Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy (3 page)

“There are no decorations in here.” It was true; the walls of this chamber were bare. “Oh, except for this.”

Will followed her to the centre of the chamber. Embedded flat into the floor were four swords, their hilts outermost, their points meeting in the middle around a large medallion. All five pieces appeared to be cast in bronze. They looked down at the plate-sized medallion, the relief on its surface as clearly visible as if it had been cast that morning.

“Oh my God,” said Eloise. She dropped to her knees to look closer and said, “What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” said Will and looked round the chamber. He saw now that the walls were not completely bare, that in four places, following the line of the swords out past their hilts to the walls, were brief inscriptions in the same runic writing that was to be found everywhere else. “There are four inscriptions on the walls, perhaps names, perhaps each relating to one of the swords. The swords could represent people.”

Eloise looked up at him, slightly exasperated as she said, “But what about this, Will?”

He looked again at the circular bronze relief, the four sword tips almost appearing to hold it in place. It was the boar’s head, his family’s crest, and a larger but identical version of the broken medallion they wore between them.

“I don’t know. Except that in some way it confirms we’re looking in the right place.”

As he spoke, he felt a slight breeze brush across his face and turned to look at the darkened tunnel. It had come from there, he was certain of it. Eloise had felt it too and stood again.

“A breeze – that means it leads to the open air, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily.” Will took a couple of steps forward, into the mouth of the passageway, and once away from the lights of the chamber, he could see some way along it. There was nothing different about it, the same abundance of decoration. And in fact, he could see light fittings dotted along it in much the same way.

“There are light fittings here too. I think they’ve fused, no more than that.” Yet now, for the first time since they’d entered the tunnels, Will actually felt the hairs rise on his neck, a shiver running through him. There was something there, beyond the edge of even his night vision, and it was something he did not want to face, not now, not without weapons, not with Eloise.

He stepped backwards into the chamber and tried to look casual while keeping an eye on the darkened tunnel. Eloise didn’t seem suspicious and was staring at the pattern of bronzes in the floor.

“I’ve seen this before somewhere. I wish I could remember where, but I know I’ve seen it.”

“You don’t just mean the medallion?”

“No, I mean the pattern, the circle in the middle, the four swords surrounding it, forming a sort of cross.”

“Of course, now that you mention it, it is a cross – perhaps that’s why it’s familiar.” Once again Will felt his eyes drawn to the darkness of the tunnel. There seemed no immediate threat, nothing he could hear or smell, and yet something about it was disturbing him.

“No, it’s not the cross.” She looked up and smiled. “Don’t worry, it’ll come to me.”

Will nodded, but said, “I think we should stop for this evening.”

“But it’s still early.” Eloise looked at her watch. “Oh. I can’t believe we’ve been down here an hour.
And
we have to get back.”

“It won’t take us an hour to get back, but we should go. And you still haven’t told me your discovery.” As he spoke, he gestured for her to lead the way out, not wanting to leave her behind in the chamber, with that darkness and whatever it concealed. And he looked back a couple of times as they walked away, still expecting to see someone, or something, appearing out of the shadows.

Eloise walked on, sensing none of his greater unease
as she said, “Of course, I’d completely forgotten.” She waited until he was alongside her and said, “I found out who’s paying Marcus Jenkins’ fees.” She responded to Will’s look of surprise by saying, “Don’t worry, I haven’t been playing the detective – I just overheard him mentioning it to the boy he plays chess with, then researched it online. His fees are being paid by something called The Breakstorm Trust, and guess who one of the trustees is? Someone called Phillip Wyndham! OK, it’s possible it’s not our Wyndham, but …”

The news hit Will hard, not because it confirmed that Marcus Jenkins had come here as Wyndham’s spy – that much he had never doubted – but because it spoke of another betrayal he’d suspected almost from the start.

“Oh, I have a feeling it’s the same Wyndham. What time is it?”

“Nearly nine.”

“Good, there’s still time. I need to go back into the city tonight.”

