Druid''s Sword

  It had been a bad day for eating, Jack thought, and was torn between wanting desperately to make his excuses and return to Copt Hall and needing to have a quiet word with Noah. She was visibly upset, and Jack knew she’d allowed herself to believe that Jack could help her daughter.

  Eventually the meal was over, and Harry said diplomatically that he and Jack were tired, that it had been an emotional day for everyone, and that if Weyland was still willing to hand a car over to Jack, perhaps he, Harry and Jack could repair to the garage?

  The sound of chairs scraping back from the table was indecently loud. Before Grace had a chance to bolt for her room, Jack managed a quick moment with her.

  “I am sorry,” he said again.

  She looked at him with emotionless eyes, then turned her back and walked away.

  What do you know? Jack thought, watching her, remembering what he’d felt from her arms. And what are you?

  Friend, or foe?

  Victim, or trap?

  “Jack?” said Weyland, jangling a set of car keys in his hand.

  Jack finally managed to have a hurried conversation with Noah as she helped him on with his coat.

  “Noah, how did the four kingship bands make it into the Faerie?”

  “Why do you want to—”

  “Noah, please, just answer.”

  “I turned them into golden ribbons and tied them about Grace’s arms and legs. Then the Lord of the Faerie carried Grace, and the bands, into the Faerie. Why?”

  Jack stared at her, but before he could answer Weyland walked up.

  “Jack? Are you coming, or not?”

  The Savoy’s garage was situated within the basement of the hotel. It was filled with such an array of luxury vehicles that Weyland’s Daimler appeared almost ordinary. Weyland led Jack and Harry to a spot partway down the garage. Here was his Daimler, and beside it a pale grey-green Austin convertible, its cloth hood folded back.

  Jack stepped close, running his hand admiringly over the soft leather of its seats.

  “You would trust me with this?”

  Weyland tossed him the keys, and Jack had to twist quickly in order to catch them.

  “If it means you are gone from here,” Weyland said, “then, yes, I will trust you with it.”

  He turned, walking away a few steps before halting and again addressing Jack. “I don’t know what you did to Grace this afternoon, Jack, but I can’t help feeling that she’d have been better off without you.”

  ELEVEN

  Clapham

  Sunday, 3rd September 1939

  Weyland didn’t go back up to Noah and Grace once Jack and Harry had left. Instead he stood, staring blankly at the space where the Austin had been parked, before cursing under his breath and opening the driver’s door of the Daimler.

  He drove to a narrow, sad side street running off High Street in Clapham. Empty crates and overflowing rubbish bins lined the footpaths, most of the windows on the buildings had been boarded up, a small, thin dog lay curled up, shivering, in a doorway, and puddles of something thick and vile lay glinting on the road surface.

  Weyland had never been here before, but he had long known of the street’s most shadowy residents. Having locked the Daimler, Weyland walked up to a door and knocked softly.

  Someone had tacked a wooden plaque to the wall by the door, and Weyland glanced at it as he waited.

  Philpot Investigations

  James Philpot and William Philpot,

  Proprietors

  Footsteps crept cautiously towards the door, and Weyland tensed slightly.

  “Come on, come on,” Weyland muttered.

  The footsteps halted on the other side of the door.

  Weyland banged his fist on the door.

  “We’re closed,” came a whisper.

  “You’re bloody not closed to me,” Weyland said. “Open up!”

  “We don’t work for you any more, Weyland,” the voice whispered.

  “Do you work for money?”

  The voice hesitated. “Yes,” it whispered eventually, the word riddled with caution.

  “Then you’re working for me,” Weyland said. “Now open up, damn you!”

  There was a long silence on the other side, then, just as Weyland raised his hand to bang on the door again, he heard the rattle of keys.

  A lock was turned, then another, and then one more, and, achingly slowly, the door creaked open an inch.

  “I haven’t got all night,” Weyland said, and pushed at the door with his shoulder.

