Named of the Dragon (9 page)

He looked at me, expressionless. "We haven't had a proper introduction."

"Lyn Ravenshaw." Accepting the challenge, I met his eyes squarely and held out my hand. "I work for Simon Holland."

I fancied his gaze altered over our handshake, but the change was imperceptible. "I should have known."

"I'm sorry?"

"Your executive director's a persistent bugger, I will give him that. I've told him time and time again that I don't want to sign, but he won't give up."

The ego of the man, I thought. First he'd thought me a reporter, chasing for an interview, and now he apparently thought I'd been sent to seduce him to join Simon Holland. I smiled my sweetest smile, and set him straight. "I hate to disappoint you, Mr. Morgan, but I didn't come down here because of you."

James draped an arm round my shoulders, defending my honour. "She came because of me. Although she's Bridget's agent, actually. Is that a drink?"

"Your agent? Is she really?" Gareth slanted a laconic look at Bridget, seeking confirmation. "You want to take much better care of her then, and not let her go walking the coast path alone."

"Oh, Lyn can take care of herself," Bridget told him. "I could tell you some stories ..."

I cut her off smartly. "You do and I'll raise your commission."

"You see?" Bridget laughed. "Tough as nails."

James, still with his arm round me, eyed Gareth's glass. "What is that, Scotch?"

"Apple juice. But never fear, I'm sure that we can find you something stronger."

Elen recovered herself. "I have sherry," she offered, "and Scotch. Gareth, could you ... ?"

"Of course." Taking charge, he led us through into the dining-room while Elen retreated again down the corridor, presumably to check on the food. I was glad of the chance to move, to slip free of James's brotherly hold. He was just being friendly, I knew, but Bridget didn't like to share, and I couldn't afford to offend either of them. I deliberately hung back to let them both go in ahead of me, then followed after Christopher.

This dining-room appeared, if possible, even larger than the one next door, with an Art Deco fireplace and a soaring seating alcove filled with windows at the front. At the opposite end of the room; where a second door stood open to a dimly lit passage—the kitchen passage, I deduced—the wall was all but hidden by a huge glass-fronted china cabinet.

"Wow," said Bridget, looking at that cabinet, "this I like."

"It's not for sale," said Gareth, shortly. Then, as an afterthought, he showed us the bottles and glasses laid out on the sideboard and said, "I'll let you help yourselves to drinks."

I chose the sherry, and retreated to the far side of the room where I absorbed myself in studying a wall display of photographs. A wedding portrait had been given pride of place, and seeing Elen, proud and laughing, circled by her husband's arms, I felt a prick of sympathy. He looked so young, I thought. So young and full of life, his broad smile brighter than the summer sunlight gleaming on his golden hair.

"You've found the shrine, I see," said James, moving up behind me. I thought it a surprisingly callous comment for a man who wrote with such sensitivity about other people's lives, but then perhaps James hadn't lost a loved one, yet. Still, he was right—this was a shrine. It only wanted candles and some incense. Every photo showed the same young man—sometimes alone, sometimes with others, always smiling. And, with the one exception of the wedding portrait, always the same age, as though the record of his life had been confined to one brief summer.

"I'm surprised she kept this one." James pointed to a picture at one edge of the arrangement, an inexpert shot of Tony Vaughan in angler's gear, his face all but obscured by the hood of his bright orange raincoat. "He looked like that the day he died. I shouldn't think she'd want to be reminded."

"Were you here the day he died?" I asked him, glad of the excuse to look away from all those photographs.

"I was. I'd only just begun to get the germ of the idea for the book, so I came down to poke about, to do some research. Not the best of timing, really. I arrived the Sunday morning, and that night they brought the body in. Elen," he informed me, "went quite mad. There was some talk, you know, of putting her in hospital."

"In hospital? Was she as bad as that?"

"My dear girl, she was barking. Seeing demons in her bedroom. The doctors were worried she'd do herself harm."

I frowned. "And now?"

"Supposedly, she's better now." He shrugged. "I'm no psychiatrist, I wouldn't know. But there are some who think young Stevie would be better off in care."

I thought about this later, watching Elen slice the bread. In her small hand the long knife somehow looked more dangerous, as a Doberman might look on the end of a lead being held by a child—one didn't get the sense that she was fully in control.

