13 Curses

by Michelle Harrison

  “But which grave would the bracelet have been buried in?” Red asked. “We’d be lucky to get away with looking into one, let alone both!”

  “That’s something we need to think about,” Fabian said. “Let’s go back.”

  Grudgingly, Red put the fox-skin on again and they went back across to the manor. Once inside, they checked that the coast was clear before hurrying upstairs to Fabian’s room.

  For once it was reasonably clean, though there was still a considerable amount of clutter lying about. With a sweep of his arm he cleared a space on the bed for Tanya and Red to sit down, and a shower of clothes and other bits and pieces went flying to the floor. Fabian did not sit, however. He remained on his feet and proceeded to pace the room.

  “What are you doing?” Tanya asked, after a few minutes. “Apart from wearing the carpet out?”

  “Quiet,” said Fabian. “I’m thinking.” He continued to pace, then went to stand by the window, staring out. “I can’t think of a way we’d find out which was the right grave to search in. But I think that the fake grave would be the best place to start, because we can get to it from the tunnels, where we’re going to search anyway. That way we can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “That makes sense,” said Red. “We can get into the tunnels from the house and find our way to the grave. It’s the route I used when I hid in the house before, and I left string in the tunnels marking out the way. It should still be there.”

  “Plus, if we go through the tunnels to the graveyard we won’t be seen,” said Tanya.

  “I say we do it tonight,” said Fabian. “There’s no time to waste.”

  Outside the window, the sun came out once more, throwing gold light onto Fabian’s face.

  “All right,” said Red impatiently. “But we need to keep looking. What shall we do in the meantime?”

  A slow smile spread across Fabian’s lips as, suddenly, his gaze shifted and refocused. Instead of trailing into space, his vision was now fixed on something in the garden.

  “I think I’ve got the answer to that too.” He beckoned, and Red and Tanya joined him at the window, Red standing with her hind legs on the bed and her forepaws on the windowsill.

  “What are we meant to be looking at?” Red asked.

  “There, in front of the rock garden,” said Fabian. “See it?”

  They both saw it at the same moment. It was a shadow, cast by the sun coming over the house, a faint and misshapen X. For two or three seconds they stared before the sun went behind a cloud, taking the shadow with it.

  Fabian held up his alarm clock and shoved it under Tanya’s nose, not taking his eyes from the spot.

  “X marks the spot at two. What time is it now?”

  “It’s half past two,” said Tanya.

  “That means that the place we saw it will be slightly off the mark,” said Fabian. “Tanya, go outside and I’ll direct you until you’re standing in the right place. Then leave something to mark it—a stone or something—and we’ll come down. We don’t want to go out there and forget the spot we’ve been looking at.”

  “But what is it that’s casting the shadow?” Tanya asked.

  “You’ll see when you’re out there,” said Fabian.

  Tanya took the hint and left. A few minutes later, she appeared in the garden accompanied by Oberon and walked over to the rock garden, standing a few paces from where the X had been. She stooped and picked something up from the ground, then looked up at the window.

  With his eyes still glued in place, Fabian lifted the window and leaned out, gesturing for Tanya to move farther back, and to the left, until she was finally standing in the correct spot. When he gave her a thumbs-up, she crouched down and marked the spot with whatever she had picked up from the ground, and then Fabian and Red went cautiously back through the house to join her. Red skulked along behind him, ready to hide or run if Florence should appear, but she didn’t, and as they passed by the sitting room, they heard her scolding the General, who had just called her a whippersnapper.

  Tanya was waiting patiently for them in the garden. She pointed to a distinctive flat pebble that she had laid on the spot, and looked up at the house.

  “It’s the weathervane,” she said, pointing. “That’s what’s throwing the shadow.”

  Red looked up and saw the dark shape outlined against the sky. Its intersecting arrows pointed to the four corners of the earth, forming the X the young Florence had described. Sitting on top like a witch riding a broomstick was a mermaid that mirrored the one on the fountain in the front courtyard.

