Doctor Illuminatus (2 page)

Determined to discover the identity of the plant, she continued on her way towards the house. Near the door, a buddleia was in full bloom, the tight spirals of deep mauve flowers attracting a small cloud of butterflies. Mixing with them were several honey- and bumblebees, dipping from flower to flower in their search for any nectar the butterflies had overlooked.

As Pip passed the buddleia, a butterfly settled on her arm. It was small and nondescript and yet, as it landed, it felt somehow heavy. Uniformly dull brown with several whitish markings along the edge of its wings, the only bright color it displayed was a single chalky yellow spot on each of its rear wings, near the abdomen. No sooner had it alighted than it dipped its head to the fine hairs on her arm and gave her a vicious sting. It was worse than a wasp, the pain as sharp as a red-hot hypodermic needle piercing her skin.

Instantly, Pip swept her hand down to swat it off, but the insect was too quick for her. With a speed she would never have expected from a delicate butterfly, it lifted off from her before she could squash it and, flying high, disappeared over the roof of the house.

Where it had landed on her skin was a circular red weal the size of a coin, with a tiny pinprick of blood in the center.

“I’m sure you’re mistaken, dear,” her mother said as she cleaned the bite with disinfectant and warm water. “It was probably a wasp or a hornet or something.”

“It was a butterfly,” Pip insisted, desperately wanting to scratch her arm, which itched incessantly.

“Perhaps,” her mother suggested, reaching into the bathroom cabinet for a tube of antiseptic cream, “it was a foreign butterfly. Maybe they bite. Blown here on the wind. It can happen, you know. Someone saw a hoopoe in Kent last year and that’s a bird that only lives in Africa. And they say, with global warming, we’ll soon have mosquitoes carrying malaria in England.”

“Thanks, Mum,” Pip retorted. “That’s really comforting.”

“Now leave it alone,” her mother ordered, “and let the air get at it.”

Yet, within an hour, all sign of the bite had completely vanished.

By dusk, Pip had more or less got her room sorted out: at least, her television and CD player were wired up and plugged in, her furniture was in the right position, her books were on her shelves in alphabetical order and the duvet was on her bed.

Although she was exhausted after all her efforts, she did not go to bed immediately, but opened one of the windows, leaning out as night fell over the pasture and trees. It was strange, she thought, how the light gradually faded and how, even after she could not make out their exact outlines, she could still somehow see the trees, as if their dark shapes had engraved themselves upon her eyes.

Yet there was something else even stranger. The whole landscape seemed utterly silent. The house the family had moved from had been in a large village and there was always some noise to be heard at night — the distant murmur of the pub and the far-off thunder of the wooden balls in the skittle alley at the back, a passing car or footsteps in the street. This house appeared to exist in a world without sound. Yet, the longer Pip stood still and listened, she began to pick up indistinct noises. The first was an unidentifiable, soft, persistent whisper, as if someone in the night were rubbing a piece of silk. The second, from the direction of the pasture, was a grunting cough, like an old man clearing his throat. The third, when it came, was close by and reminded her of the sound leaves make when they are burned.

Glancing up, she saw something materialize from the eaves just over her head. It was small and black, and — in an instant — was gone, only to be replaced by another, then another, and another. As each disappeared, a tiny breath touched her cheek as if a ghost were kissing her. The hair on the nape of her neck prickled. It was only then she remembered what Tim had found in the attic. These were not ghosts but bats coming out of their roost in the roof to hunt for midges over the pasture and the river, and which, she now realized, were the source of the sound of rubbed silk.

A few moments later, she saw something appear on the top of the ha-ha. It had no definable shape and once in view remained quite still for as long as she stared at it. Then, just as she was about to turn her attention from it, it made the coughing sound and moved stealthily off. From its movement, she knew exactly what it was — a fox on its nocturnal prowl.

Closing the window, Pip crossed the room to her bed and slipped under the cover, lying on her back and staring at the beams of the ceiling. Even in the night, they cast lines of deeper darkness across the white plaster.

