Changeling

by Sarah Rayne

  Aine’s books were all here; the leather-bound legends and tales of myth and evocative Irish folklore. Fael thought Irish mythology was like no other mythology in the world: it was eerie and chilly and it had its roots in lost peoples and creatures not quite human, and in dazzling heroes and giants and warrior queens. Or is that because I’m half-Irish to start with?

  She turned the pages, making notes as she went, her mind lighting up with delight at the pouring blue and green world that was letting her into its misty depths. Battles and quests and mountain palaces. And inhuman faery beings who lured unwary human travellers into their lair . . .

  And all the while, a tiny secret part of her mind was racing ahead to the night . . . To when he would slip through the night garden and sit silhouetted against the firelight of her room, and pick up the thread of her ideas, and spin them into something solid and real, and something that could be contained within a spotlit stage.

  Christian always waited until darkness shrouded London, and it was possible to slip through the streets unnoticed.

  There was starting to be a treacherous pleasure in the midnight sessions in Fael’s room, twice or three times a week. Tod Miller had regular patterns to his evenings, and Christian only ever went to the house when Tod would be out. But there had been a couple of occasions when he had unexpectedly stayed at home, and those couple of occasions had been very interesting indeed.

  ‘My father’s at home tonight,’ Fael had said, unlatching the garden door and speaking very softly.

  Christian paused. ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In his bedroom.’

  They looked at one another for a moment. ‘Then I should not be here,’ said Christian very softly. But he did not move back, and after a moment, picking his words deliberately, he said, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Fael.’

  The low whispering conversation accentuated the secrecy, and Christian’s words, so calculatedly chosen, drew them deeper into intimacy. We shouldn’t be doing this! We’re sharing something forbidden – something potentially dangerous! Christian saw Fael’s eyes darken, and thought: If I reached for her now she would not repel me. With the thought came a sexual charge so strong that it almost overpowered him. I believe she would let me into her bed tonight, he thought. She would do so not out of fear or cupidity or curiosity as all those hired women do, but quite simply for what I am.

  And then he remembered what he was, and he turned away and took his accustomed seat in the shadowy corner with the firelight behind him. But the accent had shifted, and a barrier had been let down, drawing them closer, not just mentally – the mental intimacy already existed – but physically. And one day, Fael . . .

  He quenched the feeling at once; he had learned control in a harsh school, and turned to the notes she had made that afternoon. It was totally outside his experience to sit like this, discussing ideas and plans, and it was absorbing. Christian found it astonishingly easy to take up the threads of Fael’s storylines and plait them into strands until the strands became ropes and the ropes became the weft and weave of a story. There were nights when he could almost see the glittering sphere that was their creation spinning back and forth between them, gathering strength and substance as it went.

  He found it easy, as well, to thread his own music through the unfolding story; working alone in the Christchurch Street house, most of the music his own, but some of it based on discarded or unfinished fragments that his father had composed. On the nights when Tod was out at one of his theatre clubs, Christian played cassettes of what he had written, using Fael’s stereo player.

  But once he said to her, ‘Open the music room tonight, Fael, and let me play this to you properly.’ And saw her eyes darken in the way he was coming to know. If Tod comes back early we could be caught! The knowledge shivered between them, edged with excitement, laced with sexual anticipation.

  But she said, ‘All right. You’ll be fairly quiet though, won’t you?’

  ‘As quiet as the night, Fael.’

  It was after that, after he had played for over an hour on the well-tuned piano overlooking the dark garden, that she said, again, ‘Won’t you tell me who you are? Who you really are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Can’t you trust me by now? Why won’t you trust me?’

  ‘I don’t trust anyone, Fael.’ Don ‘t push me, my dear, said his tone, and Fael heard it and let the matter drop.

  She was receptive to the music he wrote, and although she had not achieved the technical level that the professor had instilled into Christian, they were both pupils of the same master and she understood enough. Sometimes she talked about Roscius, half-affectionately, half-respectfully, and several times she referred to musical evenings in the Chelsea house, mentioning names that she clearly expected him to know. Christian found this unexpectedly disturbing. She’s probing, he thought; if I’m not careful she’ll realise that I don’t know any of these people.

  Once Fael said, ‘There were areas of Roscius’s life that he kept extremely private – times when he simply vanished for several weeks, and the Chelsea house was shut up.’ And then, as Christian made no response, she said, ‘It made him rather a man of mystery. But I suppose at times he had to have some kind of retreat where he could get away from his pupils.’

  ‘I suppose all men of genius have to have that,’ said Christian, deliberately off-hand, and the dangerous moment passed.

  Once or twice she made suggestions for the music on her own account. Could they have a serenade, a Ständchen, for the opening scene where the stage was first dark and then gradually lit by threads and curls of turquoise and violet, portraying the ancient magic of long-ago Ireland stirring? And then there should be a march heralding the entrance of the legendary army of the Irish kings: a huge, awesome fanfare, played con brio – with vigour. And for the greedily sexual hermaphroditic spirits who drag the heroine down to their caves – something light and silvery but subtly laced with menace.

