The Bone Quill (12 page)

He made his way quickly to the water, dodging round brothers working in the fields and gardens. The monastery’s numbers had held steady at thirteen for as long as Solon could remember. Most of the work of the farm that surrounded the monastery was done by the monks themselves, with help from one or two men and women from the villages. The two monks tilling the kitchen gardens stared curiously after him, and a brother drawing on a bench near the Abbey’s stables greeted Solon with a wave as he sprinted past.

At the water’s edge, Solon hopscotched along the rocky shore, but he had lost them. Disappointment flooded through him. He slumped on the moss-covered rocks.

‘Lost your best friend?’

Solon whipped round in surprise. The stranger was tall and thin with shiny black hair swept off his face, a jagged scar running through a trimmed dark beard and blue-grey eyes that gave his face a generous expression. His robes were cinched tightly round his waist as if he was wearing someone else’s habit, an odd-looking striped scarf looped around his neck.

He reminded Solon of someone, but the young man could not put his mind to it. Perhaps he had seen him in the monastery. Solon knew all the monks personally, but he was ashamed to admit that he had been neglectful of the other men who kept the day-to-day tasks of the monastery and its lands running smoothly while the monks were copying, illustrating and binding books: labours of love that could take as long as a year at a time.

‘I trust you won’t give me away?’ the stranger asked. His accent was that of a native Scot, but one who had learned to soften the guttural sounds of his consonants. His enunciations had a similar rhythm and pitch to the Abbot, who had travelled to places across the oceans. ‘I come here when I can, and paint all over the island.’

‘No, sir. Secrets are fully safe with me,’ replied Solon.

The man had clearly been washing paintbrushes in one of the tidal pools. Solon stared curiously at his pots of inks lined up neatly in compartments inside a wooden basket with a long leather strap. He lifted out one of the pots. It was shaped like a mug, but Solon could see its contents clearly.

He held the vessel up to the man and tapped it. ‘What is this?’

‘It’s called ... glass,’ replied the man.

He seemed uneasy. Solon strained to read his fears the way the Abbot was able to do with the old monk, but picked up nothing ... except a prickly drift of disquiet.

Setting the vessel back inside the basket, Solon ran his fingers quickly across the lining of the case: a light, soft fabric. The basket and its insides were nothing like the ones his mother and his sisters made from rushes and seaweeds, which always smelled of herring no matter how many herbs they soaked the weeds in. This basket smelled of flowers and fresh air.

‘What are you doing down here?’ asked Solon.

‘Ach, lad, I’ve been capturing the monastery and the islands on my paper— I mean, parchment. I paint landscapes.’

‘Landscapes?’ Solon understood the meaning of the word, but it was base and vulgar as subject matter for art. Why waste your gift on a scene that was visible to the eye every day?

He looked at the man’s work perched on the easel. Unable to restrain himself, Solon let out a long whistle.

The stranger had captured the monastery in the fading daylight in thick strokes of colour like nothing Solon had ever seen before. The rows of spindly fir trees were no more than tall strips of differing shades of green inks, the rocky cliff a patch of grey, the water bright splashes of blue with spots of white dabbed upon it, the part-built tower outlined in black, and the sun a pink line on the horizon; but when taken together, when seen in their entirety, the inks blended, and the painting looked like the man had held a mirror up to the scene in front of him.

‘It is beautiful,’ said Solon in wonder. ‘It is as if the light reflecting on the water has been transposed to your parchment.’

He looked into the man’s eyes, then back at the luminosity of the painting. ‘Are you a member of the Order of Era Mina?’

The man cocked his head. ‘Era Mina?’

‘It is the name for the Order of monks who live here. Many of them are Animare. They ... we have faculties to ... to enliven our art, to add to its brilliance.’

‘Era Mina ...
Animare
! Of course!’ The man laughed, a deep throaty guffaw.

Solon took a step away from the stranger, his flesh suddenly chilled. ‘Who are you?’

Before the man could answer, Solon lost his footing on the damp moss, fell backwards and cracked his head on the rocks.

After checking that the boy was still breathing, the stranger made sure Solon was as comfortable as possible. He stared down sympathetically.

‘I do hate to leave you like this, my young friend, but time is of the essence,’ he said.

The Abbey

Present Day

W
hen
Matt was younger, he’d often sneaked out of bed early on Saturday mornings before Em woke so he could have some time alone in the flat with his mum. After a while, he felt that Saturday mornings belonged only to him and her – until his mum had been blackmailed into working for an international art-forgery ring, and their Saturday mornings together were abruptly brought to an end because she had to paint.

After that, Matt stopped rising early on Saturday mornings.

Now everything had changed again. No matter what everyone at the Abbey was doing together to find Sandie, Saturday mornings were Matt’s time to investigate what had happened to his mum – on his own.

