Bone And Dream : A St. Boan Mystery

by Joan Aiken

  I said hastily, ‘I’ll start hunting for the poem, sir. I’ll try the house first.’

  The safe, I thought, must be in the house, and that would be the obvious place to start. Given the fact that I had a key.

  I walked into the house, with Fuchsia following close behind me, as if she wanted to make sure that I did not pinch the spoons. But after she had invigilated me through three or four rooms we heard an angry shout from Sir Thomas in his cane chair:

  ‘Fuchsia! I must not be left! I need my beef tea – I need my toast!’

  With an impatient sigh, Fuchsia made for the kitchen, and soon I saw her carry out a tray. Through the window I also observed that Aunt Lal had sat down beside the old boy and was engaging him in talk.

  I went on prowling about the house. It was a queer mixture. The downstairs rooms were most ostentatiously elegant – posh – I felt they had been furnished to impress visitors, not for real use or comfort. Gilded, spidery-shaped chairs covered in grey-green shiny brocade, heavy satin curtains, dozens of small, boring, lavishly framed pictures with lights over them, walls covered in very fancy, textured paper, grey-green to match the chairs and curtains. It was like a tropical swamp. And all hospital-clean. Somebody must spend hours every day polishing and dusting. Could it be Fuchsia?

  Upstairs was different, much more untidy and humbly furnished. Visitors not expected up there, perhaps.

  But the link between upstairs and downstairs was books. And papers. Piled everywhere – knee-high on the stairs, toppling piles on window-sills, on chairs, tables, beds, or just on the floor. And sheets of paper – typed, scribbled, printed, in folders, envelopes, wallets, held by rubber bands, paperclips, bulldog clips, or just weighed down by bricks and lumps of granite.

  I was impressed. A selfish monster the old man might be, but there was no question that he had given his whole life to the pursuit of poetry – or poetry pursued him – the evidence was here, plain to see.

  And where to find his wretched poem? I felt like the person in a folk tale, ordered by the witch to sort out a whole room full of feathers by nightfall. And yet, somehow, I had a queer certainty that the poem was not in the house.

  Avoiding the attic floor – it seemed utterly unlikely that Sir Thomas ever made his way up that last steep flight of stairs – I went down and re-entered his ground-floor study. This at least was fairly tidy – in case of newspaper photographers, perhaps – gold-lettered leather-bound editions of his best-known works lined the shelves, the books and documents were in tidy heaps. A steel-and-leather wheelchair stood in a corner.

  Jonquil came wandering in, with Aunt Lal close behind.

  ‘Tod doesn’t like to be watched while he eats his toast,’ Aunt Lal murmured to me, ‘because he has lost his false teeth.’

  ‘There they are, in that bowl on the mantelpiece.’

  The dentures were made of gold.

  ‘Queen Alexandra gave them to him – he told me he always had tooth trouble, even when he was a boy.’ Aunt Lal picked up the bowl. ‘This dish is Ming – probably worth thousands.’ Then she turned to Jonquil, who was standing like a zombie, with her eyes fixed on nothing at all. ‘Dearie,’ she said quietly, ‘it’s time you came back. You must not stay in that place too long – Ned, can you find the bell? And ring it?’

  I gently lifted Jonquil’s hand from her pocket and found, as I had expected, that she was still clutching the two little objects, the hand-mirror for butterflies, the dinner-bell for mice.

  I slipped the bell from her unresisting clasp and shook it. It gave out a minute, silvery tingle, the noise that might be made by a flake of snow alighting on one of Santa’s sleigh-bells.

  Jonquil frowned at the sound, then drew in a deep breath and rubbed her hands over her face. She let out a little whimpering moan.

  ‘Oh!’ she sighed. ‘Why did you fetch me back? It is so much better there!’

  ‘Child,’ said Aunt Lal, ‘it is dangerous to stay there too long, you must not go there too often – not without at least leaving the bell in somebody else’s care. You need an ally, a sponsor.’

  ‘But there is nobody! Nobody I can trust.’

  ‘You can trust me. Or Ned here. Leave the bell with him.’

