Saga, page 17
‘Oh, I’m not interesting at all,’ I murmured, coyly dropping my chin to my chest. He took my hand and I felt an urge to hold him and press myself against him.
‘Here is an invitation for you and Mary to come to a dinner soiree at the end of this month,’ I said, forcing myself to change the subject.
I thrust the envelope towards him and stepped back, shivering away the desire that was throbbing in my bones.
‘Mercy, darling girl,’ he said after a brief silence, putting the invitation aside among the mess on the sideboard. ‘Would you like to listen to the new poem I am working on? I have need of an audience. The working title is “The Spirit of Solitude”. It has the scent of Wordsworth about it. Sit.’
I did as I was told.
Percy began rummaging through a mountain of papers until he found what he was looking for. He coughed dramatically, bowed and began to read his poem.
I was transfixed. The beauty of the words and the rhythm of his voice had me falling into a reverie of sorts. I watched Percy as he poured his soul into his poem – his eyes watered and his voice trembled with emotion. I witnessed raw and unadulterated passion.
He stopped suddenly, snapping me out of my state. ‘That’s all I have so far. What do you think?’
‘It’s beautiful,’ I gushed. ‘So beautiful.’
He kneeled beside me and took my hands in his.
‘Oh, thank you, Mercy.’ He spoke with such sincerity. ‘That means so much. We writers are sensitive souls and a kind word about our work is like rain on a summer’s day.’
I heard the door open and felt a breeze rush over me. Mary walked into the room, a bundle of brown paper under her arm.
‘Well,’ she exclaimed dryly. ‘Have I interrupted a proposal? Are you asking for Mercy’s hand in marriage?’
‘Of course not.’ Percy laughed. ‘Dear Lord. One wife is quite enough!’
‘More than enough or not nearly enough, I would say,’ Mary grumbled and looked directly at me. ‘Beware of this rogue, Mercy. He breaks hearts for sport.’
‘You place too much importance on such an archaic and unnatural union, Mary darling.’ Percy pouted, standing and flicking his hair out of his eyes. ‘Your parents were all for a laissez-faire existence until you came along, then they promptly got married.’
‘Perhaps they saw the benefit of legitimising my birth,’ Mary grumbled. ‘Something this child will be denied.’
She placed her hand on her little rounded belly.
‘I should leave,’ I said uneasily and rose to go.
‘Mercy has brought scones,’ Percy declared. ‘Stay and help us eat scones, Mercy. Don’t be so shocked by us. I hear that your own Mrs Radcliffe is estranged from her husband, preferring your company. Everyone is talking about it.’
‘She is taking a rest from the pace of London,’ I told him. ‘That is all. Her husband is busy with his work and this is an extended holiday so that she might finish a new poem. He will be coming along to the dinner you are invited to. You can meet him then.’
Mary put her package down on the untidy kitchen table and sighed. ‘There is so much work to be done, words to write and read. Wouldn’t it be grand if there was nothing else to do but write?’
‘My poem is coming along nicely,’ Percy said. ‘Mercy thinks it’s beautiful.’
‘Oh Percy!’ Mary exclaimed, remembering something with excitement. ‘I found a graveyard down the road. We should go and sit there and write among the spirits.’
‘That’s a jolly idea,’ Percy said enthusiastically. ‘I find graveyards to be inspiring. You bring the scones, Mercy, and Mary, you collect some pages and pencils. Let us away to the church and the dead.’
Ann never attended church and although she claimed it was because of her health I knew there was more to it. She did not like crowds of people and the thought of them all squeezed into pews in the small church would have terrified her. I also wondered if she was questioning the principles of worship, although I had never heard her voice such opinions. Percy Bysshe Shelley was, however, renowned and infamous for being an atheist. I had been made to say my prayers in the poorhouse. Rote words with little meaning other than begging the good Lord to forgive us for our sins. Since I had left I had largely forgotten to say them.
