Advent

  Gawain could almost see the sentence curl up and die in his mouth.

  ‘It told me to go away. It had a voice like an angel. It sang.’

  When Gav didn’t answer, Owen sighed, came to a decision and got himself in the driver’s seat, wiggling awkwardly as he loosened a couple of his layers. ‘Do you mind?’ he said to Gav’s reflection in the rear-view mirror.

  Gawain didn’t mind anything at all. That was part of the light-headedness. Everything was fading away from him, going out of focus. He wondered whether he ought to be going after Horace to make sure the kid was OK, while there were still tracks to follow, but then he didn’t know how long ago the kid had snuck out of the car. Lost in whiteness.

  ‘The thing is, I know the words. Of the song.’ Peeling off a scarf, he chanted something churchy-sounding in a wavering voice. ‘It’s an antiphon. That’s a piece for a choir, sort of a call and answer. It’s the one for Advent. We had it last Sunday in fact. It’s about God coming. “Drop down, ye heavens, from above and let the skies pour down righteousness.” She sung those words. They’re from the Bible. Isaiah. A prophecy about when God comes back to the earth. That’s why I, er . . .’ He twisted round and looked hopefully at Gawain. ‘Anyway. I’m sorry if it seemed a weird question.’

  Gav was trying to hear another voice. It will come to you today. He rubbed his forehead. He felt he ought to be able to make Owen disappear just by blinking. Gone in the blink of an eye, like Miss Grey.

  Owen shrugged, wiggled in the seat. ‘I always knew, you know.’ He glanced at Gav in the rear-view mirror. ‘About . . . there.’ Finding no encouragement, the glance slid away again. ‘Pendurra. I’ve always known it was . . . different. The one place God forgot to turn off the miracles. Well, I don’t know. Perhaps there are others. You read about marvellous cures and children who see the Virgin. Perhaps there are lots, but people don’t talk about them either. You keep the lid on. No uncovering, no Apocalypse.’ He made the motion with his hands, pressing down. ‘They trusted me to keep their secret; that why I’m their friend. But I’ve always known. I think really I knew even before Swanny came, when it was just Tristram by himself in that extraordinary house.’

  Something tugged Gawain’s thoughts, a nudge back towards the here and now.

  ‘Swanny?’

  Owen twisted round again, perhaps surprised that Gav had even been listening. ‘You don’t know about Swanny?’

  ‘I don’t know anything.’

  ‘I thought maybe you . . .’ Owen turned away again to contemplate the nothing in the windscreen. ‘Swanny. Marina’s mother. She . . . she wasn’t like anyone else.’

  Gav sat a little straighter.

  ‘Marina said her mother died.’

  Owen winced. ‘What else could we tell her? How else could you say it? She was only a toddler, she couldn’t understand anyway. It would have been all right telling her her mother was a mermaid. Any small child could accept that quite easily. But we couldn’t tell her her mother had abandoned her.’

  The dream was fading away at last, the day coming back into focus.

  ‘A mermaid?’

  Owen shrugged. ‘It’s just a word. Who knows what the proper name is? If there even is one. She came from the sea and went back to the sea. I don’t know what she was. We don’t have that sort of knowing. She was something amazing. We all loved her. Gwen loved her almost desperately.’

  ‘Auntie Gwen?’

  ‘So you are her nephew? That’s who you are?’

  Gawain didn’t answer. A series of images gathered in his mind’s eye, coming together. The white face rising from the water, silk married with stone. A black-and-white photo in a frame on a desk. Marina’s face, with its elfin changes of mood. The three faces whispered to him together, barely audible but urgent. Find my child.

  The creature in the water was Marina’s mother.

  She’d come to plead with him. She’d known something terrible had happened, and she’d beckoned him down to the water’s edge and strained her airless throat to beg him to help.

  A plucking tension tightened in the bottom of his stomach.

  Swanny.

  He shifted in his seat and reached into the back pocket of his trousers. Owen watched as he drew out the envelope and unfolded it, flipping it over. Auntie Gwen’s scribblings were blotched but still legible, surviving fire and snow. Even the tea stain round what had once been his name was still visible.

  Jess!!

  chap girl?

