My Brother's Keeper, page 24
She jumped when the loud barking of a dog echoed from her right—and she remembered that the ghost Keeper had jumped into the chasm as she had fallen into it, and must have been the one who had pulled her out of the stream moments ago. She crawled along the unseen bank in that direction, trusting the ghost dog.
The muddy gravel under her abraded hands and knees shook, and a strong burst of vapor from behind tossed her hair, and she guessed that if she had not moved she would now be buried under tons of damp earth. But chunks of dirt fell onto her back and splashed into the stream beside her, and she crawled along faster, following the echoes of the unseen dog’s baying.
The tiny voices still shrilled from every side: “Tarry, taste our roots and feed us with your bones!” Emily panted through clenched teeth and kept pulling herself forward.
She was fighting off unconsciousness when the dog’s booming bark faded as if quickly receding in the distance, but ahead of her now she saw a patch of lesser darkness. Clods of soil were still tumbling onto her back and head, and it was difficult to breathe in the choking mist, but after a burst of scrambling effort that left her dizzy and gasping she found that she had collapsed on grass beside the stream, and was being pelted by cold rain.
Shivering, she sat up and pushed her sopping hair back to look around. Through the curtains of rain she could make out only a hill behind her and the stream cascading down a slope ahead, and certainly she didn’t know where she was.
She tried to recall what had led her here. An impossible willow forest by the Boggarts Green stone, a giant oak tree with arched doorways and balconies, tiny old people reciting nursery rhymes—! She was sure she had cut Branwell’s forehead and stabbed the sheepherder, Wright, in the hand . . .
Wearily she got to her feet. Clouds hid the stars, and all she could do was try to walk in a straight line and hope to find some sort of shelter.
Soon she was dragging her boots through a rain-agitated bog, and she paused when she saw a flickering glow in the darkness ahead. Wary of ignis fatui, she wiped rainwater out of her eyes to peer in that direction.
It was an amber spot of light, and though it was tiny in the distance she believed it was rectangular—perhaps a lighted window. After a convulsive shudder at the cold, she began plodding toward it.
As her course continued downhill through tangles of wet weeds, she lost sight of the light, but after sloshing through a deep puddle she found that the streaming ground sloped up again, and the soil was so loose and muddy that she had to use her hands as well as her feet to climb it; but when she had got to the top of the rise, she saw the silhouette of a house—a one-story structure with a chimney at each end.
The light Emily had seen was indeed glowing in a window, and she drove her legs harder, pushing herself forward over unseen rocks and weeds. After some weary, gasping time she saw that the window was hardly bigger than a coal chute, and set only a foot above the ground.
She hurried across the last few yards of mud and crouched beside the window. She pushed ivy leaves aside and peered through the glass, and saw a lower-level room in which three young women in black dresses, presumably in mourning, sat in chairs beside a peat fire. Behind them was a dresser with a row of pewter plates on it.
She raised a hand to knock on the glass, then hesitated.
The scene was familiar, as if from a fairy tale, and suddenly Emily thought: But there were only two sisters in the story—and all at once she remembered that this was a scene from Charlotte’s novel Jane Eyre, in which Jane, starving in the rain, finds solace at the house of Diana and Mary and St. John Rivers. And even as she thought it, the glow of the fire began to dim.
A hallucination, she thought in despair.
The house vanished, but the glow didn’t fade all the way to darkness, and the three women were now clambering up out of a shallow pool.
And in the dim ignis fatui radiance she saw their tangled gray hair, and their eyes glittering in their wrinkled gray faces, and their spidery hands groping for her; a clicking noise like the chipping of marble in John Brown’s stoneyard rang out from their slack, swinging jaws.
Emily was up and running as fast as she could over the uneven wet ground, and behind her she heard the dragging-branches sound of the old women’s rapid pursuit.
Emily’s left foot caught in a root, and with a hissed inhalation she fell to her hands and knees in mud—and in that moment she heard galloping hoofbeats and the unmistakable barking of Keeper.
