My Lady of the Bog (21 page)

I went inside. The house had indeed been searched: every drawer of every cabinet opened; every cushion, cup and rug looked under. I had a terrible sense of violation and the faintest inkling of how a woman must feel taken against her will.

“You said they took things? What?”

“Books, clothes.” Ruby went on, “Found a sword, sir, didn’t they?”

“Sword?
What
sword?”

Odin came in with Willie behind him. “Big thing, wern it? Had a sort of animal’s head, sir, on the handle, like.”

“Vidya!” I called. And when she didn’t answer, I panicked: “Where
is
she?”

“Asked her to come down and answer some questions, didn’t they, now?”

“When?”

“Oh. Hour . . . hour and a half ago. Couple of ’em stayed behind rootin’ through the laundry. Left just minutes afore ye come.”

I stalked outside, jumping back in the car. I was already heading down the drive for Stour when the grill of a van ballooned in my windshield. Both of us hit our brakes, stopping just short of the other’s front bumper. The van’s door opened and Vidya flung herself out, marching defiantly back through the gate.

I made a rude gesture, denoting the act of self-copulation, put the car in reverse, pressed the remote and closed the wrought-iron gate on his bumper.

The news wasn’t good. Two CID men had questioned Vidya for the better part of an hour, hinting at immunity if she’d turn Queen’s evidence. They’d found a sword, they claimed, behind the radiator in my study; Lumilite had revealed the presence of blood. They’d be testing it further to see if the blood was human, and if so, if it was Jai’s.

I was baffled. I
had
no sword; nor was I in the habit of dropping things behind my radiator. I was just paranoid enough to wonder if the police hadn’t planted it, though unless there was a conspiracy between the local blokes and Scotland Yard, they’d be hard pressed to find Jai’s blood on it! And without that, mere possession of a sword didn’t strike me as a crime.

But I was mistaken. Vidya said the police thought the sword was from the stolen treasure—although it seemed to me that, even if so, that would be impossible to prove.

But again, I was wrong; for according to Vidya, the police believed they could match the sword’s distinctive hilt with a silhouette in the photos.

This sounded to me like wishful bullshit! Yet how
had
a bloodied sword found its way into our home?

The only two explanations I could think of were: either the Yard had set me up or . . . Vidya had . . . But I couldn’t go there. It was too painful to even consider.

And so instead of continuing on this train of thought or returning to Sikandar’s story, I clicked instead a desktop icon, invoked the Altered Reality mode and spent the next two hours driving my BattleMechs, Storm Crow and Summoner across the wastes of the star Bone-Norman, where I savagely ravaged and digitally destroyed with my pulse lasers and ultra autocannon, every fucking thing in sight!

Having used the game in this immature manner to vent my wrath and numb my brain, I further altered my reality by falling asleep.

Chapter 28

I
took my tea in the garden the following morning. Even here were reminders of the CID’s depredations: in their demented search, they had torn up two newly planted beds. I tried to convince myself how absurd the whole thing was: how the sword could not possibly be the murder weapon. The rented cottage was two hundred years old; who knew what other hidden treasures it might harbor?

While serving me breakfast, Mrs. O’Connell filled me in on the local gossip. “Coppers think
she
stole the treasure. That’s why she got her the torc.”

“But that’s ridiculous! She wasn’t even in the country at the time. The torc was a wedding gift: a fact that might have been established by now if the CID would do its job.”

“Yer right as rain, y’ar, sir. And there’s the problem. Seems the Indian Queen Mummer don’t take unsolicited calls, least not from the likes of the chief superintendent. Just don’t ring the old gurl up and ask her twenty questions. They been dealing with her viziers and whatnots, trying to get through. And you should hear what the lads are saying.”

“What?” I asked. “That she killed her husband?”

“Eh? No, sir. Saying she’s cunning, they are. A fern witch.”

“What?”

“ ‘Fern.’
From another country. Other day, your lady was bringing in Avatar when one of Seeley’s grooms says something to her, fresh. Well, she give ’em a look, now didn’t she? That night? Bloke has a stroke. Twenty-nine. Never sick a day in his life. Can’t move, can’t speak. Three wee ‘uns. They’s saying she a-done it.”

“That’s absurd!”

