Druids Sword (52 page)

N
oah sat, wan and trembling, in the drawing room of Copt Hall, staring first at Jack, then at Grace, then at Weyland, who sat next to her holding one of her hands. Jack had asked her and Weyland to the hall first thing—Ariadne, Silvius, the Lord of the Faerie and Stella were due later—but Jack and Grace had needed to speak to Noah beforehand. They didn’t want to break the news of the White Queen, her daughter, in the presence of a roomful of people.

Noah and Weyland had arrived almost breathless with excitement at the prospect of seeing Grace. Having discovered from Harry that Grace was at Copt Hall, they had been ringing several times a day since the morning of the thirtieth trying to talk to their daughter. Either Jack or Malcolm had put them off, saying that Grace needed to rest, but that they could come visit soon.

Their joy at seeing Grace, at being able to hug her and exclaim over her and ensure for themselves that she was back whole and in fair (if thin and exhausted) condition, was quickly dampened by the news of the White Queen.

“She’s alive?” Noah whispered.

Jack glanced at Grace. “Alive” wasn’t quite the word he’d use to describe her. “She can use a
glamour to take form,” he said, “but she’s not back in the flesh, Noah.”

“My daughter,” Noah said, dashing away some tears with a trembling hand. “I thought…”

Everyone knew what Noah had thought. Almost four thousand years ago she’d lost the baby girl when she was seven months pregnant with her, and the baby had not survived the birth. Then Noah had seen what she’d believed to be her daughter in her vision of the stone hall, but which had turned out to be Catling. Then, in the seventeenth century, when Noah had become pregnant to Louis, now Jack, she’d believed
that
pregnancy had been a rebirth of the daughter she’d lost.

But that girl had been the Troy Game, growing into flesh incarnate as Catling.

Noah had resigned herself to believing she’d never have the baby girl, lost so many thousands of years ago, returned to her. Now, to hear that the girl had life in spirit if not in flesh,
and
had been communicating to Grace and Jack, was almost too much for Noah.

“Why not me?” she whispered. “Why talk to you and not me?”

There was no answer for that, and Jack dropped his eyes, unable to look at Noah. He felt guilt and anger in equal degree: guilt that he’d conversed with the White Queen, and not Noah; and anger that the White Queen had not once thought to communicate with the mother who had so wanted and loved her.

It was one more reason for him to distrust the White Queen.

He looked over to Grace, who was watching her mother with worried eyes.
Look out for the return swing of the sword, because it may take your head.
Oh, Christ. Jack felt a terrible premonition of losing Grace.
Would you die for Jack, Grace? Would you?

“What the hell is she here for?” said Weyland, angry not so much at Jack, but at Noah’s misery. “What does she
want?
”

“The others should be here in a moment,” said Jack, glancing at Weyland sympathetically. Grace’s long illness had brought Noah and Weyland much closer, healing the rift between them. For this, at least, Jack was grateful. “When they’re here,” he continued, “Grace and I will go through what we know. I don’t want to tire Grace out by going through it twice.”

Ariadne and Silvius arrived in a few minutes, closely followed by Stella and Harry. They were all delighted to see Grace, although Jack noted Harry looked a little awkward with her (likely regretting his harsh words to her when he’d discovered Grace at the side of the road to Epping Forest), while Stella warmed to the point of almost-effusiveness.

Ariadne had brought with her a large suitcase which she put by the side of Grace’s chair.

“Your clothes, my dear,” Ariadne said, handing her coat to Malcolm (and giving him a broad smile as she did so), then sitting down on the sofa alongside Silvius. “I packed everything. Well, most things. I admit to handing over to the Red Cross the worst of your fashion disasters. I’ve taken the liberty of replacing them with a few items of a more colourful nature.” Her smile widened until it was positively lascivious. “Now that you’re with Jack, of course.”

“Ariadne…” Grace murmured, then gave up and grinned. “But thank you.”

Malcolm served tea and coffee, then withdrew to the hall door to stand leaning against the jamb.

Everyone was quiet now, the new arrivals having noted Noah’s misery.

