The Dragon Charmer (7 page)

Fern devoted the following morning to final preparations and thank-you letters, which she, being efficient, penned beforehand. Then there were long phone calls—to the caterers, to prospective guests, to Marcus Greig. Will, not so much unhelpful as uninvolved, removed Gaynor from the scene and took her for a walk.

“What do you make of it all?” he asked her.

“Make of what?” she said, her mind elsewhere. “You mean—that business of Alison Redmond? Or—”

“Actually,” said Will, “I meant Marcus Greig. Who’s been talking to you about Alison? Fern tries never to mention her.”

“Gus Dinsdale,” Gaynor explained. She continued hesitantly: “I don’t want to be nosy, but I can’t help wondering…
Was
her death really an accident? You’re both rather—odd—aboutit.”

“Oh no,” said Will. “It wasn’t an accident.”

Gaynor stopped and stared at him, suddenly very white. “N-not Fern—?”

Will’s prompt laughter brought the color flooding back to her cheeks. “You’ve been thinking in whodunits,” he accused. “Poor Gaynor. A Ruth Rendell too many!”

“Well, what
did
happen?” demanded Gaynor, feeling foolish.

“The truth is less mundane,” Will said. “It often is. Alison stole a key that didn’t belong to her and opened a Door that shouldn’t be opened. I wouldn’t call that an accident.”

“Gus said something about a
flood
?”

Will nodded. “She was swept away. So was Fern—she was lucky to survive.”

Gaynor felt herself becoming increasingly bewildered,
snatching at straws without ever coming near the haystack. “I gather Fern was ill,” she said. “They thought—Gus and Maggie that she would have told me, only she never has. Some sort of post-traumatic shock?”

“Shock leading to amnesia, that’s what the doctors said. They had to say
something
. She was gone for five days.”

“Gone?
Gone where?”

“To shut the Door, of course. The Door Alison had opened. The flood had washed it away” He was studying her as he spoke, his words nonsense to her, his expression inscrutable. She could not detect either mockery or evasion; it was more as if they were speaking on different subjects, or in different languages.

“Can we start again?” she said. “With Alison. I was told—She was a girlfriend of your father’s?”

“Maybe,” said Will. “She slipped past Fern for a while. But she wasn’t really interested in Dad.”

“What did she do?”

“She stole a key—”

“I mean, what did she do for a living?”

“She worked in an art gallery in London. At least, that was what you might call her cover.”

“Her cover? She was a
crook?”

“Of course not.” He smiled half a smile. “Well, not in the sense you mean.”

“In what sense, then?”

“She was a witch,” said Will.

She looked for the rest of the smile, but it did not materialize. The narrowing of his eyes and the slight crease between his brows was merely a reaction against the sun. His expression was unfathomable.

After a pause that lasted just a little too long, she said: “Herbal remedies—zodiac medallions—dancing naked round a hilltop on Midsummer’s Eve? That sort of thing?”

“Good Lord no,” Will responded mildly. “Alison was the real McCoy.”

“Satanism?”

He shook his head. “Satan is simply a label of convenience. Mind you, if Jesus had come back a few hundred years later, and seen what had been done in his name—the Crusades, or
the Inquisition, or even just a routine schism with heretics burning at the stake over a point of doctrine—he’d probably have given up on all religion then and there. The atheist formerly known as Christ. He might even have decided it would be best—or at least much easier—to corrupt and destroy the human race instead of wasting time trying to save it. You get the gods you deserve.”

“You’re wandering from the point,” Gaynor said, determined the discussion was going to go somewhere, though she had no idea precisely where. It occurred to her that his outlook—she could not think of a better word—must have something to do with his paintings, or vice versa, but it didn’t seem to clarify anything. “What kind of a—what kind of a witch was Alison?”

“She had the Gift,” Will explained. (She could hear the capital letter.) “The ability to do things … beyond the range of ordinary human capacity.” He did not appear to notice the doubt in Gaynor’s questioning gaze. “When the universe was created, something—alien—got into the works, a lump of matter from outside. They called it the Lodestone. A friend of ours had the theory that it might have been a whole different cosmos, imploded into this ball of concentrated matter, but … Well, anyhow, it distorted everything around it. Including people. Especially people. It affected their genetic makeup, creating a freak gene that they passed on even when the Stone itself was destroyed. A sort of gene for witchcraft.” He gave her a sudden dazzling and eminently normal smile. “Don’t worry. You don’t have to believe me. I just think you ought to know. In case anything happens that shouldn’t.”

“Do you think something is going to happen?” asked Gaynor, mesmerized.

“Maybe. I’d whistle up a demon if I could, just to stop this idiotic wedding.”

“Idiotic?” She was bemused by his choice of adjective.

“Can you think of a better word? Fern’s marrying a man she doesn’t love, probably as a gesture of rejection. That seems fairly idiotic to me.”

“What is she supposed to be rejecting?”

“The Gift,” he said. “That’s the whole problem. Don’t you understand? Fern’s a witch, too.”

