‘Six objects.’
I nodded.
‘There’ll be seven,’ Ma Tregenna stated. ‘There’s always seven. Numbers matter in magic, you know. Some numbers are stronger than others. The last object will be the oldest and the strongest: the first thing she started with. And when she’s found that one and offered it up to the White Lady the babe’ll be hers and that’ll be the end of all of us.’
‘Whatever it is, we must find it before the child does.’
‘That’s what the fox said!’ Caterina piped up. ‘ “I must find it before she does” – that’s what he said before he went.’
‘So where did he go?’ I asked with a sinking feeling. I had hoped he would be here to advise me. I did not much want to be responsible for a situation that bewildered me so thoroughly.
‘I don’t know. He said he might be gone a while, and then he just… disappeared.’
‘He did say one other thing before he went,’ the Besom added almost as an afterthought.
‘What?’ My tone was sharp; I couldn’t help it.
The Besom looked affronted. ‘No need for rudeness. The young are so impatient. Wait till you get to my age,’ she rambled on, ‘then you’ll see how annoying it can be.’
‘None of us will have the chance to reach your age at this rate,’ I grumbled.
Luckily she was too deaf to hear me, though she gave me a hard look. ‘He said something about “the power of three”. That it would take three of the old blood to stop her, three who became great cats on the highways; three who guarded the world from dreams.’
‘And now you’re here!’ Caterina cried happily. ‘So there are three of us, three dreamcatchers.’
I regarded her dubiously. ‘That’s all very well,’ I said. ‘But what are we supposed to do?’
The mechanical clanking that had been going on in the background all this while came to a sudden halt and I could hear voices. My ears pricked up. ‘Anna’s by the knot garden,’ I declared with some relief. ‘She must have the baby with her.’
The three of us made our way through the mist to the back of the house. But what we saw there gave us no reassurance at all.
*
When Anna arrived at Nonesuch the light was fading. A few of the upper windows reflected the faint eggshell colours of the western sky. The rest were like shutters, and whatever lay behind them remained as uncommunicative and dark as the cedars in the grounds. The roar of the Ducati blatted back off the front of the house, then turned itself off like a tap. In the silence that followed, Anna took a few unsteady steps across the gravel to ease the trembling in her legs, staring up at the curiously angled roofs and gables.
Alice Meynell, meanwhile, propped the motorcycle on its stand, prised off her helmet, ran her fingers through her cropped hair. ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘Anna?’
‘Shh,’ said Anna absently. She tilted her head to listen.
She had heard the sound of machinery moving backwards and forwards somewhere behind the house. She looked at her watch. The builders would be long gone. It’s the knot garden, she thought. John’s going to grub up the knot garden, on his own in the dark. Her heart went out to him suddenly. She couldn’t bear the thought of him there on his own in the fog of sunk cost error, throwing good money after bad, hoping to turn his life round by doing something which had never worked anyway. Out loud she said, ‘Alice, will you do me a favour? Will you wait here while I go and talk to him? Then you can make us all a cup of tea.’
Alice rubbed at an imaginary mark on the fuel tank of the Ducati. ‘You go and give him hell, ducks,’ she said.
‘I’ll do my best.’
It was colder behind the house. White mist pooled in the knot garden. The digger, a yellow JCB hired for the day, clanked and roared, sawing backwards and forwards in short, ungainly bursts. Its black energetic outline loomed up against the afterglow, ramming into a line of hedge, reversing away with a festoon of box roots hanging like severed electrical cable from its raised scoop. Diesel smoke poured into the clear air. Anna could see John hunched up in the cab, wearing his precious site helmet. She called, but he couldn’t hear. She waved, but he didn’t notice. What was new? In the end she waded knee-deep into the mist – it was as white and cold as milk from the fridge – and stood in front of the lumbering machine, waving her arms until it jerked to a halt so suddenly that the engine stalled.
John sat there for a moment, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands. Then he opened the cab door and stuck his head out. ‘That was a bit stupid,’ he said.
