Thorn

by Sarah Rayne

  While they ate, Dan asked about the founding of Ingram’s. ‘Eighteen thirty-five, wasn’t it? That has to make it one of the oldest publishing houses in London, surely.’

  ‘It isn’t as old as Collins – HarperCollins it is now, of course – or some of the Scottish publishers like John Murray or Blackwood’s. But it’s quite old.’ She ate with a kind of fastidious sensuality that was alarmingly erotic.

  ‘Do go on,’ said Dan.

  ‘We started with halfpenny ballads and news-sheets for the Newgate crowds at public hangings and progressed from there to penny dreadfuls.’

  ‘Hannah’s Highwayman and The Gambler’s Tragedy.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Did they really have titles like that?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But then I’ve seen books on today’s shelves with titles like Flesh-eaters and Decay,’ said Dan. ‘The paper splattered with gore and the author committing verbicide on every other page.’

  She laughed at that. Her teeth were white and the two front ones were very slightly uneven. It gave her a faintly gamine look. Dan thought it might be this that at times gave her the appearance of being younger than she was. ‘We do try to keep up a good standard of English at Ingram’s,’ she said. ‘We publish children’s books, up to the age of about twelve or thirteen, but not jolly-hockey-sticks heartiness.’

  ‘Not the Famous Five or Ursula in the Upper Fourth?’

  ‘No, of course not. Where on earth do you get your ideas of nineties children, Dan?’

  Dan grinned, and said, ‘Tell me some more about the folklore idea.’

  She sipped her wine before replying, and Dan received the impression that she was arranging her thoughts. ‘Royston was considering starting a separate in-house imprint dealing solely with English folk legends for children,’ she said. ‘I expect you know the kind of thing.’

  ‘Robin Hood and Grace Darling and Greyfriars Bobby.’

  ‘Yes. But also the old ballads. He thought there was a wealth of untapped material, and also there’d be a market with the schools. Folk music isn’t national curriculum, but most schools quite like it as a sideline for school orchestras and projects and plays. I’ve suggested to the board that it would be rather nice if Royston’s wishes could be carried out, and also,’ said Thalia, suddenly sounding very shrewd, ‘I’ve suggested that it might be quite lucrative for Ingram’s.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well, this isn’t for publication yet, Dan, but we think we might do it. At the moment we’re considering how viable it is. Availability of the lesser-known ballads, things like provenance, whether there would be enough to fill more than one book, whether too many are simply plagiarised versions of one root. The copyrights would have to be looked at and possibly details about performing rights as well. The board have suggested that I compile a report. It’s a tallish order because I’ve never done anything like it but I’m quite keen to try.’

  ‘It sounds rather a good idea,’ said Dan.

  ‘Well, I think I could do it. And there’s also the fact,’ said Thalia, meeting Dan’s eyes levelly, ‘that it would be a way of – of blotting out losing Edmund.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘More wine?’

  ‘Please.’

  As Thalia removed the plates and set out the cheese board along with Bath Olivers and celery, and a bowl of fruit, Dan said, ‘Are you the first Ingram lady who’s taken an active part in the business?’ He felt her hesitation at once. Damn, she knows what I’m getting at. But he said, as offhandedly as he could manage, ‘There are a couple of fairly colourful females in your family’s history, aren’t there?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know much about them. They were both causes célèbres in their day, but it’s a long time ago.’

  She was backing off. She had talked openly and intelligently about Ingram’s and about her project for her dead cousin, and Dan could use a great deal of it for his articles. But now she was putting up the barriers. It was polite and courteous but it was unmistakable, and Dan abandoned the subject regretfully. If you had a couple of axe murderers in your family history you were probably entitled to be uncommunicative about them.

  And then he asked about Edmund.

  With the speaking of the name, Dan was suddenly and inexplicably uneasy. The daylight had almost faded, and Thalia had not yet switched on any lights, so that the small dining table was immersed in pools of shadow. He fought down the compulsion to turn sharply round and scan the dark corners of the room.

