The Merlin Conspiracy Page 23

  THREE

  I found out what Grundo had been up to in the middle of that night. But before that Judith had rung London at least twenty times. She came away from the far-speaker looking more anxious each time.

  “I can’t understand it,” she said. “I’m getting the engaged signal every time!”

  “Don’t worry so,” Heppy said. “Dora’s probably calling that vile man of hers. That Jerome. Or Maxwell has some crisis on. Try again early tomorrow. And I’ll try telepathy after that. I’d try it now, only it always annoys Maxwell so when I do it. I always seem to catch him at an awkward moment.” And she cackled with laughter.

  Of course Judith did worry. She was that sort. She set about cooking supper with her long, kind face all tense and wrinkled. I offered to help her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Children didn’t help in that house. So I went away and defended Grundo from the Izzys instead.

  They had discovered how to victimize him by then. One would twirl in and poke him, chanting, “Long nose, long nose, oh, pathetic long nose!” and the other would come sweetly undulating up on the other side and ask in a babyish little voice, “Forgive me asking, but where did you get all those pretty freckles from?” Then, of course, they would swap roles.

  Grundo couldn’t handle this at all. He was looking desperate when I came up. I took hold of an Izzy in each hand and shook them, quite roughly. “If you little freaks do or say one more thing to Grundo,” I said, “I shall turn you both into fleas. Don’t think I can’t. So leave him alone. Now.”

  They twisted round and stared up at me innocently. “But men are fair game,” Isadora said.

  “Heppy says so,” added Ilsabil.

  “And I say not,” I said. “And I say that you are ignorant, badly brought-up little witches, and I’ve got hold of you, so you are going to do what I say, not what Heppy tells you. Understand?”

  Their little pink mouths opened charmingly. “Oh, but—”

  “But nothing,” I said. “Don’t try and charm me. I don’t think you’re sweet. I think you both need spanking.” I banged their heads together, not quite as hard as I wanted to, and stalked away.

  I could feel them staring after me with hatred. I spent the rest of that evening expecting them to take some horrible revenge on me. But to my surprise they treated me almost with respect. I don’t think anyone had ever told them off before. They didn’t like it, but it seemed to have made them think.

  All the same, I think they put something slimy in Grundo’s bed that night. Poor Grundo. He was given a little room in the attic next door to the Izzys. I was given a grand guest bedroom halfway down the house. It had a wonderful high brass bedstead with knobs on its brass rails and a whole bank of pillows, and it was covered with an enormous patchwork quilt.

  “Be gentle with the quilt,” Judith said. “My great-grandmother made it—your great-great-grandmother, that is. It’s quite fragile these days.”

  “It’s beautiful,” I said, because it was. I looked at the big windows. They had brass curtain rails threaded with big brass rings. The curtains hanging from the rings were as beautiful as the quilt, but newer. “Did you weave the curtains?” I asked. “They’re lovely.”

  “Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Judith said. She went away with an anxious, apologetic smile, as near to being pleased as I had seen her.

  I settled down under the ancestral patchwork and fell straight into sleep. I was tired out. And it seemed to me that I had another dream after a while, of the same kind that I had dreamed at Grandfather Gwyn’s. I thought I floated out from under the quilt and through the window and sped off across the countryside. Dim blue fields and dark copses unfurled beneath me for miles, until I arrived at Castle Belmont and whirled through the grounds to the Inner Garden. This time I didn’t go into it. I sort of roosted on the wall, looking down into the garden’s moist, quiet spaces. Grandfather Gwyn’s horrible horse standard was still there. I could see it as a white streak at the corner of my eye while I examined the garden.

  It was spoiled. The lawns were drying out, making trees droop and bushes wither, and the waters did not seem to be running freely anywhere in the conduits and cisterns. Where the waterfalls poured into the pools, they made a strange, harsh tinkling, quite unlike the earlier deep, singing gurgle. Some animal heads had stopped running entirely. But this was only the outer sign of what Sybil had done. When I looked more closely—in a way it was feeling as much as seeing—I found a yellow-white ghostly layer of rottenness over everything. It covered the lawns and the flowers, and was particularly disgusting where it draped and glopped over the trees or oozed down the waterfalls.

