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Will crouched down by the wall to release the plug – and started back abruptly with a four-letter oath. ‘It shocked me!’ he said. ‘The bloody thing shocked me!’
‘Did you switch off?’
He reached out once more, this time for the switch – and again pulled his hand back sharply. Gaynor had glimpsed the blue spark that flashed out at his touch. ‘Maybe you have a strong electric aura,’ she offered hesitantly, coming over and bending down beside him. The instant her tentative finger brushed the socket she felt the stab of pain, violent as a burn. For a fraction of a second a current of agony shot up her arm, her fingertip was glued to the power source, the individual hairs on her skin crackled with static. Then somehow she was free, her finger red but otherwise unmarked.
‘Leave it,’ said Will. ‘We need Fern. She could deal with this. She has the right kind of gloves.’
They went down to the kitchen, where they found Mrs Wicklow extracting a cake from the oven. With her firm conviction that young people nowadays were all too thin and in constant need of sustenance, she cooked frequently and to excess, although only Will could be said to justify her efforts. But after the horrors of the afternoon Gaynor munched happily on calories and carbohydrates, thankful for their comforting effect. Fern was late back, having gone from the caterers to the wine merchants, from the wine merchants to the church. ‘We’re invited to the vicarage for dinner,’ she called out as she came in. ‘Is the bath free?’
Gaynor called back in the affirmative and was vaguely relieved to hear Will following his sister upstairs, sparing her the necessity of relating her story again. Despite all that Will had told her, she could not visualise her friend receiving it with anything but polite disbelief. She waited several minutes and then she, too, went up to the first floor.
Fern was standing in the bathroom doorway, with the chundering of the hot tap coming from behind her and translucent billows of steam overflowing into the corridor. She had obviously been in the preliminary stages of undress when Will interrupted her: her shoes lay where they had been kicked and her right hand was still clutching a crumpled ball of socks which she squeezed savagely from time to time, apparently unaware of what she was doing. There was an expression on her face which Gaynor had never seen before, a kind of brittleness which looked as if it might fragment at a touch and re-form into something far more dangerous. Gaynor could smell a major row, hovering in the ether like an inflammable gas, waiting for the wrong word to spark it off.
But all she said was: ‘I told you that TV was a mistake.’
She led the way up to Gaynor’s room and headed straight for the socket where the set was plugged in.
‘You’ll need the gloves,’ Will said. ‘Alison’s gloves …’
Fern rounded on him, her eyes bright with pent-up rage and some other feeling, something which might have been a deep secret hurt. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what you’re really after. You want me to open her box – Pandora’s box – play with her toys. You want to drag me down into her world. It’s over, Will, long, long over. The witches and the goblins have gone back into the shadows where they belong. We’re in the real world now – for good – and I’m getting married on Saturday, and you can’t stop it even if you call up Azmordis himself.’
‘From the sound of things,’ Will said quietly, ‘he’s coming anyway.’
‘If I didn’t know you better,’ Fern said, ignoring him, switching the glare to her friend, ‘I might think you’d been primed.’
Gaynor, absorbing the accusation with incredulity, opened her mouth to refute it, but Fern had turned away. She bent down to the socket, the sock-ball still crumpled in one fist, and flicked the switch on and off with impunity. ‘Well, well. Seems perfectly normal to me. On, off. On, off. How unexpected. And the plug – plug out, plug in, plug out. What do you know. If you’ve finished with this farce I’m going to have my bath. I told Maggie we’d be there at seven; please be ready promptly. Let’s not add bad manners to everything else.’
And to Gaynor: ‘I thought better of you. I know you don’t like Marcus –’
‘I do like him,’ Gaynor said, speaking faster than she thought. ‘But I’d like him a lot more if you were in love with him.’
‘Love!’ Fern cried scornfully – but for all the scorn her voice held an undertone of loss and suffering that checked Gaynor’s rising anger. ‘That belongs with all those other fairytales – in the dustbin.’
She ran out and downstairs: they heard the bathroom door slam. Gaynor had moved to follow but Will held her back. ‘No point,’ he said. ‘If there’s trouble coming she can’t stop it, not even by marrying boring Marcus.’
‘But I still don’t see what her marriage can have to do with – this?’ Gaynor said in bewilderment, indicating the television set. ‘Why is everything getting mixed up?’
‘I think,’ Will said, ‘it’s all to do with motives. Her motives for getting married.’
‘She’s in pain,’ said Gaynor. ‘I heard it in her voice.’
‘She’s in denial,’ said Will.