“Grace has a long tale to tell,” Jack said, “and of many strange things.” He paused. “I asked
Noah and Weyland here a few minutes ahead of the rest of you because, as you will hear, some of that story Noah needed to hear first. It is an extraordinary tale.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “There are better ways, perhaps, to tell this, and less bald means by which to impart the information she has, but the last thing I want is for Grace to exhaust herself by going through the same story over and over for individuals. The grouping of us here today represents the core group who must be, who
are
, concerned with the destruction of the Troy Game. You all need to hear this and I hope that, like Grace and me, you come to the end of the tale with more hope in your hearts than dismay.” He shifted a little in his chair. “As you can see, Grace is physically, emotionally and spiritually at a low ebb. The months she lay in a coma and what happened to her during that time, along with the expenditure of power to escape and then reach Noah and me on the twenty-ninth, have combined to leave her dangerously weak. Please, in however you respond to what she has to say, remember that.”

Jack looked over to Grace, and gave a lovely, gentle smile. “Grace?”

She took a deep breath, and, in a soft but clear voice, related what had happened to her from the moment the bomb fell on Coronation Avenue.

Everyone listened in silence. No one looked away from Grace for an instant.

Until she revealed the identity of the White Queen.

Then every eye swung to Noah, now far more composed than earlier.

“My daughters have ever astonished me,” she said.

Stella gave a small bark of surprised laughter. “Certainly your daughters with Jack,” she said. “Weyland has proved by far the better sire.”

“And I am not going to argue that point,” Jack said. He caught Grace’s eye. They’d revealed much about the White Queen, but not what Malcolm—Prasutagus—and Boudicca had told them. Revealing her connection with the ancient druids would only muddy the issue, and further worry Noah.

“My half-sister,” said Grace, “the White Queen, has been the one to construct this ‘shadow’ which has so puzzled us all.”

Briefly Grace told the group what she had learned of the shadow: it had the potential of a new Game, a Game that could be used to destroy the Troy Game. She also told them that the White Queen had the final two bands (although Grace could not pinpoint the location), and that it had been the White Queen who had sat by her side at night through all those years, not Catling.

“Both Grace and I have seen her,” said Jack. “I have spoken to the White Queen, to my
daughter,
as well, save at the time I thought her Catling, and called her vile things.”

Noah shook her head at this. “I had berated myself for not knowing Catling sat with my daughter at night. Now I discover it wasn’t Catling, but my long-lost daughter. Come to visit with Grace, but not me.”

“Mother,” said Grace, “I think the ‘daughter’ part of her vanished millennia ago. She is the White Queen now, and has been for a very, very long time. I don’t believe she even thinks of herself as your ‘daughter’.”

“But why should the White Queen appear,” said Stella, “and reveal this ‘Shadow Game’ now?”

“I can answer that,” said Jack. He explained that he and Grace were meant to dance the Shadow Game. “She wants us as its Mistress and Kingman.”

There was a little silence, then Noah spoke. “I don’t want to sound resentful,” she said, “but…why wouldn’t our daughter have wanted Jack and me to dance this Game she has made? That would make sense, wouldn’t it? Not
Grace
and Jack?”

“Because,” said Stella, “whatever Jack has said, there has never been much peace between you and him. You share a history of conflict. Whatever brief ‘peaces’ you conclude are always shattered at some point. But Jack and Grace, on the other hand…”

She didn’t need to finish, but already she’d said too much. Noah stiffened, and looked away.

“Well,” said Ariadne brightly, “what a little minx this child has turned out to be, eh? Do you think the White Queen thought of this all herself, or has she, in turn, been the pawn of someone else? The ally of someone?”

Noah sat back in her chair. “Weyland once said to me that he couldn’t understand why, during that terrible night when my daughter and I both died, Mag only saved
my
life. If she had the ability to save the life of a woman who had been torn apart, then she should have been able to restore breath into my stillborn daughter. So, perhaps…”

“The White Queen has been in cohorts with Mag, with the
land,
all this time?” said Harry, who until now had been content to listen, if with an expression of the utmost incredulity on his face. “I find that difficult to believe. Why keep it such a secret from—”

“The White Queen has existed in utmost secrecy,” said Jack, “because it is the only thing that has kept her, and this strange potential for a new Game she has created, away from the Troy Game’s attention. If the White Queen had gambolled out of the mists at
any
time in the past few thousand years, if she had made herself known to anyone over that time, then
the chances are that Catling would know of her. She’s been kept, or has kept herself, well away from the Troy Game, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

“But why keep herself away from
me?
” Noah muttered.

Grace glanced imploringly at Jack.

