Triskellion (10 page)

After a lunch that was little more than some sardines from a tin, a few slices of bread and the almost tasteless, lemony drink that Granny Root diluted from a bottle, Rachel sat down to read a book. It was an old, dog-eared paperback she had found on the shelf in the sitting room. Her eye had been caught by the title:
Chalk Circles of Great Britain
. She found it hard to concentrate on the old-fashioned prose as Adam laboured and sighed over his letter, and Granny Root settled in the big chair for her afternoon nap and began to snore quietly.

The atmosphere in the room was stuffy and oppressive, but the sun was too hot for comfort outside. Rachel read the
first line of the chapter again, then looked up as Adam mouthed the words to her, “I’m starving.”

Rachel nodded her agreement, then attempted to read the first line for the tenth time.

A
“tink”
on the windowpane broke her concentration yet again. Then another as a pebble struck the glass. And another, the stone thrown so hard that Rachel was afraid it would crack the pane. Adam looked round, and he and Rachel jumped up to see where the stones were coming from.

Rachel adjusted her eyes to the bright sunlight outside and saw Gabriel, standing, framed by the archway of roses that led to the bottom of the garden. He was eating from a party-sized bag of crisps, and, seeing Rachel at the window, he waved and gestured for her to join him. Rachel looked at her grandmother sleeping, nodded to Adam to follow, and went outside.

Gabriel was now sitting on the grass, stuffing large handfuls of crisps into his mouth.

“Wow, chips,” Adam said longingly, sitting on the grass. “We’re starving. We had, like, baby fish in a can of oil for lunch.”

Rachel scrunched her nose in agreement with Adam’s description, and when Gabriel proffered the bag of crisps, they both accepted it greedily.

“I want to go up to the circle,” Gabriel said. He had talked to them about it on the way back from the station two days
before. He had said he knew things about it. “If you want to get a proper understanding of it, you need to come up there with me.”

Rachel and Adam were keen. They liked the air of mystery Gabriel projected. He was … cool. They had asked him where he lived and he had told them that his parents were kind of travellers, who went off on long trips, leaving him free to do his own thing. Adam thought this was even cooler.

“That sounds fantastic,” he had said.

Rachel had agreed; had said how lucky Gabriel was. But she had also thought how lucky he was to have parents who were still together.

Then Gabriel had told them about the circle…

“Sure, we’ll come,” Rachel said.

“Let’s go,” Adam said, rising to his feet.

Gabriel held up his hand. “Wait, I have a few things to do first. Errands and stuff, you know. Why don’t you come on your bikes? I’ll meet you there in an hour.”

Rachel looked at her watch. Three o’clock now. “OK. See you there at four?”

“It’s a date,” Gabriel said. He spoke without emphasis, but Rachel felt herself redden all the same. Gabriel rose to his feet and tossed the bag of crisps to Adam, walking slowly away down the length of the garden and out through a gap in the hedge.

Adam turned to his sister, his look telling her that
he
thought that
she
quite liked Gabriel. “Wooooo,” he said,
making kissy noises with his lips.

Rachel laughed bashfully, then jumped on her brother, punching his upper arm with what he discovered, somewhat painfully, was considerable strength for a girl.

The twins couldn’t settle, so, half an hour later, having told a dozing Granny Root that they were off on a bike ride, they set out on the lane.

They decided to take the long way round: down the lane, up past the edge of the woods and then out along the narrow road that ran through the middle of the moor towards the chalk circle. They could have walked it cross-country in ten minutes from Root Cottage, but the afternoon was beginning to cool, and the breeze as they freewheeled down the lane was welcome. They sped down past the pub then round the bend, stopping at a red postbox where Adam deposited his letter home. Then on, alongside the red-brick wall that marked the outer boundary of the Waverley Hall estate.

As the ordered limits of the wall gave way to the narrower lane, Rachel felt suddenly nauseous. Sick, and scared in the same terrible second, as though she were passing through something rank, and dangerous. As though it were passing through her.

