Death of a Ghost Page 4

  OSSIAN FOUND COLIN all ready for the pub. He had taken a jacket from the coat stand and was jangling with coins and keys. His hair was combed back and slightly gelled; he looked nearer thirty-eight than eighteen. “How’s your thirst now? Coming to the King’s Head?”

  “Later,” said Ossian. “Maybe.”

  Colin shrugged amiably and they walked to the gravel drive. He pointed out a gap in the greenery at the far end of the garden. “You know the way? The stile? The path through the woods?”

  “I’ll find it.”

  Colin left by way of the lawn and wood, through grass already steeped in evening shade. There a narrow path crossed the unravelled river in five stages, each with a sleeper bridge. Ossian watched him until he had trudged himself down to an ant’s height, then turned back to the house.

  With the tiger skin behind him he admired himself in the gilt mirror in the hall. He knew he was handsome. He had always had good features, of course, but America had made him rugged and slightly unpredictable-looking in the way girls seemed to like.

  Some girls.

  “Ill-made” Lizzy had called him. He smiled a little grimly to himself. No one else had ever complained.

  Sue, for example, had let her gaze linger on him in the most emphatic way while he’d been hanging cups on hooks. Devouring him with her eyes, she’d been. It was strange, he thought, how Sue and he had clicked. He loitered in the hall a while longer, where she would have to pass him if she came down from her room. But by nine o’clock Sue had still not appeared.

  Ossian lost patience. He began to feel restless and out of place, and as irritated as if Sue had stood him up on a date. On impulse, he left the house. He followed Colin over the stile and into the lane that wound through Lychfont village.

  There was no one in sight. The houses were set back and forested behind hedges, with just the grey glint of a jeep showing here and there through the leaves. There was a farm shop with a chalk board advertising eggs, fish, cheese and manure. And it was silent – but for a radio voice, distant as rain on a skylight, pattering out music. A jay squawked across his path, but Ossian barely looked up as he walked along the verge, intending – so far as he intended anything – to find Colin in the King’s Head. He felt dreamy and vague, and did not care which way he went.

  For now, though, he followed the curve of the road, keeping clear of the deepest ruts, and was surprised to find it so thick with dark red mud. Had he missed a turning somewhere? Perhaps he had. But Lychfont was as familiar as—no, more familiar than his skin. The King’s Head would be beyond the church, with its square tower and its single bell that served for all occasions, and the grove of funerary yews. The inn sign creaked damply in the same low wind, the same snivelling breeze coming off the Solent as ever it had.

  His thin legs ached: he seemed to have been walking for ever, through this summer evening quarter-light. Walking towards a vague rendezvous that lay both behind and before him. Senseless thoughts turned in his mind like flocks of evening starlings, and would not let him rest. The lane ran along the wall of the Abbey grounds, with a postern gate cut into the wet chips of seal-black flint. The hatch on the gate was open and Ossian was aware of a small owlish face roosting, cowled in shadow. The Abbot’s man. Here they distributed food to lepers and the poor. Soldiers and thieves came too, carrying disease in the precious casket of their bodies. Even malaria was not unknown in Lychfont, bred in the sallow marsh beds of a dank mosquito coast.

  He heard the King’s army roistering on the shore wind. A ship’s bell clanked off the water and Ossian crossed himself. The tide ran swiftly beyond the Abbey, there where the shadows tilt and creep. Ossian hugged his body and ran his finger along the endless Abbey wall. How quick the evening had come on, with just the moon to guide him and the light of the lodge keeper’s hatch yards and yards back.

  “Go thy ways,” he said. “Go, parish pilgrim, beat thy bounds and return.”

  The inn he had, thus occupied, overshot. That was no matter; it would come again. Meanwhile, he was hurrying on and clutching his thin ribs close. Old Peg was up late making candles and the stench of tallow gathered in the road’s dip: a greasy, cloacal fog. Ossian knew, none better, the shades into which any thief might slide like a knife and never be seen. And it was getting late. Late.

  THE SCRYER SHOOK his head and backed away from the blackened ash. “No. Too late. It’s no good. He’s drifted off.”