Then a horse had rushed massively past her and was cracklingly trampling the old women, and Keeper was beside her, growling and facing her pursuers.
The ignis fatui glow was extinguished, and she heard the horse stamping and kicking, and then it cantered back to where she crouched.
The rider swung down from the saddle, and boots splashed heavily in the mud. A strong hand gripped her shoulder.
“Can you stand?” came Alcuin Curzon’s remembered gritty voice over the thrashing of the rain.
“Yes,” she gasped, then, more loudly, “Yes.” She hugged Keeper and then got to her feet.
A hat was set firmly on her head and a heavy Mackintosh cape was draped over her shoulders. She forced herself not to flinch, and wished she had not lost her dioscuri knife.
“Up you go.” Curzon bent and slid one arm under her arms and the other behind her legs, then straightened and lifted her into the saddle. “Don’t fall off.”
Pacing alongside the horse, he led it away at a cautious walk across the boggy ground. From up in the saddle Emily peered toward Curzon, reminding herself that this man had transformed into a ravening beast—a werewolf!—and attacked her, last September. She leaned from the saddle and was reassured to make out the shape of Keeper padding beside Curzon.
“Vicious damned things,” Curzon said, loudly over the rain. “They roused an illusion in you?”
“A scene from a book.” She watched his moving silhouette below her in the darkness and asked, “Shall I fear you?”
“No,” he said shortly. “Never again. You may rely on it.”
Perhaps, she thought. “How is it that you’re here?”
“You wrote me a letter,” he said. “I came as quickly as I could, once I received it, but I was in a monastery in France, at Rocamadour in the province of Quercy.” After a few more plodding steps he went on, “It’s a remote place, with postal delivery by donkey—and there were difficulties before I could leave.”
Then his voice was clearer, and she knew he was looking up at her as he went on. “I stopped at the parsonage tonight, and they said you and Keeper had gone haring out after your brother. I rode first to Ponden Kirk, to no avail. Then, considering what you wrote in your letter, I started out toward . . . the course we walked in September, and after a few miles I heard a dog baying. Hoping it might be Keeper, I called to him, and kept calling. Eventually he found me, and we were each disappointed to find that you were not with the other!”
The rain had stopped drumming on the hat he had given her, and the clouds were breaking up. Curzon was able to lead the horse at a faster walk, and Emily could now clearly see Keeper trotting alongside. She began to relax, and realized that she trusted Curzon’s statement: No. Never again. You may rely on it.
“Then not far from here Keeper must have caught your scent,” Curzon went on, “for he took off running, and when I saw the ignis fatui glow I dared to goad my horse into a gallop.”
“The ghost dog knew where I was.”
“The—ah, again? Keeper’s other?” He shook his head. “How did you come to be out here?”
“I—” She shivered and pulled the cape more closely around her shoulders. “Ultimately I fell into a hole, like the one you fell into in September.” Curzon looked back at her quickly, and she nodded. “Among the restless dead, as you put it then. Taste our roots and feed us with your bones.”
“Yes, I remember. But you were able to climb out.”
“Not climb. Crawl. The ghost dog had jumped in after me, and led me out along the course of a stream.”
For a while they walked along in silence, Keeper and Curzon flanking the horse and Emily rocking in the saddle. Finally Curzon asked, “And your brother? Did you find him?”
“I stabbed him in the face, with your old dioscuri. Where are we?”
“A few miles north of your parsonage, I judge. You . . . stabbed him in the face?”
“So far? North?” She shivered. “I came out far from where I fell in.”
Curzon’s shoulders lifted and fell in a sigh. “Where was that?”
“It was—a marshy copse of willows, with—but you’ll think I was delirious.”
“Your senses seem to be admirably clear, as a rule.”
Emily described, haltingly, the marshy grove of willows, and the little old men and women and their nursery rhymes, and the gigantic oak tree.
