by Sarah Rayne
She said, abruptly, ‘Is this where my father is?’ and felt a stir of amusement from him.
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘He’s not here, Fael. There’ll only be the two of us here.’
So. So, he had tricked her over that. Tod was very likely perfectly all right, and stomping about London demanding to know where his daughter was. Fael felt bitter anger at her own gullibility well up, but beneath the anger the icy fear was becoming nearly overwhelming. Is this the reckoning I thought would never come? Because I promised him recognition for his music, there’s no dodging that, and it didn’t happen. It wasn’t my fault that it didn’t, but if he’s mad it might not weigh with him. Of course he’s mad.
As they went up the steep, rutted drive leading to the house, she was dimly aware of several clusters of lights scattered about the landscape. Farmhouses, thought Fael, trying to fix their position. Farmhouses and cottages, and possibly small, remote inns. It looks as if there’s some kind of little community out here. Does that make me feel any better? She thought it did not. The little pinpoint clusters of lights looked a long way off. And even if she could escape, she would never drag herself down the uneven cliff road.
As he unlocked the immense front door and pushed it open, Fael received the impression of a cold unfriendliness from the old house. She felt as if it was studying her as Scathach carried her in, and as if it might be saying: What are you doing here? What right have you to come in here like this? This is a house for ghosts and wraiths and the dark, drifting creatures of Irish legend. You have no right here. The feeling of falling deeper into a blurred, cracked-mirror world increased.
There was a massive hall beyond the front door, with rooms opening off on each side, and a wide, shallow stairway that wound up to a shadowed landing. Fael shivered and felt her abductor’s arms tighten. Fear sliced through her again, but after a moment he carried her to a straight-backed chair just inside the door and set her down before going back out to the car for the wheelchair.
‘So you’re allowing me some freedom?’ said Fael, angrily.
‘Some.’ He moved around the hall, flicking on switches, and warm yellow light sprang up at once. Fael drew a deep, rather shaky breath. Better. Extraordinary how light dispelled terror. But she thought she was hiding the terror pretty successfully so far. She waited until Scathach had gone back to the car to unload boxes of provisions, and wheeled tentatively across the hall to explore the ground floor.
Maise was a large, rambling, old place but Fael, peering into shadowy, high-ceilinged rooms where huge furniture draped in dust-sheets loomed like monstrous squatting beasts, thought that once it might have been a happy house. Once it might have been filled with people and the kind of large, slightly undisciplined, slightly untidy family that had lots of children and friends and dogs all tumbling over one another.
But there was no happiness here now; now there was only grief and agony filling up the silence, and the lingering aura of mental and physical misery like thick choking silt on the air. Because this was where he grew up? Because it was where he spent a lonely childhood? Damn, now I’m feeling pity for him again.
He took her into the room on the right of the hall, twitching aside the dust sheets, revealing dark, rather heavy Victorian and Edwardian furniture. Velvet curtains hung at the windows and there was a massive fireplace with an iron grate and the kind of tiles that were considered ugly until about fifteen years ago, when people started to decide they were fashionable and hunted for the originals in street markets. Somebody had laid a fire: a neat arrangement of concertinaed newspapers and what Fael guessed was turf or peat.
The fire had been laid before they arrived. Fael registered this and then registered as well that although the rooms were dusty they held only the surface dust of a few days. Then someone had been here before them. Someone had come into the house and dusted the rooms and laid the fires. And the fridge in the large, stone-floored kitchen had been switched on and running, and it had held milk and butter and cheese and eggs and bacon. There had been two large boxes of provisions in the back of the car, but Fael was fairly sure those things had not been among them. She considered this new piece of information carefully. Setting aside wild notions of invisible servants who swept and garnished the master’s house like something out of Kipling or Tolkien, and who could only be seen if your eyelids had been streaked with fairy-juice or you had swigged down hallucinogenic drugs for the occasion, it was a rather warming discovery. It looks as if there’s some traffic between this house and the local community, then, thought Fael. Maise isn’t quite as enisled in the sea of life as I was fearing. I’ll get free, she vowed, silently. I’ll think of a plan and I’ll find an ally. I’ll bribe someone or blackmail someone, and I’ll get free.
