Some lapwings came and went. The turned earth lightened in colour as it dried out. Mid-morning, a fox crossed it east to west, deft and confident, unconcerned by the gulls planing and diving over its head. After that the field remained empty for some time, until the vicar of St Mary’s Ashmore appeared.
He was dressed in the tweed jacket and Fair Isle pullover which always made him look as mild and fatuous as a Labrador dog. Progress was more of a struggle for him than it had been for the fox. The sticky earth forced on him a lurching, abnormal gait. He was out of breath, his shoes were caked with mud and in his arms he was carrying a small child tightly wrapped in a threadbare pink blanket. If he knew anything, he knew this gesture to be muddled and inadequate.
The child, however, did not care. She had already managed to disengage one arm, which she used to point at things. The circling gulls had aroused in her a particular interest. ‘There!’ she said. ‘There!’
Francis Baynes paid no attention, only continued to skate and stagger across the furrows, his voice hoarse in the damp air. He was weeping and he seemed to be arguing with a third person, someone only he could see. Every so often he stopped, turned himself round as if manoeuvring some heavy, ill-designed vehicle, and with considerable effort started back the way he had come. Sometimes this disagreement lasted a minute or two before his internal voices faced him in the required direction again and set him off towards the north edge of the ploughland. From there the going would be much easier, all the way to Nonesuch.
*
Had Francis tarried but a little longer, or turned to look behind him, he might have witnessed the remarkable sight of a golden-eyed European lynx and a vast Siberian tiger bursting out of a wild road into the middle of the ploughed field he had just passed, their hot breath sending plumes of vapour towering up into the wintry air. As it was, by the time they had come into his line of sight, running fast and Ashmore-bound, Millefleur and Circassian Gogol II had dwindled back to normal cat size and were now visible only as two fleet shadows in the lee of a hawthorn hedge.
16
Anna woke hanging against her safety belt. When she moved her head hurt and a dark spinning movement began around her, going faster and faster until she was sick. After that she felt a little better and was able to open her eyes.
The Volvo had ended up on its side at the base of the bank. Through the driver’s side window could be seen the greyish, leggy stems of gorse bushes; a patch of sky. The windscreen sagged inwards, frosted and crystalline, surrounded by loose ribbons of rubber. There was a smell of fuel. Anna kicked and wriggled to get her weight on to the transmission tunnel, then undid the safety belt and slithered out through the windscreen. The effort of this caused her to throw up again, so she sat in the wet grass, looking around at the gorse bushes and thinking. I’m all right. I’m alive. The relief she felt was exuberant but distant. She couldn’t quite get in touch with it. Nothing seemed broken, though her upper body was bruised and sore. She looked at her watch. It was quarter to four in the afternoon. Oh my God, she thought. John. John and Eleanor. I’d better get going.
After tearing its way through the hedge, the Volvo had rolled down the bank, turning over once or twice before it settled into the gorse. From up in the lane where Anna stood swaying and holding her ribs, you wouldn’t know it was there. As she turned to go the world spun briefly – she reached out without thinking for something to hold on to – and she had a sudden clear memory of the accident. In it, the woman who had stepped out into the road in front of her seemed to be floating, perhaps a foot off the ground. ‘The things you think,’ Anna admonished herself.
She stared around vaguely. ‘I wonder where she went? At least I didn’t hit her.’ This conclusion seemed to release her and she set out for the house. She had a less than clear idea of where it was from here. Also she was very thirsty, but she could have a drink when she got there.
*
At the back of the chamber in which I had been trapped, a staircase had been cut into bare earth, but it led up to a solid ceiling and I could make no escape that way. I hunted around the room; I even tried to leap for the hole through which the child had reached down to me, but to no avail. It took some finding and a bit of digging, but at last, behind the staircase I finally managed to locate the entrance to the wild road the fox had blasted through to reach me when last I had been here, diverting it from its time into his own. Now it felt musty and abandoned. It had not, I suspect, been used by cats in my lifetime, or probably even that of my grandfather. It was thin and weak, and when I stuck my head into it, the compass winds there were barely more than a chill breeze carrying a haze of souls whose energies had never been redirected. My lion form was slow to come upon me in this place, and my thoughts felt tired and sluggish. It took far longer than it should have done to find my way back into the world.
