by Sarah Rayne
Maise seemed to sink into a not-unpleasant drowse in the middle of the day and taking an afternoon nap turned out to be easy. As darkness fell Fael switched on all the lamps, built up the fire, and ate her supper off a tray. Afterwards she propelled the chair to the window-seat, and read for an hour, a glass of wine to hand, paper from the desk set out for preliminary notes.
She sent up a little paean of thanks for that collection, and then wondered, wryly, how many beleaguered females had cause to be grateful to Oscar Wilde’s mamma for helping them to endure a solitary captivity. Cheers, Oscar, thought Fael, lifting her half-empty glass of wine, and then wheeling across to top it up, so that she could raise it again to his mother – what was her name? – Jane Francesca Wilde. Nice. Cheers, Jane Francesca.
The fire was dying and the room was growing cold and the premature night that fell on this part of Moher had long since shrouded the old house when he returned on the third night. Fael raised her head from her notes, listening, and felt her heart lurch with the remembered blend of panic and anticipation.
His light, quick footsteps came up the stairs, and there was the sound of the door being unlocked, and then he was there. And his presence fills up the whole room, thought Fael, looking at him. I wonder if he’s driven the chattering ghosts away?
Although he had presumably driven through most of the night after the ferry journey, there was no suggestion of fatigue about him; he moved with the suppressed energy of a tightly-coiled spring, and Fael suddenly realised that fury was driving him. Against me? But when he strode into the room, she saw that he was carrying a half-crumpled playbill in one hand. He thrust it onto the desk in front of her, and when he spoke, she heard for the second time in their strange relationship the uncontrolled dissonance of his speech that indicated extreme anger.
‘Read it.’
‘What—’
‘Cauldron. It’s being brought over here—’
‘Why? Is it a tour?’
‘It can’t be a tour,’ said Christian. ‘There hasn’t been time to form a touring company and bring it to concert pitch. It’s the original company – it must be. And they’re bringing it to a fifth-rate slum theatre in one of the most run-down parts of the west coast.’ Through the mask his eyes were narrowed into slits. But is he angry because of the slum theatre? thought Fael – because he believes the show will be devalued by appearing there? Oh hell, what wouldn’t I give for the full use of my legs right this minute! He’s so unbalanced and unco-ordinated at the moment that I could push him aside and be down the stairs and out into the night, yelling for help!
No point in dwelling on that. She said, ‘Why would it tour so soon? You either try out in the provinces and come in to the West End when you’re sure of your audiences, or if it’s a West End hit you negotiate for tours afterwards. You don’t run for a few days and then tour with the original cast. And it went like a bomb on the first night – it ought to have been set for a long run at the Harlequin— What have I said?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away, and Fael thought: But I have said something, I’ve touched a raw nerve somewhere. Something to do with Cauldron’s first night, was it?
With the idea of probing further, she said, ‘I didn’t see the notices, because you dragged me out of the country, but I bet they were raves.’
‘It’ll be the decision of some ledger-balancing finance clerk,’ said Christian, but his voice was easier to understand, as if he was regaining control once more. Damn! thought Fael. Whatever I said to disconcert him, he’s recovered his balance. She reached for the playbill, which was colourfully printed and illustrated, but gave only the information that a spellbinding musical, based on old Irish legends, would be opening at the Gallery Theatre in Ennismara in two weeks’ time. Good wording at least, thought Fael; that ought to bring the audiences in. She looked in vain for a note of the company or the promoters. Anonymous. Like everything else about this wretched set-up. But hope was burgeoning, for if the company – the original company – really was here, it meant that people she knew, people who might help her, were close at hand. Is that why he’s furious? she thought, and felt her heart bound upwards. Is he starting to feel unsafe? Maybe I’m nearer to freedom than I know.
Flynn had delivered his Peter Pan designs on his way to the ferry at Fishguard. He had bound them in two of the large, workmanlike folders he always used for presentations, and had included two balsa-wood and card scale models; one for Captain Hook’s pirate ship, and one for the Lost Boys’ island.
‘You’ll want me to take you through it all,’ he had said to the rather startled director, who had not previously dealt with Flynn Deverill, but who had heard the stories. ‘And we can do it now if you like, but I can only give you an hour because I’m catching a ferry, or say an hour and a half if I drive like a bat out of hell. Oh, and I’d need to know by the beginning of February whether you want me.’
‘Well—’
‘That’s partly because of booking the warehouse I normally use in Blackfriars for the building work, but also because I’ll be supervising the removal of the Cauldron sets to Ennismara.’
‘Good God, they’re never opening up the Gallery again, are they?’