  Sulis leapt to her feet, appalled. “How? Can he just disappear like that? Bring him back!”

  “Do not distress yourself, lady. Agitation will only delay our work further.”

  She stalked the edge of the room tigerishly. “Easy words for you! Your happiness doesn’t rest in the heart of this… this savage, foolish boy! But believe me, scryer, if I’m denied in this, I’ll make your misery my masterpiece.”

  “He won’t have gone far,” the scryer continued evenly. “The pull of Lychfont is, I am certain, far beyond his power to resist. If he has flown, it will not be further from us, but deeper in.”

  Sulis frowned and said after a moment: “Through time, you mean?”

  “You have a gift for poetical expression, lady,” smiled the scryer. “When you say ‘through time’ I imagine Ossian flitting about like one of the butterflies in your magnificent palm house. First he is on one branch, then another. Never in more than one place. I, on the other hand, think he is more like the moonlit ocean, shining near and far as the water turns, but everywhere.”

  “I understand that, of course, but—”

  At that moment, the raven on Sulis’s shoulder croaked, then fluttered down and picked its way tenderly through the scryer’s ash. Its feet made arrow points.

  Sulis watched in alarm – if the spirit map were destroyed, they would never find Ossian again, never! The scryer’s clerk flapped his hands and tried to shoo the bird away, his bald head rosy with anger. The raven hopped twice, deposited itself back in the ash an arm’s length distant and continued forward, with an air of palpable intent.

  “Let it be!” cried the scryer, seeing his clerk about to dash forward again. “Can’t you see it’s showing us where to look?”

  “I knew that bird was a good omen!” cried Sulis. “What’s it saying?”

  The raven had now wandered out of the scryer’s circle and was pecking at a hunk of bread, part of the poor clerk’s dinner. Sulis, the scryer and the clerk gathered round, puzzling at the cryptic mess the bird’s feet had made of all that ash. At last, the scryer nodded in sudden understanding. He clacked the bag of bones at his waist and searched out a paper on which to scribble his deductions.

  Sulis did not hide her impatience. “What do you see there? Tell me, you old fraud!”

  “Please,” said the clerk. “My master must now be commanding great spirits, monstrous ones, hounds to sniff your boy out through all of time and space.”

  “So he says,” rejoined Sulis sullenly.

  “I have seen what they can do,” said the clerk. “Their teeth are saw teeth, diamond-tipped, their eyes are liquid fire. And their jaws, once they take hold, must be broken before they will release. They will find your boy, never fear. Are you well, my lady?”

  Sulis had turned grey as dust.

  “You want him caught, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Sulis, but not very convincingly. “I love him.”

  The clerk knew the breeding of this girl. He was a kindly man and he pitied her. Her love for Ossian he did not doubt. But the union she desired would, in unminced words, be indistinguishable from murder. Ossian would die by the sword, his head still chapleted with flowers, and the blood on the petals would be his own, and the river would take it.

  How, wondered the clerk, could love live with that?

  On the far side of the room the scryer gave a cry – of triumph mixed with alarm.

  “What is it?” Sulis was up at once.

  The scryer’s lip was quivering in a way she thought ominous. Was this the predicted stiffenin
g fit at last? But at length he mastered himself and his eyes (which had seemed about to roll up into his head) fixed her keenly. “It’s as I thought. Your boy has manifested in another time – more than one, in all likelihood. This makes things awkward.”

  “You’ve lost him then,” concluded Sulis. She had been expecting nothing less.

  “Not at all. I know how to find him and how to bring him home too.”

  “How then? Tell!”

  “We must consult an oracle,” said the scryer. “It won’t be easy. For you, especially, there is some risk.”

  Sulis fixed him icily. “Is my resolve still in doubt with you?”

  “Not in the least. So listen.”

  The scryer made so bold as to approach her. He muttered in her ear. From where he stood the clerk saw Sulis’s long hair ripple lightly as she nodded. Then the nodding stopped. Sulis was stock still. The scryer’s words shrivelled in the frosty air.

  “A head?” said Sulis at last. “That head? Do you take me for some kind of Fury?”