Even as she registered it, she heard the nearby grumble of a diesel engine grow swiftly into a roar, and a mud-spattered Land Rover careered into their path round a blind bend in the lane.

“Adam!” Rachel screeched to her brother, two bike lengths in front of her. Adam swerved to the right, but not quickly enough for the truck to avoid clipping his back wheel, sending Adam and his bike skidding across the gravel. In turning to avoid Adam, the Land Rover was now headed directly at Rachel, who threw herself from her bicycle and into the scrub at the side of the lane.

In that split second, screaming and rolling, tumbling headlong away from the impact, she could have sworn that the Land Rover was being driven by a huge, grey dog.

The next few moments unravelled in slow motion. Rachel picked herself out of the bushes, thorns scraping her legs and catching at her clothes, until she sat, dazed, by the side of the road.

She looked over to where Adam was picking himself up at the roadside. He was brushing himself down, a hole scraped through the knee of his jeans by the rough surface of the road. Rachel felt instant relief; her brother was alive, and she had no more than surface cuts and bruises. She was shocked out of her relief by the angry, booming voice of the man getting out of the Land Rover.

“What the bloody…?”

Rachel looked up to see the imposing figure of Commodore Wing climbing stiffly down from the driver’s seat and limping fast towards her, the huge figure of a grey Irish wolfhound loping along behind him.

“Oh, it’s you.” The commodore’s temper instantly subsided. He smiled grimly, holding out a large, dry hand and helping Rachel to her feet. The giant dog sniffed Rachel, then licked her scratched arm.

“Sorry,” the commodore said. “Bit of a shock. I’m not used to meeting anyone on this road. Couldn’t see very well. Sunlight through the trees. Almost blinded me.” He held his other hand out to Adam. “Nothing broken? Hope not. I really am most awfully sorry. My fault entirely.”

Rachel found it hard to say anything. The man’s sudden charm was every bit as alarming as his anger had been just a moment or two before. Adam looked pained, dabbing the blood from his knee with a tissue, but still managing a croaky, “No problem.”

“Good,” barked Commodore Wing. “The cycles have taken a bit of a prang, I’m afraid. Chuck ‘em on the Land Rover and we’ll get them fixed up.”

Adam helped the commodore wrestle the bikes on to the back of the Land Rover while the dog, who the commodore called Merlin, continued to sniff somewhat suspiciously at Rachel. The bikes loaded, Rachel was about to turn and walk back down the lane, but the commodore stopped her in her tracks.

“Where are you off to, young lady? You’re not walking anywhere after a close shave like that. Hop aboard, I’ll take you and your brother up to the hall.”

“What?”

“Get the quack to give you the once over. Least I can do.”

Rachel and Adam both looked dumbfounded and the commodore registered their blank stares. “Sorry, the doctor. Get the doctor to check you. Shock and so on. In you get.”

Rachel and Adam felt reluctant to go, but the man was so commanding, so clearly used to having people do as he said, that they fell in with his orders and climbed into the back seat of the Land Rover without a word. Merlin jumped into the front, followed by Commodore Wing, who slammed the door and fired the diesel engine back into life. Gears crunched and they roared off down the lane as if nothing had happened.

Rachel looked at her watch, then back over her shoulder towards the moor and the chalk circle. Five to four. They’d miss Gabriel.

She’d miss Gabriel.

As the dust churned up by the Land Rover’s knobbly tyres began to settle on the road, Gabriel stepped out from his hiding place behind the wall. He smiled, delighted that things were falling into place so nicely.

He watched and waited for the vehicle to turn the bend at the bottom of the hill, then began to walk down the lane after it.

