Star Locket

by Natalie Jane Prior

  Greitz went on with his incantation, his voice continuing to be heard above the sound of the river. He was drawing the boat towards him, as if pulling on an invisible rope, and as it came, it began raining more heavily, the drizzle turning to an unexpected downpour. Stephen began shivering with cold. He saw the girls below him in their miserable little rowboat, hampered by their sodden cloaks as they became increasingly agitated by what was happening. The boat was nudging up against the pier below. There was seemingly nothing to hold it there, but no matter how hard they pushed their oars against the stonework their efforts could not budge it from its place.

  ‘Sally. Estella.’ Greitz called down to them, speaking in English so they could both understand. ‘I want you to climb out of the boat onto the starling. That’s the flat stonework at the bottom of the pier. You’ll be quite safe there. I’m going to send Sebastian down to bring you up.’

  ‘Don’t listen to him, Estée,’ Stephen shouted. ‘Stay in the boat. He’s got me here, and the other half of the star locket.’ He had barely uttered the words before Sebastian clouted him on the side of the head. The blow knocked him to the ground, and this time he did faint for several moments, for by the time the buzzing darkness had receded, a furious conversation had started between Greitz and the girls in the boat at the foot of the pier, and Sebastian was pointing the loaded revolver at his face.

  ‘One more outburst from you, Englishman,’ he said, ‘and I’ll happily blow your brains out.’

  A girl’s thin, shrill voice floated up to them through the rain. ‘Come one step closer and we throw it in the river.’

  ‘That would certainly be an inconvenience,’ Greitz shouted back to her. ‘However, you don’t really know what I’m capable of, do you? Who’s to say I couldn’t retrieve it? You would be in a pickle then, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘No bigger than we are now. Anyway, you might be bluffing.’

  ‘Ah, but I’m not,’ Greitz called to them. ‘Try it, and you’ll soon see. And then I’ll send Sebastian down to get you anyway. There really is no way out, you know.’

  There was a pause. Stephen could no longer see what was happening, for his back was now against the balustrading, but he imagined the girls conferring at the foot of the pier. Sure enough, a moment later, the voice came up again from below.

  ‘We’re staying where we are. And we meant what we said about the star locket.’

  ‘Oh, come along,’ said Greitz, and for the first time, Stephen detected a flash of impatience in his voice. ‘You know you don’t mean it. Nobody understands that better than I do. The star locket is part of you. You can’t lose it. You can’t destroy it. And I already have the other piece. Bring it up and we’ll talk the whole matter over.’

  ‘No. We’re not prepared to die. And if you rejoin the locket, that’s what’s going to happen to one of us.’

  ‘You don’t know that. You only know what Anna van Homrigh has told you. Who knows more about magic: me, or her?’

  ‘Who has more reason to lie?’

  Greitz looked back over his shoulder at Sebastian. ‘You know, one of these days I am going to have Anna van Homrigh roasted alive on a red-hot griddle,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘This whole debâcle really is entirely her fault. Sebastian, do show the young ladies we’re serious. My patience is starting to wear extremely thin.’

  Sebastian grabbed Stephen’s lapels and hauled him to his feet. With a deft shove, he threw him backwards so that he hit the parapet with a jarring smack in the kidneys. For a terrifying moment he thought he had lost his balance and was going to fall, but the guardsman’s fist still gripped his collar and stopped him. There was a thin scream from below. Stephen’s breath rasped in his throat, and his arms flailed. He scrabbled for purchase with his feet, but his leather boot soles skidded on the wet pavement.

  ‘Are you watching?’ Sebastian shouted, and then he kicked Stephen’s legs completely out from under him. As Stephen began to fall, he grabbed his right knee and tilted him violently back over the low parapet. With the other hand he jammed the revolver against his throat.

  ‘Shall I shoot him, or let him fall?’

