Jan Siegel - Prospero’s Children

‘It wasn’t a badger,’ said Fern over breakfast. ‘There were no markings. It was big, and dark: that’s all I could see.’ She didn’t want to mention the reasonless terror that had tried to drag her from the window. Fern disliked both terror and unreason.

‘A dog?’ Will suggested.

‘Maybe.’

‘A wolf?’

‘There aren’t any wolves left in Britain.’

‘It could have escaped from a zoo,’ Will theorised, ‘only…’

‘Why would it want to get into the house? An escaped wolf would be out on the moors killing sheep—supposing it was a wolf, which I doubt. Anyway, I don’t think there are any zoos near here,’

There was a short pause filled with the crunching of cereal. ‘When you have eliminated the impossible,’ Will pronounced eventually, ‘whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes. Conan Doyle was a great believer in the supernatural. And that’s what we’re left with. There’s something strange going on, something to do with this house. I thought so all along. So did you really, only you’re so grownup and boring that you won’t let yourself believe in anything any more. Remind me not to grow up if that’s how it takes you. Did you know that they’ve conducted experiments in telekinesis in the laboratory? Did you know that there are alternative universes round every corner? Did you know—’

‘Shut up,’ said Fern. ‘I’m not boring, just sceptical. That’s healthy.’ And: ‘Did you know…did you know there’s a boulder on the hill behind the garden that’s shaped like a seated man, and sometimes it’s there, and sometimes it isn’t? It’s been there all weekend—always in the same place—and this morning it was gone. How’s that for a did-you-know?’

‘Perhaps it is a man,’ Will said uncertainly, baffled by the introduction of a new element in the situation. ‘Perhaps it’s a tramp.’

‘It’s a rock,’ said Fern. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyesight. It sits there for days, in all kinds of weather, like a rock is supposed to. I think it’s watching us.’

‘Rocks don’t watch,’ Will pointed out.

‘This one does.’

‘It all centres on the house,’ Will reiterated. ‘It could be something to do with the stuff Great-Cousin Ned picked up on his travels. Maybe there’s a magic talisman hidden in the attic, or an amulet, or the green eye of the little yellow god, or—what about that chest? It must be in there—whatever it is.’

‘Too obvious.’

‘Well, we ought to look. The key should be around somewhere.’

An arrested expression appeared on Fern’s face. ‘I don’t know if it’s relevant,’ she said slowly, ‘but Mrs Wicklow said there was a woman here asking about keys, before Great-Cousin Ned died. She was in the antiques business.’

‘She must have known about the chest.’

‘How?’

They spent the morning rooting among the jumble in the attic, finding neither talisman nor key but an assortment of items which Will at least considered promising, including an evil-looking curved knife, a devil-mask which was probably African, a hookah happily empty of opium, and an antiquated map of the Indian sub-continent with elephants, tigers, maharajahs and palaces drawn in where appropriate. Also a great deal of dust and several spiders, the largest and leggiest of which sent Fern into retreat, claiming it was time she checked out the study. Unfortunately, the most interesting feature of Ned Capel’s sanctum was a mahogany writing desk the top of which proved to be locked and, like the chest, keyless. ‘Damn,’ said Fern, who had been brought up to moderate her language. ‘I bet all the keys are in one place. The question is where.’ Her sweat-shirt, she noticed, had acquired several dust-smears as a result of her foraging, and she went to her room to change it. She had no intention of returning to the attic that day.

A routine glance out of the window showed her a sky of gunmetal grey and rain blowing in waves across the bleak landscape. Her gaze shifted—then switched back again. Seconds later she was running down the stairs, kicking off her sandals at the bottom with uncharacteristic carelessness. In the hall, she plunged her feet into an old pair of galoshes, snatched Robin’s Barbour from the peg, and crammed on her head a shapeless waterproof hat which had formerly belonged to Ned Capel. Then she ran out of the back door and through the garden to the gate. The latch was stiff from infrequent use and the wood had swollen in the wet: it took a hard thrust of her shoulder to open it. The oversized boots slopped around her feet as she scrambled up the path. The wind swept across the hillside unhindered. And then she was standing in front of him with the water dripping off her hat-brim and her unfastened jacket letting the rain soak through her sweat-shirt. He no longer resembled a boulder, though there was something rock-like about his absolute stillness and the patience it implied. He wore a loose, bulky garment with a pointed hood overhanging his face: the material was heavy and laminated with long weathering, its brindled hues at once earth-coloured and stone-coloured, moss-patched and grass-grimed. Under the hood she saw a countenance as battered as the coat, with sparse flesh on strong bones and wind-worn, sun-leathered skin gathered into wrinkles about the mouth and eyes, some of them for laughter, some for thought, many for grimness and sorrow. But it was the eyes themselves which held her: they were green and gold and brown like a woodland spring and they sparkled brighter than the rain, so bright that they seemed to pierce the walls of her mind and see into her very soul. And after the first shocked recoil her soul opened in response, and her life changed forever. It was as if the personality she had made for herself, matter-of-fact, positive, conscientiously hidebound, began to peel away like a chrysalis and a different Fernanda, wet-winged and shy, poked a tentative antenna into the unfamiliar air. In that moment she realised that she did not know herself, she never had, and all her certainties had been merely the pretence of a child afraid of maturity; but ignorance did not frighten her now, for he knew who she was, and what she was, and in that knowing she could be at ease. She said ‘Hello’, and he said ‘Hello’, and their greeting dissolved the walls of her little world, and let in the unimaginable from Outside.

‘You took your time.’ the Watcher went on. He studied her thoughtfully, seeing a girl with a raindrop on her nose—a very young girl—small for her age, her face heart-shaped, her features delineated with the precision and clarity of a pen-and-ink drawing. The wind slipped under her hat-brim, tugging it back from her forehead, showing hair that was leaf-brown and close-cut, the would-be fringe dividing obstinately into a widow’s peak above her brow. Her eyes were wide and wide-set, their grey veined with celadon, and even in that instant of her mind’s opening he glimpsed depths that were incalculable, an intelligence that would always be wary. He had made her trust him, an elementary manoeuvre, but she would not hesitate to return to doubt if—and when—he let her down.

‘You looked like a rock,’ she said accusingly.

‘It’s useful,’ he replied. ‘Nobody wonders what you’re up to, if you’re a rock. No questions, no trouble. There’s nothing as unremarkable as a rock.’

‘It isn’t possible,’ said Fern, but the conviction was gone from her voice. ‘I saw the rock.’

‘Appearances can deceive,’ the Watcher said. ‘You see many things which are not there. A mirage, a reflection, a star that died thousands of years ago. You should trust your instinct, not your eyes. You knew me long before today.’