The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  “Your granddaughter!” I yelped.

  He nodded. “Has to be. Unusual name, magical heritage, prefers to be called Roddy, lives in Blest. My eldest granddaughter. QED.”

  “You mean”—I gulped—“that you’re from this place, too?”

  “That’s right.” He chuckled, quite suddenly.

  “But how come—” I began.

  “How come I publish mystery stories on Earth?” he said. “I publish on Thule, Tellans, lots of places, too. Everyone in those places is apt to go on about how convincing my alternate world setting is, but of course it’s only Blest. Quite ordinary to me—and to Blest people, worse luck. I hardly sell at all in Blest. Sales so bad, in fact, that I thought I’d make use of my Magid skills to turn a penny or so in other worlds. What did she want—Roddy?”

  He had this way of spearing you with the last little thing he said. I wriggled a bit and said, “There’s this plot. The Merlin seems to be in it, and she wanted outside help.”

  Maxwell Hyde narrowed his eyes. It was as if he was looking at this Merlin fellow from a long way off. He shook his head. “She’s wrong, of course. She has this little way of getting wrought up, our Roddy. The Merlin’s young yet, but he’s a deep one. They all are. Maybe up to something Roddy got the wrong end of the stick about. Bound to be. She’s only a child. Right. I’ll speak to your father,” he said, getting up. “Let’s get this Prayermaster seen to, then.”

  “What do you mean,” I said, getting up slowly, “speak to Dad?”

  He turned round on his way down the slope. “Well, he’s obviously got to see that you’re in one piece before I carry you off to Blest, hasn’t he?”

  I stared at him. He looked up at me seriously.

  “Look,” he said, “you’ve not only got unfinished business, lad. You’ve also managed to do something I can only do with difficulty, when drunk. Plus you’ve had conversations with animals and held off a Prayermaster when he tried to put you under the prayer. Not things most people can do. I consider it my duty, before you try something that kills you or harms your world, to take you home to Blest with me and give you a little basic training. Right?”

  “Does the Upper Room want you to?” I asked eagerly.

  “Huh!” He went crunching off down the pebbles, talking over his shoulder. “Magids have a free hand mostly in what they do. We do what needs doing. Come along now.”

  8

  RODDY

  ONE

  It was very hot. Grundo and I sat in the shade of the castle gate, drearily discussing what to do. Even if we could get to Liverpool or Southampton or Newcastle, we didn’t know which, and we had almost no money.

  “We have to get to somewhere where people know where the King is for certain,” Grundo said.

  “That’s not so easy,” I said. “He changes his mind all the time. And they change the far-speaker codes every day. The only ones we’ve got are long out of date. We can’t even call them up and ask.”

  “Your other grandfather found the Progress easily enough,” Grundo said.

  “That’s because he’s a Magid,” I said. “I wish we could go to Grandad in London, but that’s almost as far away as the port cities. We could call my grandmother up, though. Let’s go back to the castle and ask to use their far-speaker.”

  We trudged all the way back up the winding drive, where we rang at the shiny brass bellpull again. We rang several times. After that Grundo heaved up the huge iron knocker and knocked. No one came. It was obvious no one was going to come.

  “It stands to reason,” Grundo said miserably as we trudged down to the gate again. “A nasty man like Sir James is bound to have nasty servants. They don’t want to know, do they?”

  It was a horrible feeling. We sat limply in the shade of the gate once more, completely at a loss.

  Eventually Grundo said wistfully, “I wish I had relations we could go to. Have you got any who might be nearer than London?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I do have the Dimbers, but I’ve never met them. They’re Dad’s family, you see, and Grandad is divorced from my grandmother. They may not want us.”

  “How near do they live?” Grundo asked.

  “How far is Gloucestershire from here?” I said.

  Grundo was galvanized. “You’re hopeless!” he said. He dived for his bag and brought out a map book. “Gloucestershire’s practically next door. We may even be in it here!” He leafed furiously through the book. “Whereabouts in Gloucestershire?”

