The Greenstone Grail (8 page)

‘I hear you have a son,’ Rianna said. ‘Twelve or thirteen?’

‘Twelve.’

‘They say he’s very unusual, for a boy of that age.’

‘I think him special,’ Annie confirmed with some warmth.

‘Part Asian, I understand?’

There was a nuance in her words, Annie believed, and she did her best to suppress a tiny spurt of anger. ‘Do you?’ she said.

If she was hostile, Rianna didn’t appear to notice. ‘Who
was
his father?’ she asked. There was a note of boredom in her voice, as if the question was automatic rather than
inquisitive, but the narrow eyes were intent. Or so Annie imagined, though in the sombre interior of the bookshop it was difficult to be sure.

‘He was my husband,’ she answered, and there was an instant when Rianna appeared to freeze, perhaps recognizing the snub, but it passed, and she turned away, and left the shop without further questions.

She seemed more interested in Nathan than in my friendship with Michael, Annie thought, and she found this so baffling that she determined to mention it to Bartlemy, when a suitable opportunity arose.

In the kitchen at Thornyhill Bartlemy listened to the story in his usual unruffled manner. The cauldron of stock still simmered on the stove; Annie couldn’t recall a time when it hadn’t been there, and she had a sudden fancy that it was the same as the night she arrived, its contents stirred, sampled, augmented, but never changed, growing richer and more flavoursome over the years. The smell that drifted from beneath the lid still made her mouth water, and a mug of that broth – something Bartlemy doled out only rarely – satisfied hunger and warmed the heart like nothing else. ‘Do you ever change your stockpot?’ she asked him.

‘Good stock needs time,’ he said. ‘The longer the better.’

‘How long?’ Annie inquired; but he didn’t answer.

‘Don’t worry about this Rianna Sardou,’ he said at last. ‘She’s probably just curious.’

‘Why should she be curious about Nathan?’ Annie persisted. ‘She must know of him through Michael, but … why ask about his
father
?’

‘It may have been just a shot in the dark. She may be the inquisitive type. Has she ever seen him?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. He likes Michael, so I expect he would’ve mentioned meeting his wife.’

‘Mm. Well, no doubt the truth will become evident in due course. Events – like this stock – take time to mature. You are young, and impatient.’

‘Not that young,’ Annie said. ‘I’m thirty-six.’

‘How old is Rianna Sardou, do you suppose?’

‘Late thirties … forty … Older than Michael, I think. Why?’

‘I just wondered,’ Bartlemy said.

When she had gone, he sat in the living room with Hoover, drinking sweet tea and gazing into the fire. ‘Why did I come here?’ he asked of no one in particular, but Hoover cocked an ear. ‘I read the signs, but I have never been one to follow such things. There have been few portents for me, over the years. All I ever wanted to do was heal sickness, and cook. Two sides of the same coin, Rukush. Drugs and potions cure illness, good food makes the body strong, and great food – ah, great food nourishes the soul. I can prepare a dessert that will turn a peasant into a poet, I can soothe the tyrant’s rage with soups and sauces, I can roast a sirloin so tender that it would make a proud man humble and an atheist believe in God. That was all the power I ever wanted. But when I saw a fantasy in the smoke I came here, and I waited. And the day Annie knocked on my door I knew that was what I was waiting for. Annie and the child. But still I don’t know why. There are always more questions, less answers. I think it is time to draw the curtains close, and make a different fire.’

When the last of the logs had burned down he cleaned out the grate and pinned the curtains together against prying eyes. Even so, it was far into the night before he lit a new fire, feeding it not with wood or coal but with bluish crystals that spat and cracked after too long in storage. The flame they emitted was also bluish, and cold-looking, and it filled the room with a pale chill light. Presently he threw some powder
on it which seemed to be damp, turning the flame to smoke, and the room darkened again, and the chimney was closed off so the smoke could not escape, and the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy made a gesture, a little like that of the man in Nathan’s dream, and the smoke was sucked into a cloud which hovered in one place, and there was a whirling at its heart. Vague colours flickered in its depths like trails of light. Then the whirling steadied, and the colours condensed, and in the midst of the smoke there was a picture.

A cup. It looked mediaeval or older, with a wide bowl and a short, thick stem entwined in coiling patterns that seemed to shape themselves into runes and hieroglyphs. It was made of opaque glass or polished stone, but it glowed as if endowed with secret life, and appeared to be floating in the green halo of its own light. The thread of a whisper came to Bartlemy’s ears from nothing in the room. Then the light vanished and the cup was falling, clattering onto a floor somewhere, rolling back and forth on the arc of its rim. A human hand descended slowly, and picked it up. ‘The Grimthorn Grail,’ Bartlemy murmured. ‘One of a hundred – a thousand – that lay claim to the ancient legend. But it was sold abroad, and lost in the turmoil of war, and the Thorns who had failed to care for it are long gone …’