  (O.J.)

  key chap Joshua Acres

  well

  Swanny’s O?

  Swanny.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Gawain looked over the list again and then handed it to the priest.

  ‘Is this . . . ?’ Owen furrowed his brows.

  ‘Auntie Gwen’s writing. This was in her house. She wrote it right before she disappeared.’

  Owen’s lips moved silently as he read the notes down to the bottom. He glanced up at Gawain quizzically.

  ‘Swanny’s ring?’ he said.

  Twenty-eight

  Horace Jia was not a particularly imaginative child. In his inner landscape the sense of wonder amounted to little more than an occasional fuzzy intuition that maybe not everything would always turn out to look exactly as he expected. Since he preferred to think of himself as being right about everything, he tended to ignore it. Now, shattered and astonished, and having given himself up for dead – a feeling he could only recall with an odd sort of curiosity (Oh yeah?) as if it must all have been a confusing mistake – and then finding himself alive and apparently being carried home across the river, he’d passed so far beyond his limited capacity for amazement that all he could do was sit in uncomprehending silence in the stern of his boat and wait for whatever might happen next.

  It was perfectly obvious that something was moving the boat.

  At first he thought maybe a freakish current had appeared like the answer to a prayer and drawn him away from the shingle. But he was enough of a waterman to know there weren’t currents like that in by the shore, and he’d discounted the idea completely once the boat had spun round at the harbour entrance and started moving with the same steady ease towards the far bank.

  What happened next was a splash like a fish jumping, very close to the boat. It came from somewhere under the bows. Since the river was otherwise perfectly silent, he crept forward and leaned over the side to see.

  A white arm reached out of the water.

  With a stifled yelp, he shrank back from it and began clawing away the snow in the bottom of the hull where the paddle was stowed. He found the wooden shaft and pulled it out, raising it like a club.

  He stood there, knees braced, panting, the boat still yawing drunkenly. Snowflakes spiralled round him and died silently on the river surface.

  ‘Help me up,’ came a liquid whisper from below.

  Horace could not begin to guess who had spoken, but he didn’t like the idea that there was someone near him he couldn’t see. Paddle raised and ready, he leaned over the side.

  Another arm had joined the first, and below them, half obscured by a waving mass of green weed, was a face, just breaking the surface of the water. The arms were slender, oily-smooth and bone-white. Their fingers fanned towards him.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ said the voice.

  ‘Wha-what d’you want?’ said Horace. What was going through his head was something like, I’m not putting up with this. They can’t make me. I’ve had enough.

  ‘Your hand,’ it replied. ‘Help me.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  The boat rocked violently. Horace dropped the paddle, windmilling his arms as he struggled to keep his balance. He failed, collapsing onto the thwart and knocking the paddle overboard. He flung himself half out of the boat trying to recover it, instinctively terrified of ending up with no oar and a dead outboard, but it bobbed just inches beyond his reach. Then as if sucked down by an invisible whirlpool it vanished beneath the surf
ace. He stared wide-eyed at the fizz of bubbles where it had been. The head appeared there, sodden tendrils floating around it. He tried to draw back but he was too slow. Two hands shot up from the water and clasped one of his.

  ‘Pull me up,’ said the snow-soft voice, ‘or I’ll pull you down.’

  The hands were cold. They felt more like scales than skin. They also felt strong. Thinking of his sunken paddle, Horace braced his other hand against the gunwale and heaved.

  A pale body rose, accompanied by a silky rush of water flowing back into the river. For a moment he thought the weight was going to drag him back and drown him. Then its feet appeared on the gunwale, and with a peculiar swift twist he couldn’t follow it – or rather she, as he now couldn’t avoid noticing – flipped herself over the side and, releasing his hand, perched on the bows.

  Horace squirmed inwardly at her nakedness, half revolted by her fish-white flesh, half mesmerised by its unblemished and glistening sheen. Hair like the trailing fringe of a jellyfish snaked down to her waist, making her a coral-patterned patchwork of pale and dark. She reached her bloodless arms forward and clasped her fingers together.

  ‘Find my child,’ she said.

  Horace’s mouth fell open.

  He said, ‘You what?’