*
Late afternoon, Nonesuch.
Mark and Oliver Holland emerged from the rhododendrons on to the Great Lawn, where they stood for a moment energetically brushing each other’s Guernsey pullovers and pressed blue jeans. At their feet lay a blue polythene fertiliser bag, inside which something seemed to be making angry but furtive movements. At one point, while they were cleaning the leaf mould off their hand-made Australian jodhpur boots, the bag rolled to one side and became quite violently agitated.
‘Lively little devils,’ said Mark.
‘Yes, they are, aren’t they?’
‘But not as lively as the other one.’
‘No, not that lively,’ Oliver agreed. He stopped what he was doing to watch a magpie fly across the lawn. ‘Was that a jay?’ he asked. ‘Because it certainly looked like a jay to me.’
The last time they came to Nonesuch they had only managed to take the one cat and that one cat had been more trouble than most of the rest put together, since it had bitten and clawed them both, and then howled unmercifully when they had shut it away. Now they had come back for more. As many cats as they could get, that was what they wanted. As many of these cats as they could get, for the product development people at English Lion to work on.
‘We could look over there,’ said Oliver.
‘We could,’ Mark agreed. He picked up the fertiliser bag and swung it over his shoulder. ‘Well, shall we do that?’
‘Yes.’
They were in the centre of the lawn when the earth seemed to rearrange itself in front of them and a woman came out. The lawn bulged and shifted in a sort of optical illusion, just a brief delusory rearrangement of things, and the woman popped out, massive and bone-coloured, to tower above them in her eternal open-thighed squat. Her yellow feet were planted in the earth. They knew her. They knew her of old. They were relieved to see her. ‘Put those cats down,’ she told them. ‘Forget all that rummaging around. You’re not here to poke your noses in. You never were. You’re here because she needs you.’
‘We wondered why we were here,’ Mark said.
‘She needs you now.’
‘We thought,’ Oliver said, ‘she was dead.’
‘Never think, boys,’ she reminded them. ‘Never think, my nice boys.’
So they dropped the fertiliser bag and trailed off across the lawn towards the front of the house, their voices rising and falling as they went.
‘I’m sure it was a jay.’
‘I don’t think it was, you know.’
The fertiliser bag heaved for a moment or two, then disgorged two female tabby cats who, barely able to believe their luck, exchanged a single puzzled glare before running off in opposite directions.
*
I became so disorientated that I followed the old highway for miles as it doubled back on itself like a dying grass snake and when at last I regained the presence of mind to abandon it I found myself way out past the northern side of the village and had to enter two further highways in order to make my way back to familiar territory. Within minutes of using wild roads that were kept powerful and clear by regular use, my head had cleared and I navigated my way back to the lan
e in front of Nonesuch. I was just about to enter the gates when a fleeing tabby cat almost bowled me over. I dodged out of its way and turned to watch it scurrying down the road, its ears flat to its head and its hind legs bunching and leaping like a scared rabbit’s, and when I looked back again I was confronted by the sight of Grizelda, making her own urgent but rather more stately progress down the drive towards me.
‘I’m leaving,’ Griz informed me matter-of-factly. ‘So don’t try to stop me.’
‘On your own? Where will you go?’
‘Anywhere away from here is good enough for me. This place is becoming far too strange for an old cat like me to stand it any longer. Nightmares all the time; people stealing cats; great white figures rising out of the ground. I’ve had enough of it and if you’d got any sense you’d not be coming back while you have the chance to get away with your skin intact.’
‘Griz – I have to see the Besom. Do you know where she is?’
