A Dream of Wessex (9 page)

When she was alone, Julia washed hurriedly, then went to find Mark and Hannah. Mark had already left for the town on foot, and Hannah was preparing the boat in which the Castle’s wares were carried across to the town. It was a small dinghy, fitted with an old-fashioned petrol engine. It was the only motorized boat the Castle possessed - indeed, it was the only motorized vehicle of any kind - and it was moored overnight on a stretch of sand beneath the north-eastern ramparts of the Castle.

‘I’ll need the boat this evening, Hannah. I’ll be returning to the Castle in the afternoon. Can you and Mark walk back this evening?’ Hannah was a quiet woman approaching middle age, and she nodded briefly.

Julia said: ‘I’ll walk over to Dorchester this morning. I’ve got a few things to do here first.’

Hannah nodded again, seeming to stare past her. Julia had found her a difficult person to get on with from the start, and the two women still hardly knew each other. Sometimes, two or three days would pass at the stall without their speaking to each other. It seemed not to matter.

Julia helped her launch the boat, and pushed it out into deeper water before Hannah started the engine.

She watched from the beach as the little boat chugged away, and then she walked back along the shore, beneath the northern rampart. The skirt of her smock had got wet when she waded out into the sea, and so she took it off and laid it in the sunshine for a few minutes.

The warmth of the sun on her body reminded her of the day before, as she had lain on the sandy beach of the inlet, watching David Harkman swimming, and feeling the piquancy of sexual anticipation. That anticipation was still there. The prospect of the evening made her feel like she had when she was sixteen, when everything had been full of mystery and dangerous promise, when every young man on the farming cooperative had begun to look at her with new interest, and when she had started to explore the possibilities of that interest.

Those early experiences now felt remote and unreal; perhaps they had been changed in hindsight by the long months of sexual monotony with Greg, or perhaps the only real charge they had ever held was that of novelty.

Thinking of David Harkman, thinking of the intangible magnetism that drew them together, Julia felt an anticipatory moistness in her mouth, a tightness in her stomach: physical excitement, emotional arousal.

After a few minutes of such idle but pleasurable thoughts, Julia sat up and felt the skirt of her smock. It was still damp, but she felt like walking and so she pulled it on again.

She climbed the first rampart and stood for a while to stare out across the blue bay. The tide was high but ebbing, and dozens of pleasure craft were sailing on the calm water. There was a slight haze in the air, and the hills around Blandford Passage were invisible from the Castle. Sometimes Julia envied the rich tourists, for they could buy and enjoy this beautiful place and stay shielded from the less glamorous quotidian concerns of the local people. No one in this part of Wessex actually lived in poverty, but the villas and apartments and hotels that the visitors saw were a world away from local housing standards. The winter months in Wessex were hard for everybody, and when the tidal bore broke through the Passage in its midwinter fury it was as a reminder of the elemental forces that had shaped this region, not as a tourist attraction for the rich and idle.

The fact that Maiden Castle derived a substantial part of its income from supplying equipment for that attraction held a double irony for Julia. The first was implicit - for the Castle community could not survive without the sales of its skimmers - and the second was that it had brought David Harkman to her, and she thought of him as neither rich nor idle.

She turned and headed inland, walking along the crest of the first rampart. After a while she ran down the slope, and took a path that meandered over the meadows between the Castle and Dorchester, leading nowhere in particular but heading away from the sea. There was a favourite place of hers along here, a quiet hollow, a secret sanctuary.

The sea, however calm or windless, always scented the air at its shore; once inland, Julia felt its presence slipping away behind her, and the air seemed warmer, stiller, more dusty and laden with life. Insects flew and hummed, grass rustled, plants grew green and moist, and underfoot the soil was softer, browner. Julia walked slowly, feeling free and without worries.