  ‘My child.’ The voice wasn’t actually a whisper. It had no breath in it. It was like a stream over rocks, sibilant and narrow. ‘I’ve seen you with her. I saved your life so you can find her. I beg you.’ With a slither of long limbs she came forward from the bows and knelt in the bottom of the boat, clasped hands raised to him. Her face tilted up, and Horace saw its wave-sculpted smoothness, and recognised it.

  ‘You’re . . .’ It was unmistakable, but it sounded impossibly stupid. ‘You’re Marina’s mum?’

  ‘I was. I am. Help me.’

  His cheeks burned despite the cold. He was acutely aware of her marmoreal shoulders, her flat breasts draped with curling fronds of hair, and a smell like the metallic tang of a pebble in a brook.

  ‘Marina says her mum died.’ He didn’t want any of this to be right. He wanted this to be another thing he could run away from and forget as soon as he got home, another thing that would turn out to have been only a dream.

  ‘To her I am dead. I still watch her, though. I watch for her every day. When she sits in sight of the water I weep with joy and pain. Now there is danger, she has not come and I can do nothing. You must help me.’

  The steady snow didn’t melt where it touched her skin. Her body gathered its flecks like sequins. Her eyes were milky, with a pearlescent glow of their own. Her hands unclasped and stretched tentatively towards his. ‘I heard the hunter come down to the river, seeking my wedding ring. I slid under your keel and took you to safety. Haven’t I earned your help?’ The chill fingertips touched his sleeve. Horace flinched his arm away. He saw a ripple of anguish flow over the face. It reminded him instantly of Marina, how easily crushed she was.

  ‘OK, OK,’ he said hurriedly. ‘Just—’ He was about to ask her to stop begging and get up, but he imagined her body straightening in front of him and his mouth dried up. He looked away.

  ‘If you were a grown man, you’d not sleep or have an hour’s rest until you had done what I ask.’

  He felt insulted, but he also felt utterly at sea. He wanted to retort that he wasn’t a child any more, but he couldn’t say it. He didn’t know how to argue with a thing like this.

  ‘Do you love my daughter?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Would you die for her? I would. If I could become a woman again, I would let the warlock’s servants rip my flesh only to set eyes on her now. Her birth was agony to me, but I would suffer ten times that pain every sunrise if that was the price that bought her happiness only as long as noon. Do you love her that much?’

  Horace, beyond astonishment, could only think about his own mother. Did she want him to be happy? Did she love him? Why was she old and boring and on her own and too busy all the time and always bossing him around?

  ‘Can’t you just take me home?’ he said, tears rising.

  ‘You must promise first. Promise to return and find my daughter.’

  Horace wiped his nose. ‘Yeah. OK.’

  ‘Promise it.’

  ‘OK. Yeah. I will, I’ll come back. Just let me go home now, please.’

  ‘The world has changed and I’m strong again. I’ll watch for you if those are empty words, and when you come to sea I’ll find you and drown you.’

  Horace stared desperately at the shore. It looked so close, but they were getting no nearer. ‘I told you, didn’t I? I will!’

  ‘Say it. Say, “I promise.”’

  ‘All right!’ Despite his half-stifled tears, Horace reacted the same way he always did when anyone tried to bully him. He lost his temper. ‘All right, all right! I promise. OK? I promise!’

  He turned away from her and started fiddling ostentatiously with the outboard. No one was going to threaten him. (He tried not to think about the paddle, swallowed as if the river was a grey crevasse.) He didn’t care who it was, if someone wanted his help they better not talk to him like that. He yanked the starter uselessly a couple of times and swore. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her rising gracefully. He tried not to look, not to see her naked, not to notice the face that was so strangely like Marina’s watching him.

  ‘Only bring her to the river. Bring her where I can reach her and she will be safe. I’ll bless you as long as you live, and the sea will never hurt you. Promise again.’

  He was going to give some snarky retort, but instead . . . ‘I promise,’ he said, meaning it this time.

  ‘You are mortal flesh. The warlock has no power over you. And you carry my wedding ring. Keep it close. Wear it if you must. Maybe it will protect you. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yeah, course,’ he lied. His fragile pride was all he had to go on now.

