The Sword of Straw

by Amanda Hemingway

  Every Goodman had had a dog, a large shaggy creature of mixed parentage and universal goodwill, with bright, intelligent eyes under whiskery eyebrows, and a lolling tongue. This one was called Hoover, because he devoured crumbs, and indeed anything else that came his way. The most wonderful cooking smells in the world would forgather in Bartlemy’s kitchen, and the generosity of the leftovers made it canine heaven. Hoover had no reputation for savagery, welcoming every visitor, even the postman, with amiable enthusiasm, yet perhaps because of him the house had never been burgled before, except for the strange incident the previous year, and in that case the stolen object—which had belonged to someone else—had eventually been returned by Bartlemy himself, though no one knew how he retrieved it. The house was isolated, unprotected by alarms or security, and with the vague rumors that Bartlemy “collected” it should have been an obvious target, yet until that night in late April the criminal fraternity had left it alone.

  The burglars were two youths, as the newspapers would have called them, an Asian boy from Crowford who was only seventeen, and his sixteen-year-old sidekick, who was big and ginger-haired and not very bright. Getting in was easy: they broke a window, which was stupid, because the back door wasn’t locked, and were just checking out the sitting room when the dog pounced. He didn’t bark: it would’ve meant wasting time. Bartlemy came downstairs, wrapped in an enormous dark blue dressing gown with stars on it, to find the ginger-haired sidekick shivering in a corner while the other boy lay on his back with Hoover standing over him. He wasn’t growling—he never growled—but the boy could see, behind the panting tongue and doggy grin, two rows of large yellow teeth that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a wolf. There was a knife lying on the rug a little way away. Bartlemy picked it up by the blade. Afterward, the boy puzzled over how the house owner had known to come down, when neither the intruders nor the dog had made much noise.

  “This is—this is assault,” the youth stammered, keeping his voice to a whisper. “I can sue.”

  “I haven’t assaulted you,” Bartlemy pointed out in his placid way.

  “The dog—”

  “He hasn’t assaulted you, either.” Yet, said the ensuing pause.

  “We didn’t mean no harm,” offered Ginger, between sullenness and fright.

  “I’m sure you didn’t. I’ll telephone the police, and then you can sit down with me, and have a cookie, and while we wait you can tell me what you did mean.”

  The call was made, and somehow the boys didn’t argue, perching nervously on the edge of Bartlemy’s sofa and nibbling homemade cookies while Hoover stood by, watching them in a proprietary manner. Ginger was known for beating up older boys, and the little Asian—his name was Ram—made up in aggression what he lacked in size, but they sat as quiet as if they were at a vicarage tea party, and God was waiting with a thunderbolt for one of them to burp.

  “Someone sent you here, didn’t they?” said Bartlemy. “What were you looking for?”

  Mouths opened and shut, and Ginger choked on a cookie crumb, but this time it was Ram who looked most afraid.

  “No one sent us,” he said at last.

  “It was your own idea?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’m the one with the ideas.”

  “Do you think it was a good idea?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure no one sent you?” Bartlemy persisted.

  Ram turned pale, and his mouth closed tight, and he looked almost relieved when the police arrived. He knew just how not to talk to the police. He’d sat through many interrogations, he was still underage, and insofar as it concerned himself he knew the law as well as any solicitor. But this man with his unruffled manner, and his alarming dog, and his calm blue gaze that seemed to see straight into your mind—this was something far more demoralizing than any bullying copper. Ram had a horrible feeling that given time—and a few more cookies—he would have been telling Bartlemy things even his mother didn’t know. He was secretly thankful to settle for the more familiar option.

  Watching them go with a sigh, Bartlemy surmised that if they had been sent, Ginger, at least, knew nothing of it. He returned to bed, and in the half hour before sleep considered possible lines of inquiry. A few days later, he telephoned an acquaintance in the CID.

