The Merlin Conspiracy Read online

  “What do you mean?” Heppy bawled at me.

  “The power in the Regalia!” I said. “It’s because long-ago Dimbers put spells on these invisible people and forced them to live in the treasure and—and empower it for you. They don’t look like us, but they’re alive. They’re people, too, just like we are. Honestly, Heppy. Judith, can’t you see them? They’re perched all over the room. They’ve been enslaved to the Regalia for centuries....”

  Heppy was looking so thunderous by then that I began to falter a bit, but I tried to keep going.

  “They came to see me in the night,” I said, “because they’d realized that they’d never been asked to do what they do. But they’re ever so loyal and they didn’t want to leave. They were just upset that you treated them like things instead of people. So I suggested—”

  Heppy screamed. Her screaming up to then had been nothing to the way she screamed now. She screamed. And she screamed. Then she cursed. Then she yelled, “Are you telling me, little madam from Court, how to deal with my own Regalia? The—the cheek of it!”

  “All they want is for you to ask them nicely,” I said desperately, but I don’t think she listened.

  “The cool, barefaced cheek of it!” Heppy screamed. And she went on screaming “The cheek of it!” with occasional shrieks of “Judith, have you ever heard the like? In all my days, I’ve never seen such ingratitude! My own flesh and blood, too!”

  She was an almost continuous background to Judith, who was anxiously trying to ask me to explain a bit more. I did my best, but it was not easy, because I wanted to keep Grundo out of it, and I very much didn’t want to tell the Izzys’ mother that it was the Izzys the Regalia folks were afraid of. Judith just could not seem to understand. And Heppy was not giving herself a chance to understand anyway.

  “But why did you tell the treasure it was enslaved, dear?” Judith asked me patiently. She just couldn’t seem to think of it as people living in the Regalia, whatever I said. “What made you suddenly do this?”

  Grundo suddenly spoke up, in his calmest, deepest voice. “She didn’t. It was me. I talked to the Regalia first. I told them they were enslaved. And they are.”

  That set Heppy off again, worse than ever. She was so angry that she practically danced. “Get out of my sight!” she screamed at Grundo. “Go and get dressed. Pack your things.” She glared at Grundo, pop-eyed with rage, until Grundo turned white and fled. “I’m not having that boy in my house one moment longer!” she screamed. “He’s going! Going this very morning! And you!” she shrieked, turning on me. “You sneaky little traitress! You’re going, too!”

  “I am not a traitress or a sneak,” I said. I was almost as angry as she was. “I was simply trying to deal in an honorable way with people who came to me for advice. You’re just not listening to me!”

  “You chilly little sneak!” she screamed. “I take you in, and you go behind my back!”

  “I had to!” I shouted. “You can’t see them, and I can!”

  “And you’re a liar!” she shouted back. “Judith, put them both in the car and drive them to Mrs. Candace. She can sort them out. I’ve had enough of them.”

  And this was more or less what happened, except that Judith anxiously insisted we were to have breakfast first because it was a long drive. She insisted on the Izzys’ coming, too. “You’re too upset, Mother,” she said. “They’ll only bother you.”

  While Heppy was arguing that her own dear twins never bothered her in the slightest, it was only some people!—glaring at me—I tried to apologize to all the transparent creatures sitting sadly about in the room. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I don’t seem to have done any—”

  That was all I managed to say before Heppy rushed at me and shoved me out into the hallway. “I’ll talk to them! It’s my right!” she yelled.

  At least she was beginning to admit that the creatures existed, I thought while I was chewing toast I didn’t want. The Izzys were grinning secretly at one another and only pretending to be scared by then. I hoped very much that they might begin to believe in the creatures, too, but I simply couldn’t tell. They seemed to take Heppy’s word for most things, so if Heppy believed … No, all I could hope was that they would not be too rowdy in the car, and that was probably too much to hope for anyway.

  The car lived in a niche carved in the wall below the front garden, and it was quite new and modern. That surprised me. I had expected any car that Judith drove to be sort of handwoven, if you see what I mean. We all got in. Judith made me sit beside her in the front, which meant that Grundo had to sit in the back between the Izzys. I’m not sure, but I think this may have been Judith’s quiet way of punishing Grundo for abusing their hospitality. He looked very white and sulky between the two frilly yellow dresses.

