The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  All Clare could do was laugh, but that was enough to clear the last cobwebbed distress of the previous night from her mind. She was finally beginning to feel more like her normal self. Now if only Janey had been able to find Felix. . . .

  “Do get dressed, Clare,” her mother repeated as she left the room. “Your breakfast will be ready in just a minute or so.”

  “I love you, too!” Clare called after her.

  2.

  Felix awoke alone in bed, his headache gone. The experiences of the previous night, real events and dreams alike, tumbled through his mind in a confusing muddle, but clearest of all was the memory of Janey and the Gaffer sending him off.

  He thought for one moment that it had all been a dream‌—for here he was, back in the Gaffer’s spare bedroom as though he were just waking on his first morning back in the village‌—but no, they had sent him away. That had been real. The memory was too sharp, and too painful, to have been a dream.

  And last night, waking to find Janey beside him again?

  He looked around the room. If he was here‌—though not entirely sure how he came to be here‌—then that hadn’t been a dream either.

  He sat up, feeling a little groggy, though otherwise no worse for the wear.

  So how had he come to return?

  His duffel and accordion case stood near the door, Clare’s cane leaning against them. His jacket was hanging from the back of a chair, his clothes in an untidy hoard on its seat.

  He tried to remember what he could. After the argument, he’d gone up to Clare’s. Then there’d been the walk from her house; playing his accordion by the sea; the storm; going to Lena’s hotel room to lend her Clare’s cane. And then . . . then it all became confusing. Nightmare images. He’d been dead‌—executed. Cut down from the oak tree to lie in the mud where the woman‌—

  That had been a dream.

  He shivered, remembering her features.

  She’d been making love to his corpse. And superimposed over that memory was the image of Lena also making love to him, but on the bed in her hotel room. The similarities were shrill‌—from the symmetry of the two women’s positions to his own forced immobility. It had been as though he were an outsider sitting inside the shell of his own body. . . .

  Had that been real, or was it the trace memory of yet another dream?

  Last night, Janey had said something about him having been drugged.

  Lena drugging him.

  Try though he did, Felix couldn’t remember any of it. Not clearly. Only as vague troubling images that flickered behind his eyelids whenever he closed his eyes.

  Sighing, he got out of bed and put on his clothes. He started to wash up in the bathroom, but his legs began to feel weak, his stomach queasy, and he got no further than washing the sour, cottony taste from his mouth before he had to go lie down again.

  But not back in his room. He felt sick, but not sick enough to forgo some answers.

  He made it downstairs where he found both Janey and the Gaffer sitting at the kitchen table having their breakfast. They shot him identical looks of worry mixed with guilt. If he hadn’t been feeling so nauseated, he might have teased the pair of them, but it was all he could do to make his way back out to the living room and lie down on the couch before his legs gave way from under him. He lay there, waiting for the room to stop spinning, hoping he wouldn’t throw up.

  Janey followed him out and sat down on the couch, the movement of her weight on the cushions making his stomach lurch.

  “Felix?” she asked.

  “I. . . I’ll be okay. . . .”

  “You don’t look okay.”

  He tried to find a smile without success.

  “Actually,” he said, “I feel awful.”

  “Perhaps we should take you into Penzance,” the Gaffer said. “To the hospital.”

  He’d followed Janey into the living room and now stood near the stairs, leaning against the banister, obviously hesitant to come much closer.

  Felix shook his head‌—and immediately wished he hadn’t. Every movement made him want to hurl.

  “No hospital,” he managed.

  If he hated being sick, he hated hospitals more. As far as he was concerned, they were designed solely to make you feel worse than you already did, though how he could feel any worse than he did at the moment, he couldn’t imagine.

  “It might be a good idea,” Janey said. “We’ve no idea what kind of drug that woman fed you.”

  “She did drug me?”

  Janey nodded.

  “And you brought me . . . here?”

  “All on her own she did, my robin,” the Gaffer said.

  Felix looked from one to the other, moving only his eyes.

  “You both believe me now?” he asked. “That I had nothing to do with these people. . . .”

  Janey laid a hand on his shoulder. “Of course we believe you. We were rotten not to have given you the chance to explain.”

  “We went a bit mad, I suppose,” the Gaffer added. “I’m sorry, Felix. Sorrier than I could ever say.”

  For all his nausea, that made Felix feel a hundred times better. Deep in his chest, a tightness eased. An ailing part of his spirit began to heal.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “We all screw up.”

  “But not this badly,” Janey said.

  “It’s okay,” Felix repeated. “Really it is.”

  “About that hospital,” the Gaffer began.

  Felix shook his head again, sending up a new wave of nausea.

  The Gaffer eyed him for a long moment. Some of the heaviness that had been lodged behind his eyes had faded while they spoke. He straightened his back and nodded.

  “Then you’ll be wanting some tea,” he said.

  That brought a real smile momentarily to Felix’s lips. Trust Tom Little. If it needed a cure, why then, it was tea that would cure whatever the ailment. The Cornishman’s answer to chicken soup.

  “Tea would be great,” he allowed.

  “You should just rest now,” Janey said as the Gaffer went to put a new pot on.

