Greenwitch (18 page)

“Let him be,” said Captain Toms clearly from the car.

“Come back here, and we shall follow him.”

On down the lane the big car purred, and then they were round the last corner and facing the farm.

The low grey building seemed even more decrepit than Simon had remembered. He looked with more attention now at the beams of wood nailed cross-shaped over the front door; at the new growth of creeper reaching over windows unhindered; at other windows, here and there, black and broken like missing teeth. Long grass rose lush and new round rusting pieces of farm equipment left in the yard: a skeletal old plough, a harrow, the
remains of a tractor with its great tyres gone. In the pen of a deserted pig-sty, nettles grew tall and rank. Somewhere behind the farmhouse, Rufus barked shrilly, and a flurry of pigeons flapped into the air. There was a wet smell of growing things.

Captain Toms said softly, “The wild is taking Pentreath Farm, very fast.”

Merriman stood in the middle of the farmyard, looking about him, perplexed. The lines in his face seemed deeper-carved than before. Captain Toms leaned against the car, gazing at the farm, one hand absently tracing patterns in the damp earth with his stick.

Will peered in through one of the front windows of the farm, straining to see through the murk. “I suppose we should go inside,” he said, without much conviction.

“I don't think so,” Simon said. He stood at Will's shoulder, and for once there was no tension between them, but only the studying of a common problem. “Somehow I'm sure the painter never went in there. It looked absolutely untouched last time. He seemed just to be living in the caravan on his own. He was a separate sort of man.”

“Separate indeed.” Merriman's deep voice came to them across the yard. “A strange creature of the Dark, that they sent out as a thief only, to take the grail and hide it. It was a good moment to choose, for we were off our guard, thinking them too preoccupied with licking their wounds after a great defeat. . . . But the creature of the Dark was willing to betray his masters, having greater ideas. He knew the tale of the lost manuscript, and he thought that if he could secretly get that for himself as well, and thus complete one of the Things of Power, he could by a sort of blackmail make himself one of the great lords of the Dark.”

Jane said, “But didn't they know what he was doing?”

“They were not expecting him to over-reach his commission,”

Merriman said. “They knew, better perhaps than he did himself, how hopeless a fate lay waiting any lone figure who might venture on such a quest. We think they were not watching him, but simply waiting for his return.”

“The Dark is indeed preoccupied, for a time,” Captain Toms said. “They have damage to repair, from certain happenings midwinter last. They will make little showing of themselves, until the time of their next great rising.”

Simon said slowly, “Perhaps that's what the painter meant when he said to Barney,
Am I observed?
Do you remember? I thought he was talking about you, but he must have meant his own masters.”

“Where is Barney?” Will said, looking round.

“Barney? Hey, Barney!”

An unintelligible shout came from somewhere beyond the far side of the farmhouse.

“Oh dear,” said Jane. “Now what's he up to?”

They ran in the direction of the shout, Merriman following more slowly with Captain Toms. A great rambling tangle of weeds and nettles and brambles rose at the side of the old house, and all around the outbuildings beyond.

“Ow!” Barney howled from somewhere inside the thicket.

“I'm stung!”

“What on earth are you doing?”

“Looking for Rufus.”

They heard a muffled barking; it seemed to come from the further of the two outbuildings, an old stone barn with a perilous half-fallen roof.

“Ow!” Barney yelped again. “Mind the nettles, they're fierce. . . . Rufus just goes on barking and doesn't come out, I think he must be stuck. He went this way. . . .”

Captain Toms limped forward. “Rufus!” he called, very loud and stern. “Here! Come here!”

There was more muffled excited barking from the ramshackle barn, ending in a snuffling whine.

Captain Toms sighed, and pulled his grey beard. “Foolish beast,” he said. “Stand clear a minute. Look out, Barney.” Sweeping his heavy walking-stick from side to side as if it were a scythe, he moved gradually forwards, thrashing a path through the nettles and undergrowth to the crumbling stone sides of the barn. Rufus' barking, inside, became more frenzied still.

“Shut up, dog,” called Barney, at the captain's elbow now. “We're coming!” He wriggled round to a rotting wooden door, hanging sideways from one hinge, and peered in through the V-shaped gap between door and wall. “He must have got in here and knocked something over that blocked the gap. . . . I can get in here, if I. . . .”

“Do be careful,” Jane said.

“‘Course,” said Barney. He squeezed in round the tilted door, pushing aside something that fell with a crumbling clatter, and disappeared. There was a burst of joyful barking inside the barn, and then Rufus came leaping out through the gap, tongue lolling, tail waving. He pranced up to Captain Toms. He was very dirty; small damp pieces of rotten wood speckled his red coat, and cobwebs clung stickily round his nose.

Captain Toms patted him absent-mindedly. He was looking at the barn, with a faint puzzled frown on his face. Then he glanced questioningly at Merriman; following his gaze, Jane saw the same look in her great-uncle's eyes. What was the matter with them? Before she could ask, Barney's head poked out of the gap in the barn door. His hair was dishevelled and one cheek was smeared grey, but Jane's attention was caught only by the unsmiling blankness of his face. He looked as though he had had a very bad shock.

“Come out of there, Barney,” Merriman said. “That roof's not safe.”

Barney said, “I'm just coming. But please, Gumerry, could Simon come in here just for a minute first? It's important.”