  I probably looked much the same. As we rushed between hedges along the hot, white road, I felt thoroughly in disgrace. I thought I had abused the Dimbers’ hospitality, really. It came to me that the honorable, sensible thing to have done last night was for me to have gone and woken Judith or Heppy up and tried to show them the folks perching on the rails or at least explained about them. But, I had to admit, this would simply have meant we had the row in the night instead of this morning. Heppy would have screamed just as loudly then. Because—and this was the thing niggling and pinching at me—Heppy did not like me any more than I liked her. It was a horrid fact. You are supposed to get on with your own grandmother, and I didn’t. The reason I had not tried to wake even Judith up last night was that as soon as I saw the strange being perched on my bedrail, I knew I was about to go one up on Heppy. It had given me a feeling of triumph, almost like gloating. And that was horrible.

  I felt so bad about it all that I just had to talk. “Who is Mrs. Candace?” I asked.

  “Pathetic!” said one of the Izzys. “Not heard of Mrs. Candace!”

  “My dear!” said the other Izzy, in a fine, affected voice. “Mrs. Candace’s Mrs. Superwitch, and she can skin you with her eyes, my dear!”

  “Be quiet, dears,” Judith said in her mild way. “She’s the Lady of Governance, Arianrhod, if you know what that means.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “She doesn’t know everything, then, Miss Courtly Know-it-all,” jeered an Izzy.

  “Actually, my dear, she’s just plumb ignorant,” the other joined in. “Be kind to her. It’s just her upbringing.”

  It seemed to be me they had their knife into today. Not surprising. I turned round and said, in a low, menacing voice, “I said something about fleas last night. And I meant it.”

  They gave me mean looks and shut up.

  “The Lady of Governance,” Judith said, just as if there had been no interruption. “Yes, I suppose you might not know. The Court and the Progress concentrate almost entirely on the male side of magic, don’t they? The Lady of Governance is the female counterpart of the Merlin. She’s as powerful as he is, but she doesn’t usually concern herself with state magics. She controls the more domestic things. This one, Mrs. Candace, makes a point of monitoring us hereditary witches—in the nicest possible way, because after all we’re all busy with the health of the land—and I suppose that’s why Mother thought of her.”

  This was complete news to me. Up till then I had supposed the Merlin was on his own. Maybe, I thought, Sybil doesn’t know about Mrs. Candace either! Then this could be a good thing instead of a total disgrace. I was grateful to Judith for giving me something else to think of beside my failings as a granddaughter.

  I sat and thought about a counterweight to the Merlin as I stared out of the window and Judith drove. After a while I realized I could see the wild relatives of the creatures from the Regalia. They were almost completely transparent and had no color at all. They were all over the place, and they looked completely, utterly happy. They purred in the heat with peacefulness. They sat and swung in hedges, or lazed in hovering crowds over the ripening wheat, or blurred into dancing distance against hills and woodla
nd. Yesterday I would have taken them for heat haze, but today I saw they were of all shapes and sizes, although none was as large as the creature from the chalice.

  I watched them tumble and fly among the grass by the hedges in the wind from our wheels and wondered why I could suddenly see them now. Perhaps all the information from the hurt lady had expanded that part of my brain, but it felt more as if I had simply only needed to know they existed in order to see them. But how did Grundo know about them? How did he spot them in the Regalia?

  I asked Grundo during the sweltering break when Judith bought more motor fuel, while the Izzys danced around us both, calling names.

  He looked surprised. “I’ve always been able to see them,” he said.

  We got back in the car. Grundo seemed to be holding his own in the back against the Izzys, but there were moments when the struggle tipped the Izzys’ way and their voices rose in a waspish whine. “Per-thetic boy! He’s all in a shell. He’s an oyster!”

  “Not an oyster, my dear. A snail. All oooozy!”

  If it got any worse than this, I said, “Fleas!” over my shoulder. Judith simply pretended not to hear.

