After Scathach went, Fael had finally faced the fact that she might not be entirely alone in Maise. This feeling had grown over the last two days and two nights, and now she was beginning to separate and identify the sounds; the stirrings and the night rustlings.
What had he said? ‘The legend tells how this house is directly over an ancient subterranean water cave, where the leanan-sidhe once held their strange court.’
If you were going to be outrageously fanciful, if you really wanted to spook yourself, you would start wondering if that was true, and whether the creatures of the Moher legends sometimes found their way into the house, and even whether it was your own arrival that had woken them. Fael did not want to spook herself in the least – the entire situation was spooky enough already, for God’s sake! – but it was impossible to stop her mind from looping back to those half-sinister, half-romantic fragments of myth and legend that her captor had fed her. It was impossible, as well, not to keep visualising a great dark void like a monstrous well somewhere beneath her, and to imagine wizened-faced, hobgoblin beings assembling there to plot evil.
She had no idea if her fears were because she was alone in an unfamiliar place, or if Maise’s strange atmosphere was spinning a dark fantasy around her nerves, or if the sounds she heard once darkness fell were in fact real sounds, made by real, explainable creatures. Rats and bats and ravens and owls, thought Fael. But aren’t they all part of a darkly sinister romance of their own? The spectral owl dwelling in his hollow in the old grey tower – night’s fatal bellman, Macbeth had called him, and if Macbeth did not know about fate and its heralds, then no one did. And the raven with his dreaming demon’s eyes trailing his own lamplit fantasies in his wake . . . Yes, owls and ravens were undoubtedly creatures loaded with the macabre. And bats and rats had never had a good press, of course.
And this is all the wild, nightmare imaginings of a disordered mind, said Fael, firmly. If there are owls and bats or ravens out here, they’re simply going quietly about their lawful nocturnal occasions. They aren’t converging on Maise, full of malice aforethought, unless it’s aforethought to raid the larder – that’s always a possibility, I daresay. So let’s keep a sense of proportion here.
Yes, but you’re in a land where magic once ruled, Fael, and there’s no proportion in magic, or at least not the proportions that hold good in the ordinary world. Whether you like it or not – and on balance, you don’t like it one bit – you’ve been carried deep into one of the forgotten pockets of Ireland and dumped there, and it’s a pocket where the old ways are remembered, and where the creatures of the ancient myths are still sometimes glimpsed . . .
The first night after Scathach left, she had sat in the deep old window seat, trying to think of a way of escaping, wondering whether she could bargain with her captor in some way. The lamps had burned steadily and the fire had sent out a gentle, comforting crackle, and the turret room had been a little oasis of warmth and light and safety, so that it had been possible to ignore – almost not to notice – the unfamiliar creaking of the old timbers, and the occasional scutterings outside.
It was only when she finally tumbled into bed and felt the darkness settle all about her that the sounds seemed to change. They became little bony goblin-fingers tapping on the windowpane, and they became hoarse gloating chuckles outside her door, so that several times there formed in her mind an image of tiny, evil-featured creatures clustering together on the stair, plotting to snare her soul, or to steal away the human child that might be born here in exactly nine months’ time . . .
It was all ridiculous. The tappings would be nothing more sinister than the wind outside, or the nocturnal birds and flying things indigenous to Moher’s wild coast (flapping bats and spectral owls after all?), and the throaty laughter was most likely the water gurgling in the pipes. And to become pregnant after a single encounter was unlikely in the extreme. I’ll keep telling myself that, thought Fael, determinedly.
She eventually fell into an uneasy sleep, only to wake to a cold light slithering through the curtains and the leaden knowledge that she was still here, still shut away miles from anywhere, miles from human contact, and that there was no escape. For a truly terrible moment she wanted nothing so much as to pull the clothes over her head and burrow back into sleep – hours and hours of sleep so that she would not have to face any of it and so that she would not wake up until it was all over. But this could not be allowed; that was something she had learned from the days immediately following the accident. If you once gave in to that kind of despair you were lost for always.