  ‘You won’t ring it too soon?’ Jonquil looked at me pleadingly. She seemed to understand Lal without any explanations of where there was.

  I noticed that her eyes were the grey-green of daffodil leaves.

  ‘It is awful here,’ she told me. ‘Agony! Like living tied over an ants’ nest. There is a sharp pain all the time inside my head – worse than pushing against sharp ends of wire.’

  Lal gave me a firm, admonishing look, took the Chinese bowl with the gold teeth in it and went back to the garden.

  ‘Tell me a bit about there,’ I said to Jon. ‘The place that you go to.’

  ‘It is the most beautiful place in the universe … I can get there, you see, by looking in my little glass.’

  She showed me the tiny mirror in the palm of her hand. I took it from her gingerly and looked into it. All I could see was the reflection of one of my own eyes – grey and misty. But as I went on looking the grey mistiness seemed to flicker and dissolve. Hastily I handed the mirror back to its owner.

  ‘What is the place like?’

  ‘A huge orchard. All kinds of fruit trees in blossom. I just wish I could stay there for ever.’

  ‘But Aunt Lal says that it is dangerous.’

  ‘But – don’t you see – while I am there I can’t hear the questions that Grandfather is asking. I can’t hear what he says. Something else answers for me – tells him what he wants to know.’

  ‘If you went there too often – stayed too long – you might never come back at all.’

  ‘I don’t see that that would matter.’

  Fuchsia came back into the house with the empty Bovril mug and toast plate. She gave me a glance of exasperation.

  ‘Well! You don’t seem to be making much progress. I told you, the likeliest place would be the safe. Granda keeps all his most valuable manuscripts there.’

  ‘Where is the safe, then. I haven’t come across it yet.’

  ‘It’s in the garden – in case the house should catch fire.’

  Fuchsia pointed out through the study window towards a small summerhouse building that stood in front of lilac trees at the top of the lawn which ran uphill quite steeply.

  ‘Does the safe have a key? Or is it a combination lock?’

  Fuchsia said sourly, ‘It has a key. But Granda lost that weeks ago.’

  I walked out of the house and up across the grass to the top of the garden. Jonquil started slowly after me, but a shout from the cane chair halted her.

  ‘Jonquil! Come back to me! I need you! I don’t like being left! In fact I can’t stand it!’

  Very reluctantly she turned and went back to him.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE LITTLE BUILDING, which had four pillars across an open front, protected a teak garden table, and on the table was a cast-iron safe, about the size of a gas cooker. It was painted dull green, panelled with gold.

  As I had expected, my key opened it easily. Inside, the safe was stuffed, almost to the roof, with a mass of scribbled handwritten sheets of paper.

  No doubt they would be worth a fortune to collectors.

  And the old boy’s envelope was there, lying right on top. Three verses written in a crabbed, elderly hand.

  I picked up the envelope and read the verses:

  ‘To me the history of my bone

  is dream

  and has no influence on what I do

  small wonder that I am is

  what I seem

  before some voice gave wilderness

  a name

  to where I stand is no great

  way to go

  to me the history of my bone

  is dream

  and yet the legend has a hungry

  theme

  coiling around the pounce from

/>   how to who

  small wonder that I am is

  what I seem –’

  I read the verses twice, but could not make much sense of them, simple though they were. But they made me feel vaguely uncomfortable, as if something behind me were shifting its balance, getting ready to swoop and bite.

  I glanced round nervously and shut the safe door, leaving it unlocked. Just before I did so a small grey lizard shot out from among the crumpled papers and scurried off among the lilac bushes.

  The lilac flowers were pink and white and their scent was very strong.

  I carried the envelope down to the old boy, passing a small pool with a trickle of water running into it. Three goldfish swam restlessly round and round in the pool.

  ‘Aha! Aha! I see that you have run to ground my wayward verses. Good, good, that is capital!’

  The old boy held out his hand for the envelope and read the lines on it with a look of great satisfaction. ‘Yes, yes, I can proceed from here. What do you think of them, Jonquil, my dear? Succinct, are they not? I shall dictate the following stanzas to you. Make ready with pen and paper.’