  I wasn’t wrong about this! I thought in my dream. After what Heppy and Judith had said, I had been almost distrusting my own memories, thinking perhaps that I had made a mistake, or imagined Sybil talking to Sir James and the Merlin, and possibly that I had only dreamed that they had summoned Grandfather Gwyn here. Now—at least in my dream—I knew it had been true.

  Then I turned my head and saw someone else standing sadly on the wall beside me. She towered above me, tall and slender in a dress that blew about without any wind to blow it, and her long hair blew across, almost like tendrils, to touch me. It was the touch of her hair that had made me notice her. Even so, I was not sure at first that she was really there. I could see right through her, to trees and stars in the sky. She was just a sort of whiteness faintly across these things, like a cloud. Then she looked at me with huge eyes, and I saw that she was real. She seemed to be about my age, but I was fairly sure that she was older than the garden and more real than I was.

  “This used to be one of the strong shrines,” she murmured. “It anchored the land.” She sighed. She beckoned me to watch and reached down underneath Sybil’s layer of rottenness, where she took hold of the good part of the garden that still lay down there and pulled gently. She drew it out, all the power and virtue and goodness that was left, as if it was a huge, mossy cloth covered with faint, running glimmers, and draped it dripping around her shoulders. It smelled wonderful, of rain and woodland and deep, clear waters. “I have to take it back for a while,” she mused as she pulled it round her. She seemed to be thinking aloud, but she was speaking to me, too. “It will cause a strong imbalance.”

  While I was waiting for her to say more, somebody called my name from inside the guest bedroom, and I had to leave in a hurry. This is the way when somebody calls you by name. I went with such helter-skelter speed that the dark country teemed and whirled underneath me, and I landed in the brass bedstead with a thump. I was quite giddy when I sat up. But this time I knew I was awake. I could feel the frail squares of the quilt under my fingers and hear the brass rails rattle, both on the bed and above the curtains.

  “Who’s there and what do you want?” I asked slurrily.

  Someone said, “Ah, she did hear!” in a satisfied way, and several other someones said, “We are. We need to speak to you.”

  There was light coming from low down at the side of the room, gleaming and yellowish. I never found out where the light came from. I looked in the morning, and there was nothing. I blinked in the low golden glow and stared. There was a most peculiar creature perched on the brass rail at the end of the bed, looking at me with glistening pinkish eyes. He was big, at least as big as the curly dog asleep downstairs, and he had a protruding front and long, fluted, trailing parts, like wings. Handlike parts gripped the brass rail, and a facelike, birdlike part stared at me. What struck me as most peculiar, though, was that he was wholly transparent. I mean, I could see through him, just as I could see through the lady I had just met, but where she had been like vapor or a cloud, he was like a balloon full of nothing, and faintly pinkish all through. Without that low-down light, I would not have been able to see him at all. The same light, I saw suddenly, glistened on a whole row more of the creatures clustered along the curtain rails above. These ones seemed to be smaller, and they were all sorts of different shapes.

  “Who are you
all?” I said.

  “I am the person who inhabits the Dimber chalice,” the big one said gravely. “The people on the curtain rails inhabit the other vessels of the Regalia. We have inhabited these vessels and worked magics at the bidding of the Dimbers since we were first summoned, hundreds of years ago. We want to know if this is wrong.”

  “Yes, is this slavery or not?” chirped one of the ones on the curtain rail.

  “The boy told us it was,” sang another.

  “We used to be free folks,” another chimed in, “until we were summoned and bound by magic.”

  “So is this wrong?” the big one inquired. “The boy says that it is. He told us that in this day and age there are laws that forbid one person to imprison another or to force people to work unless they have agreed to do so. He says the Dimbers are acting unlawfully in this. Would you agree?”

