Changeling

by Sarah Rayne

  In the surprised silence that followed this announcement, Flynn’s voice was heard to say, ‘The home of the worst raff and scaff of Victorian theatre. The festering blot on the landscape of Ireland’s escutcheon. Well, Julius, you and the little fowl have surpassed yourselves.’ And, as Sir Julius made to speak, Flynn said, ‘Mother of God, couldn’t you have found a better home for us all than that tumbledown slum!’

  Chapter Twenty

  Flynn had not derived the usual satisfaction from taunting Julius Sherry and the others this time. Damn, he thought, walking home after the meeting; damn and blast, I’m giving way to something I really don’t want to give way to. Fael. Is it Fael? If I could stop remembering that vivid moment of mental intimacy at Marivaux’s it would be easier. If I could stop remembering the flare of sexual attraction that followed it, it would be even better. I wish to God I knew what’s happened to her, he thought in sudden anguish.

  It was better to think about something else – to think about what was happening to the Harlequin company, and to concentrate on Cauldron transferring to the Gallery.

  He wondered, did Julius and Stephen and little Makepiece not know the Gallery Theatre’s reputation? Did they not know it was the shabbiest, most dismally unsuccessful theatre in all Ireland, for God’s sake? But it appeared that they did not. Professor Roscius had tried to revive the Gallery’s failing fortunes shortly before his death – Flynn thought there had been some idea of setting up an exchange system with the Gallery’s company playing London audiences, and the Harlequin company playing Ennismara. He supposed this was what had given Julius and Makepiece the connection to set up the present scheme.

  But a great many people had tried to revive the Gallery’s fortunes, and none of them had succeeded. The Gallery was irredeemably caught in its twilight world, on its own half-acre of half-slum, in the wrong part of the Ennismara suburbs. It was the haunt of tramps and winos, said the people who lived near to it; it was the meeting place of squalling cats and brawling females, if it was not a secret hideout for the provisional IRA and maybe the neo-Nazi movement, not to mention half the terrorist organisations in Europe. It was dangerous and immoral and a bad example for innocent children, they said, crossly. As well as that, it affected property values in the area.

  But even the energetic Roscius, optimistically planning revivals of Boucicault and Yeats and Behan there, had said that not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten it, and not all the oceans of Neptune could cleanse it. Macbeth, thought Flynn, wryly. Trust the old boy not to mind quoting it.

  It was an irreclaimable old whore, the Gallery, for hire to any tenant who would make use of it, but between hirings it sank obstinately back into its raddled squalor. Not even that awesome force in Ireland, the Roman Catholic Church, had been able to do anything about the embarrassing old place. Whole benches of bishops had tried to have it razed to the ground, saying wasn’t it a scandal and a disgrace, and any number of churchmen, from archbishops downwards and cardinals upwards, had put forward worthy projects for its usage.

  The trouble was that at some stage somebody had discovered that David Garrick had appeared on the Gallery’s stage (rumour said he had done several other things in the Green Room with a very prominent Irish lady who could not be named); and then someone else had discovered that Oscar Wilde had written something there (no one had dared speculate on any other activities he might have indulged in), and then that Bernard Shaw had written something there as well. They dragged out pretty much every famous Irish writer they could, thought Flynn cynically, very nearly in chronological order as well.

  The thing had snowballed in a way that it probably would not have done in any other country in the world, and everybody had had a whale of a time discovering new and increasingly fantastical snippets of history, until somebody delving into mildewed papers somewhere came up with what appeared to be fairly indisputable proof that the Earl of Essex – Elizabeth Tudor’s Robert – had actually been involved with the building of the place during his term as Ireland’s lord-lieutenant. This was seized on and although it was hotly disputed in many quarters (for what would Himself of Essex be doing in a forsaken place like Ennismara?), by that time the Gallery Theatre’s legend had grown all by itself and was flourishing like the bay tree in the wilderness. And incredibly, cautious preliminary investigation of the ugly, chipped, old facade did indeed reveal an Elizabethan frontage, with surprisingly sound timber-framing. Preservation injunctions and Listed Building orders of varying grades and severity were at once smacked onto the place and people talked excitedly about rivalling the Swan at Stratford and putting on plain, untampered-with Elizabethan plays. Couldn’t you have a great old time doing that, and couldn’t you restore the Gallery’s fortunes and set up a grand tourist attraction as well? The pity had been that there had not been anyone prepared to take overall responsibility, let alone admitting to the ownership of the land on which the wretched place stood. Every attempt had been a resounding flop.

