glass, no bats in the chimneys or moths in the tapestries. The caretakers smiled and took the credit and waited patiently for the sons and daughters to leave again, as they always did before long.

  Except for Rufus Uren.

  Rufus was born half the world away, third son of a tea planter in the Himalayan foothills. He grew up with only the vaguest notion that his mother was heir to some minuscule unprofitable backwater of an estate in some odd corner of the old country he had never seen but mysteriously owed his loyalty to. Other people dealt with that sort of thing, deferential businesslike employees whose whole reason for existence was to keep complicated distractions out of sight. If there was no money to be made from it, best to turn it over to those people and forget it. Or sell it, someone once suggested: but there was some difficulty, apparently, something about the house being unmodernised and inconvenient. And besides, it was a piece of Mother England they could call their own, which was a fine thing, surely?

  Then Mother England called in her loyalties, and Rufus Uren and his brothers sailed to join the war against the Kaiser. The brothers were dead within weeks. Rufus did not die, but when the end of the slaughter came, he might as well have. He’d left most of his reason and all of his will to live in the trenches when he arrived back in England, shell-shocked, aimless, ruined at the age of twenty-three. His parents hadn’t survived the massacre of their sons. The deferential people took over. They talked discreetly to other deferential people, made enquiries. Rufus Uren was found and told he was now the owner of Pendurra. A telegram was sent to the caretakers, advising that Captain Uren should be met at the station, since his mental capacities had suffered as a consequence of service and he was prone to distractedness. With that, the employees in their tactful suits discharged their duties and withdrew.

  The utter silence of Pendurra reached inside Rufus, touching the last interested fragments of his thoughts. He shut himself up inside it. The caretaker couple who had been living in the lodge with their daughter were happy to look after him. So few young men had come back, after all. They became fond of the convalescent: he was almost young enough to be their son.

  Their daughter became fond of him also. As she grew into adulthood, she spent more time with him than anyone else did, bringing him his meals, reading to him, finding him when one of his walking fits took hold and he was still out of doors when darkness fell. Her parents didn’t see that she had become too fond. They were horrified when she became pregnant, but there was nothing to be done about it except keep quiet and hope for the best. Although the boy Tristram was born healthy, his mother suffered so badly that she never recovered.

  Her dwindling strength seemed to rouse Rufus. Perhaps having people to care for – the woman and the baby – gave him the strength of defiance. Death had turned back into an enemy he could face and fight. When he was certain he was going to lose thi
s battle, he insisted on marrying the dying woman and acknowledging his son. So Tristram Uren became the heir, and his grandparents were named his guardians. After his father died – grief-struck, Rufus outlived his wife less than three years – they brought him up to love the place as they did.

  Tristram never lost the attachment. His grandparents sent him away for the education they thought proper, but he hurried back whenever he could. He learned how the world worked, and what his place in it was, and so understood while still at school that his home was somewhere not quite real, a relic of a way of life that wasn’t supposed to exist any more. This made it more essential to him, because it reminded him of the parents he had barely known. He thought of himself as the progeny of ghosts.

  When he was finished with school he joined the navy. His friends all drifted towards the city or the university towns, warrens of brick stranded in green plains. The navy at least kept him by the cliffs and, at first, not more than a hundred miles from the house whose mysteries preoccupied him more and more. Or so it was for a few years, but then, inevitably, it took him far away, off to deserts where (much to his surprise) his ship was called into action, messy and utterly inglorious, and where (to his still greater surprise) he showed exceptional skill and courage.

  He was on the other side of the globe when his grandmother died, and by the time he arrived in England again his grandfather was dead too: another broken heart. He came back to the estate one windy autumn morning to find it abandoned. Yet as he opened the doors and windows, he knew by some strange instinct that it wasn’t empty.

  With the thanks and assurances of a grateful nation, he resigned his commission and stayed. Though barely thirty years old, he withdrew inside the house and its grounds, unable (and unwilling) to loosen his entanglement in their secrecy and silence.

  Like the last ward of a massive lock falling into place, Saturn neared the completion of its sixteenth orbit since the magus wove its influence into his spell. The enchantment began to thaw, its frozen architecture softening as if under a breath of summer air. The prophetess knew it, or it knew her, and a whisper of her existence slipped back into the world. Others felt it too, though they had no idea what it was they were feeling, since in the course of five hundred years the gift they had been born with had ceased to have any meaning or use at all. One was Hester Lightfoot, a clever scholar with a scientific mind that was not the slightest good to her when she caught the echo of the prophetess’s whispers one day and could not shake them off. Another was a teenage runaway in the streets of Bristol who, for no reason that he could articulate to himself, lied and stole his way to the place that was pulling him with a force as certain as gravity and, when he got there, hid in its woods until Tristram found him, recognised the compulsion that had driven him and took him in. There were many others who could only ignore what they obscurely felt, helpless in the presence of something they had no language for.

  Other kinds of things stirred also. Beings that for centuries had not been there, as the empire of reason understood it, began, gradually, to overlap again with the world. Like a reflection in a window, appearing when the light outside dims, they shifted towards presence.

  The world began to move at the speed of light. Time and distance all but vanished inside the microscopic blur of circuitry, ethereal flickers and pulses and waves of information. Tristram and his property and its phantoms sat among it, archaic and inert as rock.

  There were no apocalyptic portents when the magus’s spell finally broke. Saturn crossed the sky and one day – an October day in the year 1996, no more obviously remarkable a day than any other – the box was no longer concealed and protected as it had been. Anyone might have found it, or no one. Its wood began to rot in the salt water. It might have decayed. The bag inside might have been caught by a surge of the tide and carried out to sea to decompose. The mirror in its velvet sheath and the ring (neither of which could rot) might have each been lost for another half millennium, or for ever.

