Though the design cut into the flagstones bore some resemblance to the knot garden of Joshua Herringe, its complexities left even less for the intelligence to grasp. Each line of it seemed to shift continually. Everywhere Anna looked, patterns seethed away from her eye yet rushed towards it at the same time, so that she was forced to blink and wince, and turn away. Halfway across the knot, her husband struggled in slow motion, caught fast like a fly in a web, facing away from her with one hand raised. He had been running towards his daughter, she saw, when the design reached up to entangle him. It had taken away his time. His cry of despair was still dragging itself out of him, in a kind of formless, never-ending groan.
Mark and Oliver were amused. Every so often they stopped what they were doing to laugh at his slowly flailing limbs, his expression of anger and terror; or to look slyly across at Eleanor – who, one of her pudgy little hands held up in a curious, hieratic gesture, seemed to have brought all this about.
‘Eleanor!’ Anna cried. ‘I won’t tell you again!’
A soft laugh filled the room. The child leaned forward. ‘To be honest, dear, I never liked “Eleanor”,’ she said, in the voice of Stella Herringe. ‘You could have done better.’ Suddenly she seemed to notice her father, suspended there between two of his own moments. ‘Poor old John. Always so intense. You should have seen him at thirteen. He shivered like a pony when you fucked him.’ She laughed. ‘Just like a pony.’
John Dawe forged on into nowhere, groaning. Anna could bear it no longer and plunged in after him. As she slowed down, the world accelerated around her. Every sound in the chamber shifted abruptly into a higher register. Even the quality of the light seemed to change, brightening, becoming bluer and sharper. But she never found out what would have happened if she had continued. Mark and Oliver, exchanging the high-pitched squeals of bats as they flickered and skipped from niche to niche, found what they were looking for. Their enraptured cries caught Eleanor’s attention and she lost interest.
For Anna – though not for John – things slowed down again. The world spun. The knot expelled her. She found herself on the floor, being sick for the third time that day, with a white-faced Alice Meynell bending over her. ‘Help me up, Alice,’ she said. ‘We’re going to sort this out.’
Alice, though, shook her head, lost less for words than for a description of the world she now found herself in—
On the other side of the room, Mark Holland took a small Victorian folding card table out of one of the niches and brought it forward. On its discoloured baize surface he set: the plastic head of a 1950s doll; a jet necklace with attached mourning locket, also Victorian; the small German musical box Frances had given to Eleanor, from which dropped the sweet tentative notes of ‘Für Elise’; a silver spoon, no later than the Regency period; a miniature painting of one of the Herringe women, perhaps Clara de Montfort; and the carved bone figure of a crouching woman, to which no possible date could be affixed. These he arranged on the table according to the instructions of John Dawe’s daughter who, after studying each placement for a few seconds, clapped her hands inaccurately together and indicated that Mark’s brother could bring forward the object he had taken so reverently from its cobwebbed niche.
It proved to be a brown muslin bag, stiff and fragile with age, about six inches long, having a drawstring closure at one end. With great care, Oliver Holland worked the drawstring open until he could shake out the contents of the bag.
Eleanor, breathing heavily through her mouth, hung over his shoulder. ‘Kitcheee!’ she squealed.
A few small bones tumbled out on to the baize tabletop. They were brown with age and none of them was more than five inches long. Nevertheless it was easy to identify a tiny femur, two or three ribs, a little skull that had lost its jaw. They were the bones of a child less than a year old.
‘Aaaah,’ said Eleanor, in her most sentimental voice. ‘The baby!’
She put out her hand as if to stroke it. Then she looked up at Anna again. ‘You have to give up something if you want to live for ever, dear,’ she said. ‘This is what Clara de Montfort gave up. Her first child. Smothered at midnight, buried under the garden. She was never entirely sane after that.’ She laughed. ‘But don’t you wish you’d done the same?’ She looked up into the air above her own head. ‘Izzie!’ she cried. ‘Ishtar!’
Instantly the candles were extinguished and the room filled with an unsteady leaden light that seemed to issue from the air itself. Along with the light came a sensation Anna was quite unable to describe – a buzzing in her jaw, a metallic taste which filled her mouth. Both. Neither. The closer Eleanor’s hand approached the bones, the more pronounced this sensation became. Small motes of blue light began to leap between the objects on the table – as a kind of visual echo, splashes of much brighter light exploded soundlessly high up in the room like flashbulbs going off. In response, the design on the floor shifted and changed, the lines that composed it filling and increasing. After a moment, the space in the centre of the room was occupied by a knot of pulsing tubes each as thick as a woman’s arm and filled with a tobacco-brown substance the consistency of city fog.