And so she got up, washed, brushed her hair and dressed, and determinedly made toast and a pot of tea. This was a comfortingly ordinary thing to do, and the hot tea acted like a charm against the muffled silence of Maise. The large, L-shaped room was already becoming familiar, like a hotel room did after a couple of days, or a holiday cottage. Fael drank a second cup of tea in her favourite window spot, trying to see through the fog to the black cliffs beyond. No good. There was nothing to be seen outside. There was not a great deal to be seen inside either, really. But there were books – presumably left here by her captor’s mother. Fael eyed them thoughtfully. With food and drink and shelter, and something to read one could surely face out any situation.
Most of the books were old and rather dusty: the covers calf-or leather-bound, some with rubbed gilt lettering on the front, some with the spines splitting. It’s almost all Irish folklore, by the look of it, thought Fael, sorting through them with interest. No, this one’s a Shakespeare, a bit battered, and there are several volumes of Frazer’s The Golden Bough as well. That’s the classic definitive study of magic and ancient religions, I think. That ought to be interesting. Oh, and that’s some of Yeats’s work, and with it is something called Ancient Legends of Ireland, by Lady Wilde. Lady Wilde – would she have been Oscar Wilde’s mother? The date’s about right. Yes, she was his mother, there’s a potted biography in the front. That looks intriguing as well.
She began to tumble the books open, dipping first into one, then another. The Ancient Legends of Ireland turned out to be absorbing. I could almost write another musical out of all this, thought Fael, and with the thought her hand was arrested in the act of turning a page.
I could write another musical . . .
Excitement welled up at once, and with it a feeling of engaging in battle with him, with Scathach. I believe I’ll try, thought Fael. Hell’s teeth, I will! I’ll start drafting something out right away, and when he returns – because he will return, of course, I do know that – I’ll show it to him. And maybe he’ll be so interested that he’ll want me to finish it before he decides what he’s going to do with me, and maybe he’ll even want to compose the music again. I’ll be like Scheherezade, spinning stories to ward off her killer, or the French writer Colette, who had a husband who locked her up and fed her bread and water in return for writing books. And even if what I write turns out to be rubbish, at least I’ll have a shape to the days. And, she thought, with sudden confidence, if I work through the night, and sleep in snatches during the day, I shan’t be so frightened of the sounds outside my door. I probably shan’t even notice them.
Maise seemed to sink into a not-unpleasant drowse in the middle of the day and taking an afternoon nap turned out to be easy. As darkness fell Fael switched on all the lamps, built up the fire, and ate her supper off a tray. Afterwards she propelled the chair to the window-seat, and read for an hour, a glass of wine to hand, paper from the desk set out for preliminary notes.
She sent up a little paean of thanks for that collection, and then wondered, wryly, how many beleaguered females had cause to be grateful to Oscar Wilde’s mamma for helping them to endure a solitary captivity. Cheers, Oscar, thought Fael, lifting her half-empty glass of wine, and then wheeling across to top it up, so that she could raise it again to his mother – what was her name? – Jane Francesca Wilde. Nice. Cheers, Jane Francesca.
The fire was dying and the room was growing cold and the premature night that fell on this part of Moher had long since shrouded the old house when he returned on the third night. Fael raised her head from her notes, listening, and felt her heart lurch with the remembered blend of panic and anticipation.
His light, quick footsteps came up the stairs, and there was the sound of the door being unlocked, and then he was there. And his presence fills up the whole room, thought Fael, looking at him. I wonder if he’s driven the chattering ghosts away?
Although he had presumably driven through most of the night after the ferry journey, there was no suggestion of fatigue about him; he moved with the suppressed energy of a tightly-coiled spring, and Fael suddenly realised that fury was driving him. Against me? But when he strode into the room, she saw that he was carrying a half-crumpled playbill in one hand. He thrust it onto the desk in front of her, and when he spoke, she heard for the second time in their strange relationship the uncontrolled dissonance of his speech that indicated extreme anger.
‘Read it.’
‘What—’
‘Cauldron. It’s being brought over here—’
‘Why? Is it a tour?’
