by Kim M Watt
“Hello, DI Adams,” the chairwoman of the Toot Hansell W.I. said, tucking fine white hair behind her ears. “Was your trip up alright?”
“Less eventful than my arrival,” the inspector said. “Hello, Alice.”
“I’m so sorry about this,” Maddie said, a hitch in her voice. “They’re impossible, both of them!”
DI Adams found a proper smile for her. “No need to be sorry. It’s on them, not you.” She plucked at her damp trousers. “I’d quite like to go get changed now, though.”
Her room had a cracked jug of daffodils on the dresser, and white and green curtains on the windows that overlooked the terrace. DI Adams changed into a grey hoody and walking trousers, then watched the W.I. and the dragons at their yoga practise. Dragons weren’t invisible, but they were faint, and as very few people expected to see dragons, very few did. It still seemed needlessly risky for them to be wandering about joining in yoga classes, though.
She wondered again what she was doing here. This time last year she’d only just transferred up from London, and had no idea about such creatures as dragons and the Toot Hansell W.I. (although there had been the incident in London which had caused her transfer, but she tried not to think about that). It had been a rather blissful kind of ignorance, if she was going to be honest. Her fantasy of an easier life up north had come to a rather abrupt demise with the murder of a vicar, quickly followed by the discovery of Toot Hansell, the Women’s Institute, and dragons in one fell swoop. After which came Christmas, and the revelation that dragons weren’t the only magical Folk in the world.
It had not been the easiest year. A weekend in a spa hotel had sounded nice. It had sounded like the sort of thing that people did. It had sounded like the sort of thing that would not involve dragons, abductions, explosions, or goblins. And it hadn’t cost her anything, and while she wasn’t broke exactly, a free mini-break was nothing to be sniffed at.
She sighed. She had yet to have one encounter with the W.I. that didn’t end in some narrowly averted disaster and her covering up the existence of dragons, because God forbid the wrong people got wind of that. Like the government. Or her boss. And now they were just out there doing yoga. She fished some paracetamol out of her bag. She didn’t quite have a headache yet, but she had an idea she would before long.
“Well,” she said to the room. “Nothing for it. There is no reason for anything to go wrong. This is all going to be absolutely fine.”
She opened the door, and the dreadlocked dog that had been sitting patiently outside scrambled up, tail wagging eagerly. It shoved an enormous, well-slobbered bone at her and she jumped back with a yelp, but not before her trousers had been smeared from thigh to knees with, she assumed, rosemary-caramelised-balsamic-marinated, slow-roasted, organic lamb bone.
The dog dropped to its elbows and nosed the bone toward her, answering her yelp with one of its own that just about shook the windows.
“Well, bollocks,” she said, and went to change into her yoga trousers, trying not to think that this was an inauspicious start.
A Manor of Life & Death Chapter 2: Miriam
Miriam tried very hard to follow what Adele (who was both the yoga teacher and her niece) was saying, got her lefts and rights muddled, tried to reach for the sky and ground herself at the same time, then fell over sideways. She pitched into Teresa with a squeak, sending them both sprawling onto the cold stone of the terrace.
“I’m so sorry!” she gasped, disentangling herself from the older woman and helping her up. “Are you alright?”
“Of course,” Teresa said cheerfully, brushing off her lime green leggings. Miriam thought they must be new. They had silver dragons on them, and were too short for Teresa’s long legs. “One of the first things to learn is how to fall, Miriam.”
“Oh,” Miriam said, going back to her own mat and thinking that the first thing should be to avoid falling, if you could. She was more well-padded than Teresa, but that didn’t make it pleasant. She’d knocked her knee fairly solidly on the hard stone of the terrace, and she gave it a comforting rub.
“Are you alright, Miriam?” Alice asked.
“I suppose so,” she said, shooting Adele a dark look. The young woman had her arms entwined and her legs wrapped around each other, and was gazing dreamily over the heads of the staggering Women’s Institute. “It’s just a bit advanced for the first afternoon, isn’t it?”
