China Garden

by Liz Berry

  “Who me?” James said, amazed. Clare could see his lips twitching.“He could pick me up with one hand. He’s a big - boy, Mr Fletcher. I couldn’t shift him.”

  Mark, grinning, said,“Don’t worry, James. I’m going. I was only waiting for Clare.”

  Clare thought Roger Fletcher was going to explode. Instead he spun round and glared at her viciously. “You. I told you to stay away from the House. You can clear out. Get your cases packed. You’re on your way.”

  Clare looked at him with contempt. The bullying swine.“You’re having a disappointing morning, Mr Fletcher. Mr Aylward wants me to stay here.”

  The colour drained away suddenly from his heavy jowls. He opened his mouth to speak, but Clare said quietly,“Yes, that’s right. You’re too late. I’ve seen him. Talked to him.”

  Mark heaved his bike off its stand, got on and started the engine noisily.“Are you coming?” he said to Clare.

  Roger Fletcher looked at them. Sweat was glistening along the line of his forehead. He pointed a shaking hand at her.“I’m warning you... If you go with this misbegotten vermin, I’ll make it my business to tell Mr Aylward. He will be very angry, very angry indeed. He doesn’t like Mark Winters or his mother. If you want to stay here I advise you to have nothing more to do with him.”

  Mark said,“Come on, Rosie, let’s go.”

  Clare hesitated, looked at Mai and James, and back at Roger Fletcher, then made up her mind. She crossed the yard and slid on the bike behind Mark, holding on firmly as he accelerated away through the archway and up the drive under the yellow lime trees.

  That evening her mother said, her eyes on the television,“You didn’t tell me that the boy you were with on Saturday was Mark Winters.”

  Clare’s heart gave an uncomfortable jump.“I didn’t know you knew him.”

  “He came up to the House, this morning.”

  “I know.” The colour was burning under Clare’s skin.

  “He collected the prescriptions and the nursing supplies,” Frances said.“He went all the way over to Salisbury to pick them up. He apologized. Said it was a misunderstanding, and that it was all his fault.”

  She turned around.“Do you like him, Clare?”

  Clare’s flush deepened uncontrollably.“He got the prescriptions? He didn’t say.”

  “Apparently he had a confrontation with Roger Fletcher. Roger came in raging, demanding to see Mr Aylward.”

  “Have I got to start packing?”

  “Packing?”

  “I went off with Mark. Roger Fletcher said Mr Aylward would throw me out.”

  “That’s not very likely, is it?” Frances said, dryly.“In any case he didn’t see him. Mr Aylward wasn’t well enough to see anyone.”

  “Why doesn’t he like Mark? What’s he done?”

  Frances turned away, staring blankly at the television.“Nothing. Nothing at all. He’s just… a victim of circumstances.” She banged the arm of the sofa, angrily.“It’s not fair.”

  “What’s not fair?”

  “Oh… everything.”

  Clare laughed.“You sound like me. I’m making coffee. Do you want a cup?”

  “All right. Thanks. What have you been doing?”

  “Riding on Mark’s bike.”

  At the main gate he had stopped and made her put on a helmet and an old leather jacket which he had brought in his pannier. The helmet fitted all right but the jacket was huge and studded, hanging down all over her and it weighed a ton. Giggling she could hardly keep her balance when they started off again, but it had smelled of leather and Mark, and it had kept her warm in the slip stream of wind. It was upstairs now, hidden in her cupboard.

  “Where did you go?”

  “Wells.”

  He had bought her cheeseburgers and chips and a Coke, and they had wandered about the ancient city holding hands. They had stood together in the Archbishop’s magical garden, where the seven sacred springs which had given the town its name still bubble up and flow away, as they have done for centuries.

  “It’s so peaceful here. A holy place,” Clare said.“It feels like Ravensmere.” She could feel his hand shaking suddenly.“What is it? What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t know...” His hand felt icy cold. He put his arm around her and pulled her close, as though he needed comfort. She leaned her head against him and hugged him back.“Come on, let’s go home.”