‘It can’t be a tour,’ said Christian. ‘There hasn’t been time to form a touring company and bring it to concert pitch. It’s the original company – it must be. And they’re bringing it to a fifth-rate slum theatre in one of the most run-down parts of the west coast.’ Through the mask his eyes were narrowed into slits. But is he angry because of the slum theatre? thought Fael – because he believes the show will be devalued by appearing there? Oh hell, what wouldn’t I give for the full use of my legs right this minute! He’s so unbalanced and unco-ordinated at the moment that I could push him aside and be down the stairs and out into the night, yelling for help!
No point in dwelling on that. She said, ‘Why would it tour so soon? You either try out in the provinces and come in to the West End when you’re sure of your audiences, or if it’s a West End hit you negotiate for tours afterwards. You don’t run for a few days and then tour with the original cast. And it went like a bomb on the first night – it ought to have been set for a long run at the Harlequin— What have I said?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned away, and Fael thought: But I have said something, I’ve touched a raw nerve somewhere. Something to do with Cauldron’s first night, was it?
With the idea of probing further, she said, ‘I didn’t see the notices, because you dragged me out of the country, but I bet they were raves.’
‘It’ll be the decision of some ledger-balancing finance clerk,’ said Christian, but his voice was easier to understand, as if he was regaining control once more. Damn! thought Fael. Whatever I said to disconcert him, he’s recovered his balance. She reached for the playbill, which was colourfully printed and illustrated, but gave only the information that a spellbinding musical, based on old Irish legends, would be opening at the Gallery Theatre in Ennismara in two weeks’ time. Good wording at least, thought Fael; that ought to bring the audiences in. She looked in vain for a note of the company or the promoters. Anonymous. Like everything else about this wretched set-up. But hope was burgeoning, for if the company – the original company – really was here, it meant that people she knew, people who might help her, were close at hand. Is that why he’s furious? she thought, and felt her heart bound upwards. Is he starting to feel unsafe? Maybe I’m nearer to freedom than I know.
Flynn had delivered his Peter Pan designs on his way to the ferry at Fishguard. He had bound them in two of the large, workmanlike folders he always used for presentations, and had included two balsa-wood and card scale models; one for Captain Hook’s pirate ship, and one for the Lost Boys’ island.
‘You’ll want me to take you through it all,’ he had said to the rather startled director, who had not previously dealt with Flynn Deverill, but who had heard the stories. ‘And we can do it now if you like, but I can only give you an hour because I’m catching a ferry, or say an hour and a half if I drive like a bat out of hell. Oh, and I’d need to know by the beginning of February whether you want me.’
‘Well—’
‘That’s partly because of booking the warehouse I normally use in Blackfriars for the building work, but also because I’ll be supervising the removal of the Cauldron sets to Ennismara.’
‘Good God, they’re never opening up the Gallery again, are they?’
‘Providing they can stop up all the holes in the stage and mend the roof so the rain won’t come in on the audience, they are. Now, will I show you the device we could rig up so that the Lost Boys’ island transforms into the pirate camp? No, that’s not it, that’s the nursery, and it’s based on Arthur Rackham illustrations, by the way, and beautifully Edwardian. This one here’s the island. See now, we’d bring down a gauze scrim here, and have pools of blue and green waterlight to fall here and here – providing you’ve got a good lighting man, that is – and I’ve given the trees a kind of faintly human aspect. If you turn to the next sketch you’ll see it in enlargement. From a distance they’d all have gnarled faces within the trunks, that’s an echo of the old druid religions and the tree spirits so each face is different. It gives a terrific atmosphere of menace, doesn’t it? Children love horror these days, you’d maybe need to spike up Barrie’s original text a bit to grab them, wouldn’t you?’
‘Well yes,’ said the director, who was already involved in arguments about this with the purists, but who was not going to admit it to Flynn Deverill. ‘You’re rather expensive,’ he added, a bit weakly. ‘This fee you’ve put in—’
‘Yes, I’ll be the most expensive of all the submissions,’ agreed Flynn at once. ‘But I’ll be the best you’ll get. It depends if you’re answerable to accountants or real theatre people.’ He got up to leave. ‘Oh, and if they’re putting on Dear Brutus as part of the Festival, would you leave me out of the reckoning please, because it’s a play I can’t stand at any price.’