  Flynn, walking back to his flat in the dark winter afternoon, thought it was almost as if the place had an albatross tied around its neck. And this was the place that Julius Sherry intended to use for the re-staging of Cauldron! Has he seen it, for God’s sake? thought Flynn. Has he even seen a photograph of it? I suppose he simply seized on the tentative connection with the Harlequin, and I suppose the Ennismara authorities seized on the chance to have the place occupied for a time.

  A sleety rain was starting to fall as he reached his flat and he went quickly up the stairs to his own floor, switching on lights and heating. He set the kettle to boil for a cup of tea, and went through to the studio. There were a number of hours to fill in before setting out, and there were designs to submit for Peter Pan for the J. M. Barrie festival in March. It would be a good commission; Flynn would be pleased to get it, and he would normally have sat down at the long work-table with enthusiasm. He had already started to rough out some ideas, thinking that the nursery could have a slightly sinister feel for the lost-shadow scenes when Peter first appeared . . . And then Captain Hook and the pirate ship – that was something one could have a great old time with, providing one avoided that recent Robin Williams film, of course. And Never-Never Land – yes, you could weave in a few present-day analogies there if you were so inclined and if it chimed with what the director wanted. Flynn, trying to sink himself into the project, thought involuntarily that that was the kind of thing Cauldron’s creator would certainly have wanted. Cauldron’s creator. Fael Miller?

  Fael. All roads led back to her, it seemed. And the trouble was that once he started thinking about her it was difficult to stop. It was ridiculous to feel this scalding anxiety because she had disappeared as completely and as unexpectedly as one of Cauldron’s wraith-like characters. It was the height of absurdity to draw parallels with the abducting of the Irish queen by the sidh prince.

  The sleet was driving hard against the windows now; Flynn glanced out and repressed a shiver. It was a night for staying indoors in front of a good fire, with the curtains closed. It was not a night for stealing out to a raffish theatre club in the sleazier part of Soho to identify a murderer who looked like something from a film noir. But it had to be done. The arrangement had been made with Bill at the Greasepaint, and Flynn was not going to renege on it because of a blizzard – particularly when Bill had taken so much persuading.

  ‘Because he’s a weird one, this,’ Bill had said that night, when Flynn, his hair dripping wet from the cold-water dousing, had outlined the plan. ‘He’s suspicious and secretive, and he don’t like strangers.’

  ‘He won’t see strangers,’ Flynn had said, towelling his hair and his face vigorously and feeling the whisky fumes clearing from his brain. ‘He won’t see me at all; I’ll be in hiding.’

  ‘Who’s going to hide you?’ Bill had demanded.

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Am I hell as like! Listen, Mr Deverill, this is a very weird bloke indeed.’

  ‘You said that.’


  ‘No, but even the girls and the pimps are frightened of him.’

  ‘I’m not a street-walker or a pimp,’ Flynn had said.

  ‘Seriously, though. There was a girl got done in a few weeks ago – nasty affair, it was, and they never caught the man. She used to come here. Leila, that was her name. Bit older than the others.’

  ‘Are you saying our man did that as well?’

  ‘Bit of a coincidence, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it is. All the more reason to find out a bit more. And I’m not frightened – no, really I’m not, Bill. Show me the room now till we see where I can hide.’

  In the end Bill had complied, but he had been reluctant. ‘You’ll think better of it when you wake up properly sober, Mr Deverill,’ he had said.