"So," said James, "I take it all was quiet last night? No more sounds from Stevie's room?"

Gareth answered for her and his voice, I thought, held a warning for James. "No."

Elen, oblivious to the interplay between the men, said, "Gareth put a new lock on the window for me, too, so Stevie will be safe now."

Safe from what, I didn't know, and didn't want to ask. The less we talked of babies, the more comfortable I'd be. Head down, I concentrated on my food—an easy thing to do, since it was excellent. Barking she might be, but Elen could certainly cook. Her sauce, unlike mine, didn't come from a jar, nor had any of the marinated vegetables she'd heaped on to the technicolour plate of antipasto. And the bread, from its warm yeasty smell and texture, must also have been freshly baked.

Christopher, who apparently not only shared Bridget's penchant for flirting but also her appetite, finished his first helping faster than anyone. He looked expectantly at Elen. "Is there more?"

"Yes, of course..."

"It's all right, I can get it." He rose, plate in hand, and headed for the kitchen while Elen told the rest of us, "There's more of everything. I always make too much."

"With Bridget and my brother here, you won't have any leftovers," James promised her. He poured himself another glass of wine and glanced at Gareth. "Oh, I nearly forgot— Lyn was asking me earlier. How much do you know about the prophecies of Merlin?"

' "The prophecies?'' His frown, I thought, looked faintly diabolical. "A fair amount. I have the book, at home."

"What book?" asked James.

'
'A History of the British Kings,
by Geoffrey of Mon-mouth. The prophecies are part of that. It's rather hard going, twelfth-century prose, and the prophecies themselves don't make much sense, they're more like riddles."

"There you are, then," Bridget said, to me. "You should borrow the book."

I studied the man seated opposite. "I don't imagine Mr. Morgan likes to loan his books."

Our eyes locked, while he weighed the challenge. ' 'No, you're right," he said, at last. "I don't. You'll have to read where it lies." I caught the smugness in his smile, and knew he knew I'd rather die than visit him at home. "You can come tomorrow morning, if you like."

"Good," said James. "That's all arranged, then. Anyone for wine?''

Gareth declined the offer. "Why," he asked me, "do you want to know about the prophecies?"

I didn't have a chance to answer. From the floor above a sound rose sharply, unexpectedly, demanding our attention.

Elen's baby was awake, and crying for his mother.

XI

For if there ever come a grief to me

I cry my cry in silence, and have done;

None knows it.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Guinevere"

I reached for my wineglass to hide the effect that the sound was producing.
Please stop,
I begged silently.
Oh, please stop crying.
My fingers clenched convulsively around the glass's fragile stem, and snapped it as I drank.

"Oh, blast!" I leaped too late. The dark red wine spilled down my left side to my lap, an ugly spreading stain.

"White wine," said Bridget quickly. "I remember reading somewhere if you pour white wine on top of red, the stain won't set. Do you have any, Elen?"

"No, I'm afraid I—"

James cut in to say there ought to be a bottle or two in his uncle Ralph's dining-room. "Look in the drinks cabinet, under the window."

I stood, grateful for the opportunity to leave the room, to leave the house, to leave the crying baby.

"Shall I come with you?" asked Bridget.

I shook my head. "No." Overhead the crying rose again in volume, grew more piercing and persistent, and my hand shook as I set my napkin down beside my plate. "No, I'll be fine. I'll be back in a minute." I managed to walk, very calm, from the dining-room, my footsteps firm and even on the flooring, like a soldier making an honourable retreat. I didn't start running until I reached the lawn.

In the front porch of the larger house, I pulled the door shut and leaned against it, steadying my breathing. The crying couldn't reach me here—I only heard the rattle of the windowpanes above the covered coal box, and the scuttle of a bit of leaf across the chequered floor. Relieved, I closed my eyes and felt my heartbeat settle. There, I thought, that's better. I can manage.

Upstairs, I changed clothes and spent some minutes in the bathroom, pressing the cold dripping flannel to my cheeks until the face in the mirror looked less flushed and more like my own. I was letting the water run out of the wash basin when I heard a faint creak from the landing outside.