The Peter Pan designs would almost certainly be accepted. Flynn knew, without any vanity at all, that they were extremely good, and he knew that they were precisely what the Barrie Festival Committee wanted. But it amused him to play the prima donna. He spent the first half of the journey looking backwards, thinking about the designs and how he would enjoy being associated with the Festival, but as the Irish coast drew near, he began to think about the search for James Roscius’s son. Because whether this creature’s the professor’s son or not, there’s some kind of link, thought Flynn. As well start here as anywhere.
It ought to be relatively easy to search record offices and land registry files in Galway. Roscius had only mentioned his house near the Moher cliffs once or twice to Flynn, but there had been a note of unmistakeable wistfulness in his voice. A house that had been in his family for several generations, he had said. His great-grandfather had held on to it in the teeth of the Famine years and the tempestuous squabbles about Home Rule; his great-great-great-grandfather had held on to it through the Unionist quarrels a hundred years before that.
‘And now it will go out of the family,’ Roscius had said, sadly.
‘You can’t be absolutely sure of that,’ Flynn had said.
‘Oh yes I can.’
But for all his occasional abrupt spurts of confiding in Flynn, Roscius had never told Flynn precisely where the house was situated, and he had never mentioned the house’s name. Assuming, thought Flynn cynically, that it did have a name, and it was not something like 5 Railway Cuttings. It was almost impossible to imagine the gentle donnish professor, with his paradoxical streak of theatrical brilliance, living in the Irish equivalent of Railway Cuttings, but people were constantly surprising.
Moher did not cover a hopelessly large area, but it was difficult to know quite where you stopped calling the area Moher and started calling it something else. And ‘near to the Moher cliffs’ was a very vague identification indeed. But then Roscius didn’t want it identifying, thought Flynn, disembarking at Rosslare and setting off behind the wheel of his ramshackle car. He wanted it to remain unknown. And if that half-mad creature I saw at the Harlequin and the Greasepaint is truly his son, it isn’t surprising.
One of the problems was going to be that the area surrounding the stormy Moher coast was full of little clusters of houses, and sprinkled with tiny, rather inbred, communities. Flynn, who knew the place only slightly, thought you might come upon the answer to a quest there within the first five minutes, or alternatively you might search for five years without finding a thing.
He was not expecting to derive any amusement from this wild search of the haystack for the pin. His own family had come from this part of Ireland, from Connemara farther north along the coast, but his mother had died shortly after his graduation and he could not remember his father who had died when Flynn was very young. There was no one left there to draw him back, and it struck him as rather sad that he should be returning under such conditions.
Beneath everything else was the insidious, nagging worry for Fael. I’m not in love with you, alannah, said Flynn, to Fael’s image. I hardly know you. Let’s say I’m suffering from an attack of chivalry, and let’s say I’m doing this against my better judgement.
But he did know her, of course; he knew her through Cauldron, because if James Roscius’s son had created the music for Cauldron, then Fael Miller had written the book and probably the lyrics. The more he considered this idea, the likelier it seemed. All the facts fit the case, thought Flynn, driving through the Irish countryside, enjoying the indefinable scent of Ireland that he always thought was made up of woodsmoke and peat fires and something else he had never managed to identify. All countries had their own scents, undetectable to their inhabitants; it was only when you visited them as a stranger you noticed it.
If Fael had written Cauldron, then she was more than worth saving from the creature Flynn had so nearly caught in the Harlequin. She was worth saving in any case, but it was remarkably distasteful to think of her in the hands of her father’s murderer. I’m probably chasing a chimera, thought Flynn, scowling and driving impatiently towards Galway. I might even be playing a part in somebody else’s fantasy, because I don’t think that young man I encountered has a very good grip on reality.
As he neared Galway with its silvery river and curiously modern cathedral, he realised that for the first time he had used the expression ‘young man’. Because I’ve three-quarters identified him? Because I knew his father so very well, and because I still have this affection and respect for James Roscius’s memory? Oh hell, thought Flynn, changing lanes on the dual carriageway, I don’t know anything any more. But I do know that I’ve somehow been dragged into this, and that if I don’t find Fael I’ll have to live with a feeling of loss for the rest of my life.