The Puzzle Ring (18 page)

‘Jinx just tripped me up
on purpose
!' Hannah said furiously. ‘On the stairs! I could've broken my neck.'

‘Are you all right?' Roz asked anxiously. ‘Let me see.'

‘On the stairs coming down from the old tower room?' Lady Wintersloe asked. ‘Why, that's where she tripped me up!'

‘She's a wicked creature,' Linnet said with intense feeling.

‘She likes to lurk around on those steps,' Lady Wintersloe said. ‘I don't know why. Maybe because your father spent so much time up in that room.'

Hannah rolled up her jeans to show her mother her red, bruised knees. ‘I hit my shoulder too.'

‘I'll get you some cabbage leaves from the garden,' Linnet said. ‘Nothing better for bruises!'

‘I think an icepack might do more good,' Roz said. ‘They do look sore!'

She followed Linnet out, and Hannah sat down stiffly, putting her feet up on the footstool. ‘So was that where you broke your leg?' she asked her great-grandmother with interest. ‘On those twisty stairs coming down from the tower room?'

Lady Wintersloe nodded. ‘Oh, it was silly of me, I know, going up those steps at my age. I thought I would have one more go at opening up that door. I was sure, you know . . . well, that your father had found the way to break the curse. He told me he was close. But then he disappeared . . . He'd always kept that door locked and I didn't know where he'd hidden the key. I watched some show where the detective picked a lock with her hairpin, and so I thought I'd give it a
try. But Jinx tripped me up before I even got to the door.' She sighed.

Hannah slid her hand into her pocket and brought out the key. ‘I found it in my bedroom.'

‘But I looked everywhere! Where was it?'

Hannah told her, and Lady Wintersloe threw up her hands. ‘I never thought to look through those old books. So you've been in your father's secret room?' She leant forward anxiously. ‘Any clues? I mean . . .'

‘On how to break the curse?' Hannah gave a little nod. ‘I think so, though it's hard to understand. It's all in code.'

‘Be careful, my dear,' Lady Wintersloe said. ‘Really, maybe it would be best to leave it alone. Your father . . .' She dabbed her eyes. ‘Maybe it's best not to meddle with such things.'

‘But don't you want the curse to be broken?' Hannah demanded.

Lady Wintersloe shrugged elegantly. ‘Of course! But not if it means risking yourself, Hannah. I don't want to lose you too.'

Hannah scowled. She had no intention of giving up. ‘Won't you help me, Belle? To at least decipher his code? Then we could maybe find out what happened to him?'

Her great-grandmother hesitated. ‘But what can I do?' She indicated her broken leg with a graceful wave of her long, thin hand.

‘Well, he wrote cryptic clues . . . what do you think this one could mean?' Hannah wrote on a piece of paper:
two hornet queens flying around the one great chair
.

‘Well, let's see. Could be an anagram with “flying around” in it. Great chair. Mmmmm. I know! “Hornet” is an anagram of “throne”! Am I right? But why the two queens?'

‘Was there ever a time when there were two queens fighting over the throne?' Hannah asked.

Lady Wintersloe nodded. ‘I guess that would be Elizabeth the First and Mary, Queen of Scots.'

Of course
, Hannah thought.

Lady Wintersloe went on musingly, ‘Mary declared herself queen of England as well as of Scotland when Elizabeth first inherited the throne. That was because in the eyes of the Catholics Mary had a better claim than Elizabeth, who had been declared illegitimate by her father. You could say that was why Elizabeth cut off her cousin's head all those years later—to make sure of the crown on her own head.'

‘Elizabeth and Mary were cousins? I didn't know that. And did Elizabeth really cut off Mary's head?'

‘Oh, yes, poor Queen Mary. She was nine years younger than Elizabeth, and far prettier. Her English cousin was always jealous of her. They had very different childhoods, of course. Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, was beheaded when Elizabeth was only three, and Elizabeth lived the next twenty-odd years of her life in and out of prison, in fear for her life.'

Hannah listened wide-eyed. She had known nothing of this.

Lady Wintersloe was pleased to see her so interested. ‘Mary had inherited her throne when she was only six days old, and then she was sent over to France as a little girl to marry the French prince. She was petted and spoilt all her life, and made Queen of France when she was only sixteen or so. For a few years Mary was one of the richest and most powerful women in the world.'

Hannah wondered what it must have been like for Elizabeth, motherless at such a young age and having Henry
the Eighth as her father. Hadn't he had six wives, and chopped off the heads of two of them? Along with the heads of lots of other people. It must have been lonely and terrifying. Seeing her young and pretty cousin as queen of both Scotland and France must have been a bitter pill for Elizabeth to swallow.

‘Then Elizabeth inherited the throne when she was twenty-five, and ended up rich and powerful and loved by all,' Lady Wintersloe continued. ‘While poor Mary lost her throne when she was twenty-five and ended up living the next twenty-odd years as Elizabeth's prisoner, poor and afraid. Really, their lives are like reverse images of each other. I've often thought it was uncanny.'

‘But there was a time when they were both queens together?'

Her great-grandmother nodded. ‘Only a few years. When her first husband died, Mary was Queen of France no more and so came back to Scotland. I can't remember how old she was then. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. She only ruled here for five years. She stayed here once, did you know? In the castle before it was burnt. And Lord Montgomery fought for her when the lords rebelled, and was with her when she was defeated at Carberry Hill. Our family seems always to fight for lost causes.'

‘So when did the castle get burnt down?' Hannah asked.