  Felix closed his hand about hers as she started to get up to leave as well.

  “I don’t want to be anywhere but here,” he said.

  Smiling, Janey remained sitting on the couch beside him.

  3.

  Willie Keel appeared at Lena’s door, bright and early. He stood out in the hallway, cap in one hand, the other hand extended towards her.

  “Got the job done,” he said. “Just like you wanted.”

  The sleepless night had left Lena in a foul mood, but she kept a rein on her temper. Depending on how things went, she might still need Willie’s help again.

  “I don’t have cash,” she said. “Can I give you traveler’s cheques?”

  “Are they in sterling?”

  “Of course.”

  Lena looked in her purse to see how much she had left in traveler’s cheques. Just a little under six hundred pounds.

  “How about if I give you five hundred today and we can go together to the bank for the rest on Monday morning?”

  Keel considered that for a moment.

  “Well, now,” he said with a frown. “That wasn’t our bargain, as I recall it. You were the one who called me up in the middle of the bloody‌—”

  “Are you having some trouble, miss?”

  Lena looked up to find Jim Gazo standing in the hallway no more than a few steps away‌—not a flicker of recognition in his eyes, just as she’d asked. He’d come upon them so quietly that neither she nor Keel had been aware of his approach.

  If Keel reminded Lena of a weasel, then Gazo was a grey-eyed bull. He was broad-shouldered and tall, his features handsomely chiseled except for a nose that had been broken once and never set properly. He kept his dark hair short, and with the care he took of his physique, whatever he wore looked good on him. Considering his size, his ability to be unobtrusive and next to silent on his feet was one of his major assets. No one wanted a bo
dyguard’s presence constantly screaming protection‌—unless that was a necessary part of the job, and then Gazo could handle that equally well.

  Lena glanced at Keel who was trying to surreptitiously place the newcomer without being obvious about it. He wasn’t having a great deal of success.

  “I. . .” she began.

  “There’s no problem,” Keel said quickly. “Traveler’s cheques would be perfect.”

  With Keel’s back to him, Gazo allowed a flicker of a smile to touch his lips before he gave Lena a nod and continued on down the hall to his room. Keel followed her back into her room where she sat down by the dresser. She dug about in her purse for a pen, then signed over the required number of cheques and handed them to him.

  “I’ll ring you tomorrow morning,” he said as he stuffed them quickly in the pocket of his jacket. “Unless you’ve got other work for me today?”

  “Tomorrow will be fine,” Lena told him.

  She hobbled back to the door with him and closed it firmly behind him. She started to lock it, then reconsidered. She hadn’t asked Willie how he’d managed his success with the Mabley woman, but it had been done, and knowing Bett, she knew that Bett would be in a worse mood than ever after having been thwarted. She waited a few moments to give the hallway time to be cleared, then limped painfully down to Gazo’s room. He opened it on the first knock, gaze shifting quickly left and right, down either length of the hall, before it settled on her.

  “Bad move?” he asked.

  Lena shook her head. “No, it was just the right one.”

  Gazo glanced down at her leg and noted the swelling. “Did Bett do that to you?”

  “Would you believe I fell off a bike?”

  “Coming from you? Yes. You don’t know the meaning of doing things halfway. Do you want to come in?”

  Lena nodded. “I got in Bett’s way last night and though I’m not sure if he knows it or not, I’d just as soon be somewhere he can’t find me.”

  When Gazo offered her his arm to lead her into the room, Lena couldn’t help but remember Felix and all of his small kindnesses. She could feel her eyes start to well up with tears, and blinked fiercely.

  Damn him.

  Damn this whole situation.

  When Gazo showed concern, she pretended more pain in her ankle than she actually felt as an excuse for the shiny glisten that thinking of Felix had brought to her eyes.

  “Daddy’s flying in today,” she said once she was sitting and had her emotions under a little better control. “With John Madden.”

  Gazo, moving like a panther for all his bulk, sat down on the bed.

  “So what’s going on?” he asked. “Or do I even want to know?”

  Lena shook her head. “You don’t want to know.”

  This is what it’s like to have no friends, Lena thought, astonished at the realization. She’d never really thought of it before. She had employees, from Jim Gazo here to her maids and gardeners at home. She had every kind of person willing to spend time in her company, trying to impress or waiting to be impressed, but no friends. Not one.

  Right now she would give anything to have someone with whom she could share the turmoil that tore at her heart. Someone who would understand. Unfortunately, the only person she could think of who fit the bill was Felix Gavin, and she’d closed the book on his ever giving her a moment of his time again.

  Last night’s bad dreams came roiling back through her mind.

  Put them aside, Lena, she told herself. Put it all aside. It was time to carry on. Get that mask in place and don’t let it slip again.

  Imagine Bett sniffing out her present weakness. . . .

  “So tell me, Jim,” she said. “What’s new in Boston?”

  “Other than the Celtics being in top form?”

  4.

  Like Felix, Janey had her own troubling memories to deal with‌—both real and dreamed‌—but unlike him, there was no vagueness in her sense of recall. It wasn’t something for which she felt grateful. Images circled around and around in her mind, as though they were spliced together on a tape loop. . . .