  SOME MONTHS had passed since their last meeting, and Inspector Pobjoy had become chief inspector, helped by his recent arrest of a serial killer when most of his colleagues hadn’t believed any murders had actually taken place. Bartlemy had been involved in that affair, which had been vaguely connected to the former theft at Thornyhill, and Pobjoy still darkly suspected that he knew many facts that had never emerged. There had been too many loopholes in the case, too many loose ends. Not that Bartlemy had ever been a suspect, though perhaps he should have been, caught as he was in the middle of things. However, Pobjoy was curiously glad to hear from him, and intrigued at the news of the attempted burglary, and he agreed instantly to come to Thornyhill for a cup of tea and an informal chat.

  “You should lock your back door,” he suggested when they met.

  “But if I did that,” Bartlemy said, “people wouldn’t be able to get in.” It was unanswerable. “Anyway, they broke a window. That’s the kind they were: crude, not very clever. The sort who would always break a window, if there was a window to break. I was rather surprised to find them so unsubtle. Kids like that usually give this place a miss. I would’ve expected any burglar who came here to be more…sophisticated.”

  “Apart from that business last summer,” Pobjoy said—carefully, since he felt the subject required care—“I notice you haven’t really had any trouble here.” He added: “I checked our records.”

  “Naturally,” Bartlemy said. “I assumed you would. No, we haven’t had much trouble at Thornyhill. I prefer to avoid it, if I can.” He didn’t say how, but Pobjoy, who was not a fanciful man, found himself wondering if the house had some intangible form of protection. Apart from the dog. He noted Bartlemy said we, perhaps including Hoover in the personal pronoun.

  The canine hero of the recent burglary attempt was currently sitting with his chin in Pobjoy’s lap and the classic please-feed-the-starving expression on his face.

  “Which is why,” Bartlemy was saying, “I was a little…disturbed by what happened. I can’t help feeling there must have been something—someone—behind it. On the surface, there is nothing to steal here but books, some old but unremarkable furniture, and my collection of herbs for cooking.”

  “The paintings?” Pobjoy asked, glancing up at a landscape in oils that seemed to consist mostly of gloom and a framed drawing so crowded with detail it was almost impossible to distinguish what it portrayed.

  “Generally done by friends or acquaintances,” Bartlemy said blandly. “That drawing, for instance, is unsigned. Richard wasn’t satisfied with it. Later, he went mad. People have sometimes been curious about my pictures, but their curiosity always seems to fade in the end.”

  “You said on the surface,” Pobjoy resumed, his narrow eyes narrowing still further, dark slits in the lean pallor of his face.

  “I have a certain article concealed here,” Bartlemy explained after a pause. “It was entrusted to me.” He didn’t say I am telling you this in confidence. Pobjoy already knew that.

  “The article that was stolen last year,” the inspector surmised. “The so-called Grimthorn Grail.”

  “Of course, it was never authenticated,” Bartlemy said. “Technically, it’s valueless. But I am concerned. I have lived here a long time, and no one has ever broken in until now.”

  “Is it secure?”

  Bartlemy smiled. “No burglar would ever find it, I assure you,” he said. “No ordinary burglar.”

  Pobjoy let that pass. “You think those boys were put up to it,” he summarized, “by someone interested in the Grail.”

  “It’s a possibility I would like to check. You would know if there were any likely collectors in the market for such items.”

 
“Those kind of gentlemen don’t usually have a record,” Pobjoy said with a trace of bitterness. “Too rich, too influential. But—yes, I should know. I might know. I’ll ask around.”

  “Thank you.” He poured more tea. “By the way, how is our murderer?”

  “What? Oh—I don’t know.” Pobjoy looked startled. For him, once a villain was convicted and imprisoned, that should be the end of the matter. “We never found any trace of his accomplice—the woman who masqueraded as his wife.”

  “I suspect,” Bartlemy said, “she wasn’t the kind of person who would allow herself to be traced.” He was remembering a malignant water spirit who had poured herself into the shape of a dead actress—a spirit now returned to the element from whence she came.

  Pobjoy, who hated loose ends and didn’t believe in phantoms, fretted at the recollection. “Do you think she could be involved in this latest affair?”

