Scarlet in the Snow (34 page)

I feel the touch of his fingers tracing the outline of my face. The fog thins. I feel the touch of his lips. On my forehead, ears, eyes, lips. His lips are so soft, but mine might as well be made of stone. The fog thins some more and I can now see his shape, but oh, so far away. Despair fills me, the fog rolls in again and I am alone, wandering in greyness.

‘Leave her,’ says the harsh voice. ‘It is not yet time.’

‘Our friend is right, my lord,’ says the light voice. ‘You must let her rest.’

No, I want to say, no, it is not rest I need. I need him to keep hold of me, to not let me go.

‘I will not let her go,’ Gabriel says, and it is as though he has heard my thoughts. A tingle begins in me, deep down. ‘I will never let you go,’ he breathes. ‘Never.’

He isn’t far away, as I feared. But close. So close! The tingle is growing. Growing.

‘You remember, my love, when you told me you thought the scarlet flower against the snow was like a living painting?’ he whispers, and there is a slight shake in his voice, as if he is trying to hold back a smile, though a smile mixed with tears. ‘Well, there is such a painting now. My first in a long, long time. I’ve called it
Scarlet in the Snow
. And I do so need your opinion on it, so you really must wake up.’

The tingle flushes through my veins, itching, roaring, and quite suddenly the fog rolls away and my eyes fly open. I gasp and look straight up into my lover’s anxious face and, without a word, reach up to him.

Time disappears as we hold each other tight, my head against his chest, his mouth on my hair, breathing in each other’s smell and warmth, feeling our hearts beat so close they might as well be one. ‘You said something about wanting my opinion . . .’ I murmur happily. And without another word he lifts something up from beside him.

My breath catches. It is the most beautiful painting I have ever seen, though it is so simple. It shows a snowy garden under a pale blue sky, framed in a window – a snowy garden where a glorious scarlet rose blooms on a bush, like a living ruby. It is just as I saw it and yet not, for on the same bush blooms another rose – a white one. They are twined together, and it seems to me as though I can smell the double fragrance of the flowers, a fragrance that goes directly to my heart.

‘I know I’ve been out of practice for a long time,’ Gabriel says, a little uncertainly. ‘And that shows. I’m not sure even that it’s finished – it probably still needs –’

‘No . . . Oh, Gabriel. It’s just that . . .’ I struggle to express what I feel. ‘It’s as if I am in there, looking through that window with you. It’s so perfect, so beautiful, I have no words for it.’ And all at once, the tears that wouldn’t fall start flowing.

Gabriel puts down the painting and catches me in his arms again. He dries my tears and kisses my eyes and says,
with a little laugh in his voice, ‘Now there’s a reaction any artist would relish.’

‘Just as long as you don’t get a swollen head,’ I say, smiling.

‘Me? God forbid!’ He laughs, before a little cough sounds. ‘But, my darling, I was forgetting we have company.’

I emerge from the shelter of his arms to see Luel and Old Bony regarding us with calm patience, from two chairs on the other side of the room.

‘Good day to you, child,’ they say in unison.

I smile a little shakily. ‘Er, good day to you, too. I am glad to see you both, though I do not understand how any of this is possible or where we are or how long I’ve been here.’ I look around at a charming wood-panelled room I do not recognise, through a window beyond whose glass is half-familiar, sunny woodland.

Old Bony crosses her arms. ‘As to how long you’ve been here, that’s quickly told. Five nights.’

‘Five nights!’ I echo in astonishment.

‘The poison had got into you,’ Luel explains, ‘and already sent your spirit wandering. It took time and our combined efforts to bring you back. As to where we are, that is also swift to say. It is the old Fontenoy house, deep in the heart of the woods outside Palume. Gabriel was born here, but it was shut up when his parents died. Now it lives and breathes again.’

I remember now why the landscape seems so familiar. I had seen it in Gabriel’s miniature painting, hanging in the study at the Durant residence. I can’t help a little shiver at
the thought of that place. ‘It’s over, Natasha, quite over,’ Gabriel says, putting an arm around me.