It was not a scene that augured well for the forthcoming dinner party, but although the three of them walked down to the vicarage in comparative silence, once there the warmth of the Dinsdales’ welcome, the aroma of roasting chicken, and copious quantities of cheap red wine all combined to bring down their hastily erected barriers. Will relaxed into his usual easy-going charm of manner, Fern, perhaps feeling that she might have over-reacted earlier on, made a conscious effort to unwind, appealing to her friend for corroboration of every anecdote, and Gaynor, too generous to nurse a sense of injury, responded in kind, suppressing the bevy of doubts and fears that gnawed at her heart. By the time they were ready to leave their mutual tensions, though not forgotten, were set aside. They strolled homeward in harmony, steering the conversation clear of uncomfortable subjects, admiring the stars which had chosen to put in an appearance in the clearing sky, and pausing to listen for nightbirds, or to glimpse a furtive shadow which might have been a fox, slinking across the road towards the river. For Gaynor, a city girl like Fern, though more from career necessity than choice, the country held its own special magic. The belated child of a flagging marriage with three siblings already grown up, she had never really felt part of a family, and now, with Fern and her brother, she knew something of the closeness she had missed. The wine warmed her, the night bewitched her. She would have subordinated a whole catalogue of private doubts to preserve that feeling undamaged.
‘Perhaps we’ll see the owl,’ she said as they drew near the house.
‘I thought that was a dream,’ said Will. ‘Riding on the back of a giant owl … or did you see a real one?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Gaynor admitted. ‘Maybe it was just a dream.’
‘I’ve heard one round here at night,’ Fern said, and a quick shiver ran through her, as if at a sudden chill.
Indoors, they said goodnight with more affection than was customary, Fern even going so far as to embrace her friend, although she had never acquired the London habit of scattering kisses among all and sundry. Gaynor retired to her room, feeling insensibly relieved. As she undressed she found herself looking at the television set, disconnected now but still retaining its air of bland threat, as if at any moment the screen might flicker into unwholesome life. She thought: I don’t want it in here; but when she tried to move it, overcoming a sudden reluctance to approach or handle it, the machine felt awkward, at once slippery and heavy, unnaturally heavy. She could not seem to get a grip on it. In the end she gave up, but the blank screen continued to trouble her, so she draped a towel over it, putting a china bowl on the top to prevent the makeshift covering sliding off. Will would probably be asleep now; she could not disturb him just to help her shift the television. She climbed into bed and after some time lying wakeful, nerves on the stretch, she too slept.
She was standing in front of the mirror, face to face with her reflection. But it looked different from earlier in the day: it had acquired a sort of intense, serious beauty, an antique glamour, which had little to do with the real Gaynor. It isn’t me, she thought, but I wish it was. Behind the reflection her room, too, had changed. There were books, pictures, a pot-plant whose single flower resembled puckered red lips, a bedspread made of peacock feathers. A smoked glass shade softened the light-bulb to a dull glow. This isn’t my room, she realised. This is Alison’s room, the way it must have looked when she lived here. Mirrors remember. Her gaze returned to her own image with awakening dread: she knew what would happen with that dream-knowing which is both terrible and ineffectual, a vain striving to alter the unalterable. Dream turned to nightmare: the face before her shrank into a tapering oval, hollow-cheeked, broad-browed; the deep eyes were elongated into slits, not dark but bright, shining with the multi-faceted glitter of cut crystal. A dull pallor rippled through her hair, transforming it into the dim tresses of a phantom. Gaynor was paralysed, unable to twitch a muscle, but in the mirror her mouth widened into a thin crimson smile, curling up towards her cheekbones, image surveying reality with cold mockery. The surface of the glass was no longer hard and solid: it had become little more than a skin, the thickness of a molecule, dividing her from the other room, the other person. And then the reflection reached out, and the skin broke, and the stranger stepped out of the mirror into Gaynor’s bedroom.
‘Alison,’ said Gaynor.
‘Alimond,’ said the stranger. ‘Alison was just a name. Alimond is my true self.’
‘Why have you come back?’
The smile became laughter, a tinkling silvery laughter like the sound of breaking glass. ‘Why do you think?’ she said. ‘To watch television, of course. I’ll tell you a secret: there is no television beyond the Gate of Death. Neither in heaven nor in hell. All we are allowed to see is our own lives and the lives of those we touched; an endless replaying of all our yesterdays, all our failures, all our mistakes. Think of that, ere your time comes. Live yourself a life worth watching, before it’s too late.’