‘The electricity’s a bit unreliable out here,’ said her captor, indicating the wall sconces, which were of elaborately-wrought but rather tarnished silver. ‘It’s often necessary to resort to a primitive way of living: candlelight and cooking over the old kitchen range.’
But Fael, watching him set a match to the fire, thought there were worse things than eating by candlelight and curling up with a book before a peat fire. It depended on who you were sharing the candlelight and the firelight with, of course . . .
Scathach took the deep, wing-backed chair on the other side of the fire, his eyes behind the mask slitted and remote, and Fael met them and felt her heart begin to race. This is it. This is the moment. He’s about to tell me what he’s going to do to me . . .
And then: he’s about to tell me who he is, she thought. Or, if not that, then he’s going to tell me where we are – where we really are. She almost had the feeling that she did know where they were, or if she did not know, that she ought to be able to work it out, because all the clues were in front of her. But it was as if she had all the pieces of a puzzle except one, or as if she had one piece too many and it was throwing the whole pattern out. Or maybe I’m just too plain frightened, thought Fael.
The fire was burning up strongly now, washing the room to a warm glow, but the velvet curtains did not quite shut out the night, and little sighing winds stirred the heavy folds from time to time, as if they were trying to find a way into the house. It was easy to imagine that it was not the wind at all, but someone standing silently in the deep window bays, listening and watching . . . Fael shivered and at last Scathach spoke.
‘I brought you here because of the promise you made, Fael. Because of the bargain.’
‘You think I reneged on our deal, don’t you?’ said Fael at once. ‘You think I broke the promise, and now you’re calling it in.’
‘In a way.’ He leaned forward, and Fael felt the familiar magnetic tug. ‘But now you’re going to redress the balance,’ he said.
‘How?’
He rose from his chair and came to stand before her. He moves like a cat, thought Fael, feeling the coiling strands of sexuality snake around her mind. ‘You’re going to share my bed,’ said Christian. ‘Didn’t you guess?’ His voice brushed her senses like velvet sliding across naked skin.
‘That wasn’t in the bond,’ said Fael, forcing a defiance she was not feeling into her tone.
‘Wasn’t it?’ He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice was cold and hard. ‘But I’m not the hero of the piece, Fael,’ he said. ‘I’m the villain. Never lose sight of that. If you wanted a hero you should have encouraged that insolent devil in London.’
Flynn. Fael said, ‘So you saw him?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And hated him.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he has everything I have not.’ The words came out unemphatically, but the raw emotion behind them etched itself on the quiet room. He shook his head as if to clear it, and bent over to pick her up. As he did so, he said, softly, ‘You surely didn’t forget that all villains like to have the beleaguered heroine in their power and their beds?’
‘Supposing I fight you? Supposing I scream for help?’
They went out of the firelit room across the dark hall, and Christian paused and looked down into her face. The shadows twisted about him, so that it was difficult to tell where the mask ended and the shadows began.
‘Scream away,’ he said. ‘Out here there’s no one to hear.’
The shadows were trickling up the stairs as well. They seemed to come stealing out from their corners as he ascended them, and to half-form themselves into grotesque, reaching shapes. Fael had the frightening idea that they were acknowledging him: Scathach, who could command the darkness. And who could call spirits from the vasty deep . . .? But supposing we’re actually in the vasty deep already? Supposing we’ve passed into some kind of forgotten underworld, and supposing it’s a world peopled with demons and shadow-creatures, and supposing he really can call to them?