Luel then chimes in hastily, ‘And as to explanations, my child, they will be lengthy, so I propose that they wait. You should first get up and have something to eat. I’ll order herbed chicken and cream cakes.’

‘Tush, my friend,’ says Old Bony. ‘What the girl needs is strong hot tea and creamy porridge, not your fancy table.’

I smile at them both. ‘I should like hot tea and herbed chicken – that would be the finest thing, don’t you think, Gabriel?’

‘Or perhaps creamy porridge and cakes?’ says Gabriel, mischievously.

‘Whatever it is, let us have plenty of it,’ I say pertly, and he laughs and kisses the tip of my nose.

‘There’s a girl after my own heart!’

As Luel had promised, the explanations came later, when we were all sitting comfortably by a roaring log fire, replete after a large meal that had filled a table end-to-end. The two old
feyas
had competed mightily in the production of this hilariously varied meal, and it must be said they also ate the lion’s share of it.

We talked for hours, and so it was that I learned that when you use a strand of Old Bony’s hair, she feels it. And how at the same time the rose petal she had kept safe for me jumped in its box like a living thing. She had known
then that something was wrong and had tuned her
feya
ears to listen out. But even then she might not have come to our aid if I hadn’t spoken of the white wolf, a child of the forest, twisted and tortured, and of the fate of the old northern shaman. Guided by the homing beacon of the rose petal, Old Bony had woven a spell of speed and invisibility, and had swept off at once in her sleigh. Like an avenging fury, she had swooped down from the night sky and into the Durants’s garden. I heard then how a strand of Old Bony’s hair instantly released Luel from her stony prison, and how together the two
feyas
cast a powerful spell that turned the white wolf against its master. The sorcerer had not stood a chance.

‘Torn to shreds and vaporised,’ said Luel, with grim satisfaction.

‘Not even a bone left to adorn my fence,’ said Old Bony, with a rather terrible smile.

And the white wolf whose spirit had been enslaved and perverted? It had vanished at the same moment, reduced to a pile of ash, which Old Bony returned to its home so that its spirit could finally find rest.

Though his ultimate fate made me shudder, I could not find any pity in my heart for Edmond Durant, for the long list of his victims cried out for justice, and justice was what he had got. And if his daughter was now fatherless, she had in truth, as Gabriel said, not had a real father for a long time.

‘You see,’ Gabriel said, ‘I was a real orphan but I had the memory of my parents’ love for me. But Celeste was an orphan in all but name, for her mother died long ago
and the closest she ever got to her famous father was in the pages of newspapers and magazines. Though she never lacked for anything materially, her heart was hollow as a honeycomb. And though I never loved her in the way you thought, I grew up with her and I do care what happens to her. Luel made a spell that night that would convince the whole household that my godfather had left unexpectedly for one of his trips abroad. Later, news of his death abroad can be circulated. That way, Celeste is spared the shame and disgrace of the truth, and she can hold up her head in society. And Luel says that the spell on her died with the man who cast it, so she will be back to normal.’ He gave a little smile. ‘Celeste’s kind of normal, that is. I am glad, Natasha. I want her to have a chance to have a life as happy as it can be. Do you understand?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said softly, and kissed him. ‘And I love you all the more for it.’

I heard then how Luel had bent over the crumpled body of Felix – the sorcerer’s death had broken the crow-spell – and had found a very faint pulse. Old Bony was minded to leave him to take his chances but Luel wouldn’t hear of it. ‘His last thoughts were not for himself and that was why his heart did not give out,’ she said, ‘and I was not about to just leave him.’ So they took him to Dr Golpech’s house, left him on the doorstep and rang the bell.