The vision of the cup was replaced by a muddle of dim shapes, all unclear, but he thought he could make out a running figure, coming towards him. The image was too dark to see properly but he had an impression of breathlessness and fear, and shadows following, swarming on its heels, and in the quiet of the night there was the sound of whispering, reaching out from the smoke. It seemed to him that it was the same whisper he had heard a few minutes earlier, though louder, and with different words, different purpose. But he
couldn’t be sure, since the words were indistinguishable, the purpose unrevealed. The picture sombred and was lost, and other images succeeded it, changing swiftly, some distinct, some vague and blurred. A small chapel with a cloaked man going from candle to candle: the lighted taper picked out his profile as he bent his head, the nose outthrust like a broken spar, the lipless fold of the mouth, the eyes sagging between multiple lids. The candles burned with a greasy flame, showing a gargoyle-face peering from a stony arch, and a low altar without a cross. Then the scene dissolved into a wood with tangled trees, maybe the Darkwood – then the flash and sparkle of a river in sunshine – a cage or grille, and hands that shook the bars – a wood in springtime, with a brown twig-legged creature lurking in the hollow of a tree – the river again, only this time there was a face beneath the water, and rippled sunlight flowing over it, but he knew it wasn’t drowned. Then back to the cloaked man, raising his arm, and a sudden blaze of fire, fire in the chapel, fire in the wood – and lastly, for no reason that Bartlemy could understand, a shingle beach in the drear light of a winter’s morning, and the ebb and surge of grey waves, and a man who seemed to have come out of the water, wearing a hood that covered his entire head.

Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her
to
this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’

Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glanced
back into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.

For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.

Hoover raised his head hopefully.

‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’

In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.

Annie laughed.

Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.

‘I get seasick.’

‘On a river?’

‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’

At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with them, but there was a large section left, and Annie, Bartlemy and Hoover sat by the fire at teatime (it was not yet too warm for a fire to be unwelcome) and munched their way through a respectable portion of it. Annie talked about Nathan, as she so often did, proud of his academic achievements, but still happier at the person she felt he was growing into. ‘I’m being boring,’ she said, catching herself up short. ‘Boring on about my son.’

‘What mother doesn’t?’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘You know I’m not bored.’

‘It’s at times like this,’ Annie continued after a few minutes, ‘birthdays, and family times, that I wonder most about his
father. Not – not Daniel, I can’t fool myself that he’s like Daniel. Maybe in nature, in some ways, but not looks.’

‘He could be a throwback,’ Bartlemy said lightly. ‘You shouldn’t worry about it.’

‘A throwback to what? And I don’t worry, that’s not the word. I just feel I ought to
know
. One day soon he’s going to ask, and I’ll have to tell him, but I’ve no idea
what
I’m going to tell him. Have you … thought about it any more?’

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal,’ Bartlemy said.

‘Will you tell me what you’ve thought?’ Annie said a little shyly.

Bartlemy set down his plate with the remainder of a piece of cake. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you must understand this is pure speculation. We may never know the truth.’

‘I understand.’

‘We spoke once before of the Gate of Death. It has always been so called because death was supposed to be the only way to open it, but love, so they say, is stronger than death, and it may be that your love opened the Gate, and in a moment lost to memory you passed through, and returned with a child in your womb. Such unexplained pregnancies have happened before: I need hardly mention the most notorious case.’

Annie glanced up in bewilderment; then her face cleared. ‘I
really
don’t think Nathan’s the new Messiah,’ she said. ‘My God, I hope not!’

‘I too … but he
is
special. There is a maturity, a strength of character which distinguishes him. He’s a teenager now: it will be interesting to see if he displays the wayward behaviour usually associated with that age.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’ Annie said. ‘If he doesn’t start being rude to me, and having moods, and playing very loud music in his bedroom, and smoking pot and taking E, and treating me as an embarrassment? Is
that
when I should worry?’

She wasn’t quite joking, and Bartlemy smiled only a little. ‘If you want to,’ he said. ‘Worrying doesn’t achieve anything, but we all do it. If you need to worry that Nathan gives you no real cause for anxiety … Exactly. Where were we? You passed the Gate, or may have done, and became pregnant, so you believe, in that moment.
Not
your boyfriend’s child: that seems fairly obvious. There are worlds without number beyond the Gate, Powers which rarely touch our lives so nearly. Once in a while, however, those Powers concern themselves with our immediate affairs. Not in my experience, nor that of anyone I know; but it
has
happened. Maybe there is some task to be done, some destiny to fulfil – mind you, I’ve always had my doubts about Destiny: she’s a temperamental lady. I feel Nathan was born for a purpose, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a doom which only he can avert. Time will show. Whatever the truth, it seems clear Nathan has a father from outside this world, a being superior to us, in intellect and quality if not in essence, possibly one of the Powers themselves – anything is possible. You both have enemies, we know that much, enemies on what might be termed a supernatural plane; but a child that unique would attract attention from birth. The circumstances of his conception – the Gate opening for someone still living – would cause ripples that the sensitive might feel. Certainly there is – interest – in him, from many sources.’