Lammas Night (22 page)

As William nodded, nervously smoothing his fair hair into place, the two younger men vanished into the shadows again. Even though they had spoken no word, Graham sensed a warmth that had been comforting to William, and he was grateful. With a little bow that somehow seemed quite natural, he led the prince to the door and knocked, waiting until he felt the latch move under his other hand.

The candlelight inside seemed bright after the red-lit hall, but it was created by only a single taper in the center of the long table. Four more red votive lights, like the one outside, were set around the perimeter of the room. A breath of incense and a hint of lemon oil and old wood hung on the air.

Alix moved to the left of the door as they entered, her blonde hair hanging loose almost to her hips, folds of her robe obscuring the blade Graham knew she held in her right hand. The brigadier waited behind the table, and before it a man Graham knew the prince would instantly recognize, as soon as he got a good look at him.

Selwyn nodded stiffly as William's jaw dropped, but the interchange covered Alix's brief bending to draw her blade across the threshold of the door she had just closed behind them. She caught Graham's free hand and drew him with her as she returned to her place by Selwyn's side, leaving William standing a few paces behind. Graham kissed her hand as she slipped her other arm around her husband's waist and simultaneously laid her blade on the table behind them. William did not seem to have heard the faint scape of metal on wood as she sealed the door. Now he would see only a staghorn-handled letter opener when they moved aside, and possibly wonder what it was for.

“Good evening, David,” Graham said softly, clasping Selwyn's hand and nodding reassurance. “I'm pleased to report that your whiskey was a great success. No problems at this end, I take it?”

“We're ready,” Selwyn murmured.

“So are we. Shall we get started, then?”

The room was as he remembered it from his several other visits over the past few weeks. The deep window recesses were covered with double layers of blackout curtain, but otherwise he was sure it looked much the same as it had in Drake's time. The Drake armchair was set at the head of the table, and beyond it, just to the right of the fireplace in the north wall, was a splendidly carved settle, wide enough for three people. William would watch from there. A court cupboard and an ancient garment press were pushed against the eastern wall beneath the famous portrait of Queen Elizabeth—all vintage of the years when Drake had lived here. Several other dark-toned paintings hung on other walls, including one of the great captain himself.

Graham gazed at the likeness of Drake for a moment as the others set about their final preparations, aware of William easing closer to his back, but then his attention was caught by Selwyn pulling something bulky from underneath the table, its shape obscured by a black cloth. As Selwyn lifted the object to the table, the cloth fell away, and Graham almost gasped. It was Drake's drum.

He nearly forgot William. He nearly forgot everything else in the room. He had never seen the drum except behind glass. The difference was breathtaking.

Nearly three feet high, almost too large for a man to grasp around its circumference, the drum's sides were painted with Drake's arms and crest on one half and decorated with a pattern of small metal studs on a crimson background on the other. The rims at top and bottom were also crimson, the drumhead a yellowed, ripply vellum. He could feel the drum drawing him already, from clear across the table, and it was all he could do not to reach out and touch it right then.

All at once, Alix was moving between him and the drum with a bowl of water, and the compulsion was broken. Averting his gaze, Graham dipped his hands and dried them on the towel across her arm, then gestured minutely toward William with his eyes. The prince dipped his fingers as he had seen Graham do and returned the towel to Alix with a shy nod. As she took the bowl away, Graham laid one hand on William's sleeve and guided him to the fireplace settle.

“Well done. Now, this is your place until either I or the lady tell you otherwise. Her command supersedes even my own. Do you understand?”

At William's solemn nod, he returned to stand at the east of the table and drew up the hood of his robe, his attention drawn ever more intently to the waiting drum.

C
HAPTER
9

William shivered a little as he slid back on the carved settle and tried to make himself disappear against the wood, relieved no longer to be under Graham's scrutiny—or the others'. He watched Gray pull up his hood, the rest following suit, and surreptitiously he did the same. Huddling in the shadow of the hood eased his nervousness somewhat.

