The Puzzle Ring

by Kate Forsyth

  Roz looked uncomfortable. ‘She’s an old lady now, and not quite all there, I think.’

  ‘Does she think she’s been cursed?’

  ‘Lots of Scottish families have strange old stories attached to them. It’s just superstitious nonsense.’

  ‘But what’s the story, Mum? Don’t you think you’ve kept enough secrets from me?’ Hannah spoke with mock severity.

  Roz sighed. ‘It’s completely irrational, like all those old tales. Apparently some ancestor of your father’s married a fairy princess, they quarrelled, he cast her out, and so she cursed him. I don’t really remember the details. Your father knew it all, he was brought up on it.’

  ‘So Dad’s family was cursed? By a fairy princess?’ Hannah gave a little snort of laughter. She had read old fairytales where such things happened, but had never heard of anyone who actually believed it had happened to one of their ancestors.

  ‘I know! Isn’t it ridiculous? Yet your father told me all about it quite seriously when we first fell in love, in case I wanted to have nothing to do with him.’

  ‘Is that why he just disappeared like that? Because he was cursed?’

  Roz moved restlessly. ‘People die all the time, Hannah. It’s got nothing to do with some old story about a curse.’

  ‘His body was never found.’

  ‘It was Christmas. It was freezing. There was snow everywhere. And Loch Lomond is very deep in parts. Almost two hundred metres deep. He could’ve fallen in the loch and got caught in something under the water . . . it means nothing that his body wasn’t found.’

  It still sounds like cursed bad luck, Hannah thought, but she did not say so. Instead she said, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Scotland. When can we leave?’

  Roz looked surprised. ‘What do you mean? We can’t go to Scotland! What about my job? What about school?’

  ‘I’m going to be expelled anyway, and you hate that school just as much as I do. Why shouldn’t we go to Scotland?’

  ‘But . . .’ Roz looked harassed.

  ‘My great-grandmother says she’s sick. She wants to see me before she dies. Well, I want to see her too! I never even knew I had a great-grandmother. Let alone a castle in Scotland.’

  ‘It’s not a castle,’ Roz said. ‘More of a house.’

  ‘A big house! I know. With a curse on it. I want to see it, Mum.’

  There was a long pause. ‘I swore I would never go back,’ Roz said quietly.

  ‘Are you upset because the old lady was mean to you? But she’s said sorry now, hasn’t she? You’re always telling me not to hold grudges. You should go and make it up with her.’

  ‘It’s not just that. I don’t think I can bear to be there again. At Wintersloe, I mean. Where your father . . .’ She turned away to hide her distress.

  Hannah frowned. ‘It was a long time ago, Mum. Almost thirteen years. Don’t you think it’s time you got over it?’

  Roz smiled weakly. ‘Always so brutally frank, aren’t you, Hannah?’

  ‘Well, you’re the one always telling me not to brood over things.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but—’

  ‘Besides, if there’s a curse on me, I need to find out all about it so I can break it.’

  ‘Oh, Hannah, it’s just an old story. Curses don’t really exist. It’s completely irrational.’

  ‘So is keeping my great-grandmother secret all these years. Why shouldn’t I go and meet her before she dies? If she’s really so old, it might be my last chance.’

  ‘But it would cost a fortune. What about all our stuff?’

  Hannah grinned, sensing a weakening in her mother’s resolve. ‘What about it? We don’t have much. We’ll have a garage sale and sell it all.’

  ‘But we’ll need it when we come back.’

  ‘Maybe we won’t come back,’ Hannah said. ‘Surely I’m meant to get the castle when my great-grandmother dies? It must be full of stuff.’

  ‘Full of debts, no doubt,’ Roz said.

  ‘Well, at least I’ll get to see it—a castle in Scotland! Oh, you couldn’t be so mean to say we can’t go.’ Hannah clenched her hands into fists. ‘I’ll never forgive you if we don’t go, never!’

  Roz made a small, helpless gesture. ‘Maybe, just for a little while . . . but only if we take all your work sheets with us. You can’t start falling behind with your school work.’

  Hannah flung her arms about her mother. ‘Thank you! Oh, what an adventure!’

  Roz tried to press her close, but Hannah had already broken free and was marching to her room to look up curses in her Encyclopedia of Secret Knowledge. Her mother might not believe in curses, but Hannah most certainly did. If there was any truth to the old story, it seemed clear to Hannah that she must be the one to break the curse—the sooner, the better.