“Not really,” Alice said. She hadn’t tangled herself up quite as much as Adele, but she did have one leg crossed over the other and both arms reaching up to the sky. “You just have to focus.”
“Should you even be doing this, with your hip?” Miriam pointed out, trying to balance on her left leg. Her toenail polish was already chipped, she noticed with some dismay. It had been expensive, too.
“It’s good for my hip,” Alice said, uncrossing her leg and exhaling as she straightened, white hair held back with a slim black headband. She shifted her weight to her right leg and inhaled, floating her left foot off the floor and tucking it behind her right calf. “The doctor said yoga was very good after hip ops.”
“Falling over won’t be very good for it,” Miriam pointed out, although she had to admit that Alice looked in no danger of that. She swapped to her own right leg, hoping that one might be a little steadier. It wasn’t.
“Unless you fall into me I’m unlikely to fall over,” Alice said, shooting Miriam a warning look as the younger woman wobbled precariously.
“Ladies,” Adele said, unwinding her arms and shaking them out. “You can … take a break … or you can … keep going … I’ll … walk around …” She drifted off her mat in a swirl of multi-coloured scarves, her movement as slow as her words. Miriam thought the scarves were the loveliest part of the class, and she quite wanted to know where her niece had got them. Her attention wandered and she pitched forward with a squeak.
“Focus, Miriam,” Alice said.
“Ugh, that’s easy for you to say,” she complained. “I don’t think I’m built for yoga.”
“It’s not about being built for it,” Alice said, doing something fancy with her left leg. “It’s just practice.”
Miriam scowled rather ferociously at her feet and tried lifting her left foot again, then stomped it back down hurriedly as Adele appeared in front of her, pale hands extended.
“I’ll help you, Auntie Miriam,” she said. “Just focus on your drishti point.”
Miriam thought that she’d been focusing on drishti points when her niece wasn’t even a point of conversation for her parents, but she took Adele’s hands dutifully anyway. She didn’t like to discourage her. Everyone always thought she should like yoga because she was Sensitive, and had a passion for tie-dyed skirts and herbal tinctures. But the ohmm-ing gave her the giggles and if she spent too long meditating she started feeling too aware of things. As if there were more hidden creatures in the world than even the ones she knew about (and she did know quite a few personally these days), and some of them didn’t like to be seen. It made her uncomfortable, and unaccountably afraid. Besides, she’d never been able to touch her toes, even when she was a teenager. Some people just aren’t built like that, no matter what Alice said.
Adele’s hands were cold and smooth and steady, and after a few moments Miriam found she could stop gripping them quite so tightly and almost balance on her own.
“Excellent,” Adele said, her words still slow and drawn out. “Wonderful.” She shook herself free and drifted off again, while Miriam concentrated on not falling over immediately. “Does anyone else need help?”
Miriam risked a peek around and felt slightly better when she saw that only Jasmine, Rose and Alice didn’t seem to need help. Everyone else was either wobbling wildly, holding onto each other, or, in the case of Priya, had sat down with her face lifted happily up to the sky, eyes closed.
“How about – you,” Adele said, waving vaguely off the terrace and making her bracelets clatter into each other. “Do you need help?”
“The two – oh.” Adele laughed, and shook her head. “I’ve had too much, um, too much tea. I thought there was someone there. But it’s the topiary, isn’t it?”
The ladies of the Women’s Institute, who had given up any attempt at balance, agreed enthusiastically, and Adele wandered back to her mat, pausing to encourage her students to attempt the poses again. Behind her, Beaufort Scales, High Lord of the Cloverly dragons, stayed balancing on one foot, unmoving, his scales a deeper and darker green than usual. They were, in fact, the exact green of the topiary dotted around the terrace in tall cracked pots and sculpted into even more unusual shapes than dragons the size of large dogs. Mortimer, who had faded to an anxious grey that matched the stone of the terrace rather admirably, peered around a topiary pot.
“I thought this was meant to be relaxing,” he hissed. “I thought this was going to stop me stress-shedding, not make it worse.”
