The Dragon Charmer (39 page)

“That hand of yours is pretty bad,” Robin said awkwardly. “I know it doesn’t seem to hurt right now, but—well, they say you may need a skin graft.”

“I can be an outpatient at a burns unit,” Fern said. “Anyway, it’s my left, and I’m right-handed. I can manage with one. It’s doing me no good, lying here.” In fact, she was still sitting, but Robin did not quibble. “I just want to get up, get dressed, feel like myself again… If I find I’m not up to it, I’ll stay a bit longer.”

Liar, thought Ragginbone.

Eventually Robin gave in, preparing to depart with a list of her requirements. “Don’t know what Abby’ll say,” he mumbled. “Maybe Marcus can make you change your mind …” The prospect did not appear to fill him with enthusiasm.

As soon as he had gone Fern began to tug at the bandage.

“I don’t think you should do that,” said Ragginbone.

“I want to
see”
she persisted. “Everyone says I have these awful burns, but my hand feels fine except that I can’t move it properly because the bandage is too tight. Have you any scissors?”

Their eyes met in something that was part mutual comprehension, part conflict of will. He thought that hers were deeper and brighter than before, their veining of color more pronounced, green within the gray: they shone with a steady brilliance against the anemic pallor of her face. “I have a knife,” he said at last. Not defeat, concession. He produced a penknife from an inner pocket and undipped a narrow blade. Carefully he slit the bandage up the back of her hand.
Fern tugged it off, pulling with her teeth at the bindings on her fingers.

“I feel like a mummy,” she complained.

She extended her palm. It was smooth and unmarked, the palm of a career woman who never does housework, crisscrossed only lightly with the lines of her destiny A gypsy would have found little there to read. Her fingertips had a bluish tinge; perhaps the bandaging had restricted her blood supply. When Ragginbone touched them, they felt very cold. “Last night,” he said evenly, “your skin was burnt off, your tendons so badly damaged that the doctor said you might never recover the use of the hand. Your Gift would not mend that. Only the ancient druids had such power, at least according to legend.”

“Last night …” Fern’s brow contracted. “Yes, I suppose so. Time must move differently when you’re outside it. A week might feel like a year, a night… only a few moments.”

She looked up as the doctor returned, with the ward nurse in his train pushing a hostess trolley of sterilized dishes. “Out of the way,” she told Ragginbone briskly. She still suspected him of Munchausen, and had an unacknowledged yearning to be the one responsible for its diagnosis. Ragginbone, with a slight, ironic bow, moved aside. “Miss Capel!
What
have you done with your bandage?”

Wordlessly Fern proffered her hand. The nurse turned red, the doctor pale. “This is impossible!” he said after a lengthy pause. “I examined the injuries myself; there can be no question of a mistake.” He fixed Fern with a rather wild stare. “You have some explanation?”

“Me?”
Fern responded with just the right degree of emphasis.

The doctor, aware he had sounded accusatory, floundered into apology.

“All this has caused my family considerable distress,” Fern said blandly, seizing her chance. “Of course, this is clearly a very exclusive clinic, and I would not wish to impugn your reputation…”

The doctor took a grip on himself and retired to consider his position. He was among those who had classified Fern as
an “interesting case”—at least until she woke up. He might have reflected, had he been given to reflection, that one of the many advantages of treating coma patients is that they cannot make themselves awkward. Ragginbone, watching Fern’s performance with deep appreciation, estimated that by the time Robin returned the medical staff would probably be only too happy to permit her departure. Her voice had strengthened dramatically since she first awoke, and the physical debility that would normally succeed a prolonged period in bed seemed to have dissipated with unnatural speed. He guessed she was using her Gift to accelerate her recovery, transforming power into raw energy, pumping blood into muscle with the force of her will; but whether she realized what she was doing or was acting solely on instinct he did not know. He thought: She’s having to expend too much power just to keep going. If a crisis occurs, she’ll have very little left.

The ward nurse was still hovering, covertly watching Ragginbone. Miracle cures were out of place in a modern hospital, and intuition told her this was all an elaborate confidence trick, with him as the undoubted mastermind. She busied herself with the flowers overloading Fern’s bedside cabinet, remarking as she did so: “You really have too many bouquets here, Miss Capel. They get in everyone’s way. It would have been nice if you had suggested giving some of them to other, less fortunate, patients.”

