Spring (9 page)

She looked back at the boy and studied him more carefully. She had already noted a certain wariness of the world about him, but there was also a strength of character that bordered on defiance. From her own experience in voluntary work, she had seen that combination before in children like this, who had been let down so many times by the system that they found it hard to trust anyone or any circumstance. But there was something more about him, something quite arresting. She smiled at him and he gave a shy smile in return.

By the time Richard finally emerged from his clinic, Clare had made up her mind what she wanted to do. She suggested that they should take the boy south themselves.

‘I’m not the practice manager,’ he replied reasonably. ‘This is for her to work out.’

Clare explained what had happened so far.

Richard discreetly studied the boy, and soon came to the same conclusion about him as Clare had – that what he didn’t need now was yet another let-down by the system, but people who cared. Richard needed no further persuading. If the person coming to pick him up was showing no sign of arriving, he couldn’t just leave the child sitting here all day with no alternative plan.

‘Okay, let’s see what we can do, but it’s going to delay us a bit. Do we even know his name?’

‘Jack,’ said the same receptionist, who had been listening to this exchange.

‘Come on,’ said Clare to Katherine. ‘Let’s try and make friends with him while Daddy sorts something out.’

Richard Shore started making phone-calls, first inside the building and then outside it, having been given a number written on the card that the woman who had originally dropped the boy off had left at reception. He didn’t manage to reach her in person, but instead got Roger Lynas of the North Yorkshire child-welfare agency. Yes, he knew of the case. No, he was unable to pass on the details. Yes, severe weather was causing chaos everywhere, so that the case worker coming from London to pick him up had finally been obliged to abandon her journey; and yes, it might well be very convenient if the boy could travel with them, so long as they would deliver him to where he was going in West London.

But, no, not until someone more senior had confirmed this new arrangement.

‘Strange,’ Richard told Clare. ‘We shouldn’t have to pick up someone else’s mess and take on the troubles of the world, but—’

‘But we can’t just leave him sitting here, can we?’

‘Well, we could, as a matter of fact,’ said Richard, still hesitating.

They moved away a little, so they could talk further without being overheard. The boy stayed right where he was, his eyes occasionally flicking back to Katherine. They had exchanged a couple of words, and several more glances, but now she had begun playing separately. She got up and wandered over to the pile of toys, which another child was sifting through. There was something she wanted and she knew the score: you gave one or you took one, it didn’t matter which. But being the daughter of one of the partners in the practice, Katherine had always given rather than taken.

It was the white horse which had attracted her. It looked as if it was galloping proudly across all the other toys, as if they formed the world below and it was now heading for the stars.

‘I want this one,’ she said to herself, a shade timid now. Not touching it yet and wondering if anyone was watching.

The boy was.

So were Clare and Richard.

The boy got up off his chair, went to the pile of toys, picked up the horse and offered it to Katherine.

‘You can have it,’ he said, and returned to his seat.

Katherine took it and then held it up for her mother to see. Clare smiled and nodded.

‘It’s a white horse,’ the girl said, clasping it to her face despite its raggedy age and grinning.

Richard smiled, looking resigned as, for some reason, he let this simple statement clinch things in his mind.

‘Decision made,’ he said.

When Clare broke the news to Jack that he was to go with them, he gave a brief smile of relief, but there was still a wariness about him.

Natural enough in the circumstances
thought Clare, adding aloud, and she hoped reassuringly, ‘You can sit in the back with . . . well, this is Katherine.’

The boy looked serious again. ‘I’m Jack,’ he said, finally breaking the ice.

‘Hello, Jack,’ said Katherine with an easy smile.

That’s a first
, Clare told herself. ‘This is my husband Richard, who’s a doctor here,’ she explained. ‘He’ll be driving us.’

Richard squatted down and reached out a hand to touch Jack’s shoulder. ‘Okay with you?’

Jack nodded.

‘Shall I take your bag?’

Jack shook his head firmly. He leant down off the chair and picked it up.

‘
I
will,’ he said, holding it close, as if it was all he had in the world – which maybe it was. That was when Clare saw that it wasn’t the usual cheap nylon style branded with sports logos.

It was dark leather, beautifully stitched, like an Edwardian valise, except it was so worn and shiny with use that it looked infinitely older than that.

Clare noticed something else. Jack’s accent was rich, warm, rolling. She couldn’t place it exactly but he sounded like a country boy.

‘Come on, everybody,’ urged Richard.

They rushed out through the rain, the two children laughing as they got wet. Richard slipped behind the wheel, Clare into the passenger seat beside him, Katherine sitting behind her in the back, Jack behind Richard.

They turned out of the Health Centre car park into heavy Friday traffic, any advantage of an early start now completely lost.

‘This rain’s forecast to get even worse,’ said Richard. ‘I think I’ll get on the motorway by the longer, country route, which might avoid the worst of the home-bound traffic.’

Their long journey began.

T
en minutes later the Shore family and Jack had left the last of Thirsk’s street lights behind and were driving on a country road. The sky was now a lurid grey, but occasionally filled with sheet lightning.

‘Don’t be frightened!’ Richard called out to his passengers.

Clare turned to look behind her. ‘They’re not frightened, they’re fascinated,’ she told him in a low voice, turning forward again.

A short while later there was a bright flash and a crackling roll of thunder so loud that it shook the car.

Katherine stared open-mouthed, Jack wide-eyed.