  He had driven her back right to the stables, even though she had tried to make him leave her at the main gate, in case Roger Fletcher was around with his shotgun. He had laughed.“Don’t worry, he’s been threatening to shoot me for years.” And he had kissed her forehead, and then her mouth, and neither of them had laughed.

  Clare said to her mother defensively,“Well, aren’t you going to tell me off? You’ve always told me to stay away from boys like Mark.”

  Frances did not rise to the bait. She looked at Clare searchingly, gravely. Clare’s cheeks were still flushed, her eyes brilliant and shining. She seemed to be burning with energy and excitement.

  “Would it make any difference? You’ve fallen in love with him.”

  Clare lay awake, unable to sleep going over every minute of the day.

  It wasn’t true, she thought, panicking. Of course she hadn’t fallen in love with Mark. It was just a sex thing. Raging hormones. Just because she couldn’t stop thinking about him, wanted to see him again, wanted him to touch her, kiss her, it didn’t mean it was anything important and serious, like falling in love. It might even be in reaction to Adrian, or exam stress, or... well anything.

  She shifted uncomfortably. Her body had never felt like this about Adrian. She lay staring at the circle of brilliant moonlight on her bedroom floor, and heard the stable clock chiming midnight.

  She got up and went to the bathroom, and coming back stood at the little window looking down into the cobbled yard. Nothing moved. It was bright and still.

  Nothing moved, and yet beneath this surface calm it seemed to Clare that everything was moving. There was a buzzing tension in the air, a tightening. Something was going to happen. There was a calling, a sense of urgency.

  She saw a slight movement across the yard. Tabitha slid from under the door of the old blacksmith’s forge and flowed across the cobbles, her tail held straight up, and sat down under the window, looking up at her, waiting.

  Clare moved away irresolute. She should get back into bed at once and stop imagining things. This place was sending her crazy. But even as she pulled back the covers she knew she would never sleep. The tension and the pulling had increased. She would have to go. She groaned with irritation and pulled on her jeans and sweater.

  Tabitha was still waiting patiently and greeted her with a satisfied miaow when she let herself noiselessly out of the front door, but when Clare bent down to stroke her she slid away and went quickly ahead along the route she had taken before and Clare knew that they were going to the China Garden.

  The cat was already there when Clare arrived, sitting motionless between the guardian lion-dogs, her tail wrapped around her.

  Clare stepped up and through the First Moon Gate, followed by Tabitha, and swung the iron gates closed behind her.

  She saw at once that Mai and the boys had been working very hard. They had finished scything the centre of the Garden, and the tall grass was gone, leaving the ground uneven, broken by strange swelling hillocks and ridges.

  They had tidied up the Pavilion, propped up the balustrade and taken away the fallen spars, and she saw, with the hair lifting on the back of her neck, that the Third Moon Gate too was open now. They had cut back the great climbing red rose which had blocked it, fastening its trailing branches to the wall. Red rose for love, she thought, and looked through the Gate, half-fearfully, expecting to see the Market Cross, but there was only a view of two magnificent oaks in the park.

  “Well,” Clare said, turning to Tabitha,“You’ve brought me here, what am I supposed to do next?”

  Tabitha looked at her
and deliberately turned her back in disgust, ignoring her. Clare laughed and wandered away, following the raised path to the centre Pavilion. The sense of urgency and pressure had gone now.

  She sat down on the steps, her arms around her knees, relaxed and a little sleepy, watching the moonlight lapping across the ridges and banks, sculpting them into a pattern of silver and grey. They were like the sea, she thought, as the moonlight flowed and shimmered, throwing the dark groynes into relief. No, more like pillows, a huge feather bed billowing up and down. A quilt, machined into patterns.

  Patterns.

  There was a kind of rhythm to the shadows in the turf She could follow the dark lines inwards until they turned right, moved inwards again, turned left, moved inwards, before swinging right once again... looping... like a maze.

  At that exact moment she saw Tabitha calmly weaving her way backwards and forwards along the curved ridges.

  Of course it was a maze. The Maze. The lost Maze of Ravensmere. Not the kind of maze she and Mai had imagined, with tall hedges like Hampton Court, where you got confused, but a maze cut into the turf. The kind of maze that had been old even in Shakespeare’s time, which had a single way to the centre, and a single way back. What did they call it? A Troy Town. The words jumped into her mind without difficulty.