T
he Land Rover crunched up the long gravel drive towards the biggest house Rachel and Adam had ever seen. Sheep grazed on the grounds at either side of the road and Waverley Hall loomed impressively beyond. Adam would have called it a castle, but it didn’t have battlements as such, just columns and balustrades and carved animals over the main entrance, all made from a yellowish stone. Drawing closer, Rachel could see the big, wine-coloured vintage car they had seen in the village, parked outside the front of the house. As the statues over the door became clearer, she could see a winged unicorn and a dragon. They glowered down from either side of a carved tree, its twisted roots and branches entwining themselves around the mythical beasts. On the trunk of the tree was a large shield engraved with the symbol of the Triskellion.

Despite the change from rage to effortless charm, the commodore’s warmth had quickly dissolved. What little conversation there was in the Land Rover had been strained to
say the least. Rachel had attempted a few polite questions, which had been answered with coughs, snorts and one or two clipped words.

“Have you lived here long?” Rachel had asked.

“Family’s been here eight hundred years or so.”

“Since Sir Richard de Waverley?” Rachel had said, keen to show off her recently acquired local knowledge.

“Who?” Commodore Wing had snapped back.

“Sir Richard de Waverley. The crusader. In the church?”

“Oh yes … of course,” the commodore had said.

The rest of the journey had continued in silence.

As they climbed down from the Land Rover, a small man with very brown, hairy forearms and wearing a cap scuttled over to the car and opened the door. He was a little too slow for the commodore, who was already halfway out.

“Take those bicycles round to the stables and fix ‘em up, will you, Fred?” The small man stared at the children. “Good man,” the commodore said, before limping off up the steps to the house with the dog following closely behind. The small man nodded vigorously and scurried round to lift the bikes off the back of the vehicle. He grunted with the effort and pulled faces at Rachel and Adam, who watched him with some amusement.

“Are you coming in?” the commodore shouted from the front door. Once again powerless to resist, the twins followed him up the steps.

The cavernous hall inside the main entrance smelled of
wax polish, wood smoke and something else which neither Rachel nor Adam could quite place.

Maybe it was just age.

Two wide, wooden staircases flanked the hall at either side and in the middle sat a huge, stone fireplace where a few logs still smouldered from the night before. Above the fireplace hung a portrait of a man Rachel guessed must have been an ancient Wing. He was wearing a wig and a tricorn hat. Waverley Hall stood in the background while in the far distance, the carved chalk circle of the Triskellion was painted on the dark surface of the moor.

On the surrounding walls hung shields, broadswords, helmets, spears and the assorted horns and antlers of long dead animals. The commodore clumped across the stone floor and through a doorway by the side of the fireplace. Rachel and Adam followed him along a panelled corridor and into a sunlit room with French windows that looked out over a well tended lawn, then beyond across acres of parkland and down to a lake.

“Sit down,” the commodore said. His tone was kindly, and he gestured at an assortment of armchairs and sofas that, to Rachel’s eyes, looked frayed and beaten up. Rachel sat down in a cracked leathery chair that smelled strongly of dog, whereupon Merlin loped in from another room and, at her eye level, sniffed Rachel’s face before laying its vast, bristly head in her lap.

Straining her head back to avoid the wet nose and massive
tongue of the wolfhound, Rachel noticed that there were large bits missing from the ornate ceiling. As her eyes darted around, she could see that the rest of the room, though comfortable for such a large space, was in similar condition. At her feet was a pinkish, threadbare carpet that must have once been woven with a floral pattern and the yellow striped paper on the walls was peeling at the corners.

The commodore had crossed to the phone, telling Rachel and Adam that he would ring for a doctor, but he seemed to be having no luck. “Damn thing’s still on the blink,” he said throwing down the receiver. “You seem OK though.”

“We’re fine,” Rachel said.

He peered at them and looked as though he’d suddenly had a good idea. “Drink?” he said. He took a stopper from a cutglass bottle on a dusty tray in the corner and quickly poured three measures of golden liquid into glasses. Adam would have killed for a Coke, but resisted the urge to ask for one. The commodore pressed another bottle with a lever, and frothy water shot into the glasses, diluting the amber liquid. He passed a glass each to Rachel and Adam.