  “Let’s dig,” said Red.

  “Didn’t you hear what I said?” said Fabian. “It’s not the exact spot because the timing was off.”

  “How do we pinpoint the spot then?” she demanded.

  “We have to wait and hope the sun comes out again,” said Fabian. “If we can plot the path the sun’s taking, we can use it to work backward.”

  “You’re confusing me,” said Tanya. “And it doesn’t look like there’s much chance of the sun coming out again anyway—look at the cloud.”

  Fabian squinted up at the sky.

  “There’s a break over there, and the cloud seems to be traveling in that direction. If we wait, it could work, otherwise we’ll have to do it again another day, when it’s next sunny.”

  Red didn’t like the idea of that at all, and neither did Tanya.

  “I’m only here for a few more days,” she reminded him. “Half-term is nearly over, but I can’t go back until this is solved!”

  Privately, Red thought that Tanya didn’t have much choice in the matter. But as luck would have it, ten minutes later the sun came out when the patchy cloud broke and allowed it a quick escape. It was only a few seconds, but enough, judging by Fabian’s gleeful whoop, to plot out the path of the sun. They marked the spot—this time a short distance away from the first—with another stone and watched as Fabian scratched his head while he backtracked.

  “It doesn’t just go in a straight line, see,” he said. “It curves slightly as it moves, which means we could really do with one more marked place to get the idea of the curve. But I don’t think our luck’s going to hold out.”

  He was right. Now that the break in the cloud had passed, the rest was coming over thicker and darker. Soon, droplets of rain were spitting.

  “Just make a guess, then,” Red snapped.

  Fabian’s eyes darted from one point to another, and then he collected a third pebble and dropped it a little way from the first.

  “That’s my guess,” he said, with an apologetic shrug. “It shouldn’t be too far off—I’d say the right place should be within a meter of that area. The good thing is that as Florence was only little when she buried it, it probably wouldn’t have been buried very deep.”

  “You two go in,” said Red. “I’ll get to work here. If Florence sees a fox digging up her garden the most she’ll do is chase me off, whereas if it’s one of you it’ll raise questions.”

  They left her and went back in. The rain started to come down more heavily, in fat droplets that ran off her wiry red fur. Using her paws, she began to scrape at the ground, turfing up the grass until her claws met soil beneath. The rain helped soften it a little, though the deeper she went the harder it became—baked solid from the hot summer.

  Soon she had dug several holes, but after fifteen minutes she had found nothing. Then a strong scent caught her fox senses: the distinctive smell of a rusty tin. She dived in its direction, digging faster, mud caking her claws. As she went deeper the smell strengthened, until finally, only a few inches into the ground, her claws scraped metal. Moments later she had cleared the earth away from a small tin. There was old-fashioned writing on it, just legible through a layer of rust: BEAZLEY’S TREACLE TOFFEE.

  This was it. She had found Florence’s box of treasures. In her excitement, as she pawed the tin out of the hole, she noticed the approaching footsteps too late—and then a loud clapping made her jump almost out
of her fox-skin.

  “Shoo!” said an indignant voice.

  Red turned and froze, pinned to the ground in fright like a butterfly pinned to a board. Florence was marching toward her, her thin mouth twisted in annoyance as she clapped her hands to ward Red off.

  “Off you go,” she said crossly. “There are lots of places for you to dig—but not in my garden! Go on, hop it!”

  Red finally found her feet and fled, off through the garden and around the side of the house. There she stopped and peered back out, correctly guessing that Florence wouldn’t follow—and wouldn’t expect her to stick around. She saw the woman tutting at the mess, and using the toe of her shoe to nudge some of the little heaps of dirt back into their crevices. But then Florence stopped what she was doing and slowly bent down.

  “Oh, no,” Red whispered to herself, as she realized what was happening. “Oh, no, no, no…”

  Already she knew it was too late. With a small cry of surprise, Florence had scooped up the long-lost box and was carrying it back to the house. The look of joy and astonishment on her face was one that made it difficult to believe that the rusty tin contained not real, priceless treasure but the mementos of a small child with no value other than sentimental.