He had been a little dubious about the robe they had put on him, but he was glad for it now. The others wore the same kind of garment, though the cords around their waists were red, not black. He also did not think they were wearing anything underneath, despite the chill of the room. He had seen Gray strip by casual stages while he thought William was distracted with his own robing. He wondered whether they would have worn anything at all, had he not been here. He had read that in the old days the witches sometimes marked their revels in the nude.

He shuddered at the thought—not the nudity but the unknown rites the old tales implied—and told himself sternly that if he kept this up, he was only going to scare himself again. The people in this room bore little resemblance to the folk of the old accounts. Three of the four were his friends or acquaintances, even if he had not guessed the extent of their occult interests before.

Brigadier Ellis's involvement certainly came as no great surprise, for William remembered the telephone call at Dover and then Geoffrey's presence on the plane and outside. Ellis was Gray's father-in-law, too. The one who surprised him was the Earl of Selwyn, despite his own earlier, jesting quip about Selwyn's whiskey back at Plymouth.

Yet Selwyn
was
Michael's father, as William himself had observed, and a long-time friend of Gray's. He should have foreseen. Selwyn also had to be the group's man in black, who had stepped aside in favor of Gray because of the war.

And the woman, to whom all of them seemed to defer—he had a feeling she was Lady Selwyn, though he had never met the earl's wife. She and Selwyn seemed to be in charge of things tonight—though exactly where that put Gray, he didn't know. Gray obviously carried a great deal of weight despite Selwyn's presence, or else it would not have been his decision as to whether William might attend. But Gray himself had stressed that the lady—he had seemed to capitalize the title by his very tone—was ultimately in charge.

The four of them were consulting quietly, the countess—for so he persisted in thinking of her—doing most of the talking while the three men listened, Gray looking vaguely distracted. William could not hear what they were saying, so he turned his attention cautiously to the rest of his surroundings to keep his mind from going off in frightening directions again. The room, at least, was real. Now that he was here, he was not as sure about the other.

He inspected the paneling, burrowing his toes more snugly into the cushion they had provided to keep his feet warm. The oak—said to have been installed at the order of Drake himself—was still magnificent. In the past few days, he had taken in so much about the great Elizabethan captain that he could almost picture Sir Francis striding boldly into the room with his charts under his arm, spreading them on this very table under the portrait of his Queen and benefactress on the east wall.

And the drum—that conjured more mystical images: the drum, whose beat would summon the spirit of Drake to save England from her enemies threatening by sea. He had seen Gray's reaction when Selwyn first brought it up on the table and uncovered it. It had seemed to pull him like a magnet. William wondered whether there really was something to this business of reincarnation that Gray had mentioned so casually.

The chair had been Drake's, too. What would happen when Gray sat down in that, if the mere sight of Drake's drum evoked such a reaction? Suddenly, he was very uneasy for his friend.

Relax, William
, he told himself sternly.
He knows what he's doing
.

He shifted uncomfortably on the hard seat and withdrew further into his hood like a turtle in its shell, unable to prevent another apprehensive shiver. This was ridiculous! He had never had reason to doubt his courage before. He had faced danger often enough—far more often than most people suspected. Besides, Gray had assured him that there was no danger here so long as he did as he was told.

Why, then, was he trembling? What was it about the thought of a few people pottering about in an ancient room and creepy robes that set the hackles rising at the back of his neck? Was it the suspicion that they really were engaged in magic?

Magic, indeed! Now he was beginning to believe what Gray had been telling him.

And yet if he did not believe it at least a little, why had he almost insisted on coming? He had not been able to explain it at the time, and he had no better answer now. If he did not believe, why was he sitting here in this silly robe and expecting something to happen when Gray sat down in that chair a few yards away?

Nor was there any doubt in his mind that something would happen. Already, something ancient and powerful, alien and yet vaguely familiar, seemed to be stirring in the room. He could feel it prickling along his spine, in the pit of his stomach, making his pulse quicken in anticipation. Was it all imagination, born of Gray's casual references to the old line and his own yearning to
do
something that would make a difference, or was it real? Did he even want to know?

