Pendragon's Heir (6 page)

Blanche was silent for a while. Then she said:

“If I am not true-born then I need not return to Britain. And I will be safe, for my life will mean nothing to Logres or its enemies.”

“Not return to Britain?” Nerys turned on her in blank surprise. “But it’s your home.”

“Is it?” Blanche looked around the cosy room that was her own. “
I
never saw it.”

Nerys looked at her, shoulders slumping a little. “It is where your heritage lies. A patrimony for which men have killed and died, suffered exile and sorrow and counted the price little. …I thought you might have been less indifferent to it. Or can it be that you are afraid of these enemies?”

Blanche coloured under her gaze. “Of course not,” she said. But it was impossible now to keep the resentment out of her voice, for she knew she was lying.

O
N SUNDAY
, B
LANCHE WENT WITH
K
ITTY
Walker’s party to Tintern in a sour mood that was only fretted by the idle and carefree chatter of the others. But it was better than being trapped in the house with Sir Ector and Nerys, she thought to herself, and besides, she wanted to see Mr Corbin.

She took her chance when they reached Tintern, lagging behind Kitty and the two others as if she took some deep interest in the empty roof and lonely arches of the ruined abbey. Mr Corbin, as a matter of course, remained with her, looming on her left hand like some gigantic but melancholy bird. His silent presence, and the peacefulness of the grass-floored abbey, made it easier to let go some of the tension she had hidden with difficulty in the motor-car.

“Do you think it is more beautiful ruined than it might have been whole?” Mr Corbin asked presently.

Blanche tilted back her head to admire the delicate tracery of the great west window. All the glass was gone, of course, but the lingering gracefulness of the blind stone outline made the breath catch in her throat.

“My guardian would like it whole,” she said at last, with a bitter laugh. “I think he would prefer it if we all lived in castles.”

“Ah,” said Mr Corbin, “but think how chilly and dark that would be. Can’t you imagine all the monks, like brown mice, shivering in here of a winter morning?” And he sang a bar or two of the
Te Deum
with an exaggerated vibrato.

Blanche tried to smile.

Laughter echoed from the walls as Kitty and her friends came tripping back to them. “Blanche,” Kitty called, “we have seen it all, and we are going into the village to find a tea-shop. Are you coming?”

“I had rather stay a little longer,” she told them, and they giggled knowingly as they went away.

She and Mr Corbin walked on, further into the abbey. She felt his eyes on her when they should have been on the ruin; she was not surprised when at last he said:

“You are quiet today, Miss Pendragon. Is anything troubling you?”

The mockery that lived in his eyes was gone for the moment, and Blanche let some of her distress show in her face.

“You would only laugh,” she said helplessly.

“Try me.”

Blanche shook her head. “You don’t believe in things like this.”

“Anything that worries you is real enough to concern me.” He bent head and eyebrows to look into her face. “Look at me, Blanche. Can’t you trust me?”

She searched his eyes in a wordless hush more intimate than speech. Before long she dropped her gaze to the grass beneath their feet. “My parents,” she began at last.

His silence encouraged her to go on.

“All my life I thought they were dead. Now I find that they are alive, but so far away… I don’t know what to do.” She looked up, but he was still silent. “My guardian says I should go to them.”

“They are a long way away?”

Blanche nodded, afraid to say anything more.

“And—you?”

“I suppose I must go…”

Mr Corbin smiled. “Miss Pendragon, how can I help you if you speak of
musts?
”

She looked up at him with quick hope. “What do you mean?”

Again the silence bore that odd secrecy, before he replied, “Whoever made a decision because of what
must
be done? Ask, rather, what you truly desire.”

She looked into the sky and the sun was smiling. “A decision? You mean—I could say
no?
”

“Why not? If it is what you truly desire—on your own account.”

Blanche gulped. But she was unsurprised by the thought, for it had been lurking at the back of her mind until liberated by Mr Corbin’s words. Sudden tears rose in her throat and she blurted out:

“I can’t go! I
can’t!
It would kill me!”

She stared up at him, blinking back the tears. He took her arm with a swift gesture of comfort. “But this is melodrama, Blanche. How far away can they be? Paris? Milan?”

