The Silver Witch (7 page)

Half an hour passes swiftly in the old man's company. As Tilda sits on the squishy sofa, her feet curled beneath her, the reviving tea and the friendly conversation with the professor have such a restorative effect upon her that she soon feels quite differently about what she thinks she saw at the lake. Their talk has taken them from the history of the area to the abundance of wild birds that now live there, and the fact that the farside is a thriving example of local tourism, with its campsite and boats for hire and sailing lessons. It all sounds to Tilda so reassuringly normal, and convinces her that her fanciful mind had been working with her tired body to trick her, nothing more.

Not enough breakfast. Pushing myself too hard. Too much time spent on my own.

As she forms the thought she remembers she does not, actually, live alone anymore. She has a shaggy hound as a housemate, one that might be in need of letting out by now. She puts her cup on the tray and stands up.

‘I ought to get on,' she says. ‘Leave you in peace.'

‘My dear girl, I have nothing but peace, these days. Your visit was a most welcome distraction from the day-to-day. Please do drop in on me again.'

They make their way into the hall, where Professor Williams notices that the clock is no longer working.

He peers at it, tapping the glass that houses the face. ‘Strange. It's usually such a reliable timepiece.'

Tilda watches him as he opens the casing and adjusts the weights and chains inside. She is aware of some of her earlier anxiety returning. ‘Perhaps it needs winding up,' she suggests, even though she knows nothing about clocks, and is fairly certain the professor is the sort of man who would look after such a fine antique with great care.

‘No, no, I don't think it's that. Let me see…' He minutely alters some setting which Tilda cannot see. There is a pause, and then the hallway is once again filled with the steady rhythm of the grandfather clock. ‘There!' The professor shuts the door to the workings and gives the thing an affectionate pat. ‘Lovely craftsmanship. Look at the inlay, can you see from there? Here, thin strips of a lighter-colored wood cut and set into the walnut casing. Beautifully done. You'd think it was painted, the joins are so flawless. If you run your fingers over it the surface is as smooth as marble. You try,' he says, standing back.

Tilda finds she cannot step forward. The calm that she has acquired while with Professor Williams is leaving her, minute by minute. Her pulse begins to race as if she has just run up the hill to Ty Gwyn, for she knows beyond doubt that if she touches the clock it will stop again. And this time there will be a witness to the madness. The professor will see that it is she who is causing the clock to stutter and fail. Just as the lights failed at the cottage. Just as the computer failed.

Because of her.

And I won't be able to pretend otherwise any longer. Not even to myself.

‘I'm sorry,' she blurts out, ‘I really have to go.' Hurrying to the doorway, she jams on her sneakers, hat and jacket as the professor chatters on about tea and clocks and the fog having lifted outside. She scarcely hears what he is saying as she mumbles a good-bye and hurries through the heavy oak front door, breaking into a run the second she turns in the direction of home.

*   *   *

Two days after meeting Professor Williams, Tilda steels herself to visit the busy side of the lake. Ordinarily, she would avoid the bustle of such a place, with its boats for hire, ice-cream van, caf
é
, sailing club, campsite, and so on, but the more she thinks about it, the more she knows she must go there. However much tea and a chat with the professor helped her to shrug off what she saw in the mist that morning, time on her own has forced her to think again. Try as she might to convince herself that what she saw was nothing more than a trick of the eerie light combined with low blood-sugar levels, she cannot shake off the feeling that there was more to it than that. On top of which, her own effect on the grandfather clock still disturbs her. She cannot see how,
if
, the two things are in any way connected, and yet there is a niggling sense that they must be. On her return to the cottage that same day the lights had fused again. Not when she first arrived home, but after she had been there an hour or so.

Something is going on. Either I'm losing my mind, or there is another explanation.

