The beach was lonely and untravelled, although there was one fishing boat pulled high above the tideline and turned upside down, wedged safely in the V-shaped depression created where the runnel met the beach. It was held down by ropes against the wind, but laid on rocks that allowed it to stand higher than the ground, so that it was possible to walk beneath it without stooping too much. In fact, it made a very effective roof, and the space below could be used as a sort of improvised hut. That it had been used as such by others was evidenced by the circle of larger stones which had been arranged like an open air hearth just outside it, and by the three driftwood logs which had been dragged around the fire ring as benches. That it was still a boat occasionally used was evidenced by the rolled-up nets at the back of the shelter.
There was no sign of anyone on the beach, and the blackened stones looked not to have been host to a live fire for quite some time, since the glaucous leaves of a sea-cabbage had grown up in the centre of the pit. It was a readymade camp for them, and they were too tired to do anything other than adopt it gratefully, eat a hurried meal of warmed-over porridge and then fall dreamlessly to sleep beneath the upturned vault of the boat hull, using the bundled fishing nets as a mattress.
Amos woke on that first morning to find himself alone, and lay there for a long while, wondering if he felt relieved or betrayed by the apparent disappearance of the Ghost. The slow hiss and sudden percussive thump of the waves hitting the banked-up shingle provided a strangely mesmerising and restful noise in the background, and he had felt little urgency about stirring himself. He watched the sunlight reflect up off the water and dance across a small section of the boat-roof above his head, a patch of rippling light that moved and changed shape as the sun traversed the sky and the sea withdrew towards low tide. Eventually the need to piss moved him out from under the turtle-backed shelter, and he stood facing the sea as he emptied his bladder into a blooming tuft of thrift that had begun to colonise its way from the grass down onto the upper reaches of the beach.
Once relieved, he crunched his way over the pebbles to the steep shelf that led down to the water. He looked right and left and saw no sign of the Ghost, or indeed of anyone, bar the sails of a distant ship, hull down on the horizon.
He felt wonderfully alone.
He also felt like he hadn’t had a bath in an age, which was true.
He knew there was a heel of soap in the tinker’s pack, and he went and got it. And then with no more ceremony than shucking out of his boots, he walked into the sea, finding a firm, sandy bottom that shelved slowly and made him walk a full fifty yards towards France before he was even knee deep. He kept going and only stopped when the water reached his shoulders. He could not swim. And so he dipped his head below the surface just for a moment, and then began to slowly walk back. He washed his clothes with the soap as they remained on him, lathering and dipping below the water from time to time as he went. Since there was no one on the beach or the clifftops beyond he peeled off the wet and soapy clothes when he was ankle-deep, and rinsed them. He threw them ashore and then, on impulse, ran back into the water, free and naked as the day he was born, the glittering sea-spray kicking up round his high-stepping feet as he ran, the sun warm on his body. He made no noise, being mute, but inside his head he was laughing gloriously, like the happy and innocent child he had never been. He plunged into the deeper, colder water and then erupted skywards in a great and joyous explosion of exuberance, so full of life and liberty that he felt he might just be able to keep going until he was flying higher and higher, soaring above the water and the beach and the clifftops and the great frozen chalk wave of the Downs beyond—
And then he saw her.
The Ghost was crouched over his clothes, gathering them up, lifting his boots, and walking away up the slope of the beach.
He lost his footing as he landed and went down hard, gravity returning with a vengeance. He shipped a generous mouthful of brine as he did so, and by the time he had got his feet back under him, his head above water and the lungful of Channel back outside himself where it should be, she had disappeared.
Wait.
There was no reply. Maybe she was too far away to hear his panicked thought.
Wait please!
He tried to run against the suck of the sea around his chest, but it seemed to take for ever to get far enough back inshore to clear his hips, and even then his forward progress was awkward and lumbering, all the earlier weightless joy having evaporated from his limbs. By the time he was knee-deep again he was too tired to run effectively, and he staggered ashore to find that running up the shingle bank was so strength-sapping and treacherous that he fell over twice before he crested the rise and saw her again.
She was laying his clothes out on the hot pebbles so they could dry. He stopped.
What are you doing?
She raised her eyes and stared levelly at him. Only then did he consider that he was naked. His hands dropped and cupped, and where he had only minutes before felt as if he could almost fly, he now found himself wishing the ground would open up and swallow him.
He had never been naked in front of a woman, even an old woman, in his life. He had scarcely been naked in front of anyone, in fact.
She shook her head at him, amused.
The body is just a shell. And I had assisted at a dissection long before I was your age, boy. Your physique holds no surprises for me. Go and walk up and down the beach until the wind has dried you.
He turned back down the slope and did as she had bidden. The look she had given him and the tone of her thoughts were different. Not just amused at his dismay at being caught without benefit of clothing, but somehow… he could not find the right word for the new tone. But then he had never had a mother, and so he was hard put to find the word “maternal” in his personal lexicon.
By the time he was wind-dry, there was a wisp of smoke rising from above the crest of the shingle, and he ascended to the upper shelf to find she had a billycan heating over the fire-pit.
