by Phil Rickman
He said, 'Where's your magic, eh? Where's your fucking magic now?'
She bit her worn-down bottom lip, but otherwise didn't move. 'Don't you know me?' she said. 'Do you not know me?'
He shook his head. 'You're going to die,' he said. 'Don't you realise that?'
The withered old face crumpled into an apology for a smile. 'I'm dead already, lad,' Ma Wagstaff said, voice trickling away like sand through an egg-timer. 'Dead already. But it's nowt t'do wi' you. You'll be glad of that, one day.'
Her ancient face was as blank as unmarked parchment as she threw up her arms, hands wafting at the air. Her body seemed to rise up at him, making him lurch back into the landing wall, and then she flopped down the stairs, with barely a bounce, like an old, discarded mop.
CHAPTER V
The gypsy guy with the beat-up hat and the Dobermans wasn't too sure about this. Still looked like he'd prefer to feed the stranger to the dogs.
'No,' Macbeth said, 'I don't even know her name.' Had to be easier getting to meet with the goddamn Queen. 'All I know is she isn't called Mrs Cairns.'
The guy's heavy eyebrows came down, suspicious. 'Who is it told you where to come?'
'Uh, Moira's agent. In Glasgow. Listen. I'm not with the police, I'm not a reporter.'
'OK, well, you just stay here, pal,' the gypsy guy said, and to make sure Macbeth didn't move from the gates of the caravan site he left the two dogs behind. Macbeth liked to think he was good with dogs, but the Dobermans declined to acknowledge this; when he put out a friendly hand, one growled and the other dribbled. Macbeth shrugged and waited.
The gypsy was gone several minutes, but when he returned he'd gotten himself a whole new attitude. Unbolting the gates, holding them back for the visitor. 'Wid ye come this way, sir ...' Well, shit, next thing he'd be holding his hat to his chest and bowing. Even the Dobermans had a deferential air. Macbeth grinned, figured maybe the old lady had sussed him psychically, checked out his emanations.
Whatever, in no time at all, here's Mungo Macbeth of the Manhattan Macbeths sitting in a caravan like some over-decorated seaside theme-bar, brass and china all over the walls.
'I'll leave ye then, Duchess ... ?'
'Thank you, Donald.' Lifting a slender hand loaded up with gold bullion.
She was Cleopatra, aboard this huge, gold-braided Victorian-looking chaise longue. She had on an ankle-length robe, edged with silver. Had startling hair, as long as Moira's, only dazzling white.
'Well, uh ...' This was bizarre. This was an essentially tricky situation. Awe was not called for. And yet this place was already answering questions about Moira that he hadn't even been able to frame.
She said, 'Call me Duchess. It's a trifle cheap, but one gets used to these indignities.'
Didn't look to be more than sixty. Younger by several centuries, he thought, than her eyes.
'And you'll come to the point, Mr Macbeth. Life is short.' He blinked. 'OK.' Swallowed. Couldn't believe he'd come here, was doing this. 'Uh ... fact of the matter is ... I spent some time with your daughter, couple nights ago.'
'Really,' the Duchess said dryly.
'No, hey, nothing like ... See, I ...' This was his first meeting with Moira all over again. Couldn't string the words together. 'Can't get her off of my mind,' he said and couldn't say any more.
'You poor man.' The merest shade of a smile in the crease down one check. 'How can I help?'
Acutely aware how embarrassingly novelettish all this was sounding, how like some plastic character in one of his own crummy TV films, he said solemnly, 'See, this never happened to me before.'
The Duchess had a very long neck. Very slowly she bent it towards him, like a curious swan. 'Are you a wealthy man, Mr Macbeth?'
'One day, maybe,' he said. 'So they tell me.' Thinking, if she asks me to cross her fucking palm with silver, I'm out of here.
'The feeling I'm getting from you ...' Those ancient, ancient eyes connecting with his, '... is that, despite your name, you've always been very much an American.'
'That's that the truth,' Macbeth confirmed with a sigh. 'All we've got to do now is convince my mom.'
The Duchess smiled at last. 'I think I like you, Mr Macbeth,' she said. 'We'll have some tea.'
