Slow Poison

by Helen Slavin

  It was early, but they had already had a ‘breakfast’ of Apple Champagne, brought on small silver trays in tall thin flutes. There were several glasses empty already.

  “Ooh, have a sip, it’s lush,” the mother of the bride had offered a glass to Seren who shook her head.

  “No thanks. I need steady hands.” She had waved her little cushion of pins as the mother of the bride glugged down the fizzing, glittering liquid. She gave a burp.

  “Rude,” snapped an aunty of some description with a pinched look. The mother of the bride snatched up another glass and raised it.

  “Cheers,” she said as the liquid sloshed over the rim and splashed the aunty’s pale blue dress.

  “You clumsy cow,” the aunty cursed as she dotted at the stain, others fussing around her with a sound like hissing cats.

  “It’s a fugly outfit anyway.” The mother of the bride reached for more champagne, tipping the fat rounded bottle with its bloody red apple shaped label. The bottle was empty. Tears were shed.

  It seemed to Seren that mayhem was going to break loose before most of the guests even arrived.

  * * *

  “I now pronounce you Man and Wife…” the vicar had intoned and the newly made Mr and Mrs Hillman kissed to the accompaniment of a vast cheer. There was ecological confetti and delicious food.

  Emptied bottles of cider ranged across the table cloths looking like a glass sculpture. At the nearest table an old man was swilling each green bottle to see if there were any dregs left and sucking them down thirstily before moving to the next table. The chief bridesmaid, Minty, was finishing her third portion of apple pie. Beside her the tall lady with jet black hair and neat little black boots was wearing a dramatic hat. Black silk. Black, black, and some more black on top. Was that a jackdaw? Its wings spread wide as if it might escape at any moment. If only she could carry off an outfit like that. She looked down at her own powder blue dress. She hated powder blue. Oh God, she had been to a lot of weddings lately and always the bridesmaid. Was she ever going to be the bride?

  “I doubt it dear. Why not have some more pie?” The woman in the jackdaw hat pushed her own untouched, sugar sprinkled portion towards Minty and reached for a fresh cider bottle, the label a gold edged apple, crimson red. “Here. Wash it down with this.”

  As Minty swigged the cider from the bottle, the woman in the jackdaw hat raised a glass to her.

  Later, the room was swimmy and strange and Minty felt sad when she ought to have felt sick. She needed to go to the bathroom, sprinkle cold water on her hot face.

  On her return, feeling a need for further apple pie and possibly a side dish of apple cake, she moved amongst the tables, overheard the snippets of conversation that bubbled from the guests seated around the tables.

  “Don’t you think Cherry’s bottom looks huge? Cherry’s chunky cheeks?” sneered a thin lady in a blue suit, her long face lengthening into a cackling laugh as she leaned into the gentleman beside her. He kissed her greedily and she seemed startled by this. Minty wished someone would kiss her like that.

  “Because you never think outside the box,” the sharp voice sliced across Minty and she stumbled against another table.

  “The box you put me in, you controlling bastard.”

  “Wish I could fit you in a box you fat bitch.” The man pinched at the woman’s bottom, his fingers like a crab claw. She squealed, tears filling her eyes and still he pinched.

  “Squeal piggy, squeal,” his face was red and sweating. His other hand moved up to grab the woman’s arm, whip her forwards as if in a horrible dance.

  “Hungry piggy, eat some cake.” The man grabbed the woman’s hair, shoved her down onto the table, rubbed her face in the plate of half eaten cake, but she didn’t care, began to eat up the smushed crumbs.

  Minty sat in her seat. The others from her table were over by the dessert queue having a disagreement. The only person left seated was a man, a stocky older uncle with silvered hair who was smoking a cigar. The woman in the jackdaw hat was seated nearby and breathed at the smoke making it drift towards Minty.

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to smoke in here,” Minty coughed. The fellow guest rolled the cigar around in his fingers for a moment and raised his eyebrows.