  Fael called these uncanny water-spirits the sidh, and told Christian how they were to be found in several of the old tales and the legends of Ireland’s west coast. They appeared in several guises, she said, her face flushed with delight and absorption, the leaping firelight from the hearth turning her hair from silvergilt to rose and gold, as she tumbled the old books from the shelves and read sections to him. The sidh were a kind of bean sidh – a banshee, although some stories told how they were fallen angels. ‘Too good for hell,’ said Fael, softly quoting. ‘Some fell to earth and dwelt there long before man was created, as the first gods, but others fell into the sea.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Christian, never taking his eyes from her face.

  ‘They made the sea-caves their own, and they filled them with unearthly magic,’ said Fael, her eyes filled with dreams and her voice faraway. ‘And it’s there they imprison their victims.’

  ‘How?’

  The other-world look vanished at once. ‘By their music,’ said Fael, sitting up. ‘Like the sirens of the rocks who lure sailors to their doom. Listen, we have to have the sidh in this – I’ve made them evil but sexy and intriguing, and I’ve drafted a kind of siren song for their first appearance in Act One. This is when they’re plotting to kidnap the Irish queen Mab – that’s the nub of the plot, of course. This is it, here. See if you can conjure up something to fit it.’

  Christian did not take the typed notes. He said, ‘Read it to me, Fael.’

  ‘Oh, but— Oh well, all right.’

  As she started to read Christian felt as if his skin was being lightly scratched by a velvet-sheathed claw.

  Temptation we are and desire we are.

  Sin we are, and lust we are.

  But beautiful we are and there is no resisting us.

  We shall take your soul and drink your senses . . .

  We shall feed on your heart and bathe in your love.

  For the hunger’s upon us.

  See if you can conjure up something to fit it, she had said . . . The musi
c would write itself; it would very nearly form itself on the air without him even trying to compose it. Light and silvery, Fael had said. Debussy-like, or Chopin, perhaps. Yes, he could write for those words, and the music he would write would have every female in the audience on the edge of her seat.

  Fael grinned at him, and the slightly ethereal quality she so often possessed was suddenly and disconcertingly replaced by a glint of mischief.

  ‘The sidh are led by their prince, Aillen mac Midha,’ she said. ‘That’s a whale of a part for the right actor, by the way. I don’t suppose we’ll get a say in the casting, and even if we did, I can’t begin to think who could play him. He ought to look very nearly sexless – in the way medieval angels do: grave and austere – but of course he’s very sexy indeed. Not macho or butch, in fact he might even have a hint of homosexuality. And there’s this immense magnetism just under the surface. Mab – the Irish queen – can’t resist him, even though he isn’t quite human.’

  ‘Perhaps because he isn’t quite human.’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, there’s something intriguing about that, isn’t there?’ Fael looked up at Christian, and he waited, not speaking.

  After a moment Fael said, ‘I’ve written this for him. I thought he could sing it on a deserted stage, maybe seated on a rock with a single blue spotlight on him.’ She passed a sheet of paper across to him, and Christian read it aloud, the words and the sentiments rasping across his mind, raking at his emotions.

  I will melt your soul with longing, human,

  And I will burn your heart with belonging, human.

  With dreamful eyes I will lure you,

  And with doomful lures I will trap you.

  For the hunger’s upon me and the spell is about me;

  I am the lodestone and you cannot resist me.

  Under the floods and over the seas;

  There lies the path you will take to reach me.

  Through fire and storm and famine, my love;

  Along the paths that wolves fear to prowl, my love;

  I will lure your mortal soul,

  I will feed on your mortal dreams.

  And in the cool green caverns I will trap you.

  And you will never walk in the world of humans again.

  I am the lodestone, and the hunger’s upon me . . . Christian put the single sheet of paper down, and remained sunk in thought.

  Fael said, cautiously, ‘Well? Will it do? He’s a kind of sexy Puck-figure, you see. But he’s also dangerous. We can have the earlier scene, where Aillen’s sidh creatures dance around the two comic characters – that’s the tarty old woman like a Doll Tearsheet or Mistress Overdone, and the fat lodge-keeper – and where they snatch at their groins and mock-rape them and throw the tarty woman’s skirts over her face and everything— That’s all for laughs. It’s almost pantomime stuff.’

  ‘Playing down to the groundlings.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. But Aillen’s scenes—’ She paused, and then said, ‘There’ve been dozens of famous productions of Midsummer Night’s Dream, but I’m visualising one in particular. I think it was directed by Peter Brook.’

  ‘I know of it. I didn’t see it.’ Pointless to say that to enter a theatre and hope to go unnoticed was impossible for him.