Yes, but any man can call to spirits, she thought, her mind a jumble of panic and a wild singing excitement. Any man can call to them, but it’s a question of whether they will answer him. But what if this is the one man to whom they will answer? And what if the feeling of familiarity with Maise is because it’s the dark beckoning mansion of everybody’s deepest nightmares . . .? What if the nightmare mansion exists, and always has existed, and what if this is it?
I think I’m becoming light-headed, thought Fael, struggling for calm. I certainly think I might be bordering on the lunatic fringe on my own account now. The long journey here, and his presence . . . The strange tales about hungering sea-creatures, and timeless and invisible fairy chronicles . . .
They had reached the wide landing on the first floor and turned along a corridor that stretched into the darkness. At the far end was a second staircase; a narrow set of steps that looked as if it led away from the main part of the house. Servants’ quarters?
‘I hope,’ said Fael, speaking loudly to chase the lingering fears away, ‘that you aren’t taking me up to some wretched kitchenmaid’s room.’
‘My mother used the rooms up here,’ he said, and his voice was as remote as the black cliffs overlooking the ocean beyond Maise.
‘Oh, I see. I’m sorry.’
‘There’s no need for sorrow. She’s dead.’ Again it was the flat, touch-me-not voice. But then he said, ‘I wanted you to have her rooms.’
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to see you there.’
He went up the stairway carefully but with unmistakable familiarity. It wound sharply to the right several times, like a spiralling turret stair, and thin cold moonlight spilled in from several small windows set high in the walls. As they reached a tiny, square half-landing and Christian leaned down to depress the handle of a door, Fael looked about her in panic.
‘If I’m really to be up here, I won’t be able to—’ She stopped.
Christian said, ‘You won’t be able to get up and down those stairs unless I carry you? That’s what you were going to say?’
‘Yes.’ She looked at him. ‘That’s what you want, isn’t it? You want me to be a prisoner here?’
‘Oh yes,’ he said, softly. ‘But didn’t you expect that? Didn’t you know I intended you to be mine, body and soul and blood and bone?’
The rooms were strung out over one floor, and as the door swung open there was a faint ghost-scent of lavender, and Fael had the sense of the past looping forward to join the present.
There was a large, L-shaped room, with one limb furnished as a sitting room and the other, shorter one, as a bedroom. A small bathroom opened off it. There were more wall sconces up here as well, and whoever had laid the fire downstairs had done the same up here, and had also made up the bed.
Scathach went out, closing the door behind him but not locking it, and Fael thought wryly that he did not need to lock any of the doors. These rooms were on the second, or more likely the third floor, and although she would manage to get from room to room, she would never be able to negotiate the stairs. Even with the wheelchair, which he had carried up after her, she was hopelessly imprisoned.
The rooms were lovely in a faded, rather sad way. There was a square window facing the fireplace; in the daylight it probably overlooked the sea, and there was a padded seat built into it. Fael propelled the chair across so that it was resting against the seat, facing the room, and stayed very still to see if there were any ghosts up here. But if ordinary human ghosts haunted Maise they were shy ones, and there was nothing except the fragile, will o’ the wisp drift of the lavender, old-fashioned and evocative of a gentler world. She thought: But once, when this house was a lot younger, somebody used to sit up here and weave dreams in the soft summer twilight, and perhaps that somebody planted a lavender bush somewhere in the tangled gardens outside, and dried sprigs of it to bring indoors and fill open-mouthed bowls up here. His mother? Yes. I think she used to sit up here, thought Fael, and I think she was very unhappy indeed.
But, I wanted you to have her rooms, he had said. I wanted to see you in here . . .
She’s left an imprint here, thought Fael, in the way that all strong emotions leave an imprint. She shivered and spun the chair across to the hearth.
A box of matches had been left on the narrow mantel, but it took several attempts to get the fire going, partly because it was awkward to get sufficiently low enough to reach it, but also because the peat was difficult to fire. But eventually she managed it, and a friendly little curl of flame licked up. Fael watched it for a moment and then wheeled through to the bathroom to wash.
