lot lately – but I said, then it would be on the top floor, and it isn’t, it’s downstairs. Anyway, he thinks it could be sort of funnelled down somehow, but I don’t believe it. I haven’t found any damp patches on the walls or ceiling.’
Annie asked, a little hesitantly: ‘Could I see where—?’ She expected Ursula to find her curiosity bizarre, but her hostess clearly thought she was just trying to be helpful.
‘Of course you can.’ She led Annie through into the ground floor room in one of the towers, which had once been a study. ‘This is going to be a sitting room,’ she explained. ‘I love the shape. At the moment, Romany’s sleeping here—’ a vague gesture encompassed a mattress on the floor ‘—and Michael and Gawain are upstairs. Jude and Lib are too old to share so they have their own rooms. The murder room’s going to be a guest bedroom – but only when I feel it’s been completely purged of bad vibes.’
Annie grinned. ‘So when people come to stay you can tell them: We’ve put you in the haunted room…?’
‘Actually,’ Ursula said, ‘I haven’t really sensed any ghosts. It’s a bit disappointing. At least, not exactly disappointing, but when a house has a history like this – well, you’d expect more than just vibes, wouldn’t you? It isn’t that I want to see an apparition or anything, but I did think … You know, a bloodstain that won’t scrub out, or – or perhaps moaning in the night. Something.’
‘And all you’ve got is a puddle on the floor,’ Annie said thoughtfully. In the middle of the room was a large damp patch where the carpet still hadn’t dried out.
‘There’s nothing ghostly about that,’ Ursula retorted. ‘It’s just a bloody nuisance. I suppose we’ll have to get someone to look at the roof next. I tell you, I’m going to sue that surveyor …’
They went back into the kitchen and she poured coffee.
‘We had an awful fright last weekend,’ she went on. ‘The kids wanted a boat so much, so Donny got them an inflatable – it’s on the bank now, down by the jetty – and they were messing around with it, and Romany fell in. I don’t know how it happened – that river is dodgy, isn’t it? She must’ve gone right under, and then she popped up again, and we got her out somehow, and she was fine, but it absolutely terrified me. I mean, she’s eight, she can swim a bit, but she kept saying how the weeds pulled her under. I told them all, they’re to stay away from the river, but of course they won’t.’
Absently, Annie found herself murmuring the familiar lines:
‘Cloud on the sunset
Wave on the tide …’
‘What’s that?’ Ursula asked.
‘It’s a sort of local folk-rhyme,’ Annie said. ‘About the river.
Cloud on the sunset
Wave on the tide
Fish from the deep sea
Swim up the Glyde.
The river’s tidal, you see.’ She didn’t go on with the poem.
‘Does that mean you can get dolphins and things? Like in the Thames?’ Ursula looked enthusiastic, then dubious. ‘Surely not – this river’s far too small. I expect that’s just fanciful.’
‘Yes,’ Annie said. ‘Fanciful.’ She gazed pensively into her coffee, unsure of her own thoughts – or fears. Unsure what to say, and what to leave out.
Water on the floor – in the room where Romany slept. And it was Romany who fell in the river …
‘I think,’ she said, ‘you should keep an eye on her.’
‘On who?’
‘Romany.’
‘I always do. Though in the main, she’s such a good child. A bit solitary – always inventing her own games, making up imaginary friends, going off on adventures with them. Of course, she includes Gawain sometimes – he’s her baby brother, after all. I expect she’ll grow up to be a great novelist, or playwright, or something.’
As long as she does grow up, Annie thought.
Or was she being paranoid?
She would have to discuss it with Bartlemy when the opportunity offered.
Hazel thought too much of her time at Thornyhill Manor was spent on school work. She didn’t know quite how it had happened, but in the last few months she had begun re-doing her lessons with Bartlemy, and although a tiny part of her was secretly pleased that her grades had gone up, the stubborn, awkward, Hazelish part still told her lessons weren’t exactly her thing, and she would never do really well, so it was all a waste of effort. Besides, school work was boring, and she was supposed to be there to learn about magic. Despite her stated aversion to it, magic wasn’t boring.
‘Could we try the spellfire again?’ she said one day, off-handly. ‘I’m sick of maths. I never get it right.’
Bartlemy’s mild gaze narrowed with a hint of amusement. ‘You’re doing fine with that geometry,’ he pointed out. ‘Maths teaches you to think. If you do magic without thought you’ll end up like your great-grandmother. Do you want that?’
‘N-no. But I’ve done enough thinking for one day …’
‘As it happens,’ Bartlemy said, ‘there is something with which I need your help. But it could be dangerous. I want to be sure you won’t lose your head.’
‘Dangerous?’ Hazel brightened, doubted, dimmed. In her experience, grownups didn’t normally ask you to do dangerous things. But then, Bartlemy was unlike any other grownup.
She said: ‘It’s usually Nathan who gets to do the dangerous stuff.’
‘This time it’s you,’ Bartlemy said.
‘What is it?’
‘The behaviour of the gnomons is becoming … unpredictable. Something needs to be done about them.’
‘I always carry iron when I walk in the woods,’ Hazel said, thinking of the number in her coat pocket – a number originally made to go on the door of a house – which Nathan had provided for her protection two years ago. ‘But I haven’t seen – sensed – them around for ages. Anyway, I thought they only attacked when someone threatened the Grail – or Nathan.’
‘So did I,’ said Bartlemy. ‘But the rules seem to be changing. I am told they are getting out of control. Someone saw a hare pursued and sent mad. The next time it could be a dog which will turn on its owner – or a person. They have to be neutralised.’
‘How?’ Hazel asked bluntly.
‘If we can trap them in an iron cage, perhaps sealed with silphium – the smell is inimical to them.’
‘What’s silphium?’
‘A herb, generally extinct, but I grow a little of it in my garden. The Romans used it extensively in cooking: they made a rather pungent sauce with it, served with fish. It has a very powerful odour which gnomons cannot tolerate. Remember, they have little substance but are equipped with hypersenses, reacting abnormally not only to the magnetic field of iron but to certain smells and sound levels inaudible to human ears. We should be able to use these elements to hold them, if they can be lured into the trap.’
‘Who does the luring?’ Hazel said with misgiving, already knowing the answer.
‘That would be your job. But I understand if you don’t wish to do it. Geometry is much safer.’
Hazel looked down at a diagram involving several interrelated angles, two triangles and a rhomboid. ‘I’ll do it,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is I have to do.’
‘I