  The person who did find them was the runaway refugee, Caleb, who still had no idea why he had been born the way he was, but had at least learned that Pendurra was the only place he could exist, not least because he felt everything that happened in and on this one small patch of land as if it was part of his own body. He noticed the narrow crack in the cliffs out towards the headland the way you or I might notice an itch. Eventually he gave up trying to forget it, took the dinghy from the cove and rowed out along the rocks until he had come as close as a boat could bring him to the place where the itch appeared to be. When the tide was unusually low he found he could get even closer, scrambling over kelp-matted and barnacled stone. There was a tight cave, three-quarters flooded. He only went in because he knew something was there. He only found it when his waterlogged shoe scraped against something that was softer than rock. He had to plunge down into the absolute blackness of the water before his hands could touch it too. He dug sand away from the tiny silted hollow where the box lay wedged, holding his breath for as long as he could each time, finally prising it out between raw and bloodied fingers.

  That night he worked the silver clasp loose and opened the box. There was the strangely marked leather pouch still nestling in its padding of wool, and inside it two things: a palm-sized oval of metal in a velvet sheath, and a plain smooth ring. The metal made him feel deeply uneasy, so much so that he would not take it out of the velvet. The ring made him feel sad. And that was all there was to them, as far as he was concerned.

  The itch, though, had gone.

  He showed them to Tristram the next day. The two of them stood there, looking at the velvet and the ring and at each other.

  Caleb’s only ambition in life was for nothing to change. He remembered the misery of being anywhere but where he was, the wrenching, permanent ache of his childhood. All he cared about was that he never suffer it again. That was the full extent of his interest in Pendurra.

  As for Tristram, he wondered whether Caleb had uncovered the clue to the ghostliness he felt shadowing his whole life, the mystery he’d inherited with the house. But now that it was lying in front of him, he too was thinking that maybe it was better for secrets to stay undisturbed. A velvet mirror-case and a ring, what did that tell him? Nothing at all. They put them back in the pouch, closed the box over them and left it at that.

  Caleb slept easily. The feeling that had been nagging at him was gone; all was well again. Tristram, however, could not sleep.

  In the middle of the night he went down through the house and studied the box by the light of a nearly full moon. He thought of his dead parents and grandparents. There was no one to ask, and there would be no one to come after him. He was in his sixties, a recluse. The imperturbable silence of the house stretched back and forward in time. There was just this one moment when perhaps it might speak.

  He put on the ring. It would only fit on the little finger of his left hand.

  The first thing that happened was that he saw that the sheathed mirror was alive. Something dwelled in it, something that did not belong; it was out of place and wanted to leave. This unsettled Tristram so much that he had to put it back in the pouch and shut the box over it. Then he saw that everything else was alive too. The box was alive. It was wood, no, two woods, sharing wood’s graceful strength but otherwise with different personalities, one more pliable and patient, the other stubborn, loyal; and it was also silver, which was cunning and secretive and teasing. The table he sat at was alive, and the floor his feet rested on. (He stood up, putting a hand down to steady himself.) The house was alive. It wasn’t just a thing; it had a presence. The moonlight was exquisitely alive, like a rain of bittersweet music flooding in around his feet. Everything was still as it had been, the shabby old room and the shadows and the dust, but everything was also itself, brimming with being: like the difference between a beloved face asleep and awake.

  Every night after that, when he was sure Caleb was asleep, Tristram went downstairs and put the ring on his finger and walked fo
r as long as he dared, often nearly until dawn. For those hours it was as if he walked inside a symphony. Tristram had found his ghosts. Sometimes he was sure he felt them in the air nearby, just behind him, ready to be glimpsed if only he could turn his head quickly enough. Sometimes he was so sure of it that he thought he saw a face, a solemn, age-worn woman’s face shrouded by curtains of dark hair. Or perhaps that was just the face he imagined when he held the ring itself up to his eyes. It was alive too, of course, alive with unfathomable vertiginous ancientness and a kind of hollow patience, a grief that had worn itself out.

  When the moon had waned almost to nothing, he walked down one night to the edge of the river. He reached the cove and was standing on the little crooked stretch of sand when someone came out of the water.

  For all those hundreds of years there had been no such thing as mermaids. Mythical creatures, the encyclopaedias said. This was how the world was divided since the last and greatest magus had drowned: facts on one side, legends on the other. In the vicinity of the prophetess’s ring, though, the line was fraying. The sea-creature had seen Tristram when he’d first wandered near the shoreline, wearing on his finger the passage between her world and his. She had fallen in love with him at once, and when he saw her step up out of the water, gleaming as if made of moonlight, how could he not be utterly enchanted, as spellbound as any man who saw a mermaid was fated to be?

  He gave her the ring as a wedding band. It kept her human, or as close to human as she could come, though she couldn’t go far from the water for long, and she could not pass out of the gates of Pendurra at all: in the world beyond there was no such thing as she was. Tristram didn’t mind. As far as he was concerned she might as well have descended from heaven. He loved her blissfully, passionately. He no longer felt like a hermit sealed in a haunted house. Pendurra became their home: his, Swanny’s (so he called her), Caleb’s and then, two summers on, Marina’s. The baby should not have been possible, but there she was, growing month by month, with a whole future lying in wait. There were things that needed doing and preparing for, everyday things Tristram had not had to think about for many years. So he talked to the friend who knew him best and whom (apart from Caleb) he trusted most, and Owen Jeffrey looked around, and that was how Guinivere Clifton came to be invited to live in the lodge and join the strange family.