“Well, you’re not concentrating, are you?” Beaufort said. “You’re over there hiding behind a plant pot.”
“It’s very hard to concentrate when someone could see us any minute,” Mortimer pointed out, not moving, then waved at the peacock that had wandered up to investigate them. “Shoo!”
“Bu-kurk,” it said.
“Shh, both of you,” Miriam whispered, flapping her hands at them.
“Miriam, do go back to your mat,” Alice said. “You’re not exactly helping.”
“It’s making me terribly nervous.”
“No one here can see us, Miriam,” Beaufort said, trying to move into a Warrior One. Miriam was pretty sure you couldn’t do that with dragon feet, but the High Lord was certainly making a good attempt. “We checked with the gargoyles. They’ve been on this house since it was built, and no one has ever seen them. There’s not a glimmer of sight in anyone here.”
“Gargoyles?” Miriam said, and Alice shushed her.
“She thought she saw something,” Mortimer muttered, trying to work his way into the pose without emerging from behind the pot.
The peacock opened his tail and shook it at him encouragingly. “Bu-kurk!”
“I really don’t think yoga class is a place for dragons,” Miriam said with a sigh, but went back to her mat and tried to get her feet to go one way and her legs another. She hoped the dragons were getting more out of the class than she was.
Somehow they made it to the end of the session without anyone breaking anything (although, judging from the mutters, there were quite a few stubbed toes and shaking legs), and Miriam finally lay back on her mat in the gentle spring sun with a sigh, her eyes closed, listening to the soft breathing of the women around her and trying to not giggle every time Adele ohmm-ed. Someone was snoring, and from the raspiness she thought it was Beaufort.
He had been quite right, of course. Adele hadn’t seen him. Not quite, anyway. That was what tended to happen – people thought they saw something, but when they looked again there would be nothing there, or it would make their eyes hurt, and they’d think they were getting a migraine. You had to be expecting dragons to see them. She still thought it was rather risky, though, as they didn’t know who the other guests were yet. She did hope that this was going to be a relaxing weekend. She could really do with a relaxing weekend after the last year.
For a while there was silence, just the breathing of the women and the dragons, and birdsong in the trees beyond the terrace, where soft green grass rolled through more strangely shaped topiary and on to the untamed woods that circled the property, full of badgers and foxes and pheasants, and streams and rivers that would eventually lead to Toot Hansell. The sun was bright against her eyelids, blood vessels painting patterns on the insides, and she drifted, smelling cut grass and woodsmoke and the warm scent of stone in sunlight. Then a voice rang out around them.
“Ladies on the stone in the sun,
her lips spitting kisses like sunny secrets from the gods,
only to realise that none are there for him.
Oh! To be the lost man in such a place of beauty!”
There was a pause, and Miriam wondered if this was part of the class. She’d read that there were such things as beer yoga and dog yoga, so maybe this was poetry yoga?
Then Adele’s voice rose, sounding rather less slow and smooth than it had a few minutes before. “Boyd! What are you doing? I told you, you have to stop this! You’re ruining everything!”
“I’m not,” Boyd said. “It adds an extra dimension to your classes. It makes them transcendent.”
“My classes are already transcendent!”
Miriam thought that might be pushing things, but the poetry certainly hadn’t added anything. She pushed herself up on one elbow and looked at her nephew.
“I raise you up through my words and create,
waking dreams through which rage-slash-love can play,
while buxom fancies fairly tintinnabulate,
and all too soon will be gone the way of spring.”
“Buxom what?” Gert demanded, sitting up. “And tintinnabulate? That does not sound like something you should be doing on a yoga mat.”
“Umm,” Boyd said. He was a tall man with longish hair, hovering at the edge of the terrace in a large white shirt and ripped jeans. “No?”
“No what?” Gert snapped. She was wearing a sleeveless floral top, and her biceps bulged rather alarmingly, making the mermaid tattoo on one arm dance. “Are you saying you want to tintinnabulate us buxom fancies on the yoga mats?”
“No!” he squawked. “I was just – I – poetry! Art, yes?”