“Wife accused her. Yesterday in Stour. Told her they knowed a bad fairy when they seed ’em and they didn’t wish her kind around.”

“She
said
that?” I asked, aggrieved. “To
Vidya
?”

“Woman gets home, prize heifer’s dead. Poor thing’s fell into its trough and drowned! You should never have disturbed that body in the bog, that’s what they’re sayin’.”

And it struck me there was no need to read
Sikandar
. In county Dorset, the Middle Ages were
now
.

Mrs. O’Connell, having unburdened herself of an entire village’s worth of gossip, started to go. “And you? What do you think of her, Ruby?”

She paused for a moment. “Treats me fair enough.” She thought some more. “Odin adores her.”

I went inside, feeling more disturbed than I’d have thought. The accusations against Vidya just kept coming.

Well, witch or fairy, Vidya wasn’t. I knew local girls with elfin eyes and flesh whiter than the ninth wave of the sea. If you’d told me they were fey, I might have half-believed you. But there was nothing airy-fairy about Vidya.

So why then
hadn’t
dear Lakshmi Auntie returned the chief superintendent’s calls? Is that how the Queen Mum responded to an official inquiry about her beloved niece? Or had she not answered him because—like everyone else—
she’d never heard of Vidya Prasad
?

For in the time we’d been together—brief, albeit—no one had called for Vidya.
No one!
No brother, sister, mother or friend; no former employer or business associate; no ex-lover or ex-college roommate, had phoned or sent so much as a note—at least that I’d observed. And though her name and news of her husband’s murder were in the press on four continents, no old nurse or former teacher, no near or distant kin had rung with their condolences or to inquire how she was. I mean, really! How was that possible?

It was almost as if Vidya Prasad had descended from heaven, bodily, last May, in order to wed Jai—or, perhaps, ascended from hell!

Vidya was in our bedroom, folding clothes on the bed.

“Heard you had some trouble in Stour.”

“Oh. Hardly ‘trouble.’ ”

“Heard some old biddy accused you of being some kind of a witch.”

“Yes, that was a new one to me.”

There was an awkward silence. “Look, Vidya,” I said, trying to sound offhand, “the police can’t find any record of you in Kenya. Or in Switzerland, for that matter. How come?”

She paused, then said in a voice I didn’t recognize, “You know why. You’ve always known why. You just won’t admit it.”

“Admit it?”

She tossed more clothing on the bed. “Who I am. What I’ve done.”

Her answer knifed me. I’d have said she was kidding, except the Lady Vidya wasn’t much of a kidder, nor was there the least amusement in her eyes.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I know is . . . I
love
you.”

“You love
whom
?”

“You. Vidya . . .”

She smiled a smile I’d never seen on her before—arch, wicked, worldly wise, the leer of a dominatrix. “And what if I’m not Vidya? What if I’m . . . that wicked fairy? What’s her name?”

“Come on, Vidya. That’s not funny.”

“Isn’t that what the villagers are saying?”

“What if they are?”

“Isn’t that why you showed me ‘my body?’ ”

“What? No!”

“Then again, maybe I’m . . .
Rukmini Patel.”

That name on her lips frosted my soul.

“And how do
you
know about Rukmini Patel?”

“Oh, I know everything, Xan. It’s one of the perks of being me. I know what the bull in that field is thinking. And what the sunrise will look like from the top of Bulbarrow on the morning of the night you die. I’m ‘Vidya,’ remember? Knowledge itself.”

Annoyed at being so easily played, I said, “Look, Vidya, if you’re trying to upset me, keep it up.”

“Upset
you? Damn
your eyes!” she said, overturning the basket so that the sweaters she’d folded spilled back on the floor. “Did you ever stop to think what it might be like for
me
? To come home and find my . . . ? To be suspected of his murder and questioned by Scotland Yard? And even you!
‘What were you doing the night Jai was killed?’
What the deuce do you
think
I was doing? And how in the bloody hell do you think your inquiries make
me
feel?”

I realized, then, too, that though
I
was a suspect, Vidya had never once asked me where
I
had been.

There was a long, frozen silence; then Vidya turned and stared out the window, wrapping herself in her long, thin arms. After a while, she began to cry, pathetically, without a sound.

