by J Armitage
She casually skimmed over the other portraits as she slowly walked down the steps to the main hall. She had almost got to the bottom when her eyes rested on the eleventh portrait. The man in the painting had her rooted to the spot.
She stopped and gasped. It couldn’t possibly be.
But it was. The truth indelible on canvas. Her father was looking down at her from a painting painted in the 19th century. Sure, here he was white blond whereas she’d known him as having brown hair and it was in a different style. He’d worn glasses too, as far back as she could remember but here he wore none. How was this possible? She thought back to her father. It was true that he had a kind of ageless quality to him but she had put it down to good genes. She had been told her grandparents had died before she was born so she had no way to gauge it. She supposed it was true, she just didn’t expect that ‘before you were born’ would mean hundreds of years before she was born. Her wonderful father was an immortal.
‘Well not really,’ she reminded herself. A car had driven onto a pavement and snuffed his life out just as it had done her mother. A thought occurred to Anais. She quickly scanned the other paintings to see if she could see her mother.
“I know what you are looking for.”
Aethelu had appeared silently by Anais side.
“She wasn’t a Guardian. Your mother was just an ordinary woman.”
“Guardian?”
“We call ourselves Guardians of The Light. The Custor Lux.”
Anais remembered it written on the stained glass window.
“The elixir we took, my father named it The Light because of the way it shone.”
“I didn’t know.” Anais let the tears that were forming in her eyes fall down her face.
Aethelu took hold of her hand in her own, now regloved hand and held it while Anais sobbed.
“Who was he?” Anais felt bereft, she had only just come to terms with the loss of her parents, but now, she felt she hadn’t known them at all.
“He is and will always be your father. Come on.”
August has made us some lunch. I guess we should tell you the rest of our story.”
She put her arm around Anais and guided her to a sitting room which Aethelu called the parlour.
The room was painted all white with most of the furniture in the room being predominantly white also. The fireplace holding a real log fire was currently unlit but logs were stacked ready for kindling and a wonderful smell of burning wood lingered slightly in the air. On the mantelpiece was a pair of crystal candlesticks with long tapered unused candles. A huge ornate mirror hung behind them making the room appear even bigger than it actually was.
Amazing abstract paintings hung all around the walls in pale pinks, greens, blues and yellows. They were fascinating and brought life to the all white room. In the centre of the room was a glass table on which laid a plate of roughly cut sandwiches and three steaming mugs of tea. A family sized bag of crisps lay unopened next to them. August was there squeezing his bulky form into a very delicate looking chair. A two-seater sofa and another chair from the same collection surrounded the table. They were a pale velvety pink colour. Anais chose to sit on the sofa and Aethelu sat right next to her. She realised that they were still holding hands, a fact that was bringing her comfort in light of the revelation that her father was not who he had seemed. August gestured for her to take a sandwich. She wasn’t hungry despite missing breakfast but she didn’t want to offend him so picked one up and held it in her lap. August didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t eating. He was too busy tucking into the doorstop ham sandwich he had made for himself. A dribble of mustard had caught itself in his beard.
Aethelu picked up a sandwich in her left hand as her right was still holding on to Anais.
“Eat up love,” said August finally noticing that Anais wasn’t eating. He sprayed bits of sandwich all over and then looked momentarily embarrassed whilst he fumbled for a napkin. He swallowed and wiped his mouth.
“They took me ages to make, them did.”
“Eat!” Aethelu squeezed her hand and then let go so she could eat her own sandwich. “I promise we’ll answer all of your questions but there’s no point starving yourself.”
Anais nibbled at her sandwich.
What questions did she have? Her life had been turned upside down. Her father had lied to her. He was like a stranger. How could he not have told her? At any point in eighteen years he could have said ‘Hey Anais guess what? I’m hundreds of years old thanks to some magic drink and I’m super strong and if you turn the light off I might just glow like a beacon!’
Yeah, how hard could that have been?
Aethelu must have sensed Anais’ difficulty in coming to terms with everything so she began to speak again.
“You asked me earlier who your father was…” She paused as if thinking what to say. “For the longest time he was my best friend. We grew up together. His mother and sisters had died of the plague a week before we took the elixir. His father lasted a week longer but then succumbed to the same fate. Before the plague came to our village we spent our entire childhood together. He was a year older than me, the same age as Alex and Rafe, but for whatever reason he befriended me. We were inseparable from the age of five when he pulled me out of a stream. I’d got stuck in the mud and in my five year old mind I thought I was going to drown. In reality the stream was barely up to my knees but I remember being terrified at the time. Alistair was my hero ever since.”
“You dated my father?” Anais felt very strange about the thought.
“No. Never. I’d say he was like a brother to me but he was more than my brother. He was my best friend and he meant everything to me but I never felt that way about him. He never had any romantic feelings towards me either. It was enough for both of us for the longest time but then he met Sarah.”
