The Shadow Cabinet

by Maureen Johnson

  “Thorpe’s out,” Boo said, her voice groggy. “He went over to check on Charlotte. Kettle’s boiled if you want tea.”

  I left Freddie to explain what she had discovered. I heard her talking while I was in the kitchen, stuffing tea bags into mugs. According to the clock on the wall, it was eight in the morning, but the sun really hadn’t come out yet. The sky outside was a pale purple, and I think some stars were still out. I stepped into the back garden while the tea steeped and took a breath of the cold, heavy air. Day three since Stephen. That’s what days were. Since Stephen.

  “Rory.”

  It was Boo, standing behind me in the kitchen doorway.

  “Just getting air.”

  She nodded and stepped out. Boo was taller than me by several inches, and she never seemed to get cold. She was only wearing an artfully shredded T-shirt and some jeans.

  “Freddie told you about Stephen’s book,” I said.

  “Yeah. Thorpe will want to know.”

  “If Stephen thought it was important . . .”

  She nodded wearily and folded her arms over her chest.

  “What do you think of Freddie?” I asked.

  “I think she seems to know a lot of stuff. I don’t know how she’ll do when she’s in some Tube tunnel in the dark with the rats, looking for some mental ghost.”

  There was clearly something else she wanted to say, but she wasn’t saying it. She leaned against the doorway and looked up at the sky, not at me.

  “What?” I asked.

  “We did the hospital, the flats, Eton, and his house. We did his dad’s flat. We looked all along the route to the hospital. Callum’s not going to look any more, and if Stephen is—”

  “If? You don’t think he’s out there now either?”

  “I don’t know why we can’t find him,” she said.

  “He could be anywhere.”

  “He could be anywhere, but he probably would have been where we looked. And he could find us, or . . .”

  “You know what you saw,” I said.

  Boo closed her eyes and shook her head. This couldn’t happen. Boo couldn’t be giving up. Boo giving up made it all more real. It stripped away everything I thought I was sure of. Her eyes welled up, and she dabbed them dry, which was a terrifying thing to watch, considering how long her nails were.

  “I’m not going to stop looking,” she said. “I’m just saying I don’t understand. And I miss him. He feels gone right now. He never said bloody much except about maps and things like that, but he was always there. He was the one thing that always held it all together. I dunno . . .”

  “We are going to find him,” I said to Boo.

  “You need to talk to Callum today,” she replied.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Which is why you need to talk to him. You’re good at talking. Make him talk to you. We need to stick together or it will all fall apart. Stephen would hate that.”

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  • • •

  We waited for Thorpe and drank the tooth-stainingly strong tea I’d made. He arrived wearing a fresh suit, so he must have returned home at some upsettingly early hour. Once again, he carried a small bucket of coffee.

  “Charlotte hasn’t remembered anything else,” he said.

  “New girl has something,” Callum said.

  Freddie gave her speech for the third time that morning, and Thorpe took it in as he drained his coffee.

  “Do you know what Stephen was up to?” Thorpe asked me. He seemed even more displeased now. As I watched them all, I realized why this was stranger for them than it was for me. I wasn’t part of the team, but they were, and Stephen had been doing something in secret. He’d shut them out.

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  “It makes sense,” Freddie said. “He doesn’t mention the stone, but he’s talking about where the stone was. He’s talking about—”

  “I understand,” Thorpe snapped. The exhaustion was hitting us all. “Where is this Chanceford?”

  “Amesbury. By Stonehenge.”

  “It’s not overly far. We could be there in an hour or two, depending on the traffic. All right. I’ll phone some contacts and see if we can get access to any of Lord Williamson’s papers kept in the house.”

  “But Charlotte’s okay?” I asked.

  “She seems to be recovering well. Extremely well, for someone who spent a few days in captivity.”

  He seemed uneasy.

  “That’s just Charlotte,” I said. “She’s very prefecty.”

  “There’s something wrong with the picture,” Thorpe said. “They take her. They treat her well. They give her the sight. Then they leave her under the floor in the house.”

  “They were probably coming back,” Boo said. “Right?”

  “Possibly. But it’s not good practice to kidnap someone and leave her alone.”

  “But where they had her . . .” Callum said. “No way she was getting out of there. And maybe they never kidnapped anyone before.”

  “Yes, I’ve thought of that,” Thorpe said. “However, the first part of the plan was extremely well executed. She was removed with care. A car was obtained. A house was prepared. That floor was custom work. Houses don’t come with ventilated crawl spaces perfectly designed for storing people under the floorboards. That work couldn’t have been easy to arrange—builders don’t usually install crawl spaces like that. They might have had to do it themselves. And the house had sprinklers, so whatever they were storing in there, it could be damaged by fire.”

  “Stones are usually okay in fires,” Boo said.

  “Nor do they need ventilation. So we’re talking about a long-term plan. A house purchased in 1982. Given all of that, there are a lot of questions here. Let me see that.”

  He reached out for Freddie’s pad and the notebook and glanced through them for a moment.