What is that stuff? Anna thought. It’s like smoke. Then, sadly. It’s been here so long. It’s alive. It’s alive. It’s supposed to flow, it’s supposed to be free.
But whatever it was, it had long ago become static and gelid. Ages before the building of Nonesuch, something had turned it against itself so that it festered. Who knew what its proper purpose might be? You could only tell that it was some basic process of the world. Generations of terrified women, empowered by their ghastly little flint idol, had helped knot it up. Anything to hold back the flow, hold back time. She remembered John saying, ‘Those women! They all look so alike, as far back as you can trace them. And God knows how far before that. I bet they looked the same when they were knapping flints on the chalk downs. The genes of the Herringe women, raging out of the Stone Age long before they had a name!’ Now those women had trapped him somehow in this place. Worse, he had trapped himself.
The knot tightened.
John Dawe groaned and struggled. He was obscured.
Anna bit her lips. ‘John!’
‘Izzie,’ whispered Eleanor Dawe. ‘I’m ready to come back.’
She looked up.
In its upper reaches the room now stretched away indefinitely, up through its own ceiling into a night no one observing from Ashmore would ever see. Up there, something moved, faint and huge. Eleanor kicked her legs in excitement. ‘Now, Izzie!’ she cried. ‘Now!’ She reached down, fumbled among the collected objects, and came up clutching the bone figurine of a crouching woman, which she banged repeatedly on the tabletop.
‘Izzie!’
Smoke roiled in the flickering air. It writhed and contracted. There was a brief, sharp cry; an earthy smell, at the same time animal and metallic, which Anna remembered from the birth of Eleanor; a sense of pain. The figurine vanished.
Eleanor, who had perhaps not quite expected this, stared puzzledly at her empty hand for a moment. Then she laughed. ‘And now,’ she said thoughtfully in the voice of an adult, ‘what am I going to do about you, my dear?’
‘You’re going to give me my daughter back,’ Anna said. ‘For a start.’
There was a silence. The child stared at her. ‘Who do you think I am?’ it said quietly.
Anna shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but I never liked you when you were alive.’
Stella Herringe’s laugh rang through the room. ‘Oh my dear! Hoity-toity. Do you think I care?’
‘You were a drunk and a snob, and terrified in case other people knew something you didn’t. Are you always like that underneath, whoever you’re pretending to be at the time? Whoever’s life you’ve stolen?’
Stella gazed absently into the air in front of her. ‘Hoity-toity gets a disease,’ she said, after a moment, ‘Hoity-toity gets cooked in a pot.’ She arranged a coy smile on Eleanor’s face. ‘When I was Clara de Montfort, I killed my own baby,’ she continued proudly. After a moment’s thought she squeezed out a tear or two. ‘It was rather awful, dear. Still, after I’d killed her I had your husband every way I could think of. I wore the pony out.’ Another laugh. ‘I forget what your name was in those days. You were a dry little thing.’
‘I feel sorry for you,’ Anna told her.
‘A dry little thing. His words.’ Stella sighed. ‘His very words.’
‘Was it worth it, all of that?’ Anna asked. ‘Just so you could hang on and hang on like this?’
‘What else can you offer me, my dear?’
Anna had an idea. ‘Can’t you help me, Francis?’ she appealed.
Francis Baynes stood there awkwardly holding the baby, much as he might have done on the lawn at Nonesuch two or three months before. Anna remembered him then, eating cake with a fork, wincing away from the smell of Eleanor’s nappy, trying to hide his fastidiousness behind his smile. Poor Francis, she thought. You weren’t cut out for me and Eleanor, or for all the opera and mess and bad judgements and honest mistakes of the world. All you ever wanted to do was talk. You wanted to look at the sparks of sunlight coming through the cedars and ask me about my inner life so that you could tell me about your own. Look what it got you.
His inner life had led him here, then abandoned him. The short and bitter journey from Ashmore rectory had worked dirt into his clothes and his pores. His skin had a bluish, exhausted pallor. His fingernails were filthy and broken, and his eyes had the empty look of someone whose immune system has collapsed, someone who has fallen away from everything warm and supportive and ended up, without ever really knowing why, living in a cardboard box.