“Noah,” Jack said, very gently, “we have only just learned of the White Queen, and none of us really knows what she truly wants. We know the potential for a new Game exists, we know that it has the capacity to destroy Catling, but we don’t know how. Grace says this is a Game such as none of us have seen before. I don’t think your daughter is snubbing you, or punishing you—gods alone know she has no reason to want that or to feel resentful towards a mother who loved her so greatly—but I think she is revealing herself only in snatches and only as the need dictates. All of us are brimming with questions, Grace and me included, and I think all of us are going to have to be patient for the answers.

“Grace needs to regain her strength,” Jack continued. “We can do little until that happens. Then she and I need to discover what this Game is about, what its purpose is,
how
it can be used to destroy the Troy Game without destroying Grace at the same time.”

“Wait,” said Weyland, “haven’t you forgotten something? The imps? Their murders? What kind of Game is this that relies on blood?”

Jack and Grace exchanged another glance.

“We have not forgotten, Weyland,” Jack said. “Grace and I approach the White Queen and this Game with the utmost wariness. We still don’t know the connection between the Shadow Game, the imps, and the murders. We will find out all we can about this Game before we touch it.”

“And how to do that?” said Silvius. “I remember how, when you’d first become aware of the shadow, and aware of its labyrinthine nature, you thought it would take years to walk it out, to discover its extent. Does that still hold true, or has the White Queen given Grace some clue?”

“Oh, aye,” said Grace, a rueful expression on her face, “she showed me clues as visions while I lay unconscious in St Bart’s. However, those visions were so fragmentary, and there is so much I don’t recall. But there was something…”

Silvius, along with most others, raised his eyebrows.

“She showed me a tall, thin man, crawling about crypts and ancient byways of London. He was dressed in the manner of a late Georgian gentleman. I do not know his name…but I remember seeing him arguing with a typesetter over the title of a book he had written.”

“
And?
” said Stella.

“
Londina Illustrata
,” said Grace. “The book was called
Londina Illustrata.
”

“Then all we need to do, or all that Grace and Jack need to do,” said Silvius, “is discover the book, and perhaps all of the White Queen’s secrets shall be revealed. How hard can that be?”

A
little harder than it sounded, as it transpired, but at least Jack and I could bury our disquiet about the White Queen by hunting for the book. After all, what harm could a book do?

Very quickly we discovered that
Londina Illustrata
had been written by a man called Robert Wilkinson in the early nineteenth century. The late Georgian period witnessed the emergence of a number of antiquarians and engravers intent on recording what was left of ancient London before it was lost forever to development. Wilkinson was on the outer fringe of this group, never achieving the same public recognition as men like John Thomas Smith or Thomas Shepherd, and thus never achieving the same depth of subscriptions needed to publish his work. Eventually Wilkinson didn’t publish a book as such, but a collection of some two hundred folio pamphlets dealing with largely unknown parts of London which he put out over a twenty-year period. Subscribers could collect these individual pamphlets and have them bound into a book, if they so wished, and if they were inclined to pay a book binder. Ever helpful, Wilkinson actually provided a title page for those who wanted to do
this; in fact Wilkinson published so many pamphlets, he felt it prudent to issue two title pages. Subscribers could bundle the pamphlets dealing with monasteries, churches and schools into the first volume, and those dealing with everything else (primarily, but not exclusively, the theatres of London) in the second.

Copies of the two-volume
Londina Illustrata
abounded.

Unfortunately, they were all different.

Twenty years is a long time to expect subscribers to collect every single pamphlet Wilkinson put out, to keep them, and then to decide they wanted to pay to have them bound themselves. Some subscribers died partway through the process, some only gained interest when Wilkinson got to the theatres, others lost pamphlets when they were moving house, or to the jaws of ravenous babies and cats, or they mislaid one or two (or thirty or forty), or they simply missed acquiring a few of the pamphlets as they came out. Other collections were lost during the passage of time.

After all, Wilkinson was hardly a household name, no one thought these pamphlets were valuable and, in the subsequent Victorian craze for modernisation (involving the wholesale destruction of what remained of ancient London), who really cared about a few musty pamphlets about the odd buried crypt or laneway?

Indeed, no one actually knew how many pamphlets there were in total, and we were faced with the realisation that we might not recognise the “complete”
Londina Illustrata
should it be thrust under our noses.

Jack and Harry (who had the contacts) set themselves the task of finding that elusive, complete copy while I continued my convalescence at Copt Hall.

All they could hope for was that something had survived the wholesale bombing and firestorming of London, but, in the end, they encountered a different and far more frustrating problem.