  It was a long, long drive. At lunchtime we stopped on a baking village green for prettybread from the local baker. It wasn’t very nice, stale and tough. The Izzys took one bite of theirs and then announced they were slimming, so Grundo ate it all, while the Izzies turned cartwheels all over the village green. A row of fascinated children turned up and stared at the Izzys’ frilly yellow knickers, until a big woman came out of the Post Office and sent them all indoors.

  Judith didn’t seem to notice any of this. Nor did she pay attention when we all got back into the searingly hot car seats and the Izzys discovered there was no prettybread left. She just said, “Well, it wasn’t very nice, dears,” and drove on.

  The rest of the drive was full of complaints from the Izzys. They were too hot, they were starving, and it wasn’t fair. On and on, while the country turned to smooth green hills with lines of trees at their tops and very straight white roads. Then there was blue distance and a narrow spire against the horizon.

  “There’s Salisbury,” Judith said. “Nearly there.” Then, much to my surprise, she spoke quite sternly to the Izzys. “Mrs. Candace is a very old lady, dears, and she can do Heppy and me a lot of harm if we annoy her. So I must ask you to behave really beautifully while we’re there. Can you do that?”

  “But, my dear, I am beautiful,” replied one Izzy.

  The other whined, “Old ladies are so boring. Can’t we stay in the car?”

  “No,” said Judith. “She’ll be very disappointed not to see you.”

  It must have been misguided mother love that made Judith say that. We finally stopped at a house on the outskirts of Salisbury that was almost hidden by high evergreen hedges and walked stiffly up the path behind the hedges, where Judith pushed open a green front door into a cool, elegant house and stepped inside, calling, “Mrs. Candace! It’s Judith Dimber. You were expecting us, weren’t you?”

  “Yes, my dear. I’m in here,” an elderly voice called back.

  We trooped into the room, where Mrs. Candace was sitting elegantly on a low chair beside a table full of tea things. She turned. She had the most beautiful small head loaded with thick white hair and amazingly shapely legs in silken stockings. The dismay on her face when she saw the Izzys nearly made me laugh. “I didn’t know you were bringing the twins, dear,” she said. I realized that the affected voice the Izzys kept using was an imitation of Mrs. Candace. She was so old-fashioned and well bred and well spoken that she did sound almost affected.

  “We knew you would just love to see us!” one Izzy said. It was almost an exact imitation. Mrs. Candace winced.

  The other Izzy said rudely, “And who’s he? We don’t allow boots in the house.”

  She pointed at the man standing by the table holding a teacup. He was a pleasant-looking elderly man in a shabby linen jacket. He was wearing green rubber boots. He looked down at his boots and then at the Izzy and seemed rather startled, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, yes,” Mrs. Candace said. “May I introduce Salisbury? We were just consulting about your problem, as it happens.”

  “Salisbury?” said Judith.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Candace said. “Salisbury, the city.”

  “Oh!” Judith wrapped her shawl around her in a flustered way and introduced Grundo and me. Obviously, the idea of speaking to a city in green rubber boots was too much for her.

  The Izzys had no such problems. One of them said, “That’s stupid!” and the other agreed: “No one can talk to a town.” And they stared rudely at Salisbury.

  Judith, as usual, pretended not to notice. She said, “I can’t stay very long, I’m afraid. It’s such a long drive.”

  “You’ll stay for a cup of tea,” Mrs. Candace stated. “Then I shall make sure you get home much faster than you came. More tea and perhaps some cake,” she said to the air.

  We all sat down politely on little padded chairs, except for the Izzys, who wandered about, pulling and prodding at everything in the elegant room. A fat gray cat that had been peacefully asleep on a stool only just escaped onto a high cabinet in time, where it stood with its fur bushed, staring down at the Izzys in horror. Mrs. Candace looked up at it anxiously. But Judith simply pulled her shawl closer round her shoulders and went on explaining how Grundo and I had been left behind by the Progress.