‘Francis?’ Anna said.
Eleanor laughed. ‘Franciiis!’ she squealed. Then in another voice altogether, ‘I seen his little secrets.’
At the sound of Anna’s voice, though, Francis seemed to recover something of himself. He gave the child in his arms a startled look, as if he wondered how he had come by her, then gazed vaguely about the room. The great pulsing knot made him pause and blink, but he showed no interest in anything but Anna. Despite this, she wasn’t entirely sure he recognised her. ‘I’m not very good with babies,’ he said. Then he shuddered, passed one hand rapidly across his face and shouted, ‘I won’t do it!’
Eleanor giggled. ‘Oh yes, you will.’
‘It’s all right, Francis,’ Anna reassured him. ‘It’s all right.’
He looked at her again. This time his eyes were clear and direct. All his intelligence and delight in the world, all his sense of it as an essentially benign place to live a life, shone out through them. He was the Francis Baynes she remembered. He smiled sadly. ‘It isn’t all right,’ he said. ‘And it never will be now. But we can’t have this, Anna. We can’t have all this.’ He stared at the knot. ‘What is that thing?’ he asked himself.
Eleanor Dawe grasped at his face with her cruel little hands. ‘Oh yes, you will,’ she repeated.
‘Oh no, I won’t,’ he replied with a laugh.
Eleanor shrieked angrily. She squirmed round in his arms until she could face him. She bit and kicked.
‘Silly girl,’ he said in a preoccupied voice. ‘Silly baby.’ He approached the knot and examined it for a moment or two. Almost as if it sensed his presence, the knot pulsed. The longer Francis looked at it, the more its ugliness seemed to puzzle him, until puzzlement was replaced by a kind of mild irritation, as if he had discovered something unpleasant in the nave of St Mary’s one morning before his favourite communion. ‘But this is completely monstrous,’ he said to Anna. He tucked the screaming Eleanor securely under his left elbow, knelt down and began to pray, ‘Our Father, which art in Heaven—’
For a moment a light seemed to shine on his face and he looked like a twelve-year-old boy.
Eleanor stared around anxiously. ‘Izzie!’ she cried, redoubling her efforts to escape, ‘Izzie!’
In response, something picked Francis Baynes up and threw him carelessly into the nearest wall.
He fell at the base of it as limp as a doll, with his hair and coat on fire. ‘I don’t think I can do any more,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
He dropped the baby, who began to crawl rapidly away from him, calling, ‘Norty! Norty!’
Alice Meynell, who had watched these events unfold with the numb incomprehension of a dreamer stuck inside her dream, shook herself and shouted, ‘Anna! He’s let her go!’
‘It’s not like that, Alice,’ Anna began to say.
Too late. Alice had dashed forward, wincing away from the knot, and swept the baby up in her arms. ‘Come on, Anna! Let’s get out of here!’
Eleanor writhed and screamed, ‘Izzeeeee!’
In some way, Anna now saw, Izzie was less a goddess – spiritual mother or precursor of all those ancient, nameless Herringe women – than a sour and arrogant dream of the earth itself. Something that had lain here under the ground since the beginning of time, musty and yet full of appetites, savage with its own desires, savage with the desires of others. A permission, a carte blanche, an invitation that fed on all the insecurities of the human world. Izzie had tied her knot long before human beings came along to claim it as theirs and make it the living metaphor of their fear of age and death, their refusal to move on. Izzie was the knot; she was as much its substance – its meaning – as she was its caretaker.
So when Eleanor called, she came, condensing out of the air as a mist until she hung, surrounded by black space and the cold lights of the stars, feet placed squarely apart as if for purchase on an invisible floor, her eyes staring but unfocused, her mouth open as wide as it would go on a silent roar of triumph and loss. From one angle she was the flint figure from the downs; from another she was the ghost of Ashmore graveyard, the woman in the muslin dress; from a third they were only aspects of her and she was something else altogether, something huge, the bones of the earth, clad in earth.
‘Bloody hell,’ exclaimed Alice Meynell.
‘I told you,’ said Eleanor. ‘You silly bitch.’
Alice let go of her, stumbled backwards and fell down, knocking over the card table as she went. Many of the objects Eleanor had so painstakingly collected over the last few weeks were lost immediately. The doll’s head spun and danced, then rolled to halt in the shadows, its eyelashes fluttering. Baby bones rattled across the floor. The music box, which had been quiet for some time, started up again out of nowhere – a few tremulous notes filled the room and were gone.