Gaynor stopped abruptly for the second time, staring at him in a sudden violent uncertainty. They had walked quite a way and she was aware of the empty countryside all around them, the wind ruffling the grasses, the piping voice of an isolated bird. The wild loneliness of it filled her with an upsurge of panic that nudged her into anger. “If this is your idea of a joke—”

And then normality intruded. The dog came out of nowhere, bounding up to them on noiseless paws, halting just in front of her. Its mouth was open in a grin full of teeth and its tongue lolled. Will bent down to pat its muzzle but the yellow-opal eyes were fixed on Gaynor. The man followed briskly on its heels. He, too, gave the uncanny impression of appearing from nowhere. But this was normality, or so Gaynor assured herself. A man and his dog, walking on the moors. The dog was friendly, the man, dressed like a tramp, at least unequivocally human. Will evidently knew them.

“This is Ragginbone,” he told Gaynor. The man, not the dog. And: “This is Gaynor Mobberley. She’s a close friend of Fern’s.” A firm handclasp, bright eyes scanning her face. He looked very old, she thought, or perhaps not so much old as aged, reminding her of an oak chest her mother had inherited recently from an antique relative. The wood was scored and blackened but tough, unyielding, halfway to carbonization. The man’s face seemed to have been carved in a similar wood, a long time ago, scratched with a thousand lines that melted into mobility when he smiled at her. His scarecrow hair was faded to a brindled straw but his brows were still dark and strong, crooked above the bright eyes that shone with a light that was not quite laughter but something deeper and more solemn. She wondered about his name (a sobriquet? a nickname?) but was too polite to ask.

“And Lougarry.” Will indicated the dog. A shaggy animal without a collar who looked part Alsatian and all wolf. But Gaynor had grown up with dogs and was not particularly deterred. She extended her hand and the dog sniffed briefly, apparently more out of courtesy than curiosity.

“And how is Fernanda?” asked the man called Ragginbone.

“Still resolved on matrimony,” said Will. “It’s making her
very jumpy. She picked a fight with me last night, just to prove she was doing the right thing.”

“She has to choose for herself,” said the old man. “Neither you nor I have the right to coerce her, or even advise”

Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back toward Yarrowdale, following a different path that plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.

“Was this where Alison drowned?” Gaynor said suddenly.

“Yes and no,” said Will. “This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Farther down from here.”

Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.

Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.

“You’ll stay around, won’t you?” Will said to him.

“There’s nothing I can do.”

“I know, but…”

“Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?”

“There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.” He appealed to Gaynor. “You’ve felt it, too, haven’t you?” She remembered her nightmare in front of the television and the owl dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. “It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.”

“We’ll be here,” said Ragginbone.

He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. “I suppose he’s a wizard?” Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.

“Oh no,” said Will. “Not anymore.”

* * *

Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts, and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twenty-first-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualized something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with premarital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. “I’ve run out of stamps,” she announced. “I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.”

“Why can’t you?”

“The older generation would be offended. Etiquette hasn’t caught up with technology yet.”

“Shall I go and get the stamps for you?” Gaynor offered. “I can find the post office. I saw it yesterday.”

“That would be wonderful,” Fern said warmly, “but you’ve only just got in. Have some coffee first. The pot’s on the stove. I made the real thing: I thought we might need it. Instant doesn’t have the same kick.”

Gaynor helped herself and replaced the contents of Fern’s mug, which had begun to congeal.

“How are you getting on with my brother?” Fern enquired, scribbling her way automatically through another note.

“I like him,” Gaynor responded tentatively, thinking of the row the previous night.

“So do I,” said Fern. “Even if he is a pain in the bum.”

“He lives in a world of his own, doesn’t he?” Gaynor said rather too casually, seating herself on the opposite side of the table.

“Not exactly.” Fern’s head was still bent over her work.

“He lives in someone else’s world a world where he doesn’t belong. That’s just the trouble.”

   Now we search the smoke for her, skimming other visions, bending our dual will to a single task. But the fire-magic is wayward and unpredictable: it may sometimes be guided but it cannot be forced. The images unravel before us in a jumble, distorted by our pressure, quick-changing, wavering, breaking up. Irrelevancies intrude, a cavalcade of monsters from the long-lost past, mermaid, unicorn, Sea Serpent, interspersed with glimpses that might, or might not, be more significant: the hatchling perching on a dark, long-fingered hand, a solitary flower opening suddenly in a withered garden like the unlidding of a watching eye. Time here has no meaning, but in the world beyond Time passes, years maybe, ere we see her again. And the vision, when it comes, takes us off guard, a broad vista unwinding slowly in an interlude of distraction, a road that meanders with the contours of the land, white puffball clouds trailing in the wake of a spring breeze. A horseless car is traveling along the road: the sunlight winks off its steel-green coachwork. The roof is folded back to leave the top open; music emanates from a mechanical device within, not the raucous drumbeat of the rabble but a music of deep notes and mellow harmonies, flowing like the hills. The girl is driving the car. She looks different, older, her small-boned face hollowed into shape, tapering, purity giving way to definition, a slight pixie look tempered by the familiar gravitas. More than ever, it is a face of secrets. Her hair is cut in a straight line across her brow and level with her jaw. As the car accelerates the wind fans the hair out from her temples and sweeps back her fringe, revealing that irregularity of growth at the parting that we call the Witch’s Crook. Her mouth does not smile. Her companion—another girl—is of no importance. I resist the urge to look too closely, chary of alarming her, plucking Sysselore away from the smoke and letting the picture haze over.

When we need her, we will find her. I know that now.

We must be ready.

V