She came at last to the place she was looking for: a mound of higher ground, overgrown with bracken. This was some distance from the Castle, although from one side of the low mound a part of the Castle could be seen through a break in the trees around the tiny hamlet of Clandon. Julia walked up the slope, pushing a way through the pathless bracken which grew, in places, as high as her shoulders. The ground was mossy, alive with all manner of tiny animals and insects. On the far side of the rise there was a natural break in the vegetation: the ground was stonier here, and the bracken grew less thickly.

Julia sat down, hugging her arms around her knees, and stared towards the south. She had never seen anyone from the Castle here. It was the one place she could come to and know she would be alone.

She sat and dreamed for about an hour, enjoying the warmth, relishing the solitude. Later, she turned and walked back through the bracken, intending to take as long as possible to reach Dorchester, and then spend the rest of the day at the stall before taking the boat back to the Castle.

Unexpectedly, there came a sudden glint of dazzling light in her eyes, and she blinked and turned her head, as if trying to flick away a piece of grit. She looked around, trying to see the source of the light: it had come from her right, through the bracken.

She moved to one side, trying to peer across the thickly growing vegetation. There was nothing there, no movement, no sign of anything.

She walked on, but moving towards the right, as if to investigate it.

As she pushed aside a large growth of bracken she saw a gleam of white light travelling quickly and erratically across the stalks and leaves towards her. In an instant it found her, and again the brilliance of reflected sunlight dazzled her. She ducked away, and at once saw the source of the light: there was a young man crouching in the bracken about twenty metres away from her, holding a piece of glass in his hand.

He stood up as soon as he realized she had seen him.

‘What are you doing?’ she called to him, holding up her hand in case he played the light on her again.

‘Watching you, m’dear.’ A local accent and intonation, but her doubts were raised immediately by something she sensed in the voice, as if it were an assumed accent.

He was stepping towards her, brushing aside the bracken with his hands. She saw that he was dark-haired and good-looking, and with an easy walk and physique, but the smile on his face was vaguely sinister. She sensed danger, but then saw that he was dressed in a smock similar to her own, which meant that he was from the Castle. But she didn’t know his face.

‘Who are you?’

‘Never mind who I am,’ he said, and again there was a trace of the old Wessex lilt. ‘I know you’re Julia. That right?’ She nodded before she could stop herself. ‘Are you from the Castle?’

‘You could say that.’

‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘I only just arrived, after a manner of speaking.’

He was standing before her now, not threatening her in any way but apparently amused at the sight of her. He was holding a mirror in his right hand, a small circle of polished and silvered glass, quite ordinary. He was playing with it as he stood there, turning it from side to side at shoulder height, and Julia glimpsed whirling reflections of bracken and sky and herself. ‘What do you want?’

‘Surely you know that, m’dear.’

Once again there was no suggestion of threat, but he seemed surprised that she did not know.

‘I’m going back to the Castle,’ she said, trying to move past him.

‘So am I. We’ll walk together.’

As he said this he stepped to one side, and the sun fell across his face. Once more the mirror caught the sun, and he flashed it at her so that the light went into her eyes.

She turned her face away. ‘Don’t do that, please! ‘

‘Look into it, Julia.’

He held it towards her at eye-level. She wouldn’t look at first, not wanting to be dazzled again, but this time he was holding it so that she could see a reflection of herself. His hand was steady, but the mirror was angled down very slightly so that she saw a reflection of her own chin and neck. Automatically, she stooped a little so that she could look into her own eyes.

‘Hold still, Julia.’

She hardly heard what he said, because as she looked at her own eyes it was as if she was staring into a deep cavern. It frightened her and fascinated her, because the more obsessively she looked the deeper became the gaze of her own reflection.

She stepped back involuntarily, and blinked.

‘Did you see yourself, Julia?’

‘Please ... I don’t understand. What are you doing?’

He was still holding the mirror out to her, but she had moved away so that she was no longer transfixed by her own gaze.

Then, in the mirror, she saw a second reflection. There was someone behind -

She turned, gasping aloud. Another man had come up behind her, silently through the bracken. He too was holding a mirror towards her, trying to make her see her own reflection.