‘Izzie’s here,’ observed Mark conversationally into the silence.
‘Yes,’ agreed his brother. ‘Yes, she is.’
They seemed reluctant and shy. They glanced furtively up at her, and away again. Then something passed between them, in a look and a shrug, and they began to climb up into the shadows between her massive thighs. She absorbed them as if they had been part of her all along and they were lost to sight, though for some time they could be heard calling in progressively more muffled voices, ‘You first.’ ‘No, you.’
Eleanor, meanwhile, had got herself carefully to her feet. She stood for a moment in her OshKosh dungarees and maroon jersey, bottom stuck out for balance, then tottered over to the fallen card table and began to root around on the floor beside it, shaking her head and clicking her tongue. ‘No good,’ Anna heard her say. ‘No good.’ She bent down precariously and picked up the music box. Waving this in one hand, she approached Izzie. ‘I earned my name,’ she said.
She raised her pudgy little arms, as if she expected to be picked up.
Nothing happened.
‘I earned my name.’
The bone goddess squatted and roared in silence, her image wavering in the black air.
Eleanor looked puzzled. She rattled the music box next to her ear, looked at it, rattled it again. ‘Norty,’ she said. She stared up at the thing that called itself Izzie. ‘I earned this,’ she repeated, in Stella Herringe’s voice. ‘I earned this and I want it.’ Silence. ‘I’m as good as you.’ When nothing happened, she threw the music box at the goddess and turned to walk away.
Something shifted slightly in the room. It was nothing you could describe. A kind of settling of the light. Then, while Eleanor’s back was turned, Izzie and the knot slumped into one another suddenly and quite silently, like two drops of oil merging. Eleanor’s objects were drawn from all over the room, to be absorbed one by one. When the last pathetic brown fragment of bone, Clara de Montfort’s dead child, had been taken home, a curious, rubbery sphere filled the space which had been occupied by the knot and Izzie was nowhere to be seen.
Eleanor turned. ‘Aaaaah,’ she said.
The sphere shrank steadily, until it was two or three feet in diameter. Oily patterns roiled across its surface, flickered, became clear pictures in which the same three people could be seen again and again: Stella, John and Anna, dressed in the costumes of every television historical Anna had ever watched, and tied together in the same miserable knot of manipulation and betrayal. They were at Nonesuch. They were in the Painted Room. They were struggling and panting together in some bed, or on some floor, or in the knot garden in the middle of the afternoon. Stella laughed. Anna cried. Now Stella cried. John turned his back on both of them and sullenly walked away. Stella walked and John cried. Anna cried and cried.
‘I’d rather die than go through that again,’ said Anna.
‘Would you, dear?’ asked Eleanor in Stella Herringe’s voice. ‘How brave of you.’ She tottered towards the sphere, reached out a little hand, as if she could touch the pictures on its surface. It dimpled beneath her fingers, shrank a little further. ‘I love it, actually,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to start again.’
‘Leave my daughter alone!’ Anna shouted.
Stella laughed sadly. ‘I can’t, dear. I wish I could.’
She seemed to be preparing to step through the surface of the sphere and into the past – or, worse, into the present – when the air in the chamber ripped apart and several huge creatures leapt out.
*
The first was a lion, its mane a vast dark halo round its head. Muscle braided its chest and forelegs like a demonstration of anatomy. Its brassy orange flanks smoked with heat, as if it had run through a furnace to arrive there. You could hear the air go in and out of its lungs. It roared and the chamber reverberated with the sound. Everyone shrank away from its primal grace; everyone but Anna who, recognising it instantly as the great cat she had encountered at Cresset Beacon, felt no fear, only a kind of elation. Immediately behind the lion came a leopard, not yet full grown but gleaming with power and vitality. Last of all came a dusty-looking wildcat with a grizzled face and wicked-looking claws.
For a moment they stood there in the middle of the chamber, illuminated by the bizarre blue light like a mirage or a Fata Morgana. A moment later the great cats had gone and in their place stood a marmalade tomcat, a half-grown female and a geriatric brindled cat. These three fanned out to surround the child.
The sphere wobbled away from them, borne up out of Eleanor’s reach by the waves of hot air generated by the rank energies of the new arrivals.
Ellie stared at them with a trembling lower lip. ‘Bad cats!’ she said, trying to back away.