  “There’s a lot here that doesn’t make sense,” he said. “Stephen meeting with someone. This house. All of it. If these two things intersect, we’re going to find out about this stone.”

  “You don’t think Stephen was working with—” Freddie cut herself off, which was a smart move. None of us would have responded well if she’d finished that sentence. Suggesting Stephen was doing something wrong was just dumb. But Thorpe wasn’t as reactive.

  “No,” he said. “Stephen was not working with Jane. But I’m uncomfortable with the fact that he was keeping secret notes, and that I have no idea what they mean or who he was meeting with. Get yourselves ready. We’ll leave in a few minutes. I’ll arrange it.”

  There was a pall over the room now, as gloomy as the London sky. Something had entered the conversation that had managed to make things worse—which I hadn’t thought was possible. There was something about Stephen that none of us could understand, that he’d been trying to hide. The room felt airless, and I couldn’t help but feel that we were on the verge of something bad.

  But then again, that was a good assumption by this point.

  17

  ENGLAND IS STRANGE IN MANY WAYS, AND ONE OF THOSE ways is that they leave things like Stonehenge sitting at the side of the road. I think I expected something more like Disneyland, with all kinds of buildings nearby, and maybe a waterslide called Druid Dunk! or something. Maybe I thought it would be larger, or behind a wall. No. It was just there, in the field. It wasn’t as big as I thought it would be. Several of the stones had fallen over, so really, it was just a pile of rocks. Important rocks, to be sure. England loves important rocks. Everyone loves important rocks.

  Chanceford was outside of a town called Amesbury. The grounds were on the River Avon. The entire place was surrounded by a high brick wall and there was a wrought-iron gate we had to pass through to get inside. What we found waiting for us was a tiny stone castle—turrets and portculli
s and the whole works. But really small, like a castle that had been put in the dryer and shrunk.

  “It’s a re-creation of a castle from the fourteenth century,” Freddie said. “Lord Williamson was an unusual man.”

  This became very clear as we got closer, and I noticed that many of the stones were carved into the form of faces or goats’ heads. There were pillars by the main doorway that had clawed feet. There was a gothic spire on top of one of the turrets, and a spinning golden globe as some kind of weathervane. That was also the only thing Freddie said in the car, because I think she had gotten the message that casting aspersions about Stephen had been a bad move, even off-the-cuff ones. She slept for most of the ride, snoring softly with her head against the window.

  The plan was laid out in the car. Thorpe was to go inside with Freddie. Freddie, after all, had the best working knowledge of the weird stuff and had translated the code in the book. Callum, Boo, and I were to stay together. Thorpe felt that Lady Williamson wouldn’t want four young people coming into her house under the auspices of doing some research work. She apparently hadn’t been that happy about letting anyone in at all on such short notice. We were to stay on the drive and remain mostly out of sight, keeping an eye on the house. It was always possible that if Jane and her people knew where the stone was, as Charlotte said, then they knew about this place.

  We watched as Thorpe and Freddie went to the door, where they were greeted by Lady Williamson herself. I expected a lot from a Lady, but she was just a woman in her fifties who wore a purple cardigan and a pair of khakis. She didn’t look thrilled.

  “Thank you for allowing us to come, Lady Williamson,” Thorpe said.

  “I’m not happy about this. What can be so important that you need to be here now? This bloody . . .”

  We could hear her muffled complaints after the door was shut.

  “Right,” Callum said, looking around. “Once around the house. It’s open. Nothing to hide behind. If any of Jane’s crew are still around here, if they were here at all, we’ll see them.”

  We walked the path around the building, to the supposedly famous garden out the back, which was a proper “physic garden,” as Freddie had informed us in the car, full of strange herbs and medicinal plants. Famous or not, it was really just a small plot of plants, with curving walkways between them, and yet more stone figures of goats and sphinxes.

  “I’m going around the house the other way,” Boo said, taking a few steps backward. “Cover it faster. Rory’s with you.”

  It wasn’t the most subtle exit, but it was still effective. Callum and I were stuck together.

  “I’m supposed to talk to you,” I said to Callum.

  “Yeah, I figured that.”

  “So should we talk?”

  “No,” he said.

  We stepped quietly across the spongy lawn for a few minutes.

  “I’m going to talk anyway,” I said.

  A long sigh from Callum.

  “Let me explain,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. Okay?”

  I guess it was okay, because he didn’t respond. He continued to cast his eyes over the horizon.

  “What happened . . . neither of us like it. We both think it’s the worst thing that has ever happened. Which is why I’m here instead of home. I left my family. I left my friends. I don’t even know what happens to my life now. I’m a runaway. I don’t know where I live, even. All I want is for him to be okay.”

  Callum stopped for a moment and looked up at the quickly moving clouds.

  “It shouldn’t have happened,” he said. “He shouldn’t have crashed that car. He was so . . .”

  I watched him search for the words he wanted, but I could have filled in a few of my own.

  “. . . He was smart, but stupid at the same time. I never met anyone more clever than him, but when it came to some things . . .”