She smiled back. ‘Wasn’t it? And it’s the second time I’ve done it today.’
He frowned. ‘I was going to try to get this job done before the light went.’
‘But will you come down and talk to me? Just for a moment?’
‘I don’t know what we’d talk about.’
‘About Eleanor. I thought we’d talk about Eleanor.’
This brought him out of the cab and they stood looking at one another awkwardly in the hot, oil-smelling gloom by the engine. It was hard to judge his expression. She wanted to put her arms round him, but she knew she must keep a clear head. Perhaps he wanted that too. In any case, neither of them could think of anything to say.
Then he narrowed his eyes, reached out to touch the bruises on her cheek. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ he wanted to know. ‘And where’s Eleanor?’
Anna told him what had happened. ‘Eleanor’s all right,’ she said. ‘But the car’s a write-off.’
‘I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe it.’
‘John, we have to talk.’ Anna tried to make eye contact with him, but he wouldn’t look at her. ‘Please?’
‘You left your daughter with someone we hardly know,’ he accused.
‘It isn’t quite like that, John.’
‘What is it like?’
‘I don’t want her here, I told you that. And Francis Baynes is perfectly reliable.’
John shrugged. He turned away abruptly and swung himself back up into the cab. ‘I’m sure he is,’ he said. ‘It’s you I have my doubts about.’
Anna bit her lip. ‘John, Eleanor’s your daughter.’
He gave a quiet laugh. ‘I remember that.’
‘So won’t you come away with us? For her sake? Don’t you want this sorted out?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Then—’
‘It’s just that I have my own view of what needs sorting out. Do you see, Anna? I won’t have you take my decisions away from me by presenting your view of the world as the only correct one.’
‘John!’
He did something in the cab; then, when the engine of the JCB burst into life, revved it until the ground shook and the air stank of burned diesel. As soon as he was certain it would keep running, he let it idle and stuck his head out again. ‘What I want to do is get this job done. What I don’t want is to have my choices made for me. Can you understand that?’
‘Nonesuch is making our choices,’ Anna said. ‘Not us.’
‘You just won’t give up, will you?’
He put the digger into gear. It coughed, hesitated, then lurched forward suddenly, its rear wheels throwing up earth.
‘You won’t either,’ Anna whispered. ‘You won’t give up either.’
With her arms folded under her breasts and her shoulders hunched against the cold, she walked away. When she stopped to look back, the JCB was still visible, rolling busily about like a Tonka toy in the low white mist. She stood watching until the darkness swallowed it, and she could follow its progress only by the irregular squeak and clank of the shovel, the hiss of the hydraulics, the snarl and groan of the exhaust. Eventually she wiped her eyes and turned away.
At that, a comforting arm went round her shoulders and Alice Meynell said, ‘Don’t cry, love. Don’t cry.’
‘Oh dear. Have you been here all the time?’
‘No,’ Alice said. But she had clearly heard most of
the exchange, because she added, ‘Come on. He’s not worth it.’
Anna sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘He is, Alice. That’s the problem. He is worth it. Will you take me back to the village? I want to see Eleanor.’ Then she said, ‘What’s that?’
*
The JCB had shuddered to a halt. On his last pass, John had set the angle of the shovel too steeply and instead of peeling up the remaining hedge it had buried itself in the earth. Anna and Alice heard the cab door open as he got out to look at the damage. Torchlight skittered across the knot garden to reveal white mist, churned earth and uprooted vegetation, then the front of the vehicle itself, which seemed to have sunk into the ground. John moved forward cautiously and dropped the torch. For a second he was visible in its yellow beam, his face a pale, drawn blur under the site helmet. His whole body looked puzzled.
‘Are you all right?’ called Anna.
He made an irritated gesture, as if to say ‘Don’t bother me now’, then, as he picked up the torch, vanished again. Shortly after that, Anna heard a low cry. The torchbeam bobbed about meaninglessly, settled on something she couldn’t quite make out, some movement at the base of the silent vehicle. Then she understood. All around him the ground mist had begun to move. It was flowing across the knot garden at an unhurried pace, rippling and parting here and there like shallow water over stones, speeding up a little towards the centre where the JCB had stranded itself, then pouring smoothly and silently over the edge of the hole which had opened up there. The knot garden was emptying itself like a bath.