The animals showed her their teeth and lolling tongues the colour of a rose. Then the air crackled with heat again. Concentric rainbow-coloured rings spread out across the roof and walls, and something else tumbled into the chamber.
‘Orlando, the dream!’
The humans there were able to comprehend the sound as a wild and raucous ululation, but Orlando recognised the speaker at once. He spun around.
It was the fox; and with him were a lynx and a white tiger.
With a leap of his heart Orlando recognized Millefleur in her wild form. ‘Millie!’ he cried ecstatically, his attention fatally distracted. ‘He rescued you!’
‘No one rescued me,’ Millie retorted. ‘I escaped—’
The fox ran at Orlando. ‘There’s no time for this, no time at all! Don’t guard the child; take down the dream, you fools!’
With a roar lion, leopard and wildcat sprang upon their prey.
Eleanor sat down suddenly. Anna ran forward and scooped her up. The cats floated over both of them in a short steep arc, so close Anna could feel their tremendous heat and mass, smell the rank, savage smell of them. They came down with the full weight of their three bodies on the iridescent sphere, which now somehow contained both Izzie and the Great Knot. It writhed beneath them, pulsing with some delirious awareness of itself: dream within dream, within dream, within dream. It was like nothing Orlando had ever previously encountered, on or off a wild road: its texture was more slippery, yet at the same time more defined than the usual dream globe – less of a membrane than a skin – as if time itself had wrapped itself up again and again to congeal into this one tangible, solid mass of images and experiences. It seemed to be impossible to get a grip on it. But it was not as if the sphere was resisting them; it was more that it was shrugging them off, uninterested in their attentions, all its sentience turned inwards in complete selfabsorption.
He tried to bite it but his teeth slipped agonizingly across the surface. On the opposite side of the thing he saw Caterina and the Besom working in unison, arching their backs and digging all four paws in with a vengeance. The thing hunched and gave beneath them before repulsing them again. Orlando swiped at it with all his might. He felt a claw snag into the globe; then a second; and another. He gouged harder and the dream, as if waking suddenly from itself, gave off a jet of sulphurous gas that made his eyes water and his gorge rise. A wrinkle appeared in the previously slick skin. Seizing his opportunity, Orlando bit down hard and got the fold between his teeth. He worried at it like a terrier, twisting his head back and forth until his neck muscles ached. The sphere gave out another stinking emission that engulfed both cats and onlookers; then it seemed to gather its strength. With a lunge, it distorted, quivered and shot away. Orlando hung on for grim life. He tried to call to Cat and Ma Tregenna to help bring the sphere down to the floor of the chamber, but he dared not open his mouth for fear of losing his grip on the thing altogether, and his cry emerged as a muffled growl that only served to enrage the dream globe further.
He brought his hind legs up and started to scrabble at the iridescent surface. The glistening pictures of the lives trapped and knotted within writhed away from his mauling claws. They floated beneath his nose: first Anna, pale and austere in a high-necked robe, a white shift, a shroud; then John in a stiff frilled collar and a single pearl earring, a tall hat, a khaki uniform; and over and again the witch, green eyes blazing with the sheer desperation of maintaining her hold on life and on this grim eternal triangle. Her black hair wreathed about her head like roots, like snakes, like a deadly anemone, latching on to the other two figures wherever it could noose them, so that the three of them, in all their different configurations, were yoked together by black tentacles of the stuff. Orlando bit down and made another hole in the skin. Fluid gushed out, followed by a rope of hair which – as if it had a mind all its own – struck unerringly at its attacker and wound itself tightly round his neck. In the ensuing struggle he became aware of a number of things: the way the dream globe bucked and dived as Caterina and the Besom leapt heroically and attached themselves to it; how the air was filled with the bubbling and hissing of furious cats; how more hot liquid spouted out of their prey, followed by the scents of times long gone and never buried; how the hair wound itself more and more tightly about his throat; how his limbs began to feel as soft and heavy as waterlogged wood, and his vision speckled away into scintillas of black…
Then, with a howl of fury, something flung itself at his head. He felt it land on him, felt its claws rake his sides as they scrabbled for purchase. He felt its hot breath on his face and its teeth at his throat.
Suddenly he could breathe again. His eyelids fluttered once, twice; and on the third blink he found himself nose to nose with the blurry image of Millefleur, her mouth full of black hair, her eyes shining. Then she slipped away from him and in her place he could see a headless Ma Tregenna, all four feet braced on the sides of the dream globe, her neck disappearing into its interior. A moment later she re-emerged, with what appeared to be a large wet rat in her jaws.