  “Hmm…I doubt it. Still, it is an idea.”

  As he drank his tea, Pobjoy seemed to become abstracted. Once, he asked: “How is…Mrs. Ward?”—hesitating over the inquiry as if it embarrassed him.

  “She’s very well,” Bartlemy said. “You should go and see her.”

  “I don’t think…she wouldn’t want…” Pobjoy’s excuses faltered and failed; he looked around for a change of subject, but didn’t find one.

  “It’s up to you,” Bartlemy said. “Annie doesn’t bear grudges.”

  At one time Pobjoy had wanted to arrest Nathan.

  The inspector retreated into silence and stayed there, until Bartlemy began to talk of something else.

  NATHAN AND Hazel Bagot had been friends from infancy, closer than brother and sister; they used to tell each other everything, but now they were getting older they needed their own secrets. Nathan didn’t tell Hazel about the city and the princess (not yet, he said to himself, not till it becomes important), and Hazel didn’t tell Nathan about the boy she was keen on at school. When they got together on the weekends and during the holidays, they talked about music and television and lessons, and feuds or allegiances with their classmates, and how parents never understood what it was like to be a teenager, because it must have been different for them. Hazel’s bedroom had evolved into a kind of nest, lined with prints and posters, cushioned with discarded clothing, floored with chip packages and CDs, where she and Nathan could curl up and listen to her latest musical discovery—usually something twangy and foreign sounding and faintly bizarre—while she related how her father, who had left last year, wasn’t allowed to come home anymore because he’d tried to hit her mother again, and how her mother had a new boyfriend who was rather old and a bit dull but nice.

  “They met through an ad in the paper,” Hazel said. “Lots of people do that now. Has your mum tried it?”

  “I don’t think she’s too keen on dating,” Nathan said. “There was you-know-who last year—I’m not sure if he ever asked her for a date, exactly, but—well, obviously it didn’t work out.” He didn’t need to say any more. Hazel knew what he was alluding to.

  “She must’ve loved your dad a lot,” she remarked. Nathan’s father had died in a car accident before he was born, or so he had always been told. “I mean, she’s not forty yet and really pretty, but she hasn’t had a proper boyfriend for years, has she?”

  “No.”

  “You wouldn’t mind though, would you?” They’d been over this territory before, but Hazel thought it was worth checking.

  “Of course not—as long as he was kind, and loved her. What about your mum’s new man? Do you think it’s serious?”

  “ ’Spect so. He brings her flowers, and that’s always a sign, isn’t it? She says he’s dependable, which is what she wants, after Dad. He’d never knock her about, or get drunk, or anything. He’s sort of boring, but that’s okay for her. She likes boring.”

  “Have you talked to him much?” Nathan queried.

  “Not really. He asked me about my homework once, but when I showed it to him he couldn’t do it.”

  “If you haven’t talked to him,” Nathan said, “you don’t really know if he’s boring or not.”

  “You’re being reasonable,” Hazel said sharply. “You know I can’t stand it when you do that. He—he gives off boring, like a smell. BO. Boring Odor. He walks around in a little cloud of boringness. Please, please don’t start being open-minded and tolerant about things. It’s revolting.”

  “When you shut your mind,” Nathan retorted, “you shut yourself inside it. That’s silly. Besides, I just said, give him a chance. You think he’s nice, don’t you? So he might surprise you. He might be fun after all.”

  “Mum doesn’t need fun,” Hazel said obstinately. “She’s my mum, for God’s sake. I like him, okay? He’ll do. I don’t have to be thrilled by him.”

  “Okay.” Nathan grinned, a little mischievously. Sometimes he enjoyed provoking her. She was always too quick and too careless in judging people, and slow to alter her opinions, and he liked being the only person who could ruffle her certainties.