  There was a startled yelp on the other side as whoever had crouched behind the door was pushed onto the floor, then Weyland was in a dark corridor. He groped along the wall, hoping that the fools had at least had their establishment electrified, found a switch, and flicked it down.

  Light flooded the corridor from a bare bulb hung high.

  A thin man dressed in drab clothes was slowly rising from the floor, his hands fluttering at his trousers as if to brush from them the dust collected during his fall, his bright black eyes wide with fright and fixed on Weyland. His dark hair was slicked back against his skull, his face was swarthy and marked with old acne scars, and his mouth curled as if wondering whether or not to snarl.

  “So this is what you look like all grown up,” said Weyland to the imp. “Which one are you, then?”

  “Jim,” said the imp, now fully risen, “and quite independent, thank you.”

  Weyland regarded him. He’d first created the imps almost a thousand years ago as a means to control Noah and Stella—Caela and Swanne as they had then been. But during the last life Weyland had come to love Noah, and had set the imps free in London, tired of them and the agony they’d inflicted. This was a decision Weyland had regretted when the imps became the servants of Catling, draping her hex about Grace’s wrists. Every so often over the past three hundred years Weyland had occasionally sent his senses out scrying for the imps, seeing what mischief they were about, but he hadn’t bothered himself with them otherwise. They’d simply faded into London’s turgid underworld after the Great Fire, where no doubt they had created some limited mayhem, but not any major troubles, so far as Weyland could make out.

  “Private investigators, moreover,” he said. “What do you investigate, Jim? Gutters? Sadnesses? Despair?”

  A muscle twitched in Jim’s throat, and he edged past Weyland. “We’re entirely respectable.”

  Weyland sneered.

  “If you’ll come through,” Jim Philpot said, nodding to a doorway at the end of the corridor.

  The other imp sitting at a wooden table in the back room had just picked up a bread-and-dripping sandwich from a plate. There was another plate with a half-eaten sandwich pushed to one side; evidently, Weyland had interrupted their evening meal. As Weyland entered, the imp put his sandwich down and stood warily.

  “You must be William,” said Weyland, noting that the imp was identical to his brother, save that his face was slightly rounder and even more pockmarked.

  “Bill,” said the imp, wiping his hands on his stained vest and then holding one out to shake hands.

  Weyland ignored it. “I need you to do something for me.”

  Jim and Bill shared a glance.

  “He said he’d pay,” Jim said.

  “Money?” said Bill.

  Weyland, who had been inspecting the contents of a filing cabinet, turned around. “I’ll pay you in violence, if you like.”

  “We’d prefer money,” said the imps together.

  “Well, if you insist. What are your rates?”

  Bill told him, and Weyland raised his eyebrows. “I’ll pay you half that. You’re worth no more.”

  “We’re very good,” said Jim.

  “We can creep anywhere,” said Bill.

  “Discover anything for you,” said Jim.

  Weyland grunted. “I need you to display some manner of delicacy. Think you can manage it?”

  The imps grinned, showing unexpectedly white, good teeth.

&nbs
p; “Has Noah a lover?” said Bill.

  “Do you need photographs?” said Jim.

  “No! Not Noah,” Weyland said, and the imps glanced knowingly at each other.

  “Jack’s back,” said Bill.

  “We can take photographs,” said Jim. “Dig out receipts. Bribe hotel clerks. Present you with the evidence.”

  “Not Noah!”

  “Of course not,” said the imps as one. “Not Noah. Never Noah.”

  “Jack,” Weyland said, his voice grating.

  “Jack,” the imps said, their eyes gleaming. “Now there’s an interesting fellow.”

  Weyland’s eyes narrowed. “And what do you know about Jack?”

  “Absolutely nothing,” said Jim.

  “Never heard of him,” said Bill.

  Weyland drew in an irritated breath. “Jack thinks there’s something ‘different’ about London. Something that is possibly…malign.”

