The Merlin Conspiracy (31 page)

“Well,” I said, “you've been awfully kind, and I don't want to cause a problem. If you know how to find where the King is, Grundo and I will rejoin the Progress as soon as we can.”

Heppy looked up at her tall daughter, and Judith, as usual, looked anxious. “Huh!” Heppy said. “You can't find them either, can you? Thought so. Those wizards are keeping the King secret again, aren't they?”

“I was told one of the ports,” I said.

Heppy swept that aside. “They could be anywhere. No, your best bet is to go to your grandfather in London. Maxwell can do the finding for you. He's good at it. Judith, when you've a moment, will you get Maxwell on the far-speaker? If I speak to him, we'll only end up shouting at one another.”

Judith smiled at me. “Of course. But first …”

“Yes, yes, she has to be shown the Dimber Regalia. It's her right as a female of the family.” Heppy, upright and barrel-shaped, bustled across the room. One wall was dark oak paneling. I watched as she laid one chubby, much-beringed hand on a particular place in the wooden squares. “Now you'll see,” she said over her shoulder. Then she worked magic. It was nothing like any of the magic I had in my head. It was reverent magic, very old and very practiced, and it sent a shiver up my spine. I felt another shiver as two doors that had not been there in the wall before came creaking open like a cupboard. Inside, something blazed. There was a sweet smell, of old wood and new flowers.

Judith put an arm round my shoulders and pushed me gently toward the open space. “Our vessels of virtue,” she said softly. “Full of beauty and power.”

I found myself gasping. Inside the wooden space, laid out on red velvet, were cups, bowls, plates, and jugs of gold and silver. All were most exquisitely made and wonderfully, elegantly shaped. Some had patterns raised in the metal—patterns that I knew
meant
something, except that the meanings were just out of reach somehow—and some had small clusters of sapphires and pearls set into them. One of the most beautiful was a great cut glass goblet with a base of gold filigree that grew around the glass like part of a flower. The centerpiece was a majestic flat chalice with golden handles that had tiny running patterns on every part of it. Around it were old, old cups, worn lopsided with use. I could see everything was immensely old and full of power. And it all felt alive. The life in the things seemed to pour out of the cupboard and scintillate on all the elegant, shiny surfaces. While I was trying to decide which vessel was the most splendid—the crystal goblet, the chalice, or maybe the small, strange one like a vase, irregularly dotted with bulging pearls and sapphires—their sheer aliveness seemed to cause two little gleams of light to go dancing over them. They looked almost like eyes.

“Aren't they something?” Heppy said warmly.

At her parrot voice, the eyes vanished, but the sense of warmth and strength stayed. The things felt so safe and so strong that I had no doubt that they would help me when I tried to explain about Sybil and the Merlin.

“They're the repositories of our strength,” Judith said raptly, clasping her hands gawkily to her chest. The shine from the vessels was gold and silver on her face. It made her look quite beautiful for a moment.

“And,” Heppy said, “believe it or not, we use them every day.”

“Yes, every day, for whatever needs working on in our provenance,” Judith said. “We're working at slaking this drought just now. And there seems to be a little imbalance in the magics here at the moment that we're trying to put right.”

“And you use everything in here?” I asked.

“Not all at once, of course,” Heppy said. “But according to which day it is and where the moon is. We give them all a drop of blood every time we use them. This is why we can't have men around. Can't you feel how secret and how
female
they are?”

To tell the truth, I couldn't. The strength that came out of the space lined with red velvet did not feel to me particularly much to do with women, or men either. But I did my best not to say this. “They are … quite wonderful,” I said. “Quite the most strong and beautiful …” Then my worries got the better of me, and I burst out with “Oh, Heppy, Judith,
how
do I go about raising the land?”

“Good
lords
!” Heppy banged the two halves of the cupboard shut, and the cracks in panels where they had been vanished at once. “Heavens, child, don't
say
such things! In front of the Regalia, too! Don't even
think
them! Whatever put that notion into your head?”