“Then I’ll come with you. We can call Rachel and Chris and ask them …”

“No. It’s a risk, but we’ll call a taxi and ask it to collect us from here. There’s a telephone here and I have money.”

“But it’ll take the taxi as long to get here as Rachel
and …” Eloise stopped herself and said, “How do you have money?”

Will was bemused by the odd things she found exceptional about his life when she so readily accepted all the true strangeness that surrounded him.

“Money comes to me here and there, and what belongs to the cathedral belongs to me – I give back whatever I have to the church each time I return to the earth.”

“OK. But why do you want to take a taxi?”

“I want to surprise them. There might be a rational explanation, but I want to surprise them nevertheless. I saw brochures and leaflets from The Breakstorm Trust at Chris and Rachel’s house, addressed to Chris. It was one of the occasions when I saw the spirits of the witches, and one of the leaflets blew to the floor – I should have known it was significant.”

“Oh God, this isn’t good. You felt weird about them the first time we went to The Whole Earth – I should have listened!” Eloise sounded distraught, fearing the same as Will, that Chris and Rachel had betrayed them, clearly upset too at the thought that she had been their defender against Will’s suspicions. “But look, they’re rich, and it’s an educational charity, so they’re absolutely the kind of people who’d be approached to donate.”

“True. And they did have good reason to act oddly around me.”

She looked confused for a moment, then the penny dropped and she said, “You mean filming you all those years ago?”

He thought of the middle-aged Arabella, collapsing at the sight of him, and set against that memory, Chris and Rachel’s behaviour had been much more reasonable.

But he smiled, saying, “Yes, that’s what I mean. It also has to be said that I couldn’t have reached Asmund without them.”

“And they’ve helped us so much these last couple of months. I mean, it would have been difficult getting you out here without them.”

“Also true,” said Will again, while equally aware that it possibly suited Wyndham to have Will come here, that perhaps his intention was not only to destroy Will, but also Lorcan Labraid, to unravel everything that had been woven together here over a thousand years and more.

They walked in silence for a short while and finally Eloise said, “What will you do if he has betrayed us?”

It was an interesting choice of words, he thought. As much as she didn’t want to believe, she was already subconsciously deciding who the guilty party must be, suggesting it would be Chris rather than he and Rachel together who’d been treacherous. Yet on the other hand,
Eloise didn’t believe it was just Will who might have been betrayed, but both of them, both of their destinies, and in that perhaps she was right.

“What am I to do? In my own time the answer would have been obvious, but now? Perhaps, as you suggest, we should hope for a credible explanation.”

And Will hoped against hope that there would be one, because if there wasn’t, he couldn’t see how he could allow them to live, posing an ever greater danger to him. A spy was one thing, but if Chris and Rachel had betrayed him, he would have no choice but to kill them, and in so doing, he feared he’d also kill everything that existed between him and Eloise.

E
loise had doubted the taxi would come – she’d assumed the cab company, getting a call from a teenager asking for a car to come twenty minutes out of the city, would mark it down as a hoax. Maybe it was something in Will’s tone of voice, some remnant of his former life, but Eloise’s doubts proved unfounded, the booking was accepted and the taxi came. When asked to give a surname, he hadn’t hesitated in saying “Wyndham” though he wasn’t sure why.

As the car left Marland, the driver said, “What on earth were you doing out here at this time of night? It’s closed in the winter.”

Eloise looked alarmed, but Will said simply, “We’d prefer not to talk, if you don’t mind.”

“Fair enough,” said the driver and turned the radio a little louder.

Eloise looked both shocked and amused that Will had spoken to him like that. But of course, the way she saw it, he was a young person speaking to an adult. As far
as Will was concerned, he was a noble speaking to an inferior, someone being paid to carry out a simple service.

They travelled in silence. Will was thinking of the situation that lay ahead of them, and after ten minutes, Eloise gave away the fact that she was thinking about the same thing.

Unprompted, she said, “There has to be an explanation.”

He nodded and no more was said, and then, as they travelled on into the suburban edges of the city, he found himself dreaming. He was walking as he had been several times before, among ruins on a sunny day. Someone called his name, but in an odd form, “William Dangrave?”, a surname that he predated by more than a century, and he turned and saw Eloise, beautiful, luminous.