Later she picked up on the theme. 'You're really not what you appear, are you?'
'No?'
The Duchess shook her head. Tiny gold balls revolved in her earrings.
'This worries you. You feel you've been living a lie. You feel that all your life you've tried to be what people expect you to be. But different people want different things, and you feel obliged, perhaps, to live up to their expectation of you. You feel ...' The Duchess scrutinized him, with renewed interest, over her gold-rimmed bone china teacup. 'You feel you are in your present fortunate position because of who you are rather than what you can do.'
Macbeth said nothing. He hadn't come here for this. Had he?
'Sorry to be so blunt,' the Duchess said.
'No problem,' Macbeth said hollowly.
'This is your job perhaps. People think you can open doors?'
'Do they just,' said Macbeth.
'Now you've woken up, and you're thinking, am I to spend my life ... serving up the, er, goods ... ? As a form of restitution? Paying back, even though I might be paying back to people who never gave me anything, or do I go out on my own, chance my arm ... ?'
There were subtle alterations in her voice. Macbeth felt goose-bumps forming.
The Duchess said, 'is there something more out there than piling up money? Even if that money's not all for me, even if it's helping the economy and therefore other people who might need the money more than me? Are there ... more things in heaven and earth than you get to read about in the New York Times?'
Christ. He was listening to himself. By the time she sat back to sip more tea, he'd swear the Duchess had developed a significantly deeper voice and an accent not unlike his own.
Ah, this is just a sophisticated act. This is a classy stage routine.
'No it isn't,' the Duchess said crisply.
He almost dropped his cup. 'What... ?' His hand shook.
'No, it isn't ... going to rain,' the Duchess said sweetly. 'Although it was forecast. But then forecasts are seldom reliable, I've found.'
He guessed she'd never been to college. He guessed she hadn't always talked so refined. He guessed her life-story would make more than one mini-series.
Then he guessed he'd better start keeping a tighter hold on his thoughts until he was someplace else.
'I'm not a fortune-teller, you know,' she said, like some women would say, what do you think I am, a hooker?
'I, uh ... Moira never said you were,' Macbeth said uncomfortably.
'I appear to be able to do it. Sometimes. But I don't make a practice of it.' She poured herself more tea. 'So why did I let you in here?'
Macbeth didn't know.
'Because I'm worried about the child,' she said. 'That's why.'
He said, 'I can understand that.'
'Can you?'
'I'm, uh, a Celt,' he said, and she started to laugh, a sound like the little teaspoon tinkling on the bone china.
'To be Celtic,' she said, 'is more an attitude than a racial thing. Like to be a gypsy is a way of life.'
'What about to be a psychic?'
Her face clouded. 'That,' she said, 'is a cross to bear. She'll tell you that herself. It's to accept there's a huge part of your life that will never be your own. It's to realise there are always going to be obligations to fulfil, directions you have to go in, even though you can't always see the sense of it.'
'That's what she's doing right now?'
The Duchess nodded. 'She has things to work out. Oh, I don't know what she's doing and I wouldn't dream of interfering, she's a mature person. But I am her mother, and mothers are always inclined to worry, so I'm told. I was only thinking - coincidence - just before you arrived, I wish she had someone who cared for her. But she's a loner. We all
are, I fear. We learn our lesson. We don't like other people to get hurt.'
'You're saying you think Moira needs someone with her?'
The Duchess shrugged her elegant shoulders. 'Someone looking out for her, maybe. When Donald told me there was a man at the gate asking after Moira, I wondered if perhaps ...'
Then she gave him the kind of smile that was like a consolatory pat on the arm. 'I don't really feel you're the one, Mr Macbeth.'
Sometimes, when he interviewed would-be film-directors, there was one nice, bright-eyed kid he could tell was never going to make it. And trying to let the kid down easy he'd always start out, 'I don't really feel ...'
'Look, Duchess ...' Macbeth felt like he was about to cry. This was absurd. He started to tell her about the night at the Earl's Castle, about Moira singing 'The Comb Song', and how it ended.
'Yes,' the Duchess said impatiently, 'I know about that.'