  The blood rushed dizzyingly to Stephen’s head, until he did not know which was louder, the sound of the river, or the sound of his own terrified heartbeat. He was hanging backwards, staring vertiginously down at the river, thirty feet below him. Only Sebastian’s weight, pressing roughly down on his leg, stopped him plunging to his death. There seemed to be a lot of shouting going on, with both girls screaming hysterically, but it was impossible for Stephen to focus on anything except his own predicament. His hands flailed in nothingness, and he could hear Greitz, standing on the parapet, shouting again at the girls to get out of the boat. The girls were shouting back at him. One of them, Estée, Stephen guessed, had scrambled out of the boat despite his plea and was crying up at Greitz to stop. A moment later the other followed her onto the slippery stonework of the pier and they clung together in a huddle of black sodden clothing.

  As soon as the second girl set foot on the stonework, the rowboat shot away from the starling as if possessed with a life of its own. Greitz had released the magic he was using to hold it in place. Captured by the current it smashed into the opposite pier with a crunch of breaking timber, and was whirled away through the arch into the lower river. Greitz muttered something to Sebastian in Ostermarkan and Sebastian grinned back. He eased the pistol slightly from Stephen’s neck and pulled him unceremoniously back from the parapet.

  Stephen flopped onto the pavement, gasping and shaking. As he landed, the sharp edges of Sally’s star dug into his leg through his coat pocket. He had forgotten about it. Belatedly, it flashed through his head that Sebastian would never have let him fall with it still on his person. It had all been one enormous bluff.

  For the moment, however, both Greitz and Sebastian seemed to have lost interest in him. Sebastian was still pointing the gun at him, but he was looking over the balustrade at the girls on the starling. Greitz, who was still standing on the parapet, straightened out of his unnatural lean, and stepped lightly down onto the bridge. He put his hands together and began deftly twisting them, as if washing invisible clothes. A rope appeared, growing out of the space between his two hands; a long grey, double-twisted strand. It coiled in quick lengths onto the stonework at his feet, looking almost as if it were made from the web of some enormous spider.

  Greitz was concentrating on what he was doing and Sebastian’s attention was on the girls. Consequently, the first person to notice the newcomer was Stephen. Something about the sound of the footsteps—quick, light and urgent—made him look up, and he saw a woman running across the bridge towards them. She was well-dressed, but wearing no hat, and her furtrimmed coat was half unbuttoned. She looked dishevelled and upset. Stephen did not know who she was, but he heard her call Greitz’s name, and saw the procurator quickly look up.

  ‘Esther!’ The name was followed by an angry expostulation in Ostermarkan, and then suddenly the woman was throwing herself at Greitz with such force she nearly knocked him off his feet. The procurator dropped his rope. For a moment, Stephen was not sure whether Esther Trier was trying to attack Greitz or embrace him. Sebastian grabbed her shoulders and tried to drag her away, and she started struggling and shouting. There was a momentary tussle by the parapet, followed by a stream of unintelligible conversation that grew more and more heated with each successive exchange. Greitz had Esther by the arms, and was shaking her so furiously her head seemed likely to rattle off her shoulders. For the first time since Stephen had met Greitz, he was less than immaculately composed. In a flash it came to him that the procurator was not angry, but frightened. Stephen did not understand what was happening, but something was clearly going desperately wrong.

  On impulse, Stephen grasped the parapet. He had not the faintest idea of what he was going to do, but as he pulled himself up onto his knees, Esther Trier broke free of the men who were holding her. She darted along the carriageway and jum
ped up onto the parapet, precariously poised above the roiling waters of the Ling.

  ‘Come one step closer, Richard, and I’ll jump.’

  ‘Esther. This is ridiculous.’

  ‘I mean what I say, Richard. I am not going to let you do this. If you don’t let them go, I shall jump.’

  ‘Esther.’ Greitz advanced one step, and then another. She did not jump, of course; there was too much at stake. But her fists clenched at her sides, and the expression on her face was enough that he stopped in his tracks, Sebastian at his shoulder.

  ‘I can stop you, Esther. You know I can force you to do whatever I want.’

  ‘Of course I know that. I have always known it.’

