At the Edge of Waking (15 page)

“Brandy, please,” she said.

“She means the real stuff, Jock,” Graham said. “In one of those fat glasses that spill all down your chin.”

“A snifter, sir, yes, thank you, sir,” said Jock, his accent refined to the point of sarcasm. But he came back with the brandy and another pint for Graham. Graham finished off the old pint and then looked at Lucy. She was shivering from too harsh a swallow—Our Best Brandy Isn’t Better—and put the back of her hand to her mouth, a fascinating gesture, but they all were, her gestures like a private conversation between Lucy and herself, and she had such beautiful hands . . . Graham gave his second pint a wary look and pushed it away. Trouble, he thought. And then looked at her again and woke up to her pallor and bruised eyelids: trouble indeed.

“But what do you really do?” she said, and lowered her hand.

He had to retrieve her initial question. “Really don’t write it. What would be the point?”

“What if people should believe it? What if they need to know?”

Graham hooted with laughter. “There is no such story. Listen, love, you can’t tell the glorious public anything for their own good, not unless you’re in advertising. One of the great mysteries of life. Tell them snake oil cures warts and they’re happy to pay a shilling an ounce. Tell them the Country Hospital Fund requires property taxes to increase by a shilling next year and consider the outrage!” He drank from his beer, then remembered and set it aside.

“Maybe outrage cures warts,” she said with a smile that made him feel she was looking at him for the first time.

“Maybe snake oil does. What’s your story that no one will believe?”

“Maybe magic does.”

“Cut a potato with a silver knife and bury it by the light of a full moon.”

Her smile grew lighter, questioning.

“Magic,” he explained. “To cure warts.”

“Shhh.” She reached across the table and touched her fingers to his lips. “Not so loud. He might hear you.”

She wasn’t smiling now. He knew what he was supposed to ask, but it took him a moment, seduced as he was by a touch that lingered after she had taken her hand away. What is this, Lucy? What the hell?

“Who might hear?”

She didn’t answer him directly. “Do you believe in magic?”

“Do I believe in . . . are we talking philosophy? History? Curing warts?”

“Magic,” she said, as if it were a perfectly sensible thing to say in an empty pub on a day in early spring. “Here and now, curing warts, whatever you like.”

“No. Never tell me that’s your story.” His eyes wandered to the fat portfolio between them on the table. “What is that, dispatches from a thousand years ago? Or is all this just leading up to something else?”

“Magic is real. Here and now. And I can prove it.”

She had a faint smile and a tension that dared him to take her seriously, but was she serious?

“You’re dead right, chicken: nobody will believe you.”

“But I can prove it. I can. And it’s easy, anyone can do it who’s ever read a newspaper, seen a newsreel at the moving picture show. Anyone who learned their history lessons at school.”

“What?” This whole conversation was the set-up for an insult to his intelligence. “Can you possibly be talking about who I think you’re talking about? That stuffed suit the royals haul out for parades! That dressmaker’s dummy! That moth-eaten remainder from a waxwork museum! What the hell has come over you?” His gaze was caught again by her portfolio. “Oh, Lucy. Lucy, no.
This
is your life’s work?
This
is what you’ve been chasing after all this time?”

She looked down as if she were surprised to see the battered folio case on the table. Her cheeks were flushed and her smile had fled; he felt a stab of shame, as if he’d been picking on the slow child at school; but all the same!

“Of all the dull corners of history you could have chosen,” he said before he could change tack. “Well, all right. But please don’t suggest the Marshal of Whatsisname is news. Really, old darling, believability is not the issue. Sheer, unadulterated boredom is the issue.”

“Didn’t you ever scare yourself with the stories when you were a child?” Her voice was quiet, and though there was a humorous quirk to her brows she didn’t meet his eyes. “The end of an empire, the end of an age. The end of magic. And the one who did it just goes on and on . . . ”

“I know. ‘Don’t stay out after dark,
he
might get you!’ But that was just to make staying out after dark more fun.” Studying her face, Graham found himself increasingly sorry for his scorn. She always looked delicate; at this moment she looked frail. “I still don’t get what this is about? The story no one will believe?”

“Magic is still alive,” she said, almost in a whisper. “And I can prove it.”