‘Anna, come and look. Come and look at this!’ He bent down and peered into the hole. ‘I can see something down there,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to have a look—’
‘John, no!’ called Anna. ‘Wait!’
But by the time they got there he was gone.
Standing at the edge of the hole, they watched the mist slipping over and into the darkness. Alice Meynell – wondering aloud how much harm a bit of fog could do – knelt down to have a closer look. ‘I can see what he meant,’ she said. Her voice echoed back from the hole. ‘There are stairs in there. Steps. Can you see?’
Anna shook her head. ‘I don’t want to see.’
But she knew she would be made to in the end. She waited miserably for the last of the mist to drain away and vanish. A cold, stale smell filled her nostrils. It was the smell of history – the headless doll, the twist of hair, bad dreams in the night. Old photographs she couldn’t understand. Lives she had already lived, which, though she remembered nothing of them, would never let her be.
‘Why did he have to go in there?’ she whispered, more to herself than Alice. ‘It’s just one more horrible bit of the past.’
She looked up at Nonesuch, looming above her, its queer gables and gambrel roofs black against the sky, then down again into the hole – from which issued suddenly the hollow, echoing cry of a baby.
‘My God,’ said Alice.
They stared at one another. A noise came out of Anna’s mouth, a kind of muffled whimper in which you could barely discern the word ‘Eleanor’. What’s happened? she asked herself. I can’t cope with this, I won’t be able to cope. The thought made her instantly calm. ‘I can see the steps,’ she told Alice quietly.
‘Anna—’
‘I’ll go first.’
*
It wasn’t far.
The stairs were narrow and steep. Worn into John’s beloved curve of use, slick with moisture on every tread, they had an acoustic of their own, which fetched up echoes and refractions of voices, and what turned out to be music. Near the bottom a faint light wavered on the damp walls. There was a smell of candle-wax. Anna paused and felt behind her until she found Alice Meynell’s hand.
‘I’m still here,’ Alice reassured her.
‘Alice, listen!’
It was the ‘Für Elise’.
Anna shivered. With the old melody dripping a reluctant sweetness into the air around her, she stepped into the candlelight.
The room in which she found herself was circular in plan, perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Useless to ask yourself who had built it, Anna thought. Something had already convinced her this was the wrong question. It was as old as Dr Russell’s paleolithic finds on the downs, just another temple to that malformed Iceni goddess, a chamber of worship echoing with her groans of loss and defiance in the face of time. It’s been here from the beginning, she decided. Since before the beginning. Successive Herringes, locked into the past yet somehow unable to cope with the idea of a time before themselves, had rebuilt it to try to obscure this obvious fact. Even now, sugary Victorian plaster was falling off the uneven walls to reveal rough limestone blocks, thick with calcium deposits, eroding at their unmortared joints. There were dozens of niches and recesses at head height, waist height, and niches you would have to lie on the floor to reach. In them were objects collected to no good purpose by the same Herringes; and older things which Anna did not wish to look at. Here and there great thick grey cobwebs swept up, like net curtains layered three or four inches deep, towards a ceiling which seemed too far away.
There was no furniture.
A knot-shaped design took up most of the floor.
On the other side of it, in a loose, shifting group in the candlelight, she recognised the Holland brothers and Francis Baynes. Mark and Oliver were busying themselves about, moving from niche to niche like shop assistants searching for a difficult item. Francis looked ill and exhausted, and under some appalling strain. He had her daughter in his arms. ‘Francis?’ Anna said. ‘Francis?’ At this, the baby chuckled; the candles flickered (was that another figure, there in the shadows? If it was, it had vanished in the instant she saw it); and Francis stood forward of the others. Awkwardly, he raised Eleanor Dawe up in his arms, as if presenting her to the room.
