old is Rianna Sardou, do you suppose?’
‘Late thirties … forty … Older than Michael, I think. Why?’
‘I just wondered,’ Bartlemy said.
When she had gone, he sat in the living room with Hoover, drinking sweet tea and gazing into the fire. ‘Why did I come here?’ he asked of no one in particular, but Hoover cocked an ear. ‘I read the signs, but I have never been one to follow such things. There have been few portents for me, over the years. All I ever wanted to do was heal sickness, and cook. Two sides of the same coin, Rukush. Drugs and potions cure illness, good food makes the body strong, and great food – ah, great food nourishes the soul. I can prepare a dessert that will turn a peasant into a poet, I can soothe the tyrant’s rage with soups and sauces, I can roast a sirloin so tender that it would make a proud man humble and an atheist believe in God. That was all the power I ever wanted. But when I saw a fantasy in the smoke I came here, and I waited. And the day Annie knocked on my door I knew that was what I was waiting for. Annie and the child. But still I don’t know why. There are always more questions, less answers. I think it is time to draw the curtains close, and make a different fire.’
When the last of the logs had burned down he cleaned out the grate and pinned the curtains together against prying eyes. Even so, it was far into the night before he lit a new fire, feeding it not with wood or coal but with bluish crystals that spat and cracked after too long in storage. The flame they emitted was also bluish, and cold-looking, and it filled the room with a pale chill light. Presently he threw some powder on it which seemed to be damp, turning the flame to smoke, and the room darkened again, and the chimney was closed off so the smoke could not escape, and the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy made a gesture, a little like that of the man in Nathan’s dream, and the smoke was sucked into a cloud which hovered in one place, and there was a whirling at its heart. Vague colours flickered in its depths like trails of light. Then the whirling steadied, and the colours condensed, and in the midst of the smoke there was a picture.
A cup. It looked mediaeval or older, with a wide bowl and a short, thick stem entwined in coiling patterns that seemed to shape themselves into runes and hieroglyphs. It was made of opaque glass or polished stone, but it glowed as if endowed with secret life, and appeared to be floating in the green halo of its own light. The thread of a whisper came to Bartlemy’s ears from nothing in the room. Then the light vanished and the cup was falling, clattering onto a floor somewhere, rolling back and forth on the arc of its rim. A human hand descended slowly, and picked it up. ‘The Grimthorn Grail,’ Bartlemy murmured. ‘One of a hundred – a thousand – that lay claim to the ancient legend. But it was sold abroad, and lost in the turmoil of war, and the Thorns who had failed to care for it are long gone …’
The vision of the cup was replaced by a muddle of dim shapes, all unclear, but he thought he could make out a running figure, coming towards him. The image was too dark to see properly but he had an impression of breathlessness and fear, and shadows following, swarming on its heels, and in the quiet of the night there was the sound of whispering, reaching out from the smoke. It seemed to him that it was the same whisper he had heard a few minutes earlier, though louder, and with different words, different purpose. But he couldn’t be sure, since the words were indistinguishable, the purpose unrevealed. The picture sombred and was lost, and other images succeeded it, changing swiftly, some distinct, some vague and blurred. A small chapel with a cloaked man going from candle to candle: the lighted taper picked out his profile as he bent his head, the nose outthrust like a broken spar, the lipless fold of the mouth, the eyes sagging between multiple lids. The candles burned with a greasy flame, showing a gargoyle-face peering from a stony arch, and a low altar without a cross. Then the scene dissolved into a wood with tangled trees, maybe the Darkwood – then the flash and sparkle of a river in sunshine – a cage or grille, and hands that shook the bars – a wood in springtime, with a brown twig-legged creature lurking in the hollow of a tree – the river again, only this time there was a face beneath the water, and rippled sunlight flowing over it, but he knew it wasn’t drowned. Then back to the cloaked man, raising his arm, and a sudden blaze of fire, fire in the chapel, fire in the wood – and lastly, for no reason that Bartlemy could understand, a shingle beach in the drear light of a winter’s morning, and the ebb and surge of grey waves, and a man who seemed to have come out of the water, wearing a hood that covered his entire head.
Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her to this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’
Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glanced back into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.
For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.
Hoover raised his head hopefully.
‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’
In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’
‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.
Annie laughed.
Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.
‘I get seasick.’
‘On a river?’
‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’
At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with them, but there was a large section left, and Annie, Bartlemy and Hoover sat by the fire at teatime (it was not yet too warm for a fire to be unwelcome) and munched their way through a respectable portion of it. Annie talked about Nathan, as she so often did, proud of his academic achievements, but still happier at the person she felt he was growing into. ‘I’m being boring,’ she said, catching herself up short. ‘Boring on about my son.’
‘What