  But Flynn had known he would not think better of it. Because someone had killed Mia Makepiece and torn away half her skin to make a grisly cloak, and someone had dug out poor silly Tod Miller’s heart. And it was more than possible that the same person had stolen out to Fael’s house and overpowered her and carried her off.

  I’ve got to find out who he is, thought Flynn, grimly.

  Fael wheeled the chair through the rooms that Scathach had designated as her prison, trying to see if there was a way of getting out, but finding none. Of course not, said her mind angrily: did you really expect him to have left you an escape route? Did you seriously believe that he wouldn’t have checked every crack in every floorboard and every section of every window and door before bringing you up here?

  He had left a couple of hours earlier – Fael had heard the powerful car go snarling down the cliff road – but before that he had brought food up as he had promised. There was bread and butter, and cheese and eggs. A small cardboard box contained several large tins of soup and corned beef and tuna fish. There were also several vacuum packs of ham and bacon and a bag of pears and apples. In a second box was a canister of tea and one of instant coffee, and two sealed cartons of milk. He had added three half-bottles of red wine. About two glasses for each night. Elegant to the last, thought Fael. None of it comprised a feast, but it would certainly sustain her very comfortably for three days and probably longer. There was no fridge, of course, but the milk and the perishable stuff could be put on the bathroom window ledge.

  And now she was alone in the silent old house; she was alone with the softly creaking floorboards that might almost make you think someone was creeping quietly up the twisty stairway, and she was alone with the clustering shadows that would certainly start to form as the light drained outside.

  None of that now! said Fael determinedly. I’ll make myself some lunch – yes, it’s one o’clock already and I’m quite hungry.

  She scrambled eggs over the small electric plate more easily than she had been expecting, buttered a slice of bread, and added a wedge of cheese and an apple. She ate sitting by the large window with the velvet seat, where it was possible to make out the looming shapes of the Moher crags through the mists. Was the curious, sinister, Self-Bored Stone on this side? It had been difficult to keep her bearings on the drive here, but Fael thought it might be on this side. If the mists cleared later she would look again.

  It had been rather an unusual tale, the Self-Bored Stone one, but there had been that odd, familiar resonance about it. It would only be because all these legends and fairytales echoed one another. Look at Rossani, her father’s Dwarf Spinner. Fael could remember her mother saying that Rossani had at least half a dozen other incarnations in various parts of the world. There had been a stack of different versions of the story on the shelves of the Pimlico house which Tod had presumably acquired when he was writing his musical. Fael could remember her mother reading some of them to her, and then later, reading them for herself.

  Rossani had been the Italian name, of course, and Fael thought that the best-known – ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ – was the German version. English and Welsh folklore called the evil little creature Tom Tit Tot and Trwtyn-Tratyn and two or three other names, which she had forgotten. And he had been quite a widely-travelled dwarf; in France he had gone under the title of Robiquet, and in Hungary, Winterkolbe. Fael thought there had even been a Russian and an Icelandic version, although she could not remember much about either of them. The Icelanders had a terrific myth culture, of course. And in Austria he had been called something that sounded more like one of those marvellous Austrian gateaux, all chocolate and almonds, than a vengefully-inclined goblin. Kruzimugeli, was it? Fael grinned.

  But in each story the theme was the same: the creature helped the heroine, extorted the grisly promise to either grab the heroine’s first-born or her virtue by way of reward, and then relied on his anonymity to preserve him from discovery or justice.

  His anonymity . . . Light exploded in Fael’s mind. His anonymity. The nameless, unnamed creature helped the heroine, and then kidnapped her. And his power could only be broken if his name could be discovered. And: ‘Have you never heard of the primitive belief of the interdependence between identity and safety?’ he had said.

  Why didn’t I see it before? thought Fael, sitting up very straight in the chair, her eyes bright with discovery. Why didn’t I see the parallel before – it’s very nearly exact. It’s the Dwarf Spinner replayed, it’s all those macabre fairytales come to life. Winterkolbe and Rossani and Tom Tit Tot alive and well and stalking the west coast of Ireland. How amazing.