‘Oh, you bastards!’ Anna shouted. ‘Eleanor, stop this!’
17
Though the design cut into the flagstones bore some resemblance to the knot garden of Joshua Herringe, its complexities left even less for the intelligence to grasp. Each line of it seemed to shift continually. Everywhere Anna looked, patterns seethed away from her eye yet rushed towards it at the same time, so that she was forced to blink and wince, and turn away. Halfway across the knot, her husband struggled in slow motion, caught fast like a fly in a web, facing away from her with one hand raised. He had been running towards his daughter, she saw, when the design reached up to entangle him. It had taken away his time. His cry of despair was still dragging itself out of him, in a kind of formless, never-ending groan.
Mark and Oliver were amused. Every so often they stopped what they were doing to laugh at his slowly flailing limbs, his expression of anger and terror; or to look slyly across at Eleanor – who, one of her pudgy little hands held up in a curious, hieratic gesture, seemed to have brought all this about.
‘Eleanor!’ Anna cried. ‘I won’t tell you again!’
A soft laugh filled the room. The child leaned forward. ‘To be honest, dear, I never liked “Eleanor”,’ she said, in the voice of Stella Herringe. ‘You could have done better.’ Suddenly she seemed to notice her father, suspended there between two of his own moments. ‘Poor old John. Always so intense. You should have seen him at thirteen. He shivered like a pony when you fucked him.’ She laughed. ‘Just like a pony.’
John Dawe forged on into nowhere, groaning. Anna could bear it no longer and plunged in after him. As she slowed down, the world accelerated around her. Every sound in the chamber shifted abruptly into a higher register. Even the quality of the light seemed to change, brightening, becoming bluer and sharper. But she never found out what would have happened if she had continued. Mark and Oliver, exchanging the high-pitched squeals of bats as they flickered and skipped from niche to niche, found what they were looking for. Their enraptured cries caught Eleanor’s attention and she lost interest.
For Anna – though not for John – things slowed down again. The world spun. The knot expelled her. She
found herself on the floor, being sick for the third time that day, with a white-faced Alice Meynell bending over her. ‘Help me up, Alice,’ she said. ‘We’re going to sort this out.’
Alice, though, shook her head, lost less for words than for a description of the world she now found herself in—
On the other side of the room, Mark Holland took a small Victorian folding card table out of one of the niches and brought it forward. On its discoloured baize surface he set: the plastic head of a 1950s doll; a jet necklace with attached mourning locket, also Victorian; the small German musical box Frances had given to Eleanor, from which dropped the sweet tentative notes of ‘Für Elise’; a silver spoon, no later than the Regency period; a miniature painting of one of the Herringe women, perhaps Clara de Montfort; and the carved bone figure of a crouching woman, to which no possible date could be affixed. These he arranged on the table according to the instructions of John Dawe’s daughter who, after studying each placement for a few seconds, clapped her hands inaccurately together and indicated that Mark’s brother could bring forward the object he had taken so reverently from its cobwebbed niche.
It proved to be a brown muslin bag, stiff and fragile with age, about six inches long, having a drawstring closure at one end. With great care, Oliver Holland worked the drawstring open until he could shake out the contents of the bag.
Eleanor, breathing heavily through her mouth, hung over his shoulder. ‘Kitcheee!’ she squealed.
A few small bones tumbled out on to the baize tabletop. They were brown with age and none of them was more than five inches long. Nevertheless it was easy to identify a tiny femur, two or three ribs, a little skull that had lost its jaw. They were the bones of a child less than a year old.
‘Aaaah,’ said Eleanor, in her most sentimental voice. ‘The baby!’
She put out her hand as if to stroke it. Then she looked up at Anna again. ‘You have to give up something if you want to live for ever, dear,’ she said. ‘This is what Clara de Montfort gave up. Her first child. Smothered at midnight, buried under the garden. She was never entirely sane after that.’ She laughed. ‘But don’t you wish you’d done the same?’ She looked up into the air above her own head. ‘Izzie!’ she cried. ‘Ishtar!’