  Thalia was still seated opposite him, resting her elbows lightly on the table, cupping her half-empty wine glass between both hands, and the uncertain light created the impression that her eyes were sunk in deep, dark pits. Dan had the disquieting feeling that it was no longer Thalia who was seated opposite him but something evil and greedy. Something that had jealously clawed off a brother’s masculinity ninety years ago, and something that had hacked a faithless husband’s flesh to bloody tatters ninety years before that.

  ‘You asked about Edmund.’ Thalia’s voice was soft.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Edmund is so brilliant, Dan. So perceptive.’ Her voice held a blurred, unreal note, and Dan felt as if someone had brushed down his spine with an icy finger. She said ‘is’, not ‘was’.

  He chose his next words carefully. ‘He would have made a good successor to Royston Ingram?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ In the shadowy room her thin face was suddenly alight with haggard radiance. ‘Yes, he has knowledge and insight, and even at such a young age—’ There was the briefest movement of her head, as if she tilted it to listen, and then she smiled slightly. Her eyes were blank black discs.

  And then she set down her glass and deliberately reached out to a small table lamp behind her. Warm light flooded over the table at once, chasing back the crawling shadows. ‘Dan, I’m sorry. I’m talking as if he’s still alive. I do it sometimes. I am aware that I do it. But it’s been so difficult to accept his death, you see. He was such a golden creature.’

  ‘If you would like to talk about it – I mean not as part of the interview . . .’ Blast, I’m rotten at this kind of thing, thought Dan. And how genuine is she?

  But Thalia said, ‘I would far rather talk about something more interesting.’

  Dan caught the deepening of her voice. We’re off, he thought, and felt a prickle of apprehension, but beneath it the stirring of desire. He met her eyes levelly and said, ‘Such as?’

  ‘Whether we might take the rest of the wine to bed?’

  Dan was aware that he had been deliberately and calculatedly wined and dined and feted – not lavishly and not clumsily, but elegantly, and with some subtlety. It was this subtlety that made the issuing of the blatant invitation very nearly jarring. Dan was unable to decide if it denoted extreme sophistication or plain naivety. But there was nothing naive about Thalia. There might be vanity. Yes, there had been a flavour of I-know-you’re-going-to-accept about her invitation. And the trouble is, thought Dan, I am going to accept. I’m a bit worried about her motives and I’m very worried indeed about the suggestion that she thinks Edmund is still alive somewhere. I’m not worried about impotence – my God, I’m not! – but that’s probably all I’m not worried about. Well, not at the moment. She repels me on the one hand and fascinates me on the other, but as long as I can keep the repulsion at bay and the fascination in the foreground . . . I wonder how old she is. Forty? Forty-two?

  Thalia reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were cool and silken. She said, softly, ‘I am probably fifteen years your senior, Dan. Does that matter?’

  ‘You read thoughts?’ It always fascinated and amazed Dan how immensely erotic the stroking of palm with finger could be.

  ‘An educated guess.’ She regarded him. ‘Does it matter?’

  Dan wondered whether to say, ‘Madam, age will not wither you, nor custom stale your infinite variety,’ and decided against it. ‘It doesn’t matter the least bit.’

  He was not unaccust
omed to being on the receiving end of seduction. He was not unaccustomed to exerting the technique on his own account either. He thought he was pretty much prepared for what was ahead, but what he was not prepared for was for his own character, the dark, greedy Margot, suddenly to claw her way into his mind and from there into the lamp-lit sitting room. When Thalia issued that odd, unsubtle invitation, Dan heard a black echo of Margot luring one of her wretched cat’s-paw lovers into bed. For several seconds he could very nearly see Margot, exactly as he had depicted her – tall and thin and faintly haggard – standing just behind Thalia, like a ghost twin or a phantom image seen in the jolting window of a railway carriage or a deserted late-night bus.