She took Gaynor’s hand as she spoke: her grip felt insubstantial, light as a zephyr, but cold, so cold. The icy chill stabbed Gaynor to the bone.
She said: ‘Plug the television in, and switch it on.’
Gaynor tried to pull free of the cold ethereal grasp but her nerve withered and her strength turned to water. ‘You are too sensitive,’ murmured Alimond. ‘Too delicate to resist, too feeble to fight. You have neither the backbone nor the Gift to stand against me. Fernanda chooses her friends unwisely. Push the plug in …’
She’s right, Gaynor’s thought responded, taking control of mind and body. You’re betraying Fern, betraying yourself. You cannot help it …
She was on her knees by the wall; she heard the click of reconnection as the plug slid home. Alimond guided her hand towards the switch. Then the dream faded into sleep, and darkness enveloped her.
When she woke again, the room was shaking. The bed juddered, the floor vibrated; above her she could make out the old-fashioned fringed lampshade twitching like a restless animal. She struggled to sit up, and saw the television rattling and shuddering as if seized with an ague. Its fever seemed to have communicated itself to the rest of the furniture: even the heavy wardrobe creaked in response. As she watched the china bowl on top of the set danced sideways, trembled on the edge, and fell to the ground, rolling unbroken on the carpet. The towel followed suit, sidling inch by inch across the screen and then collapsing floorwards in a heap. In a sudden access of terror Gaynor reached for the remote and flung it with all her strength against the wall, but the impact must have jolted the power button, for even as it hit the television screen exploded into colour. The furniture was still again; the picture glowed in the darkness like an extra-terrestrial visitation. Gaynor sat bolt upright, clutching the bedclothes. It felt like a dream, dreadful and inexorable, but she knew she wasn’t dreaming now. The image was flat, two-dimensional, not the hole in the very fabric of existence through which she had seen the idol in the temple. But it had been from an apparently normal image that Dr Laye had turned and looked at her, and stretched out his hand …
She was watching a vintage horror film. Pseudo-Victorian costumes, men with sixties sideburns, a heroine with false eyelashes and heaving bosom. It was low camp, reassuringly familiar, unalarming. Improbable plastic bats circled a Gothic mansion which had loomed its way through a hundred such scenes.
Presently, one of the bats came too close to the screen, thrusting its wing-tip into the room …
Fern and Will woke to the sound of screaming.
* * *
The room was full of bats. They blundered into the passage when Will opened the door, ricocheted to and fro as he switched on the light. Gaynor was covered in them, her pyjamas hooked and tugged and clawed, her hair tangled with wildly threshing wings. She beat at them in a frenzy, irrational with terror, but her fear only served to madden them, and they swarmed round her like flies on a corpse. Their squashed-up snouts resembled wrinkled leaves, their blind eyes were puckered, their teeth needle-pointed … More flew out of the television at every moment, tearing themselves free of the screen with a sound like lips smacking. Miniature lightning ran up and down the flex.
‘Help her,’ Fern said to her brother, and raced back to her room, extricating the box from under her bed – the box she never looked at, never touched – catching the scent of the long-lost forest, fumbling inside for the gloves she had always refused to wear. Upstairs, Will was trying to reach the figure on the bed, arms flailing in a vain attempt to disperse the bat-cloud.
When Fern re-entered the gloves were already on her hands. The scales grew onto her flesh, chameleon-patterns mottled her fingers. She reached for the socket with lizard’s paws; the plug spat fire as she wrenched it out. There was no explosion, no noise, just the suddenness of silence. The screen reverted to blank; the bats vanished. Gaynor drew a long sobbing breath and then clung to Will, shaking spasmodically. Fern gazed down for a minute at the hands that were no longer hers, then very carefully, like a snake divesting itself of its skin, she peeled off the gloves.
They deposited the television outside by the dustbins after Will, at Fern’s insistence, had attacked it with a hammer. ‘What about the mirror?’ he said. ‘We can’t leave it there.’
‘Swap it with the one in the end room,’ Fern suggested. ‘It’s even dirtier, I’m afraid,’ she apologised to Gaynor, ‘but at least you know the nastiest thing you’ll ever see in it is Will, peering over your shoulder.’
Gaynor managed an unsteady laugh. They were sitting in the kitchen over mugs of strong, sweet cocoa, laced and chased with whisky. Mindful of the shuddering cold that so often follows on shock, Fern had pressed a hot-water bottle on her friend and wrapped her in a spare blanket. ‘If you want to leave,’ she said, ‘I’ll understand. Something, or someone, is trying to use you, victimise you … perhaps to get to me. I don’t know why. I wish I did.’