  ‘I have never used that power, Esther. Not once, in all the years I have known you. I don’t want to use it now. But if I have to do so, I will.’

  ‘If that is the case, Richard, then there really is no more to say.’

  On the starling below, the girls clutched each other.

  Estée’s teeth were chattering. Her eyes raked the bridge for Stephen. She could not see him any longer; could feel nothing but Sally’s arms around her, gripping her so tightly they felt like one person. Sally’s breath was on her cheek, and hers on Sally’s. She felt the other girl’s ragged gasp, and the beat of her heart under the enveloping cloaks. She had heard and understood every word of the exchange on the bridge, but one did not need to speak Ostermarkan to understand the challenge Esther had issued, or the fact that Greitz was disregarding it. He was walking towards her. He was not going to stop.

  Esther glanced at the girls. She swayed a moment on the parapet, then lifted her arms at her sides. Sally screamed; Estée flinched and hid her face. Neither of them saw Esther fall, but there was a faint splash as she hit the water and by the time they opened their eyes, she was gone.

  ‘Esther!’

  There was nothing to be heard above the roar of the river. Stephen only saw Esther disappear, and Greitz and Sebastian break into a run. In a moment they reached the spot where Esther had jumped. Greitz was up on the parapet in a single stride, and Sebastian was over the side. Faint screams floated up from the river below. Stephen saw Sebastian’s head just below the level of the parapet and heard Greitz shouting instructions to him as he climbed like a lizard down the pier wall. Greitz, he realised, had caught Esther as she disappeared under the bridge and was using magic to hold her back against the current until Sebastian could reach her. The strain this was causing, and the desperation of the situation was obvious.

  Stephen put his hand into his pocket and jerked out the diamond star. ‘Estée! Sally! Quickly.’ At his shout both girls looked up. Sally’s pendant dropped from his fingers; for a moment, he scarcely knew which one he was throwing it to, then he saw the glint of gold chain on the girl’s neck below and realised it was Estée who had caught it.

  Sally’s hand went to her throat. For an instant their eyes locked. Then the girls’ hands joined under their cloaks and there was a sound like something enormous shattering, as if on some level Stephen had scarcely realised existed, ties were breaking and a myriad unsuspected bondages were being torn asunder. A wave of something hot and hateful passed over him, almost blowing him off his feet. And then it was gone, and there was only the cold and rain of a Starberg winter morning, and Estée, weeping on the starling at the foot of the pier in a sudden, sodden drapery of filthy black ash.

  A man was screaming.

  Stephen had never heard a grown man scream before, and at first he did not realise what the noise was. He thought it was a bird, or the whistle of a boat on the river. He was, in any case, only interested in Estée down on the starling, standing in what appeared to be shock in her bedraggled black cloak. He called out to her not to panic, and then the cry sounded behind him again. He realised it was no bird, but the procurator. Greitz was standing on the parapet of the bridge, hysterically screaming one word over and over. It sounded like a woman’s name: Esther, Esther.

  ‘Hold on, Estée,’ Stephen shouted. ‘Hold on.’ He became aware that men were swarming onto the bridge from the crane at the end, burly men in dark grey workmen’s jackets. Sebastian was nowhere to be seen. Stephen guessed he had slipped, or fallen, in the rush of discharged power released when the locket had been rejoined. He looked for the rope Greitz had made, but it had inexplicably vanished, leaving only a coiled pattern of ash on the cobbles.

  There was help at hand. One of the workmen, seeing him, came running over with a huge loop of real rope around his shoulder. He shouted at Stephen, who of course could not understand him; the man spat, and said something, then Stephen was thrust aside and two or three burly men were tying the rope around the parapet and dropping it over the bridge to the starling below. The first man shouted instructions and Estée looked up, stupidly, as if she were in shock. Eventually, she took the rope and tied it around her waist. The workmen started hauling her up. She was not precisely a dead weight, but she was not much better than one, and it took them what seemed to Stephen an unbearably long time to drag her up. At last her hand appeared on the parapet, and her head and shoulders in the long black cape. The workmen grabbed and manhandled her onto the bridge. Her face was covered with dark smears of ash and she was trembling from head to foot.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Abandoning pretences, Stephen stumbled towards her. He took her in his arms and held her tightly, attempting to comfort her. Quite patently, she was not all right. She was shivering and stiff in his arms, so cold from being on the river that she felt like a corpse. She began to cry. The first fear struck him then, the second when he saw what she was holding in her hands, but it was not until she lifted her ravaged face to his that Stephen finally realised the truth.