“That is not art,” Gert said, shaking a finger at him. “I think that was probably quite rude, to be honest. Is this what you do? Hang around your sister’s yoga classes spouting bad poetry at people?”
Boyd spluttered. “It’s good! It’s very good! I’ve won prizes!”
“At school,” Adele said. “And I’m pretty sure they only gave it to you to stop you submitting anything else.”
“That’s not true!”
“It so is.”
“Now, kids,” Priya raised her hands placatingly. “Aren’t we all practising compassion and so on?”
“I’m practising lying down,” Rose said, eyes still closed.
“It’s called shavasana. Corpse pose,” Jasmine told her.
Rose opened her eyes and sat up. “Well, I’m not so keen on practising that. Plenty of time for that later.”
“It’s just a name,” Adele said, sounding slightly desperate. “Let’s just go back to considering compassion—”
“We all talk about compassion,” Boyd proclaimed suddenly, and Gert made the sort of noise an angry llama might make. “Till the furies comes, those wizened old crones—”
“Those what?” Gert demanded, and Alice said, “Really.”
“Boyd!” Adele wailed.
“Those – those angels of the Dales,” Boyd managed, looking around wildly as if hoping someone would rescue him.
“Is he trying to poetry?” Beaufort asked, not bothering to keep his voice down. “Because he’s really terrible at it. Doesn’t he know that it’s about creating beauty?”
“Well, I’m not sure modern poetry is exactly like that,” Mortimer began, and Miriam waved at them wildly.
“Shh!” she whispered. “We don’t know who might hear you!”
“Hear what?” Boyd asked.
“Nothing,” Alice said.
“Oh! ’Tis but the sound of the breezes!
His heart grows faint, his hands begin to shake—”
“Terrible,” Beaufort said, shaking his scaly head. “Once upon a time, someone that bad at poetry would have been burned at the stake.”
“I don’t disagree with the concept.” Alice sat up and pulled her cardigan on. “He’s quite ruined the mood.”
“You see?” Adele said. Her arms were folded and she was glarin
g at her brother in what Miriam thought was a rather un-yogic sort of way. “You’ve ruined it. Happy now?”
“It was a very nice class until then,” Priya said encouragingly.
“Well, not everyone can appreciate art.” Boyd tossed his hair. It would have looked more effective if it hadn’t been so wispy, Miriam thought. Poor boy. It just sort of wafted around his face rather dismally.
“Oh, go do some of your crappy topiary,” Adele snapped. “See if you can ruin the view as well as the mood.”
“Well, that explains a lot,” Carlotta said. “I did wonder why none of them actually look like anything.”
“It’s art!” Boyd insisted.
“It’s rubbish,” Rosemary said, and she and Carlotta exchanged short nods.
“It is not,” Boyd said indignantly. “Why should topiary always be animals? Why can’t it be abstract?”
“And I thought we had problems with Gilbert and his abstract baubles,” Mortimer mumbled to Beaufort.
“Oh, leave the poor man alone,” Priya said. “They do get so precious. And the class is over anyway.” She got up and started rolling her mat up.
“Wait!” Adele pleaded. “We haven’t done the breathing yet! Or the guided meditation!”
“Oh, no, I’m done,” Rose said, getting up. “It must be gin and tonic time by now, isn’t it?”
“But you can’t finish now! You’re not fully relaxed yet!”
“Teresa is,” Pearl said, gesturing at the tall woman, still stretched out and snoring gently.
“Boyyyyd!” Adele wailed. “Why do you have to spoil everything!”
“Your whining drains the peace from the day—”
“Enough,” Gert said. “I can’t listen to either of you anymore. I’ve got plenty of kids and grandkids if I want to listen to squabbling.” She scowled at Boyd, and he scuttled backward, trying to look dignified. He yelped as he ran into someone coming out the doors.
“Sorry! Sorry, sorry …” He shuffled sideways, looked at the W.I. and the newcomer, then gave up and headed across the terrace and into the garden at a pace that was uncomfortably close to a run.