The graveyard sat in the front of the churchyard and a path cut through it leading to the open doors of the old stone church. Mary took me to a headstone and ran her hand over its rough surface.
‘It is strange to think that there are merely two yards of earth as a barrier between the living and the dead.’
‘What would you have your own epitaph read, Mary?’ I asked as we all sat in a ring on the patch of grass in the sunniest spot, just past the larger tombstones.
‘“A great writer and woman who put love above all”.’ She sang whimsically.
Percy clapped his hands. ‘I would have, “Believed in the pursuit of happiness, pleasure and the perfect poem”. And you, Mercy?’
‘Mine would once have been quite dreary and morbid but I am feeling brighter about life and my future now. Perhaps, “Learned many lessons and opened many minds”.’
‘Ah yes, you dream of being a teacher. Who has been your greatest influence, dear Mercy? Your parents?’
‘No,’ I said, perhaps too hurriedly. ‘I mean, no, not really. They were not very present in my life. I believe Ann Radcliffe has given me more than any other soul. I hope perhaps one day she might adopt me now that I am parentless. She has no children of her own.’ I saw Mary put her hands over her stomach protectively.
‘Have you ever been in love?’ Percy asked with a wry smile as he lay back on the grass and looked directly at me.
I felt my mouth go dry. His lips were pursed as if awaiting a kiss. My cheeks burned.
‘No, never,’ I said and ate a scone.
‘I have never not been in love.’ He grinned. ‘My very first love was one of my teachers. I find teachers very loveable.’
I could see that Mary was becoming uncomfortable with Percy’s flirtatious manner.
‘What are you writing, Mary?’ I asked.
‘A little of this and that.’ She sighed. ‘I spent some time in Scotland with a family and it was there that I first began to write. There is something hauntingly beautiful about those bleak woodless mountains up there that encourages words. Where was your estate, Mercy?’
‘Oh,’ I said, trying to think of something. ‘Just outside of Glasgow.’
‘And is your inheritance a large one?’ Percy asked.
‘Percy,’ Mary chastened him. ‘How dare you? That really is not any of your concern.’
‘My inheritance is small but it is all I need,’ I said sadly, thinking of that one wooden box in a storage room in that bleak building by the banks of the Clyde River.
‘Let us find the most interesting dead person in the graveyard,’ Mary said brightly. ‘We must read a gravestone and come up with a story about that person. We will go back and tell our stories to the great Ann Radcliffe and she can judge the winner.’
Each of us separately roamed around the overgrown cemetery. Some headstones were on the lean, falling into despair, while others were new and upright and easy to read. I looked to the darkest shadowy corner where the paupers’ graves were marked by small wooden crosses. Many had fallen to rot. I watched Percy concentrating on the large, imposing monuments and a family mausoleum looking like a small house over by the gate. Mary was picking dandelions and sprinkling them over the ground. I went over to visit the unloved and wondered about their lives. I shut my eyes and tried to listen to the whispers of ghosts.
After coming up with a story I went back and looked about at the words on the headstones. So many children gone too soon.
Mary pointed out a famous writer. ‘Look. Here lies Mary Robinson,’ she shouted. ‘She was a scandalous writer in her time. I’m sure she knew my mother.’
We began a childish game of hide and seek and scared each other by leaping out from behind gravestones. I ran and hid behind the mausoleum and got a fright when Percy appeared.
‘Found you!’ He laughed and grabbed me about the waist and held me tight. Our faces were almost touching. ‘I should like to kiss you, Mercy Mist.’
I struggled a little, knowing it was wrong, but my heart was pounding in my chest and I stared at him for just a moment too long and then shut my eyes and leaned in. It was a short hot kiss. His lips touched mine and my whole body prickled with feeling right down to my toes. I quickly pulled back and put a hand to my mouth and shook my head.
‘No Percy,’ I whispered harshly. ‘It’s not right.’
‘It feels right.’ He pouted and flipped his hair out of his face with a toss of his head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It feels wrong.’