I half-turned my head. "Is that you, Bridget?"

No one replied.

Reaching for a towel, I blotted my face dry and opened the door, peering out. "Hello?"

No one was there.

But when I went downstairs a minute later, carrying my red-stained blouse, I found Bridget in the kitchen, making a systematic search of the cupboards. "You were taking so long," she explained. "I just thought I'd come see if you needed a hand. You've got the blouse, have you? Good. We can use the washing-up bowl, it should be clean enough."

"You weren't just upstairs, were you?"

"No. Why?"

"I thought I heard something."

"Well, you know old houses. They're always... ah, here we are." Triumphant, she held up a bottle of white wine.

I looked at the label. "Oh, Bridget, we shouldn't use that one."

"Why not?"

"It's Bordeaux, that's why not. What we want is a table wine, not so expensive ..."

But she was already applying the corkscrew. "Wine," she said firmly, "is wine." She stuffed my blouse into the tub and upended the bottle, her gaze sliding sideways to study my face. "It wasn't because of the baby, was it?"

"Sorry?"

"That this happened," she elaborated, nodding at the sodden blouse, now bleeding streams of pink. "Because if the baby
is
bothering you, then I want you to tell me. I really didn't think that he would be here, honestly I didn't, and I don't want you having a miserable Christmas."

"I won't have a miserable Christmas," I promised her.

She tipped back the bottle in time to save some of the wine. "Good. Then let's have a glass each of this and get back to the party. I'll need you to keep James diverted," she said with a wink, "while I'm talking to Gareth."

*-*-*-*-*

I fought the need to sleep.

It wasn't that I was afraid to face the dream, but after this evening at Elen's—with Stevie crying on and off upstairs and Gareth jabbing at me all night with his pointed little comments about Londoners and agents—after all that, my nerves felt quite raw and exposed, and the last thing I needed to see was the blue woman coming towards me with child in tow.

Instead I propped my pillows firmly up against the headboard and began to read. I didn't often read for pleasure, but in a bookcase in the dining-room downstairs I'd found a paperback copy of Wilkie Collins's
The Woman in White,
a long-forgotten favourite and the perfect book for keeping me awake.

I'd never managed to unveil the trick of Wilkie Collins's prose. It was, on the surface, as heavy and laboured as one would expect from the pen of a stalwart Victorian, laced with descriptions of trivial things, the sentences strung out
with commas and colons until they became full-page paragraphs. But underneath the ornate style lay
something,
some force that compelled me along like a hand at my back, and I found it impossible, once I had started, to put his books down.

It was light when I finished.

Not full light, but rather the fiat grey suggestion of dawn that precedes it. The moon, fighting hard to hold on to its reign of the sky, had dug in its heels at the edge of the tower and hung there, a glimmering disc of pure white. The little morning star was there as well, looking down on me, watching and waiting. It looked small and cold, and my limbs felt an answering chill. By now I had gone beyond tired, to that fuzzy-edged, cobwebby level of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking and makes doing either impossible. But the ache in my legs called for movement.

I dressed and went downstairs with the thought of making tea, but trying to move quietly around that sleeping house proved to be difficult—each floorboard had its own small voice, the cupboard hinges creaked, and when I turned the taps the water thundered through the pipes so forcefully it seemed to shake the walls. It was safer, I thought, to forget about tea. I put the kettle down again and went to fetch my coat.

Outside, at least, I didn't run the risk of waking anyone. If I stayed off the gravel and kept to the grass, my footsteps made no noise.

At the foot of the drive I turned west this time, setting my back to the tower and the reed-filled estuary to follow the curve of the lane that would lead me out on to the main village street. We had taken this lane coming home from the pub, Friday night, but I hadn't yet walked it in daylight. Not that it was daylight now—the sun was little more than a faint spreading stain of pink above the bay behind me. Still, the chilled blue dawn gave light enough to see by.

To my left a faintly worn footpath struck a course across the rough grass, through a kissing gate set in the old rail fence, to a small, tidy park with a playground for children. I felt' a small tug deep inside at the sight of the dangling baby swings and I quickly turned to look the other way, to where the still-green pasture sloped uphill to meet the ploughed and narrow fields of reddish soil. They looked like potato fields, to me, but I wasn't certain. I must, I thought, remember to ask Owen what they grew down here, in Angle; what crops would thrive so close beside the sea.