'So am I right in thinking Moira caused all that, the deer heads and stuff to come crashing down?'
The Duchess looked cross. 'The question is ... pouff! Irrelevant! How can anyone ever really say, I did this, I caused this to happen? Perhaps you are a factor in its happening, perhaps not. I'll tell you something, Mr Macbeth ... nobody who's merely human can ever be entirely sure of the ability to make anything happen. Say, if you're a great healer, sometimes it works ... you're lucky, or you're so good and saintly that you get helped a lot. And sometimes it doesn't work at all. I once knew a woman called Jean Wendle ... but that's another story ...'
She lay back on the chaise and half-closed her eyes, looking at the wall behind him. 'Or, let us say, if you're a bad or a vengeful person, and you want to hurt somebody, you want to curse them ... in the movies, it goes ... zap, like one of those, what d'you call them ... ray guns, lasers.'
He heard a small noise behind him, turned in time to see a plate, one of a row of five with pictures on them, sliding very slowly from the wall.
The plate fell to the floor and smashed. Macbeth nearly passed out.
From a long way away, he heard the Duchess saying, 'Doing damage, harming people is much easier but that's unpredictable too. Sometimes people dabble and create a big black cloud ...' Throwing up her arms theatrically,'... and they can't control where it goes.'
Numbly, Macbeth bent to pick up the pieces of the plate. Maybe he'd dislodged it with the back of his head. The ones still on the wall had pictures of Balmoral Castle, where the Queen spent time, and Glamis Castle, Blair Atholl Castle and the Queen Mother's Castle of Mey.
He held two pieces of the broken plate together and saw, in one of those shattering, timeless moments, that they made up a rough watercolour sketch of the familiar Victorian Gothic facade of the Earl's place.
'Accidents happen,' the Duchess said. 'Leave it on the floor.'
Macbeth's fingers were trembling as he laid the pieces down. He needed a cigarette more urgently than at any time since he quit smoking six years ago.
'I never liked that one anyway,' the Duchess said.
Doubtless psyching out that Macbeth could use more hot tea, and fast, she filled up his cup and added two sugars.
He drank it all. She was offering him an easy way out. She was saying, what just happened - the plate - also, the skulls on the wall ... this is kids' stuff ... this is chickenshit compared to what a person could be letting himself in for if he pursues Moira Cairns.
Mungo Macbeth, maker of mini-series for the masses, thought maybe this was how King Arthur laid it on the line for any mad-assed knight of the Round Table figuring to go after the Holy Grail.
He'd often wondered about those less ambitious knights who listened to the horror stories and thought, Well, fuck this, what do 1 need with a Holy Grail? Maybe I should just stick around and lay me some more damsels, do a little Sunday jousting. How could those knights go on living with themselves, having passed up on the chance of the One Big Thing?
He said, 'Earlier, you said ... about when a guy gets to wondering how much his life has really been worth and if there isn't more stuff in Heaven and Earth than he's reading about in the New York Times ...'
The silent girl who'd brought the tea came back and took away the tray.
After she'd gone, he said, 'Duchess, why? I only met your daughter once, never even ... Why? Can you tell me?'
Instead, the Duchess told him the story of a man who fell in love with the Queen of the Fairies and all the shit that put him into. Macbeth said he knew the songs. Tarn Lin, Thomas The Rymer, all that stuff? But that wasn't the same thing, surely, Moira Cairns was a human being.
'That's quite true,' the Duchess said gravely. 'But remember this. Wherever she goes, that young woman ... she's bound to be touched with madness. Now, who is the white man?'
'White man?'
'I thought perhaps you might be his emissary ... White-skinned man? I don't think I mean race. Just a man exuding a whiteness?'
'Somebody I know?'
'You don't?'
'I don't know what you mean.'
'I believe you don't. All right. Never mind.'
Macbeth asked, 'Do you know where Moira is?'
'Oh ... the little Jewish person, Kaufmann, tells me she's in the North of England.'
'Bastard wouldn't tell me.'
'You he doesn't trust. Strange, that - I find you quite transparent.'
'Thanks.'
'There was a man called ... Matt?'
