The Greenstone Grail: The Sangreal Trilogy One

Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her to this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’

Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glanced back into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.

For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.

Hoover raised his head hopefully.

‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’

In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’

‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.

Annie laughed.

Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.

‘I get seasick.’

‘On a river?’

‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’

At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with them, but there was a large section left, and Annie, Bartlemy and Hoover sat by the fire at teatime (it was not yet too warm for a fire to be unwelcome) and munched their way through a respectable portion of it. Annie talked about Nathan, as she so often did, proud of his academic achievements, but still happier at the person she felt he was growing into. ‘I’m being boring,’ she said, catching herself up short. ‘Boring on about my son.’

‘What mother doesn’t?’ Bartlemy smiled. ‘You know I’m not bored.’

‘It’s at times like this,’ Annie continued after a few minutes, ‘birthdays, and family times, that I wonder most about his father. Not – not Daniel, I can’t fool myself that he’s like Daniel. Maybe in nature, in some ways, but not looks.’

‘He could be a throwback,’ Bartlemy said lightly. ‘You shouldn’t worry about it.’

‘A throwback to what? And I don’t worry, that’s not the word. I just feel I ought to know. One day soon he’s going to ask, and I’ll have to tell him, but I’ve no idea what I’m going to tell him. Have you … thought about it any more?’

‘I’ve thought about it a great deal,’ Bartlemy said.

‘Will you tell me what you’ve thought?’ Annie said a little shyly.

Bartlemy set down his plate with the remainder of a piece of cake. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘But you must understand this is pure speculation. We may never know the truth.’

‘I understand.’

‘We spoke once before of the Gate of Death. It has always been so called because death was supposed to be the only way to open it, but love, so they say, is stronger than death, and it may be that your love opened the Gate, and in a moment lost to memory you passed through, and returned with a child in your womb. Such unexplained pregnancies have happened before: I need hardly mention the most notorious case.’

Annie glanced up in bewilderment; then her face cleared. ‘I really don’t think Nathan’s the new Messiah,’ she said. ‘My God, I hope not!’

‘I too … but he is special. There is a maturity, a strength of character which distinguishes him. He’s a teenager now: it will be interesting to see if he displays the wayward behaviour usually associated with that age.’

‘What if he doesn’t?’ Annie said. ‘If he doesn’t start being rude to me, and having moods, and playing very loud music in his bedroom, and smoking pot and taking E, and treating me as an embarrassment? Is that when I should worry?’

She wasn’t quite joking, and Bartlemy smiled only a little. ‘If you want to,’ he said. ‘Worrying doesn’t achieve anything, but we all do it. If you need to worry that Nathan gives you no real cause for anxiety … Exactly. Where were we? You passed the Gate, or may have done, and became pregnant, so you believe, in that moment. Not your boyfriend’s child: that seems fairly obvious. There are worlds without number beyond the Gate, Powers which rarely touch our lives so nearly. Once in a while, however, those Powers concern themselves with our immediate affairs. Not in my experience, nor that of anyone I know; but it has happened. Maybe there is some task to be done, some destiny to fulfil – mind you, I’ve always had my doubts about Destiny: she’s a temperamental lady. I feel Nathan was born for a purpose, though I don’t know what it is. Perhaps there is a doom which only he can avert. Time will show. Whatever the truth, it seems clear Nathan has a father from outside this world, a being superior to us, in intellect and quality if not in essence, possibly one of the Powers themselves – anything is possible. You both have enemies, we know that much, enemies on what might be termed a supernatural plane; but a child that unique would attract attention from birth. The circumstances of his conception – the Gate opening for someone still living – would cause ripples that the sensitive might feel. Certainly there is – interest – in him, from many sources.’

‘Now you really are frightening me,’ Annie said. ‘Otherworldly beings – Nathan – a mythical task – all this can’t be true … can it?’

‘Someone sent the things which followed you,’ Bartlemy pointed out. ‘They may even have slipped into this world after you when the Gate opened: such shadows might do that. But of one thing you can be sure, if you have need of comfort. Whoever fathered Nathan has power of a kind we cannot imagine – the power to break the rules – and such an individual would never leave his son unprotected. Somehow, he will be watching over Nathan. Believe me.’