  Fairknowe

  ‘Mum, what does maudlin mean?’ Hannah was reading her great-grandmother’s letter again.

  Roz sighed. ‘Oh, I don’t know, Hannah. Sad. Sad and sentimental.’

  ‘It’s a good word. I like it. It sounds like someone’s name. Maudlin.’ Hannah imagined a sad little girl with drooping black hair, sitting on a chair with her feet turned inwards and her shoulders slumped.

  ‘Put that letter away, it’s going to fall to pieces if you keep poring over it.’

  Hannah carefully stowed the letter away and turned to look eagerly out the bus window again. Almost a month had passed since the arrival of her great-grandmother’s letter. Roz had had to give notice to leave her job, apply for passports, and put their furniture into storage. Even the flight had taken a day and a night, for there were more than fifteen thousand kilometres between Australia and Scotland.

  Now they were on a bus heading north into the Scottish Highlands. Undulating green countryside rolled past, each field contained within old mossy walls of stone overgrown with brambles and thorns. The bright autumn leaves of birch trees fluttered in the wind, brilliant against the moody grey sky. Every now and again Hannah saw a grand house with turrets and battlements, and she would cry out in delight and point them out to her mother. Most of the houses, though, were small and grey.

  Gradually the gentle rounded hills humped higher against the horizon, showing bare brown flanks where nothing seemed to grow except heather and the occasional patch of a brilliant golden flower that Roz said was gorse. Then the bus bumped its way through a small village, past tiny cottages with flowering boxes at the windows and past an inn built of slate and timber. Then Hannah at last got her first glimpse of Loch Lomond.

  It had been drizzling that morning, but over the loch the skies had cleared so the wide stretch of water was a soft blue. Islands floated here and there, the still water reflecting a blurred mirror image. Then the road took them back into the forest, the silver trunks of the birch trees hanging with silvery-green moss as if they were thousands of years old. In the distance, Hannah saw a glimpse of a gloomy mountain peak towering above the other high peaks.

  ‘That’s Ben Lomond,’ Roz said. ‘I climbed it once with your father. It was a beautiful warm spring day when we left, and by the time we got to the top it was snowing. Lucky your father had packed a fleecy jacket in his backpack, else I might’ve frozen to death.’ She sighed. ‘To think we’ve come in October! I swore I’d never live through another Scottish winter.’

  ‘It can’t be that bad,’ Hannah said.

  Roz shot her a wry look. ‘Just you wait, you little Aussie.’

  ‘Well, I’m looking forward to having a white Christmas.’

  ‘A dark and gloomy Christmas,’ Roz retorted. ‘It doesn’t always snow this low down.’

  ‘It will for me!’

  ‘I hope so, honey.’

  The bus rumbled into another small village, built close on the shores of the loch. Dinghies bobbed on the swell only a few metres away from the bus stop. Hills rose on the far side of the loch, purple laid upon brown. Here and there clumps of trees blazed gold and red.

  Roz pulled her makeup compact out of h
er handbag and squinted at herself anxiously, then outlined her lips with a soft brown lipstick that hardly changed the colour of her lips at all. Hannah thought that she would wear fire-engine red when she was allowed to wear makeup.

  The bus came to a halt and they clambered out, Hannah lugging her guitar, her backpack heavy on her shoulders. Roz heaved out their two enormous suitcases, saying, ‘How are we to get all our stuff to Wintersloe without a car? There must be a cab. Let’s go into the general store and ask.’

  Dragging their suitcases, they crossed the road and went inside ‘Shaw’s Store’, a small shop built of grey stone with tiny windows whose frames had been painted a dazzling white.

  A pretty girl about Hannah’s age was reading a magazine behind the shop counter. Her blonde hair was tied back in a ponytail, her eyes were as blue as forget-me-nots, and she wore tight jeans and a baby-doll top with red and blue embroidery. She made Hannah feel taller and gawkier than ever. She was dressed in a navy-blue smock with a white Peter Pan collar. Hannah hated it, but Roz thought she looked sweet.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the blonde girl asked in a bored voice, not looking up from her magazine.

  ‘I was wondering if we could call a cab? We need to get up to Wintersloe, and it’s a bit far, what with all our bags . . .’ Roz waved an apologetic hand at their suitcases.