‘Providing they can stop up all the holes in the stage and mend the roof so the rain won’t come in on the audience, they are. Now, will I show you the device we could rig up so that the Lost Boys’ island transforms into the pirate camp? No, that’s not it, that’s the nursery, and it’s based on Arthur Rackham illustrations, by the way, and beautifully Edwardian. This one here’s the island. See now, we’d bring down a gauze scrim here, and have pools of blue and green waterlight to fall here and here – providing you’ve got a good lighting man, that is – and I’ve given the trees a kind of faintly human aspect. If you turn to the next sketch you’ll see it in enlargement. From a distance they’d all have gnarled faces within the trunks, that’s an echo of the old druid religions and the tree spirits so each face is different. It gives a terrific atmosphere of menace, doesn’t it? Children love horror these days, you’d maybe need to spike up Barrie’s original text a bit to grab them, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well yes,’ said the director, who was already involved in arguments about this with the purists, but who was not going to admit it to Flynn Deverill. ‘You’re rather expensive,’ he added, a bit weakly. ‘This fee you’ve put in—’
‘Yes, I’ll be the most expensive of all the submissions,’ agreed Flynn at once. ‘But I’ll be the best you’ll get. It depends if you’re answerable to accountants or real theatre people.’ He got up to leave. ‘Oh, and if they’re putting on Dear Brutus as part of the Festival, would you leave me out of the reckoning please, because it’s a play I can’t stand at any price.’
The Peter Pan designs would almost certainly be accepted. Flynn knew, without any vanity at all, that they were extremely good, and he knew that they were precisely what the Barrie Festival Committee wanted. But it amused him to play the prima donna. He spent the first half of the journey looking backwards, thinking about the designs and how he would enjoy being associated with the Festival, but as the Irish coast drew near, he began to think about the search for James Roscius’s son. Because whether this creature’s the professor’s son or not, there’s some kind of link, thought Flynn. As well start here as anywhere.
It ought to be relatively easy to search record offices and land registry files in Galway. Roscius had only mentioned his house near the Moher cliffs once or twice to Flynn, but there had been a note of unmistakeable wistfulness in his voice. A house that had been in his family for several generations, he had said. His great-grandfather had held on to it in the teeth of the Famine years and the tempestuous squabbles about Home Rule; his great-great-great-grandfather had held on to it through the Unionist quarrels a hundred years before that.
‘And now it will go out of the family,’ Roscius had said, sadly.
‘You can’t be absolutely sure of that,’ Flynn had said.
‘
Oh yes I can.’
But for all his occasional abrupt spurts of confiding in Flynn, Roscius had never told Flynn precisely where the house was situated, and he had never mentioned the house’s name. Assuming, thought Flynn cynically, that it did have a name, and it was not something like 5 Railway Cuttings. It was almost impossible to imagine the gentle donnish professor, with his paradoxical streak of theatrical brilliance, living in the Irish equivalent of Railway Cuttings, but people were constantly surprising.
Moher did not cover a hopelessly large area, but it was difficult to know quite where you stopped calling the area Moher and started calling it something else. And ‘near to the Moher cliffs’ was a very vague identification indeed. But then Roscius didn’t want it identifying, thought Flynn, disembarking at Rosslare and setting off behind the wheel of his ramshackle car. He wanted it to remain unknown. And if that half-mad creature I saw at the Harlequin and the Greasepaint is truly his son, it isn’t surprising.
One of the problems was going to be that the area surrounding the stormy Moher coast was full of little clusters of houses, and sprinkled with tiny, rather inbred, communities. Flynn, who knew the place only slightly, thought you might come upon the answer to a quest there within the first five minutes, or alternatively you might search for five years without finding a thing.
He was not expecting to derive any amusement from this wild search of the haystack for the pin. His own family had come from this part of Ireland, from Connemara farther north along the coast, but his mother had died shortly after his graduation and he could not remember his father who had died when Flynn was very young. There was no one left there to draw him back, and it struck him as rather sad that he should be returning under such conditions.
Beneath everything else was the insidious, nagging worry for Fael. I’m not in love with you, alannah, said Flynn, to Fael’s image. I hardly know you. Let’s say I’m suffering from an attack of chivalry, and let’s say I’m doing this against my better judgement.
But he did know her, of course; he knew her through Cauldron, because if James Roscius’s son had created the music for Cauldron, then Fael Miller had written the book and probably the lyrics. The more he considered this idea, the likelier it seemed. All the facts fit the case, thought Flynn, driving through the Irish countryside, enjoying the indefinable scent of Ireland that he always thought was made up of woodsmoke and peat fires and something else he had never managed to identify. All countries had their own scents, undetectable to their inhabitants; it was only when you visited them as a stranger you noticed it.
If Fael had written Cauldron, then she was more than worth saving from the creature Flynn had so nearly caught in the Harlequin. She was worth saving in any case, but it was remarkably distasteful to think of her in the hands of her father’s murderer. I’m probably chasing a chimera, thought Flynn, scowling and driving impatiently towards Galway. I might even be playing a part in somebody else’s fantasy, because I don’t think that young man I encountered has a very good grip on reality.
As he neared Galway with its silvery river and curiously modern cathedral, he realised that for the first time he had used the expression ‘young man’. Because I’ve three-quarters identified him? Because I knew his father so very well, and because I still have this affection and respect for James Roscius’s memory? Oh hell, thought Flynn, changing lanes on the dual carriageway, I don’t know anything any more. But I do know that I’ve somehow been dragged into this, and that if I don’t find Fael I’ll have to live with a feeling of loss for the rest of my life.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The intricate network that Christian had so carefully set up in London and that had served him so well there, served him again now.
