The Gawain Legacy

by Jon Mackley

  She moved away from the railings, but felt herself momentarily losing her balance. She reached out to the wood to steady herself and instead of finding support she heard the wood protesting under the weight and then cracking. She did not fall, but the sudden sound had startled Roger. His curiosity had been overwhelmed by his realisation he was in a place where he possibly should not have been. He gave a yelp of terror before turning and running blindly from her, knocking into the metal box with the hay spilling from it. She heard the sound of ripping fabric and didn’t need to see the red stain on his T-shirt to know he had cut himself.

  And that she had been the cause of the accident.

  ‘No,’ she fought for breath, but oppression was crushing her chest. Her face had creased in horror. Her vision was swimming. There had to be a way to travel back in time and play through this scene again, but the pool of time had drained away from her and she was trying to claw her way through the arid landscape of the present. Her throat was clogged with dust from the crypt; her vision was blurring with tears.

  Will was not looking at her when she opened her eyes. He was gathering the documents from Margery’s tomb. She didn’t know how much time had passed. Perhaps only seconds. Her face flushed with the knowledge that she had to explain her actions, had to explain her guilt. She suppressed a sob, found herself choking on the dust. Lara coughed until her eyes watered, her head span and purple fireworks exploded in front of her eyes. She gagged and wheezed. All strength left her. She staggered and held herself up against Sir William’s tomb.

  ‘Will?’ Her voice was filled with a forlorn desperation.

  Will did not answer immediately, instead he placed the parchments in a careful pile on Sir Gerard’s tomb, balanced the torch on top of them, then walked across to her, patting her firmly but not painfully on the back.

  He started to embrace her, but she pulled away. ‘I’ve done a terrible thing …’ she started.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Will said. ‘I know. I’ve always known. Marsh told me a long time ago that you caused Roger’s death. At first I only believed it because I needed someone to blame. That was why it was so easy to agree to betraying you. But then I got to know you, watching you sleeping. I realised you couldn’t carry that on your conscience. You weren’t that kind of person.’ He looked away. ‘ How can I condemn you? You were trying to change it so I wasn’t part of all this.’

  She cried into his shoulder. ‘How can someone get it so wrong when they’re trying to do the right thing?’ she wailed.

  ‘Time doesn’t change,’ Will said softly. ‘It just makes sense.’ He looked down sadly, ‘Thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.’

  She tried to pull away, to be free of the love that he was giving her, love she didn’t deserve. ‘How can you even look at me?’

  Now he did pull away, just a little so he could look down on her. She tried to look up, not knowing what she would see in his eyes. ‘What you did, you did out of love. No matter what anguish it would have caused you. You wanted me to be happy.’

  ‘I killed your son,’ Lara whispered.

  Will shook his head. ‘No you didn’t. Fate killed my son. You didn’t put a gun to his head and pull the trigger. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I should have been there supervising him. Janet should have noticed he was hurt, except that he changed his top and hid the one he’d torn because he was embarrassed.’ He started to gather up the documents, unable to look at her. ‘Whether you were there or not, something would have happened to Roger. Tantris told me that. We’ve both been pawns in a game where we don’t even know the rules.’ He held her again, so she could cry into his shoulder. ‘I can’t hate you for what you did,’ he whispered. ‘That’ll just make the future more difficult.’

  ‘I’ll go back,’ Lara said with sudden determination. ‘I’ll go back and change everything again. Find a way of warning myself I shouldn’t go back and change the past. Things can still be all right.’

  ‘They won’t, because I’m here, now,’ he said, shaking his head solemnly. ‘We can’t change the past. We can only learn from it and hope we can change the future.’ He sighed. ‘I did try to tell you not to change things on the day we first met.’ He kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘I’m sorry I let you down, Lara, but maybe you understand all my reasons why. They told me you’d help me by changing things that have already happened, but instead it was that which caused me to be in the mess I was in.’

  ‘But why me?’ Lara said. ‘I’m nothing special. I’m not the kind of secret agent who could use the serum for military powers. I’m just me.’

  ‘Perhaps we should ask the person who allowed you to be administered with the serum in the first place, someone who also wanted to change the past.’

  ‘Who?’ Lara said, but realisation was already dawning on her. ‘No,’ she said, jaw clenching in a mixture of terror, anger and understanding. ‘Not my father.’

  19

  Lara ran from the chamber. She became blinded on the spiral staircase, seeing neither light from above, nor below. Will’s footsteps clattered behind her, but she paid no attention. Her mind was set on retribution against her father for using her as a guinea pig. She grazed her arm against the wall as she ran. Light echoed off the walls as Will drew closer. Then he was holding her, preventing her from extracting her revenge.

  ‘I want to tear him to pieces,’ Lara said struggling to be free from his grasp. ‘I want to rip him in half.’

  Will nodded. ‘I’m sure you do. But let’s just take it easy for a second. I’ll tell you what: take a few really deep breaths; help me get the documents into the car; and then you can go and rip him to pieces.’

  Lara still resisted, but with less effort. Her eyes were livid, her hands twisted into claws, but she inhaled deeply. Even at this point on the stairs, she could smell the church incense.