“You really shouldn't know about that,” Judith said reproachfully. “Come and sit down, my dear, and tell us what made you say that. I can see you're dreadfully anxious about something, but I feel sure you have to be overreacting.”

I could see they were both going to treat me as an over-fanciful child. I sighed. But I sat down all the same in the upright chair Judith guided me to and tried to explain. I was so worried by then that tears were trying to push themselves out of my eyes, and I could hear my voice shaking as I talked.

And it was no good. Heppy simply laughed comfortably. “No, dear. You've got the wrong end of the stick somewhere. The Merlins are always for good, and Court wizards are chosen for their loyalty. What you're talking about just can't happen in Blest. We're the most stable of all the worlds. You misunderstood something grown-up, dear. That's all.”

“It's so easy,” Judith explained soothingly, “to hear three adults talking in the dark and to imagine all
sorts
of queer things. No wonder you went on and had bad dreams about it. If you'd overheard them in daylight, you'd have felt quite different.”

“But you said yourselves that the magics were unbalanced,” I said desperately. “And Grandfather Gwyn told me—”

“Hush!”
Heppy said sternly. “We don't mention That One here. And he's someone you can't be expected to understand, not for years yet. You go and play in the garden, Arianrhod my dear, and don't trouble your head anymore. Judith will get on the far-speaker to Maxwell for us, and we'll have you all sorted out before bedtime. You'll see.”

I left Judith dragging a far-speaker out from among the looms and went dejectedly out into the back garden. It was almost as empty as the front, just grass—where Grundo was sitting with his arms round the dog and wearing his most faraway look—and some wire netting around it.

The Izzys were cavorting around the grass. “Pathetic!” said one.

“This boy is per-
thetic
!” said the other. “Fancy not understanding us Dimbers!”

When they saw me, they left off trying to provoke Grundo and began doing handstands up against the wire netting. “
You
understand us, don't you?” Isadora said. She was rather muffled because her dress had turned upside down with her. I pretended not to hear and looked anxiously at Grundo instead. He just looked vague. He had had tons of practice in ignoring Alicia after all.

“Our family
never
stays married,” Ilsabil proclaimed, clattering the netting with her feet. “It's against our rules. Anyway, I'm thinking of joining a circus.”

“We
invented
single-parent families,” Isadora said, from inside her dress. She came down, tangled in pink silk. “Our customs go back thousands of years,” she added breathlessly, “but I shall never marry. Boys are too pathetic. So are circuses. I shall be a great actress.”

“I believe you,” I said as Ilsabil came down in her turn.

Ilsabil went upside down again with a twang almost immediately. “I shall marry a rich wizard,” she declared, “and wear lots of jewels and lipstick. Then I shall kick him out and keep his money after seven years. Because
I'm
going to be chosen for Dimber third, not Isadora—
Ouch
!”

She ended in a scream and a collapse when Isadora rushed at her, shrieking,
“No, you won't!”
and shoved her hard in the stomach.

“Filthy little
witch
!” Ilsabil yelled. They fell on one another and fought energetically. The pink dress tore with a noise like a gunshot.

Grundo, I could tell, neither heard nor saw any of this. I thought at the time that he had simply tuned the Izzys out, the way he does with Alicia or Sybil. It never occurred to me he might be up to something.

I found out what Grundo had been up to in the middle of that night. But before that Judith had rung London at least twenty times. She came away from the far-speaker looking more anxious each time.

“I can't understand it,” she said. “I'm getting the engaged signal every time!”

“Don't worry so,” Heppy said. “Dora's probably calling that vile man of hers. That Jerome. Or Maxwell has some crisis on. Try again early tomorrow. And I'll try telepathy after that. I'd try it now, only it always annoys Maxwell so when I do it. I always seem to catch him at an awkward moment.” And she cackled with laughter.