  “You think not?” he sucked in a deep breath. The cigar smoke was not mixing very well with the apple delights. It was making the cake look very brown and dry. The fellow guest blew the smoke over Minty, making elaborate movements with his head to give the smoke maximum swirl. Minty coughed again and her fellow guest laughed. He leaned in close and put the cigar out on her forearm. The pain was so intense Minty could only gasp, the air choking her. The cake fork fell from her hand onto the floor and as she bent down to retrieve it she slid off the chair and hid under the table, beneath the snow-white drape of the cloth, a quiet fortress in which to cry.

  10

  The Friends of Woodcastle Castle

  Ailith was up before dawn, stepping out of Cob Cottage into the almost light of the October morning. It seemed darker to her in the last few days but that might have been the fact that the weather was clouded in, heavy skies of steel grey.

  She noted that none of the floorboards creaked and neither did the door as it gave her safe passage out into the wood. She had been cooped up in the house and she needed a breath or two of air.

  She was feeling on edge, as if the weight of everything was now starting to bite into her shoulders, strain all her muscles, the mental ones as well as the physical. She had pondered for a long time whether it was wiser to leave His Lordship in the cottage or to keep him with her. She was unsure of the territory, even in Havoc. Her anxiety led her to see shadows where perhaps there were none. At last she decided to leave him within the walls of the cottage. She had no idea what the town was like and Cob Cottage, if Grandam Orla had been right, was a safe haven for now.

  She moved in a very few light steps into the cover of the wood. She had her task in mind and was not, under any circumstances, about to go wandering in this wood. She had heard the tales of it from Grandam Orla and she was sensible enough to work out, within her first few footsteps beneath its canopy, that those stories were true. For now, she was respectful and made only the footprints she needed to, keeping the water close by as a guide. She was just at the edges; the wood would understand her situation and grant her safe passage.

  * * *

  Back home, Ailith was nothing, a dandelion seed blown phwip-phwish on the wind, and of no consequence. Except, of course, if a dandelion seed took root in a paving stone then it grew into a plant, a tough rooted guerrilla of a thing that was hard to get rid of. That was how Ailith saw herself, she was ground into the paving stones in the courtyard, a little weed they’d have to dig out.

  She kept the dandelion image in her mind. Physically she was strong, always had been, it came with her job, where she was wrapped in a pinny and in charge of an ever increasing pile of dishes. Breakfast dishes were no sooner done than she had to collect up the lunch dishes and then when that sinkful was wiped and dried the castle’s inhabitants had dirtied up their dinner dishes and the copper must be boiled once again.

  What they didn’t know, none of them, was that Ailith was a fast learner, a good observer. Her place was in the kitchen and, in Ailith’s view at least, people underestimated the importance of kitchens. The dishes were heavy, so your arms grew muscles, and you learnt of ways to balance them so that you wouldn’t have to make so many trips back to the hall and the long table that was made from the tallest oak. A great many people came to sit at that table, visitors and residents. You could learn a lot about someone from how they left their plate, the way they hid their runner beans under their knife, the bits they left on the chicken bones. You learnt to distinguish between the ravenous and the picky.

  People gossiped in the kitchen and let their guard down. Hidden behind the grub and slops of your pinny, you were nothing and therefore you could learn everything.

  It would stand her
in good stead now for, if the Ways could not help her, she would have to help herself.

  There were boundaries where Ailith lived, there were drystone walls and wooden gates knotted with iron but there was nothing like the wires that choked this place. Trying to break out of the edges of Havoc Wood was like being trapped in a snare. Ailith, her hair snarled into brambles, her knitted jerkin nearly unravelling on the thin snake of fence wire, writhed and wriggled her way out of the grip of the wood. With the small triumph of the fence out of the way she skidded and slipped her way down the banking of browning bracken and leaf litter to a straight path.

  There was a largish sort of storybook left open by a bridge which Ailith stopped to try to read. Ha. Yes. No one knew she could do that. The pictures were pretty enough and she could make out the words ‘industrial revolution’, ‘railway’, and ‘disused’. The image looked like a furnace with wheels, everything was odd here. Foreign. Other. There were pictures of a kestrel and a heron however, so she felt connected.