  Oh, dear! I thought. Now I knew why the Regalia had felt so much alive. I also knew why I had seen those two little spots of light, so much like eyes. They were eyes, Grundo’s, looking in. He had been spoiling for trouble anyway, and it must have been the last straw when he was sent away to play with the Izzys while I was shown the treasure.

  “Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. It was difficult to think. Half my mind felt as if it was still with the Inner Garden. “Grundo told you that you’ve been enslaved by the Dimbers, is that right? So now you have to live in the chalice and the other things and do magic when they tell you to. How did they get you to live in the things?”

  “By spell and ritual,” said the big creature. “One day I was free and floating in my hedgerow, and the next, I was haled into the chalice, and my power was at the command of Eliza Dimber. It was the same for the others, with different Dimbers.”

  “We had no choice,” twittered the ones on the railings. “The spell laid on us was strong.”

  “But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” I said. “The laws might have been different then. And I’m not sure it was slavery. They do reward you, don’t they?”

  The creatures on the railings burst out twittering again, like a row of birds. “They give us blood,” one sang, and another sang, “But blood is not our proper food!” Another piped, “What is a reward? We never asked to work.” A small one answered, “Reward is living in a vessel of glory,” and others twittered him down with “Freedom is better!” A medium-sized one chanted, “But we would be dead by now, but for the spells and the blood.”

  “This is all true,” the big one said, staring at me solemnly, “but the boy said it was slavery because no one asked us first.”

  “I suppose that is right, in a way.” I felt forced to agree. “But why did you come to me?”

  “The boy has unbreakable protections round his room,” the medium-sized one chanted from the curtain rail. “We can’t get in.”

  This did not surprise me. If I were next door to the Izzys all night, I would make sure no one could get into my room, too. It surprised me slightly that Grundo could do this, but then Grundo never seems to know what he can do until he does it. All the same … “I don’t understand,” I said. “If Grundo has already told you all this, did you come to me for a second opinion or what?”

  “He advised us to speak to Hepzibah or Judith Dimber,” the big creature told me, “but they have never known that we exist. They were asleep, and we couldn’t get them to hear us. And we need to know whether we should proceed now with the rest of the boy’s advice.”

  “Oh-oh!” I said. “What else has Grundo told you?”

  “To leave the treasure and stop doing the Dimbers’ bidding,” chirped a small one from the curtains.

  The rest burst out twittering at that. “Good advice!” or “Bad advice!” or “No one has ever advised us before!” and “No one has ever noticed us before!” came from a dozen transparent, pulsing throats. It was like a tree full of sparrows until the big one took charge again.

  He frilled and fluttered his trailing bits, in a way that reminded me exactly of Judith clutching and resettling her mauve shawl. The rest all stopped twittering when he did this. “Looking to the future,” he said, “viewing what is to come, we think we should take the boy’s advice.”

  The smaller ones all went crowding this way and that along the curtain rails, looking very anxious indeed. I saw their point. I saw where all this had been leading now. If I was booked to be enslaved to one of the Izzys, I would be terrified. “I see,” I said. “It might not be so bad. They seem quite kind to their dog.”

  The big creature just looked at me out of sad shining pink eyes.

  “Yes,” I said, “but—if Heppy and Judith don’t know you exist, they won’t understand it if you leave. It seems a bit hard on them. What is it that you actually do for them?”

  “Secret ceremonies with me,” the big one said, “and appropriate rituals with all of us, for the health of the land and its magics, in this part of the country. Our belief is that both Dimber ladies have power enough of their own to do this without us.”

  But they love that treasure, I thought. They revere it. If these people leave, the Regalia’s going to be like the Inner Garden after the lady on the wall took the goodness away.

  “Look,” I said. “Your problem is really Ilsabil, isn’t it? Or Isadora?”

  None of the creatures spoke, but there was a terrible tense stillness about the way they perched that showed me I was right. They were dreadfully loyal, though. None of them would say a word against any Dimber. How can I handle this? I wondered. Oh, blast Grundo! What a perfect revenge he’s taken!

  “I think what you need,” I said, “is some way of making them realize that you’re people and just as alive as their dog.”

