The Poisoned Crown

by Amanda Hemingway

  “I don’t need to be fit. I wasn’t there physically; just in thought.”

  “Something’s scared you. You look done in.”

  He wasn’t going to tell her about his fear of the water. “I’m okay,” he assured her. “Just trying to figure out what’s going on.”

  “Can I help?”

  “Maybe.” He hesitated. “How much do you know about the water spirit who was after the Grail?”

  Annie tensed, her nebulous fears returning like bats to their cave. “Do you think she had something to do with your accident?”

  “No. No, not that. But I’ve been to this place—Widewater—it’s all sea, a whole planet with nothing but sea. There was land once but it was overwhelmed. She devoured it. She hates all creatures of the air— lungbreathers—even whales and selkies. They call her the Goddess, the Queen of the Sea—the Grandir said her name was Nefanu. She seems to have some connection with the water spirit here. Like an alter ego—a more powerful twin. And more evil.”

  “A doppelganger,” Annie said promptly. “I know. The theory is that we all have other selves in other worlds, living out alternative lives.”

  “It’s something I’ve come across before, in a way,” Nathan said. “Not exactly other selves but… parallels. The same stories running through every world, the same kind of people. Like, Nell always reminded me of Hazel—a medieval, princessly Hazel, much prettier and a bit spoiled—”

  “Don’t ever tell her that,” Annie said hastily.

  “D’you think she’d mind?” Nathan sounded a little surprised.

  “The phrase much prettier isn’t good. About this goddess—?”

  “This is different. The link seems to be much closer—as if the spirit in this world knows her counterpart is out there, and wants to reach her, to bond with her. That’s why she wants the Grail—and me. Or so the Grandir said.”

  “You’ve talked with him?” Belatedly, Annie was picking up on the implications. More bats came home to roost.

  “Yes, but only briefly. He says he’s helping me, or guiding me, but he never answers my questions. Not the really vital ones.”

  Annie asked, very carefully: “What kind of a—a being is he?”

  “Human.” Nathan was startled. “Like Eric, only taller. Big shoulders. He makes you feel… like he’s huge, not so much physically but his personality, his mind. His aura. He has the kind of vibes that fill up all the available space. He could talk to a crowd of millions, and every single person there would think and feel exactly what he wanted them to think and feel. And he wouldn’t even be trying: it would just happen. That’s how he is. Huge inside. It’s difficult to describe …” He was running out of metaphors, gazing intently at Annie in an attempt to convey some impression of the man who had ruled a cosmos—who had laid an ungloved hand on his forehead and stroked his hair. For a minute he thought his mother had gone deadly pale. The way she might have looked if a raven had flown into the room and perched on the bedstead, croaking: Nevermore—

  And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor

  Shall be lifted

  Nevermore!

  —but he concluded it was a mere quirk of fancy, a footstep on his grave; that was all. The bleak winter daylight made everyone look gray and cold.

  He said: “Mum …?”

  “Sorry,” Annie said. “I was … woolgathering. The goddess—what did you call her? Nefanu. Nefanu—and Nenufar. That’s almost an anagram. It can’t be coincidence.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that. D’you suppose she’s still around— Nenufar, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Annie said, but her expression gave the lie to her words.

  She knew.

  AT FFYLDE, the blame chain had reached the headmaster. He had been in the job for less than a year, after his predecessor, the abbot, had left for higher things. Unlike Father Crowley, he was a layman who talked managementspeak and prided himself on his ability to bond with the boys, especially those with the wealthiest and most influential parents. Right now his main concern was that Nathan’s accident had occurred in the absence of the games master, laying the school open to possible charges of negligence. It was therefore imperative that blame—like the baton in a relay race—was passed on to someone else. The only question was whom. After interviewing Rix, sympathetically and at length, he talked to the other witnesses.

  “I gather Nathan was—hrmm!—showing off,” he suggested.

  Ned Gable said flatly: “No. Nathan never shows off. He isn’t like that.”

  And, baring his chest for the knife: “It was my fault. I was the one who … I should’ve done the dive, but I couldn’t because of my ankle. So Nathan had to.”