“A mundus loci,” said Curzon, “as described in the apocryphal Acts of Simon Magus. They’re . . . localized twists in reality. You and I were briefly in one last year, at that Druidic temple. That one straddled time, but the one you were in tonight clearly straddles space, like . . . an unreal spider whose legs touch the earth at various real places. Enter here, come out there.”
Emily looked around at the dimly visible hills. What Curzon said must be true, she thought, or else something very like it must be. “I’m glad they’re localized.”
“Hence loci. They’re too irrational to extend across much distance.” After a few more paces, he asked, “Stabbed your brother in the face?”
“I had to.”
“How did—”
Emily interrupted, “He was Welsh, and—” Her teeth were chattering, and she clenched her jaws for a moment, then went on in a rush, “The stone in the church split last night! And they’ve still got the new head for the thing under the stone, Adam Wright has already sent to London for it! And—Branwell was Welsh, and he means to kill my father, and I had to stab him to drive him out of my brother—” She took a deep breath and let it out. “I cut his forehead. I hope that was enough to drive out Welsh, and that Branwell has found his way home.” She sniffed and then scowled down at Curzon. “Here you’ve been taking your ease in a French monastery while we were left in the soup—the ever hotter soup!”
He had been staring up at her as she spoke, and now he burst out, “What? I heard that you killed the Flensing woman, and I assumed you destroyed the new head while you were at it! And you had apparently got Branwell under control, with the measures I told you. I thought things here had been restored to their previous balance—shaky though it was.” He raised a fist and let it fall. “Taking my ease!”
“If I hadn’t written to you—”
“Be quiet.”
Emily leaned back in the saddle and watched clouds scudding across the full moon, and worried about Branwell. He wouldn’t have fallen into one of the holes, at least, probably.
“I did consider,” said Curzon finally, “informing the Huberti in Rome about developments in this Yorkshire situation. But when they act at all, they can be too thorough. I thought it possible that they’d kill you, as well as your brother.”
“You had no concern for my brother.”
“None. I won’t lie to you.”
Emily was suddenly very tired, and she wondered if she might actually go to sleep and fall off the horse. “I didn’t kill Mrs. Flensing,” she said. “That companion of hers must have done it, and taken the head away with him. She had some means of putting my ghost into it, as a placeholder till they could rouse the ghost under the stone—I suppose her companion put hers into it.”
Curzon muttered something that Emily was sure was a curse.
The sky had cleared enough for her to see the stars, and she could see that Curzon was leading the horse south. The parsonage really couldn’t be far off.
“Tomorrow,” she said, “you and I must—”
“You’ll be bedridden for days. Lucky if you don’t catch a lethal fever from all this.”
“I’m not frail. Tomorrow we must do what I said in my letter. Quickly, since now the stone is broken and they’ve sent for the head.”
“It’s true you’re not frail.” He laughed shortly. “You count on your father’s acquaintance with her, again? Seeking a task from a goddess can be costly—and having undertaken to fulfil it, you’re generally in mortal peril if you fail. Immortal peril, I should say. I only asked her for . . . the local news, last year.”
“And without my help you wouldn’t have got that. I’m not afraid of whatever the cost is.”
“You always were a fool. And you blithely expect me to put myself in that peril too.”
“Fools,” she said, “plural.”
He didn’t reply, and they walked on in silence except for the muddy thumps of Curzon’s boots and the horse’s hooves. Keeper padded along silently, swinging his head from side to side to watch the emerging hills.
Charlotte and Anne and Tabby heard the hoofbeats in the yard, and hurried out the kitchen door. When Emily swung a leg over the horse’s back and let herself slide down to the pavement, Anne hurried up to her.
“You’re drenched!” Anne said, putting her arm around her taller sister’s shoulders. “And freezing! Dry clothes, tea, and a warm bed, right now.”
Emily protested, but Anne led her into the kitchen, with Keeper following attentively. Anne freed Emily from the wet hat and Mackintosh cape and walked her away toward the stairs.
