Prospero's Children

by Jan Siegel

  “Happen she’s looking for a husband,” said Mrs. Wicklow sapiently. Her dourness had long been revealed as purely external and she had evidently ranged herself on the side of the young Capels.

  “Well, naturally,” said Fern. “That was what I assumed from the start. I’ve never had any problems dealing with that kind of thing.”

  “Cunning little lass, isn’t she?” Mrs. Wicklow almost grinned.

  “But,” Fern persisted, “if it’s Daddy she wants, why send him to America? It’s almost as if—” She stopped, closing her mouth on the unspoken words. It’s almost as if she were interested in this house. It was not cold in the kitchen but Fern felt a sudden chill.

  “What’s she like?” Will asked. “I haven’t met her, have I?”

  Fern shook her head. “She’s clever,” she said. “I think. I don’t really know. She has a lean and hungry look, like Cassius in Julius Caesar. But . . . there’s something there you can’t catch hold of, something fluid. She can look all bright and glittering and slippery, like water, and yet you always feel there’s a hardness underneath. I can’t explain it very well. See for yourself.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Sometimes,” Fern admitted dubiously. “She can exude a kind of shimmering fascination one moment, and the next she’s just a thin ugly woman with a big mouth. It’s not looks: it’s all in her manner.”

  “Those are t’ ones you have to watch out for,” said Mrs. Wicklow.

  “You’ll take care of it,” said Will. “You always do.”

  In the afternoon Fern, annoyed with herself for not having thought of it earlier, rang the solicitors to inquire if they had the rest of Mr. Capel’s keys. Her brainwave, however, failed to bring results; a man with an elderly voice suggested that she search in drawers, cupboards, and so on. “I already have,” said Fern.

  “He’ll have put them in a safe place, then,” said the solicitor comfortably.

  “I’ve been afraid of that,” said Fern.

  She tried vainly to stop herself looking out of the window every few minutes; Ragginbone’s continued absence might be irrelevant, but it provided an extra irritant. At tea, Will startled her by remarking: “That rock’s gone again.”

  “Which rock?” The question was a reflex.

  “The one that looks like a man. It’s been gone for several days now.”

  “You’re imagining things,” said Fern. “Forget it.” She was still reluctant to talk about the Watcher.

  Will studied his sister with limpid detachment. “This woman who’s coming here,” he said, “do you suppose she could be part of it?”

  “How could she?” said Fern, without pretending to misunderstand.

  “I don’t know,” said Will, “but I can see you thinking.”

  Alison Redmond arrived later that day, driving a Range Rover loaded with paintings, samples of carpet and furnishing fabrics, several cardboard boxes taped shut, and three or four items of Gucci luggage. She was wearing her point-edged smile and a passing flicker of sunshine found a few strands of color in her dim hair. She greeted the Capels with a diffidence designed to undermine hostility, apologized to Mrs. Wicklow for any possible inconvenience, and demanded instantly to be taken over the house, praising its atmosphere and period discomforts. She did not say “I do so hope we’re all going to be friends,” nor scatter kisses in their vicinity: her gestures were airy, tenuous, almost filmy, her fingertips would flutter along an arm, her hair brush against a neighboring body, and Fern knew it was paranoia that made her fancy these feather-touches contaminated her. Alison managed to adore everything without quite crossing the line into effusion, drawing Will out on his attic researches so skillfully that his sister grew anxious, throwing her arm around him with unaccustomed affection and digging her nails into his shoulder to silence him. The only thing that checked Alison’s flow, just for a moment, was the main drawing room. She hesitated on the threshold, glancing round as though something were missing, her smile blurring; and then she seemed to regain her self-command, and the charm was back in play. Afterward, pondering that temporary glitch in her manner, an explanation occurred to Fern, but she discarded it as too far-fetched. Alison had never been in that room before. She could not possibly be disconcerted because the idol had been moved.

  “I’ll help you bring your things in,” Will offered, clearly reserving judgment.

  Alison, just grateful enough and not too grateful, passed him a valise and a book of carpet patterns and began hefting the boxes herself. “Most of the pictures can stay in the car,” she said. “One of our artists lives in York: I picked up a load of stuff on my way here to take back on Monday. There are just a couple of mine I’d like to have in my room; I never go anywhere without my own pictures.” The sweep of her smile deprecated affectation. “Some people won’t travel without a particular cushion, or a bag, or an item of jewelry. With me I’m afraid it’s paintings. It’s disastrous on planes: it makes my baggage so heavy.”

  Fern went to assist her, largely out of curiosity. The paintings in question were propped up against the bumper, shrouded in a protective cloth. Alison vanished indoors and Fern lifted the material to steal a glance at the topmost canvas. She had been expecting an abstract but this work was representational, though it struck her as strangely distorted, not for effect but because of some clumsiness on the part of the artist. It showed a horse’s head peering over a stable door, a conventional enough subject, but there were bars impeding it and an odd discoloration creeping in from the borders of the image like mold. The horse’s mane was unnaturally long and tangled and its forehead seemed somehow misshapen, as though its creator had made no real effort for verisimilitude, yet its eyes were intensely alive, heartbreakingly real, dark wild eyes gazing out at Fern with a mixture of pleading and defiance. Being in London most of the time Fern had had few opportunities to ride, but she loved horses and still dreamed of having the chance to learn. She found herself reaching out to touch the canvas, her hand going instinctively to the lock on the stable door; the paint felt rough and hard, like metal, like rust. “Leave it!” The voice behind her was Alison’s, almost unrecognizable in its abrupt alteration.