Griz shook her head sadly. ‘Silly old mog. I tried to persuade her to come with me, but she wasn’t having any of it. Said she was too old to move again and that if you weren’t there to sort out the White Lady she’d have to do it herself. So I said to her, “Pol Tregenna, I’ve known you most of my life, which is far too long for most cats to remember, and you’ve always been as stubborn as a mule. Have it your own way.” And off I went.’
‘But where is she?’ I asked, suddenly chilled.
‘She and Caterina were on their way to the knot garden when last I saw them—’
Without another word I fled up the driveway.
*
Anna sat at the side of the road with her legs tucked up and her arms clasped round her knees. Every so often she applied her dampened handkerchief to the bruises round her right eye. It’s so ridiculous, she thought.
She had wandered into the shadow of the downs, where the tangled lanes slipped down the escarpment before fanning out into the valley like the veins on the back of a hand – a maze of ancient greenways resurfaced with tarmac in the 1920s but still following the vanished commercial logic of the Middle Ages. Little clear identical streams ran beside them. Every barn, hazel coppice, or intimate fold in the hillside looked the same as every other.
I’m lost. I don’t know what they’d all think of me.
She was too dizzy and disorientated to be quite sure whom she meant by they, but the thought made her feel she wasn’t doing enough. After a minute or two she got herself to her feet again and began to walk. She was too far north now and it was late in the afternoon. John was one of them. Francis was, too. They were all depending on her. Poor old Francis, she thought. Eleanor will have worn him to a shred.
After she had been walking for some minutes she heard a dull whining noise, intermittent and indistinct, somewhere off towards Ashmore. It grew rapidly louder, turned from a whine into a roar and a bright-red motorcycle burst round a bend in the lane in front of her, front suspension bumping and boring as its rider fought the understeer. Anna shrank away; then, understanding what she was seeing, stepped back into the road and waved her arms. ‘It’s me!’ she cried. ‘It’s me!’
There was a shriek of brakes, a strong smell of burning rubber. The machine slewed past her, mounted the grass verge, from which its enormous rear tyre tore great clods of earth, then, fishtailing wildly, disappeared round the next corner.
‘Oh dear,’ whispered Anna.
There was a silence. After a moment, the motorcycle came back into view, moving much more slowly. It stopped in front of her. ‘Bloody hell, Anna,’ said Alice Meynell with a grin.
Alice had been back in the country for two hours. She was in love, she admitted, and jet-lagged, and the only cure she knew for either of those things was motorcycling. ‘Best fun in the world, these lanes, as long as you keep your wits about you.’ She was pleased to see her friend – though, as she put it, ‘a bit arse-over-tip’ to find her wandering about concussed like this in the middle of nowhere. She had no idea what was going on and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But – love or not, jet-lag or not – she was still Alice Meynell, who at the age of eight had driven her father’s Land Rover into Ashmore Pond. So when she heard Anna’s garbled tale, she only shrugged and revved her engine. ‘Hop on,’ she commanded.
Anna, awash with relief and affection, hugged her and hopped on. ‘Oh, Alice. Thank God.’
The motorcycle bellowed. The world erupted into speed lines and began to rush past her on either side. Alice Meynell was in charge now. Things would be all right, at least for a while. Then the ice-cold airstream blew Anna’s headache away and her sense of urgency returned. ‘Can you get me to Nonesuch before dark?’ she shouted.
‘This is a Ducati 916, Anna. It could get you to Edinburgh before dark.’
*
Nonesuch, late afternoon.
Joshua Herringe’s courtyard was an empty well, its ancient shadows drawing away from the walls with the onset of evening.
Three figures, bulky-looking yet difficult to identify in the milky, rather beautiful greyish light, squeezed through the hole in the Painted Room wall and made their way to the centre of the littered space. Ahead of them, somewhat more than life-sized and leaning forward like someone walking into the wind, floated the woman who called herself Izzie.
Francis Baynes’s progress was slow. He held his head at a strained, reluctant angle, as if he were trying to dissociate himself from his own actions.
