Jan Siegel - The Dragon-Charmer

‘Must have been one of Great-Cousin Ned’s sisters,’ said Will, attacking Mrs Wicklow’s cooking with an appetite that belied his thinness.

‘Great- Cousin –? ’

‘He left us this house,’ Fern explained. ‘His relationship to Daddy was so obscure we christened him Great-Cousin. It seemed logical at the time. Anyway, he had several sisters who preceded him into this world and out of it: I’m sure the youngest was an E. Esme … no. No. Eithne.’

‘I don’t suppose there’s a romantic mystery attached to her?’ Gaynor said, half ironic, half wistful. ‘Since I’ve got her room, you know.’

‘No,’ Fern said baldly. ‘There isn’t. As far as we know, she was a fluttery young girl who became a fluttery old woman, with nothing much in between. The only definite information we have is that she made seed cake which tasted of sand.’

‘She must have had a lover,’ Will speculated. ‘The family wouldn’t permit it, because he was too low class. They used to meet on the moor, like Heathcliff and Cathy only rather more restrained. He wrote bad poems for her – you’ll probably find one in your room – and she pressed the wild flower he gave her in her prayer book. That’ll be around somewhere too. One day they were separated in a mist, she called and called to him but he did not come – he strayed too far, went over a cliff and was lost.’

‘Taken by boggarts,’ Fern suggested.

‘So she never married,’ Will concluded, ‘but spent the next eighty years gradually pining away. Her sad spectre still haunts the upper storey, searching for whichever book it was in which she pressed that bloody flower.’

Gaynor laughed. She had been meaning to ask about Alison again, but Will’s fancy diverted her, and it slipped her mind.

It was gone midnight when they went up to bed. Gaynor slept unevenly, troubled by the country quiet, listening in her waking moments to the rumour of the wind on its way to the sea and the hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The owl-cry invaded her dreams, filling them with the noiseless flight of pale wings and the glimpse of a sad ghost-face looming briefly out of the dark. She awoke before dawn, hearing the gentleness of rain on roof and window-pane. Perhaps she was still half dreaming, but it seemed to her that her window stood high in a castle wall, and outside the rain was falling softly into the dim waters of a loch, and faint and far away someone was playing the bagpipes.

In her room on the floor below, Fern too had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deep to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple-drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. ‘I must go back!’ she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly lustre of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to weigh her down, the spirit that breathes in every creation and at the nucleus of all being. An emotion flowed into her that was as vivid as excitement and as deep as peace. She wanted to hold on to that moment forever, but there was a voice calling, calling her without words, dragging her back into her body and her bed, until at last she knew she was lying in the dark, and the owl’s hoot was a cry of loneliness and pain for all that she had lost.

An hour or so later she got up, took two aspirin (she would not use sleeping pills), tried to read for a while. It was a long, long time before exhaustion mastered her, and she slipped into oblivion.

Will slumbered undisturbed, accustomed to the nocturnal smalltalk of his non-human neighbours. When the bagpipes began, he merely rolled over, smiling in his sleep.

The next day was spent mostly on wedding preparations. The girls having brought the Dress with them, Mrs Wicklow exercised her royal prerogative and took charge of it, relegating Trisha to the sidelines, personally pressing it into creaseless perfection and arraying it in state in one of the spare bedrooms. Will had unearthed a rather decrepit tailor’s dummy from the attic, formerly the property of a long-deceased Miss Capel, and they hung the Dress on it, arranging the train in a classic swirl on the carpet, tweaking the empty sleeves into place. He even stuck a knitting-needle in the vacancy of the neck and suspended the veil from its point, draping it in misty folds that fell almost to the floor. Fern found something oddly disquieting in that faceless, limbless shell of a bride; she even wondered if Will was trying to make a subtle point, but he was so helpful, so pleased with his and Mrs Wicklow’s handiwork, that she was forced to acquit him of deviousness. It was left to Gaynor to offer comment. ‘It looks very beautiful,’ she said. ‘It’ll walk down the aisle all by itself.’

‘ Up the aisle,’ said Fern. ‘It’s up .’

They met the vicar, Gus Dinsdale, in the church that afternoon and retired to the vicarage for tea. Gus in his forties looked very much as he had in his thirties, save that his hair was receding out of existence and his somewhat boyish expression had been vividly caricatured by usage and time. On learning that Gaynor’s work was researching and restoring old books and manuscripts he begged to show her some of his acquisitions, and when Will and Fern left he took her into his study. Gaynor duly admired the books, but her mind was elsewhere. She hovered on the verge of asking questions but drew back, afraid of appearing vulgarly inquisitive, a busybody prying into the affairs of her friend. And then, on their return to the drawing room, chance offered her an opening. ‘You have lovely hair, dear,’ Gus’ wife Maggie remarked. ‘I haven’t seen hair that long since Alison – and I was never sure hers was natural. Of course, I don’t think they had extensions in those days, but –’

‘Alison?’ Gaynor nearly jumped. ‘Will mentioned her. So did Fern. Who was she?’

‘She was a friend of Robin’s,’ Maggie replied. ‘She stayed at Dale House for a while, more than a decade ago now. We didn’t like her very much.’

‘ You didn’t like her,’ Gus corrected, smiling faintly. ‘She was a very glamorous young woman. Not all that young really, and not at all beautiful, but … well, she had It. As they say.’

‘She looked like a succubus,’ Maggie said.

‘You’ve never seen a succubus.’

‘Maybe not,’ Maggie retorted with spirit, ‘but I’d know one if I did. It would look like Alison.’

‘My wife is prejudiced,’ Gus said. ‘Alison wasn’t the kind of woman to be popular with her own sex. Alison Redmond, that was her full name. Still, we shouldn’t speak harshly of her. Her death was a terrible tragedy. Fern was completely overset by it.’