Charlotte looked out at the tall figure standing in the yard beside the horse, and she recognized the man with the eyepatch who had called on their father a year ago: the man who had later taken Emily to consult a goddess at a pagan shrine, and who—according to Emily and Anne and Tabby—had transformed into a werewolf in this very kitchen!
But Emily had written to him, asking for help, and it seemed that tonight he had saved her life. Charlotte took a deep breath. Accepter l’aide, she thought.
Tabby was pulling her backward and tugging anxiously at the door, but Charlotte pushed her away and held the door open. “Come in, sir,” she called, and to Tabby she added, “Yes, I know who he is.”
“God help us!” wailed the old housekeeper, retreating back toward Emily’s dog, who simply lay down. Surely it was a good sign that Keeper wasn’t alarmed!
“I’ll go,” said Curzon, looking away. “I have no right to enter this house again.”
“I think,” said Charlotte, “my sister would have been found dead on the moors tomorrow, if not for you.” Dizzy with bravado, she went on, “I’m inviting you in.”
Behind her she heard Tabby gasp.
Curzon stared at Charlotte with his one exposed eye. He shook his head and opened his mouth, but Charlotte spoke first.
“Please,” she said.
He shifted uneasily, then said, “Very well, Miss Charlotte. After I’ve returned this horse to the stable down the street.” He bowed. “If you’ll excuse me for half an hour.”
“Certainly.”
Curzon led the horse out of the fan of light from the open kitchen door, and Charlotte heard its hooves splashing in puddles as the two of them rounded the corner of the house.
Charlotte closed the door at last, and crossed to the table and leaned on it.
“If your father wakes up,” said Tabby, “and finds that devil in his kitchen . . . !”
“We’ll explain that he saved Emily tonight. She sent for him, remember.”
“In a mad hour.”
“At least we’re all within these walls tonight.”
Branwell had come stumbling to the back door an hour ago, as soaked as Emily and with a makeshift bandage around his head. Anne and Tabby had stopped him from rushing straight upstairs and had made him sit down until they had cleaned and dressed two cuts in his forehead and put a proper bandage on. He had tearfully refused to tell them where he’d been or what had happened, and upstairs it had been all they could do to get him out of his boots and wet clothes before he threw himself into the bed and ordered them to leave him in peace.
“What do you suppose happened out there tonight?” Charlotte whispered now.
“I’ll warrant it’s to do with the stone cracking,” said Tabby.
Charlotte nodded wearily. “How not?”
“At least John mortared it up.”
“Mr. Curzon might know the effectiveness, if any, of that. For now all we can do is pray, Tabby.”
Twenty minutes later there was a tentative knock at the door, and when Tabby had got a firm nod from Charlotte she pushed it open. Curzon stepped in past her and pulled it shut behind him.
Charlotte had forgotten how big and swarthy the man was, and his eyepatch gave him the look of a corsair. She fell back on courtesy and said, “Do sit down, sir.”
He remained standing, and blinked around at the kitchen in evident unease.
“I neglected to ask,” he said. “Has your brother—Branwell—come home?”
“A while ago,” said Charlotte, “as wet as Emily, and with terrible cuts in his forehead! Do sit, sir, please! Were they out at Ponden Kirk?”
“I don’t know where Branwell was,” Curzon said. He crossed to the table and lowered himself into a chair. “I found Keeper, and then Emily, a few miles north of here. Why Ponden Kirk?”
“That’s where . . .” Charlotte began, then hesitated. The so-called promissory notes weren’t her secret to reveal. “Where Emily found you wounded, last year,” she finished lamely.
He stared at her with his one exposed eye.
But who can save us, she thought, if this man can’t?
“You’re Catholic,” she said impulsively. When he nodded, she went on, “I was a student, and then a teacher, at a school in Brussels, four years ago. Emily was there too for a few months, but came home for our aunt’s funeral and then just stayed here.” She glanced at Tabby, who stood by the knife drawer, and at Keeper, who was resting his head on the floor between his massive paws. “In September of 1843 I was alone in that foreign city—the school was closed for summer, and one evening I found myself in front of St. Gudula church.”