The dream globe convulsed, as if the Besom had ripped away something crucial to its existence. Gouts of steam came up out of it, smelling of canker and rot, and some part of it turned itself inside-out, spilling a wreath of coloured vapours into the foul air. The Besom was catapulted backwards off the skin of the sphere, her burden adding momentum to her fall, which ended with an indistinct thud at the opposite end of the chamber. There was the murmur of voices, then something else was disgorged from the globe, something that shrieked like a firework and shot away into the darkness, trailing the stench of the grave in its wake.
‘Mistress!’
Orlando heard an unfamiliar, deep voice; the unmistakable sound of a cat’s hunting call; the scuffle of dancing feet; a mournful wail that chilled him to the bone; silence.
Then the world became inverted and Orlando found himself falling away from his prey. He hit the ground with an impact that shook the breath from him and when he came to himself this is what he saw:
The sphere, darting overhead, smaller now and somehow lighter. Beneath it, a blue-grey cat with golden eyes danced on its hind legs, clapping her paws together, striking out right and left. A fox – long-backed, reddish, brindling towards its hindquarters and fine tail – wove himself in and out of her dance. As he did so, the room appeared to undergo a transformation. It shimmered; it twined about as if everything in it were as insubstantial as smoke. And where there had been a small grey cat, now there was a young leopard, all muscle and roar and arboreal splendour. It was an odd struggle. The cat leapt and turned, and made artful, devastating sweeps with her shining claws; while the sphere – its surface as slick and iridescent as a soap bubble – wobbled and bobbed out of her reach.
Anna watched this strangely graceful display with something approaching awe. Into her mind came a line from a book she had once read – ‘Any cat who wants to live for ever should watch bubbles. Only kittens should chase them.’
We can’t expect to armour ourselves against change, she thought. Yet if we don’t – well, this cat is as rough as it is beautiful. Your life doesn’t care how you use it, only that you should. It doesn’t care how it uses you.
Even as she was completing this thought, the sphere trembled and burst. Anna heard it burst, with a sound like tapped porcelain. She clutched her daughter to her. Now we’re for it, she thought. All those rotten, knotted-up Nonesuch lives, all those crimes against animals and human beings, all that fear and desperation—
But released, its contents weren’t dark and foul at all. They streamed upwards like coloured fire into the night sky. A single female human figure struggled hard to form itself and travel against the flow of things, only to waver and sigh, and relinquish its hold at last. While Anna heard an old woman’s voice whispering sadly in front of a mirror in some empty room, ‘I only wanted to keep the nice things, dear. I only wanted to stay nice.’
Then it was all gone.
Anna felt bruised, astonished, elated. She felt herself all over. ‘Well!’ she said.
The next thing she thought of was Eleanor. She stared warily into her daughter’s eyes, half expecting to see Stella Herringe staring back out in triumph. But look how she might, all she could see there was a daughter, a proper little girl who was looking rather puzzledly around the chamber, as willing to be upset as to be amused by all these things that were happening. Anna laughed delightedly. ‘Hello, Eleanor!’ She hugged her tight, smelling baby smells, feeling baby warmth against the side of her face. ‘Eleanor, look!’ She held Eleanor up as if they were at the zoo. ‘Look, Eleanor! Look at all the cats!’
Eleanor laughed and extended her hand. ‘Ca’!’ she said. ‘Ca’!’
For a moment or two the leopard who, with the fox, had somehow conjured a wild road into existence before their very eyes, continued to fling herself about the room, rearing up on its hind legs in a kind of joyful memory of the chase, batting with its massive forepaws at the strange lights fading and dying like fireworks around her. Then the dream globe filled the air with a grunting, coughing roar that Anna felt as much as heard, and it fell back to all fours again, trotting once or twice round the room, panting heavily and staring from side to side in search of an exit.
As it went, it shrank rapidly until it was the size and colour of an ordinary blue-grey cat, barely more than a kitten, with two little bony lumps on the top of its head.
‘Good grief,’ whispered Anna. ‘Caterina? Is that you?’