  When he had gone she took out the picture she never showed anyone, cut off from the end of a group shot taken at the school disco. It was a picture of a boy with a fair childish face, wavy hair worn rather long—hobbit hair, said his detractors—blue eyes crinkled against the flashbulb. He smiled less than his classmates and Hazel believed he nursed a secret sorrow, though she could only speculate what it might be. (Of course, he could have been merely sullen.) He rarely spoke to her, hardly seemed to notice her, but somehow that only made him more fascinating. He didn’t have Boring Odor, she reflected—beneath their lack of communication she sensed the wells of his soul were fathoms deep. She stared at the photo for what felt like an age, racked with the pain of impossible longing, with anger at the hopelessness of it all, with shame because she would never be pretty enough to fascinate him in return. Her girlfriends all expected her to be in love with Nathan—Nathan with his dark alien beauty, his lithe athletic body, his indefinable uniqueness, charms she had known all her life and regarded with the indifference of familiarity—but she would only shrug at the suggestion, and smile, and hug the secret of her true affection to herself. She liked to be contrary, to keep Nathan as a friend—only a friend—and give her heart to someone nobody would suspect. Until the moment she dreamed of—the distant, elusive moment when they came together at last. The moment that would never happen…

  Presently she dived underneath the bed, groping behind the schoolbooks and sweaters and CD cases, and pulled out a carrier bag that chinked as it moved. The bag of things that had belonged to her great-grandmother Effie Carlow, who was supposed to be a witch—the bag she had always meant to throw away, only somehow she hadn’t gotten around to it. Hazel hadn’t wanted to believe in witchcraft but she had seen too much of Effie not to know what she could do—at least, until she drowned. You, too, have the power, the old woman had told her. It’s in your blood. The Carlows were offshoots of the Thorn family on the wrong side of the blanket: there was said to be a strain of the Gift in their genes, dating back to Josevius Grimthorn, a magister of the Dark Ages who had reputedly sold his soul to the Devil. When Effie spoke of such things Hazel was frightened—frightened and skeptical both at once. (Skepticism was her protection from the fear, though it didn’t work.) She had no intention of taking up her great-grandmother’s legacy, of dabbling in spells and charms and other stupidities. But now there was Jonas Tyler, who wouldn’t look at her, and the moment that would never happen, and maybe…maybe…among the sealed bottles with their handwritten labels was a love-philter, or in Effie’s notebook there was an incantation, something to make her irresistible, just to him.

  One by one she took the bottles out of the bag and peered at the faded writing, trying to make it out.

  BACK AT the bookshop, Nathan sat down to supper with his mother. In the summer months she tended to favor salads, but the weather was still vacillating and he noted with satisfaction that it was cauliflower cheese. “You should have brought
Hazel back,” Annie said. “There’s plenty.”

  “I wasn’t sure,” he explained. “Have you met her mum’s new boyfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “She says he’s nice, but boring.”

  “He seems very nice, certainly,” Annie said. “I don’t know about boring. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to him.”

  There was a brief interlude of cauliflower cheese, then Nathan resumed: “Has Uncle Barty said any more about the burglary?”

  “Apparently he called the inspector. You remember: the one from last year.”

  “The one with the funny name?” Nathan said, with his mouth full.

  “Pobjoy.” There was a shade of constraint in her manner. She hadn’t completely forgiven the absent policeman for his suspicions.

  But Nathan had forgotten them. “He was clever,” he said judiciously, “even if he did get lots of things wrong. I bet he guessed those burglars were after the Grail.”

  “We don’t know that. Anyway, Rowena Thorn has it, not your uncle.”

  “She gave it to Uncle Barty to look after. The traditional hiding place is at Thornyhill: they once discussed it in front of me.”

  “How do you know she—”

  “I just know.”

  Annie didn’t argue anymore. Even after fourteen years there were times when she found her son’s alert intelligence disconcerting.

  “The thing is,” he went on, “they were just ordinary burglars, right? Not like the dwarf last time.”

  “Mm.”

  “So they wouldn’t know about the Grail unless someone told them. It couldn’t have been any of us, so they must have found out by magic.”

  “They’re just kids,” Annie said. “I don’t think they’re the sort to use magic.”