  Some things, I interpreted from his look, meant me.

  “I wish he hadn’t followed me,” I said. “He should have just let them take me.”

  “He wasn’t going to do that. None of us would have done that. But we could have taken care of it some other way. We would have got you back. He didn’t need to do it all himself.”

  When Callum said that none of them would have let me be taken, I started to tear up a little. I turned and pretended to be interested in the view to give myself a chance to clear my eyes.

  “He liked you,” he said. “But you knew that. I mean, considering how I found you two back at his dad’s flat. You were good for him. You got him to loosen up a little. I’m glad that happened. I’m glad he was happy.”

  “Me too,” I said. My throat had dried out, and the words had a crack to them. Things were softening now. At least I knew Callum cared. Or that he cared at some point. I didn’t know how far we had gotten on the forgiveness front, but when we started walking again, he didn’t keep a stride ahead of me. We walked together. It was a start.

  “So, what happens now?” I asked. “Boo said you’re going to leave.”

  “No point in staying. No terminus. No Stephen.”

  “What about Boo?”

  “What about her?” he asked.

  “You know.”

  “You mean that Boo likes me. Yeah, I know that. But that’s not going to happen. It’s a bad idea.”

  “Why?” I said. “You like her, right?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he said, walking again. “This stuff, when I leave it? I’ve got to leave it all, yeah? Normal life.”

  “But Boo . . .”

  “Just leave it,” he said.

  It was probably best to drop that. It was a miracle we were talking at all.

  “So,” I said. “We talked. So are we . . .”

  He said nothing. We continued walking around, staring at the dark forms of the low plants and the grass and the specter of Stonehenge in the distance. But a minute later, he reached over and put an arm over my shoulders. Callum had a heavy arm, and a reassuring one.

  When we reached the back and met up with Boo, he pulled back. I thought she would be pleased at what she had undoubtedly seen, but she was distracted, looking off at something that resembled a tiny Greek temple—at least, the front of a tiny Greek temple. It was what (I had learned, again, thanks, Art History) was called a folly, I guess because it was a ridiculous and largely pointless bit of architecture.

  “There’s someone over there,” she said. “You see him?”

  We both turned to the little temple. At first, I saw nothing, but then a head peered out from around a column. The figure had a white beard. He stepped back behind the column when he saw us looking in that direction.

  “Is he hiding?” Boo asked.

  “Looks it,” Callum said. “Or he’s trying to.”

  In order to get to the folly, we had to pass over the widest and most open part of the lawn. Boo scanned the windows to see if anyone was looking out, and Callum checked around. They moved quickly, and I did the same. As we approached, the man did his best to stay behind the column. But once we were inside, there was nowhere for him to hide. He was old, with white hair. He wore a gray suit, definitely not of this century. His outline was firm—there was no translucence to him, but he still had that telltale faded aspect.

  “What do you want?” he said. There was a tremor in his voice. “Go away. I’m an old man. Go away.”

  “Are you Lord Williamson?” I asked the ghost.

  “Bloody stupid question. Go away. Leave me alone.”

  Sounded like a yes to me. The pleasant attitude must have run in the family.

  “We need to talk to you about a stone,” I said.

  Lord Williamson shook his head sharply.

  “I should never have talked to that other one. Now you’re here. I want to be left alone. I can’t help you.”

  “Other one
,” Boo said. “So someone else has been here? Was his name Stephen? Tall? Dark hair?”

  “Go,” he said again. “I’ll tell you nothing.”

  “You need to talk to us,” Boo said. “It’s important. We need to know about this stone? The Oswulf.”

  He shook his head as if he didn’t even want to hear the word.

  “Someone’s after it,” Callum said.

  “You’re after it.”

  “We’re trying to help,” Callum replied.

  “Look around you,” Lord Williamson said, indicating the view of Stonehenge in the distance. “Look at them, standing strong for thousands of years. I built my house here to be close to them. Someone has always had to protect them. So many times they’ve almost been carted off or knocked over. Someone must always stand for the stones. You don’t know how to help.”

  Callum raised his eyebrows.

  “We can help more than you think,” Boo said.

  “You know nothing of the old ways. If you did, you wouldn’t come here like this.”

  He was yelling, but of course, we were the only ones who could hear him. When we didn’t move, he tottered around the folly in annoyance.

  “Someone wants the Oswulf Stone,” I said. “Someone bad. She says she knows where it is.”

  “If someone had taken the Oswulf Stone, you would know,” he said.

  “She could be going for it now. You told our friend where it was, but he’s gone. Please. What did you tell him? What was he doing here?”

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Friends of his.”

  “Friends?”

  The word sounded like an accusation. He paused and put his hands together in prayer formation and touched them to his chin.

  “You know what the Eye of Isis is?” I asked.

  “Of course I know what the Eye of Isis is. Why do you ask stupid questions?”

  “The Eye of Isis, it’s in pieces. And one of the pieces . . . is in me.”

  This got his attention. He tottered back over and came up to me, forcing me back. Suddenly he didn’t seem as fuddled.