  “Very fine of you,” the headmaster said indulgently, “standing up for your friend, but you can’t take responsibility for his actions. That will be all.”

  “Sir—”

  “That will be all.”

  The other boys received the headmaster’s suggestion with variations on a blank gaze and stony silence. Father Crowley would have known how to elicit the true facts, but the new head had neither his piercing eye nor his uncanny omniscience, and was only too ready to take that silence for assent. In the classroom, omertá was the rule of the day: none of the boys would point the finger at Rix in front of an adult, whatever their private feelings—that would be the behavior of a super-snitch. However, many of them resolved secretly that on the rugger pitch they would make him pay.

  All of which did Nathan no good at all.

  “The boys shouldn’t have been left unsupervised,” the head told their form master, Brother Colvin. “That goes without saying. We can only hope the Ward woman won’t get herself an unscrupulous lawyer— that could cause us a lot of trouble.”

  “Mrs. Ward,” said Brother Colvin, laying some emphasis on the title, “is a very sweet person who would never dream of doing such a thing. A year or so ago Nathan had a problem with Damon Hackforth—he was a bit of a delinquent, we’d had a lot of problems with him—and Annie was quite amazingly kind and understanding about it. The whole business could have been very serious, both for the Hackforths and the school. If she hadn’t shown truly Christian forbearance …”

  “I see,” said the headmaster. “I hadn’t realized Nathan had a track record as a troublemaker.”

  “Nathan wasn’t the one making trouble,” Brother Colvin said. “I told you—”

  “No, no, Brother, say no more. He never makes trouble, he’s just caught up in it. That’s the danger with these scholarship boys: we all feel obliged to bend over backward for them, no matter how badly they behave. They come to us from questionable homes—I gather Mrs. Ward is a single parent—no discipline, no moral standards, and they’re thrown in the midst of decent kids from good families, and thanks to political correctness we have to make heroes of them. Well, I won’t have it. I infer Nathan fancies himself as a ‘tough guy’—he’d probably call himself street-smart—and that sets a very poor example to the others. And word gets around, believe me. Many parents of prospective pupils could be discouraged by that sort of thing. I intend to see that Nathan’s scholarship entitlement for next year is going to be reconsidered.”

  “He’s very bright,” Brother Colvin pointed out with deceptive mildness. “His results make an important contribution to our position in the league tables.”

  “Well, well. We’ll see. Perhaps Mrs. Ward may be offered some kind of subsidy, providing she can come up with the bulk of the fees. This is a prestige establishment, not a charity school. I see no reason why she should freeload when other parents are prepared to dig into their pockets—often to make sacrifices—for their children’s welfare.”

  Brother Colvin blinked. He wondered fleetingly what sacrifices bankers, stockbrokers, and oil millionaires had to make to pay for their sons’ education. Living half the year in a tax haven, perhaps?

  He said, still fighting his corner: “Nathan’s also an accomplished athlete. He’s on the sc
hool team for both rugby and cricket.”

  “No doubt,” said the head with a thin smile. “I don’t believe in favoring a boy for such reasons. This isn’t Cambridge, where they tolerate almost anything if a student can wield an oar.” In his youth he had been turned down for Magdalen, and he still bore a grudge.

  “Father Crowley had a very high opinion of Nathan,” Brother Colvin persisted.

  A tactical error.

  “Father Crowley,” said the head loftily, “was, I am sure, a naive and trusting soul, as befits a man of the cloth. I, alas, am expected to take a more worldly view. The governors installed me as his successor since they needed someone with secular experience and the people skills that come from a life lived in the rough-and-tumble of the wider world.” He’s quoting from the speech he made when he first came here, Brother Colvin thought with a sinking heart. “Trust me: I understand these boys. I can sense a bad apple even before I bite into it. Besides,” he added obscurely, “we have a good ethnic mix here.” Belatedly, Brother Colvin realized this was a reference to Nathan’s dark complexion. “Think of Aly al-Haroun O’Neill—Charles Mokkajee—just the sort of pupils we need.”