  It was my turn to dive for my bag. I fetched out my address book and found Hyde. That was wrong, because my grandmother had refused to change her name from Dimber. I turned to the D’s and discovered that I really knew the address quite well. Mum made me send them a letter every New Year and cards on their birthdays. “Dimber House, Sutton Dimber,” I read. There was even a far-speaker code, for what good that did us.

  Grundo searched the pages of his map book with a slow, studious finger. The maps didn’t bother him, but the writing on them did. “Got it!” he said at last. “And this castle’s on the same page. Roddy, it’s only about forty miles away! We could walk there, if we had to.”

  “It would take days!” I said. “Walking’s slow.”

  “Then let’s go out on the road and find a car to give us a lift,” said Grundo.

  We repacked our bags and set off. I was still dubious. “I warn you,” I told Grundo as we came out into the blazing road, “they may be very peculiar, if my aunt Dora is anything to go by.”

  “Your father’s not peculiar,” he said.

  “That’s because Grandad brought him up,” I explained. “They wouldn’t let anyone male stay with them beyond seven years. That’s why Dad and Grandad had to leave. But Grandad once said that he’d had as much as he could take by then. The Dimbers are hereditary witches, you see. And that’s all I really know.”

  Grundo sighed enviously. “When I grow up,” he pronounced, “I shall take care to have three really peculiar families at least. I want crowds of mad relatives.”

  We toiled on between hot hedges, arguing how Grundo could possibly achieve this. As we came to the junction with the main road, I remember I was saying, “Three peculiar wives mean three bigamies or three divorces. Can you stand that?” Then I said, “Hang on.”

  On the shady corner where the roads met, my eye was caught by a blue drift of speedwell flowers. Instantly my mind was full of a wood in winter and of a hanging swath of creeper crowded with gray puffs of seed. Old-Man’s-Beard, I found myself thinking, or Traveler’s-Joy, and I could feel another of the hurt woman’s flower files opening. Journeys and expeditions, this one said, cross-refer to spirit traveling and shape shifting. I didn’t think we needed that reference, but speedwell flowers were in there, under ordinary journeys, and I realized they were not called speedwell without a reason. It was a simple spell for a safe and lucky journey, and I knew we needed that. Best performed where three ways meet, it said, and we had that, because the main road went off hot and shimmering in two directions and the castle road met it to make the third way.

  Grundo put his bag down and waited expressionlessly while I picked seven of the juicy little flowers. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on the flower file in my head, I might have noticed a few danger signals from Grundo then. Grundo was trying to be civilized, but he was deeply jealous by now. From his point of view, I had had all the luck—all the magics, all the interesting relatives—and he had had nothing but being allowed to tag along. It wouldn’t take much more to make Grundo dangerously annoyed. And when Grundo was annoyed, he was liable to do strange things with his back-to-front magic.

  But I was far too hot, blinking sweat out of my eyes while I concentrated on translating the rhyme into modern language, and I didn’t think of Grundo. I carefully threw one small flower in each of the three roads. Then I threw three more while I said, “Journey flower, speedwell fair, keep us safe and speed us there.” Finally, I threw the seventh flower down the road we ha
d to take.

  Then I did look at Grundo, but all I saw was that he was white in the heat. His face was freckled on top of his freckles with transparent beads of sweat. “Do we have to walk?” he said.

  “I think so,” I said.

  Grundo grunted, and we started walking.

  The spell took awhile to work. Our feet got hot and sore. Heat came blasting up off the road. Everything shimmered: green shimmers from the humpy green hills on one side and gray quiverings above the long stretches of green-gold wheat on the other. The near-black trees beyond the fields were hazed and motionless in the heat, and unreal puddles glimmered in the distance up the road.

  Grundo gave up at the next crossroads. He said he was probably going to die before my spell worked and sat down in the whippy dry grass by the signpost. I got out the last of the griddle cakes and waved them at him enticingly, but he said he wasn’t hungry. I was just putting the packet away again when the first cars we had seen came howling and clicking between the dusty hedges, three of them, one after another. We jumped up and waved.

  Everyone in those cars waved cheerfully back, and they drove past without stopping.