She is relieved not to be having to explain her actions to anyone. She is aware how unformed her ideas are. How unfounded her theories. She is acting only on a hunch, and has no real notion of where it will lead her. Or even what it is she is hoping to find. Last night she sat in front of the fire in the snug sitting room of Ty Gwyn, sipping a glass of daftly expensive wine from the local shop, with Thistle stretched out on the hearth rug, and tried to pull together what she knew. Or at least, what she thought she knew. Her flashbacks–or waking nightmares as she had come to think of them–of the moment of Mat's death are not new. She has been having them for over a year now. But recently they do seem to be more vivid, more horribly, cruelly real in every heartbreaking detail. And then there are the electrics in the cottage. Bob found nothing wrong, yet the fuse box continues to trip out so frequently that Tilda has given up resetting the thing. She and the dog muddle along without electric light or the computer or any other plug-in appliances. The solid fuel range in the kitchen means she can continue to boil a kettle or cook the few food items she has left. And it heats the water to lukewarm, too. The open fire in the sitting room stops the house from becoming uncomfortably cold, even if upstairs is getting increasingly bleak as the temperature outside drops. Tilda is certain that it was her own proximity to the professor's clock that caused it to stop, so she cannot pretend that the wiring at the cottage is faulty. It makes no real sense, but the fact is,
she
is the common factor in both cases.

Sitting next to Thistle, gazing into the flames, Tilda had tried to recall what she had seen—or thought she had seen—at the lake. Three people in a boat. Two men, one woman, rowing for the shore. Dressed outlandishly. Or rather, outdatedly.

By several hundred years.

And the farside of the lake utterly changed. No caf
é
, no boathouse, no sailing club. No buildings that made any sense. Just a collection of huts. As if everything had been washed away by the mist and replaced by another land entirely. The most obvious cause for what she had seen, Tilda had decided as she drained her wine, was that grief had finally unhinged her. She was losing her flimsy hold on her own sanity. It was not a conclusion that brought her any comfort. And the only way she could think of to disprove it, to come up with something,
anything
else, was to go to the north shore and reassure herself that everything was still there, still as it should be, in all its slightly tacky, hot dog and paddleboat normality. That her hallucination, if such it was, amounted to nothing more than the febrile workings of a troubled mind. Her grief counselor, all those months ago, had advised her to accept her flashbacks as a part of the grieving process. Was this latest vision simply more of the same?

So here she is, duffle-coated against the late autumn chill, woolly hat pulled low, her pale plait tucked into her collar and Thistle walking a little stiffly at her side on the end of an old leather belt that stands in for a lead. Although it is late in the year, it is the weekend, and plenty of people have taken the opportunity to come down to the lake. The little car park is nearly full, and the bicycle racks bristle with mountain bikes and racers, their riders sitting nearby to eat their lunches, or wandering closer to the shore to view the lake. There is a family of swans being fed by some walkers, their cygnets grown large but still sporting some of their grubby brown feathers. Pushy mallards waddle onto the small tarmac quay in the hope of sandwich crusts or maybe the stub of an ice-cream cone. A harassed woman shepherds her own brood of young children away from the water's edge, luring them toward the caf
é
with the promise of hot dogs. A party of teenage canoeists busy themselves unloading their boats from a trailer.

All perfectly normal. Solid people. Real buildings. Of course.

Tilda walks past the concrete boat launch and follows the path to the recently constructed crannog center. Unlike its ancient namesake, this little thatched building is a modest single-story room, with glassless windows set into its curved walls, constructed to give people better views of the lake. Like the original crannog, it is reached via a wooden walkway, the whole thing supported by stout wooden stilts. Standing on the decked and railed area that encircles the hut, Tilda has the curious sense she is above and yet upon the water. She can hear ripples lapping against the wood. Coots and moorhens scoot about below her, bobbing on the gentle waves the light breeze has stirred up, or hurrying into the cover of the reeded area of the shore. Thistle creeps nearer the edge and peers into the water, ears alert, following the progress of a water vole as it gathers weeds for its nest. Looking across the lake, Tilda can make out St. Cynog's Church and the Old School House on the farside, and the bird blind a little farther around. This enables her to pinpoint where she must have been standing when she saw the people in the boat. The air is clear today, visibility excellent, and all there is to see is the reedy shore, the path, the fields with cows grazing peacefully, and the small area of woodland to the right.