She did not trouble to look away as he approached his clothes, so he had to run the gauntlet of her eyes a second time as he pulled on his under-drawers, which were still wet.
He left the rest of the clothes to bake on the hot stones and came to sit on one of the driftwood logs as she made herself free with the contents of his pack, brewing up the tea. This was the first time she had done this, and somehow the unwonted domesticity of her actions further perturbed him. Power had somehow shifted. He could not work out if this was a benign or a dangerous thing. She looked happy enough as she worked, and indeed he heard her hum as she did so, a nursery rhyme he recognised from the meagre schoolroom in the workhouse, the one called “Do you know the Muffin Man?”. She paused for a moment and caught his eye.
A nice warm and buttery muffin would be just the thing right now, would it not?
He nodded as the wind eddied and drove the thin smoke from the fire right into his eyes. He closed them and waited until it moved back to its original quarter.
“Sit by an open fire with a smirched conscience and smoke will follow you round the compass,” she said. “It’s nature’s way of punishing the unrighteous.”
What?
“Have some tea,” she said, pouring from the billycan. “I’m just teasing.”
She was just as disconcerting as before, but he detected an unusual, gentler edge to her. He sipped the hot tannic brew, careful not to burn his lips on the metal rim of the cup. It was sweet.
“Last of the sugar,” she said.
He nodded and drank. After the bracing cold of the sea and the caressing warmth of wind and sun, the tea coursed through him, heating him through from the inside and making him feel strangely both relaxed and reinvigorated.
Where were you? he asked.
“Along the shore, around the far bend in the cliffs,” she said.
What were you doing?
“Looking,” she said. “Just looking.”
But she wouldn’t say what for.
They stayed for two more nights, loafing on the edge of the world, enjoying the sun and the charged air where the waves pounded ceaselessly but–given the mildness of the season–relatively amiably along the pebble rampart that protected this stretch of cliff-buttressed downland from the sea.
On the afternoon of Amos’s first “swim”, the owner of the boat came down the runnel with his son and an aged donkey loaded with another fishing net. He was a cheery, red-faced man who seemed unconcerned that they had been using his vessel as a shelter, and even was so generous as to allow it was a “sensible” measure. He and his son then took the roof and turned it back into a boat, loaded it with the net and had allowed Amos to help them drag it into the water. Amos had shaken his head when offered a berth for the afternoon’s fishing expedition, but when they had returned with three baskets of fish, the Ghost acquired more goodwill from this friendly and accommodating fisherman by using some of their purloined coin to purchase both some fish and a thick plug of his tobacco. She had noticed a cutty pipe in the bottom of the tinker’s pack, and when the fisherman and his offspring had upended the boat back into its original roof-like configuration and headed back up the runnel with the even more overloaded donkey, she had filled it and lit up.
They had eaten well of the fresh fish, and they sat back in the darkness, watching the sparks from the fire ascend towards a moon that was within a thin sliver of full. She caught him looking at her, and pointed at the great silvered disc that seemed to hang on the very tip of the cliff above them, like a plate.
Close now.
Close to what? he thought back.
Close to full. And then we shall be able to leave.
Until this point he had not thought of where or indeed why they would go. But a yawn drowned his next thought, and then he was asleep.
He woke to find she had laid the blankets across him, and that the moon had travelled halfway across the star-strewn immensity overhead. It was so clear a night that he felt no need to roll under the cover of the boat-roof, in the shadow of which he expected she was now slumbering. He closed his eyes and returned to the comfort of sleep.
He would have slept less soundly if he had known that the Ghost was not doing the same thing under the cover of the boat, but was in fact haunting the chalk highlands above him, striding up to the flattened tops with a purposeful gleam in her eye, and a sharp metal knife in her hand.
She found the intersection of two sheep trails on the crest of the downland and sat there for a while, eyes turned to the moon. Then she sniffed the air and bent, cutting a small square of turf from the ground which she carefully laid aside, revealing the bare chalk beneath. Without flinching, she ran the blade across her palm and squeezed dark blood into the hole so that it spattered the white below. Then she used the knife again to rip a strip of cloth from the bottom of her shift, and stanched and bound the wound. She spat into the hole three times, and then looked down into it. Anyone close by would have heard the following doggerel whispered into the night.
By the blood in my veins, by the moon in the sky,
By the free earth below, Mountfellon must die.
She replaced the trapdoor of turf over the bloodied chalk and pressed it back into place. And then she sat, facing away from the beach, alert and waiting.
She spoke no more out loud, but the thought sped away from her like an arrow, away from the sea and back into the dark heart of the countryside to her north.
Come.
CHAPTER 26
CALM BEFORE THE STORM
Hodge was taking time to adjust to his reduced state. Charlie never heard him complain once about his blindness, and in that regard he was as tough and philosophical about the injury as Jed had always been with his own hurts and wounds: like the terrier he just became quieter and went into himself until he had healed as much as he was going to heal, and then he got on with life.
Charlie spent the most time with him of anyone since, in the absence of Sharp and Sara, Cook was the immoveable cornerstone of the Safe House, and The Smith spent his nights at The Folley where Lucy remained billeted, which was not to say that Lucy and Charlie saw little of each other: the truth was quite the opposite since Lucy was driven by dog cart, or sculled downriver by Emmet to the Safe House, which she entered by the river gate, and their daily shared lessons would take place in the kitchen or the Red Library.