  Fael said, ‘When Titania was finally led to her wedding night with Bottom, the fairies – Cobweb and Mustardseed and the rest – lifted her shoulder-high on a draped litter, and carried her in a ceremonial procession. But as they went, one of them thrust his forearm up between her legs from beneath and clenched his fist, so that the audience saw it as – hum – as a huge jutting phallus. And if you join that up with something like Mendelssohn’s Wedding March – not the perfunctory jangly thing you get at most weddings, but the real thing—’

  ‘Indecently triumphant and blatantly randy.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. That’s what we want for Mab’s kidnapping. Because once Aillen appears – really appears – the audience needs to be frightened but intrigued. When he carries Mab down to the under-ocean realm where he rules, we want everyone knowing precisely what’s about to happen – visualising what’s about to happen, for God’s sake! – and we want the men envying him and the females swooning.’

  Christian said, ‘Even though they know once Mab submits she’s lost for ever.’

  They looked at one another. ‘Yes,’ said Fael after a moment. ‘Once she submits, she’s lost, isn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Christian, very softly. ‘Because once he’s taken her, Mab will never again be free, will she? She’ll be his, body and soul and blood and bone for ever.’

  There was a pause. Then Fael said, a bit too briskly, ‘But you understand what’s wanted? The music—’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Christian, again. ‘I understand what’s wanted.’ To himself he thought: I understand, because that’s how I want you, Fael. I want you to be frightened and intrigued – I think you already are – but when you do submit, I want you to do so more completely and more entirely than you can possibly imagine.

  One day soon I’m going to beckon to you, Fael, and when I do you won’t be able to resist me.

  Because I am the lodestone, and the hunger’s upon me . . .

  As Christian walked back to the Chelsea house that night, his mind was working on a number of different levels.

  It had been ridiculously easy to compel the street girls and the drag queens and the theatre-fringe, club-denizen people to accept an anonymous, slightly sinister master who would look after them and fight their battles. He had done all of that for them, but he had also learned a great deal about them from the spies he had planted in their midst. He had planted spies among the fringes of the theatre world as well, which was how he had learned of Tod Miller’s newest venture with the northern factoryowner. He smiled the twisted smile. That had been money well invested. It was all money well invested, of course.

  And even when there was the odd rebel, the occasional threat, it could be dealt with. That bitch Leila . . . Would she really have named him? Had she been speaking the truth or only taunting him? The risk was not one he could take. You were damned in that first instant, Leila, and you had to serve as an example to anyone else who might try the same trick. He wondered if her body had been found yet, and if so, by whom. The little red-head, Leila’s friend Gilly, perhaps? Or Danilo, who was wasting his youth and his considerable gifts by singing in drag in night-clubs where nobody saw beneath the raunchy suggestive lyrics to the strong core of genuine talent? Danilo . . . Something stirred at the back of Christian’s mind. Had Danilo the strange androgynous magnetism that Fael had described for Aillen mac Midha? Was it worth planting a few hints through the spy network when the time came, ensuring that Danilo auditioned for the new Harlequin show? He began to consider how this could be done, and was aware of cynical amusement that he could wield such power.

  He turned towards the river, pulling his coat collar up to hide his face, wondering if the situation he had created in his corner of Soho could have been created anywhere else in the world. Chicago, perhaps, or Sicily, where protection rackets and gangster kings and Mafia networks were rife. Where people understood about revenge.

  Revenge . . . Yes, it was about revenge, this. And when he had made that long-ago vow to destroy Tod Miller, and when he had conceived the present surreal plan, he had thought he had allowed for everything. But there was one thing he had not allowed for, and that was the astonishing closeness with Tod’s daughter. It had happened without him realising it, and it was still happening and alongside it was a growing sexual awareness.

  Christian knew about sexual awareness and sexual gratification; you could get those in any city if you were prepared to pay enough. He knew about the dark sensuality of bloodlust as well – that bitch Leila last night! And he knew about mental domination and the 1,000-volt charge you received when you entered a room full of people who were all in thrall to you. Tod Miller, twenty years previously, had given Rossani the famous, at the time slightly shocking, line: I
get my sexual kicks above the waist, my dear, and Christian, setting himself up as a kind of demi-world overlord in the section of Soho he had mapped out, knew precisely what Miller had meant, even while he was conscious of surprise that so shallow a mind as Tod’s could grasp such a concept.

  But to share thoughts and ideas with another human being as he had done with Fael was totally new. Fael was fighting against being dominated – there were times when Christian could feel her fighting him, but there were times as well when he felt her mind yield, and it was sweeter than anything he had ever dreamed possible.

  I get my kicks above the waist, my dear . . .

  Christian had never learned about ordinary relationships, because he had never been allowed to experience them. Neither Professor Roscius nor Christian’s mother, during the few years of his life she had lived, had been able to visualise their son having any kind of relationships at all. The best that could be hoped for, they had said, was a solitary but scholarly existence. Not unrewarding, not without interest: something academic, something to do with writing, perhaps. Or even music, if he was found to have inherited his father’s gifts. The professor, carefully balancing his time and husbanding his energies so that his pupils and his London and Galway theatre work did not suffer, so that he still found time for his protégé in Connemara, the young fatherless Flynn Deverill, had yet managed to map out a rough-and-ready blue print for his own son’s life.