  “Now I shall die,” Grundo said.

  We really knew so very little about hitching lifts—and you should have heard what Grandad said to me later about how dangerous it was!—but we went on waving and cars went on passing, until at length one did stop. It had a notice in the front that said DOCTOR. The man driving it leaned out of his window and asked, “Is this a medical emergency or just a friendly wave?”

  We rushed up to the car and explained. He looked serious. “Sutton Dimber’s well outside my practice,” he said, “but I’ll do what I can for you. Climb in, and I’ll see if we can catch our area nurse.”

  He drove us to a village clinic. All I remember about that drive is that we tried opening the windows and the wind that blew in was hot. But I remember his car screaming into the clinic forecourt just in time to catch the nurse climbing into her little green car. The doctor passed us on to her and went screaming off again.

  The nurse was rather a strict lady, as you might expect, and she thoroughly disapproved of the way we were wandering about the country on our own. She said we were on no account ever to do it again. Sutton Dimber was out of her way, too, she said, but she drove us into the nearest town, sweating our way between shimmering hedges, while she talked about all the wells and reservoirs that were drying up and shook her head about the drought. She was probably a bit of a snob. When we told her how we had been left behind by the Royal Progress, she turned a great deal more friendly and stopped talking about the drought.

  “Then it’s no wonder you’re both so ignorant,” she said. “Haven’t had a chance to learn, have you? Look, I can’t do much for you—I’ve got an old man with a bad leg to see to—but I’ll show you the place in the Square where you can catch the Dimber bus. Have you got the money for the fare?”

  We counted the money we had, and it turned out to be just enough.

  “Then ask the bus to drop you outside Dimber House,” she said. “You’ll get to it before you get to the village, and you’d only have to walk the mile back.” And as she drove into the Square, she said, “There’s the stop. Wait right outside the Chequers Inn or they won’t know you’re waiting. There’s one due at two-thirty, any minute now.” She stopped, and we opened the doors to get out. “They are expecting you? The Dimbers?” she said.

  “Well, no,” I said, and started to explain.

  She clicked her tongue. “Oh, dear! Then I’d better call them up and warn them when I get to my old man,” she said. “You really can’t just land on people like that, you know. You’re not the King.”

  “We know,” Grundo growled, but she didn’t hear and drove away.

  But she did warn the Dimbers. When we finally got out of the hot, rumbling bus—which was worse than a bus in the Progress because I swear it visited every tiny spot in Gloucestershire and sat and rumbled by village greens in sweltering heat, waiting to connect with other buses—I saw my aunt Judith anxiously waiting for us outside Dimber House. I knew it must be my aunt because she was about the same age as my aunt Dora. I could see her even before we got off the bus, because the house stood above the road, all by itself against the sky, and Judith was at the top of the six-foot drop down into the road, standing in the bare garden above the wall.

  Dimber House was unexpected. From the name, I’d expected it to be big, but it was quite modest. It was tall and narrow, with lots of dark windows, and it looked as if it had escaped from being one of a row of houses in a town. It was not exactly forbidding, but it was strange, standing all by itself in the middle of the country. It was built of row upon row of different dark bricks, ending at the bottom with small deep red ones like tiles, that Aunt Judith said were Roman bricks. She said this showed that Dimber House had been there continuously, just like the Dimbers, for nearly two thousand years. “And we go back much further than that,” she added.

  But that was after we’d got off the bus. When she saw us getting off, Judith came striding along the wall, calling out, “There you are! Come this way, my dears!” and pointing to the nearly hidden steps that went sideways up into the garden. It was a great relief to know she knew we were coming. She watched us anxiously as we climbed the steps, clutching a mauve, handwoven shawl around her in spite of the heat. I could see she was an anxious person. She was tall and thin and long-faced, with long dark hair that had a lot of gray in it, and she was serious and kind and still rather good-looking, in an arty way. She welcomed us at the top of the steps with a thin, cold hand and a very nice smile.