I untangled myself from him and walked away to find Mary, my face burning as if the sun had reddened it, the guilt weighing heavily in my heart.
‘I first fell in love with Percy on my mother’s grave,’ Mary told me as I stood next to her, looking at the last marking of Edith Joyce who had lived sixty-one years on this earth. ‘It was where we first kissed.’
I felt the brutal sting of her words and gasped looking at her, sure that she must have known, but her face was relaxed and she smiled innocently at me.
‘I think my mother would have loved Percy too,’ she said. ‘My father hates him but I suspect he would hate any man who loved me.’
We tumbled back to Ann’s house and into the kitchen, where we sat at the long wooden table and shared our grave stories. Mary told a story about a small girl who had died of measles. It was a sad but beautifully told tale. She painted a lovely portrait of her subject in words. Percy’s story was humorous. He spoke of a man who had pursued a mysterious woman, begging for her love and when she rejected him he had thrown himself off a bridge, his pockets weighed down with stones and died of drowning and a broken heart. My story was of a little boy called Tiny Tim. I recalled the child who had died in the pickpocket’s warehouse on the previous Christmas morning.
Ann gave me the honour of announcing that my story was best.
‘You have a gift for storytelling,’ Percy agreed. ‘Are you sure you won’t try your hand at writing like the rest of us?’
‘No.’ I smiled shyly. ‘You are all such talents. Mary read me a short story the other day and it was the most brilliantly terrifying thing I have ever heard. And the poem that you read to me today, Percy, is like sacred music. I am content to read the work of others.’
As my friends left, waving and smiling their goodbyes, Percy’s hand brushed against mine very deliberately and his eyes bore into mine.
‘Come over and visit us again very soon, Mercy.’
After they left, Ann levelled me with a cautionary look.
‘Do not covet thy neighbour’s goods,’ she said.
I opened my mouth but I was certain that she could see the guilt washing over my face.
‘I … I …’
‘It’s all right, dear girl,’ she said, embracing me. She then held me at arm’s length and looked at me. ‘It is all right to feel the sentiments. That is only natural in the face of such charm. But always remember to put sense and sensibility before sensation. Reason is what separates us from the beasts.’
I nodded mutely.
‘Always put your head before your heart. It is not easy. But the heart can fool even the most intelligent head. You must always keep a fence around it to keep it in check.’
It was good, strong motherly advice.
Snow began to fall in the afternoon. We sat by the fire in the library. Lady Sylvia Thorn. Cait. Me. Samuel, the butler, had brought tea on a tray. The teacups and saucers were delicate and patterned with roses.
‘I don’t trust that Theo Hodges,’ Sylvia said primly. ‘There have been a number of thefts from the university down there in Glasgow and also from the nearby Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. New Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Unit is digging deep and there’s a connection between the campus and the gallery. I don’t think Professor Mallory’s death was a random attack.’
‘You think he was murdered?’ I gasped.
The elderly lady nodded slowly and sipped her tea.
‘Art theft? That would be big business I guess,’ Cait said, glancing out at the snow fluttering past the large picture window.
‘Oh yes,’ Sylvia said. ‘The London Stolen Art database, which covers all of Britain, has about fifty-five thousand objects listed. Mallory told me that two detectives from the squad had been interviewing lots of people in various art and history departments. He was convinced that someone in his department was involved, although he never named anyone specifically.’
‘I’m confused. How is it that you are connected to my book and you just happened to be the one Mallory contacted about the valuation and translation and decryption of the script? It seems impossibly coincidental.’
‘I’d known Mallory for many years. The antiquities game is quite a cliquey profession. Everyone knows everyone else. I’d become entranced by old books ever since I was a child and the Systir Saga came into our lives. I too made a rubbing of that Ogham script just as you did, Mia. But I lost it. Then my sister took her family to Australia after a big family disagreement and—’
‘A family disagreement?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she said sadly. ‘I married a Catholic. Back in those days my family saw that as a mortal sin. Trust me – a widower, a Catholic and a Lord were the unholy trinity. As the eldest girl the book had been given to me by my mother but the family took it back when I married Alexander. No one from my family ever spoke to me again.’