“No doubt I would have done,” said Fern, with an air of faint hauteur, “if I talked in my sleep.”

“You shouldn’t have taken that bandage off,” the nurse pursued, ignoring the implied rebuke. “You could have done yourself a great deal of harm. Burns have to be treated very carefully.” The inference was that if the bandage had remained in its place, so would the injury.

“I knew there was nothing wrong with my hand,” said Fern. “I could feel it.”

“Doctors don’t make mistakes.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” her patient retorted unanswerably.

Balked, the nurse moved toward the door. It was then that her glance fell on the patchwork bag shoved behind the cabinet away from the general view. “What is this?” she said.

“I suppose
you
brought it—” to Ragginbone. “It looks extremely dirty. We do like to maintain standards of basic hygiene here.” She bent over it and, being the sort of person who believed she had the right to pry into anything that impinged on her territory, she lifted the flap and peered at the contents.

The angry red that was still in her face drained away, leaving her cheeks sallow pale, brackish with the frayed ends of blood vessels. Her mouth dropped open, but only a sort of gasp emerged, like a soundless scream. Then gradually, as if in slow motion, she buckled, crumpled, and subsided into a heap on the floor. Fern, unable to see what it was she had been looking at, craned over the edge of the bed—and shot backward, round-eyed with horror.

“I don’t know what it is you’ve got in there,” Ragginbone said, his tone perilously close to a drawl, “but I think it might be a good idea if you made it resemble something different… before anybody else takes a look.”

“Something—different?” Fern repeated stupidly.

“Similar in shape and size, perhaps. Something … likely. Not a bunch of grapes, but along those lines. If you have the power left—?”

But Fern, hands pressed against her forehead, was already muttering in Atlantean. Satisfied, Ragginbone picked his way around the unconscious ward nurse in a leisurely manner and leaned into the corridor to summon assistance.

Eventually a pair of muscular porters removed the body for revival elsewhere, and in due course the doctor returned. He appeared harassed and increasingly ill at ease. The recollection of the ward nurse’s stone-faced assertions, when she recovered from her faint, had shaken his remaining confidence. She had always been so practical, so down-to-earth, so reliably unimaginative … “I looked in the bag,” she had said, “and there was a head. A severed head. It was alive. Its eyes rolled. It
smiled
at me.” She was currently being dosed with tranquilizers while the doctor, feeling foolish, found himself asking Fern what was in the patchwork bag.

“Someone brought me a watermelon,” said Fern. “I’m very fond of them. I can’t think why it should have upset her so much. Unless she has a phobia of watermelons?”

The bag did look as if it contained a severed head, the
doctor thought, but when he opened it, in a would-be careless manner, all it contained was watermelon. Only watermelon. He apologized yet again, and retreated to suspend the ward nurse from duty and recommend her for an intensive course of psychoanalysis. Ragginbone, who had found the accusation of Munchausen both stupid and distasteful, tried not to feel avenged. It was only several days later, describing the incident to a friend over a game of golf, that it occurred to the doctor to wonder, with a twinge of sudden doubt, why anyone should bring fruit for a patient in deep coma.

   Marcus Greig arrived around lunchtime to find Fern fully dressed, sitting on the edge of the bed. She was barefoot, since she had forgotten, in the aftermath of her awakening, to request any shoes, and neither Robin nor Abby had thought to repair the omission. She had already tried standing up, fighting the onset of giddiness and the weakness of her legs, forcing her head to clear and her limbs to support her. She knew she was drawing too heavily on her resources, leaving herself almost empty of power, but a sense of urgency gripped her, left over from her escape through the Underworld, and she longed above all to get home. Her surroundings in the clinic felt less a trap than a hindrance; at Dale House she would be free to think, to talk to Ragginbone, to plan. She had had time to coax from the Watcher a brief account of Will and Gaynor’s disappearance, two days earlier, but she wanted more details. She had a feeling of imminent danger, of the need for desperate action. Weakness, weariness, hospital confinement all got in the way. When Marcus walked in, primed by one of the staff and aglow with appropriate happiness, she felt only guilt and a shameful pang of irritation, because here was yet another delay. The pleasure she must once have felt on seeing him seemed an emotion as unreal as a daydream. She struggled to thrust urgency aside, to respond suitably to his warmth. Then she asked her family—and Ragginbone—to wait outside.