  It was the most bizarre thing he had ever experienced. He thought he might well doubt his sanity in the morning, but if he was really crossing the line and entering some strange half-world where his characters were not only real but crawling out of the woodwork to seduce him, it was very necessary indeed to put from his mind certain of Margot’s grislier techniques. It was absolutely vital not to remember the chapter where she had sucked one of her poor wretched young men dry several times over without respite, using fingers and lips to augment her body, leaving him moaning on the bed, clutching his groin which throbbed with agonising cramp. What they used to call an attack of lovers’ balls. Dan had dredged this expression up from the magpie corners of his mind, and he had put the episode in to spice up Margot’s character and add the obligatory vein of steamy sex.

  By the time they reached the bedroom his tangled emotions were warring with one another and he no longer knew which of the two women he was undressing. Thalia lit candles and set the silver holders on a low dressing table, so that the soft blurred discs of light reflected over and over in the mirror. As Dan parted Thalia’s thighs and slid between them, there was a moment when the candle flames flickered and danced, throwing distorted images in the mirror’s depths. On the rim of his vision he caught the fleeting glimpse of a figure in the mirror’s smoky depths – or maybe emerging out of it. Someone with thin, sexless hips and haggard eyes and a curving, hungry mouth, holding out hands that were dark and dripping . . . There was a faint stirring on the other side of the bed, as if someone had turned back the sheets for a moment and then slipped in beside them.

  Margot, straight from that gore-drenched killing of Rosamund’s parents.

  The sensation sent Dan’s body soaring into fierce, helpless passion and when Thalia slid her hands between his thighs and began to caress him to point-of-no-return arousal, he felt Margot’s thin, bony fingers twining with Thalia’s, digging her sharp little fingernails into his skin. There was a moment when there were unmistakably two sets of hands exploring his body, and the thought, God Almighty, I’m about to screw them both! skidded across his mind. This is probably most men’s major erotic fantasy, he thought incredulously. One in front of me, one behind . . . And then he felt the butterfly touch again, and he thought: if whichever of them is doing that keeps on doing it, this is going to be the shortest encounter in history . . . No, it’s all right. Here we go, then . . .

  He dressed swiftly in the cold, early-morning light, considering whether to wake Thalia before leaving or whether to just leave quietly, putting a note on the table, and phoning her later in the day.

  He did not want to see Thalia over breakfast. He admitted it at last, and considered the admission carefully. It had nothing to do with embarrassment and nothing to do with motives of delicacy. It was simply that having dined with a faintly sinister lady by soft, golden lamplight, and having explored her body by candlelight, he did not want the dark romance to melt before a forty-something woman in a dressing gown, frying bacon for breakfast. Half-baked romanticism, Daniel? Or something deeper?

  He knew perfectly well that it was something deeper. He was already uneasily aware that Thalia and Margot were becoming inextricably tangled in his mind; he did not like either of them very much, and he certainly did not like the emotions that had been dredged up from his deepest mind earlier on. The trouble was that he might still need Thalia to find out about Imogen and he would certainly still need Margot. But he needed Margot as a cold, merciless bitch who could wind a seductive bewitchment into a man’s heart and into his loins, and he did not want that witchery spoiled by seeing her in a dressing gown, or with bad breath in the morning, or looking middle-aged without make-up. He wanted Thalia and Margot both to be mysterious, ageless temptresses; creatures of nightshade deadliness, sable-haired and sloe-eyed . . . ‘Come into my parlour, said the villainess to the romantic lead . . .’ – No, that had been Margot, Thalia had made that suggestion about the wine. ‘Come into my bedroom, my dear, and see how hungry I can be . . . Bring the wine while you’re about it and we’ll slake all our thirsts . . . My, what strong thighs you have, my dear . . .’ All the better to ride you, madam . . . ‘And my, what splendidly stiff manhood you have . . .’ All the better to screw you, madam . . .

  I think, said Dan to himself, very firmly indeed, I really do think that I’d better get out of this particular spider’s clutches before I lose my grip on reality entirely. And Margot, you bitch, if you’re going to behave in this unruly manner, you might have to be killed off earlier than you expect.

  He went out into the odd half-world of the extreme early morning and, after walking for a while, picked up a cruising taxi near Langham Place, which took him home.

  His own flat was untidy; the carpet needed vacuuming and the bedroom was strewn with cast-off sweaters and yesterday’s shirt and three pairs of socks.