  Yes, and I’m the beleaguered heroine, which means he had to covet either the first-born child or my virtue. Well he’s had the virtue, even though he wasn’t the first to have it. He probably didn’t expect to be; this is the permissive twentieth century after all, it’s not some timeless myth-world.

  But he certainly wanted the first-born child. Fael sat very still, staring through the mists beyond her window. Even Tod had never known about that poor half-thing, tipped out by the car crash, ending its poor little life in a hospital bowl . . . Oh blast, I didn’t know I still minded. Oh hell.

  She finished her lunch and washed up the plate and knife and fork in the little bathroom handbasin, her mind turning determinedly to the enigmatic creature who had brought her here. Not for the first time, she wondered about his background. It was only in fairytales that the villain made his appearance fully grown, apparently with no past life, no childhood, no schooling or parents.

  What had her villain’s childhood been like? Had he been to an ordinary school, or a university? Because he was certainly no fool, in fact he was extremely intelligent and very widely-read. And there had been the music – someone taught him music to a very high standard indeed, thought Fael. Someone taught him about composition as well, in the way that Roscius tried to teach me, only I hadn’t the spark of originality. But if he was one of the professor’s students – which is what he tried to indicate that first night – that’s not so very surprising. The feeling of hovering identification still lingered. I ought to know who he is, thought Fael, frowning. I ought to be able to make sense of all the clues. She could not do it. It was like trying to pin down an elusive memory; it was like trying to remember why a face or a snatch of music was familiar. You tried and tried, but it kept slithering through your grasp, and it was only when you gave up and stopped trying that the memory suddenly clicked into place and you knew.

  Whoever her captor was he had been gone for over four hours now. Would he have reached Rosslare and boarded a ferry? Fael’s mind conjured up the image of the slenderly-built figure driving through the countryside, driving on to the ferry, remote and withdrawn . . . The silk mask would be firmly in place, and the mental mask would be in place as well, concealing the cold, dark creature who had brought her out here and shut her away.

  He was there all the time, she thought. That appalling face was there all along – I could almost have guessed at that, of course – but I could never have guessed at the complexity of that second self. There’s more than a trace of the schizophrenic about him; in fact he’s very nearly Jekyll and Hyde. The trouble is I think there might be a
trace of the schizophrenic in my own feelings; I think I might still respond to the masked lover, she thought, with profound self-disgust. I might very easily respond as strongly as ever, even while I was shuddering from what’s behind the mask . . .

  And then, the thought she had been trying to force down ever since last night finally thrust itself up to the surface: what would Scathach do with her now that she could no longer provide the first-born child for his grisly bargain with the leanan-sidhe?

  The Gallery Theatre in Ennismara was as appalling as Flynn Deverill had prophesied; in fact Julius Sherry and Gerald Makepiece, arriving in Ireland along with the stage manager and his electrician to reconnoitre the terrain, thought it was worse. Plainly there would have to be immediate discussions as to what was going to be done, because neither of them had visualised anything like this and both were secretly wishing they had taken more notice of Flynn Deverill, who might be exasperating beyond bearing at times, but who appeared to have told the truth on this occasion.

  ‘Yards of peeling facade,’ said Julius, staring up at the glowering exterior.

  ‘Miles of rotting floorboards,’ added Gerald, going back inside. ‘And I heard the stage manager saying that the lighting’s 1940s vintage.’

  ‘We’re probably lucky there’s lighting at all, and not gas jets or limes,’ said Julius, grimly. ‘We can’t possibly put Cauldron on here. We can’t bring the company to this terrible place.’

  But they would have to put Cauldron on here, and they would have to bring the company here, because the arrangements had been made and a lease had been signed for a three-month period of the Gallery, and individual contracts had been renegotiated with most of the actors for the out-of-London run. Sir Julius had a brief but sickeningly vivid image of the quarrels that would rage if those contracts were terminated, and felt ill when he tried to calculate the compensation that would have to be paid out, never mind braving Equity’s wrath and that of the Irish authorities.