Jeannie was in the kitchen making scones when Matt came downstairs. Without saying a word, she handed him a glass of milk and a plate with one of Matt’s favourite handheld breakfasts on it – two flaky wheat biscuits with chocolate spread slathered between them. Weeks ago, he and Zach had come up with the idea of creating breakfasts that you held in one hand while you played video games with the other.

‘Mind ye don’t leave a trail of crumbs in all the books,’ Jeannie warned, as Matt headed off, plate and glass in hand. ‘Or I’ll be hearing from Mr R.’

Inside the huge library, Matt set his plate on a table next to a cabinet with glass doors and shelves packed with over-sized leather-bound books. The cabinet held mostly old maps and prints that no one had looked at for years.

With its smell of old books and lemon polish, this room was one of Matt’s favourites. It fed his obsession with old maps of the islands and ancient drawings of the Abbey, and held a wealth of both – thanks to the fact that all of the Calders in the past had been avid book collectors. Some of the drawings and maps that he’d recently been checking out were still spread across a table in the middle of the room. The walls were covered with books and, where there wasn’t a shelf, art. Carvings of local birds covered the great wooden doors. Sometimes when Matt caught his grandfather deep in thought or lost in one of the library books, the bulbous puffin in the middle bobbed its head knowingly.

Busts of all the Calder ancestors who had lived on the island and owned the Abbey were carved in white stone and set into a series of small niches evenly spaced along the high stepped ceiling. Em thought it a little creepy that their ancestors were always watching them from above, but Matt found them comforting. His favourite was the guy with a scar down his cheek. He always saluted him when he entered the room.

Matt unlocked the glass cabinet, sliding the door open as far as he could. Then he shifted the biggest of the map books on to the floor under the table. As he lifted out a ragged folder of prints, the corner of the folder caught the edge of his plate. As if in slow motion, the plate and glass of milk began to topple off the end of the table towards the precious stack of maps underneath.

Matt flung the folder away from him like a Frisbee. He lunged at his falling breakfast, catching the glass in time and just saving the maps from a soaking. But he was too late for the plate, which clattered to the wood floor.

While he was on his knees brushing crumbs on to a folded sheet of sketch paper, a burst of colour caught his eye. It was from one of the prints that had fallen from the folder when he’d tossed it.

Balling up the paper, Matt dunked it into the bin across the room. He flipped through the prints as he returned them to the folder, searching for the one that had caught his eye. Most of them were impressions from medieval woodcuts, images of the monastery when it was founded. One showed the Abbey’s ancient catacombs, and there were a number of etchings of the face of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, a few sheep and lots of haloed angels. He dismissed all but the sketch of the catacombs, which he rolled up and slid into his pocket, and an original painting of the Abbey.

This painting was quite unlike the others. Taking it over to the light table, Matt set it on the white, translucent surface and turned on the light. Looking at the picture in this way meant he could see the details of the artist’s strokes and – the part that always made Matt’s pulse quicken – anything that had been sketched or painted underneath.

There was nothing underneath this one. It was an Impressionist scene, and reminded Matt of William Turner’s paintings of the Thames and its ships. This artist had titled it
Skinner’s Bog
. Matt knew the spot: a putrid marsh beside a couple of standing stones high up on Auchinmurn which were reputed to have mystical powers. The artist had painted from the edge of the bog, capturing the western façade of the Abbey in the distance, with the bay a band of blue-grey between the two islands and the rising sun a pink line on the horizon.

Matt took a magnifying glass from the light-table drawer and examined the watercolour brush strokes more closely. They had been applied quickly in the classic Impressionist style, and there were places where the colours had bled into each other more roughly than in other parts of the painting. The picture itself was the shape of a sheet of notebook paper. A whiff of rotting fish seeped out of it, a mixture of seaweed and Jeannie’s pickled-herring sandwiches.

The smell shifted an idea in Matt’s head, and he spotted what was wrong with the image. The tower on Era Mina wasn’t there.

He knew from his research that the tower had been completed in 1263, and as such it was one of the oldest standing Celtic structures in the whole of Great Britain.

The Impressionists produced their new style of painting in the mid-nineteenth century. So how had an Impressionist captured the Abbey and the islands as they had been before 1263? There would have been no photographs to copy. All Matt had found in his research was a series of woodcuts depicting the history of the monastery. There had been no woodcut of the buildings.

A shot of adrenalin spiked Matt’s pulse.

What if he and Em were not the only Animare whose powers were strong enough to time-travel through art?

The picture was most definitely worth hanging on to.

A
crusading knight on a black stallion, a Templar cape with its signature red cross rising and falling behind him, was riding straight for Em as she ran for her life, trying desperately to escape his reach, breathlessly sprinting through a labyrinth of hedgerows and tangled paths. But no matter which direction she turned, the knight was always in front of her, always charging at her through a smoky white veil, the black horse’s eyes fiery points of red.

Em woke up in a fright. Gasping for breath, she recognized after a moment of terror that she was not being chased, but was in her room at the Abbey, safe in her bed.