Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

Gaynor found his air of authority somewhat incongruous, but before she had time to consider her surprise he had turned to talk to her, and was enquiring about her work and displaying an unexpected familiarity with the subject. The three of them walked along together for some distance, the dog padding at their heels. Will said little. They turned back towards Yarrowdale, following a different path which plunged down into the valley and brought them eventually to the river. Spring was unfolding among the trees but the leaves of many winters lay thickly on the ground.

‘Was this where Alison drowned?’ Gaynor said suddenly.

‘Yes and no,’ said Will. ‘This is where they found her. In the Yarrow. Further down from here.’

Ragginbone made no comment, but she felt his gaze.

Where the path branched they separated, man and dog going their own way.

‘You’ll stay around, won’t you?’ Will said to him.

‘There’s nothing I can do.’

‘I know, but …’

‘Something troubles you? Something more than your sister’s obduracy?’

‘There’s too much tension in the air. I don’t think it’s all coming from her.’ He appealed to Gaynor. ‘You’ve felt it too, haven’t you?’ She remembered her nightmare in front of the television, and the owl-dream, and for no reason at all there was a sick little jolt of fear in her stomach. ‘It isn’t like the last time, hounds sniffing in the night: nothing like that. But I have a sense of someone or something watching … spying. An uncomfortable tingle on the nape of my neck. I might be imagining it.’

‘We’ll be here,’ said Ragginbone.

He strode off at great speed, the dog always beside him, unbidden and silent. ‘I suppose he’s a wizard?’ Gaynor said with a wavering attempt at sarcasm.

‘Oh no,’ said Will. ‘Not any more.’

Fern was sitting at the kitchen table, an untidy pile of cards, gifts and wrappings on one side of her, a tidy pile of sealed and addressed envelopes on the other. There was a cup of coffee at her elbow, almost untouched. She glanced up as her friend came in, her expression preoccupied, a brief smile coming and going. Perhaps because she wore no makeup she looked visibly strained, the small bones showing sharply beneath her skin, faint shadow-bruises under her eyes. But she did not look like a witch. Gaynor’s concept of the twentieth-century sorceress was drawn from books and films: she visualised something between the Narnian Jadis and Cher in one of her more glamorous roles, a statuesque creature with aquiline profile and waist-length elflocks. Fern looked compact, practical, wearily efficient. A PR executive frustrated by rural privations. A bride with pre-marital nerves. The antithesis of all that was magical and strange. ‘I’ve run out of stamps,’ she announced. ‘I wish I could do these things on the laptop: it would take half the time and at least they’d be legible. My handwriting’s turning into Arabic.’

‘Why can’t you?’

‘The older generation would be offended. Etiquette hasn’t caught up with technology yet.’

‘Shall I go and get the stamps for you?’ Gaynor offered. ‘I can find the post office. I saw it yesterday.’

‘That would be wonderful,’ Fern said warmly, ‘but you’ve only just got in. Have some coffee first. The pot’s on the stove. I made the real thing: I thought we might need it. Instant doesn’t have the same kick.’

Gaynor helped herself and replaced the contents of Fern’s mug, which had begun to congeal.

‘How are you getting on with my brother?’ Fern enquired, scribbling her way automatically through another note.

‘I like him,’ Gaynor responded tentatively, thinking of the row the previous night.

‘So do I,’ said Fern. ‘Even if he is a pain in the bum.’

‘He lives in a world of his own, doesn’t he?’ Gaynor said rather too casually, seating herself on the opposite side of the table.

‘Not exactly.’ Fern’s head was still bent over her work. ‘He lives in someone else’s world – a world where he doesn’t belong. That’s just the trouble.’

III

Long before, when she was five or six years old, Gaynor had stayed in a haunted house. She still retained a vivid memory of the woman who had bent over her bed, staring at her with eyes that saw someone else. A woman in a long dress, shadowy in the semi-dark. She had brought a chill into the room that made Gaynor shiver, even under the bedclothes, but she could remember no sense of evil. Only a presence, and the cold. ‘She’s a sensitive,’ a friend had told her mother, and for some time she had worried about that, afraid of what she might sense, but no further incidents had occurred and the matter had faded from her mind, though her recollection of the phenomenon remained very clear. Now, she found herself reviving that image, reaching out with her so-called sensitivity, half in hope, half in fear, though the house did not respond. It felt not so much haunted, she decided, as inhabited : she always had the impression there were more people around than was actually the case.

After she returned from the post office Fern had to drive into Whitby to sort out a problem with the caterers. ‘Do you want to come?’ she asked but Gaynor declined. Will was out painting somewhere and she welcomed the idea of some time to herself. She stood in the room gazing in the mirror – Alison’s mirror – willing it to show her something, part fanciful, part sceptical, seeing only herself. A long pale face, faintly medieval, or so she liked to think, since medieval was better than plain. Brown eyes set deep under serious eyebrows. A thin, sad mouth, though why it should be sad she did not know, only that this was what she had been told. And the hair that was her glory, very long and very dark, falling like a cloak about her shoulders. Alison Redmond had had such hair, Maggie had said, though for some reason Gaynor pictured it as fairer than her own, the colour of dust and shadows.

‘You stare much harder at t’glass you’ll crack it,’ came a voice from the doorway. Gaynor had forgotten Mrs Wicklow. She jumped and flushed, stammering something incoherent, but the housekeeper interrupted. ‘You want to be careful. Mirrors remember, or so my mother used to say. You never know what it might show you. That was the one used to hang in her room. I’ve cleaned it and polished it up many a time, but the reflection never looks right to me.’

‘What was she like?’ asked Gaynor, seizing the opportunity. ‘Alison, I mean.’

‘Out for what she could get,’ Mrs Wicklow stated. ‘This house is full of old things – antiques and stuff that the Captain brought back from his travels. Her eyes had a sort of glistening look when she saw them. Greedy. Wouldn’t have surprised me if she were mixed up with real criminals. She didn’t like anyone in t’bedroom when she was away. We didn’t have no key then but she did something to the doorknob – something with electricity. Funny, that.’ She turned towards the stairs. ‘You come down now and have a bite of lunch. You young girls, you’re all too thin. You worry too much about your figures.’

Gaynor followed her obediently. ‘I gather Alison drowned,’ she continued cautiously. ‘In some kind of freak flood?’

‘That’s what they say ,’ said Mrs Wicklow. ‘Must have been an underground spring, though I never heard of one round here. Swept most of the barn away, it did; they pulled down t’rest. She’d had the builders in there, “doing it up” she said. Happen they tapped into something.’

‘I didn’t know there was a barn,’ said Gaynor.

‘The Captain used to keep some of his stuff in there. Rubbish mostly, if you ask me. He’d got half a boat he’d picked up somewhere, part of a wreck he said, with a woman on the front baring her all. Fern insisted they give it to a museum. Will wanted to keep it, but it wasn’t healthy for a young man. There’s trouble enough him messing around with Art.’