‘That’s awful, just because he was Catholic?’
‘He was also much older than me,’ she explained and I could hear the sadness in her soft voice. ‘I went to Australia twice to reconnect with my sister, Lillian, but she wouldn’t see me. As it was, I never had any children so the book would have ended up with you regardless.’
‘Oh, I thought Ash was your son,’ I said.
‘No, no.’ She shook her head. ‘He’s my step-grandson. Alexander had one boy when we married, Robert, and Ashley is his only son. He’s all I have and he is so devoted to me. And I couldn’t run this place without him.’
Sylvia looked so small in her chair. She had a pale grey cashmere rug over her legs. I had put her at about eighty but she may have been older. My Grandma Fiona was eighty and Sylvia was her aunt.
‘But going back to before I was interrupted,’ she said, giving me a smile to let me know she was playing with me, ‘I had told Mallory all about the book and the strange inscription. I learned quite early that it was Ogham script. Never once did I imagine that our little scratching might point to the GQ and proof of goddess worship in early Britain.’
‘So when Mallory got Mia’s email he put two and two together.’ Cait leaned forward.
‘Yes. And between us we translated the Ogham and, my goodness,’ she laughed and put her bony hands on her cheeks, ‘I was absolutely stunned. I told him that I would be happy to fund your trip to Scotland so that the Systir Saga could come home and we had the chance to locate the GQ.’
It was Lady Sylvia who had been the chequebook behind Mallory’s offer of reimbursement. Theo’s surprise when I told him now made sense.
‘So you really do believe the book exists and that it has never been found?’
‘I do,’ Sylvia said solemnly. ‘And I firmly believe our Systir Saga book has some power. Almost as if it is alive.’
‘Um, hello!’ Cait looked at me and grinned and then turned back to Sylvia. ‘I have been telling Mia this all along. I sense it.’
‘We have saints and witches in our blood,’ she said. ‘If our book can survive intact for so long in an unbroken chain, I have no doubt that the book of the Goddess did too. If it has not survived, so be it. But if it has, I think it has remained hidden until this exact moment in history for a reason. Our world needs the ancient wisdom of the Goddess now more than ever.’
‘So why do you think it’s Theo who’s involved in the art robberies? What sort of things have been stolen?’
‘Lots of smaller things, books mostly, because they are the easiest to steal. I have had three old books worth hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from this room. I have had more security installed so it won’t happen again, but I open the house up once a month for guests to see the collection. Researchers from the universities, and antique and book dealers come here all the time. I just don’t know Theo. He only ever came here with Mallory. He looks shifty.’
I raised my eyebrows at Cait. ‘He seems a little aloof,’ I said. ‘But I don’t get shifty vibes off him.’ I looked back at my new great-great-aunty.
‘Sylvia, Mallory didn’t give me the full translation. He just said something about it giving clues to the whereabouts of the lost source. You mentioned a holy island?’
As she thought for a moment, she reminded me a little of my Grandma Fiona. I was still reeling a little bit that this woman, in this extraordinary house, was related to me.
‘It was a difficult translation,’ she explained. ‘The language is very ancient. An early form of Ancient Scottish Gaelic, most probably the last version of what is known as Pict, although Pecht is a more accurate word.’
‘They say the Picts painted themselves blue,’ I said, sounding very knowledgeable.
‘Possibly blue tattooes, yes,’ she said. ‘But Pecht was more a word that means ancestor worship. All my research points to the Pict culture having been goddess worshipping. The Goddess lived and was the landscape, the earth. They also traced their ancestors through a matrilineal line, which would account for the connection between our book and the lost one.’
The snow was coming down steadily and the gusting wind was throwing it into chaotic swirls. The fire crackled and snapped as it consumed the wood. I found the smell comforting. I drank the last of my tea.