  The girl stared at them in open curiosity. ‘No cabs round here. Why do you want to go up the big house?’

  ‘We’re staying there,’ Roz said.

  ‘We’re going to stay with my great-grandmother,’ Hannah put in proudly.

  The girl flashed Hannah an unfriendly look. ‘Mum! Need you!’ she called.

  ‘What’s wrong? Can’t you manage it, Scarlett? The boys have run me off my feet, and I’ve only just sat down for a cuppa,’ a woman’s voice grumbled down the stairs.

  ‘People here wanting to get to the big house.’

  ‘Really? Is it Lady Wintersloe’s great-granddaughter? Linnet said she was expected today.’ A short, round woman with a mass of dark curly hair hurried down the stairs. Her hazel eyes were bright with interest. ‘Why, Roz! I mean, Lady Fairknowe. How lovely to see you again after such a long time. Is this your little girl?’

  Roz smiled awkwardly, as if she did not really remember who the woman was. ‘Oh, yes. This is Hannah,’ she said.

  ‘My, but you’re the vision of your great-grandmother!’ Scarlett’s mother said to Hannah, smiling broadly. ‘Welcome home!’

  ‘Lady Wintersloe doesn’t have orange hair!’ Scarlett shot a hostile glance at Hannah.

  ‘She did when she was a lass,’ Scarlett’s mother replied. ‘All the Roses have red hair.’

  Scarlett snorted. ‘Her hair’s not red, it’s orange as anything.’

  Roz leapt to her daughter’s defence. ‘We normally call it copper-coloured. It’s beautiful.’

  Hannah just stared at Scarlett with her stoniest expression.

  Scarlett looked away. She twirled her blonde ponytail round and round her finger.

  ‘Best go over to Allan’s place,’ Scarlett’s mother said, frowning in thought. ‘He’s got a van, with plenty of room for all your bags.’

  ‘Allan?’ Roz cried in surprise. ‘Not Allan MacEwan?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ she said.

  ‘That’s amazing. Allan is still here? Allan was your father’s best friend,’ Roz said to Hannah. ‘They grew up together. Yes, let’s go and ask Allan.’

  ‘Do you remember the way? Scarlett, best show them.’

  Scarlett screwed up her nose as if she had smelt something disgusting, and reluctantly came out from behind the counter. ‘Great way to spend the first day of the holidays,’ she muttered.

  ‘Leave your bags,’ her mother said, ignoring her. ‘Allan can pick them up for you. My, but Lady Wintersloe will be pleased to see you, lassie. It’s a bit lonely up there, that big old pile. A young thing like you will liven it up no end.’

  Hannah nodded as the two mothers exchanged a rather stilted farewell, and followed Scarlett as she led the way outside. The shops were all lined up along one side of the road, facing the loch. Most of them were built of the same grey stone as the general store, with white-painted window frames. There was a hairdresser, a pharmacy, a butcher, and an inn called The Green Man. At the very end of the row was a shop with its door and window frames painted fairy-floss pink. A sign hung above the street, depicting a green hill with a flowering tree upon it. The sign read The Fäerie Knowe. Crammed in the window were fairy dresses, sparkly wands, glittering tiaras, books on fairies, and fairy dolls sitting on toadstools. Hannah paused to look in the window. Her eye was caught by a small booklet in one corner. It was called The Curse of Wintersloe Castle. A chill ran down her body.

  ‘That’s new,’ Roz said, catching up with them. ‘It used to be a baker’s shop.’

  ‘I work there on Saturdays,’ Scarlett said. ‘They run parties in a little room upstairs. It’s all painted to look like a fairy forest. I dress up as a fairy princess, I have the best outfit!’

  ‘What fun that would be!’ Roz said. ‘Maybe Hannah could come and help out sometimes.’

  Scarlett looked less than enthusiastic. ‘I guess. Though Miss Underhill won’t let just anyone work for her. They have to be able to sing and dance and do face-painting.’

  ‘I can sing,’ Hannah said.

  ‘They’ve got to look like a fairy princess too.’ Scarlett’s voice made it clear she thought Hannah would not be at all acceptable.

  ‘Hannah would make a perfectly beautiful fairy princess,’ Roz said.

  ‘Fairy princesses don’t have red hair,’ Scarlett said flatly.