In his arms Eleanor Dawe chuckled gleefully to herself. There was the faintest flicker in the air above her. She stared up at it, transfixed. ‘Aaah,’ she said, in a voice more like a child’s. She kicked her legs to be let down, and as soon as Francis Baynes had unwrapped her from the pink blanket and set her on the ground, she began to burrow. Her plump little arms and legs made energetic swimming motions. A dimple of sour dry earth formed quickly around her, slipping away like sand pouring through an egg timer. Then she was gone.
The three remaining figures stood about vacantly, staring at one another, then down at the disturbed earth. One by one, they settled on to their hands and knees and followed the child. As they swam into the ground their expressions wavered between distaste and puzzlement. Mark Holland got his mouth full of soil.
The woman called Izzie hung in the air above them. Then she wrapped herself in a kind of dark bubble and she too vanished like a dream.
*
There was a clammy mist wreathing around the house and no sign of any cats. When I called out, all that answered me was a weak and muffled echo of my own voice. I was just about to round the corner to the back of the house where the knot garden was situated when there came a suddenly mechanical, rumbling sound ahead of me and, a few moments later, a higher-pitched roar from the vicinity of the road, which grew ever louder in volume as it approached. I hurled myself into some bushes, and landed on something soft and warm.
There was a yelp, then, ‘Where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere for you,’ a voice hissed.
It was Caterina and behind her, half hidden by the shadows and the mist, was the Besom.
It transpired that Loves A Dustbin had been looking for me, too. Instead, he had found the Besom, who had been half frightened to death by the sound of a large dogfox addressing her. She had been trying to face him off with a show of spiked fur and a terrifying spread of toothless gums, when Caterina had intervened to explain he was not there to eat her.
‘He said some pretty weird stuff,’ Caterina finished, ‘then he went to look for you.’
‘I’m glad to see you. Cat,’ I said, licking her swiftly on the cheek, ‘but I have to ask Ma something. Something important. Anna’s and John’s child,’ I went on quickly. ‘Have you noticed anything odd about her?’
The Besom froze. She batted her eyes rapidly, as though the question had confused her so much that she was unable to focus. ‘The child,’ she said slowly. ‘Ah, yes. The child. With the eyes…’
‘Green,’ I prompted.
‘Her eyes.?
??
‘Whose eyes?’ Cat stared from Ma Tregenna to me and back again.
‘She’s got her eyes all right. And soon she’ll have the rest of her.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Caterina was almost bouncing with irritation.
‘She kept collecting these… objects,’ I said. ‘The baby, I mean. Strange objects; not what you’d expect a child to want to play with. And every time a new one appeared the dreams came…’
The Besom nodded wisely. ‘Ah yes. Witch must have stuffed them things full of herself and buried ’em around the house for when all her lives ran out and she needed to find other ways back. Must have called on the dream maker when she died to send her dreams, help her retrieve her memories.’
‘Stuffed herself into the objects?’ I frowned, bewildered.
‘Aye, I reckon. Seen it before, I have. Previous life, though. ’T’ain’t really her self, as such,’ the Besom continued. “Tis her spells and craft. Her memories and the like. To keep other folks’ thieving hands off them, apart from anything else. I knew a witch once kept all her childhoods in a little blue egg. Weasel ate it in the end and she went quite mad. Forgot how to speak and such…’ She mused on this for a moment. Caterina and I exchanged glances. A little later she said, ‘Tell me what she got. I need to know how many.’
‘An old doll’s head.’ I remembered the horrid thing with the flickering blue eyes I’d dug up in the knot garden.
‘A black metal box thing,’ Cat offered, ‘that made a noise when you opened it.’
‘A black shiny object full of old hair,’ I added, ‘and then there was a long silver spoon.’
‘I remember that thing,’ the Besom said with a grimace. ‘Come at me with that, she did, just like her ladyship. Stirred the pot with that spoon, the witch did, stirred the pot and supped from it most like.’
I closed my eyes. ‘A small doll made of bone, too.’
The Besom puffed out her chest. ‘Witch’s mannikin,’ she declared sagely.
‘And a tiny picture that changed when I looked at it.’