‘Ragginbone might know,’ Will offered.
‘Then again he might not.’ Fern opened a drawer and fished out a crumpled packet of cigarettes, left behind by a visitor months or even years ago. They were French, their acidic pungency only enhanced by the passage of time. She extracted one, remoulded its squashed contours into vaguely tubular shape, and lit it experimentally.
‘Why on earth are you doing that?’ Will demanded. ‘You never smoke.’
‘I feel like making a gesture.’ She drew on the cigarette cautiously, expelling the smoke without inhaling. ‘This is disgusting. It’s just what I need.’
‘It has to be Azmordis behind this business, doesn’t it?’ Will said after a pause.
‘Don’t name him,’ his sister admonished. ‘Not if he’s around. Ragginbone said he would be seriously weakened after Ixavo’s death, maybe for a long time – but how long is that? Twelve years? And what kind of time – real time or weretime, time here or elsewhere?’
‘Do you think what Gaynor saw was really Alison?’ Will pursued. ‘Alison returned from the dead?’
‘N-no. The dead don’t return. Ghosts are those who’ve never left, but Alison had nothing to stay for. I suppose he might use a phantom in her image, possibly to confuse us.’
‘I’m confused,’ Gaynor confirmed.
‘Will you be okay for the rest of the night?’ Fern asked. ‘We could change rooms if you like. I’ll drive you into York in the morning: there are trains for London every hour.’
‘I’m not leaving.’ Behind the dark curtains of her hair Gaynor achieved a twisty smile. ‘I’m frightened – of course I am. I don’t think I’ve ever been so frightened in my life. But you’re my friend –my friends – and, well, you’re supposed to stand by friends in trouble …’
‘Sentimentality,’ Fern interjected.
‘Hogwash,’ said Will.
‘Whatever. Anyway, I’m staying. You invited me; you can’t disinvite me. I know I wasn’t very brave just now but I can’t help it: I hate bats. I hate the way they flutter and their horrible ratty little faces. That’s what they are: rats with wings. I’ll be much braver as long as there are no more bats.’
‘We can’t absolutely guarantee it,’ Fern said.
‘Besides,’ Gaynor continued, ignoring her, ‘you’re getting married on Saturday. I’m not going to miss that.’
For an instant, Fern looked totally blank. ‘I’d forgotten,’ she said.
They went back to bed about half an hour later, warm with the twin comforts of chocolate and alcohol. Will dossed down in the room next to Gaynor’s, wrapped in the ubiquitous spare blanket. Worn out by events, reassured by his proximity, she fell asleep almost at once; but he lay with his eyes open, staring into the dark. Presently, he made out a hump of shadow at the foot of his bed which had not been there before.
He said softly: ‘Bradachin?’
‘Aye.’
‘Did you see what happened?’
‘Aye.’
There was an impatient silence. ‘Well?’ Will persisted. ‘Did you see a woman come out of the mirror?’
‘I didna see ony woman. There was a flaysome creature came slinking through the glass, all mimsy it was, like a wisp o’ moonlicht, and the banes shining through its hand, and cobwebs drifting round its heid. Some kind o’ tannasgeal maybe. It was clinging round the maidy like mist around a craig. She seemed all moithered by it, like she didna ken what she was doing.’
‘Where did it go?’ Will asked.
‘Back through the glass. I’m nae sure where it gaed after, but it isna here nae mair.’
‘But how could it get in?’ Will mused. ‘No one here summoned it, did they?’
‘Nae. But a tannasgeal gangs where the maister sends it – and ye asked him in long ago, or sae ye seid.’
‘You mean Az–– the Old Spirit sent it?’
‘Most likely.’
‘Yes, of course … Bradachin, would you mind spending the night in Gaynor’s room? Don’t let her see you, just call me if – if anything happens.’
‘I’m no a servant for ye tae orrder aboot.’
‘Please?’ Will coaxed.
‘Aye, weel … I was just wanting ye tae keep it in mind. I’m nae servant …’
The hunched shadow dimmed, dissolving into the surrounding dark. After a few minutes Will closed his eyes and relapsed into sleep.