  “Madam, if there were any other way—”

  “If you need an oracle, use one of mine. I’ve a very reliable one right here in Lychfont, not at all given to double meanings. I’ll send Alaris for a chicken and the brass shears right away.”

  “It would do you no good, my lady. Believe me, the knowledge you seek is not to be had—”

  “No! It’s unthinkable!”

  The scryer waited tactfully, then resumed his muttered persuasions. Sulis endured it for a little, before waving him abruptly aside.

  “No, no, you’ve said quite enough. You have brought me nothing but misery and heartbreak. I can see it is my fate. Very well then, scryer, you shall work your horrible magic and you shall have your ghastly prophesying head. And don’t worry, I’ll play my part in procuring it for you. You’ll not have cause to complain of my cooperation.”

  “You are generosity itself, lady,” said the scryer dutifully, and bowed so low that his beard’s tip straggled dustily on the flagstone floor.

  Two

  OSSIAN KNEW HE must be late by now. He seemed to have been walking for ever. The Abbey wall was behind him and the dew was falling, the night dark. He had passed the yew grove and the farrier’s, passed Peg of the Willow’s, as if in a dream. He had no memory of any of them. And even now he was not home. How his thin legs ached!

  Ossian was late, but Adam Price’s fire would still be burning. In Adam’s house there was perpetual light: hearth light or candle, or else the curious green heat of asphyxiated copper, the sulphurous yellow spirits writhing in blown glass. From the slope of the valley the house was an unearthly sight, a quivering glister through the mist.

  Different, of course, once you were within the door.

  That was still a half-mile off. Past the Kerney Stone and the cottages where the King’s officers were billeted. Ossian shivered when he heard their hurdy-gurdy laughter and the songs they spun out of drink and dice, their brutal merriment. All that lay between him and Adam’s house.

  He had lingered too long at the crossroads coming home. It was a haunted place, they said, and Ossian’s eyes were sharp that way. But there had been nothing ghostly about the girl singing at the ford nearby. There, where the cleft rock was green with moss and thorn-bearded, she’d been washing a cloth of white linen. A spray of flowers had been spread about the lip of the pool, their torn stems steeped in the water. Again and again she had wrung out that cloth and laid it flat across a smooth stone, rubbing at a stain he could not see. He did not know why he had stopped to watch her. But he had loitered in the shadow as she washed and wrung, until at last she had turned and seen him, and smiled as if she had always known he was there. Stumblingly, he had asked for a drink, only to see her laugh and flick the wet slapping cloth at him. He had woken with the shock of that water, looked up to find the sun low and red-faced as himself, and hurried on his road like one pursued.

  So it was dark as he came to the last stretch of woodland. He was breathless here, with the dank, leaf-drowned air, the shivering dew that settled on his skin like fever. The stars blinked and flickered beside a purple gob of moon, but he could see little of the village, just the shingle track winding from it.

  He was all but clear of the wood when a tree root caught his foot. He fell heavily and the breath was knocked from him.

  The tree root was booted – had a voice – was a man, bending over him. That bearded face was lean as a long winter. Ossian went to put his hand to his chest, but the same heavy boot was grinding heel-first into his palm. A second man stood behind and iron shone from his hand.

  “Where has your master sent you, so long after the closing of the gates?”

  Ossian’s lip jibbered. He could not have answered had he wished to. There was no answer he could give.

  “What nest have you flown from, fledgling?”

  “He’ll not speak,” said the second man. “Just take what he carries and leave his confession to the crows.” The iron shone in his voice too.

  Ossian knew what these were. Chance soldiers, cast his way by an unlucky throw. The King’s army was all restless, waiting for the call to France. And now had come the rumour of a conspiracy, with Lord Hungerford’s name at the back of it.

  The bearded man ripped open Ossian’s shirt. About Ossian’s neck hung the leopard-punch of his master’s brotherhood, the sign of his indenture. The man yanked it sideways, choking Ossian before the frayed leather snapped free.

  “No gold,” the man told his companion. “Shall I slice his throat?”

  The second man began to answer – but his only sound was a liquid yelp of fear. Ossian saw him look back past his own shoulder, eyes wide and white. The bearded man followed his gaze and called on St Alban.