But I wasn’t about to be put off. “How do you know about Rukmini Patel?”

“Idiot!
I was questioned by the CID myself. Re
mem
ber?”

“Then why can’t they find any record of you? Of Vidya.”

“In Kenya?” She snorted contemptuously and said in a brittle, mocking tone, “Did your
leftenant
offer
baksheesh?
If not, no information will be forthcoming, I assure you.”

“And Switzerland? I don’t believe they demand
baksheesh
there.”

She shrugged and made a wearisome gesture, as though to indict again my American naiveté. “I traveled there on another girl’s passport.”

“How come?”

“There were problems leaving Kenya.”

I waited for more.

“Mr. Daniel arap Moi, our fearless leader, had gone on one of his periodic rampages and closed the border to a long list of Asian families, mine amongst them.”

“But isn’t that dangerous? Assuming someone else’s identity?”

“Irregular. Hardly
dangerous
. I doubt the Swiss would have had me
shot.”

I reached out to hold her, but she wouldn’t be held. She pulled away.

“Please don’t doubt me, Xan, ever again. For if you do . . .”

Chapter 29

W
hen I awoke . . . I was in love with her. I know no other way to say it. I awoke to a feeling that outranked every other, to a presence and affection like some luminous essence poised beside me in the night, and for two or three of the sweetest seconds I have lived, I revelled in it, the exquisite throbbing pulse of love. And only then, and by degrees, did the night assert its black priority and did the pain of my predicament come upon me full well—and I turned and groaned at this clash of worlds, like stars colliding, the one without and one within.

For there was no time to sip the nectar of my new feeling. I got up at once and proceeded on my way, disturbed that sleep had claimed me without my knowing—but grateful, too, that in its house, I had seen what I had. I loved her. I would not betray her.

As for me, I went downstairs, though not before randomly opening “the book” to the passage above, though I closed it as quickly, before it could swallow and sweep me away. Despite my conversation with Vidya, I didn’t feel badly. Maybe I’d begun to accept the thought that, like it or not (and like Sikandar), I was being challenged and changed: that my Lady, the book, Jai and Vidya were all intent on expanding my identity, altering my outlook and reforming my so-called “American naïveté.” It was as though I had built a life for myself, an academic ivory tower, that didn’t include love, magic or murder—except from afar—and now all three were beating down my door.

Online, I googled Henry Carlson Lewis Jones, but found nothing. His body, apparently, had not been discovered, and the longer it wasn’t, the better for us.

I thought about Jai and his terrible death, and again, I came up empty-handed.

And so I turned to another murder and the question that was eating at the back of my brain: if my Lady’s burial was medieval, why were the stakes and runes used to bind her cut circa 1675? That made no sense to me at all.

But, as I considered it, something else did. There it was again.
Linguistic drift. Huldres’
becomes
Holders. God be with you
becomes
goodbye
. Thus “Albemarle” was probably not her name at all—
but what her name had become after 350 years!
No wonder I couldn’t find her in English history!

Encouraged by this fresh direction, I looked up “alb” and was returned this quote from
The White Goddess
by Robert Graves:

Britain derives its earliest name, Albion, from Albina (“the White Goddess”) [whose] name accounts for the Germanic words . . . alb, elf, and alpdrucken, the nightmare or incubus . . . and is connected with the Greek words alphos, meaning ‘dull-white leprosy’ . . . and Alphito . . . whose more polite title was Marpessa, ‘the snatcher’ . . . ‘the White Lady of Death and Inspiration’ . . .

This was remarkable, as the nymph-like
“alb”
and the rapacious “
nightmare”
were the forms in which “Albemarle” had appeared to Strugnell . . . . In fact, Oberon, Shakespeare’s King of the Fairies, was, I learned now, originally Alberich, the Old High German
alb
, “elf” and -
rîh-
, “ruler.” Though
alb
also was associated with whiteness.

Then there was the name’s final syllable,
marle
, whose silent
e
would have not been silent then.
Mara
was an ancient worldwide name for the goddess of death, while
mare
was well-attested-to in fourteenth-century England. As Tylor states in
Primitive Culture
, “The
mare
in nightmare means spirit, elf, or nymph; compare Anglo-Saxon
wudurmaere
(wood-mare) = echo.”