In the room on the floor below, Fern was still wakeful. She was trying to concentrate on her marriage, re-running a mental reel of her possible future with Marcus Greig. Cocktail parties in Knightsbridge, dinner parties in Hampstead, all-night parties in Notting Hill Gate. Lunches at the Ivy, launches at the Groucho. First nights and last nights, previews and private views, designer clothes, designer furniture. The same kind of skiing trips and Tuscan villas which she had experienced as a child, only rather more expensive. In due course, perhaps, there would be a second home in Provence. Her heart shrank at the prospect. And then there was Marcus himself, with his agile intelligence, his New Labour ethics, his easy repartee. She liked him, she was even impressed by him – though it is not difficult for a successful forty-six to impress a rising twenty-eight. She knew he had worked his way up from lower middle-class origins which he preferred to call proletarian, that his first wife had been a county type who left him for a farmer and a horse. She had contemplated marrying him on their third date. He fulfilled the standards she had set for her partner, and if his hair was thinning and his waistline thickening he was still generally considered an attractive man. She was nearly thirty, too old for fairytales, uninspired by casual love. The more she thought about it, the more she had wanted this marriage – and she still wanted it, she knew she did, if only she could keep hold of her reasoning, if she could just remind herself what made those scenes from her life-to-be so desirable. She should never have left London. Away from the polluted air and the intrusive voices of traffic, telephones, and technology, her head was so clear it felt empty, with too much room for old memories and new ideas. She had done her best to fence them out, to fill up the space with the fuss and flurry of wedding preparations, but tonight she sensed it had all been in vain. The future she had pursued so determinedly was slipping away. She had worn the witch’s gloves, opened her heart to power. Trouble and uncertainty lay ahead, and the germ of treachery in her soul was drawing her towards them.
She languished in the borderland of sleep, too tired now to succumb. Her mind planed: recollections long buried re-surfaced to ensnare her, jumbled together in a broken jigsaw. Alimond the witch combing her hair with a comb of bone like a lorelei in a song, her lips moving in what Fern thought was an incantation, until she heard the words of an antique ballad: Where once I kissed your cheekthe fishes feed … And then the siren dived into deep water, and there was the skeleton lying in the coral, and she set the comb down on its cavernous breast, and Fern saw it slot into its place among the ribs. And the head looked no longer like a skull: its eyes were closed with shells, and its locks moved like weed in the current. Sleep well forever there, my bonny dear. A ship’s foghorn drew her out of the depths – no, not a foghorn, an albatross, crying to her with a half-human voice. They said in Atlantis that albatrosses were the messengers of the Unknown God. It was very near now, almost in her room. How ridiculous, thought Fern. There are no albatrosses in Yorkshire. It must be the owl again, the owl Gaynor talked about …
She was not aware of getting up but suddenly she was by the open window, leaning out into the night. She heard the sough of the wind in the trees although there were no trees anywhere near the house. The owl’s cry was somewhere in her dream, in her head. And then it came, hurtling out of the dark, a vast pale blur too swift and too sudden to see clearly. There was a rushing tumult of wings, the close-up of a face – a mournful heart-shaped face with nasal beak and no mouth, black button eyes set in huge discs, like a ghost peeping through the holes in a sheet. She thrust out her hands to ward it off, horrified by the impression of giant size, the predatory speed of its lunge. The power came instinctively, surging down her arms with a force dream-enspelled, unsought and out-of-control … The owl reeled and veered away, gone so fast she had no time to check if its size had been real or merely an illusion of terror. But its last shriek lingered in her mind, haunting and savage. She stumbled away from the window, her body shaking with the aftermath of that power-surge. When she touched the bed she collapsed into it, too exhausted to disentangle herself from the blankets, helpless as with a fever. Dream or reality faded, and in the morning when she finally awoke, late and heavy-eyed, she was not sure if it had happened at all.