She knew of no way to mitigate the blow—if it was a blow. She half thought he might be secretly relieved. Desirable brides do not lapse into unexplained comas on the eve of the
wedding. “I can’t marry you,” she said bluntly, and then cursed herself for sounding ridiculously melodramatic.

“We can discuss it when you’re feeling better,” Marcus said, remarkably unperturbed. “The doctors said your condition might be psychosomatic”

“I
am
feeling better.”

“—a childhood trauma resulting in a secret horror of commitment, some connection with your mother’s death maybe. Alternatively, you could have an abnormal reaction to certain forms of alcohol. Gaynor told me you’d had several brandies that night. You don’t usually drink much, and I’ve never seen you touch brandy. If a postprandial cognac is always going to have this effect, we ought to be forewarned. These days, you hear of people
dying
of peanut allergy, and someone I know had to have his stomach pumped after a bad reaction to a couple of aspirin. Anyway, we don’t have to rush into marriage. We’ll talk about it when you’re ready.”

“I’m ready now,” sighed Fern. “You don’t understand. I’m not—I’m not in love with you. I never was. I’m so sorry, Marcus. I’ve behaved very badly. I
wanted
to be in love with you: you have all the qualities which … The problem is, I’m not sure I could ever really love anyone. Perhaps I’m just too cold…”

“Nonsense,” said Marcus with uncomfortable enthusiasm. “I
know
that’s not true.”

“Well… maybe the trouble is that I’ve always been in love with—someone imaginary. An unattainable ideal…”

“We all do that,” Marcus responded to Fern’s surprise. “I remember there was a painting I saw once in an exhibition, when I was in my teens: it haunted me for years. I bought a postcard of it and pinned it up in my room. I might still have it somewhere. It was by one of the lesser Pre-Raphaelites, nobody distinguished, I can’t even recall his name. It wasn’t really all that good. Just a picture of a woman—well, a girl—Circe, or Morgan Le Fay, someone like that. She had that crinkly hair that all the Pre-Raphaelites went in for, done up in a sort of Bacchanalian disorder, all loops and tendrils and bits of ivy leaf, but it was her face that got to me. One of those wistful, Burne-Jones faces with a drooping mouth, but the eyes the eyes were different. Slanting and sly and wild. An
improbable shade of green. I used to fantasize that one day I would meet a woman with eyes like that, a witch woman with an untamed soul looking out from behind a sweet, solemn façade.” He smiled at her with a tenderness that she had forgotten. “I settled for sweet and solemn. When you’re a teenager you read Yeets and Keats—” he mispronounced deliberately “—you dream of a Belle Dame Sans Merci, of Bridget with her long, dim hair. It’s a phase. A germ of it stays with you and recurs from time to time. First dreams are like first love: best in souvenir. That sort of thing isn’t real.”

“I never knew,” she whispered, confused and distracted by the strangeness of it, by a kind of bittersweet irony, an insight that was both pointless and too late. “I never knew you wanted—
magic
”

He did not notice the special emphasis she gave the word. “It passes,” he said. “Romance—dreams—they don’t matter. What matters is liking, companionship, affection, respect. Even sex. That’s the sort of love that works.”

“Not for me,” she said, horrified to find herself on the verge of tears. “Maybe I’m too young for you. Or you’re too old for me. Too wise, too worldly, too—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, that sounds cruel. I didn’t mean it so. I think something got lost, in the eighteen years between us. There was a level where we might have met, a different plane which… But it’s gone, it’s gone for good, we won’t find it now. I’m so
sorry
, Marcus…”

“Leave it,” he insisted. “You’re not in a state to make decisions. We’ll talk again in a week or so.”

“I need to be on my own…”

He grimaced. “I’ve just driven up. I was planning to stay over—leave around six in the morning. I’ve got a lecture tomorrow. No, don’t worry. It’s probably easiest if I head back now. I’ll call you.”

“All right,” Fern said, seizing control of herself. He would accept it, she thought, given time. Liking, affection, respect—he could find those with someone else. With any number of someone elses.