“All right. What’s your proof?”

“The Marshal of Kallisfane.”

“But he ended it.” He leaned forward, as if it was important to convince her. “He brought the dread empire down and put an end to magic. Hurray for the dawn of reason and the rule of law.”

“A thousand years ago.”

“Give or take.”

“Then what’s keeping him alive?”

“What . . . ” Graham scratched his chin. He was on the verge of laughter, because though it was nonsense, it was clever nonsense. “Well, he’s a remnant, isn’t he? Sort of . . . a leftover. Wasn’t it supposed to be the doing of it, whatever he did, that preserved him? Dried prunes, salt cod, the Marshal of Whatsisname?”

“Are you asking me, or telling me?”

“I am telling you,” he said pompously, “what they taught us in school.”

But the more he tried to jolly her out of it, the more solemn she became.

“That,” she said with one of those direct, heartstopping looks, “is what he told someone a long time ago.”

“There you are, then.”

“And he’s a reliable source, is he? Mister Newspaperman?”

“Oh, come on!” He was stung by her echo of his scorn. “It’s clever, I grant you, but you don’t think you’re the first person ever to think of it, do you?”

“No,” she said, her gaze falling again to her papers. “No, I don’t.”

“Even if it’s a neat bit of logic, it doesn’t go anywhere, does it? I mean, so what if he is . . . ” (he felt like an ass for saying the word) “ . . . magical. If he’s the only magical thing in the world, what’s it good for? He’s an anomaly, the exception that proves the rule.”

“That just means ‘tests the rule’. The challenge to the rule. Did you know that?” This, apparently to the portfolio.

“And it’s no kind of newspaper story,” he forged on, though he was starting to hate the sound of his own voice. “You do know that, right?”

“Oh, yes. I know. Because no one will believe it, and no one will care.”

“Well, listen . . . ” By this time feeling like an utter shit. “There’s nothing wrong with the idea. I mean, as an idea. Philosophy, history, all that. Very profound.”

“Rest easy, my hero. I wasn’t going to ask you to put it in your paper.”

She smiled, finally, but she didn’t quite met his gaze. And then before he knew it she was gathering up the weighty portfolio and bending down to kiss him, which she never did, a press of her lips to the corner of his mouth, a gesture as mysterious and expressive of any of hers, warm and sad and what? What is this, Lucy? What the hell
is
this?

But by the time it occurred to him simply to ask, she was gone.

Lucy had called up Graham with the vague notion of asking for help, or perhaps for less than that, for comradeship, a shoulder braced against her own. So his contempt stung, and confused her, too, because she could have argued against it, but what if he was wrong? What if the danger was real? It
was
real, it was the crooked backward course she had been plotting all this time. So if she was wrong, if she had been chasing nothing more than a scholar’s delusion, then she was a fool, but she was safe. And if she wasn’t wrong, then
he
was safe, because she had taken her proof away unshared. And wasn’t it just a dream? She didn’t know. She could not explain the certainty of danger, even to herself. She went home.

And walking from the bus stop (the bus easier than hunting for a cab so close to noon) she turned the corner into the square and saw him.

Him.

Benbury Square was really three squares nested one inside the other: the outer square of townhouses; then the square of cobblestone pavement fronting the houses; then the square of the central garden, hemmed in by palings and punctuated by trees. There were beds of turned earth, two benches awaiting this year’s coat of paint, and a rounded patch of lawn already showing green. And on the lawn stood a man wearing a double-breasted overcoat of the sober, fashionless type favored by royalty. As Lucy had said to Graham, one saw this figure sometimes in the newsreels: herky-jerky frames of celluloid gray, at once luminous and drab, of the king opening the High Court or greeting a Special Envoy, with this stiff dark figure in the background. Stuffed suit, waxwork dummy, museum mannequin waiting for his armor. He stood so dreadfully still on the greening lawn. Watching Lucy’s house.

Lucy drifted backwards, taking a glacial age to slip back around the corner. She felt transparent as a ghost, as if her substance had been stripped by shock, leaving nothing but the damp gray chill of the day. She drifted, and even around the corner she could feel him, as if she were a compass and he, black as iron, were a magnetic pole. Still walking backwards, she was jostled by a passer-by, and suddenly the world leapt into existence: not a ghostly arena hushed with anticipation, but a living city, busy with pedestrians, motor cabs squawking their horns and delivery-van horses clattering on metal-shod hooves.