Caterina wasn’t saying. She scampered across the room to exchange a sniff with Orlando and a tall tabby-and-white cat who looked remarkably like the missing Tufty, and who, in a distinctly proprietorial manner, was grooming viscous fluid out of his marmalade fur. She then progressed to the fox and they touched muzzles in what seemed an almost ritual greeting. Beside him, curled in upon herself like the husk of a dead wasp, an ancient brindled cat lay where it had fallen in the midst of the conflict. All the life had gone out of her, that was plain to see. Caterina bent and licked the top of the creature’s dusty old head. Then, with a curiously tender gesture, the fox nosed her out of the way, picked up the carcass so that it hung out of either side of his long, sharp jaws and sprang into the air. Rainbow rings shimmered across the room, and a moment later the fox and his burden were gone.
In the afterglow as the wild road closed in upon itself, Anna became aware of two more cats sitting in the shadows at the back of the room. One was tall and regal-looking, his fur the dense blue-grey of an August stormcloud, or the wing of an elderly nuthatch, and his eyes were the same deep gold as Caterina’s. Beside him was a small tabby cat with neat white socks and a ragged ear.
‘Vita,’ breathed Anna, disbelieving. And it was, drawn through time from the centre of the pattern in which she had been trapped for so long, as if someone had taken the loose end of a knot and pulled it free, which in a way they had.
Meanwhile Caterina made an ambling personal circuit of the chamber, sniffing the empty niches, addressing various invisible items with her nose or, more cautiously, with one front paw. Her gaze passed briefly over John Dawe, Francis Baynes and Alice Meynell, who lay, huddled or sprawled, their limbs at odd angles, more or less where events had left them. Then she shook herself and returned to the centre of the chamber, where she sat down and began to groom with considerable energy, beginning with her left front paw.
Anna looked to where Orlando lay up with the cat she knew as Tufty. They had been joined by the tabby with the ragged ear, and each was licking the other in what seemed a paroxysm of relief.
‘Orlando, have I understood any of this?’
No answer. How could a cat speak anyway? Anna shook herself. ‘Obviously not,’ she said.
Alice Meynell now groaned and woke up. ‘I wish I hadn’t done that,’ she said. She looked at her own hand. ‘Anna? Have we come off the bike?’
Anna laughed. She set Eleanor down next to Orlando – who paused for a second to give Eleanor a suspicious look before he acknowledged, by licking her outstretched hand, that she was just a little girl again; then, in that companionable way cats have when they groom in groups, stuck one rear leg up in the air and redoubled his efforts – and went to help her friend up. ‘Come on, Alice. I’ll explain later.’
‘I hope you will.’
‘I’m just going to have a look at Francis.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Alice. ‘Didn’t there used to be a design of some sort on this floor?’
Anna looked. ‘So there did,’ she confirmed. ‘But all that’s finished now.’
Francis Baynes was already awake. A considerable smell of scorched tweed hung about him. Anna helped him to his feet. ‘Let me look at you,’ she said. ‘Oh dear, Francis, you have been in the wars.’ But while his face still looked shabby and aged – as if twenty years had passed in twenty-four hours – and much of the hair had been burned off the left side of his skull, his eyes gleamed with energy and his spirits were remarkable. He wasn’t what he had been, but you could see something of what he might become. Determination and intelligence had liberated themselves from the romantic in him – whatever had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours, he had exchanged one set of qualities for another and moved on. When she hugged him he winced.
‘I’m afraid some of my ribs are cracked,’ he said apologetically.
‘And your inner life, Francis? Is that cracked too?’
This seemed to amuse him. ‘It could be worse,’ he told her.
They smiled at one another for a moment; then he gave her a long, thoughtful look. ‘And Eleanor?’ he asked.
Anna said quickly, ‘She’s fine, Francis, fine.’
‘I’m sorry if I—’
‘You did your best,’ she assured him.
Any other answer would be too complex, requiring admissions, explanations, justifications that would better be made later and at leisure. Here and now, the events themselves were too close. What had happened to Francis? How had he come to be here? In a way she didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to pry. Francis’s trials had been his own and he had risen above them beautifully. Anyway, Eleanor was Eleanor again and safe.
Half understanding this, Francis made a hesitant gesture, as if to explain himself, or begin explaining himself, then changed his mind and asked instead, ‘Do you have any idea what happened here?’
‘A little more than you, perhaps.’
He nodded. ‘I thought so. You must tell me about it when you have a moment.’ Then, ‘You know, at first I believed some great evil was being brought to book.’ He looked around the chamber. ‘Now I suspect it was only a case of bad spiritual plumbing.’
‘Francis!’