  Fern jumped. Her hand dropped; the cloth slipped back into place. “I beg your pardon,” she said with exquisite politeness. “I wasn’t aware the pictures were private.”

  For a second, she thought Alison was discomfited; then both curtness and awkwardness melted away and a thin veil of warmth slid over her face, leaving it as before. “The paintings are old,” she explained, “and very fragile. If you touch the paint you could damage them. I’m keeping them for restoration work: my own personal project. As a matter of fact, I think that whole scene has been applied on top of something else. The layers have to be removed very carefully. As you saw, I’ve only just started.” The area that looks like mold, Fern thought, only half satisfied. “A lot of stolen masterpieces get painted over to make them easier to hide or transport. I keep hoping I’m going to come across something special.”

  She carried the pictures upstairs herself. They had installed her, by common consensus, on the top floor—“Out of the way,” said Will—in a room that felt chill and gloomy from long vacancy. Alison, however, professed herself delighted with the crooked ceiling, the balding velvet of cushion and curtain, the smoky mirror above the mantel. “I trust you won’t think me obsessive,” she said, “but if I might just have the key? I have this thing about privacy. My own space is vital to me—I can’t help it, it’s just how I am. I grew up sharing with three sisters: I expect that’s how it started.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Fern blandly. “We only have the house keys. Great-Cousin Ned seems to have put all the others in a safe place.”

  “We’ve looked everywhere,” Will added. “At least, Fern has.”

  Watching Alison, Fern was convinced there was another flicker in her expression, a momentary freezing-over. “I’d be obliged,” she said, “if you didn’t come into my room when I’m not here
. I’m sure you understand.”

  Do I? thought Fern.

  She and Will went back downstairs, leaving Alison to unpack.

  “She’s very nice,” said Will, “if you like niceness. It’s hard to tell how sincere she is. She seems to be working at it—but if she’s keen on Dad she would, wouldn’t she?”

  “The niceness is all on the surface,” declared Fern. “All sparkle, no substance. It’s called charm.”

  “Like tinsel,” said Will, “on a shoddy Christmas tree. I don’t think I trust her. I haven’t quite made up my mind.”

  “I have,” said his sister. “You don’t.”

  In the hall, Mrs. Wicklow was putting on her coat. “I’ll be off now,” she said. “There’s a pie in t’ oven. I daresay Madam won’t eat it, she’s too skinny to eat pie: probably lives off brown rice and that muesli. Still, I know you two appreciate my cooking.”

  “We do,” Will concurred warmly.

  “Queer thing about her,” she added, glancing up in the direction of Alison’s room. “Odd fancies you do get sometimes.”

  “What fancy?” asked Fern.

  “Miss Redmond comes from London: that’s what you said?”

  Fern nodded. “She works in an art gallery in the West End.”

  “There was a young woman over from Guisborough, three . . . four months before t’ Captain died. Happen I mentioned it. Something to do with antiques. I didn’t get a good look at her, of course, and she didn’t have all that hair—I think she had a kind of bob, just about shoulder-length—but I could swear it was t’ same woman. Heard her, I did, chattering away to t’ Captain, sweet as sugar. She didn’t notice me, mind: she’s t’ sort who sees them as interest her and doesn’t bother to look at t’ rest of us. I’d have bet five pounds it was your Miss Redmond.” She gave a brisk shake, as if throwing off a cobweb. “Must be my fancy. Still, you take care. Third house from end of t’ village if you need me.”

  “Thanks,” said Fern, smiling, making light of the matter. But the smile vanished with Mrs. Wicklow and she went to check on the pie with a somber face.

  Dinner was a polite meal. Alison kept the conversation going by discussing her ideas for the house. “I think we could do something really exciting with that barn,” she said, having duly admired the Seawitch and her current residence. “Your father’s very keen to have my advice. He’ll be calling from the States in a day or two: I’m going to ask him if I can make a start. I have a friend in the building trade who specializes in these sort of commissions. I thought I’d get him up here to give us an estimate. Of course, we must take care of that wonderful boat. It should be all right outside for the time being, if we cover it in tarpaulins. After all, it is supposed to be summer, even if it hasn’t reached Yorkshire yet.”

  “We like the Yorkshire summer,” Will said. “It’s bracing.”

  Fern sucked in her cheeks to suppress a smile. Will had never been noted for appreciating a bracing climate. “We only need to tidy the place up before putting it on the market,” she pointed out. “Daddy doesn’t want to spend any money on it.”

  “It would be a good investment,” Alison insisted. “Convert the barn and you can sell two properties instead of one. I’ll discuss it with Robin when he calls.”