  Once, long ago, on a Bank Holiday, they had taken a casual drive out into Essex, and had come across an ancient turf maze on the village green at Saffron Walden. Delighted, Clare had started to run the complicated pattern, but her mother had been strangely upset, walking away instantly, refusing to wait, refusing to have anything to do with it, and Clare had never been able to complete the run.

  Could her mother know about this maze? It had been here a long time. The Puritan Earl had tried to cover it up and had stopped the traditional Maze Dance.

  She stood up and stared at the patterns. She could see the way, a depression between two ridges, bending back on itself. The impulse to follow it was too strong to resist.

  She started from the First Moon Gate and began to move cautiously along the narrow track. After four metres or so it moved back on itself, retracing the curve but going in the opposite direction, and then bent back again. Backwards and forwards.

  Clare counted seven switchback curves, all on one side, moving outwards, getting larger, but disappointingly not circling round to the rest of the Garden. Perhaps it wasn’t a maze after all, just the remains of a curling path or old flower-beds. Everything was overgrown, changed. It was at least twenty years since the Garden had been open.

  There was an almost hypnotic rhythm to the curving way. She felt her body sway and lift, sway and lift, like a dance. She drifted into a dream-like trance.

  Then, suddenly, she realized the path, having led to the centre, had swung right out, up and around the four circular banks at each corner, and she was now circling the whole Garden at an increasingly dizzy pace, like a spring unwound, the flashing patterns of the moonlight and darker shadows confusing her eyes.

  When the path stopped at the Fifth Moon Gate she was unprepared. She must have made a mistake somewhere. It had brought her to a different place. And surely only the First and Third Moon Gates had been cleared. Hadn’t this one been blocked by a vine of some kind—a thick old fig tree, impenetrable like Sleeping Beauty’s castle?

  But now the Fifth Moon Gate was framing, like a huge circular painting, the majesty of Barrow Beacon Hill, its lower levels furred with dark trees, its summit open and floodlit by a golden moon hanging directly over it. And there, reflecting from some large dark shapes, was an unearthly haze of light.

  What on earth was up there that she had never noticed before? Clare stood on the Moon Gate step, screwing up her eyes, trying to see. What could produce that kind of strange light? But the next moment a cloud sailed across the moon, and the objects, whatever they were, disappeared.

  For a moment she went on scanning the hill, but now there was nothing to see, and suddenly she felt shivery and cold. Tabitha was curling around her, pressing warm fur against her legs, forcing her to stumble away towards the First Moon Gate.

  Clare turned back once, to take another look at the view through the Gate, and saw, almost without surprise, that it was once again filled by the twisted fig tree.

  Chapter 16

  “Mr Aylward would like you to take his elevenses, miss, if that’s all right,” said Mr Bristow, coming into the kitchen the next morning. After the complete bed rest Frances had ordered, he was on his feet again, and anxious to take up his duties, but still not strong, Clare thought.

  She was helping her mother wash the dusty Wedgwood china from the Dining Room, terrified she would let slip one of the precious plates, designed for the Tenth Earl in 1771.

  “Is he …annoyed?” she asked cautiously, drying her hands.

  “Oh no, miss. He enjoyed his conversation with you. He said that you have something to tell him and something to ask him.”

  Clare felt a prickling sensation in her scalp. It was true she wanted to see him again, ask him questions, tell him she had found the Maze—but how did he know? Suddenly she was sure he knew about the Maze, and that she had been there last night.

  “How did Mr Aylward know I was looking at the China Garden the other day? Is he psychic too?”

  Her mother turned away, but Mrs Anscomb chuckled. “Well, of course he is. All the Guardians have the gift. Runs in the families, don’t it? That’s why they were chosen to be Guardians in the first place. They know what’s going to happen. They have the powers. They can guard the Benison better.”

  “Just old stories,” said Frances, dismissively.

  “True stories,” said Mrs Anscomb, firmly.“Here’s the tray, Clare m’dear. Mr Aylward is in his study today. Next to his dining room.”