Some dim awareness, a distant memory...

‘No!’ she said. ‘Please!’

The first man was twirling his mirror again, catching the sun, making the brilliant rays flash about her head, whisk across her face.

She closed her eyes, trying to avoid the light, trying to rid herself of the terror that was in her.

The second man said: ‘Julia, look into the mirror.’

He was standing beside the first man now, and they both had their mirrors held before her face. Although she was backing away, stumbling through the bracken, they were always in front of her, and soon it was inevitable that she -

Her gaze became locked with that of her reflected self. The same fright and fascination were there, drawing her in, holding her in the limbo of the illusory mirrored world. She became two-dimensional, spread across the plane between glass and silver. She felt a last, terrible compulsion to run, to hide, but it was too late and she was held in the mirror.

Later, she found herself walking back along the path she had followed, one man in front of her, the other behind. Her trance excluded all awareness of the things around her, except for the sight of the back of the man ahead, the sound of the man behind.

They came to Maiden Castle, and she walked with them up the slopes of the ramparts. They went over the first earthwork, then the second, then along the trough between second and third. There were a few people about, but Julia paid no attention to them, and they did not notice her.

At last they came to an artificial construction in the trough: a low, concrete building. It was open on one side, and they walked in. There was nothing here: rubble littered the floor, and the walls and ceiling were cracked. Daylight showed in many places. On the far side there was a flight of steps, leading down, and the first man led the way. They walked slowly and carefully, stepping over small heaps of broken plaster and concrete. The air was chill, and smelled of clay. At the bottom of the stairs it was dark, because an electric light-bulb attached to the wall had broken, but ahead was a long corridor, a tunnel, leading under the village of Maiden Castle, and this was well- lit.

They walked along the tunnel, and Julia saw that the floor was untidy with scraps of paper, broken glass, pools of water. Circular mirrors, lying as if discarded, winked up at her as she passed.

‘In here, Julia.’

They walked into a long, low hall, chill and almost completely dark. Only one light-bulb burned, radiating a pool of light into a bright circle in the centre of the floor.

She felt numbness and fear, compounded by the sense of unwilling compliance with the men’s will. The warmth of the sun, the breezes and brightness of the bay, the people in her life ... they were already long behind her, almost forgotten.

Along the length of one wall, barely visible in the gloom, there was a row of metal cabinets, grey-painted, dull-sheened. The second man, the one who walked behind, went across to these and walked along until he had found the one he was looking for. He put his hands on a steel handle, and pulled ... and a long shallow drawer appeared.

Julia walked towards it without being told.

The younger man, the dark-haired one with the Wessex voice, stood beside her.

‘Don’t you be frightened, Julia.’

She saw in him the affinity, the sense of recognition.

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Take off your dress. Lie on the drawer.’

Talking had weakened the trance. She looked away from him, feeling a return of her sense of identity.

‘No,’ she said, but her voice was uncertain, trembling.

Watching her, he raised the little mirror again, and she shrank back from it, not wanting to see her own face. She felt the cold edge of the metal drawer against her hip.

‘Take off your dress, Julia.’

‘No, I won’t.’

‘I’ll hold her down, Steve. You get it off.’

Before she could resist, Julia was pushed back against the drawer, and one of the men seized her from behind, his arm holding tightly across her shoulders. The other man snatched at the laces at the front, opening the dress, pulling it down. She struggled at first, but she was still under the partial influence of the mirror and in a few seconds she was naked.

‘OK, that’s it.’

They turned her and pushed her down along the length of the drawer. The metal was cold against her flesh, and she resisted again ... but they were too strong and too determined. She felt their hands on her body, pulling her and holding her arms and legs. Her head was pushed down into a contoured support, and she felt a sharp pricking in her neck and back.

At once, she felt she had been paralysed.

The men released her, and together they pushed the drawer.