Jan Siegel - The Traitor’s Sword - The Sangreal Trilogy Two

‘Yes,’ she said with a furtive smile. ‘Sorry. It’s only … Prenders told me …’

‘That Woman,’ her mentor said with unmistakable capital letters, ‘talks a load of –’

‘Frim!’

‘Squiffle-piffle! That’s all I was going to say. Doesn’t know her coccyx from her humerus. Why, when everyone else leaves, she has to stay around …’

‘She loves me,’ the princess said gently. ‘And Papa.’

‘Overrated, love. People use it as an excuse for anything.’ Absently, he stroked her hand again. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll find a cure for the king – and then, so they say, the kingdom will be healed. Somewhere there’ll be a formula – the recipe for a potion …’

‘Then light the lamp,’ said the girl, indicating an oil lamp on the desk, ‘or you’ll miss it.’ She removed the glass chimney, struck a match and held the flame to the wick. The sudden glow flushed her cheek and spun a shimmer of gold from her hair. As the dream faded Nathan tried to fix the image in his mind, wanting to remember exactly how she looked, but of course, when he awoke, he couldn’t.

It was deep night. He got out of bed and climbed up to the Den, his childhood retreat under the pitch of the roof. Through the skylight he saw a single star look down, watching him. But he knew it wasn’t a star: it was a spy-crystal through which, in an alternative universe, the faceless ruler of Eos could survey anything in its range. Sometimes, when the world was ordinary, that knowledge seemed like a brief glimpse into madness, but not now, not tonight.

‘Things are happening,’ he thought, with a complicated shiver, reaching back into the dream. Something had been said, something significant – something which struck a faint chord of familiarity – but he was too busy trying to re-create the face of the princess, and he couldn’t remember what it was.

Bartlemy Goodman was home the night the burglars came. He usually was at home. For a man who had seen so much, and done so much, he now led a very tranquil life, or so it appeared, visiting the village of Eade mainly to see Annie Ward, who was widely thought to be his niece, and rarely venturing beyond Crowford. He was known to own the bookshop where Annie and her son lodged, and believed to be a collector, though no one was quite sure of what. The villagers accepted his unspecified eccentricities, and respected him for no particular reason, except that he appeared worthy of respect. It was a part of his Gift that he could pass almost unremarked in the local community, giving rise to no gossip, awakening no curiosity, though he had lived at Thornyhill, the old house out in the woods, since the original Thorns had sold up and all but died out generations before. Without really thinking about it, people assumed that the house had been bought by Bartlemy’s grandfather, or some other elderly relative, and had passed on from Goodman to Goodman until it reached the present incumbent. They never wondered why each successive owner should look the same, or remain apparently the same age, around sixty; indeed, had anyone been asked, they would have sworn to little differences between the Bartlemys, to periods of absence following the death of one when another must have been growing up somewhere abroad. Nor did they ever wonder about the dog.

Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would foregather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object (which had belonged to someone else) had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumours that Bartlemy ‘collected’ it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.

The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark-blue dressing-gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling – he never growled – but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth which wouldn’t have looked out-of-place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterwards, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.

‘This is – this is assault,’ the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. ‘I can sue.’

‘I haven’t assaulted you,’ Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way.

‘The dog –’

‘He hasn’t assaulted you either.’ Yet , said the ensuing pause.

‘We didn’t mean no harm,’ offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright.

‘I’m sure you didn’t. I’ll telephone the police, and then you can sit down with me, and have a biscuit, and while we wait you can tell me what you did mean.’

The call was made, and somehow the boys didn’t argue, perching nervously on the edge of Bartlemy’s sofa and nibbling home-made biscuits while Hoover stood by, watching them in a proprietary manner. Ginger was known for beating up older boys, and the little Asian made up in aggression what he lacked in size, but they sat as quiet as if they were at a vicarage tea-party, and God was waiting with a thunderbolt for one of them to burp.

‘Someone sent you here, didn’t they?’ said Bartlemy. ‘What were you looking for?’

Mouths opened and shut, and Ginger choked on a biscuit crumb, but this time it was Ram who looked most afraid.

‘No one sent us,’ he said at last.

‘It was your own idea?’

‘Yeah. Yeah. I’m the one with the ideas.’

‘Do you think it was a good idea?’

‘No.’

‘Are you sure no one sent you?’ Bartlemy persisted.

Ram turned pale, and his mouth closed tight, and he looked almost relieved when the police arrived. He knew just how not to talk to the police. He’d sat through many interrogations, he was still underage, and insofar as it concerned himself he knew the law as well as any solicitor. But this man with his unruffled manner, and his alarming dog, and his calm blue gaze that seemed to see straight into your mind – this was something far more demoralizing than any bullying copper. Ram had a horrible feeling that given time – and a few more biscuits – he would have been telling Bartlemy things even his mother didn’t know. He was secretly thankful to settle for the more familiar option.

Watching them go with a sigh, Bartlemy surmised that if they had been sent, Ginger, at least, knew nothing of it. He returned to bed, and in the half-hour before sleep considered possible lines of inquiry. A few days later, he telephoned an acquaintance in the CID.