and there was a dim figure sprawled in front of him, on a kind of table or altar, and when the sword fell blood jetted up, and as the woman proffered the cup to catch it red spattered on the cloth that bound her hair. Both man and woman drank from the cup, and she lifted a crown from the thing on the ground, and put it on his head – a misshapen crown of twisted metal spikes – and lightning stabbed up from the crown, splitting the sky in half. For an instant Hazel glimpsed a symbol drawn in lightning, something she recognised, though she couldn’t think from where: an arc bisected by a straight line, enclosed within a circle. Then the vision went dark, and she heard a voice crying out in an unknown language, words that seemed full of anguish or regret.
‘What does it mean?’ she asked Bartlemy, but he shook his head.
‘This is Nathan’s story,’ she said, ‘not mine,’ but her smoke-reddened eyes were wide, fixed on the changing images, and she no longer looked away.
‘Keep in mind,’ he pointed out, ‘the pictures are relevant, but there may be no logic to them, and no chronology.’
Now, they were looking at a river – a slow lazy river, dimpled with sunlight, with the occasional overhanging willow, and little eddies scooping out pools under the bank which vanished in a mudslide. A tidal river with hazardous currents beneath its dimpled surface, and lurking weeds that could entangle flailing limbs, and rafts of floating rubbish wedged here and there, hiding among the debris a child’s shoe, a water-logged teddy bear, an upturned hand. The River Clyde, which flowed through the village of Ede down the valley to the sea – the river where Effie Carlow, Hazel’s great-grandmother, had been found drowned, though Hazel knew she had never left the attic of their house. She heard the voice of the spirit called the Child, chanting an old doggerel, though the smoke-scene showed only the stream.
‘Cloud on the sunset,
Wave on the tide,
Death from the deep sea
Swims up the Glyde.’
And suddenly Hazel found herself wondering whose hand she had seen among the flotsam – whether it was her great-grandmother or some more recent victim, someone yet to be discovered …
A boat moved up the river, surely too large a boat for such a narrow waterway. It was all white, with white sails and a white-painted mast and a white prow without name or identification, and it looked faintly insubstantial, almost like a ghost ship. A woman stood in the bows, wrapped in a long white cloak pulled tight around her body, with a drooping hood covering both hair and face. The picture shifted, until Hazel thought she should be able to glimpse a profile – the tip of a nose, the jut of a chin – but under the hood there was only darkness. The boat drifted on, fading into mist, and then there was just a swan, wings half furled, floating on the water. Hazel had always hated swans, ever since one attacked her as a child; she thought they had mean little eyes.
She said: ‘That was her, wasn’t it?’
Bartlemy said: ‘Perhaps. But remember: to come, she must be called. Nenufar is a spirit; there are laws she cannot evade. Have you called her?’
‘Of course not!’
The vision dimmed, dissolving into smoke, and at a signal from Bartlemy she unblocked the flue. Gradually the air cleared, and she saw the fire-crystals had burned away, and the room was ordinary again. An old room with heavy wooden beams, diamond-paned windows, lamplight soft as candle-glow on the shabby Persian rugs and worn furniture. And in the middle Bartlemy, fat and placid and silver-haired, with eyes as blue as the sky. There were more biscuits, but Hazel didn’t take one, not yet, though his dog sat looking hopefully at her – a huge shaggy dog of questionable ancestry, known as Hoover, whose age was as indeterminate as his master’s. Suddenly, it seemed to Hazel that the world was complex and baffling beyond her understanding, and magic and reality were no longer separate but part of the same puzzle, tiny fragments of a jigsaw so vast and intricate that its billion billion pieces could never be fitted together, not though she had a hundred lifetimes. Her thought was too small, and infinity was too big, and she felt crushed into littleness by its immensity, its multiplicity, by the endless changing patterns of Chaos. Bartlemy asked her: ‘What troubles you?’ and she tried to explain, groping for the words to express her diminishment, her confusion, her fear.
Bartlemy smiled faintly. ‘We all feel that way sometimes,’ he said, ‘if we have the gift of perception. Embrace your doubts: if there is such a thing as wisdom, they are part of it. I’ve had my doubts for more than a thousand years. Actually, I’ve always believed that the answer to everything must really be very simple.’ And he added, unconsciously echoing Annie on Irish history: ‘The problem is finding out the question.’
‘So Riverside House is sold at last,’ Annie said to Lily Bagot in the deli. No one had lived in Riverside House since the tragedy, though rumours of new tenants had circulated from time to time, only to fade as another sale fell through. ‘Do you know when they’re moving in?’
‘They’re already there,’ Lily said. ‘Came down last week. Some family from London.’ All the newcomers in the village were from London these days, big-city types in search of a rural paradise, bringing with them their big-city lifestyle and their big-city needs – and their big-city income. ‘I daresay they’ll be coming into the bookshop soon.’
Annie managed a second-hand bookshop, owned by Bartlemy; she and Nathan lived in the adjacent house.
‘I hope so,’ she said. She couldn’t help being a little curious. She had been so closely involved in the events at Riverside, two years ago now. She wondered what kind of people would buy a house with such a well-publicised history of disaster.
A few days later, she found out.
A woman came in to browse among the books, a woman with a frizz of dark hair and a thin body that grew wide around the hips, dressed in antique shoulder-pads, hand-printed scarves, carved jewellery from the remoter parts of Asia. She studied the shelves for a while, enthused over an early edition of Mrs Henry Wood, then seemed to make up her mind, and pounced.
‘You’re Annie Ward, aren’t you? I know: I asked around. I’m Ursula Rayburn. We’ve just moved in to the oast house down by the river. Of course, I expect you’ve heard, haven’t you? – gossip travels so fast in a village. Such an intimate little community – I can’t wait to get to know everyone. Although Islington is really just a village enclosed in a city … Anyway, I’ve been dying to meet you. I hope you don’t mind me introducing myself like this.’
‘Not at all …’
‘You see, I did my homework. I know you’re the one who found the body …’
Slightly at a loss, Annie said: ‘Yes.’
‘Was it awful? I gather she was there for months, slowly decaying, while her husband lived on in the house with his mistress, who was pretending to be her. I suppose he’s in an asylum now … and they never caught the mistress, did they? I expect it was all her idea. Mind you, I don’t really see the necessity – I mean, everyone gets divorced these days, it’s as normal as eating your dinner. I’ve had two and Donny’s had one and the kids are totally well adjusted. They say more parents mean more presents at Christmas and birthdays! Are you divorced?’
‘Widowed,’ Annie said.
‘Oh dear. And then to have to go through all that … you poor child. You must have been in therapy for months. Bereavement and then post-traumatic stress …’