  ‘I’m not Estée,’ she whispered. ‘I’m Sally.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The winter snows had been and gone and there was a hint of cold spring in the air before Sally Taverner, recovered from the bronchitis she had contracted in December, was ready to travel from Starberg back to her finishing school in Lausanne. It had been a difficult three months. Sally had spent Christmas and New Year in bed, too sick to talk to anyone. In fact, neither she nor her parents had wanted to discuss the events of that terrible week in December, and they had all gone out of their way to avoid it. Emily had withdrawn into herself, and Clive had been so busy at the legation that they had scarcely seen him. In a properly English fashion, it seemed that all of them had decided that the best thing would be for everyone to forget, or at least pretend that the incident had never happened.

  The problem for Sally, however, was that forgetting was impossible. Some things had changed. She was no longer the girl who had travelled to Starberg to join her parents, but a person who had no family, no identity, no place. That she would never again enjoy the same close relationship with her parents she accepted, with grief, as inevitable, and whenever the events of December threatened to recede into her memory, she had only to look at her right hand to be reminded that they really had taken place. The mark of the star locket would be there, burned into her palm for the rest of her life, a patch of purplish skin in the shape of a many-rayed star. And always, there at her shoulder, was the shadow of her other self, the girl who had lived the life she might have had herself, who had been somebody she herself might perhaps have become.

  In her private moments, Sally thought about Estella Merton a great deal. From the shock of their first glimpse of each other, to those last, frantic moments on the starling, they had spoken properly only once. It had thus been strange for Sally to realise that what she was going through was a real grief, as if somebody she had known and loved had actually died. And in a sense, somebody had, for they had been the same person, after all. In the end, when they had made their choice, they had both realised that. It was what had made destroying the star locket possible, the knowledge that one of them would go on, to live the rest of her life for both of them. Neither Esther nor Greitz would have understood that, Sally thought. She did thin
k of Esther from time to time. Once or twice she had even considered visiting her grave, but she had not known where to find it, and had, in any case, been too ill to seriously consider making the search.

  Meanwhile, a wind of change blew through the corridors of the legation. Mr St John Everett, the new British Minister, had arrived from London early in February to take George Melhuish’s place. Clive Taverner, who had hoped against hope for the position, resigned himself to sit out his own appointment as Secretary of Legation. Mr Everett placed great store on method and routine, and expected everyone who worked for him to do likewise. His new regime prompted some grumbles, especially from the junior secretaries, who were heard to say that Everett needed some old-fashioned vices, but Sally had heard that Francis Sinclair had become a model of orderliness and efficiency.

  From Stephen Melhuish, she had not heard at all.

  Stephen had, in fact, been extremely busy, overseeing both his own affairs and his late uncle’s. They had found the missing British Minister at last, not long after the announcement of his successor. After six weeks wedged under a jetty at Soderling, Melhuish’s body was so decomposed it was barely identifiable, and determining the cause of his death was impossible. The police had decided he must have fallen into the river and drowned, a verdict which, despite the mysterious lack of clothes, no one at the legation cared to challenge. The general consensus of opinion among his colleagues was that Melhuish had met an unsavoury end suited to his unsavoury habits. Only Stephen might have demanded a fuller investigation under Ostermarkan law, but he already knew the truth, or part of it, and he did not want to provoke Richard Greitz into moving against him. The new procurator had been keeping a curiously low profile since his investiture, and it was said in Starberg that he was proving to be less effective than his supporters had hoped. Stephen, who had feared reprisals, was hoping it would stay that way.