The mention of those two kindly cities struck her as a cruel joke. “Oh, if only!”

“India, then? But that isn’t far. Not today. Haven’t you read that capital book, by Mr Verne, wasn’t it?”

“It isn’t India,” she said.

He frowned. “Surely not Australia?”

In the midst of her tragedy she couldn’t help laughing. “No, indeed!”

But Mr Corbin remained serious. “You said I wouldn’t believe you, Blanche. What aren’t you telling me?”

“You would laugh…”

“I give you my word not to laugh. Tell me, Blanche. Better than keeping it all bottled up inside.”

Blanche screwed her eyes shut. Then she said, “My mother is named Guinevere, and she is the one you are thinking of.”

“T
HERE
’
S EVEN A PROPHECY
,”
SHE FINISHED
. “Pendragon’s heir is the life of Logres. If I go back there, I’ll be killed!” She glanced up at Mr Corbin’s saturnine profile. “Oh, but you can’t believe me. You don’t believe in fairy-tales, do you?”

“I do not,” he said. “But I know of science, and the strange properties of space and time. Why shouldn’t this all be possible?”

Blanche gaped. “You mean you believe me?”

“Of course I do. You are not crazy, and why should you be lying?”

“You’re
wonderful
,” she cried. “Tell me, what should I do? This is my home—this time, this place. I don’t want to leave.”

Mr Corbin shrugged. “Your parents thought they were doing their best for you, sending you here. Who would willingly leave, having stood on the brink of the twentieth century and looked into a bright future where war and poverty might very well vanish, within fifteen years or so, before a peaceful brotherhood of humanity…? It is hard on you, having lived here, to go back to the Dark Ages.” He glanced up at the abbey with a laugh. “Only just now I was speaking of the discomforts of such places.”

“I shall probably have to live in something like it.” Blanche felt tears crawling up her throat again. “Oh, what shall I do?”

Mr Corbin shook his head. “Miss Pendragon, you are not a child anymore. Nobody can advise you, least of all me. You must follow your own heart and judgement.”

She looked at him in doubt. “I’ve always done what Sir Ector advised. Or Nerys. They always knew best. And I know they love me. How could I disappoint them?”

“But everyone makes mistakes,” he said gently. “Especially with their children, I think; they are so full of their own hopes that they forget to let you have yours. Don’t be afraid to know your own mind.”

Blanche nodded, and let her gaze fall to her feet. “I will try. I will try to make the right choice.”

“Miss—Blanche,” said Mr Corbin, and stepped closer. She shivered with surprise as his cool fingers tipped her chin. She looked up, into his eyes, and smiled awkwardly; after the adventure of the pavilion, she felt shy even of Mr Corbin. But he returned the smile, and her discomfort smoothed away.

“The only wrong choice,” he told her with gentle insistence, “would be to let someone else choose for you.”

5

Nay, then,

Do what thou canst, I will not go to-day;

No, nor to-morrow, not till I please myself.

Shakespeare

I
T WAS A WARM
M
AY EVENING
not long after the excursion to Tintern, and Blanche sat on the hammock in the garden. She had been reading a Miss Austen novel,
Mansfield Park
, but even the charming Crawfords no longer distracted her thoughts, and she had flung the book down among the cushions. Instead she was tatting lace for a collar, her fingers scrambling wildly across the cotton. The sun, sinking into flaming clouds, would be gone soon and the bite of cold would send her indoors, to dinner and Nerys and polite conversation. Blanche tatted a little faster. She needed to
think
.

The shuttle, followed by its inky shadow, danced up and down above the cream-coloured lace and Blanche, staring through it, still saw the windows of Tintern. Since the trip she had not spoken to anyone about what she had learned from Nerys and Sir Ector in the library. If anything, she had tried to forget. But her time was running out. Her guardian would return in a day or two from the Newport Antiquities Society’s monthly meeting, and when he spoke to her about it again—as he certainly would soon—she needed to have a decision.