'Jesus, you intuited that?'
The Duchess sighed in exasperation. 'She told me.'
'Right,' Macbeth said, relieved. 'Matt, uh ...'
'Castle. She thinks he was her mentor. I rather suspect she was his.'
'Right,' Macbeth said uncertainly.
'He's dead. She'll have gone to try and lay his spirit to rest.'
Macbeth squirmed a little. Was this precisely what was meant by things you couldn't find in the New York Times? Was this what Mom meant about uncovering his roots? He thought not.
The Duchess smiled kindly. 'You can leave now, if you wish, Mr Macbeth. I'll have Donald see you to the gate.'
'No, wait ...' Two trains of thought were about to crash, buckling his usual A to B mental tracks. 'This, uh, white person ...'
'A thin man with white hair and a very white complexion.'
The Castle. The bones. White-faced man with a cut eye.
'Shit, I don't believe this ... you got that outa my head. You pulled it clean outa my head.'
'Mr Macbeth, calm down. Two or three weeks ago, a man of this description came to consult me. As people do ... occasionally. He didn't get in. Donald is my first line of defence, the dogs are the second, and Donald told me the dogs disliked this man quite intensely. On sight. Now ... dogs can't invariably be trusted, they may react badly to - oh - psychic disturbance in a person, or mental instability. But when a man arrives in an expensive car and seems very confident and the dogs hate him on sight...'
Stanhope, Macbeth thought. Stansgate?
'And when Donald conveyed my message that I was unwell, he was apparently quite annoyed. He sent a message back that he had information about my daughter which he thought I would wish to know. I suggested Donald should let the dogs have him.'
'What happened?'
'He left.'
Stanley? Stanmore? 'Duchess, you think this guy meant her harm?'
'Two people arrive within a short period to talk to me about my daughter. One the dogs dislike. How did the dogs take to you, Mr Macbeth?'
'I wasn't invited to play rubber-bone, but I seem to be intact.'
The Duchess nodded, 'I don't know how you found me - no, don't explain, it's not important. I didn't mention the man to Moira, she has enough problems, I think. But if you wanted to help her, you might keep an eye open for him. If there was a problem and you were to deal with it, she need never know, need she?'
Macbeth started thinking about the knights and the Holy Grail.
And this guy ... Stanton? Stansfield?
Part Seven
&
nbsp; angels
From Dawber's Secret Book of Bridelow (unpublished):
THE HISTORY OF BEER
Beer, of course, was brewed in Bridelow long before the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Ale was the original sacred drink, made from the water of the holy spring and the blessed barley and preserved with the richly-aromatic bog myrtle from the Moss.
Nigel Pennick writes, in his book Practical Magic in the Northern Tradition:
'Cakes or bread and ale are the sacrament of country tradition. The runic word for ale - ALU - is composed of the three runes As, Lagu and Ur. The first rune has the meaning of the gods or divine power; the second water and flow, and the third primal strength. The eating of bread and drinking of ale is the mystery of the transmutation of the energy in the grain into a form where it is reborn in our physical bodies.'
It follows, therefore, that, to some local people, the sale of the Bridelow brewery and the detachment of the beer-making process from its ancient origins, would seem to be a serious sapping of the village's inherent strength, perhaps even a symbolic draining away of its lifeblood.
CHAPTER I
'She's got to be in. I can hear the kettle boiling.'
And boiling and boiling. Whistling through the house. The kettle having hysterics.
'I've got a key,' Willie said, bringing out the whole bunch of them.
A dark, damp dread was settling around Moira. She took a step back on the short path leading to Ma Wagstaff's front door. Held on to a gatepost, biting a lip.
'What the f—' The door opening a few inches, then jamming and Willie putting his shoulder to it. 'Summat caught behind here ...'
'Hey, stop, Willie ... Jesus.'
Through the crack in the door, she'd seen a foot, black-shod and pointing upwards. She drew Willie gently back and showed him.
'Oh, Christ,' Willie said drably.
He didn't approach the door again. He said quietly, 'Moira, do us a favour. Nip across to t'Post Office. Fetch Milly.'