  She followed the path and it led into the town itself. It was noisier and more bustling than she had expected and there were carriages that roared by with no horses. She felt adventurous as she looked around, sighted the castle at the top of the hill, and began to walk.

  The lady in the castle wall, clearly held there under an enchantment, was asking her for coin she didn’t have.

  “I need to have a look around the castle, that’s all…” Ailith reasoned. “I have come here—” she stopped herself in time, had almost confessed to the Bone Resting. She must not give herself away.

  “It’ll cost you £4.50 then,” the woman insisted and turned her attention to the two women standing behind Ailith. Ailith stepped away and looked sulkily back towards town thinking of a bag of coin she had once had. There was a funny sound, like a bird’s brief chirp and the women at the castle wall were all giggly and chattering.

  “Oh… this contactless card stuff. Magic money!” The tall woman was waving a card, coloured and carrying a picture of a horse upon it. “Still freaks me out a bit. Where do I…?” She was gazing at a box that the enchanted castle lady was offering, and they were all putting on seeing glasses. Ailith wondered for a moment if she ought to have seeing glasses too, were they like armour or adornment? She couldn’t quite work it out. The woman tapped the horsey card at the box and the bird sound Ailith heard seemed to signify that the money magic was worked.

  Ailith needed to borrow a little of that magic, just enough to gain entrance to the castle. The enchanted lady was handing out maps and storybooks and the tall woman was absently putting the card into a pocket in her bag. Ailith waited for her moment to reveal itself.

  She caught up with them later, standing by another storybook in the Great Hall and Ailith was very careful to slip the horsey card back into the woman’s baggage. She understood that borrowing magic was dangerous, almost as dangerous as owning magic, and everything she had done in the last few weeks had been a ridge of danger that she was running and so she did not wish, so near to the completion of her task, to jeopardise it. Once the card was returned she wandered off by herself, trailed in and out of each room and ruinous pile of stones and, finally, took the lichen covered steps to the curtain wall.

  * * *

  Charlie woke up with a start. She’d been wandering again, trailing her way through a clearing somewhere deep in Havoc, her hands reaching for plants as she did so, putting them into a basket of Grandma Hettie’s. It was important, this dream. She had trailed through the wood in several similar dreams in the last few nights, her sleep broken up by these wanderings.

  This morning she had put a pad at the side of the bed and she scribbled down a few. She noticed that there were other less legible scribbles from in the night and she was too tired and crabby to try to decipher them now.

  She padded into the kitchen in her socks. They were her soft woollen ones and, she noticed as the cold floor touched her feet, there were holes in them. She ought to call into the outdoor shop and replace them. She took the offending sock off; it was, now she looked at it, more hole than sock and she put it down on the table as she turned to the kettle. There was a note on the fridge from Anna regarding their lack of milk and Emz was just exiting the bathroom, dressed for school and carrying a slight scent of toothpaste.

  “You need a lift?” Charlie asked. “I’m going into town.”

  Emz shook her head and opened the fridge.

  “Thanks, but no… There’s no milk.” She waved the empty plastic bottle, plonked it on the sinktop for the recycling. “Shall I get one on my way back?”

  “No. I’m going into town so I will. What about our guest?”

  “I don’t think she can get milk.” Emz grinned and Charlie made a mocking ‘haha’ noise complete with fake beaming smile before the sisters regarded each other properly. “If you’re going into town why not take her with you?” Emz suggested.

  “Is that against the rules d’you think?” Charlie was trying to remember some of the guests that she had met up with during Grandma Hettie’s tour of duty. Emz, clearly, was thinking the same.

  “Don’t think so. There was that thin woman we took to Leap Woods for a picnic once, remember? And that bloke with the weird rabbit waistcoat, we walked him to the castle really late one afternoon and there was that funny falconry display.”