  The scene outside on Chapel Place, when she and the Gaffer had sent Felix off.

  Driving through the rain.

  Felix in the American woman’s bed.

  Her mother as an alcoholic bag lady.

  Forgive me.

  And the secret Dunthorn book, spilling out its music, so magical at first, until the shadows closed in and then it turned so very, very dark. . . .

  She was happy to be with Felix, sitting on the couch with him to keep him company, but she didn’t like the silence. Because it gave her too much time to think. It made it too easy to start the tape loop spinning its captured images through her mind and then all she wanted to do was just hit something . . . anything, but preferably the woman who’d drugged Felix, because‌—

  She jumped when the doorbell rang.

  Now who . . . ? she started to think, but then she remembered the Rolling Stone reporter who was supposed to be by today and thought for one horrible moment that it was him coming to take his photos, and here she was, looking like death warmed over. But when the front door opened, it was Clare who stepped inside.

  “Who’s that then?” the Gaffer asked, coming out of the kitchen.

  Seeing Clare, he smiled.

  “Decided to forgive me?” Clare asked.

  “You were right and we were wrong, my flower,” he replied. “We should be the ones asking for your pardon. If you hadn’t. . .”

  His voice trailed off as Clare waved a hand at him.

  “It’s done,” she said. “Let’s not worry over it anymore.”

  She turned to step into the living room, her gaze sliding past Janey to where Felix lay on the sofa. Relief settled over her features. It wasn’t until that moment that Janey realized just how anxious Clare had been. As Clare looked at Felix, a tightness eased from around her eyes and the corners of her mouth.

  “You did find him,” Clare said.

  She came farther into the room to have a closer look at him and some of her worry returned.

  “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “Well, the woman did drug him,” Janey began, but then Felix cracked open an eye and looked at the pair of them.

  “I wish you wouldn’t talk about me like I wasn’t here,” he said.

  “Feeling better then, are we?”

  Her tone was teasing, for all that the question was serious. She gave his hand a squeeze.

  Clare sat down on an ottoman that she pulled over closer to the couch. The Gaffer came into the room as well and, after moving the Dunthorn book, settled into his own chair.

  “A bit,” Felix replied. “I’m not ready to go body surfing out on the bay or anything.”

  Janey didn’t hear him for a moment. She stared at the book that the Gaffer had moved, the memory of its music‌—both the glad and the dark‌—moving through her mind before she turned back to Felix and found a smile to offer up.

  “No,” she said. “There’s been quite enough excitement around here as it is, without us having to call out the lifeboat to rescue some daft sailor who’s decided he’s in Hawaii instead of Cornwall.”

  “Excitement?” Clare asked.

  So Janey launched into an account of what had happened last night, editing out just what sort of a compromising position she’d found Felix and the woman in. If Felix couldn’t remember, well then she bloody well wasn’t going to drag it up herself.

  “I had a bit of excitement myself on the way home,” Clare said when Janey was done.

  And then it was her turn to relate how a simple walk up Raginnis Hill had turned into a scene from one of those slasher films that the tabloids liked to dwell on when there isn’t any real news for them to either uncover or make up.

  “Oh, that must have been awful,” Janey said.

  Felix looked grim.

  “Did you call the constables, then, my love?” the Gaffer asked.

  Clare sho
ok her head. “Davie doesn’t get along well with them and‌—”

  “No surprises there,” Janey interrupted.

  “And by the time I got up this morning,” Clare went on, “well, I just felt sort of stupid. I mean, what would I say when they asked why I’d waited so long to report it?”

  “The truth,” the Gaffer said.

  Clare shook her head. “That wouldn’t be fair to Davie.”

  “He was probably out looking for someone to rob himself,” Janey said.

  “And that’s not fair either,” Clare said. “If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be here talking to you right now.”

  “I suppose. But Davie Rowe.” Janey shook her head. “And then you invited him in to your house?”

  “What should I have done? Sent him off, back into the rain, without so much as a thank you? Besides, I was still scared. At least with him there, I felt safe.”

  “But Davie Rowe. . . .”

  “I think she gets the picture,” Felix said.

  Janey turned to him. “I suppose. But you don’t know him, Felix. He’s been to prison and everything.”

  “What she means,” Clare said, “is that he’s not the most handsome bloke you’re likely to meet.”

  “What difference does that make?” Felix asked.

  “It shouldn’t make any,” Clare said.

  Janey threw up her hands. “I give up. You know what I meant, Clare. I don’t have anything against Davie Rowe.”

  Clare nodded. “I know.”

  Janey looked at her friend, sitting there on the ottoman, as unruffled as though she hadn’t almost been killed the previous night. How did she do it? How did she stop her own tape loop from replaying its images through her mind?

  “You seem so calm,” Janey said to her. “If it had happened to me, I’d still have the jitters.”

  Clare nodded. “I do have them‌—but they’re hidden away, deep down inside me. Sort of locked up and secreted because I feel that if I let them out, then I’ll lose control and I won’t be able to ever stop shivering. So I act calm, and somehow acting calm makes me feel calm.”