‘Golpech had nothing to do with Edmond’s crimes,’ Gabriel said. ‘He was just used. That story of my being found on his doorstep was just that – a story. Golpech was told by Edmond that I’d been found unconscious in a squalid dive in the city, that it was obvious I’d been living
a shady life under an assumed name and that for this reason it was best if people thought I’d been kidnapped by foreign bandits. Golpech agreed because Edmond helped to fund his researches, so he was hardly going to ask too many questions. He was happy to have someone to experiment on with that
antirentum
of his. It’s supposed to clear bad memories. Perhaps it will help Felix.’

They went on to tell me the story of how the white wolf had come to be. Potent as a shaman’s spirit-wolf, obedient as a witch’s familiar, it had been a unique combination of the two, and so more dangerous than either. Durant had come across the living creature in a forest in his northern sojourn. And I had been right – it was a fragment of the white wolf’s spirit, not his own, which Durant had captured with his photograph. He had grown it and artificially enlarged it, like an exotic culture in a hothouse, in the synthetic white night of the glass room, with its concentrated energy. And that concentration of energy was precisely why he’d had Gabriel put in the glass room – there the
antirentum’s
effects, magnified and perverted, would have worked over time to cut the young man’s spirit loose of all memory for ever, thus rendering Gabriel utterly malleable, even more so than Felix had been.

Once the spell was complete, the spirit-wolf could be taken wherever its master went, an innocent photograph simply slipped into his pocketbook, till the time was right to unleash it. And unleash it he did, many times, in different places, against any person who stood in his way. Luel thought there were at least a dozen victims, starting from Byelfin the shaman. Without knowing it, I’d even
seen a mention of one of those crimes: for the
Kolorgrod Messenger
report had got it wrong. The nameless man in that story hadn’t been killed by a shaman’s spirit-wolf at all, but by Durant’s creature of light.

That was the terrible secret Gabriel had found out, three years before, when he had stumbled across a secret panel hidden behind the bookshelves in Durant’s study. He had found a notebook detailing his godfather’s experiments with magic. Till then, he had not had the faintest idea of his godfather’s double life. ‘I hardly knew him,’ Gabriel said. ‘He was hardly ever home, but he was the last person you’d suspect of sorcery. Not only did he claim to despise magic, he was also a man of action, whose exploits in remote places were the stuff of legend, and he had friends in high places, including the Presidential palace. The rare times he was home, he spent his time locked in the glass room, tinkering with the photographs he’d taken abroad. That was hardly a secret; his photographs were published in magazines and shown in exhibitions. I’d helped him with the work when I was younger. If he seemed even more distant when he came back from those long months in the north five years ago, I did not really pay attention. So I had no inkling – no inkling at all – of this thing that had become an evil obsession, a cancer that gradually ate away everything that had ever been good in him. I suspected that Felix had used some kind of magic to enhance his painting and secure his win, but I had absolutely no idea Edmond was involved.’

‘As for me, I’d felt for a while there was something different about that man,’ Luel chimed in, ‘but never
anything I could be sure of, and I was distracted by the painting. Like Gabriel, I suspected something, and when I saw it at Lilac Gardens I was sure it had been magically enhanced. But I didn’t suspect Durant. I just wanted to punish Felix for his cheating, so I made the painting vanish from the gallery. I had no idea that would precipitate what it did . . .’

‘That was just before I discovered the notebook,’ Gabriel explained. ‘I had no idea Luel was behind the disappearance of the painting. The day it happened Felix turned up at the house, ranting that I’d done it, that I was eaten up with jealousy because he was a genius and I wasn’t. Edmond was there and sent him packing, and the way he did it made me think he too suspected that Felix had cheated, so I told him my hunch about the involvement of magic. He had looked grim and had said he’d investigate, that in the meantime I was to keep quiet.

It was that very night I found the notebook. I could hardly believe it at first. I was in utter turmoil, repulsed by what I’d read. But I could not just betray Edmond to the authorities, not without giving him a chance to explain. He was my godfather, after all – the man who had taken me in when my parents had died, who had paid for my education. He might never have shown me affection, but also never enmity. From honour, from loyalty, I could not forget those things.’