“Did she know... about him I mean?”
“We assume he had told Sarah although, like the rest of us, he hid it from the rest of the world. It looked like he dyed his hair brown and then as she aged, he dyed gray streaks in and wore glasses to age himself. His eyesight was perfect, better than perfect really. He didn’t need glasses. They were just frames with plain glass in. Let me start from where I left earlier so I don’t miss anything out.”
She settled back on the sofa as if ready to tell a long story.
“I think I left it at the fourteen of us travelling from place to place, living as long as we could in one place then moving on when we could no longer hide our youth.
“Eventually we all began to grow weary of each other’s company.”
“You can say that again!” August cut in.
Aethelu shot him a look and then began again.
“We eventually found this big old house set in the woods and kept it as our home but many of us left to follow their own lives. My sister Arcadia, for example, is currently living in a chateau in the south of France. She is involved in the movie industry, the business side. My Aunt Ava and Uncle Alfred have a yacht and just sail where the mood takes them. My cousin Audsley is currently living somewhere near Las Vegas I believe and my wonderful biggest brother..,” she gestured to August, “lives in the gatehouse which is at the beginning of the driveway to this place, although he may as well live here as he’s always taking food from our fridge. We can’t get rid of him.”
She smiled at him and he returned the grin.
“A couple of the fourteen disappeared years ago, Amber and Abel. I think they just wanted to make their own lives. Then there’s your dad Alistair of course.
“The rest of us live here. My brothers Alexander, Raphael, our friend Andrew, My father Aldric, my mother Astrid and me.”
“Raphael? I thought you all had to have names beginning with A?”
“It was just something we did, it was never a law. Raphael did change his name originally to Albert but after a while he changed it again to Raphael or Rafe as he likes to be known. My mother has since gone back to her original name too.
“This house has been our base for over two hundred years. Those of us that don’t live here touch base every now and again.”
Aethelu paused while August opened the crisps with a loud rustle and noisily began to pop them into his mouth, crunching them a handful at a time.
Aethelu ignored him and continued her story.
“We were all doing well, rolling along as people do. We’d managed to keep ourselves pretty secret here. Those of us that wanted to travel have done so. We were all happy until a year ago.
“We got a call from your father. He’d been in an accident. Sarah had been killed instantly. They’d both been hit by a car. Of course we went to him immediately. He knew he couldn’t go to the hospital. If they did a simple blood test, the doctors would find out that he was different and he couldn’t chance it. He was bleeding pretty badly. We were lucky that we got to him before anyone else. It was a pretty remote street and it was late at night. We knew it was too late for him. His bones were smashed up, His internal organs were failing. Even for a man full of The Light as he was, there was just too much damage for his body to take. If he was just a normal human he would have died instantly just like Sarah. He held on long enough to tell us two things. The first was that he loved you and he asked us to take care of you. The other thing scared us. He said he’d seen the driver of the car who crashed into him. It was Jago.”
“Who’s Jago?”
“My father’s partner.”
Anais thought back through all Aethelu had said
“The guy who helped him make The Light?”
“Yup, the very same.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know. We’d not heard from him for hundreds of years.”
“So how would my father recognise him after so long?”
“Apparently he spoke to Alistair. He said ‘I am Jago. Remember me? Soon everyone will know my name. Tell your little coven that this is the beginning of the end.’”
He’d shouted it from the open window of the car and then driven off. Your father had called us on his mobile phone straight away. We got to him pretty quickly but he was in a very bad way. He was practically delirious. The message from Jago was one of the only coherent things he said. Apart from that he just kept repeating Sarah’s name over and over. My father did everything he could but we think Ali was just holding on long enough to pass the message on.
We brought his body back here and buried it in a specially built crypt in the woods.”
“No you didn’t!” Anais had found a chink in their story.
Aethelu looked at Anais questioningly.
She continued “You can’t have. Policemen came to my house to tell me he’d died. I went to the funeral. He and my mother were buried side by side at a cemetery in York.”
Aethelu suddenly looked anxious. Her and August traded looks between them.
“You just buried your mother. I’m sorry Anais we couldn’t let Ali be picked up by the authorities. One very simple blood test would show him as different. It wouldn’t have taken much experimentation to realise the significance of his rare blood. His body would have been cut up and studied. The findings would have first been published in every scientific journal in the world and then the press would pick up on the news. Your father would have been famous in death. Of course people would look into his history and they’d eventually find us. We couldn’t let that happen. Alistair knew that, he died protecting our secret.”
“So who the hell did I bury alongside my mother?” Anais said loudly, feeling more and more hurt and angry with each passing second.