  “Sounds interesting,” said Jim.

  “Sounds like our kind of job,” said Bill. “We can take photographs of the malign, if you like. Lots of them.”

  “Shut up,” Weyland said. “Just listen! Jack is all over my wife and my daughter, and I don’t like it.”

  Jim opened his mouth to say something, thought better of it, and closed it again.

  “Everything has…changed…since he’s come back,” Weyland said. “Grown unsettled. I don’t like it. Like as not Jack will destroy us all. Destroy Grace.”

  “Sweet Grace,” whispered Bill, and Weyland snarled at him.

  “I said not to speak! Can’t you just listen?”

  The imps both nodded vigorously.

  “I don’t like not knowing what he is doing. Not knowing what he’s about. Discover it. Follow him. If he is seeing…”

  The imps raised their eyebrows.

  “Just follow him,” Weyland finished. “And see if you can’t find out what Jack is babbling on about when he talks about this difference…this wrongness.”

  “We can do that,” said Bill.

  “Be careful,” said Weyland. “Don’t reveal yourselves.”

  “We’re very, very good,” said Bill. “He won’t know we’re following him. We can cloak ourselves from Jack—and Ringwalker too, come to that.”

  There was a silence, then Jim spoke. “You don’t trust Jack, do you?”

  “Would you?”

  “Not if we had a daughter like Grace to protect, no,” said Bill, and for once there wasn’t a hint of cupidity in his voice at all.

  When Weyland had gone, the imps sat down at the table and finished off their dripping sandwiches.

  “So Jack has discovered the dancing,” said Bill. “What a good boy he is.”

  “He hasn’t discovered all of it,” said Jim, and both imps giggled about their mouthfuls.

  “What do you think we should tell Weyland?”

  “Not all of it,” said Jim, and both spluttered with laughter.

  And within a breath, fell silent.

  “It needs to feed again,” whispered Jim.

  “Soon,” whispered Bill. “Soon.”

  TWELVE

  Copt Hall

  Thursday, 7th September 1939

  The war was on, but as yet it had little impact on Londoners’ lives.

  The war had been expected for almost a year; civil and defence preparations had been complete for months, and evacuations from the city underway for the past weeks (although so far, most people had elected to stay). There had been a frisson of emotion on Sunday when the worst was known, but over the past few days the excitement had died down. London had not been bombed (there had been one or two false air raid warnings), there had been no massed campaigns in Europe, and the world had not ended.

  Life went on, largely, as normal.

  Jack Skelton spent the earlier part of the week at Copt Hall and its surrounds.

  He settled in, altering the hall to his needs, Malcolm proving an invaluable resource. Neither Jack’s nor Malcolm’s presence was ever noted by the four or five servants and gardeners who still worked about the hall, keeping the one remaining wing in some semblance of order and tending the gardens to send flowers and vegetables down to London. When fires were lit in the hearths high in the burned-out walls, no mortal eye saw them; when a gramophone occasionally played music in what remained of the elegant drawing room, they did not hear.

  If any had the occasion to walk through the stark remains of the hall, then their feet encountered only grassy earth, not the beautifully patterned rugs, and their hips did not bump into the chairs and tables set about.

  Neither did the servants ever notice the Austin convertible parked under the trees, and they did not realise the comings and goings of the major and his valet.

  In the mornings they did note the deer spoor along the gravelled front driveway, but so long as the deer kept off the gardens they did not mind their presence.

  The strange heart of Copt Hall had awoken about them, and the servants and gardeners had not even a single intuition of it.

  Epping Forest had once surrounded Copt Hall completely, but for scores of years now the forest had retreated, and the hall stood some three-quarters of a mile from the main body of the forest. But during the night, when Malcolm would open the front door so the major might set off for his evening walk (his run through the forest) then the forest crowded all about, embracing the hall and its occupants, and Jack could move from front porch into forest depths with a single step.