She ran until she could not breathe around the stitch in her side.

She rode a bus until the conductor turned her off at the end of its route, and then she rode another one.

She did not know where to go. The very concept of hiding was equivocal, denying as it did her passage from there to here. Hadn’t her feet pressed all that ground? Didn’t the tires of the bus? Wasn’t there a trail?

Hadn’t he, even he, left a trail?

The buses all seemed to turn her back towards the center of the city. After a bit she realized this was no arcane conspiracy, it was simply the logic of transportation: where else would the buses go? But getting off was hard. She looked anxiously through the dusty windows, expecting that stiff, dark, figure; or if not that, then the rumored black motorcars of the Regiment No One Ever Saw.

There were black cars, but they were only taxicabs. She hoped. She dared. She descended the high steps onto the curb and found herself in a neighborhood she knew, the politely shabby territory behind the national library, realm of scholars and writers, private libraries and obscure museums, bookstores and cafés. She was known here. She could not possibly go to ground here. But her feet were on pavement they knew, and they took her to one of the smaller train stations in the city where she bought a ticket for a slow suburban train leaving in half an hour.

Half an hour. A terrifying gulf of time.

She sat, her feet throbbing in her not very sensible shoes, and watched the suburban shoppers flock and scatter like pigeons. She eyed the crippled clock above the ticket booth that refused to move its hands any faster than a creep. She studied the Departures board, looking for the hundredth time for a train that left any sooner. Which means that she must have look at that one word a hundred times before she saw it. Palton. A country town, one stop among many, so why did it swim slowly up into her consciousness like a fish rising to the hook? Palton, Palton . . .

Palton, where only last week two teachers had been dismissed to cover up the “hysteria” amongst the students of a country school. Palton, that lay tucked under the haunted peak of Breadon How. Palton, that was only a crow’s flight away from the castle at Denbreath.

It was like finding a path in the trackless wood. She had somewhere to go.

The last thing Lucy expected was to fall asleep on the train, but that was what she did, all but resting her head on the shoulder of the plump girl who had entered the compartment with a bevy of aunts just as the train pulled away. While they clucked over their parcels Lucy slipped gently into the murmur of voices, the swaying of the carriage, the rhythm of the wheels. Outside the window the city peeled away, diminishing into low brick districts, into gray waste grounds, into greening suburbs half-veiled by the engine’s steam. The train’s whistle shrieked at crossings and hooted for stations like a huge iron owl. Lucy half-slept while the train was in motion, half-woke when it crawled into one station and the next. The ladies left in a flurry of packages and she had the compartment to herself until a young man looked shyly in.

“Do you mind, miss?”

“No,” she said. He had a plain, open face, and an old raincoat slung over an off-the-rack suit that gave an impression of untidiness despite the bright polish of his enormous black shoes. Perhaps it was just that men of a certain size shouldn’t wear suits: he wasn’t fat, but he was very large. He gave Lucy a nervous smile and tucked himself away behind a paperback book that looked small in his hands. She relaxed a little; yet as the train rolled on, she began to find the racketing rhythm of the wheels more implacable than soothing.
To Palton to Palton to Palton
and what was she going to do when she got there? Something, she thought with her hands clenched into sharp-knuckled fists. Something to oppose. Something to defy.

Unable to sit still, she got up and slid open the door to the corridor. The countryside spread over brown fields and grey-green trees to the dusky northern hills. The smoke of burning thatch rose to meet the end of the day, drawing down the clouds. Lucy leaned against the corridor window, feeling a hard, old-woman’s sadness that seemed like the older sister to her fear, as if part of her knew that things weren’t going to turn out well. To defy, yes, that seemed necessary. That did not mean that she, knowing what she knew, could hope to overcome. She thought of the books scattered throughout her grandfather’s library. She thought of her grandfather, and her mother, and Graham. She thought of the hasty letter she had written, and of the papers she had abandoned to the care of the Left Luggage Office of Skillyham Station, and of the claim check that had gone into the post just as the train was called.