Bit by bit, as she had come to hear the noises in the night outside, Pip listened to those of the house settling down. With all the ancient wood used in its construction, it squeaked and clicked as the walls cooled after the hours of sunlight. It was, she thought, like a person going to sleep, easing their muscles after a day’s work, their flesh twitching as their nerves relaxed.

Sometime in the early hours, just before dawn, Pip woke from a dream in which she was wandering through a strange house, getting lost in its labyrinth of long, twisting corridors and gloomy chambers where all the furniture stood about haphazardly. For a moment, she was afraid because she did not recognize her surroundings. It was as if her fantasy had become reality. Then, slowly, her fear subsided as she saw the tiny red light on her CD player, knew it for what it was and remembered she had, after months of being dragged with her brother from house viewing to house viewing by her parents, finally moved into one of them.

However, it was not, Pip soon realized, the scary dream that had woken her, but a noise in the wall behind her bed. At first, it was a slight and irregular scratching that she put down either to the bats returning to their roost before daylight or to mice scurrying about behind the paneling. Old houses, she reasoned, must have centuries of mouse holes gnawed, nibbled and dug in their walls. Yet, after a short while, the scratching ceased, replaced by a persistent, almost gentle, knocking. Going over the possibilities and admitting that the mice were hardly likely to be wearing boots or pick-axing a new run through the wall cavity, Pip reckoned it was caused by the central heating pipes warming up. When she looked at her alarm clock, she saw dawn was less than half an hour off and she knew her parents always liked to get up to a warm house.

The knocking soon became an irregular tapping and then, after about ten minutes, it stopped altogether. Pip gave it no further thought, pulled the cover up to her chin, turned over and went back to sleep.

The school secretary, a prim woman bearing her name — Mrs. Rigg — upon a label pinned to her substantial bosom, her hair scraped severely back into a bun, opened the door.

“Headmaster? I have Mr. and Mrs. Ledger here, with Philippa and Timothy.”

Pip inwardly winced to hear her full name. Tim grinned at her and nudged her with his elbow.

As they were ushered in, the headmaster stepped from behind a large leather-topped desk, cluttered with papers and report forms, a telephone and a notebook computer.

“I’m Dr. Singall,” the headmaster introduced himself. “Come in and, please, do sit down.” He indicated a semicircle of comfortable chairs before him, perching himself informally on the corner of his desk.

Pip and Tim exchanged glances and looked around the room. One wall was covered with annual photographs of the staff and pupils, various triumphant sports teams and a portrait of a man in a gray suit shaking hands with the headmaster, the flourish of a signature in one corner. Printed on the picture mounting was
HRH Prince of Wales visits Bourne End Comprehensive School
—
July 2000
. Beside it was a map of the town and surrounding countryside, red felt-tip marker delineating the different areas served by the school buses, the routes picked out and numbered in blue. Another wall bore shelves of books and file boxes, and a glass-fronted cabinet.

“I understand from Mr. Bradley,” the headmaster began, “who is in charge of admissions, that you have been given a tour of the school and our introductory folder, and that you have completed the relevant paperwork. There is nothing more for me to do but welcome you.” He smiled expansively. “As we discussed on the phone, Mr. Ledger, I think there’s little point in Philippa and Timothy joining us with only ten days to go to the summer holidays. Far better,” he continued, looking from Pip to Tim and back again, “you start fresh in September.” He scanned the admission forms on the desk beside him briefly. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “I see you are the new owners of Rawne Barton.”

“We moved in yesterday,” Mr. Ledger confirmed. “Do you know the place?”

“Indeed, I do,” the headmaster replied. “Old Mr. Rawne was most kind to us at the school. He had, I recall, a great interest in the education of young people and invited the year nine history class to visit the house every year. Just prior to his death, he let us conduct an archaeological dig in one of the fields. Nothing terribly ambitious, you understand, but it brought history alive for the students. The resulting coursework folders were exceptional and we had our best-ever history examination results. The science department was also given access to the Garden of Eden for their natural-history project.”

“The Garden of Eden?” Pip echoed.