‘The summer of 1567,' her grandmother replied promptly. ‘The same year Mary abdicated. After the battle, Lord Montgomery fled back here but the lords who had fought against Mary did not want anyone trying to rescue her. So they came and burnt the castle down.'

Hannah wondered when Eglantyne had been burnt as a witch. It had been in winter, she remembered, just before Christmas. It must have been 1566 then.

Hannah sat, hand on her chin, watching the flames flicker and dance, thinking about her father's clues. She knew most of them off by heart now.

‘Belle, what does “gibbous” mean?' she asked.

‘Do you know, I have no idea. Something to do with the moon.'

Roz came in just at that moment, carrying two icepacks wrapped in tea-towels. She laid them tenderly on Hannah's knees.

‘Mum, do you know what “gibbous” means?' Hannah asked.

‘When the moon is waxing. You know, halfway between the half-moon and the full moon.'

‘So when the moon is three-quarters full,' Hannah said, half to herself.

‘That's right.'

Hannah sat back, her brain so busy she hardly noticed Linnet bringing in cabbage leaves or her mother trying hard not to roll her eyes. She doodled with Lady Wintersloe's fountain pen in the margin of the newspaper. She drew a tree, and a gate, and a hill with a thick crisscross of pen strokes upon its peak, and then she drew circles within circles. As she doodled she thought. She remembered Lady Wintersloe telling her that her father had believed the cave in Fairknowe Hill could be used as a gateway to another world, and another time. Donovan had said too that the rift in the yew tree had been barred and padlocked to stop people from running through it on their way to the fairy hill.
Through the winter gate I must go
, her father had written. And Linnet had told her to beware of the green hill at the quarter points of the year, at midwinter and midsummer, and the spring and autumn equinoxes, and
the cross-quarter days between, for they were the days when the gateway opened. She remembered her father's notes on leylines and how they had said there were ‘thin places' where two worlds meet and time stands still.

As Hannah doodled and daydreamed, the conviction that her father really had gone back in time to the days of Mary, Queen of Scots, grew upon her strongly, until she could not bear to sit still any longer. She got up, despite her sore, stiff knees, and began to pace back and forth. Questions whirled through her mind. Was it even possible? And if she was to break the curse, as she had vowed, must she too go back in time? Which brought her again to the biggest question of all. How?

‘Mum, is it possible to travel back in time? Scientifically speaking, I mean?' Hannah asked, as they sat in the drawing room after dinner.

Roz looked surprised. ‘Do you know, your father once asked me exactly the same question! How like him you are, darling.' Her hand briefly touched the wedding ring about her neck.

‘So what did you tell him?'

‘Well, theoretically, it is possible. One of the consequences of Einstein's special law of relativity was that it changed the whole way we understand time and space.' Roz leant forward, her face beginning to glow with eagerness. ‘Once upon a time people used to think time and space were separate forces, but now we know they're a single entity, like a piece of fabric.' Roz showed Hannah the cloth of her skirt. ‘See how the fabric is made from threads weaving in and out of each other? That's what space-time might look like.'

‘So it is possible?' Hannah was excited.

Roz smiled. ‘Only theoretically. We haven't got the technology to build a time-travel machine, and I doubt that we ever will. Though when you think of the leaps we've made just in the past ten years—'

Hannah interrupted her. ‘But what if there was some way of travelling back in time without having to build a machine. Something . . . natural.' She had wanted to say ‘magical' but knew her mother would immediately become scornful.

‘Again, just like your father! It's really quite uncanny. I guess the answer is yes, Hannah, it's possible. Some scientists have worked out that there are things called wormholes, which
could
connect different parts of the space–time continuum. If you could find a way to travel through a wormhole, you'd find yourself in quite another time or place.'

Hannah listened intently, her face rapt.

‘What's amazing about this is that scientists now think wormholes could be found anywhere, at any time. One could be a mere millimetre away from us right now, only we can't see it because it's in a different dimension.' Roz was speaking rapidly now, waving her hands about, her cheeks pink. The permanent line between her brows had almost smoothed away.

‘So time-travel tunnels could be anywhere?' Hannah asked.

‘Yes! Isn't it amazing? Though, of course, we don't know how to access them.'

Hannah thought of the dark cleft in the side of the fairy hill. She had explored the passageway one afternoon, with Donovan, and found nothing but graffiti-scrawled rock. But that had not been at any of the thin times, the turning points
of the year. Hannah was determined to explore it the next time a thin time came along, which was the upcoming winter solstice, the day after her birthday.

Dreamily Lady Wintersloe said, ‘You know, T S Eliot said “The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.” Even though one lives such a short time, and the other for so long.' She was often vague and faraway in the evenings, after Linnet had given her medicine.

Roz burst into words again. ‘It's such an exciting time we live in! We're so lucky! So many mysteries being cleared up, so many misunderstandings. Did you know that they may have discovered the theory of everything, which so many scientists have dreamt of for so long? They're calling it M Theory.'

Hannah thought it sounded like the name of a band. ‘Why?' she asked.

Roz laughed. ‘Who knows? M could stand for master or mother or mystery or even music . . .'

Or magic?
Hannah asked herself silently. She yawned. It had been another long and busy day, and she was very tired.

‘But the idea is that at the very heart of everything is a tiny vibrating string, like a guitar string. It's the very stuff of the universe, and it's in everything,' Roz said.

So
, Hannah thought,
music lies at the very heart of all things, like Linnet's flame of magic
. And, half asleep, she suddenly began to see
how
her father had managed to cross the threshold between times.
Sing a song of spells, there is a reason in rhyme, like ringing the bells, to unlock the gate in time
. . .