Jan Siegel - Witch’s Honour

‘How will you recognise me?’ she had asked. ‘Carnation buttonhole? Rolled up copy of Hello! ?’

‘I’ll know you,’ he had said, with a quiet certainty that was unnerving.

Not for the first time in her life, she wished she wasn’t quite so well brought up.

They met in a City bar not long after six. Fern arrived in time to get a small table to herself, reserving the spare chair, before the bulk of the rush-hour drinkers flooded in. As always when awaiting someone she’d never met, she checked each new arrival, particularly the men on their own, trying to match a face to the voice on the telephone. At one point, a young man stood in the entrance for a couple of minutes, peering round the room, and she thought with a sense of resignation, ‘This is it,’ but it wasn’t. He had the pink-faced, slightly smug good looks that youth so often assumes when it has too much money, but there was no sign of the single-mindedness or the underlying tension she had detected in the brief telephone conversation. He moved across the room, waylaying a blonde who had been screened by a pillar, and Fern switched off her expression of polite welcome and stirred the froth into her cappuccino.

When he finally arrived, only five minutes late although it seemed like much longer, he took her off guard. She was expecting someone who would pause, gaze about him, vaccillate; but he came towards her without hesitation or doubt, sat in the empty chair with no invitation. ‘Miss Capel. Hello. I’m Lucas Walgrim.’

Her initial reaction was that this was not a face she would trust. Attractive in the wrong way, with that taut-boned, clenched-in look, like a person who is accustomed to suppressing all emotion. A suggestion of something unsafe, an element of ruthlessness carefully concealed. No sense of humour. Under the black straight line of his brows his eyes were a startling light grey, nearly silver. She had never liked pale eyes. A lack of pigment, she had been told in her school years. Lack of colour, lack of warmth, lack of soul.

She said: ‘How did you recognise me?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’ She was the girl in his dream of the city, though older, the girl he had seen waking from oblivion. But there was no sign of the intense, arresting creature he remembered. She was just a classic London type, more woman than girl, discreetly power-suited, elegantly pretty, aloof, so inscrutable that she appeared almost bland.

She asked: ‘Where?’ and he didn’t know how to answer. He could not tell this cool sophisticate that he had seen her in his dreams. Instead, he was conveniently distracted by a waitress, ordering coffee and whisky for himself and, at Fern’s request, gin and tonic for her. Then he adopted boardroom tactics, changing the subject before she had time to repeat her question.

‘It was good of you to come. You said you were busy, so I won’t keep you. If I could just tell you about my sister—’

‘And then what?’ Fern knew he had deliberately evaded her earlier demand and was beginning to feel uneasy in a totally different way.

‘I don’t know. I was hoping it might strike a chord of some kind. I’m going on instinct here. I don’t have anything else to go on.’

‘I honestly don’t think I’ll be much help. What you need is some kind of support group…’

‘ No . What I need is someone who’s been there —wherever Dana’s gone. Can’t you just try and talk to me?’

‘All right.’ Fern felt cornered. ‘What exactly happened to your sister?’

‘We had a New Year’s Eve bash at my father’s place in the country. I wasn’t in the room at the time, but I’m told Dana fell and hit her head. Not very hard. The doctors said she shouldn’t even have had concussion. When she passed out—well, I thought it was drink or drugs. She’s had a problem with both. I took her to the hospital, but they said she hadn’t taken anything and her alcohol level was high but not excessive. She just didn’t come round. They couldn’t understand it. They waffled about “abnormal reactions”, that sort of crap, but it was obvious they were stumped. She hasn’t even twitched an eyelid since then. Her pulse is so slow she’s barely alive. I heard it was like that with you.’

‘A little,’ Fern acknowledged. ‘I was very drunk, I blacked out, I stayed out. Then a week or so later, I came round. That’s really all I can tell you.’

His eyes looked lighter, she noticed, because of the shadows beneath. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘I know it isn’t. Tell me where you went, when you were unconscious.’

He noted with interest that her expression became, if possible, a shade blander. ‘Answer my question,’ she said.

‘Which question?’ he queried unnecessarily.

‘The one you dodged.’

He paused, thinking it over. ‘You might not believe me: that’s why I didn’t answer. I saw you in a dream. Twice. Nothing sentimental, don’t get that idea. The second time you were in a hospital bed, regaining consciousness. I only saw you for an instant, but the picture was very sharp. Too sharp for dreaming. You looked…intensely alive. More than now.’

He realised too late that he had been offensive, but her manner merely cooled a little further. She inquired noncommittally: ‘Do you often have such dreams? Dreams that stay with you?’

‘Occasionally. Did you dream, when you were in a coma?’

‘No.’ Their drinks arrived, covering a momentary stalemate. When the waitress had retreated, Fern pursued: ‘You said you dreamed about me twice. What happened in the first one?’

‘It didn’t make sense. There was a city—an ancient city—a bit like Ephesos in Turkey, only not in ruins—and a girl asking me for help. Then it changed suddenly, the way dreams do, and we were in the dark somewhere, and the girl turned into you. She looked much younger—fourteen, fifteen—but it was definitely you. The strange thing…’

‘Yes?’

‘I recognised you. I mean, the person I was in the dream recognised you. Whoever you were.’ When she did not respond, he added: ‘Do you follow me?’

‘Yes.’ Both expression and tone seemed to have passed beyond circumspection into a realm of absolute detachment. She sounded so remote, so blank, he knew that his words had meant something to her. Her drink was untouched, her hand frozen in the act of lifting her glass.

When he saw that she wasn’t going to elucidate he said: ‘Your turn.’

‘My…turn?’

‘You were going to tell me what happened when you were comatose. If you didn’t dream…?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said slowly. ‘I wasn’t there. I was—outside my body, outside the world.’ She concluded with a furtive smile: ‘You might not believe me, of course.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Under a tree.’

‘Where? In a wood? A field? What kind of tree?’

He knew the questions were meaningless, but she answered them. ‘The only kind of tree—the first tree. The Tree all other trees are trying to be, and failing. No wood, no field. Just tree. Under the Tree, there was a cave, with three witches. It’s always three, isn’t it? The magic number. I was the third.’

‘Are you a witch?’ he asked, unsmiling. She looked very unmagical, with her sleek short hair and svelte besuited figure. But it troubled him that she did not either affirm or deny it. She glanced down at her hand—her left hand—as if it did not belong to her, and remembered her gin and tonic, and sipped it, slowly, as though she were performing an exercise in self-restraint. He had developed similar methods in business, learning to curb his occasional impetuosity, to suppress any inner weakness or self-doubt, to control every nuance of his manner. But she does it naturally, he thought. Without trying.