Their little pink mouths opened charmingly. “Oh, but—”
“But nothing,” I said. “Don’t try and charm me. I don’t think you’re sweet. I think you both need spanking.” I banged their heads together, not quite as hard as I wanted to, and stalked away.
I could feel them staring after me with hatred. I spent the rest of that evening expecting them to take some horrible revenge on me. But to my surprise they treated me almost with respect. I don’t think anyone had ever told them off before. They didn’t like it, but it seemed to have made them think.
All the same, I think they put something slimy in Grundo’s bed that night. Poor Grundo. He was given a little room in the attic next door to the Izzys. I was given a grand guest bedroom halfway down the house. It had a wonderful high brass bedstead with knobs on its brass rails and a whole bank of pillows, and it was covered with an enormous patchwork quilt.
“Be gentle with the quilt,” Judith said. “My great-grandmother made it—your great-great-grandmother, that is. It’s quite fragile these days.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, because it was. I looked at the big windows. They had brass curtain rails threaded with big brass rings. The curtains hanging from the rings were as beautiful as the quilt, but newer. “Did you weave the curtains?” I asked. “They’re lovely.”
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact I did,” Judith said. She went away with an anxious, apologetic smile, as near to being pleased as I had seen her.
I settled down under the ancestral patchwork and fell straight into sleep. I was tired out. And it seemed to me that I had another dream after a while, of the same kind that I had dreamed at Grandfather Gwyn’s. I thought I floated out from under the quilt and through the window and sped off across the countryside. Dim blue fields and dark copses unfurled beneath me for miles, until I arrived at Castle Belmont and whirled through the grounds to the Inner Garden. This time I didn’t go into it. I sort of roosted on the wall, looking down into the garden’s moist, quiet spaces. Grandfather Gwyn’s horrible horse standard was still there. I could see it as a white streak at the corner of my eye while I examined the garden.
It was spoiled. The lawns were drying out, making trees droop and bushes wither, and the waters did not seem to be running freely anywhere in the conduits and cisterns. Where the waterfalls poured into the pools, they made a strange, harsh tinkling, quite unlike the earlier deep, singing gurgle. Some animal heads had stopped running entirely. But this was only the outer sign of what Sybil had done. When I looked more closely—in a way it was feeling as much as seeing—I found a yellow-white ghostly layer of rottenness over everything. It covered the lawns and the flowers, and was particularly disgusting where it draped and glopped over the trees or oozed down the waterfalls.
I wasn’t wrong about this! I thought in my dream. After what Heppy and Judith had said, I had been almost distrusting my own memories, thinking perhaps that I had made a mistake, or imagined Sybil talking to Sir James and the Merlin, and possibly that I had only dreamed that they had summoned Grandfather Gwyn here. Now—at least in my dream—I knew it had been true.
Then I turned my head and saw someone else standing sadly on the wall beside me. She towered above me, tall and slender in a dress that blew about without any wind to blow it, and her long hair blew across, almost like tendrils, to touch me. It was the touch of her hair that had made me notice her. Even so, I was not sure at first that she was really there. I could see right through her, to trees and stars in the sky. She was just a sort of whiteness faintly across these things, like a cloud. Then she looked at me with huge eyes, and I saw that she was real. She seemed to be about my age, but I was fairly sure that she was older than the garden and more real than I was.
“This used to be one of the strong shrines,” she murmured. “It anchored the land.” She sighed. She beckoned me to watch and reached down underneath Sybil’s layer of rottenness, where she took hold of the good part of the garden that still lay down there and pulled gently. She drew it out, all the power and virtue and goodness that was left, as if it was a huge, mossy cloth covered with faint, running glimmers, and draped it dripping around her shoulders. It smelled wonderful, of rain and woodland and deep, clear waters. “I have to take it back for a while,” she mused as she pulled it round her. She seemed to be thinking aloud, but she was speaking to me, too. “It will cause a strong imbalance.”
While I was waiting for her to say more, somebody called my name from inside the guest bedroom, and I had to leave in a hurry. This is the way when somebody calls you by name. I went with such helter-skelter speed that the dark country teemed and whirled underneath me, and I landed in the brass bedstead with a thump. I was quite giddy when I sat up. But this time I knew I was awake. I could feel the frail squares of the quilt under my fingers and hear the brass rails rattle, both on the bed and above the curtains.
“Who’s there and what do you want?” I asked slurrily.
Someone said, “Ah, she did hear!” in a satisfied way, and several other someones said, “We are. We need to speak to you.”
There was light coming from low down at the side of the room, gleaming and yellowish. I never found out where the light came from. I looked in the morning, and there was nothing. I blinked in the low golden glow and stared. There was a most peculiar creature perched on the brass rail at the end of the bed, looking at me with glistening pinkish eyes. He was big, at least as big as the curly dog asleep downstairs, and he had a protruding front and long, fluted, trailing parts, like wings. Handlike parts gripped the brass rail, and a facelike, birdlike part stared at me. What struck me as most peculiar, though, was that he was wholly transparent. I mean, I could see through him, just as I could see through the lady I had just met, but where she had been like vapor or a cloud, he was like a balloon full of nothing, and faintly pinkish all through. Without that low-down light, I would not have been able to see him at all. The same light, I saw suddenly, glistened on a whole row more of the creatures clustered along the curtain rails above. These ones seemed to be smaller, and they were all sorts of different shapes.
“Who are you
all?” I said.
“I am the person who inhabits the Dimber chalice,” the big one said gravely. “The people on the curtain rails inhabit the other vessels of the Regalia. We have inhabited these vessels and worked magics at the bidding of the Dimbers since we were first summoned, hundreds of years ago. We want to know if this is wrong.”
“Yes, is this slavery or not?” chirped one of the ones on the curtain rail.
“The boy told us it was,” sang another.
“We used to be free folks,” another chimed in, “until we were summoned and bound by magic.”
“So is this wrong?” the big one inquired. “The boy says that it is. He told us that in this day and age there are laws that forbid one person to imprison another or to force people to work unless they have agreed to do so. He says the Dimbers are acting unlawfully in this. Would you agree?”
Oh, dear! I thought. Now I knew why the Regalia had felt so much alive. I also knew why I had seen those two little spots of light, so much like eyes. They were eyes, Grundo’s, looking in. He had been spoiling for trouble anyway, and it must have been the last straw when he was sent away to play with the Izzys while I was shown the treasure.
“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. It was difficult to think. Half my mind felt as if it was still with the Inner Garden. “Grundo told you that you’ve been enslaved by the Dimbers, is that right? So now you have to live in the chalice and the other things and do magic when they tell you to. How did they get you to live in the things?”
“By spell and ritual,” said the big creature. “One day I was free and floating in my hedgerow, and the next, I was haled into the chalice, and my power was at the command of Eliza Dimber. It was the same for the others, with different Dimbers.”
“We had no choice,” twittered the ones on the railings. “The spell laid on us was strong.”
“But that was a long time ago, wasn’t it?” I said. “The laws might have been different then. And I’m not sure it was slavery. They do reward you, don’t they?”
The creatures on the railings burst out twittering again, like a row of birds. “They give us blood,” one sang, and another sang, “But blood is not our proper food!” Another piped, “What is a reward? We never asked to work.” A small one answered, “Reward is living in a vessel of glory,” and others twittered him down with “Freedom is better!” A medium-sized one chanted, “But we would be dead by now, but for the spells and the blood.”
“This is all true,” the big one said, staring at me solemnly, “but the boy said it was slavery because no one asked us first.”