Rather than having been destroyed (although some, indeed, had been) the majority of collections of books and manuscripts had been removed from London in the year preceding, and in the months just after, the outbreak of war. The great collections of the British Museum, of the various record offices, of the book dealers and clubs and societies and public libraries of London, all of which might reasonably have been expected to have copies of
Londina Illustrata,
had been scattered all over Britain. Many were not accessible, either because they were too far away, packed behind blast-proof concrete walls or deep in mines…or had been broken up to be stored in the attics and cellars of the houses of the gentry.

And, unbelievably, no one actually had a list of what had gone where.

After all, everything had been done in such a rush.

One day Jack and Harry arrived back at Copt Hall so frustrated I could hear them banging car doors, and then cursing as jackets got caught in those slammed doors, from my bedroom on the first floor.

They thumped up the stairs, and came to sit on either side of my bed.

Jack tapped out two cigarettes from his pack, lit them, and handed one to Harry. If I had needed any indication that they’d had a bad day, then this was it. Harry rarely smoked, and Jack mostly tended to do so only when he was nervous or severely annoyed.

“No luck, huh?” I said, trying a smile to ease the tension. Jack and Harry had been searching for the damned book for over three weeks now, and I think they must have harassed most librarians and book dealers within a hundred-mile radius of London.

Jack muttered something unrepeatable, and it was Harry who was left to explain.

“Someone suggested we try the Admiralty as all the sons of the gentry and nobility who served in the Navy tended to leave their book collections, along with tidy sums of cash, to the place. So we went to the Admiralty. Their librarian checked his cards, and, yes, they actually had
twelve
different sets of
Londina Illustrata.
But their collections were removed into the country about six months ago.”

“They waited,” said Jack, and I could almost hear his teeth grinding, “until the bombs started to fall, and
then
decided to do something about it. Utter panic.
Witless
fools!”

Harry shot him a glance, and resumed the tale. “Indeed, utter panic. They had no plan about what to do, all they wanted was to get everything into the safety of the countryside. So they requisitioned trucks from everyone they could think of. But they didn’t have enough trucks, and the bombs were beginning to get closer and closer.”

“So,” said Jack, blowing a plume of smoke towards the ceiling, “they sent clerks rushing into the streets, to ask passing motorists to help.”

“Scores of motorists stopped,” said Harry, “and tons of books and manuscripts were loaded into the boots and back seats of private motor cars and the trays of passing vegetable lorries.”

“And no one,
no one
,” said Jack, “thought to take down the names of these people, or ask them for their addresses. The stuff has just vanished into the barns and attics of innumerable private houses around the home counties…and no one knows where it is.”

I didn’t need to ask. The twelve sets of
Londina Illustrata
had gone into one, or many, of those private motors.

“Oh,” I said.

Jack saw the expression on my face. “Don’t worry, Grace. If Harry and I can’t find a copy of this damned book then we’ll just have to demand one from the White Queen.”

I smiled for him, but I doubted the White Queen was about to pop a set of
Londina Illustrata
in the Royal Mail for us. In the weeks since I’d risen from my coma and had come to Copt Hall I had woken on many occasions through most nights, and I’d never found her sitting by the side of my bed.

Neither had she manifested herself to me in any other fashion, or made it known how we might contact her. I had tried to reach out with my power, but it was at such a sad ebb because of my physical weakness and my exertions on the night of the twenty-ninth that I had no luck. I don’t know if the White Queen would have allowed the contact, in any case. Having spent almost four thousand years at a distance, I do not think my newly found sister was going to become chummy all at once…if ever. I don’t know what she wanted, and thought it highly possible that she had become so used to her solitary state that she didn’t want it disturbed.

She certainly showed little inclination to contact her long-lost parents (save, of course, for those brief appearances she made to Jack over the past year).

Noah came and sat with me several days a week. She tried not to ask about the White Queen, but inevitably did, and I told her everything I knew. Much had changed for my mother—Jack’s slow turning to me, my place at his side as a Mistress of the Labyrinth, the return of a daughter she thought she had lost and who she had yet to touch—but I think she was, although very slowly, coming to terms with it. For thousands of years Noah had fought her battles centre stage. Now (hard words,
but I don’t know how else to phrase it) it appeared I was to take that place…

How did I feel about this? Oh, my Lord, how my life had
changed
since Jack had returned to London. I had thought to resent and dislike him, had been afraid of him and all he could do to me, and, yes, he had turned my life topsy-turvy, but it had not been as frightening or as disastrous as I had feared. Jack had taken my cage, opened its door, then shaken it violently and tipped me out. In doing so, he’d taught me to live, not so much through any action, but through his simple belief that I was capable of it. Jack had been the first person to really believe in me, to treat me no differently than anyone else, to rage and rail at me as he raged and railed at everyone else…and to smile at me, and laugh with me, to grant me respect, and, the greatest compliment, to learn from me.