IV (#u56f3e0f1-1d47-57a8-af29-372e72a54439)
Weddings have their own momentum. Once the machinery has been set in motion – once invitations have been issued and accepted, present lists placed with suitable department stores, caterers conjured, live music laid on, flowers, bridesmaids, and multi-storey cakes all concocted – once male relatives have hired or resurrected morning suits and female ones have bought outfits in the sort of pastel colours that should only be worn by newborn infants – the whole circus rolls on like a Juggernaut with no brakes, crushing anything and anyone who may get in its way. The groom is sidelined, the bride traumatised. Couples who are madly in love lose track of their passion, floundering in a welter of trivial details, trapped by the hopes and expectations of their devoted kith and kin. Those less in love find in these chaotic preliminaries the wherewithal to blot out their doubts, giving themselves no leisure to think, no leeway to withdraw. So it had been with Fern. She had made her decision and intended to stand by it, obliterating any last-minute reservations, and now, when she felt a sudden need to stop, to reconsider, to take her time, there was no time left to take. It was Friday already, and although she had overslept she did not feel rested, and the morning was half gone, and the phone was starting to ring downstairs. Someone answered it, and Fern stretched and lay still, temporarily reprieved, and for the first time in more than a decade she opened her waking mind to memories of Atlantis. A villa on a mountainside, a room golden with lamplight and candlelight, the blue evening deepening outside. The echo of a thought, bittersweet with pain: This is how I shall remember it, when it is long gone … She got up in a sudden rush and began rummaging furiously in her dressing-table drawer, and there it was, tucked away at the back where she had hidden it all those years ago. A skein of material, cobweb-thin and sinuous as silk, so transparent that it appeared to have neither hue nor pattern, until a closer look revealed the elusive traces of a design, and faint gleams of colour like splintered light. As Fern let it unfold the creases of long storage melted away, and it lay over her arms like a drift of pale mist. She was still holding it when she went down to the kitchen in search of coffee. Will frowned: he thought he had seen it before.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Gaynor, touching it admiringly. ‘It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. What is it – a scarf?’
‘Something old,’ said Fern. ‘Like it says in the rhyme. Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. This is very old.’
‘What will you do for t’rest of them?’ asked Mrs Wicklow.
‘A new dress, a borrowed smile, the three-carat sapphire in my engagement ring. That should cover it.’
Gaynor started at her flippancy; Mrs Wicklow found excuses for it. ‘Poor lass. Happen it’s all been too much for you. It’s always hard on t’bride just before t’big day, specially if she hasn’t a mother to help her. You don’t want to go drinking so much coffee: it’ll wind up your nerves even tighter.’
Fern smiled rather wanly, pushing the empty cup away. ‘I’ll switch to tea,’ she said.
After a breakfast which only Will ate, Mrs Wicklow departed to make up beds and bully Trisha, and Will and Gaynor went out in search of Ragginbone.
‘You won’t find him,’ said Fern. ‘He’s never there when you want him. It’s a habit of his.’
She went to the upstairs room where the dress waited in solitary splendour. It was made of that coarse-textured Thai silk which rustles like tissue paper with every movement, the colour too warm for white but not quite cream. The high neck was open down the front, the corners folded back like wings to show a glimpse of hidden embroidery, similar to the neckline worn by Mary Tudor in so many sombre portraits. The sleeves were tight and long enough to cover the wrist; the waist tapered; the skirt flared. Further decoration was minimal. It had beauty, simplicity, style: everything Fern approved. If I was in love, she thought irrationally, I’d want frills and flounces and lace. I’d want to look like a cloud full of pearls, like a blizzard in chiffon. No woman in love wants understatement. But there was no such thing as love, only marriage. On an impulse she took the dress off the dummy and put it on, wrestling with the inaccessible section of the zip. There was a hair ornament of silver wire, fitting like an Alice band, in order to secure the veil. She arranged it rather awkwardly and surveyed herself in the mirror – Alison’s mirror, which Will had moved from Gaynor’s room. In the spotted glass the sheen of the silk was dulled, making her look pale and severe. Her face appeared shadowed and hard about the mouth. I look like a nun, she decided. The wrong kind of nun. Not a blossoming girl abandoning her novitiate for the lure of romance, but a woman opting out of the world, for whom nunhood was a necessary martyrdom. A passing ray of sunlight came through the window behind her, touching that other veil, the gift of Atlantis, which she had left on the bed, so that for an instant it glowed in the dingy mirror like a rainbow. Fern turned quickly, but the sun vanished, and the colours, and her dress felt stiff and cumbersome, weighing her down; she struggled out of it with difficulty. I must have time to think, she told herself. Maybe if I talk to Gus …
She could hear Mrs Wicklow coming up the stairs and she hurried out, feeling illogically guilty, as if, in trying on the dress before the appointed hour, she had been indulging in a culpable act. Mrs Wicklow’s manner was even more dour than usual: Robin, Abby, and Robin’s only surviving aunt were due later that day, and it transpired that although Dale House was lavishly endowed with bedrooms there was a shortage of available linen. An ancient cache of sheets had proved to be moth-eaten beyond repair. ‘It’s too late to buy new ones,’ Fern said, seizing opportunity. ‘I’ll go down to the vicarage and see if I can borrow some.’
She felt better out of doors, though the sky to the east looked leaden and a hearty little wind had just breezed in off the North Sea. At the vicarage, she explained to Maggie about the bedding and then enquired for Gus.