Merriman glanced from Captain Toms to Will and back to Barney. His stern-lined face was tense. “All right. For a moment.”

Simon slipped past them to wriggle his way through the gap. Behind him Will said diffidently, “Would you mind if I came too?”

Jane winced, waiting for the inevitable snub; but Simon only said briefly, “Fine. Come on.”

The two boys wriggled in after Barney. Simon flinched as a splintered edge scraped his arm; the gap was narrower than it looked. Scrambling to his feet, he stood coughing as Will came in after him. The dust was thick on the floor, and it was hard at first to see clearly in the half-light from dirty, overgrown windows.

Blinking, Simon saw Barney beckoning him.

“Over here. Look.”

He followed Barney to one end of the barn, clear of the piled timber and logs that filled much of the floor. And then he stopped.

Before him, ghostly in the shadows of corner and roof, stood a Gipsy caravan, of exactly the same shape and pattern as the one in which they had met the painter of the Dark. There were the tall outward-sloping sides, the insets of carved wood beneath the eaves of the overhanging wooden roof. There, at the far end, were the shafts for the horse, and at this end the divided door—in two halves, swinging, like a stable door—reached by a wooden stairway-ladder of six steps. And the top step was the step on which, at the end, they had stood. . . .

But of course it could not be the same. This caravan was not shiny-neat, or newly painted. This caravan had dusty worn sides in which only odd patches of ancient paint remained,
flaking away. This caravan had one broken shaft, and the top half of its split door hung from half a hinge. It was old and beaten, unused, unloved; the glass in its windows was long broken. It could not have been moved from its place for the many years since the roof of the old barn had begun to sag, for at the further end of the barn the roof-beams lay rotted with all their remaining weight resting on top of the caravan.

It was a relic, an antique. Simon stared. It was as if he were meeting the great-great-grandfather of a boy he knew well, and finding that the old man had exactly the same face as the boy, but immensely, impossibly aged.

He opened his mouth and looked at Barney, but could think of nothing to say.

Barney said flatly, “It must have been here for years and years and years. Since long before we were born.”

Will said, “How well do you remember the inside of the painter's caravan?”

Simon and Barney both jumped at the sound of his voice; they had forgotten he was there. Now they turned; Will stood near the door of the barn, half-hidden in shadow, only his amiable blank face blinking at them in clear light.

Barney said, “Fairly well.”

“And you, Simon?” Will said. Without leaving time for an answer, he went on, “Barney doesn't remember seeing the grail at all. But you remember everything, from the moment when he first took out the box it was in.”

“Yes,” Simon said. With a vague, detached interest, he realised that for the first time he was listening to Will as though he were older, without resentment or argument.

Will said nothing more. He crossed from behind them to the steps at the end of the old caravan, pushing aside with his toe the dust and debris that lay cluttered everywhere. He went up the steps. He took hold of the top loose-hanging half of the
caravan door, and it came away in his hands, as the rust-eaten hinge crumbled into dust. Then he tugged sharply at the bottom half of the door, and it swung reluctantly towards him with the slow creak of an old farm gate.

“Barney,” he said. “Do you mind going inside?”

“‘Course not,” Barney said boldly, but his steps towards the caravan door were reluctant and slow.

Simon said nothing to help him. He was looking at Will, whose voice, as once before, had a crispness and certainty that raised inexplicable echoes in his head.

“Simon,” Will said. “What did the painter say, word for word, when he first directed Barney to the place where he found the grail?”

Half-closing his eyes, concentrating fiercely, Simon pushed his mind backwards and looked to see what was in it. “We were both about halfway inside,” he said. Like a sleep-walker he went forwards up the ricketty old steps, his hand on Barney's shoulder gently propelling him, and with Will following, the two of them walked into the little room that made the inside of the van.

“And the man said, because Barney had said he was thirsty, ‘
In that cupboard by your right foot you will find some cans of orange soda. And
. . .
and you might bring out a cardboard box you'll find in there too.'
So Barney did that.”

Barney turned his head and looked nervously at Will, and the Will who was somehow not quite Will beamed encouragingly, as if he were after all no more than the amiable foolish-looking boy they had met at the beginning of this small strange holiday. So Barney looked down at his right foot, and saw beside it a low cupboard with no handle and the clutter of years mounded against its door; and he crouched on his knees and cleared away the rubbish and scrabbled with his fingernails to find enough leverage to open the small door. When at last it swung
open, he felt inside and brought out a battered, damp, evil-smelling cardboard box.

He set it on the floor. All three of them stared at it in silence. Faintly from outside the barn they heard Jane's light voice cry anxiously, “Are you all right? Hey, do come on out!”

Will said softly, “Open it.”

Slowly, reluctantly, Barney took hold of the top of the box. The ancient rotting cardboard came away in his hand, and a brightness was in their eyes, a golden radiance that seemed to fill the decrepit, crumbling remnants of what had once a long time ago been a caravan. And there shining beneath their eyes was the grail.

 

 

I
N THE FARMYARD, IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE, A GREAT ROUND
piece of granite was set into the ground: an old mill-wheel, worn and grass-fringed. On its bright-flecked grey surface they set the grail, and gathered round as Merriman took from his pocket the battered little cylinder that held the manuscript. He slid out the small roll of parchment, its edges cracked and flaking, and unrolled it to lie on the uneven stone.