  “I hear the King went off and left you. What an awful thing to happen! You’re entirely welcome to stay with us, my dears, until we’ve got in touch with your parents. I’m sure that won’t take long because they must be madly worried about you. The trouble is, nobody seems to know where the Progress is just at the moment. But it’s only a slight snag. You’ll see.”

  She led us up the brick path to the house, talking away. I looked around as we went. Apart from a bush of lavender and a box tree cut into a round ball, there was nothing in this garden. It was all tufty grass. How odd, I thought. I’d always thought that witches cultivated herbs and were generally bowered in fertility. And I tried not to exchange looks with Grundo. I knew that a certain similarity to Grandfather Gwyn’s manse could not have escaped him. It was a relief to find a searingly bright cherry pink rose climbing over the front porch.

  There were squeals and barking coming from behind the house. Grundo says he thought the Dimbers kept pigs. But the sounds cut off when we went into the front part of the house. It was all quiet and stone-flagged and dark in there, and it went up in shallow steps.

  “Oh, mind the steps!” Judith cried out, too late. “These are mine,” she added apologetically as we both banged into upright wooden looms. The whole dim hall was lined with weaving machinery and smelled like new carpets. There was a spinning wheel ready to be fallen over at the far end. Grundo only just saved himself from it. “This is my trade,” Judith explained as she opened the door beyond the spinning wheel. “I sell quite well actually. It always surprises me. Put your bags down on the stairs there, and come on in. Here they are, Mother.”

  “Come in! Come in! Let me set eyes on Arianrhod at last!” my grandmother shrieked from the kitchen. “Where is she? Oh, there you are! Aren’t you tall! Come in, come in, let me look at you, and the boy, too.”

  My grandmother’s name is Hepzibah Dimber—but she shrieked at me almost at once that I was to call her Heppy—and she couldn’t have been more different from her daughter Judith. She was quite small, a head shorter than me, and she would have been plump if she hadn’t worn very obvious corsets which made her look like a tight little bolster. On the top half of the bolster she wore a shiny orange blouse with a flouncy bow, and on the bottom half a short, tight, black skirt. Where Judith had bare feet shoved into wide, arty sandals, Heppy wore stockings with shiny b
lack hearts on them and shiny brown shoes with three-inch heels. She trotted toward us, beaming, waving plump hands with several rings on each finger. Her hair was dyed a sort of apricot, and her mouth was painted a shiny red.

  The minute I saw her, I knew I was a snob—worse than the district nurse. I was ashamed of myself, but it was true. It came of being brought up at Court, and at Court most people consider Sybil pretty vulgar. I now saw that Sybil was refined compared with Heppy. Heppy was the most vulgar woman I’d ever seen. I was amazed that my soldierly, well-bred grandad Hyde had ever married Heppy. That was the marvel, not the divorce. And it was only my Court training in manners that made me able to smile back at her and kiss her scented, powdered cheek as if I liked doing it. It was awful. I felt like a cold little bitch. But it was the truth.

  Grundo got off more lightly. He only had to shake hands. But his eyes widened as his nose approached the flouncy bow and his fingers felt the twenty rings.

  My grandmother took us both by one arm and pulled us over into the best light. “Let me look at you,” she kept saying. I thought her eyes must be very bad, because the kitchen was one of the brightest rooms in that house. Sunlight streamed in through several windows, and it was all most cheerfully decorated with bright handwoven rugs and knitted cushions and a big table with a most impressive red-and-white tablecloth all woven with little figures and flowers. Judith blushed when I looked at it admiringly, and admitted that she had made it. “Then it’s no wonder you sell a lot of weaving!” I said.

  Meanwhile Heppy was peering up into our faces and saying, “Well, well, well! She favors you a bit, doesn’t she, Judith? Same anxious look about the eyes. And what strong witchcraft! If it wasn’t for all this strange stuff she’s got in her head, I’d take her by right to be our third witch here. That’d solve a few problems, eh?”

  This took my attention back from the tablecloth with a jolt. I realized that Heppy’s eyes were not bad at all. She had just brought us into the sunlight in order to exercise her divining powers. She was a very strong witch indeed.