  “If the corruption charges against Mr. Mokkajee Senior stick,” Brother Colvin said rather tartly, “he’ll be spending a long time in a Bombay jail. Hardly the most desirable parent.”

  “Now, now,” said the head with a tolerant smile. “He’s innocent until proven guilty; we mustn’t forget that. Anyhow, I gather the case will be bogged down in the Indian legal system for some years. And by the way, it’s Mumbai, not Bombay. We don’t want to offend Charles’s ethnic sensibilities, do we?”

  “No—of course not,” said Brother Colvin. Seething with frustration and other, less Christian, emotions, he took his leave.

  ON THURSDAY night Annie stood over Nathan while he took the painkillers. He tried not to be glad about it. He wasn’t yet ready to face the sea again.

  In Thornyhill woods, it was raining. Water drizzled out of the sky and dripped through the trees with the peculiar persistence of English rainfall. Hazel, peering out of a latticed window, thought the weather could keep it up all night and all the next day and probably right through the following week. It was that kind of rain. Although it was barely seven, she felt as if it had been dark for hours. Evening had set in midway through the afternoon with no real daylight to precede it, just the gray gloom of overcast skies and general Novemberitis. Bartlemy had cheered her up by allowing her to abandon math for supper—wild rabbit roasted in honey and chestnuts, creamed spinach, homegrown-apple tart—and now they were discussing the shortcomings of Hamlet and why too much thinking was bad for you.

  “He was stupid, wasn’t he?” Hazel insisted. “Not stupid like me, but clever-stupid, if you see what I mean.”

  “I see exactly what you mean,” Bartlemy said. “He used thought as a substitute for action, and when he did act, it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A common failing of highly strung, oversensitive adolescents. Of course, he was only sensitive to his own feelings, not other people’s, or he would have been less prone to commit haphazard murders. As it was, the native hue of resolution got sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

  “That’s what I said,” Hazel averred.

  “However,” Bartlemy resumed, “I didn’t know you were stupid. This is hardly a stupid conversation.”

  “My teachers say I am,” Hazel mumbled, caught off guard. “Anyway, my mum’s not that smart—nor’s my dad. To be clever, you have to have clever genes. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t underrate your mother. Or your father, for that matter. Everyone has brains. The question is whether they choose to use them. How will you choose?” Hazel was silent, briefly nonplussed. “Pleading bad genes is a very poor excuse for unintelligence,” Bartlemy concluded.

  That was the point when she wandered over to the window, evading a response, staring darkly into the dark.

  Neither of them saw the figure on the road nearby: little could be distinguished through the rain curtain and the November gloom. Only Hoover lifted his head, cocking an ear at the world beyond the manor walls.

  The man on the road wore jeans that flapped wetly round his calves and a heavy-duty sheepskin jacket without a hood. Raindrops trickled down his hair inside his turned-up collar. His face was invisible in the dark, but if it hadn’t been a passerby would have seen lean, tight features clenched into a lean tightness of expression, grimmer than the grim evening—grim with determination, or discomfort, or something of both. But there were no passersby. The road was empty and almost as grim as the man.

  He had left his car more than a mile back, close to the Chizzledown turning, when the slow puncture became too hazardous for driving. No one would want to change a tire on such a night, but he was a chief inspector in the CID, on more or less official business: he could have called a subordinate to pick him up, or the AAA or a local garage whose owner owed him a favor after he had prevented a robbery there. Instead he chose to walk through the woods, wet and growing wetter, wearing his grimness like a mask under the water trickle from his hair.