A few minutes later they ran straight into a hailstorm. It sounded as if a truckload of pebbles was suddenly being poured on to the roof of the car. Richard just had time to pull over into a lay-by before the wipers failed, seizing up under the onslaught of the golfball-sized hailstones.

They were coming down so hard the noise was deafening, and Clare was worried whether the windscreen would come out the other side of the storm in one piece. Already nuggets of grey-white frozen water were piled on top of each other, obscuring the lower half of the screen. The tops of the posts of the wooden fence alongside which they had stopped were piled with hail.

For a few moments they felt transported to another world, one hemmed in by ice. Then a light slanted across the windscreen, signalling the approach of another car, and lit up the posts as well.

Richard turned on the wipers again and, as the windscreen cleared, began to pull out into the road. He braked too hard, the approaching car being on the wrong side of the road, and they all crashed forward into their seat belts. The headlights of the other vehicle came straight at them through the rain. The car missed them by inches before disappearing into the night.

‘That was close,’ murmured Richard uneasily.

‘Go carefully,’ said Clare, who was not normally a back-seat driver but was now feeling apprehensive – just as Jack had been. ‘
Please.
’

As Richard eased the car slowly back on to the road, they snatched a final glance at the fence posts where the hail had collected. All that was left now was dripping water which, catching the tail-lights of the receding car, turned the colour of blood.

‘Weird,’ said Richard as they finally continued their journey.

M
aster Brief, Imbolc and the others had all moved to the top of the bridge, on Stort’s warning. He felt nervous staying under it, even if standing on top meant getting very wet.

‘Why stay at all?’ muttered one of the stavermen. ‘Nothing’s happening here.’

‘Because Master Stort wishes it,’ said Pike who, alone of them, was not hunkering down against the rain. Ever alert and restless, he was watchful of everything in the dark. He sensed a general danger and a specific threat, and he remained standing up so he could look one way more easily, then another, and then a third.

His fear?

That they had been seen and followed by a patrol of Fyrd and even now were being watched, though even the Fyrd might remain under shelter in weather like this.

Englalond had long since suffered under the rule of this army of occupation sent to run the country by the Sinistral, ruling dynasty of the Hyddenworld, whose headquarters were across the Channel in the Rhineland.

Fyrd!
Many were the hydden’s dark songs that rhymed Fyrd with wyrd, all of them bad; and, as the songsters put it, many were the good and decent folk the Fyrd had cast into grave-grip.

Pike knew very well that an expedition such as their present one was, strictly speaking, illegal. They had crept out of Brum under cover of night, so that the hydden city’s guardians, as, ironically, they called themselves, would not notice them leave. No easy feat for a hydden of Brief’s importance, and he must already have been missed.

So Pike stood guard in the rain, alert and menacing.

He glanced over at Bedwyn Stort, back now in his bin-bag, then at the other stavermen, dripping with rain; at Brief, who also stood as solid as a rock against the storm; and finally ‘the pedlar’ who he had long since guessed was a lot more than she seemed to be.

He leant on the parapet of the bridge, eyes screwed up against wind and rain, his face shiny wet when caught by lightning.

Finally he looked down along the nearly invisible road below.

Something wasn’t right.

He went coolly to the other stavermen and spoke to them quietly. ‘There’s a something in the air, a Fyrd kind of something. So you all keep alert, every one of you. You keep your stave to hand and your knives ready on your belts, understood?’

They nodded grimly. Pike had a nose for danger and they knew it.

‘Whatever it is, what it’s going to be, I don’t know. But it’s not good, not good at all. Most of all I want no harm falling on Master Stort.’

They nodded again.

Pike knew that Master Brief could look after himself, and anyway no Fyrd would dare harm him, for things hadn’t got that bad in Englalond yet and his official position should be enough to deter them. As for the pedlar, she looked like she would know how to keep herself safe. He returned to where he had been standing before, and peered again into the darkness below.

For a human standing at the edge, the brick-built parapet on the bridge would have been much too low to conceal him. But for a hydden wishing to remain more or less unobserved, at two and a half feet it was just right.

Pike was the only one among the stavermen feeling absolute confidence that young Stort was not leading them on a wild-goose chase. He didn’t know why he felt like that or why, from the first moment he met the youngster nearly three years before, he had felt so strongly that his destiny had changed direction.

As he now leaned on the parapet, alert, uneasy, the rain seemed to trickle down inside his cloak as well as through it – cold and hungry again, but not wishing to be anywhere else.

For he sensed . . . something. It was Fyrd certainly . . . but something more.

Pike eyed the now nearly impenetrable darkness, his stubbly chin hard and purposeful. He was just able to make out a sharp bend turning off to the left further along when lightning glimmered in the sky and then again, striking closer to hand. The bend up ahead then became a brief crescent of streaming light.

‘Master Stort . . .’

He never called the youngster by his first name. He liked such formality of address and the fact that Stort called him Mister Pike in return.

The bag moved.

Water, which had collected over those parts of it where Stort’s hands and arms stuck out a bit, now spilled to the ground. His nose retreated and, unfolding himself vertically, he stood up, almost as tall as Pike himself, then removed his bag and came closer.

‘Mister Pike?’

‘I don’t like the feel of things,’ said Pike. ‘I swear, by the Mirror itself, there’s Fyrd about down there in the dark, but there’s something more than that.’