Of course Judith did worry. She was that sort. She set about cooking supper with her long, kind face all tense and wrinkled. I offered to help her, but she wouldn't hear of it. Children didn't help in that house. So I went away and defended Grundo from the Izzys instead.

They had discovered how to victimize him by then. One would twirl in and poke him, chanting, “Long nose, long nose, oh, pathetic long nose!” and the other would come sweetly undulating up on the other side and ask in a babyish little voice, “Forgive me asking, but where
did
you get all those pretty freckles from?” Then, of course, they would swap roles.

Grundo couldn't handle this at all. He was looking desperate when I came up. I took hold of an Izzy in each hand and shook them, quite roughly. “If you little freaks do or say one more thing to Grundo,” I said, “I shall turn you both into
fleas
. Don't think I can't. So leave him alone. Now.”

They twisted round and stared up at me innocently. “But men are fair game,” Isadora said.

“
Heppy
says so,” added Ilsabil.

“And
I
say not,” I said. “And I say that
you
are ignorant, badly brought-up little witches, and I've got hold of you, so you are going to do what
I
say, not what Heppy tells you. Understand?”

Their little pink mouths opened charmingly. “Oh, but—”

“But nothing,” I said. “Don't try and charm
me. I
don't think you're sweet. I think you both need spanking.” I banged their heads together, not quite as hard as I wanted to, and stalked away.

I could feel them staring after me with hatred. I spent the rest of that evening expecting them to take some horrible revenge on me. But to my surprise they treated me almost with respect. I don't think anyone had ever told them off before. They didn't like it, but it seemed to have made them think.

All the same, I think they put something slimy in Grundo's bed that night. Poor Grundo. He was given a little room in the attic next door to the Izzys. I was given a grand guest bedroom halfway down the house. It had a wonderful high brass bedstead with knobs on its brass rails and a whole bank of pillows, and it was covered with an enormous patchwork quilt.

“Be gentle with the quilt,” Judith said. “My great-grandmother made it—your great-
great
-grandmother, that is. It's quite fragile these days.”

“It's beautiful,” I said, because it was. I looked at the big windows. They had brass curtain rails threaded with big brass rings. The curtains hanging from the rings were as beautiful as the quilt, but newer. “Did you weave the curtains?” I asked. “They're lovely.”

“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Judith said. She went away with an anxious, apologetic smile, as near to being pleased as I had seen her.

I settled down under the ancestral patchwork and fell straight into sleep. I was tired out. And it seemed to me that I had another dream after a while, of the same kind that I had dreamed at Grandfather Gwyn's. I thought I floated out from under the quilt and through the window and sped off across the countryside. Dim blue fields and dark copses unfurled beneath me for miles, until I arrived at Castle Belmont and whirled through the grounds to the Inner Garden. This time I didn't go into it. I sort of roosted on the wall, looking down into the garden's moist, quiet spaces. Grandfather Gwyn's horrible horse standard was still there. I could see it as a white streak at the corner of my eye while I examined the garden.

It was spoiled. The lawns were drying out, making trees droop and bushes wither, and the waters did not seem to be running freely anywhere in the conduits and cisterns. Where the waterfalls poured into the pools, they made a strange, harsh tinkling, quite unlike the earlier deep, singing gurgle. Some animal heads had stopped running entirely. But this was only the outer sign of what Sybil had done. When I looked more closely—in a way it was feeling as much as seeing—I found a yellow-white ghostly layer of rottenness over everything. It covered the lawns and the flowers, and was particularly disgusting where it draped and glopped over the trees or oozed down the waterfalls.

I wasn't wrong about this! I thought in my dream. After what Heppy and Judith had said, I had been almost distrusting my own memories, thinking perhaps that I
had
made a mistake, or imagined Sybil talking to Sir James and the Merlin, and possibly that I had only dreamed that they had summoned Grandfather Gwyn here. Now—at least in my dream—I knew it had been true.