  Jonquil had resumed her position on the grass at his feet. She held a notebook and ball-point. She looked up at him and said in a toneless voice:

  ‘A villanelle. Very interesting.’

  Old Tod nodded. ‘Quite right, quite right, you clever little monkey! Ah, they teach you verse forms at your school, do they? As I grow older I confess I tend more and more to these formal uses.’

  Fuchsia came out and said, ‘Granda, it is time you moved indoors.’ And to me she said, ‘Your aunt has gone home. She left you a message to say that she would be late for supper as she had a visit to make on the way.’

  ‘I’ll be off, then.’ I waited for thanks but none came. I said, ‘Would you like Sir Thomas’s chair put under cover? It is going to rain tonight.’

  She gave me a surprised, not particularly grateful look, but answered, ‘Oh yes. All right. Fold it and put it in the summerhouse with the safe.’

  ‘And whatever you do, young man,’ Sir Thomas said fussily, ‘do not pass the fence beyond the lilac shrubbery, for there is a most dangerous tract of bog on the hillside. It is known as St Boan’s Mire and during the past century three people at least have lost their lives in its treacherous embrace. I have written several poems about it,’ he added, as if that increased its importance and menace.

  ‘I’m sure the boy knows all about the bog, Granda,’ said Fuchsia sharply. ‘Give me your arm now.’ She handed him two heavy walking-sticks with curved arm-rests.

  As Fuchsia helped him indoors, Jonquil trailing along behind like a sleep-walker, I heard the old poet say, ‘Yes, yes, it is high time I was indoors. The garden grows chill when the sun has passed its zenith. And I have a curious delusion – although the place is very silent, and lonely in fact when you girls are not beside me – I have a notion that there are eyes watching me from the shrubbery – eyes – of what kind I do not know – I wish indeed that they would come forth and display themselves. Or do I wish it? Jonquil!’

  He addressed Jonquil sharply, but she seemed deep in thought and took no notice.

  ‘Jonquil!’

  ‘Jonquil!’ said her sister sharply. ‘Answer when Granda speaks to you!’

  Chilled with apprehension I pulled out the little silver bell, which I had kept, and I rang it. The result was immediate. Jonquil pulled herself together and answered, ‘Yes, Grandfather?’

  ‘Aha, aha, you little minx!’ he rallied her playfully. ‘You were far, far away – were you not? Now. I wonder where you had got to? Let me hazard a guess! Is it a place where your old grandfather might follow? I have a notion that it might be so – that I might venture after you! What would you say to that? Eh? Eh?’

  They passed into the house.

  Horrified, sick with misgiving, I manhandled the cane chair into the shelter, and bolted for home.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AT SUPPER – WHICH, as always, was cooked by Uncle Adam – Lal told me that she had been to visit little Rose Mayfield in hospital.

  ‘She is dying, poor child. She has only a few days to go, now. She is under heavy sedation most of the time, and even in her clear intervals she wanders a great deal. Recites scraps of poetry, cries a little, and says she wishes “Grandy” would come to see her – but she knows that he is too busy to be bothered. She said one thing several times that struck me.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘She said, over and over, “I used to think I would be sure to meet him again later in the wonderful place.” “Where is that wonderful place, Rosie?” I asked her. “Oh,” she said, “it is all fruit trees, apple and pear and plum and peach – the trees are so green and the fruits are so red, it is like one of his best poems. But, lately, I have been frightened when I go there. A bad thing has got in. It isn’t safe there any more.”’

  ‘What kind of bad thing, did she say?’

  ‘No, when I asked that question she became very restless and started crying and rolling her head from side to side and the sister in charge came and gave her a tranquilliser. It would have been heartless to ask any more questions. The last thing she said was, “I don’t go there any more. I can’t go there any more.”’

  I told Aunt Lal about Jonquil’s there, and she said, ‘It sounds like the same place that Rose visited. You must keep a very careful eye on Jonquil, Ned, she is in very great danger.’