“I’m William Dangrave,” he said, and stirred from the dream, nervous for a moment that he’d said those words aloud.

But the driver was staring intently at the road which looked icy here and there in front of them, and Eloise was sitting quietly next to Will. At some point in the last few minutes she’d slipped her hand into his. The warmth of her ran through him, seeming almost to fill him, and he clasped his fingers round hers.

She smiled at him, as if this simple act had been meant
to offer her reassurance, and he smiled back, though he knew that right now he could assure her of nothing.

They had the taxi drop them in a side street close to the city centre. Will paid the driver in full and told him to keep the change, but once Eloise was out of the car, he said, “Just a second.” He opened the passenger door and climbed back in.

The taxi driver looked hostile. “What do you think you’re doing? We’re …” His eyes caught Will’s and his words disappeared somewhere in his throat. The radio, which had been blaring some jangly and infectious tune, became a wall of static and frequency noise.

“Do you remember this evening? You collected an elderly man and woman, Mr and Mrs Wyndham. They’d been walking out at Marland. Their son’s car broke down so they called a taxi to bring them back into the city. You were the driver of that taxi. Do you remember?” The driver offered a confused nod, lost in a dream of his own, and Will said finally, “Forget about us.” He climbed back out of the car and closed the door.

Will and Eloise started to walk towards The Whole Earth and Eloise checked her watch and said, “Twenty to eleven, a good time to catch them.” Then, as an afterthought, “You’ll be able to get me back into school, won’t you?”

“Of course.”

“And you just got back into the taxi because …?” She looked behind and Will followed suit – the taxi driver was sitting where they’d left him, looking confused, fiddling with the buttons on his radio.

“I hypnotised him, muddied his thoughts – he’ll have some vague recollection of us, but jumbled up with other things, false memories. The fewer people who remember us the better.”

Eloise shook her head and said, “There are times when I realise I hardly know you at all. I mean, I know you, but I forget all the weird stuff.”

“That’s one of the reasons I like being with you.”

She looked at Will questioningly.

“Because you make
me
forget the weird stuff. Sometimes when I’m with you I forget …” He tried to sum up the enormity of how transformed he was by her company, but he couldn’t. “I just forget.”

“Me too.” She smiled, and they turned into the narrow street where The Whole Earth was located, less busy than usual, no doubt because of the cold. They were nearly at the café when Eloise said, “If there is a problem with Chris and Rachel, couldn’t you hypnotise them to forget? Marcus Jenkins too.”

“It would make life simpler, but I don’t think so. For one thing, I imagine Wyndham is powerful enough to counter my limited efforts, perhaps even to use
them against me. We should hope, instead, for simple explanations.”

He stopped at the café door and Eloise stepped in ahead of him. Before Will was inside, he heard Rachel say, “This is a nice surprise! What are you doing here?”

Without missing a beat, Eloise said, “We needed to come into the city, but we wouldn’t have asked you to fetch us during opening hours.”

Rachel smiled and kissed Eloise on the cheek. She looked at Will, falling short of encroaching on his physical space, as she said, “Thanks. It
has
been manic this evening. Do you want to go through and we’ll follow as soon as we’re free.”

Chris emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray with soup and bread on it. He looked visibly shocked at the sight of them standing there and it took a moment for him to regain his composure. He placed the food in front of a customer at a corner table, and by the time he turned back to them, he was smiling.

He approached with his arm outstretched, shaking Will’s hand, then kissing Eloise on the cheek as Rachel had. Will noticed his hand was dry and hot, without the supposed tell-tale clamminess of the guilty.

“You didn’t tell us you were coming in.”

“They didn’t want to call us away from the café,” said Rachel. “Isn’t that sweet of them?”

Her response was genuine, but it appeared to irritate Chris in some way, as if she’d broken his momentum. If that was the case, he rebounded quickly enough, saying, “Well, to be honest, this evening would’ve been difficult, but we’ll take you back of course.”