But what decision? “Don’t be afraid to know your own mind,” Mr Corbin had said. Blanche felt like laughing. Know her own mind! It was easy for him to say it, but her mind fought knowing. Mr Corbin was right, of course: it was hard, it was
impossible
for her to leave this time willingly, with everything that she knew and loved. But Sir Ector and Nerys expected her to go—expected her to return to take up the life to which she had been born and even, in a way, raised. How would she ever talk them into letting her stay? She stirred uncomfortably in her seat.

She heard a door close and looked across a lawn like green fire to see Nerys coming from the house to call her for dinner. The sun flared once and was swallowed up in a velvet bank of cloud. The light changed from gold to purple. Red bled across the horizon and Blanche, suddenly in shadow, rose from the hammock. Then she shivered in a breath of wind that scattered the perfume of roses and sent a dank, earthy scent fluttering around her.

She pulled her shawl closer. The wind raced across the lawn and tugged loose the strands of Nerys’s hair. For a moment, apart from the leaves and grasses stirred by that chill breath, all motion ceased. Blanche saw her draw breath. Then the gust died and Nerys was hurrying across the lawn calling her name.

“Blanche—come quickly.”

Blanche dug among the cushions for her book and thrust it with the tatting into her work-basket. As she fumbled with the catch, Nerys caught her arm. “Leave it,” she panted. At the uneven note in her voice, Blanche turned and looked at her. Something of the immortal woman’s glory had broken loose with the strands of hair, some hint of power hung about her, but her eyes were wide with what could only be called fear. Blanche dropped her work-basket.

Then Nerys’s fingers gripped Blanche’s arm convulsively, and her gaze slid past, into the shadows of the bushes beyond. Blanche turned to see. For a moment she saw nothing; then the shadows coalesced. There, just beyond the beeches from which the hammock hung, stood the statue of a man in armour, shield on arm, sword drawn.

Blanche felt the hair rise along the back of her neck. The weird light of dusk, the trembling of Nerys—
Nerys, trembling!
—and above all the mute, inexplicable figure reminded her of a childish nightmare. For one horrible moment she supposed that it must have been standing there watching her for hours. But it moved, and was an armoured man with a sword coming at them around the tree.

Blanche screamed before she could stop herself. Then Nerys snatched her hand and they were fleeing across the lawn to the house. Footsteps pounded behind them. Blanche did not dare to look over her shoulder. They reached the door and flung against it. Blanche grabbed blindly for the knob; then the door spilled them into the hall.

She looked back. Nerys was there, almost stumbling into her arms; behind Nerys, the knight and the sword, only yards away and closing in. “Quickly—the wardrobe,” Nerys said, slamming the door shut, and shooting the bolt.

At the foot of the stairs, in the middle of the house, stood a wardrobe which Blanche knew had nothing in it but coats and tennis-racquets, though it was always kept locked. Was it like Nerys’s wardrobe upstairs? Would it take them to safety? She darted down the hall and tugged the handle. Then a heavy blow struck the back-door and shook the whole house. There was such implacable malice in the shivering air that Blanche nearly screamed again. Nerys pushed her aside, fumbling at a chain around her neck.

Voices and running feet came up the passage from the kitchen. One of the housemaids looked into the hall just as another violent crash shook the house. The bolt on the door was not a heavy one. Already the bar was bending and the wood of the door was splintering. But Nerys, poised with a key in her hand, said calmly to the maid:

“Tell Keats we shall be a few minutes late for dinner, will you, Lucy?”

Whether it was Nerys’s cool manner, or some exertion of that veiled authority, Blanche never knew. The girl nodded and disappeared. Nerys fitted the key into the wardrobe lock and turned it. With a jerk, she pulled the door open a crack, and stood waiting.

“What are you doing?” Blanche gasped.

Nerys lifted a finger.

The next blow came accompanied by the sound of splitting wood. Then with one more crash the door burst off its hinges into the hall. Blanche drew a breath like a sob. The knight stepped over the threshold toward them, silhouetted against angry twilight. Nerys, pale and concentrated, whisked open the wardrobe door and swept Blanche inside.

B
LANCHE STUMBLED INTO IRON
-
GREY RAIN SLASHING
down from a clouded mid-afternoon sky. She stood in the stony courtyard of a castle, empty except for three posts standing erect by the wall and a man holding a sword. She blinked and gasped under the battering rain.