  ‘Of course they do.’ A voice spoke behind them. ‘Legends say that anything red and white is fairy-born. They used to believe that a glance from a red-haired girl could kill a man.’

  Hannah looked around. A woman stood on the doorstep of the fairy shop. She had grey hair pulled back from her face, and wore a shapeless cardigan over beige slacks. Big glasses obscured her eyes.

  ‘Well, that’s just nonsense, isn’t it, darling,’ Roz said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Hannah said and shot Scarlett her best glare. Scarlett glared back.

  ‘You’re the Rose girl, aren’t you?’ the woman asked. ‘I’m Morgana Underhill. I own the Fäerie Knowe. I’m very interested in fairy lore. Are you? You should be, with your heritage.’

  ‘I like fairies. I mean, I used to, when I was little.’

  ‘You don’t have to be little to believe in fairies,’ Miss Underhill said. ‘Not real fairies anyway.’

  Roz looked exasperated. ‘Come on, Hannah, let’s keep going, shall we? We said we’d be at Wintersloe in time for afternoon tea.’

  ‘Come and see me if you’d like to earn a little extra pocket money,’ Miss Underhill said. ‘I’m always interested in red-haired girls that can sing.’

  Hannah nodded, and followed Scarlett and her mother along the street. Scarlett was walking quickly, looking cross. Roz gave Hannah a little smile and a shrug. As Scarlett led them into a crowded mechanic’s yard, a motorised bicycle whizzed past at top speed, spraying them with gravel. Crouched on its back was a boy with long black hair whipping around his face.

  ‘That Donovan!’ Scarlett cried. ‘He’ll kill somebody one day.’

  The boy looked back over his shoulder at them. Hannah went scarlet and looked away, embarrassed to be caught staring.

  A thin, crooked-looking man limped after the boy, shaking an oily rag. ‘Come back here, you little brat! Did I say you could go?’

  He stopped shouting at the sight of Roz and the two girls, and rather self-consciously shoved the oily rag in his back pocket. He wore a torn blue singlet under a dirty flannelette shirt. ‘Sorry about that. That boy would enrage a saint! What can I do for you?’

  ‘Allan? Is that you?’ Roz stared at him.

  He stared back. ‘Roz?’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve come back. Just for a little while. This is Hannah.
My daughter.’ She put her hands on Hannah’s shoulders.

  ‘My God. Bob’s daughter? Bob’s little girl?’

  With difficulty, Hannah stopped herself from rolling her eyes.

  Allan huffed out a great breath and limped towards them. He did not seem to know whether to embrace Roz, or shake her hand, or just nod and smile at her. He settled for the latter, perhaps because of the dirt and grease on his hands, which he wiped on his shirt. Hannah then saw, with a shock, that one of his hands was badly scarred. ‘Welcome home, Roz. It’s been a long time.’

  Roz nodded and smiled too, and said, ‘Yes, indeed.’

  ‘Where have you been all this time?’

  While Roz answered politely, Hannah looked around her with curiosity. They were standing in a yard crowded with cars and motorbikes and trucks, all in various stages of dismemberment or decay. A big shed had its doors thrown open. Inside were a dirty white van and a bench littered with tools.

  Roz was explaining about their bags. ‘I think we may just walk up to Wintersloe, it’s such a lovely day, and it’s not far from here, really. If you wouldn’t mind bringing up the bags for us later.’

  ‘Of course, not at all. Good to have you back.’

  Hannah picked up her backpack and her guitar. She was not leaving them in the care of this dirty-looking man. She followed her mum out into the street.

  ‘I warn you, the castle is haunted,’ Scarlett said, close to Hannah’s ear. ‘A witch was burnt to death near there. You’d better be careful.’

  ‘Really?’ Hannah asked, but Scarlett just called ‘See you!’, and went back down the hill towards the village with a casual wave of her hand.

  ‘I cannot believe how much Allan has changed!’ Roz was saying. ‘I guess thirteen years is a long time. I would not have recognised him if I’d passed him in the street. He’s got so . . .’ She groped for a word.

  ‘Old?’ Hannah suggested.

  ‘Older, of course. We’re all older.’ Roz sounded irritated. ‘I mean we were only quite young when I saw him last. No, I don’t mean that. I mean . . . he was just so . . .’