Movement caught William's eye, and he looked up with a start. The countess had finished her briefing. As she and the brigadier removed velvet wrappings from a heavy, gilt-framed mirror and set it upright at the end of the table, Gray pushed back his hood and slipped into the Drake chair, pulling a tartan lap rug around his legs and lower body. He and Selwyn spent several minutes adjusting the angle of the mirror and trying different placements of the candle the countess brought closer; then Gray glanced over his shoulder at William with a reassuring quirk of a smile before settling back in the chair. Selwyn lowered the drum to a cushion on the floor close by Gray's right and sat on a stool with it braced between his knees, hands resting on the rim. The countess and the brigadier withdrew to stools on Gray's left and facing him. After that, no one moved.

Not a sound broached the silence. William sat a little straighter and watched the candlelight flicker and crawl along the carving of the gilt mirror frame like something alive. Gray's image shone darkly in the blackened glass, the hazel eyes hardly blinking, the face stilled and devoid of emotion, perhaps already in trance. William tried to imagine what Gray might be seeing.…

Breathing out in a faint sigh, Graham let his body relax and settle and began to put the others out of mind, gradually shuttering off outside distractions. He could see his face in the mirror, smell the incense lingering on the air, sense the others watching, but he paid them less and less attention, even William. Stilled, he let his mind begin to drift with the candle flicker, gradually detaching himself from the eyes that gazed back at him. Almost, he could touch that Other, waiting to pull him into the past. Joining it was now only a matter of time.

Resolutely, he settled down to the business of bringing it through. He drew a slow, deep breath and let it out with a conscious effort to clear his lungs of all of it; drew another like it, and another, until he felt the beginning tingle of over-breathing in lips and fingertips. His trance was deepening steadily, his vision taking on that curious tunnel aspect that was a sure sign of stilling and readiness—passive, receptive—and he let the breathing shift back to a shallow, easy rhythm, dismissing further consciousness of any of his bodily processes as a factor for concern. He lingered there at the balance point for an endless several seconds, neither willing nor desiring anything further, until he felt Alix touch his wrist in old signal.

That started him back along the road of time and memory and past lives. This, too, was familiar, though he had never done it before with such specific intent. To his right, Selwyn began to tap softly on the drum—slow, slow, soon catching and holding the rhythm of his heartbeat in a cadence ancient before the Romans came to Britain—expectant, compelling. As the complexity of the drumming increased, though not the volume, Graham sensed himself sliding into even greater depths of trance, relaxing, centering, balancing.

His right hand began to twitch then, to lift, and he knew immediately where it would go. A part of him watched quite dispassionately as it rose from the chair arm and drifted jerkily to the side, so separate from his conscious control that it might not have been his hand at all, guided by something deep beyond his consciousness. Unerringly, it sank toward the drum, his conscious will receding as the distance closed. The touch of the vellum and the smooth wood of the rim was an almost electrical tingle shoving him deeper, a catapult flinging him back in time as the drumbeat went on, answering his rising pulse beat.

He gasped, his head jerking against the chair back as his eyes half closed, for the speed was dizzying, disorienting, and he could not seem to focus. After an eternity bound up in a heartbeat, the backward flight slowed, and so did the drumbeat. As he gazed into the mirror again, images began to materialize from mist and fog that only he could see: vague, hazy at first, taunting, teasing—something about the mirror, which for an instant was not the one that physically stood before him.

Then, in a blink, all was changed.

He was Drake, and exultant. The drum was under his hands, throbbing and potent, as he drummed out the ancient rhythms and the dancers whirled. On a moon-drenched hilltop he sat with the drum braced between his knees, wind whipping his hair and mantle around him in growing frenzy. The very ground reverberated with the power being raised, the energies pulsing with his heartbeat and shuddering through his body in an ecstasy that was part pleasure and part pain. Around him, the dancers leaped and twisted as the bonfire surged and receded—nearly a hundred dark shapes circling the round of which he was the center, raising the righteous power to rend the Spanish fleet.