  ‘Are you afraid?’

  ‘Course not!’

  ‘Good.’ She stepped up onto the thwart, arched like the crescent moon – for a heart-stopping instant Horace knew he had never seen anything so beautiful – and dived into the water with a tiny splash. The boat swung round purposefully and set itself for the opposite shore, weaving through the moored boats, the snow falling lightly all around. He heard the soft swish of the bow-wave and mistook it at first for her voice: Find my child, find my child.

  Owen handed the envelope back.

  ‘Gwen was totally mesmerised by her,’ he said. ‘I think for your aunt Swanny was living proof that she was right about everything. You know, that the world really is full of mysteries. I think she loved Swanny almost as much as Tristram did. I sometimes think we all did. It was almost like you had to. You couldn’t help yourself.’

  Gav looked at the envelope in his hands, its few scrawled lines, so full of secrets. Marina’s mother. Had Auntie Gwen known? She must have. She’d kept that photo on her desk. But she’d never told Marina. None of them had. All Marina knew was that she sometimes saw a white woman with green hair, watching her from the river. She was as ignorant of herself as Gav was.

  He couldn’t put the pieces together, but he was beginning to see that all of the seemingly indecipherable nonsensical words had meant something to Auntie Gwen. Something that had led her to the chapel with its evil light and its voice like dead leaves.

  He traced the stain left by his mug of tea with a fingertip. Round and round, circling his old name. He tried to conjure a pattern out of the scribbles above, but nothing would come. He frowned and examined the top of the list.

  Jess!!

  ‘“Jess”? What’s that?’

  ‘A who, not a what, I think.’ Owen sounded relieved to have something to talk about. Soon I’ll go, Gav thought. A little while longer and then I’ll go and I’ll find her. ‘Gwen was talking about her just this last weekend, so I assume that’s who she means. I hadn’t thought about it for ages. A woman who showed up on the estate, years ago. Happens occasionally. People tak
e a wrong turn from the footpath, or perhaps they get curious. Usually Caleb just escorts them out. This one was different. She had an infant with her.’ Owen blinked, remembering. ‘Tiny, a newborn. They were both in a terrible state. God knows what she thought she was doing. I think she belonged to some religious commune up the valley and they’d thrown her out when she showed up pregnant. I’m not sure. It’s a long time ago. She was homeless anyway, and she hadn’t had anyone to look after her properly at the birth, that was obvious. She’d started bleeding. They got hold of me and we got her to the chapel, her and the baby.’

  ‘The chapel?’

  Owen took off his glasses and massaged his eyes. ‘There’s a tiny old private chapel off in the woods at Pendurra. Sixteenth century, I think. It ought to be a ruin by now, but it’s not. Anyway. They built it over the site of a spring, and there’s a well inside, or a sort of pool. They say the water from the spring is blessed. It’s supposed to have healing powers.’

  The water that makes you well. Gav winced. Marina had told him that already, but he hadn’t listened. He looked out through the smudged window, wondering if the day was getting dark. Time to get going soon, he thought. Time to find out where she is.

  ‘The baby survived. Amazingly. The mother did too, though she was in a pretty bad way. I wanted to get her safe somewhere but she disappeared with her boy. I’ve no idea what happened to them. No one seemed to know. I’d forgotten all about it . . . This was all before Marina was born. I don’t know what suddenly got Gwen interested in it. Can I see that list again?’

  Gav passed it forwards. Owen tapped the envelope. ‘That must be me in the next line, in brackets: “O.J.” See?’ Owen Jeffrey: Gav had to concentrate to remember the priest’s name. The fragments of old stories tumbled around him like snowflakes. ‘I’ve no idea who that next person is.’ Owen tilted the paper so Gav could see. ‘“Joshua Acres.” If he’s anyone. But “key chap” must be the key to the chapel. She’s obviously thinking about the chapel anyway, isn’t she. The “well” must mean the water there, the pool. And then something about Swanny. I’m not sure why the “O” made me think of the ring she used to wear. Maybe it’s a name instead, I don’t know.’ Owen’s look travelled down to the end of the list. ‘And then.’ He looked up at Gawain. ‘You.’