How everything had changed. How
I
had changed.

The period that I spent convalescing at Copt Hall was a time of not merely gaining in strength, but in much reflection. It was also a time of growing. The first month, all of January, I spent mostly in bed. Jack sat most nights in the wing-backed easy chair by my bed, alternatively sleeping (and snoring softly as his head tipped against one of the wings of the chair) or, when he was awake, reading or watching me. I would often wake in the night, and see him there, and I felt so cared for, so protected, that I felt as if nothing could ever touch me.

During the days when Jack was out and about, often with Harry, trying to track down a copy of
Londina Illustrata,
or trying to discover as much as he could about this new Game, Malcolm sat with me. We talked about his wife, Boudicca, and what had happened two thousand years ago, and what
had happened on New Year’s Eve when Boudicca came to me, and one day he asked me if I were afraid.

I smiled. “Afraid? No, Malcolm, I am not afraid. I am at peace, mostly, with both the world and with myself.”

“Not afraid of Catling?”

“No. What happens will happen. But she has no power to terrify or terrorise me now.”

“And what of your sister, the White Queen?”

I fell quiet at that, because, to be frank, she did disturb me. I could not help remembering that night, so long ago now, when she’d asked if I would die for Jack.

And I had said yes.
I would say it again, but, oh, I wished I knew what she had meant by it.

Of course, Boudicca’s little warning hadn’t exactly calmed my disquiet, either.

“Be wary of the White Queen,” Malcolm, said. “Trust what she says, but always be wary of it.”

“Oh, come now, Malcolm! What kind of advice is that?”

He just shrugged, annoying me.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” I said, irritated with him for unsettling me, and wanting to put a stop to the conversation, “and I need your arm to help me get there.”

By February I was feeling much better. I’d gained weight, and my flesh had started to plump out from my bones. My strength had largely returned, and I spent more time out of bed than in it.

Even though it was cold, I spent an hour or two each day, wrapped well in a coat and scarf, my breath frosting about me, the frozen leaf litter crunching under my boots, walking Epping Forest with Jack.

These were good hours. Jack and I grew day by day into a deeper intimacy. It wasn’t sexual—we had not become lovers—but something far greater: a sharing and trusting, an ever-deepening understanding and friendship. We explored each other in a way I think few people do, exposing our sins and our hopes, our frailties and the strengths we have made of them. We explored our powers, the depths and possibilities inherent in those abilities and in each other.

We each
understood
the other, and we were completely, utterly, at peace.

What we were doing was forging a partnership. This process had been in progress for at least a year, but it solidified during the early months of 1941. By the end of February neither of us had any surprises left unknown to the other, only an infinity of possibilities.

Our intimacy was extraordinary, and I felt blessed by it. One day, when we were atop Ambersbury Banks, I turned to him, and tried to put into words what I was feeling.

“Jack…” I said. “Jack…”

I could have felt like a fool then, standing there with my face all pinched with the cold, my hands thrust deep into the pockets of my coat, staring at the man standing before me, and once I would indeed have felt like a fool. But today I didn’t. I knew he would understand.

He did. He smiled, so gently, and stepped forward and kissed my forehead, then just gathered me to him.

We stood there for almost an hour, not speaking, just standing close, the forest watching, the leaves frosting under our feet, fallow deer rummaging about in the trees for whatever nourishment they could find, and felt the land turn about us.

We’d both had disastrous lives, and we stood in a place where once the people of this land had met a disastrous fate at the sword of an invader.

We’d both been marked, one way or another, by the land, and those who had lived on it.

We both hoped, more than anything, that we could walk away from this place of death, and this time turn all the disasters that had nourished us into something triumphant.

At the very end of February Harry sent word that a book dealer by the name of Lionel Sutherland was making a brief trip back to London to see a relative. He was one of London’s premier rare book dealers, but had fled, together with all his stock, some three or four months before the declaration of war (being a man of caution, Sutherland was taking no chances with what had taken him a lifetime to acquire). Sutherland had heard from various sources in the book world that Harry had been searching out a copy of Wilkinson’s
Londina Illustrata
for friends, and Sutherland had what he claimed was “an almost” complete copy.