  Several memories tumbled forward for both of them. A small album of long-forgotten brief encountered faces.

  “Right. Yes. Seems okay. So that’s a good plan. I will do that.”

  “If she wants to go, of course,” Emz qualified the plan. Charlie was less sympathetic.

  “Well, if she wants breakfast she’d better get up.” Charlie spooned coffee into her pot.

  Emz headed off and Charlie thought that the house felt very empty and she understood why at once. She took a mug of coffee down the short corridor to the guest rooms and knocked on Ailith’s door. When there was no reply she went in.

  She stood for several minutes sipping her coffee and looking around the room. The bed didn’t look slept in, although the floor did; Ailith’s coat was folded into a pillow under the window. The basket containing the head was on the side table, so it seemed that perhaps Ailith hadn’t done a bunk as such, unless, of course, she’d decided to abandon the Ways to the task. Charlie reached for the door handle and as she looked away from the room it shifted at the edge of her gaze. She looked back. What had altered? She looked back at her hand poised on the door handle and saw at once.

  Ailith’s coat was rumpled and folded into a 3D map of the route Ailith had travelled. It encompassed pathways that Charlie had not seen before in Havoc and yet they pinged in her head as if familiar. The trails and tracks turned, revealing to Charlie how careful Ailith had been on her journey. The sensation of travelling, of movement, increased until Charlie was spooked, and she stepped back, pulling the door to behind her. She stood for a moment listening to her heart pound itself back into its usual rhythm. Anna’s eyes looked into her head; she saw the moment when Anna had said the word ‘flickerbooked’.

  It was a long time since her sister had used the term. It was something they said matter of fact when they were younger, when they spent more time in the wood and, Charlie understood, when they were closer to their Strengths. Something deep inside Charlie pushed and she pushed it back, turned to the kitchen.

  More coffee, this was definitely a two-mug problem. She toyed with the idea of calling Anna but decided she did not want to appear panicky. It didn’t seem to be a rule that Ailith had to stay in the cottage otherwise, Charlie knew, the doors would have shut against her. Charlie felt calmed by this idea, so, where might she be? Taking a walk round Pike Lake perhaps?

  A quick scan with the binoculars proved that this wasn’t the case. Every second that Charlie looked through the binoculars she understood what she was avoiding looking at. Her fingers were sweating, the pads soft with heat. Find her. The word she had used for her own Strength was waiting for her at the ba
ck of her head. She would let it wait a little while longer.

  It was as she buttered her thinking toast that Charlie happened to glance at her holey sock. She saw the subtle change at once and her mind lurched away from it. Oh. Strength. She glanced at the sock again; the effect was as easy as blinking, the fibres and nubbles of the sock shifting and then, uh-oh, blurring. Wrong. Doing it wrong. She took a deep breath. This was, really, if you thought about it, like riding a bike or learning to drive a car, wasn’t it? You could spook yourself if you wanted but you could just accept it as a practical tool. Wasn’t that what Anna was doing?

  Charlie took in another deep breath and looked down at the sock. Mindful of the way she’d lost the map of Hartfield in the paving stones outside the Castle Inn, she stopped thinking. She did not have to grab at this, that was the key. She looked back. At once the holes combined with the tweedy colours of the wool and the scrubby surface of the table to show her the map, a map quite as clear as the ones she used to see when she was a kid. She looked the sock map over a few times and felt a small fire start up inside her. It was warming and bright as daylight. The thing about Strengths, Charlie thought as she scoffed the last of her toast, pulled on her boots and grabbed her keys, is that they make you feel strong.

  * * *

  Mrs Bentley was in the kiosk today and there was simply no arguing with her.

  “You know, Charlie Way, if everyone didn’t pay then very shortly we wouldn’t have a castle, you do appreciate that fact?”

  Charlie looked at Mrs Bentley’s face; the determination seemed hewn out of the same stones as the castle itself. Charlie opened her mouth to speak but as she did so a fierce high-pitched sound struck up and she halted, looked around.