  Dan had never been so glad to see any of it. He had never been so grateful for the blessed familiarity and he was even pleased to see the trail of cornflakes on the kitchen worktop where Oliver had taken the packet upside down out of the cupboard. Oliver was still in bed, and Dan moved quietly about his own bedroom. His brother might later ask if he had had a good evening, but he was more likely to avoid the subject altogether, partly from tact and partly from embarassment.

  At half past six Dan gave up the fight to sleep, got up, brewed a pot of coffee, made a sketchy attempt to tidy the worst of the chaos and sat down at his desk with a sense of relief. He had sometimes heard writers – or maybe they were only would-be writers – wax complaining about their work and their characters, cursing their heroes and denouncing their heroines as irritating. This was completely incomprehensible; Dan loved every one of his characters with consuming passion. He embarked on a new chapter with a feeling of safety and homecoming. While he was here, the world and its problems could go hang for a while.

  Rosamund was by this time nicely incarcerated in the old Victorian madhouse. Dan had unashamedly used Oliver’s notes, which had been so vivid and so graphic that they would probably give him nightmares. Oliver had turned up several primary-source references to Victorian workhouses, and also to the original Bedlam sited first at Bishopsgate and later at Lambeth. These conjured up an appalling image of people discarded by society and forgotten: orphaned children and elderly, impoverished men and women flung into workhouses to sew sackcloth aprons or mailbags; long windowless dormitories and wards where the stench of human excrement and human sweat was like a thick wall, and where the reek of sadness and loneliness and neglect was just as strong. There were horrific descriptions of what was called a commode bench: a wooden structure like a multi-seated earth closet, to which the incontinent and the paraplegic and the severely retarded were strapped for months on end. Dan read the descriptions feeling a bit sick, and was grateful to hear Oliver making coffee and toast in the kitchen. There was the smell of burning, and then determined sounds of a second onslaught on the toaster. Presently Oliver appeared with a cup of coffee which he set down at Dan’s elbow along with a plate of buttered toast, and went off to shower. Dan ate and drank with enjoyment and felt as if he was back in his own skin again.

  It was time now for Rosamund to go into the long sleep that was the kingpin of the book and the heartwood of the ancient legend. This dramatic plummet into un
consciousness had been steadily drawing closer ever since she had discovered the mutilated remains of her parents and spun into hysteria, and Dan had considered several methods for creating the actual sleep. It would have been nice to have somehow introduced a spinning wheel, or at the very least some kind of spindle mechanism, but he had abandoned the idea in favour of a straightforward drugged slumber – perhaps even a full-blown coma – which was something that modern readers would more easily identify with.

  With this in mind, he had earlier in the week borrowed an armful of medical books from the nearest library. He tumbled them on to his desk and inspected his booty. Some of the books were long-winded and some were technical and most were multi-syllabic. One proved to be a kind of Lambs’ Tales From Psychiatry, which explained hypnotism in terms of bright swinging pocket watches and started off by saying, ‘Sigmund Freud believed that dreams tell us a lot about our lives.’ Two turned out to be written wholly in German and would therefore have to be returned unopened, which was a nuisance because they were heavy to carry.

  Dan stacked them crossly in the hall to await his next forage in the library, and returned to his desk to pick his way through the maze presented by the rest. He started with the hallucinogenic drugs, and read solemnly about mescaline and marijuana and lysergic acid diethylamide, only realising after ten minutes that this last was, of course, the LSD of the flower children of the sixties and seventies. He cast the book irritably aside. Beleaguered on all sides she might be, but Dan was blowed if he was going to let his heroine be felled by a plot device that was twenty-five years out of date. He turned hopefully to the chapters on barbiturates and psycho-active drugs, and considered whether Rosamund might be sent into her death-like coma by a deliberate overdose of chloral hydrate or methaqualone, both of which were apparently sedative-hypnotic and either of which could be administered by the manipulative doctor with satisfyingly spectacular consequences. Or maybe it would be better for her to be subjected to psycho-active substances, which could modify the biochemical or physiological processes of the brain.