  Will took her hands, peeled back her fingers, then led her back to the crypt.

  They did not stay for long.

  Will loaded up Lara’s arms with some of the documents, but took the majority of them himself, then wedged the torch under his armpit and led her up the stairs. Lara followed, silently raging, but careful not to crush the fragile parchment.

  The air of the church, although heavy with incense and polish, was sweet compared to the stale air of the tombs. Will laid his manuscripts and parchments on one of the pews as he pushed the stone door to the crypt shut. It grated across the flagstones, and that grating turned into a rumbling, echoing down the staircase and returning to the high ceiling. Lara set down her own documents and went to Will’s side. She saw no telltale white scratching across the floor. Nor was there any apparent join in the stones where the entrance for the crypt should be. It was as if the stones had healed themselves. If she had not known what was concealed within those walls, she would have sworn there was nothing there.

  Then Will was at her side. He gently took her elbow as if guiding an invalid. He pushed open the heavy oak door and peered outside. Seeing no one about, he led her away.

  She stopped when they reached the threshold, taking a tentative glance over her shoulder. She took a moment to look at the crypt’s entrance and then at the great arched windows over the altar. This would be the last time she came here. She no longer had anything to fear. She had confronted her memories, the ghosts that had wandered down the aisle. She could leave, knowing she had exorcised a small piece of her past. She swallowed, then looked at the distant street lights and the shadows created by the gravestones. Her eyes flashed involuntarily to her mother’s gravestone – she could pick it out, even in the darkness, then she marched down the pathway, leaving Will to pull the door shut behind him. It slammed shut and the metal door-ring clattered and echoed in the darkness. He trotted a few steps to catch up with her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  She nodded, but she did not smile at him. Her feelings for Beaded had changed. Instead of fearing what was in the church, her emotions had twisted into an
ger, directed at her father. She walked with determination towards the lych-gate and the pub. She was always a few steps ahead of Will, impatient to find the answers she needed to hear.

  ‘I need you to sit here for a moment,’ Will told her.

  She shook her head. ‘The last time you left me on my own, Marsh’s thugs took me. You’re not leaving my sight.’

  He sighed stoically. ‘I need to get the documents,’ he told her. ‘We don’t want to be here any longer than we have to. And you need a couple of minutes to calm down before you see your father.’

  She didn’t like it, but it made sense. He handed her the car keys then turned and scuttled back towards the church. She unlocked the car, sat down in the passenger seat, then locked the car again. Her teeth and jaws hurt from where she had been clenching them. Her fingernails had scored into the palms of her hands. She hugged herself tight, shivering with both cold and pure rage.

  She didn’t know how long he was away. She adjusted the rear-view mirror and kept glancing behind her. Eventually, he appeared again, weighted down with medieval documents. His steps were slow and precise. He stopped at the car, waited for her to unlock it and to open the boot, then he lovingly placed the manuscripts on a blanket and covered them over, before shutting the boot once again. ‘All right,’ Will said, looking at the sky. ‘I don’t want to leave those in there for too long. They’ll get damaged. We have a choice: we can either rest on our laurels with the manuscripts we’ve got, and go back to Olivia’s to try to decipher them, or …’

  ‘Or,’ Lara cut him off, ‘We can go and see my father, get some answers and see if I still want to tear him to pieces.’ She started to march towards the house.

  Will hurried after her. ‘Be careful,’ he warned. ‘You might not like what you find.’

  She stared at him coldly. ‘I’ve had a lifetime’s worth of not liking what I’m finding in the last week, so why should it be any different now?’

  As she stormed forward, she wondered if she had made the final connection: her father had agreed to her being injected, because he owed something to Eric Marsh.

  Because Eric Marsh was her long-lost brother!

  She stopped when she reached the front door, trying to assimilate these suppositions. Marsh was about the right age. Her brother had not simply gone missing when he had reached the age of consent. Instead, he’d taken his leave and gone to the secret military establishment. He’d informed their father he’d been working on a secret formula and needed a test subject. This was the argument she’d remembered as a tiny child: Eric Marsh had wanted to use her as his experiment and her father had refused. But all it had taken to convince him was the knowledge that Lara had been the cause of her mother’s death and the world would be a better place without her.

  She saw her reflection in the glass of the front door and realised her face had contorted into a snarl. She realised how much she loathed him, loathed the fact that any failure to conform to his wishes resulted in beatings and erosion of her self-esteem. How could she have idolised her father because he had spent time reading Shakespeare to her, when all the other girls were going to the zoo or the fair with their family. And if their fathers read to them, it was from a book of their choice, not some archaic play she could barely understand.

  Will had no doubt seen the way her face was twisting. He placed a hand on her shoulder. She did not flinch away from him, but she did not feel comfortable with the touch either.

  ‘You ready?’ he asked.

  She shook her head, but knocked robustly on the stained glass of the door. ‘Let’s get this over with.’