  The inference was unmistakable: Fern was a child, it was none of her business, financial matters were beyond the zone of her responsibility. The hairs bristled on her nape; her small face set in lines that might have been etched in steel. But for the moment there was little she could do: final authority rested officially with her father, and while he was in America it would be difficult for her to counteract Alison’s influence. She had a suspicion the telephone would not lend itself to an assertion of filial control. She was conscious of a frustration that bordered on panic, but she fought it down.

  “Delicious pie,” Alison said, pushing the pastry to the side of her plate.

  They went to bed early. Inevitably, Fern lay sleepless for an hour or more before drifting into an uneasy doze. Suppressed anxieties surfaced as garbled dreams: she was at a private view in New York trying to reach her father who was on the far side of the room, but a huge crowd of people impeded her, and her father saw her, and waved and smiled as if there was nothing wrong at all. He was talking to a woman who had to be Alison Redmond, but when she turned round it was a stranger, and Alison was right next to Fern, wearing a dress that rippled like water, and her hair rippled as she moved, so you could not tell where the hair ended and the dress began. “Come,” she said, laying a long-fingered hand on Fern’s shoulder, and there was Javier Holt, standing beside the etching of the Lost City, and the door was open, and the streets unraveled below her, and the drums were beating in the temple, and she knew she must not cross the threshold, but she couldn’t remember why. She awoke from a jumble of color and incident more vivid than life, but recollection faded even as she tried to hold on to it, and there was only her heart’s pounding and a disproportionate sense of loss. The night-noises that were growing familiar came to her ears: the endless sough of the wind; sudden and startling, the screech of a bird. She was floating back toward sleep when the snuffling began.

  Despite the fear that seemed to invade the very air around her she felt a flicker of indignation. She cultivated it, gritting her teeth, smothering cowardice, not forgetting but rejecting Ragginbone’s advice. This was her place, her home, if only temporarily, and no intruder, canine or feline, mongrel or monster, had the right to terrorize her here. She had not formed any specific plan for driving it off but she was determined at least to see it, to face it down, to prove to herself once and for all that it was merely a stray dog, half savage maybe but solid, flesh and blood and smell, and no bodiless hunter from a dimension of shadows. She sat up, picking up the flashlight which she now kept beside her bed. She thought she had closed the window but it had to be open: the snuffling sounded so loud and near. And then she froze. The noise wasn’t coming from under her window. It was outside her door.

  She sat absolutely still, all resolution forgotten. It can’t come in, Ragginbone had said, but it was in. In the house, in the passage; she could hear it scraping at the floorboards, rucking the worn drugget. Her thought stopped, her limbs seemed to petrify, but she could not control the violence of her pulse: it must be audible even through the barrier of the walls. The door was not locked: something which had no hand to grasp rattled at the knob. For a few seconds, Fern ceased to breathe.

  It moved on. She heard the gentle pad-pad of stealthy paws, receding down the corridor, the guttural hiss of hoarse panting. When the sounds had died away she sat for what seemed like hours, waiting and listening. The thudding of her pulse did not abate. Gradually, the tension in the air around her appeared to diminish: the house settled into a nervous quietude. Fern got out of bed so cautiously the duvet barely rustled, feeling her way to the door without switching on the flashlight. It took an effort of courage that made her sweat to turn the handle and peer into the passageway. Her vision was well-adjusted to the darkness and for an instant she thought she saw something, not a black animal shape with glowing orbs but something much smaller, furtive, skulking in a corner by the end window, shrinking into invisibility even as she caught its eye. Her heart leaped into her mouth—but whatever it was, it had gone. The corridor was empty. She could sense its emptiness. She groped her way along the wall to Will’s room and entered without knocking.

  “Who is it?” He was awake.

  “Me. Shush.” She closed the door carefully, switched on the flashlight. “I don’t want to make too much light. Move your legs: I’ll sit on the bed.”

  “Did you hear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was inside. How could it be inside? Did we leave a door open?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Fern said. They were talking in whispers and the flashlight was on the table; little light reached their faces. She found she was holding his hand for mutual reassurance, something he would never have allowed if he could see it
. “It can’t come in unless invited. That’s the ancient law.”

  “What law? How do you know?”

  “Never mind. I just do.”

  “Laws can be broken.” Will sounded skeptical.

  “Maybe.” Ragginbone, after all, had not been sure. “Maybe not.” She glanced upward toward Alison’s room; Will saw the whites of her eyes gleam, followed her gaze.

  “You think she—?”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence. The day she arrives, it comes inside. She invited it in. She must have done.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “There’s more,” she persisted, adhering to her train of thought. “There was something in the corridor when I came out of my room—something else, I mean. It was quite small and it vanished very quickly but there was definitely something there.”

  “It’s too much,” Will said. “Alison Redmond and the Sniffer and the Seawitch and the chest and the rock that isn’t there and the missing treasure . . . and now this. Whatever it was. It’s too much. I can’t cope. Do you think . . . do you think we should try to tell Dad?” She knew from the note in his voice even more than his words that he was struggling not to betray the level of his terror. Despite her own fears, she was comforted to feel herself the stronger. If she could only be strong enough.