should have guessed,” groaned Colin.
“I’m going to be the shepherd, actually. Dad’s asked me to model.”
Colin shook his head. “I hope he’s paying you well.”
“Not bad,” said Ossian. “He’s quite generous like that.”
The pay can be very good, he thought. He had been modelling in the life class at the college in Philadelphia when he’d first spotted Lizzy. She’d been wearing a loose shirt knotted at the front and an expression of concentration which made her freckled nose wrinkle. He’d known right away she would be special. She’d caught him frighteningly well.
“I’m only there to make the scenery look good.”
“Bloody artists, eh?” said Colin cordially. “You hungry, by the way?”
Ossian followed Colin to the kitchen, wondering where the other guests might be. “I saw several cars in the drive.”
“Yes, it’s a party,” said Colin, helping himself to an olive. “My mother’s got some of her horsey friends down – she wants advice on a roan she’s had her eye on. There’s you and Jack, of course. Oh, and a bunch of money-men Dad had to invite. Something to do with his marina project, I think.”
Colin was already on his way out to the lawn. He was carrying too much weight, Ossian noted. His chin barely existed. Was this really the boy he had idolised that summer – the sacrificer-in-chief? At eighteen he seemed virtually middle-aged.
Once, these grounds had boasted peacocks. Ossian remembered being frightened of their strangulated cries, the locust-dry rustling of their fans. Now the lawn was bare, except for the pedestals with their Greek statues that arced to the lake. Things had slipped a bit at Lychfont, he concluded. Zeus and the Olympians were mildewed and rather sombre: Athena in her helmet, Hermes alert as a deer, Pan fluting. Silenus had lost half his grapes in the storms the previous autumn. Yet still they hung on in the alien northern air.
He found Catherine and the other guests listening attentively to Jack.
“It’s good to be back,” he was telling them. “You can be as cosmopolitan as you like, but you forget how much you’ll miss those little things. Marmite, you know, and the shipping forecast.”
“Well, you’ve caught the tan but not the accent – much the best combination. How long were you in the States again?”
“Eighteen months.”
“Enough to see the place in all its moods then. To be a traveller rather than a tourist.”
A small, sunburnt man in a checked shirt said: “The difference being what?”
“Money, I think. Or time.”
“More a question of where you keep your souvenirs – in your hand luggage or in your head,” said someone sagely.
“Or on canvas, of course. What do you have to show for your stay there, Jack?”
Jack cast his gaze modestly to the ground. “Most of the originals are still on exhibition back in Philly, but I have some smaller canvases in the car.”
“I look forward to seeing those,” said Catherine. “Not a day passes but I find something new to admire in the little watercolours you did when you stayed before. I hung them in the saloon, you know. You never painted better, Jack.”
Jack acknowledged this with a small, self-mocking bow. Ossian knew he would not care for the suggestion that his best work was seven years behind him. Jack Purdey had once been the enfant terrible of English landscape painting, but somehow he had never quite made it to the farther shore and become a Pillar of the Establishment. These days all compliments were routinely sifted for nuggets of treacherous dispraise.
As soon as he could, Ossian escaped back to the house. He felt suddenly and deeply tired. It was the effect of the flight, he supposed; he wasn’t used to the time difference. Already he wished he had not come.
And he knew he ought to write to Lizzy.
THE SCRYER’S NEXT question was a delicate one. “May I take it, my lady, that you loved this boy?”
“I do. Even now I do,” said Sulis.
“In the way of chaste desire or are there… other feelings involved?”
Sulis bridled at the man’s insolence. “Does it make a difference?”
“In such cases, invariably,” said the scryer with a fatherly smile. “The currents that run between our realm and his can easily be disrupted by such intimate attunements.”
“I see,” said Sulis coldly. “Well, you may put aside all such worries in this instance. My feelings are vast and profound as any ocean, but they are mine and I control them as I see fit.”
The scryer, who had not yet been paid, assured her that everything was quite in order.
“Then we should begin,” she said.
They were standing in the flagged kitchen at Lychfont: Sulis, the scryer and the scryer’s clerk. The servants’ table had been heaved aside and a dusting of chalk laid down, with heaped ridges of ferrous ash trowelled and footed into shapes appropriate to the scryer’s trade. Sulis recognised them as letters, but could not read them. They were Syriac, she supposed, or Hebrew.
The scryer felt about in his gourd for the dice and knuckle-bones. The curtains were drawn close and the room was sparkling with the reflected glitter of the ash. At a certain point, Sulis noticed that the scryer had begun to sway slightly back and forth, and that an obscure dribble of language was falling from his lips. Again, the speech was unknown to her. She guessed, though, from certain familiar names studding it, what the scryer was about. It was an invocation, though of what quality she could not yet tell. She suspected the man was a quack.
The scryer’s clerk was tapping the gourd, across one end of which the belly skin of a pig was stretched tight. It was quite mesmeric, Sulis had to admit. That, however, was something to beware of. Sometimes these scryers claimed to have fetched out spirits with such rhythms as this, when all they had done was plant a dream in fuzzed and puttied imaginations. It was a trick of the trade.
“Now cast your mind like a net,” said the scryer. “Cast through time and space. Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m not afraid!” cried Sulis.
“Don’t be complacent either,” he returned without breaking rhythm. Sulis felt as if her response had been expected, required – almost a ritual phrase. Anything she said would sink into the rhythm of that gourd and the old man’s chant as completely as a stone tossed on to the Lychfont mudflats. Trick of the trade? There was certainly movement on the ash-strewn floor. It was – jiggling, somehow. Then it stood stark and stiff, like filings magnetised but shifted to a new pattern. The ferrous dust no longer spelt out letters. It now formed – what?
“Is