  The big room overlooked the terrace too. Book-lined and scattered with files and papers, it was obviously the room he used most. There was a huge desk, and surprisingly an array of state of the art computers with modems and fax machines and Care realized that he must still be involved in his business interests. The screens were glowing, but he was sitting in his wheelchair by the window, staring out. Surely he wasn’t working? Yesterday he had been too ill to get up.

  He turned his head.“Well?”

  Clare put the tray down on a side table, and poured his cup of China tea, bringing it to him.

  “The China Garden is open. Mai Lee and the boys have cut the grass It’s terribly overgrown.”

  The sharp eyes watched her carefully.“You’ve been inside?”

  “It’s the Maze, isn’t it? The lost Maze of Ravensmere. Only it’s not lost. It was deliberately hidden.”

  He grunted with satisfaction.“You have done the Maze Dance?” Then there was that ironic, croaking laugh.“Of course you have. Which Moon Gate did you open?”

  Clare took a deep breath.“So it is the Maze. And the Maze Dance opens the Moon Gates.”

  “Rather say it heightens the power to... see beyond. What have you seen?”

  “Last night, the Fifth Moon Gate was open. There was a view of Barrow Beacon Hill. And some dark shapes glowing with light. I couldn’t quite make them out.”

  “The Fifth Gate.” His eyes focused on her and seemed to deepen in colour.

  “The Third Gate is open too. It was kind of accidental. I saw the centre of the village and the Market Cross.” And Mark and his friends, but she couldn’t tell him that. He didn’t like Mark.

  “Where the youths meet. Two Gates already. They are working fast.” His eyes seemed to film over.

  Clare sat down abruptly, feeling her knees shaking.“I ... don’t like it much. I don’t understand. What is the Maze? Why did you close the China Garden?”

  He sipped his tea, carefully.“You must understand that the ability to sense things, to read the future, has saved the Benison many times. It mostly runs through the female line here. Nobody knows how or when the Maze was made, but from the earliest times the Maze Dance was used to discover the most psychic
of the women of the area to be the Guardians of the Benison. Certainly the Abbesses were always chosen in this way, forbidden though it must have been.

  “Even the Romans must have chosen Guardians for the Benison. They laid a magnificent mosaic in a Temple to the west of this house.”

  Clare remembered the snaking line of women she had seen dancing in the green bowl before ever there were buildings at Ravensmere.“But who started it? How did they know?”

  “My grandfather spent his life trying to find out. He believed that there were women here doing the Maze Dance as long as thirty thousand years ago.”

  “It sounds too... fantastic, crazy even.”

  “He had evidence. He found a bone scratched with a line of nine dancing women beneath a stalagmite flow.”

  Clare stared.“Thousands of years, anyway.”

  “Exactly. The Dance is a very efficient method. The females dance, and those that can see beyond—see. I suppose it could even be explained scientifically. You must know that flashing, flickering light can effect changes in the brain. And there is the movement of the dance. The Whirling Dervishes of Turkey dance into a trance state. Perhaps it is a combination of the two.”

  Clare said, hesitating,“Since I came here I’ve seen ... things . . . not in the China Garden. From the past, I think.”

  “You have a powerful gift. More powerful than your mother. Much stronger than Caroline. They know what will be needed. A strong woman in difficult times.”

  “You always talk about ‘they’. Who are ‘they’?”

  He shrugged.“A force? Energies? I don’t know. I have never seen them. I only know they are there, looking after Ravensmere and the Benison. They are very powerful. Disobey them at your peril.”

  Clare shivered involuntarily.“What about the China Garden?”

  “The turf maze was there in medieval times, covered up briefly by the Puritan Earl, then reinstated by Rosamond the Strong. But by the eighteenth century it was becoming dangerous. Ravensmere was no longer concealed and isolated. James Edward, the Travelling Earl, was an extraordinary and farsighted man. He made a fortune with the East India Company, and undertook diplomatic missions to China and the East before he inherited Ravensmere. I think he realized that there were great changes coming, new machines, a different world. Ravensmere could not remain hidden in its obscure backwater. People would come. More and more of them from the world outside.