“All fields and many woodlands in the countryside, Philippa, have a government registration number,” the headmaster explained, “but many of them also have names that go back hundreds of years. Our school is called Bourne End Comprehensive because it was built on a field of that name in which a bourne, or stream, once ran. At Rawne Barton, the Garden of Eden is a small clump of trees on a hillock down by the river. It never floods, no matter how high the water might come. Miss Hall, our head of biology, says that in the center of the trees there is a circular clearing where some very exotic plants grow.”

“When did Mr. Rawne die?” Pip’s mother inquired.

“Ten or eleven years ago,” Dr. Singall said. “He was in his late eighties, I believe, and had lived alone in the house for about six years, after the death of his wife. At the end, he was only living in a few rooms, with the remainder of the house left unheated and unoccupied. It not surprisingly deteriorated quite rapidly.”

“Who inherited it?” asked Mr. Ledger.

“No one exactly,” the headmaster responded. “Mr. and Mrs. Rawne had no children, although, during a field trip, I once saw the old man with a young boy. His nephew, I think he told me. He was a pale little chap, didn’t look at all well. I would have thought the property might have been left to him or his parents, but it was, in fact, left in trust. The trustees, a law firm in London, only finally wound the trust up two years ago. At least, that is what I’ve heard. The property was then sold to the developers from whom I assume you purchased it.”

Rising from the desk, Dr. Singall opened a glass cabinet on the wall, taking from it a polished wooden box held closed by brass clasps.

“During our dig, we unearthed a lot of quite interesting finds from Rawne’s Ground. That’s the name of the pasture to the north of the house.” He opened the box and started to take items out of it. “A pair of fifteenth-century scissors and a key — rather rusted, I’m afraid.” He put them on the blotting pad on his desk. “A broken mortar with its accompanying pestle, a few pieces of what may have been a retort of some sort, some clay pipe stems and this —” he held a small, polished silver disc between his finger and thumb “— which is an English penny dating to the reign of Henry the Fifth. The most intriguing find, however, is this . . .”

From the box, the headmaster gently lifted a tall, thin bottle. It was made of rich blue glass and sealed with a lead plug. When he held it up to the sunlight streaming in through his office window, Pip could see it contained a clear liquid.

“What’s in it?” Tim asked.

“We don’t know, Timothy,” Dr. Singall replied. He tilted the bottle upside down and watched as an air bubble drifted slowly up through the dense, viscous liquid. “As the seal has a curious symbol embossed on it, we assume it might be a medicinal substance of some sort.”

He held the bottle at an angle so that they could see the top. Impressed into the dull grey lead was a strange hieroglyph:

“Don’t you want to know what the liquid is?” Tim inquired.

“Yes, of course,” the headmaster answered, smiling patronizingly at Tim. “Academic curiosity. But it seemed a shame to break the seal to analyze the contents, which are probably nothing more than a common remedy. Castor oil or the like.”

“Do you know what the sign means?” Pip asked. “We do not,” the headmaster told her, “but Mr. Carson, our head of geography, informs me it is sometimes used today in meteorology to denote exceptional visibility on a fine day.”

He placed everything back in the box carefully and returned it to the cabinet.

“So,” the headmaster remarked, addressing Pip and Tim, “when you dig your garden, you’ll never know what you might turn up. As we say to the field course students, always watch the blade of your spade! And,” he turned to their father, “Mr. Ledger, if you would not be averse to it, I should like very much to revive Mr. Rawne’s tradition and bring our history field trip to you next year.”

“I’m sure we would be delighted,” Pip’s father said, rising to his feet.

“Well, I shall see you two in September,” the headmaster said to Pip and Tim as they left his office. “Do enjoy the holidays and come back bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

Pip watched as her parents’ car disappeared down the drive, then she returned to carefully unpacking her ornaments and arranging them on her bookcase. It was only when Tim opened the door and walked straight in that her attention was broken.

“Aren’t you ever going to remember to knock?” she complained.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Tim replied.

Pip threw him a look. He reveled in avoiding straight answers. Ask him what time it was and he would reply that supper would be in twenty minutes, the news was on television or, when he last saw a clock about an hour ago, it was coming up to three-thirty.