  A teapot and a big cake cut into large, squashy slices came floating through the room. The Izzys left off trying to reach the cat and stared. Grundo’s eyes followed the path of the cake with interest. I screwed my eyelids up against the daylight and found I could just see the shapes of four transparent, birdlike creatures guiding the teapot and the cake down onto the small table beside Mrs. Candace.

  “Don’t even think of it!” I whispered fiercely at Grundo.

  He shot me a guilty look and grinned. Then he worked some magic. It is often hard to tell when Grundo is working magic. He doesn’t move, and his face hardly changes. But this time I had no doubt. It jolted me. I jumped as if I’d had a bad fright, and so did Mrs. Candace. I rounded on Grundo to tell him to behave.

  But just then one of the Izzys succeeded in grabbing the cat’s dangling gray tail. The cat squawked. The cabinet rocked, and all the delicate china inside it rattled. And, to my surprise, Judith sprang up and more or less shouted at the Izzys. “Isadora, stop that at once! Come here, both of you!”

  The twins, looking as surprised as I felt, wandered sulkily toward her. “It’s booooring here!” Isadora moaned, and Ilsabil said sweetly, “But we’re being ever so good, Mother. We promised!” Then, as usual, they did it the other way round.

  “You are not being good at all!” Judith snapped. Her face was most uncharacteristically red and angry. “Say sorry to Mrs. Candace and then we’ll go home. I do apologize,” she said to the rest of us. “We really must leave now. It’s such a long way.”

  She began pushing the Izzys out of the room. Both of them leaned backward. “But I want some cake!” Ilsabil protested.

  “You’re not getting any. You don’t deserve it,” Judith said. “We’re going straight home, and you’re going to have another long talk with your grandmother.”

  Both Izzys burst into loud tears. We could hear them wailing and yelling even after the front door had slammed behind them. We could hear them through the opening and shutting of car doors and the sound of the engine starting. We went on hearing them until the noise of the engine had died away into the distance.

  “Well!” said Mrs. Candace in the final silence. “What was that about?”

  “Grundo?” I said.

  Grundo went pink. “They had a spell on Judith,” he growled, “so that they could do whatever they liked and she would never notice.”

  “And you took it off?” Mrs. Candace demanded.

  “Not quite. They had it on Hepzibah, too,” Grundo explained. “I had to put a spell on the
m, to make what they were doing obvious to Judith—and Hepzibah, too, I hope, once they get home. It was difficult. It took me the whole drive to work it out.”

  “Well!” Mrs. Candace said again. “In the normal way, young man, I would give you a good talking to. It is not allowed to tamper with people’s personalities. That’s black magic. But in this case I concede that it was richly deserved. Still, it seems hard on poor Judith to have to take to the road again without even a cup of tea. I’d better do what I promised her. Help yourselves to cake. I won’t be long.”

  She stood up—with an effort. She was old and creaking. Salisbury passed us cake, gravely and silently, and the cat came down from on high and sat across Grundo’s legs, purring. The cat knew who to be grateful to all right. I bit into squashy cake while I watched Mrs. Candace bring several pieces of empty air together and then sort of pleat it in her twisty old fingers.

  “Find them a way through a suitable otherwhere,” she murmured, “and then bring their road to it and fold it like a fan, so that they only touch the road at the tops of the folds....”

  I found I knew this spell, or one so like it that it made no difference. It was under Traveler’s-Joy: mundane journeys. It was one of six ways to shorten a road. I wondered, as I watched, if Mrs. Candace knew the other five, too. And before I had quite finished my cake, I realized that Judith was nearly home already with her carload of yelling Izzys. Mrs. Candace was good at what she did. She was even doing something the flower file in my head had not mentioned, unpleating the road behind the car as it traveled, so that no other cars would get caught in the spell. That impressed me.

  “There!” Mrs. Candace sank down as if it had tired her to take so much off the journey. Salisbury sat down, too, at last, cautiously, and the low chair groaned underneath him. He passed her a cup of tea. She smiled at him and turned to me, still smiling. I saw that she had once been ravingly beautiful. “That seemed the least I could do for her,” she said. “Now, what have you two been up to that Hepzibah Dimber couldn’t handle?”