  It wasn’t even the best route for him to take, on foot or by car, but he often drove that way, though this was the first time in over a year he had found a reason to stop. There was no light on the road and from time to time he stepped in a puddle, cursing under his breath as the water leaked into his shoes. The only sounds were the squelch of his own footfalls, the hiss of the occasional oath, and the murmur of the rain. He didn’t know what made him turn around—instinct, perhaps, a sixth sense developed over years of seeing life from the dark side. He could make out little in the murk but had an impression of movement along the shoulder, a rustle beyond the rain—the sussuration of bending grasses, the shifting of a leaf. And then, light but unmistakable, the scurrying of many feet—small feet or paws running over the wet pavement. An animal, or more than one. Nothing human. Nothing dangerous. In an English wood at night, the only danger would be human. There were no panthers escaped from zoos, no wolves left over from ancient times—he didn’t believe in such stories. No animal could threaten him …

  He was not a nervous type but all his nerves tensed: Fear came out of the dark toward him. Fear without a name, without a shape, beyond reason or thought.

  Fear with a hundred pattering feet, just out of rhythm with the rain …

  He knew it was illogical, but instinct took over. He turned and ran. Ahead he saw the path through the trees, the gleam of a lighted window. He slipped in the wet and almost fell, lurching forward. Inside the house a dog barked once, sharp and imperative. The front door opened.

  The man stumbled through the gap into Bartlemy’s entrance hall.

  “Chief Inspector Pobjoy,” Bartlemy said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  IN THE living room he found himself seated by the fire, sipping some dark, potent drink that was both sweet and spicy. Hazel surveyed him rather sullenly; after all, he had once treated her as a suspect in a crime. He said, “Hello,” and, on a note of faint surprise, “You’ve grown up.” He wondered if he should congratulate her on becoming a young lady, but decided she didn’t look like an eager aspirant to young-lady-hood and he would do better to keep quiet. In any case, the Fear had shaken him—the violent, inexplicable Fear reaching out of the night to seize him. It wasn’t even as if it was very late.

  Bartlemy said, “There’s some apple tart left,” and threw Hazel an admonitory look when she muttered something about waste.

  The tart was hot, blobbed with clotted cream. If Eve had prepared such a tart, the gods would have forgiven her the theft of the fruit.

  Between mouthfuls Pobjoy said: “I had a flat.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t phone for help,” Bartlemy remarked. “On a night like this.”

  “Battery needs recharging,” Pobjoy explained.

  Hazel thought with a flash of insight: He’s lying. Why? Has he come here to spy on us?

 
She said: “Let’s see.”

  Pobjoy stared at her but didn’t answer.

  “Hazel, don’t be rude,” Bartlemy said mildly. “I’m always happy to see the inspector. He helped save Annie from a psychopathic killer—or have you forgotten?”

  “She saved herself,” Hazel argued. “She’s much tougher than she looks.”

  “I know,” Pobjoy said. “She’s a very brave woman.” He was disconcerted by his own recent cowardice, by the strange panic that had held him in its grip. He hid uncertainty behind the leftovers of his former grimness.

  Bartlemy looked faintly amused, as if he knew. “I think,” he said, “you’d better tell us what happened out there before you fell through my door. You were running away from something, weren’t you?”

  “It was nothing,” Pobjoy said. “Nothing I could see. The dark— some animal—I don’t know what came over me. I’m not one to jump at spooks just because I’m on a lonely road.”

  It was Hazel’s reaction that surprised him. “Them” she said, and her voice was gruff. And to Bartlemy: “It is, isn’t it?”

  “I fear so.”

  “But why were they after him?”

  “The rules have changed,” Bartlemy reiterated. “They’re out of control. You did well to run, my friend. Had they caught you, they would have entered your mind and driven you mad. Remember Michael Addison.”

  “This is nonsense,” Pobjoy said, setting down his plate, fortified by the apple tart on its way to his stomach and the afterglow of the unknown drink. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I don’t believe it. All that supernatural crap. I was just—spooked. That’s all.”

  “Then go outside,” Bartlemy said. “See for yourself.”

  Pobjoy got up, walked through the hall, opened the door.

  They were there, he knew it immediately. Watching for him. Waiting. Just beyond the reach of the light. He saw shadows shifting in the darkness—heard the whisper of the rain on the leafmold, and behind it another whispering, as of voices without lips, wordless and soulless. Suddenly he found himself picturing Michael Addison’s drooling mouth and empty eyes. Fear reached out in many whispers. The hairs crawled on his skin.