comprehensive at Crowford, any day. All they seem to do there is take drugs and beat up the teachers.’ As Hazel and George were both there, Nathan knew this was an exaggeration, but he didn’t say so.
‘He gets his principles from his mother,’ Bartlemy said gently.
Rowena Thorn set down her teacup. ‘Better be off,’ she said. ‘Thanks for everything, Bartlemy. You’ve always been a good friend.’
‘You don’t mind my living here, do you?’ he inquired curiously. ‘Your ancestral home …’
‘Good heavens no. Hardly a mansion, is it? The Thorns never had the money for that. Just inconvenient, hell to maintain – never dared ask you about the plumbing. It isn’t as if I ever lived here myself. No sentiment involved.’
‘You never owned the cup, either,’ Bartlemy pointed out.
‘That’s different,’ she said. ‘I told you. That’s a matter of blood.’
At supper that night, Nathan told Annie about the cup of the Thorns – it didn’t appear to be a secret – or as much as he was able to tell, without talking about his vision, or the dreams of blood. Hazel was there; George came later. They both absorbed the story with enthusiasm and determined to search for the missing injunction. ‘D’you think it will be, like, a piece of parchment?’ George said. ‘A scroll or something, yellowing and with spiky writing.’
‘It’s fifteenth century,’ Nathan said. ‘I think they had paper in the fifteenth century. When did what’s-his-name invent the printing press?’
‘Caxton,’ Annie said, ‘in the fifteenth century. There was a lot going on then. Would anyone like some ice cream?’
Not surprisingly, everyone did. ‘Have you ever had a book here as old as that?’ Hazel asked when the ice cream had been shared out.
‘No. I had a seventeenth century two-volume history once: that was the oldest. Anything from the fifteenth century would probably be in a museum. Does Rowena have any idea what this document looks like?’
‘Don’t think so,’ Nathan said. ‘We’ll just have to go through absolutely everything at Thornyhill.’
‘If your Uncle Barty doesn’t mind …’
‘It could be hidden in a book,’ Nathan pursued. ‘Secret papers very often are.’
‘But – Thornyhill is full of books!’ Hazel exclaimed, daunted. ‘It’ll take forever.’ Suddenly, the prospect of finding a missing document didn’t seem half so interesting. ‘Perhaps Mr Goodman won’t want us rooting around there. He might prefer to do it himself …’
‘Is there a reward?’ George asked.
‘Yes,’ Nathan said, looking rueful, ‘but I told Mrs Thorn we wouldn’t want it.’
‘We didn’t,’ George and Hazel chimed simultaneously.
‘You have to find it first,’ Annie pointed out. ‘Then you can worry about the reward. Are you sure it’s actually at Thornyhill?’
‘It must be,’ Nathan said. ‘Please don’t make things more complicated. Anyway, Mrs Thorn thought so.’
They retreated to the Den to discuss the problem further, until Hazel switched to the subject of a forthcoming party which she wanted Nathan to attend with her. ‘There’s going to be a disco,’ she said.
‘I don’t like discos,’ George offered. ‘They’re stupid.’
‘You only say that because you’re too scared to ask anyone to dance,’ Hazel said with devastating penetration. ‘Please come with me, Nathan. Not as – as my boyfriend or anything, just for … moral support.’
‘You – with a boyfriend!’ George guffawed.
‘No reason why Hazel shouldn’t have one, if she wants,’ Nathan said. ‘The thing is, next Saturday I was meaning to start searching –’
‘Not in the evening,’ Hazel said. ‘We could look for the injunction in the afternoon, and then go to the party.’
‘Okay.’ Nathan was not inspired by discos. He hoped, now they were teenagers, Hazel wasn’t going to start acting too much like a girl – or at any rate, like other girls. ‘Will there be drugs and people getting beaten up? Only according to Mrs Thorn, that’s what goes on at Crowford Comprehensive. It’ll be an awful let-down if it’s just dancing,’ he smiled.
Hazel giggled. ‘Jason Wicks got caught trying to sell Es last term,’ she said. ‘But it turned out they were his mother’s pills for cleaning her contact lenses.’
Maybe I could use drugs to control my dreams of the other world, Nathan thought. Maybe if I took sleeping pills …
But he hadn’t had one of those dreams for some time.
His friends left around eleven, and he climbed up to the skylight and sat on the edge, gazing up at the unknown star. He had still been unable to trace it on any chart, and a couple of weeks earlier his astronomy class had spent an hour on top of a tower at Ffylde studying the night sky, but there had been no sign of it. The star was there for him, watching him, a single pale eye effortlessly camouflaged among the constellations. He knew he should be afraid, but it was difficult to feel fear when the night was so beautiful, and the star-sparkle so magical: he could almost imagine it was benevolent, the eye of a secret guardian or kindly angel, not merely watching but watching over him, watching out for him, keeping him safe. But why would he need to be kept safe, and from whom (or what)? And why did he feel that it was all connected – the star, the dreams of the other world, and the cup of the Thorns – the whispering cup – the Sangreal?
‘Nathan!’ his mother’s voice carried from downstairs. ‘Bedtime!’
‘I’m thirteen,’ Nathan objected, sliding off the window frame. ‘I’m too old to have bedtimes.’
‘You’re positively ancient,’ Annie called, ‘and you still need your sleep, especially during the term. Come down now.’
‘Coming.’
In bed, he drifted comfortably into sleep, at ease despite the problems niggling round the borders of his thought. And then some time in the night the mists of slumber withdrew, and he was in the light. The light of the other world, a burning sunset with streaks of cyclamen cloud above a puddle of molten gold that spilled along the rim of the sky. He saw it from the top of a tower so high that it must be the tallest in the city; spires and pinnacles glinted far below him, sparking fire from the sunglow; on an adjacent segment of roof he made out two xaurians tethered, tiny at that distance; another wheeled in the gulf of air between. Further down, he saw the city lights coming on as dusk deepened, window by window, lamp by lamp, creeping upwards out of the shadows until every building was ribbed with beads of glitter, and the moving flecks of far-off skimmers flashed eyelights of green and blue and neon-pink. Then somehow he was inside the tower, descending what appeared to be a liftshaft. He floated through closed doors along the gallery he had seen before with the twisted pillars, and into the semicircular room. But now the night outside was altogether dark, and screens covered most of the curving window. The man in the white mask – ruler, dictator, president, whatever he was –