  She became aware that someone was behind her and turned quickly, ready to run again—but it was Tanya. She had come down the side of the house from the front.

  “What happened? We were watching from Fabian’s window when my grandmother came out—did you find anything?”

  “I found a box,” said Red. “But I didn’t get a chance to look inside. She came out and shooed me away, and now she’s taken it inside with her!”

  “We have to get it back,” said Tanya, pushing her dark hair away from her face. “If she finds the charm, it could put her in danger and ruin everything.”

  “What shall I do?” Red asked. She felt helpless and angry with herself for failing to get away with the box.

  “There’s nothing you can do,” said Tanya. “You’ll have to leave it to Fabian and me. Come with me, we’ll go in the front way.”

  They went back around the side of the house to the front, pushing through the brambles and wild rosebushes, and then crunching on the gravel path to the front door. Once inside, Red crept upstairs to Tanya’s room alone and crawled under the bed, wet and cold and miserable. There was nothing to do but wait.

  When Tanya went into the kitchen, Fabian was already there with her grandmother.

  “It’s extraordinary,” Florence was saying. “I only went outside to shoo the fox away—I never dreamed it had dug something up. How peculiar! And to think that it’s my old tin of treasures. Why, I’d forgotten all about it! I can’t even remember what’s inside! Now, if I could just get the blasted thing open…”

  “Let me try,” said Fabian, doing his very best to look innocent and helpful.

  Florence handed the box to him, along with a knife she had been using to scrape away more of the caked-on mud. Fabian wrestled with the lid.

  “It’s stuck tight. Seems to be rusted on,” he said. He ran the knife under the rim of the lid, pulling out another curl of mud. Something gave and the lid shifted a little. With a flourish he finally got it off, and Florence swooped on it like a magpie.

  Tanya leaned farther over the table, peering into the tin as her grandmother turned over the contents. There were small collectable cards, a tiny doll, some glass beads rattling about with a broken costume brooch, and a couple of toffees, still in their faded gold wrappers. Underneath, not immediately noticeable, was a glimpse of tarnished silver….

  Tanya caught Fabian’s eye and gave the slightest nod of her head to show she had seen it. It was long and thin, and mentally she recalled the charms that were still missing. It had to be either the Staff or the Sword.

  “This was my mother’s,” said Florence, lifting the broken brooch out of the box. “I always loved to see her wear it. Then one day it fell to the floor and chipped, and she let me have it.” She gave a wry smile. “It’s funny, the little things you treasure as a child. Once I even buried the old charm bracelet—the one that you’ve got now, Tanya. I did get a telling-off for it too when my mother realized what I’d done.” She lifted out one of the toffees. “These were my favorite. They don’t make them anymore.”

  By now Tanya was itching to grab the charm, but her grandmother’s attention was fully on the box. She shot a desperate glance at Fabian, wondering if there was a way they could distract Florence somehow.

  “Did you hear that?” she said suddenly. “It sounds like the General—do you think he’s all right?”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” said her grandmother. “But I’m sure he’s fine. He’s safely in his cage in the other room.”

  “What’s that?” Fabian asked, pretending to be interested in something. He lunged clumsily for the box, knocking it straight off the table. The contents, apart from the brooch in Florence’s hand, mostly went clattering and rolling across the kitchen floor. But Fabian had misjudged, and some of the objects fell into Florence’s lap.

  “Oh, Fabian, do be careful,” said Florence, but as she said it, an odd thing happened. Her voice changed from scolding to wistful. She lifted her hand to her forehead, making no attempt to pick up any of the dropped objects. Instead, she stared into the empty tin as Fabian scrambled around on all fours retrieving the things from the floor.

  “Perhaps some things should remain in the past,” she said in a queer voice. “It doesn’t do to dwell on it.”

  “Are you all right, Gran?” Tanya asked, concerned. From down on the floor behind Florence, Fabian caught her eye.