  She tapped her foot impatiently and found herself staring at the door. It was strange how even the door could conjure memories: here was the scratch in the wood where she had run her bike into the frame. She remembered playing Trick or Treat one Halloween with one of her friends from the village, and even calling at this door, hoping her father would not see through her disguise and would give her sweets. She smiled inwardly. Her father had spent three weeks helping her make her costume. How could he fail to recognise her …

  No! She recoiled from this prosaic memory and allowed herself to admit the truth. She had spent three weeks working on the costume and all the time her father berated her for wasting her time with frivolities when she could be doing something useful. And at the bottom of the door, there was the dent from when her father had come home from the pub absolutely out of his tree. She had been asleep when he’d knocked and, before she had been able to answer, he’d started kicking the doorframe and cursing her for being a lazy, good-for-nothing bitch, even though it had been two in the morning. The argument had ended with Lara retreating from her father when he had slapped her. She had screamed ‘Bastard!’ at him, which he had taken to mean that she had invited the Devil into her soul, and only a beating would drive the Evil One away. But Lara was no longer the naïve girl her father had expected and she had defended herself, clawing at him: huge rakes of blood ran down his cheeks. In this instance, the drink had been merciful, forcing him into a sea of unconsciousness before he could lay a finger on her, but she never, ever forgot what had happened that night. Even now, she was convinced there had been a sparkle of drunken lust in his eyes. Despite everything else she’d endured, once she had seen that, she no longer felt safe. For the next couple of months she made sure she was awake when he came home to avoid his increasing anger. Sometimes it was the early hours of the morning, on one occasion it was six o’clock the following evening, because the pub had had a lock-in and no one had told her. And at the same time, she had started seeing a young man called Michael, and she was doing everything she could to plan her escape.

  When the door opened, her father looked at her with the disinterest of someone who knew a visitor was coming, and with the expression that she was not at all welcome. Lara was about to launch into a tirade against him, but Will placed a gentle hand on her shoulder. ‘We’d like to speak to you, Mr Halpin,’ he said. His voice was soporific. Lara felt the rage draining from her. Halpin nodded slowly and stepped back to let them into the hallway. Will gently nudged her forward.

  Lara was hit by a sensory bombardment. The house had its own, unique sounds and smell. There was the heavy ticking of the grandmother clock on the stairs, the reeking of beeswax and Brasso for the fireplace ornaments, the thick smell of the coal fire, her father’s soap and aftershave. The hallway was the same lurid orange that her father had been promising to re-paint since she was fifteen. There was her father’s distinct odour, lingering through the hall, and the stench of wine congealing in the bottom of a bottle. Her stomach churned and she wondered when the hall had last seen a vacuum cleaner, or if the disinfectant had even moved from the place in the cupboard under the stairs, where she had left it years before.

  Halpin walked into the lounge without even looking at them again. They were not offered a drink, for which Lara was grateful. The glasses in the display cabinet were stained brown. She did not sit down and, following an infuriatingly long silence, her father eventually spoke.

  ‘Somehow I knew you’d come back to haunt me.’

  She was surprised there was no despair in his voice, just the tone of someone who had been caught, and who knows it is useless to deny the charges put against him. Lara was about to retort, but again she felt Will’s hand on her shoulder.

  ‘Do you understand why I had to do it, Lara?’ her father spoke in a soft voice.

  Lara thought for a minute ‘No,’ she said eventually. ‘All of my life, I’ve believed one thing, believed in you, believed the stories you told me. Even when you were drinking and bullying, I believed there was good in you and you’d protect me no matter what.’ The words were tumbling out in an unstoppable torrent. ‘Now I find there’s a brother I knew nothing about, and rather than protecting me, you’re the one who sold me out.’

  Her father nodded, but did not show any repentance. ‘I did what I needed to do. And if you’ve ever believed in something so much you’d sacrif
ice anything for it, then you’ll understand what I mean.’

  ‘But your own daughter …’ Lara started.

  ‘A daughter who took away the only person I truly loved,’ Halpin said. There was fire in his eyes now; it was the first time he had focused on her. ‘You would only understand that if you had loved anyone as deeply as I had loved her.’

  ‘The only person you ever loved was yourself,’ Lara spat. ‘Did you really hate me so much you had to sell me to Eric Marsh to be one of his experiments?’

  ‘I took no money,’ her father said earnestly. ‘I make no apologies. I have no regrets.’

  ‘He promised you something,’ Will said. ‘He said he’d help you get her back.’

  Halpin raised an eyebrow. He turned back to Lara. ‘I needed your mother, and you were in the way.’ His gaze became stony and unwavering.

  Lara was about to speak, but Will interrupted. ‘And what if the serum had fried Lara’s brain?’ he asked coldly. ‘Would you have said the experiment was a success then?’

  Halpin turned to him. ‘I don’t know who you are, sir, and in my house I don’t answer to you. This is between my daughter and myself.’ He turned back to Lara. ‘But to answer your man’s question: you were expendable. But what I did, I did out of love, love for your mother. Your presence here smells strongly of a desire for revenge, revenge for something you know nothing about.’

  ‘This isn’t revenge,’ Lara said. ‘It’s justice, and for you to take responsibility for your actions.’

  ‘Don’t patronise me,’ her father said. ‘Your intentions are nothing but a self-centred, glossed-up euphemism for revenge.’

  ‘This is getting us nowhere,’ Lara said.