  ‘But how can I? I have to go home to Abbot’s Yarn – and even when I am here, I am not close to her – not even in the same house – and she slips off to that paradise place of hers so easily, she’s probably there now.’

  And I can’t blame her for doing so, I thought. If I had that bossy old tyrant beside me, day in day out, I would bolt off down any escape route that offered – and never mind the chances of getting back safely.

  But if he were to follow?

  Then I remembered my strange feeling at the top of the garden, by the lilac thicket – the feeling of somebody, something, close at hand, something hostile – and the sliding scurry of the little grey lizard as it escaped from among the manuscripts. I felt I knew what Aunt Lal meant by danger though I could not have put it into words.

  But then Aunt Lal said something that really froze my blood.

  She said, ‘The old ideas of Paradise, I wonder if they were folk memories, pre-Ice Age memories, of Eve’s apple orchard with dinosaurs crawling about under the fruit trees.’

  ‘When you say that Jonquil is in danger, Aunt Lal – do you mean real physical danger? Or the risk of being stuck for ever in a sort of no-man’s land in her own mind?’

  ‘Either. Both,’ said Aunt Lal. ‘And that’s why you have to monitor her, Ned. Did you know,’ she added parenthetically, ‘that Monitor Lizards are called that because they are supposed to be highly aware of crocodiles and let out a warning if ever one is in the neighbourhood? Mind you, I wouldn’t care to be in the neighbourhood of either of them . . .’

  That night I had horrendous dreams, dreams set in shadowy, scented orchards, among trees cascading with pink or white blossoms which ought to have been beautiful but were not, because of some outsize creatures sliding with frightening agility through the flower-laden branches, never quite visible, but audible because they hissed – was it one creature or were there several of them? And I was vainly hunting for little Jonquil and not daring to call her name aloud because someone, some thing, might hear me, and anyway her name was an unlucky one . . .

  The moment I woke I thought of poor Rose Mayfield saying, ‘A bad thing has got in.’

  And at breakfast Aunt Lal told me that Mrs Mayfield had telephoned to tell her that Rose had died in the night.

  ‘I suppose I had better go up later and tell the old boy,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose anyone else will. People in St Boan are too scared of him. You had better come along too, Ned; it will give you a chance to talk to Jonquil.’

  Glumly I agreed, though I was not
at all keen to meet Sir Thomas again.

  But he, we found, was in the throes of completing his poem, limping to and fro in his study (for the night’s rain still hung on, it was a soaking, foggy day, the sea masked from view, the lighthouse letting out its wail every four minutes). As we entered the house we heard the old boy declaiming words and lines with triumphant energy and then, with equal energy, calling for them to be deleted, struck out, thrown into the waste-bin:

  ‘Displaced, we roam the forest,

  and we climb

  unroped by sleep, the marathon

  of snow –

  ‘No, no, that will not do, strike out marathon, that will not do at all. Skeleton is better, take that down – unroped by sleep, the skeleton of snow – that gives the alliteration, do you not see, Jonquil, my dear?’

  ‘Perhaps you are right,’ came in Jonquil’s flat lifeless voice.

  ‘Of course I am right!

  ‘unroped by sleep, the skeleton

  of snow,

  to me the history of my bone

  is dream.

  ‘Yes, yes, that works, that marches! Set it down, set it down!’

  We had a glimpse of them through the open French window as we walked to the main door of the house. But Fuchsia, who met us in the front hall, told Aunt Lal fiercely that it was quite out of the question to talk to Sir Thomas just then.

  ‘No one is allowed to trouble him when he is at work.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you will be good enough to tell him – when he is quite at liberty,’ said Aunt Lal, and I wondered if Fuchsia recognised the frightful scorn in her voice, ‘that Rose Mayfield died last night and the funeral will be next Thursday.’

  ‘Oh, Granda won’t want to go to that. He never goes to funerals.’

  ‘No, I daresay not,’ snapped Aunt Lal.

  The booming voice came from the study:

  ‘late by my burglar’s key

  re-enter home

  make saurian snatch long

  lifetimes overdue