But do I want an alien power watching over my son? Annie asked herself. She finished her cake, and stroked Hoover’s rough head, and tried not to feel the future touching her with its shadow.

The sailors had made it to the sea via the little harbour of Grimstone, and enjoyed themselves very much learning how to tack out in the bay, where a brisk wind whipped the waves into scuds. The river journey back took more than two hours, since the Glyde was winding, and Michael observed the speed limit, so it was dark before they reached the mooring outside Riverside House. They had left the breeze behind in the bay and it was a clear still night with a young moon not bright enough to obscure the stars.

‘There’s the saucepan,’ Hazel said. ‘And Orion’s belt.’

‘Do you know your stars?’ Michael asked.

‘Nathan does.’

‘Not much,’ Nathan disclaimed.

‘You can navigate by the stars,’ Michael said, ‘if you’re out at sea. Look, there’s the Pole Star, and the Evening Star. They tell you what direction you’re going in. It’s like a route map up there.’

‘I thought you had radar,’ said George.

‘Yes, but a good sailor doesn’t need them. Not that I’m a good sailor – I don’t know the sky well enough.’

‘Do you know what that star is?’ Nathan asked, pointing. ‘The one just under Orion.’

‘No idea. I told you, I’m not really an expert. I just remember the easy ones.’

‘Is that the new star we found last year?’ said George. ‘The one that wasn’t on the chart?’

‘You found a new star?’ Michael was amused. ‘Well, it’s a busy sky up there. Maybe it was an old one that had popped out for a tea break when the chart was drawn up.’

Nathan found the opportunity to tread on George’s foot. ‘My star chart’s pretty basic,’ he said.

It was back, the unknown star, hanging above the village; he was almost sure it hadn’t been visible further downriver. He didn’t know why, but he wasn’t prepared to discuss it with grown-ups yet – not even a grown-up as nice as Michael. It was their star, they had located it, a private star shining over Eade.

‘Like the star of Bethlehem,’ Hazel said later.

‘That’s silly,’ George objected. ‘There’s nothing special about Eade. Even if it was the second coming, Jesus would have to be born in the hospital at Crowford, like my cousin Eleanor. That’s where the – the maternity unit is. And the Bethlehem star was big and sparkly: the three kings followed it from another country. Ours isn’t really noticeable at all. I still think it’s a UFO.’

‘Why would a UFO be interested in Eade?’ Hazel retorted scornfully. She thought George was getting much too assertive.

‘Why would a star?’

‘Shut up arguing,’ Nathan admonished. Michael joined them (he had been locking up the boat), and they cut through the gardens of Riverside House and set off along the lane towards the village. Nathan tried not to keep glancing upwards, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself, and he half fancied the star was looking back at him, gazing down from its viewpoint in the night like an unwinking eye.

THREE The Luck of the Thorns (#ulink_02581907-104b-5d25-a477-14772194a795)

Annie wondered a good deal about her conversation with Bartlemy and his theories concerning Nathan’s conception. On the one hand she dismissed them as bizarre, on a par with the worst of New Age mysticism, crystal power, geomancy, and the sort of people who talked about former incarnations. On the other hand, Bartlemy was not that kind of person, and the fold in her memory – the timeless moment locked away – was something she felt, dimly now, but still real even after the passage of over thirteen years. She could recall clearly the deep shock she had experienced, less from Daniel’s death than from her own involvement in it, her journey to another place, forgotten but still sensed, forever a part of her, forever changing her. It remained always the most intense event of her life … but founded on what? Fantasy – delusion – her imagination overworking in an attempt to blot out the abyss of her loss? No, she decided; in the end, you must trust yourself, because if not yourself, whom can you trust? Besides, she had seen them, she had heard their whisperings, and if shadows walked in this world, then anything was possible, in any world. She sat in the bookshop on a quiet afternoon, her fingers slackening on the computer keyboard, revolving these things in her mind, always returning to the same enigma: Nathan’s paternity. It was strange how she had accepted it, over the years, rarely troubling herself with speculation. And now …