A mingled scent of salt and seaweed, not unpleasant, clung damply to the morning breeze that touched my upturned face, and I closed my eyes a moment, breathing deep. The air itself was like a tonic, cleansing all the grime and weariness of city life away, and in my ears the rush and murmur of the waves against the shore sang like the soothing calm refrain of some old song, forgotten once, and now remembered, haunting in my mind. I filled my lungs again, absorbed in the sensation. So absorbed, in fact, that by the time I heard the sound I could do little to react.

It was a strange sound, soft and snuffing, like a small pig rooting in the wet grass at my feet. I opened my eyes and looked down. The wiry little terrier, more brown than white now, splattered with mud, tilted up his fox-like face and laughed at me, his stump of a tail fiercely wagging. I quickly glanced in all directions, but could see no sign of Gareth Gwyn Morgan. The dog was apparently walking alone.

"Good morning, Chance," I greeted him, and bent to scratch the perked-up ears. "Where's your nasty master, then? Where is he?"

The dog angled his head to the right, then the left, as all dogs do when trying to make sense of speech. Giving up with an uncannily human shrug, he turned in the lane and looked back, expectant.

"Yes, well, I was heading that way to begin with," I told him. "You're welcome to come if you like."

He didn't really keep to heel. His little legs moving a mile a minute, he bounced before me like a blind man's cane, investigating everything. As we rounded the comer, just yards from the street, he veered suddenly left and went straight into someone's back garden, to sniff round their dustbins.

"Chance!" I hissed, trying not to wake the neighbourhood. "Get out of that!"

It had about as much effect as tugging on a giant's sleeve. Ignoring me, he moved a little further round the bins, clearly intrigued by whatever he smelted.

"Chance, for heaven's sake." I stopped and stood, uncertain, while the windows of the pink cottage attached to the garden gazed down on me in silent accusation. "Come
on,"
I urged the dog, and when he shrugged me off a second time I gathered up my courage and went after him.

It was not, I decided, the most equal of struggles. For something so short-legged and muscle-bound, the dog could move like lightning, and he seemed to view the whole thing as a jolly sort of game—three circles round the dustbins, then a pause, and round again the other way, tail wagging with such energy I feared it might fall off. When I tried to head him off he dodged, and knocked one bin over with a dreadful clatter.

It rolled, but to my great relief, the lid stayed on. "You're lucky," I informed the terrier, who didn't look at all contrite as he watched me bend to chase the rolling dustbin. I'd nearly got it upright when the back door of the cottage opened. Chance woofed and scarpered, leaving me alone to face my fate, but before I could turn round a dry voice stopped me.

"There's a man comes on Tuesdays to deal with those, thanks all the same."

I hung my head. "Oh, bloody hell." In a burst of frustration, I wrestled the dustbin back into place and wheeled to face Gareth Gwyn Morgan.

He stood square in the doorway, arms folded, stone-faced. "Are you sure you're not a journalist? That's just the sort of thing that lot go in for, searching people's rubbish."

I set my teeth, refusing to give him the satisfaction of a reply. Instead I merely sent him what I hoped was a defiant look, and turning on my heel, prepared to leave. Behind me, Chance whined sharply and I heard the heavy conflict in his master's exhaled breath.

"Miss Ravenshaw."

I stopped, not looking back, and he continued.

"Would you like to come inside?"

It seemed so unlike him to offer that my head moved of its own accord. I stared at him. "Inside your house?"

"That's where I keep my books," he said. "And you were rather keen, as I recall, to read the prophecies of Merlin."

"The prophecies..."

"I did tell you that this morning was convenient," he went on, his gaze flicking upwards to scan the spreading pinkish stain that wanned the dawning sky. "And this is definitely morning."

He was daring me again, I thought, and his next words confirmed it. His dark eyes deliberately free from expression, he curved his mouth into the ghost of a smile. "Or are you too afraid to spend an hour in my company?"

I raised a steady eyebrow. "And why would I be afraid?"

"Why indeed?" he asked, and stood aside, inviting me to step across the threshold.