‘The teachers keep a close eye on things,’ Nathan said. ‘They try to stamp out bullying before it gets really nasty.’
‘No school bad boys?’ Bartlemy persisted. Annie looked thoughtfully at him.
‘There’s Nick Colby … he was caught insider-trading. He overheard his father talking about a merger and bought up shares for half the class.’
‘Did you get some?’ George asked, awed.
‘He’s the year below me.’
‘Anyone else?’ Bartlemy murmured.
‘Well … Damon Hackforth, in the Sixth. He’s been in trouble with the police. We’re not supposed to know, but of course everybody does. There was a rumour he’d be expelled. He’s always having long talks with Father Crowley. I expect they’re trying to reclaim him – some of the monks are very idealistic.’
‘Do you think they’ll succeed?’ Bartlemy asked.
Nathan made a face. ‘Don’t know. I’ve never really had anything to do with him, but … he gives off very bad vibes. You can feel it when he walks past. A sort of – aura – of anger and aggression. Worse than Jason Wicks. Ned Gable’s parents know his parents, and Ned says they begged the school not to chuck him out. They must be pretty desperate about him.’
‘They care about him, then?’ Annie said, flicking another glance at Bartlemy.
‘I expect so.’ Nathan was still young enough to assume that parents generally cared about their children. ‘He’s got a sister who’s an invalid. Ned says Damon’s jealous because she gets all the attention. She’s very ill – something they can’t fix, where she just goes on and on deteriorating. Muscular dystrophy, maybe. Something like that. She’s in a wheelchair. Ned says she’s very pretty and clever.’
‘How awful,’ Hazel said, thinking of a girl who had everything she didn’t, trapped in a wheelchair, wasting away.
‘Awful,’ Annie echoed, thinking of the parents, with their violent, mixed-up son and dying daughter.
‘Stupid,’ said George, ‘being jealous of someone who can’t even walk.’
‘Good point,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Most of the unhappiness in the world is the direct result of stupidity – of one kind or another. Who’s for baked apple?’
Afterwards, when Nathan, Hazel and George had left, Annie said: ‘So what’s your interest in this boy Damian?’
‘Damon. Did I say I was interested?’
‘You didn’t need to say. I could see it.’
‘I don’t know that I am interested in him,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I might be interested in his father.’ He told her about his conversation with Pobjoy.
‘Is it going to start again?’ Annie whispered. ‘Like last year?’ She was remembering a man with a crooked smile who had been nice to her – a thing made of river-water with a woman’s face – a very old corpse in a white-cushioned bed. And the secret she had never shared with her son, the secret of his paternity …
‘You’ll have to tell him,’ Bartlemy said, as though reading her mind.
‘That’s for me to decide.’ Annie’s tone was almost tart. ‘He doesn’t have to know yet. Perhaps he never will.’
‘That’s just it,’ Bartlemy sighed. ‘He ought to know. It’s important. It may be relevant.’
‘To what?’
‘Trouble,’ Bartlemy said. ‘Like last year.’
As the light failed, Bartlemy moved round the living room, drawing the curtains. He was alone now except for the dog, who stood by one of the windows, staring through the latticed panes with cocked ears and a faint stirring of the hackles on his neck. When Bartlemy joined him, he thought he saw a movement outside – the branches of a nearby shrub twitched, new leaves shivered as if in the wake of something, but whatever it was, it had gone too swiftly for him to have even a glimpse of it. ‘Something small, I think,’ Bartlemy mused. ‘Smaller than a human.’ Hoover glanced up at his master, his shaggy face alarmingly intelligent. ‘Well, well,’ Bartlemy said. ‘I see.’
When the darkness deepened he swept the hearth and laid a fire that wasn’t made of coals. Presently, pale flames leaped up, casting a flickering glow that played with the shadows rather than dispersing them. Bartlemy threw a powder on the flames which smothered them into smoke. The chimney was blocked and the air in the room thickened, till the eyes of both man and dog grew red from the sting of it. Bartlemy began to speak, soft strange words that swirled the air and shaped the fume, sucking it into a kind of cloud which seemed to spin inward upon itself, until there was a shifting at the core, and the smoke cleared from an irregular space, and in the space was a picture. At first it looked like a television picture, only the definition was far better, but as it developed the perspective changed, until it was no longer smoke-deep but profound as reality, a peephole into another place. Sound followed image, and a draught came from it bearing the scent of roses. Bartlemy saw a woman in a garden cutting flowers. The garden was beautiful and the woman well-dressed, but when she lifted her head her face was pinched and sad.
Then the picture changed. Smoke-magic is wayward, unreliable; it can be encouraged but not controlled. The scenes that passed before him were fragmented, their meaning often obscure, with no logic in the sequence, no connecting thread – though Bartlemy knew that much later some connection might be revealed. After the garden the vision darkened. He saw a man whose hooked profile jutted beyond the overhang of his cowl, lit only by a furtive candle-glimmer, head bent towards another and whispering, whispering, while his auditor, a dwarf with more beard than face, listened with dread in the twist of his brows. Bartlemy knew this must be Josevius Grimthorn, ancient warden of the Grail, who had died fourteen hundred years ago, and his henchman (or henchdwarf), a creature long imprisoned beneath Thornyhill Darkwood, until Nathan and Hazel, exploring in the valley, had accidentally freed him. Then came the cup itself, a chalice of polished stone, glowing green in a dim recess, and what appeared to be a gallery of those who had sought for it. The Jewish collector, starving in Dachau – the grandson of an SS officer, drowning in a rainstorm – an old woman, older than she looked, tangled in river-weed – a greedy academic, clutching the wheel of a car, driven mad by phantoms who had eaten his mind. All insane, drowned, dead. And then those who had survived: Eric Rhindon, the purple-eyed exile from an alternative universe, Rowena Thorn, last descendant of a vanished family, Julian Epstein, the badger-haired man from Sotheby’s – and Nathan, who had brought the Grail back from another world so it could return to Rowena, its rightful guardian. And now Bartlemy held it in trust at Thornyhill, the house where her ancestors had lived, until the moment came for which it had been made – whenever that moment might be.
There are three elements to a Great Spell: the female principle, the male principle, and the circle that binds. The Cup, the Sword, the Crown. Relics from a different Time, a different cosmos, forged endless ages ago and hidden away – the Cup in this world, the Sword and the Crown none knew where – guarded by alien forces – until in the city of Arkatron on Eos a ruler thousands of years old should find a way to complete the Spell