The drifting, raggle-taggle world of the streets had its own brotherhood and its own information system, and the spider network could be extended so that its threads stretched very far indeed. Several of the itinerant musicians who entertained theatre crowds and tourists and tube travellers, had been delighted to accept cash from the mysterious gentleman who had ruled part of Soho for so long, because even with the Shadow apparently leaving London for a time, the authority still somehow held and no one wanted to offend him.
It was an easy enough task to keep an eye on the young man, Flynn Deverill, and even easier for three or four of them with Irish blood to mingle with the motley collection taking the ferry at Fishguard, and to travel unremarked to Rosslare. It was great altogether to be making this trip, and great to have the cash in your pocket, along with the fare back to England. But after the message was delivered to the Shadow they were going to try their luck in Galway City, and after that they might wander across to Dublin for a time. Hadn’t you great opportunities in Dublin; there was the Abbey Theatre and there was the Royal Dublin Horse Show, never mind all the tourists with money to throw away. And if none of it worked as well as they were hoping – if the streets of Dublin were no more paved with gold than the streets of London had turned out to be – well, they would simply take the ferry back again. And if they could find the queer, remote place the Shadow had described to them and leave the information about Flynn Deverill that he wanted, there would be the plastic-wrapped pack of money waiting for them to collect. At the foot of a certain stone it would be, the Shadow had said, and one of their number, who was inclined more to whimsy than the rest, said wasn’t it exactly like the gold at the end of the rainbow, and paid no attention when his fellows jeered and said, fool’s gold, more like, and him the biggest fool of all to trust to it!
Even though Flynn Deverill was driving his own car and they were reliant on lifts and thumbing and their own two feet, they had managed to follow him and learn his plans, particularly since he had the way of talking to people in a careless fashion. Once on the ferry he had had a few drinks down in the bar, and they had tossed a coin for who was to go in and drink with him and fall into carefully casual conversation. As far as the busker who had won the toss could tell, Deverill had been wholly unsuspicious, not to say generous with his money. He bought several drinks, until the busker, who was secretly a bit guilty about his spying role, felt obliged to buy at least one back. After drinking two large whiskies at Flynn’s expense, he made a quick calculation of the joint funds, and bought a round on his own account; not to have done so might have caused comment, and also it meant he got a third whiskey.
It was during the course of the third whiskey he found out what they wanted to know: Flynn was driving to Galway City, where he was going to book in at the Royal George.
As Christian locked the door on Fael and went quickly down the turret stair, the twin streams of hatred – the one against Flynn, the other against whoever had brought Cauldron to the tumbledown Gallery Theatre – were fusing angrily together in his mind. Two sets of enemies: Cauldron’s organisers, and Flynn Deverill. Cauldron could probably be dealt with relatively easily – Rossani would show him the way, as he had done on those other occasions – but Flynn was a different matter entirely. Flynn would die slowly and terribly.
It was possible that it would be some time before Flynn began the search for Maise in earnest, but Christian did not think that was very likely. He had laid sufficient clues, and he thought Flynn would pick them up and walk unsuspectingly into his, Christian’s, trap. And Flynn had too much impatience and too much energy not to travel out here at once, and he certainly had sufficient intelligence to have worked out Christian’s identity by now.
Christian had employed three separate groups of people to watch Flynn, but he thought it would be the street musicians who would succeed. They were more nomadic than the rest; they would think nothing of uprooting themselves for a few weeks or a few months, and crossing to Ireland. Quite a few of them were Irish to start with, and the Irish had the restless gypsy strain from birth.
He waited until he had been back at Maise for four days, and then he waited until he caught the faint chimes of midnight from the little wayside church. Midnight, the hour that looked kindly on l
overs and plotters and murderers. As he walked down the deserted cliff road and onto the narrow track that dipped below the road, a storm was blowing in from the Atlantic – he could feel it and he could smell it. The ocean was lashing itself angrily against the foot of the cliffs, far below, and the sea was black and menacing, the waves topped with little froths of white.
But the Self-Bored Stone reared up clearly in front of him, and Christian paused, staring up at it. Seen like this, against the backdrop of scudding storm clouds, the old tales came vividly to life, so that you wondered whether you might not have fallen into the seductive world of myth and legend and evil enchantments. When the moon was full, the silvery radiance poured through the aperture and laid a circle of cool light on the ground, but tonight the storm was blotting out the moon, and the stone’s tip was in darkness. It made you believe that if you could but scale the stone’s heights and peer through the round, smooth opening, you would find yourself looking down into worlds you had never dreamed existed. And finding deliverance there? said Rossani’s evil voice in his mind.
Christian stayed where he was, his eyes going to the jagged cliff-edge, only a few yards away from where he stood. He thought that no one would know or care if he simply walked over that cliff tonight and was dashed to pieces on the rocks below, and with the thought, his mind rocked, he felt the wild madness seize him anew. To step into that tempestuous darkness, and to step beyond it, into oblivion and peace . . . To die . . . But supposing death was only the prince’s hag-ridden sleep after all? Aye, there’s the rub.