“The Law,” said The Smith, one dim afternoon as they clustered round the scrubbed deal table with the range seeming to throw out less heat than normal. “The Law is the simple bit. It’s common sense, and where it’s not sense, it’s common decency. Law says neither natural nor supranatural should predate one upon the other, nor should either side use its own particular advantages to the detriment of the other.”
“It’s fair play,” said Charlie.
“Exactly,” said The Smith. “There’s a line between the two and The Oversight patrols it. We keep the balance.”
“Except when we don’t,” said Cook quietly, riddling the grate to try and coax more fire from the coals, speaking so low that Lucy thought she must be the only one who heard her. She turned and looked a question at the older woman.
Jed was sitting by the door, looking meaningfully at it and then back at Hodge and anyone who could catch his eye, tail thumping hopefully.
“In a minute,” said Hodge. “I’m having my tea.”
Jed barked.
“Anything worth having’s worth waiting for,” said Hodge cryptically.
Jed whined and then slumped to the ground with his back to them and his nose to the gap beneath the door. Every now and then he sniffed deeply and his tail thumped the floorboards.
“Cook sometimes has qualms,” said The Smith.
“What are qualms?” said Lucy. She was thinking of what she had heard The Smith and the Sluagh talk about on Ruckholt Lane. Somehow the fact that Cook also often differed from The Smith’s view of things just added to that discomforting itch she felt about him.
“Qualms are luxuries the desperate can’t afford,” said The Smith with a finality that ended the conversation without answering the question at all.
One of the worst things about that itch was that ever since she’d heard the Sluagh fire his parting shot about the Black Knife and the matter of allegiances, she had been sure the way to scratch it was to examine it more closely, and glint the truth from it. The Smith’s prohibition, telling her it would be too much for her mind to cope with, might be the perfect way for him to keep her away from his secret. Or he might be telling the truth. It was the fear of the latter that kept her fingers off it. But it was a growing temptation. And a part of that temptation was that she’d never thought of using glinting as a tool, on purpose: there was something quite liberating about the prospect of using what had once seemed like an affliction as an extra power. But for the moment, caution outshouted curiosity.
Hodge and The Smith were still locked in their discussion.
“There are things we just do not have the time or the luxury of examining in our reduced and parlous state,” said The Smith, clearly keen to move on with the lesson, which in this case happened to be about the identification of malign entities. “Now tell me three characteristics of changelings.”
Charlie and Lucy exchanged a smile. They had spent a large portion of the previous afternoon watching the changelings in the Sly House cell through the viewing window. They were particularly pleased with themselves because they had snuck away to do this, and had entered the hidden passage beneath the public house without either of the Bunyons noticing. They were both getting better at moving fast and not being seen.
“Their faces don’t quite work,” said Lucy.
The Smith exhaled in disappointment.
“I should say their faces work all too well, Lucy Harker. I should say their ability to manipulate themselves to mimic those they seek to replace is evidence of a profoundly overdeveloped facial facility…”
“No,” said Charlie. “Lucy’s got it.
They don’t actually look exactly like whoever they’re mimicking. They just make people think they do. It’s more clever than copying like a calotype picture or a waxwork…”
“Is it?” said The Smith, sounding irritable and sceptical in equal measure.
“They can adjust their looks, but it’s almost more a thing of expressions and atmospheres than being a facsimile,” said Lucy.
“Facsimile,” said The Smith. “Now that’s a fancy word.”
“If you don’t want me using fancy words, someone shouldn’t put a dictionary on my bedside table,” said Lucy. “Or have Emmet do so.”
Cook harrumphed and looked a bit embarrassed.
“Nothing wrong with reading dictionaries. Nutritious things, dictionaries,” she said. “Thought you’d like it.”
“I do,” said Lucy. “I sometimes get lost in it when I can’t sleep—”
“Changelings!” snapped The Smith. “We are talking about identifying them. Concentrate—”
“Look closely and you see their faces never quite set,” said Lucy. “Like junket that doesn’t take.”
“My junket always takes,” said Cook. “But I know what you mean.”
“Sure, and I’m partial to a spot of junket myself,” said a familiar voice from the corner.
The Smith turned to peer into the shadows. Cait leant forward into the light and smiled innocently.
“Glory o’ the day to you,” she said.
“I didn’t know you were there,” said The Smith.
The innocent smile turned into a mischievous grin that made something flip again in Lucy’s stomach.
“I wouldn’t be much of a hunter if I wasn’t able to be unnoticed when I wanted, now would I?” she said. “The youngsters are right about the changelings. They don’t copy exactly, not once they’re grown. What they do is part acting, part expressions and mimicry, but all of it pushed along by working on your mind as you look at them. They’re like conjurers who can see what you expect to see and then stop you noticing that what you do see isn’t quite the full sixpence. And the truth is they are forgettable in themselves. Your eyes will slide off them if you don’t concentrate. It’s slippery they are, and no mistake.”
The Paradox Page 19