The bathroom was as old-fashioned as everything else in Maise, but it was serviceable and the water was hot, with the silky feel of genuinely soft water. Fael washed, brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth, and then made her way back to the main room. After a moment, she deliberately opened the door leading out to the stair. Because I want to hear if he comes? Don’t be ridiculous, Fael, of course he’ll come. You’ll share my bed, he had said . . . You’re mine, body and soul and blood and bone . . . Oh no I’m not, thought Fael, defiantly. But I’m leaving the door open.
The fire was burning up well now, and the flames were leaping on the walls, turning the room into a fire-drenched cave. It was beginning to rain, and Fael could hear the patter of raindrops against the window panes. She stayed where she was, the chair facing the fire, staring into its depths and seeing pictures in the flames.
It was midnight before she heard the soft footfall at the foot of the stairs and her heart gave a great bound, and then resumed a too-fast beating. There was the acrid scent of a candle flame as well, drifting up from below. Fael turned her head to watch the door.
As he came up the narrow stair, the flickering candle he carried cast moving shapes onto the wall, so that she saw his shadow before she saw him: menacing and larger than life. As he came nearer, the current of air caused the candle-flame to dance wildly, and there was a moment when it seemed as if other shadows joined him: prowling, prancing shapes with greedy, snatching hands and shifting, changing outlines. Why candles? thought Fael.
And then he was in the room, turning off the electric light and placing two candles on each side of the bed and two more in the wall brackets. The tiny flames leapt up, mingling with the firelight, sending the shadows dancing across the ceiling. Fael drew in a deep, shaking breath and thought: Well, he sets a good scene, at least; I’ll give him that.
When he finally lifted her and carried her to the bed, his hands were curiously gentle, although she found to her anger that she was starting to tremble. But when he began to undress her, his touch roused such instant and fierce emotion, that she felt as if her skin would scorch the sheets with passion. The surgeons had said it wouldn’t make any difference . . . They said the feeling wouldn’t have gone, that I could have a partner like anyone else, even before I was able to walk properly. I didn’t believe them, not really, but I do now . . . And I’d forgotten – oh God, yes, I’d forgotten how good the feeling is . . .
A tiny, detached part of her mind held back for a moment, saying that what she was feeling was almost wholly due to the curious compulsion of his
mind, and that it was the natural culmination of their weeks of immense mental closeness. The body expressing what the mind had already experienced . . . Because let’s face it, Fael, let’s be absolutely honest, mentally you’ve already done this; you’ve already locked minds and this is only a by-product . . . Some by-product. Oh God, yes, I’d forgotten what it felt like . . .
When she reached up to touch his face, he resisted at once, and a hand came up to imprison her wrists. ‘Don’t—’ said Christian, and Fael heard for the first time that his voice was breathless and ragged with emotion.
‘But won’t you let me see you— Won’t you tell me your name now—’
‘No!’ It was torn from him in anguish. ‘No,’ he said, softly.
So he was still keeping the barriers between them. Fael registered this with a return of the anger, because surely like this, surely with this mounting intimacy he could have trusted her . . . There was a whisper of cloth and then he was lying alongside her on the bed. He’s not undressing, said her mind. Not properly, not fully. Only enough to— I’m going to hate this, she thought, abruptly. I’m going to feel used or raped . . .
But when at last he moved inside her, he did so with a kind of helpless, blind need, that wrenched her defences aside. There was an unguarded moment when she felt the brush of the black mask against her cheek, and there was a dark, shivering sensuality about the brief contact.
She felt the moment when his body spun out of its iron control, and in the same instant his mind melted into hers – lonely and anguished and desperately unhappy. Fael’s senses spiralled with pity and the agonising need to comfort him, and there was a blazing, bone-melting fusion, so that she could no longer tell the difference between mind and body, and she could no longer tell where his mind and his body ended and hers began.