  He spent these nights roaming as Ringwalker, reacquainting himself with forest and land, and stamping his authority back on both. Others—strange creatures not of the Faerie or of the mortal—had tried to nibble away at Ringwalker’s influence in his absence, and on both Monday and Tuesday nights the forest rang now and again with the sounds of battle: brief, fierce, bloody encounters.

  Malcolm always had cloths and a bowl of warm water redolent with antiseptic waiting for when the major returned just before dawn.

  Jack also ventured into the Faerie. He had seldom been here during the time he’d been away, but little had changed. The Naked, the central sacred hill of the Faerie, still rose in the midst of the forest-covered hills that rolled away towards snow-capped mountains in the vast distance; the Lord of the Faerie’s throne of Faerie wood still sat on the eastern aspect of its summit. The Faerie folk continued to drift in and out of the mists that clung to the hills, and Jack spent hours talking to them or, more often, just sitting in silence with them absorbing the Faerie.

  The only difference Jack noted was that the Idyll, Weyland’s creation that had graced the top floor of the house in Idol Lane, now bordered the Faerie. If Jack stood close to the Faerie Lord’s throne on The Naked and looked east, then he could see rising on the horizon the myriad walkways and spires and bridges of Weyland’s extraordinary creation. The Lord of the Faerie told him that he’d walked close to the Idyll, but had never entered.

  “That realm is of Weyland and Noah and Grace, all of themselves,” the Faerie Lord had commented.

  By mid-week Jack felt he’d done enough to reestablish his dominance over the forest spaces, as well as renew his bond with the Faerie, so on Wednesday he drove the Austin convertible down to London. He spent that day wandering about the city, but came home in the evening none the wiser.

  There was something…wrong…but he could not define or isolate it.

  On Thursday morning he remarked to Malcolm that they would have visitors in the late afternoon, and could Malcolm please prepare a tea for five guests.

  Noah enjoyed driving, and she particularly enjoyed driving the Daimler. She enjoyed even more her success in acquiring it from Weyland for the day, but in truth that had not been at all difficult. When she had said where she was going, and with whom, he’d rolled his eyes and simply handed over the keys.

  Grace beside her in the front passenger seat, Noah drove north to Hampstead where she picked up Matilda, Ecub and Erith. None of these three women had been reborn this life. As with
Noah, Weyland, Stella and Harry, they had merely moved back into the realm of the mortal from the Faerie, taking as their identities the names each had borne in their original lives. They shared a terrace house in a smart quarter of Hampstead, where they busied themselves in their local community, teaching music, history and botany to private girl students. On some days—the ancient pagan festivals—they joined Noah, and together Eaving and Eaving’s Sisters walked the land, rejoicing in the eternal themes of rebirth and regeneration.

  There was a time when Grace had often joined them. For a long time now, she did so very rarely.

  The three sisters who crowded into the back seat of the Daimler were in a high mood. Jack was back! Noah was slightly less exuberant, but still cheerful, and Grace was her usual introspective, quiet self, preferring to look out the window than to take part in the animated discussion between the other women. Noah had already spoken to Matilda and Ecub on the telephone, so the women knew of Jack’s sense of something wrong in London and his failure to help Grace, and now they chatted about more inconsequential things, like whether or not Jack could possibly be as handsome as Noah had said, or as charismatic as she intimated.

  They arrived at Copt Hall close to five p.m., their arrival—as everything else even faintly connected with the Faerie—totally unobserved by the hall’s mortal servants.

  “Mesdames,” said Malcolm at the door, inclining his head as he ushered them through. “Major Skelton is waiting for you in the drawing room.”

  Grace was the last to come through, and Malcolm gazed at her a little more curiously than was polite, but Grace was herself looking about with so much inquisitiveness that she did not notice.

  Just before he closed the door, Malcolm saw that several deer had emerged from the trees.

  In the shadows behind them Malcolm thought he saw three ghostly spears propped against a tree trunk, and he smiled.