‘Something was unblocked, anyway.’
There was a comfortable pause. Then she suggested, ‘Come up to the house.’
He shook his head. ‘There are things that ought to be done down here and they’re my responsibility. I want to make sure this never happens again. I don’t know how strong I am, or how much I can do, but I have to be a proper priest and try.’
She held his hands for a moment. ‘Be careful, Francis.’
‘I will.’
*
Arms round each other, Anna and Alice looked down at John Dawe. He was snoring.
‘I’m tempted to leave him here,’ said Anna.
‘I know. But where would you get another one?’
They woke him up and a few minutes later the three of them stood in the remains of the knot garden in the moonlight. Alice was examining the foundered JCB with a kind of professional disdain. John, who had his daughter in his arms, kept looking puzzledly back over his shoulder. He seemed to retain little memory of the night’s events and none at all of his episode of temporal fugue. He kept looking at his watch, shaking his head and saying, ‘I can’t believe it’s this late.’ Then he added, ‘Something awful happened down there, Anna. Didn’t it? I don’t know if I remember—’ Suddenly, he gave Eleanor to Alice and took Anna in his arms. ‘A lot of this was my fault,’ he said.
She shivered and laid her head against his chest. ‘It was,’ she admitted.
‘Have I been a complete bastard?’
Anna laughed. ‘You’ve been a complete idiot,’ she said. ‘If only you’d trusted the two of us, Ellie and me—’
‘She wasn’t Ellie, though, was she?’
‘I think most of her was, John. She needed you to encourage that part, not the other. Who knows how it would have gone then? But look, she’s Ellie again now and we’re going to keep her that way.’
‘I love you,’ John told her.
‘I love you too.’
‘Good grief,’ said Alice Meynell. ‘Kiss her or something, and then take this child off me so we can all have a cup of tea.’
John looked round puzzledly. ‘What was I thinking of?’ he asked himself. He hugged Anna again. ‘I’m so glad you came back.’
‘Think yourself lucky,’ Alice Meynell advised him, ‘that she did.’
‘Alice!’ Anna chided.
Indicating the digger, John said, ‘I’ll have to sort that out in the morning. It’ll mean another day’s hire. I’m afraid.’ And finally, ‘What exactly did happen here?’
Anna laughed and touched his arm. ‘You fell asleep. Overwork. Bad driving. It’s the usual old story.’
Bad driving, she thought, remembering the crashed Volvo – and, worse, the episode with Francis at Cresset Beacon. Oh well, we’ve all done some of that. Meanwhile she was anxiously examining her daughter’s eyes. They were still green, but it was a green that inclined to the hazel now and, more importantly, they were Eleanor’s. Each time Anna checked her heart turned over with relief and she thought of Stella Herringe, perhaps the worst driver of them all.
‘Do you think she’ll ever come back?’
John looked puzzled. ‘Who?’ he enquired.
‘Never mind.’
Anna looked up at the crowded roofline, Flemish gables and tall octagonal chimneys of Nonesuch, behind which the moon rode the mackerel-coloured sky. They seemed less convoluted and threatening now, and she was already recovering some of the delight she had felt when she first came to the house, armed only with Stella’s description of it as ‘the Tudor building on the left at the end of Allbright Lane’. She remembered the languor of the afternoon sunshine in empty rooms; Stella’s voice on the telephone – then suddenly, frost on the lawns on Christmas Day, her first Christmas as John’s wife.
I can put up with the past, she told herself, as long as it stays where it belongs. I can even learn to welcome it. Out loud she said, ‘Let’s go in and have some tea.’
‘Good idea,’ Alice agreed.
John said, ‘I want whisky with mine. I don’t seem to have had whisky for ages.’
They were turning to go when Orlando the cat trotted up the steps from the hidden room. He sniffed the night air, gave the JCB an old-fashioned look, then made off rapidly, tail up, in the direction of the orchard.
Alice Meynell laughed. ‘That cat knows something it’s not telling.’
Anna laughed too. ‘They all know something.’ She gave the garden a secret smile. ‘Orlando?’ she called.
He stopped, looked at Anna over his shoulder. His eyes gleamed like gold in the night, then he was gone. What did he know? She had a sudden memory of him as a day-old kitten, struggling with an eye dropper of condensed milk, fighting so blindly to stay alive. What a long way they had all come since then!
Don’t be silly, Anna, she told herself, but tears came into her eyes.