A sightseer comes to stand next to her, scanning the water with expensive-looking binoculars. Tilda makes a mental note to rummage through the as-yet unpacked boxes back at the cottage to find her own pair. Following the visitor's line of vision, she sees what it is that has caught his attention. To the west of the lake, a hundred yards or so from the shoreline, are a minibus and a van and a cluster of people; a small knot of activity on a usually empty part of the landscape. It is not a campsite, yet she can just about make out a large tent pitched beside two portable toilets. She does not feel bold enough to ask the man if she might borrow his binoculars, so instead she forces herself to speak.

‘What's going on over there?' she asks. ‘Can you tell?'

Without lowering his glasses the man replies, ‘Archeologists. Some sort of dig, according to the bloke hiring out the boats.' Only now does he look at Tilda.

Look. Look away. Look again. Standard reaction number three.

Into the awkward silence comes a woman—the man's wife, Tilda thinks—holding a small girl by the hand. While the adults seek refuge in talking about nothing, the child stares openly from beneath a floral sou'wester. Tilda holds her gaze, waiting. She has her contact lenses in place, but she had not bothered with mascara or any sort of makeup for weeks now, so that her white lashes and brows are clearly visible. At last the girl, swinging her mother's hand, asks loudly, ‘Why is that dog on a belt? Haven't you got a proper lead? And why are your eyes funny? Are you blind?' The mortified parents hasten to smooth over their daughter's inadvertent rudeness.

‘I'm so sorry,' says the woman, reflexively pulling her child back a pace.

‘It's all right,' Tilda says.

‘She shouldn't ask questions like that.'

‘Really, it's fine.'

The girl frowns deeply, causing her rainhat to drop a little lower on her brow. ‘But, Mummy, why does she look like that? And why hasn't the dog got a proper lead and a proper collar?'

Tilda glances at Thistle's makeshift leash, and has to agree that the belt buckle looks uncomfortable on the dog's slender neck. She crouches down in front of the child. ‘You know, you're right. She does need a proper collar. And a lead. I'm going to go and buy her one right now. What color do you think I should get?'

The girl gives the question serious consideration and then says firmly, ‘Pink.'

‘Right. Pink it is. I'll see what I can do.'

‘Can I stroke her?'

‘I think she'd like that,' Tilda says.

The child moves closer, her nose only just higher than Thistle's shoulder. She gives the animal a gentle pat. Both dog and child appear to enjoy the experience.

Tilda straightens up, smiling a practiced smile.

The parents breathe again. The moment of embarrassment has passed. The little family moves on with their day, the child turning to wave at Thistle. Tilda sighs and returns her attention to the lake. The archeologists are pushing a small boat out onto the water and placing some sort of floats or buoys at measured distances. Looking to the north, in the space between their camp and the car park, now Tilda can clearly see the original crannog. It is a small island, with little to give away its unique origins; the fact that it is the only such man-made island in the country, and is still there, settled onto the silky waters of the lake, over one thousand years after its construction. Now it is almost completely covered in trees, and is inhabited only by some of the more timid waterbirds that benefit from its protected status. The oaks and willows, their branches just patchily leaved now, are reflected prettily in the water, and Tilda at once finds herself thinking how she might use such shapes and patterns in her work. It has been a while since she felt inspired to try something new, and a tiny spark of hope inside her lifts her mood.

Maybe now. Maybe here. Those twisted boughs and shadowy trunks … soft grays mingled with the fading gold leaves. I could do something with that.

A nearby mallard quacks loudly for no apparent reason, causing Thistle to jump. Tilda notices that the hound is shivering a little.

‘You're still not properly better, are you, poor thing? Come on, we'll buy some chips in the caf
é
on our way home.'

Their route takes them past a shop selling camping equipment, fishing rods, and similar leisure supplies. There is no sign on the door barring dogs, so Tilda is able to take Thistle inside in search of a collar and lead. Minutes later the pair emerge with the dog sporting a rather bright pink-with-blue-paw-prints ensemble.