  “I can’t find it!” he mouthed.

  “Yes,” said Florence. “I’m all right. I just feel tired, all of a sudden. Tired, and awfully old. What with Warwick gone… I just don’t know how to cope with it all.”

  Tanya was worried now. She had never heard her grandmother express herself in this way before. She had always been so sprightly and energetic. Even as she watched, Florence’s shoulders drooped and the color drained from her face, leaving her gray and haggard.

  Behind Florence, Fabian went rigid. Tanya followed his gaze, and then when he saw her looking, he frantically gestured to her grandmother’s side. Only then did Tanya realize what had happened. Fabian was trying to tell her that he could see the charm—and it was in a fold of her grandmother’s skirt.

  “I think I’ll go and have a lie-down,” said Florence. “I’m not feeling well.” She rose from the table, her eyes staring blankly ahead. As she stood, the objects in her lap fell to the floor with various pings and clatters, but Florence did not pause for any of them. She left the kitchen, leaving Tanya and Fabian to collect the fallen objects.

  “There it is,” Fabian said, pouncing. He lifted up a tiny silver item. Tanya saw that this time it was the Sword.

  “Be careful,” she told him fearfully. “Did you see what it did to my grandmother?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She went all funny, like she’d given up on everything. What’s the power of the Sword?”

  “It’s for victory,” said Tanya, remembering. “And from what we just saw it’s like the power was the exact opposite. The look on her face and the things she was saying—it was like she was completely defeated. It did something to her mind.”

  “But she wasn’t even wearing it,” said Fabian. Even so, he put the charm on the table, looking at it as though he was afraid it might bite him.

  “Neither was the young Florence that Red saw in the attic with the Goblet,” Tanya pointed out. “Don’t you see? They don’t have to be worn to take some kind of horrible effect. The more time that passes, the more powerful they’re becoming!”

  They took the Sword charm up to Tanya’s bedroom in a cup of salt. It was Tanya who hit upon the idea after remembering that salt could be used to dispel magic. There, Red took off the fox-skin coat and attached the seventh charm to the bracelet. As Tanya and Fabian told her what had happened to Florence, h
er pointed face paled.

  “Perhaps you’d better check on her,” she said.

  Tanya nodded and left, leaving Red and Fabian alone to stare awkwardly at each other and the cursed piece of jewelry.

  “We’re only halfway,” said Fabian. “We still have another six charms to find. What if our luck runs out and we can’t find them all?”

  “Luck?” Red scoffed, but she could hear the fear in her own voice. She knew Fabian could hear it too. “You think it’s luck that’s led us this far? Think again. If they’d really wanted to, the fairies could have hidden the charms anywhere—anywhere at all. Instead, they’ve put them in places they knew we’d track down.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s all a game,” said Red. “If they hadn’t wanted us to find the charms they’d have made sure it was impossible. So we haven’t been lucky. We’ve been led exactly where they want us to go—with a few added scares along the way. They want us to find the charms, I’ve no doubt about it.”

  “But why?” said Fabian. “Surely they don’t want us to win?”

  “Of course they don’t. So that must mean there’s something else, something bigger to all this. I just haven’t figured out what it is yet.”

  “Do you think they’ll really release my father?” he asked, his voice troubled.

  It was a question Red had been dreading, and so she was grateful for the sudden distraction of voices from outside the room.

  “You’re sure you’re all right now?” Tanya was asking.

  Florence’s reply was brisk. “Yes, yes, fine. I don’t know what came over me.”

  The stairs creaked as Florence went down them, and then Tanya came back into the room, closing the door behind her.

  “She’s fine,” she said, her voice weak with relief. “Whatever power the charm held over her is gone.”

  Rain pattered at the windowpanes. The afternoon sky had darkened, and now dirty gray clouds swirled across it like a witch’s brew.

  “When Florence goes to bed we’ll sneak out to the grave,” said Fabian. “We’ve got all evening to prepare. I’ll gather as many flashlights and candles as I can get away with.”