  This caused a perfect storm of cheeping and chanting. It was like having the dawn chorus in my bedroom.

  “If only they knew!”

  “We’ve served so long, but they all think of us as things!”

  “Just to be thanked for once!”

  “And so we are people, just as you are!”

  “They can’t see us, they can’t see us or hear us!”

  “We want them to know!”

  They made me lose my thread. “What were you before you were made to inhabit the Regalia?” I asked them.

  “Merely some of the folk who live in the land,” the big one told me. “You people never seem to see us, but there are crowds of us everywhere. In summer we sway and sing and climb ladders of hot air …”

  I missed the next bit because a flower file suddenly opened in my head. You took your time! I thought crossly, but it was all there, under Mullein again. Invisible beings of the day: very potent transparent folk existing in crowds all over the land, idle and joyful, can be commanded but should be entreated with politeness as, when annoyed, they can cause storms, floods, and droughts. Cross-refer to bad magics: enslavement. She had known them well, the hurt lady.

  “It was high summer,” the big creature was saying when I started listening again, “and it was a great shock to me when the spells were cast and I was hurled from my bed in the warm air into the cold gold chalice. I admit that my existence has been useful since....”

  Should be entreated with politeness, I thought. And they’re very loyal, really. “Look, wouldn’t you rather help the Dimbers of your own free will?” I asked.

  “Certainly,” said the big creature, frilling his trailing parts. “It is not the work we object to. We would like to be asked to do what we do.”

  “Politely,” muttered someone on the curtains.

  “Of course,” I said. “So this is what you should do. You mustn’t really leave, you must just leave the Regalia for a day or so, until the Dimbers realize that you exist. I’ll help. I’ll tell them that you’re really people that they didn’t know they’d enslaved. Then, when they start talking to you, tell the Dimbers that you’re quite willing to go on working for them so long as they ask you politely first. Tell them that slavery is wrong. Do you think that will do it?”

  This
was exactly what they had hoped I would say. They told me so in chorus, singing and twittering and chanting and thanking me over and over again. I settled back to sleep, smiling a little smugly, because it seemed to me that I’d done everyone a favor. I’d scotched Grundo, helped these strange invisible folks, shown Heppy and Judith that there had been a dreadful mistake all these years, and possibly even forced the Izzys to be polite to something for once.

  It didn’t work out like that at all.

  FOUR

  There must have been an early-morning ritual. I was woken by Heppy screaming. She screamed like a parrot, on and on and on. I sprang up in my nightclothes and rushed downstairs to the stiff living room. Grundo came tumbling and yawning down after me, wearing nothing but his trousers.

  The cupboard in the paneling was open. I saw at a glance that the Regalia inside was lifeless. It was still beautiful, but it was lackluster, simply cups and plates and vases, with nothing special about them, except fine workmanship. It could have been merely the Crown Jewels.

  Heppy was in front of the cupboard, dressed up to the nines in a blue satin two-piece, jumping up and down in her high heels and screaming. Judith was wringing her hands under a lovely lace shawl, and the Izzys were there, too, sitting in two corners, looking scared and almost subdued. They were wearing frilly yellow dresses with yellow bows in their hair, and I had no idea which was which, even less than yesterday.

  Mainly I thought, Oh, dear! I think this was an important ceremony!

  “Look!” Heppy shrieked, pointing a dramatic arm at the cupboard. “The virtue’s gone! Somebody’s stolen all our power!”

  “No, no, they haven’t, Heppy, honestly,” I said. I took a quick look around. The big creature was sitting on one of the open cupboard doors, looking sorrowful and anxious. His frilly parts were almost trailing in Heppy’s face, but I hadn’t seen him straightaway because these strange beings were truly extremely hard to see by daylight. The rest were perched around the room, roosting beside vases on the mantelpiece, on the long-case clock and on top of the glass-fronted bookcases. “They’re all here,” I said. Heppy just went on screaming, so I shouted, loudly and slowly, “Heppy! They’re all here! All the folks that inhabit the Regalia are sitting here in this room!”