“Andrew planned it all. He’s really clever, fast thinking. We all knew the trouble we were in but it was Andrew that came up with a plan. While we brought your father’s body home, Rafe called in the accident. He pretended to be Ali. He told the ambulance drivers that he’d just been missed by the car but had passed out which is why it had taken so long to call for an ambulance. He’d already scrubbed the floor of your father’s blood. The rain had done a good job of hiding that as well. He travelled with Sarah’s body to the hospital. When she was taken down to the morgue he then waited for a change of shift and pretended to be a member of staff. He found a body that had also come in that night and between him and Andrew, they somehow changed all the paperwork for this body into your dad’s name. We claimed both bodies first thing next morning so no one could look into it too much.
“Surely the police would have been involved. It was murder after all.” Anais couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Rafe did the same over at the police station with Andrews help. There’s not a locked door Andrew can’t get through, a computer he can’t crack and Rafe’s so damned charming that people just believe every word he says. He’d have made a great conman or politician.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?” August cut in and laughed heartily at his own joke until he realised nobody else was laughing with him.
Silence descended over the trio. Each lost in his or her own thoughts.
Eventually Anais broke the silence.
“My parents died a year ago. Why now? How come you suddenly want to protect me now?”
“We have been protecting you. Since your father died we have watched over you from a distance. We didn’t want to spoil your life so we didn’t show ourselves. Unfortunately you weren’t doing so well...”
Anais knew she was talking about the bar hopping and cringed. She felt so awful about that period of her life, and now she was mortified that her deterioration had been spied upon.
“We decided to step in about six months ago.”
“Six months ago I moved in with Winnie.”
“Yes, my mother. Remember I told you she’d changed her name from Astrid back to her original name? Her real name is Winifred.”
“Winnie? Winnie is one of you?”
“One of us yes. My mother, she is a member of the Custor Lux.
She is with my father at the moment.”
Anais had heard a lot of information this morning, she’d just got over the fact that her father had been six hundred years old, but somehow this seemed even more unbelievable. Sweet little Winnie. Winnie who had saved her, who had looked after her and yes, had protected her, but she’d made seem as though it was she that needed protecting.
Anais thought back to the first day they had met. She had just walked down the little side street, on which Winnie's Antique book emporium was located, on a whim. The antique books had reminded her of her father and so she had decided to go in to the shop.
“I went into the shop of my own volition.”
“Sorry?” Asked Aethelu.
“It was my decision, the day I met Winnie. You couldn’t have known that I’d go in that shop.”
“We watched you spiral out of control after your parents died. We took it in turns to follow you, going from bar to bar. Eventually we decided that your behaviour was too risky, besides, it was exhausting and taking up too much of our time. Andrew came up with a plan. He noticed you walked the same streets every day. We rented a shop and apartment and knowing you liked antique books we made it an antique book shop. Mother volunteered to look after you. She moved into the apartment and we waited. A week later you still hadn’t walked down the side street so Alexander gave you a nudge in the right direction. Literally.”
“The skateboarder!”
Anais thought back to that day. She had been walking down the street when a skateboarder had accidentally crashed into her knocking her into the side street. Angrily she has sworn at the skater who had sheepishly apologised and skated away. Rubbing her arm, which the skater had knocked, she glanced down the side street and saw a shop she’d not seen before. The antique book emporium.
“That was Alex.”
“Ok so you’ve been looking after me for ages. How come I only just found out about you?”
“My father will back from his travels next week. He’s going to be pissed that I told you anything at all. He wanted me to ke
ep you in the room on the second floor and not even talk to you. I think it’s best if you wait for him to get back and tell you himself.”
This was all so much to take in. Anais was reeling from all the information she had just learnt. Her father being over six centuries old and Winnie too. It felt like her whole life had been a lie, and the worst news of all. Her parents had been murdered. Her father, almost indestructible brought down by a car of all things, and her mother, a normal human being hadn’t stood a chance against the power of a car ploughing straight into her.
Thoughts of escaping had now left Anais completely. Her only home was with Winnie at the shop. If Winnie was moving back here and shutting the shop up, she had nowhere else to go. She resigned herself to the fact that she’d have to stay here at the manor. At least until her parents money and the contents of their will finally came through.
A thought occurred to her.
“Can I see my father’s grave?”
“I think that’s the least we can do,” Aethelu said “August, are the paths clear enough?”
“Yeah, the snow’s not that thick in the woods. Just put some wellies on. I’ve put a pair for Anais by the back door. A coat, hat and gloves are in a bag on the kitchen table. ”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Anais followed Aethelu out into the main hall and down the spiral staircase to the kitchen.
Aethelu put her own boots and coat on as Anais pulled out hers from another supermarket carrier. It seemed August had thought of everything. Unlike the rest of the clothes. The coat and wellies fit her perfectly. She followed Aethelu through the big oak kitchen door, which August had entered through earlier. It had a large holly wreath nailed on to the outside. She found herself in a large courtyard with some outbuildings on the opposite side to the house. Aethelu led the way through a gate and into the woods. The air was crisp. Anais took great lungfuls and watched her breath as she breathed out. Snowflakes fell silently around her.