  A devil was squatting on the alder bough. Ossian saw its horns and coal-red eyes blinking as it preened itself. It croaked twice, then hopped to a lower branch, gripping the wood with close black talons. The smell of sulphur was overpowering.

  The man who had hold of Ossian let him drop and fled back towards the army lights, his companion on his heels. The creature flapped after on leathery wings and, landing by the woodland path, barked raucously at their retreat.

  Ossian watched in terror. The devil was crawling now, bat-like and awkward, sliding itself forward on grotesquely elongated fingers until it reached the hollow bole of an elm. It squatted there, dark in the night’s shadow, eyes glimmering with dull red heat. It folded its wings in neatly and did not move again. They were alone.

  They faced each other until dawn, the devil and the goldsmith’s boy. Ossian knew he could not outrun the thing; to brave it would be madness. Exhaustion had made his senses ragged, but he could no more shut his eyes in that presence than he could fly. The cruel teeth it had shown! The weasel shrillness of its call! Throughout the night hours it kept its red eyes fixed on him. Ossian waited for dawn and said all the prayers he knew.

  Dawn came, swinging a censer of grey light. Ossian made himself stand. He was stiff with cold and dew. By the elm tree nothing stirred. He approached, to find those coal-red eyes no more than a pair of pimpernel flowers growing from the tree’s foot. There was no devil.

  But the grass where the thing had planted its feet was a pair of charred black arrows.

  Ossian stumbled back out of the wood, down the shingle track and past a field of misty cattle. He did not choose his path, no more than a blown leaf, but in five minutes he was outside Adam Price’s door.

  Mother Bungay had baked fresh loaves that morning. Ossian’s stool had a jug of small ale beside it to drown his thirst. He sat in his place and ate, hungry now he could notice it. Adam too was dressed for out of doors. He must have come in shortly before Ossian himself. Mother Bungay was helping him lever off his boots. His cloak, not yet laid up, was draped across his chair like a thunder cloud.

  “You were blessed last night,” said Adam Price. He fixed Ossian with eyes that were flint-black, flint-sharp. “That was no devil but an angel of G
od. And it is God who has protected you.”

  “I NEVER HEARD anyone snore so loud!”

  “Shh! He’s waking up!” “Well, it’s nothing personal. Just a function of the angle of the epiglottis to the nasal tract.”

  “I see. Just how much did you two drink last night?”

  “I don’t remember much about it.”

  “Then I have my answer,” said Sue.

  “My head’s fine! Ossian didn’t say much in the pub, though.” Colin screwed his face up in a parody of concentration. “Now I think of it, he never even turned up.”

  “You’re useless, Colin! Useless!”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  “I will when I get a chance. Damn – he’s drifting off again.”

  OSSIAN HAD FETCHED up at Adam’s door as a baby swaddled in sooty rags. He had been thin as an icicle. Adam had taken him in, fed and raised him, shown him charity. That was fifteen years since. A good man, Adam, a fair master. Ossian had never seen him drunk nor angry, except in that stern, controlled way when he delivered blows as a sculptor might chip a statue from the living rock, to fashion a man. Chip, chip – down came the sculptor’s hammer. He had made Ossian lovingly, in his own image. It was his duty as a follower of Christ, he said, to cherish the boy.

  Ossian slept in Adam’s house, in the loft over his cattle. He was skinny, with a tangle of hair the colour of the straw he lay on. In the last year he had grown tall as well, so that he was forced to sleep with his legs curled up towards his chin, but he liked to hear the grunting of the beasts below and breathe the smell of them. The ass Jerusalem loved him and would eat from no one else’s hand.

  Adam was a goldsmith. He kept a furnace, and in the red-orange heat he shaped and flattened metal according to his mind. His workshop had thick doors and braces of iron because of the gold he kept inside, but they were hardly necessary. Fear of Adam Price was ward enough. Didn’t he have spells to keep the Devil himself at bay? Hammers of many weights and shapes lined the walls, files and rasps and tongs, pincers and scorpers, while under the shutter lay a drawplate with a stiff, four-handled lever for racking gold into wire. The fire and the ram’s-hide bellows it was Ossian’s job to tend stood at the centre of the longest wall, with the kiln set above.