The deer leaned into Grace, so very, very slowly, and just as slowly Grace leaned towards it. The deer snuffled at Grace’s wrist, then ran its damp nose up her arm. Its tongue gently rasped against her skin. Grace gasped, and for a moment looked as if she was about to pull back.
“Be still, Grace,” said Malcolm. “He will not hurt you. He just wants to know you.”
“I am afraid…”
“I know, girlie.”
At the gentleness in Malcolm’s voice Grace looked at him. “I will destroy them.”
“You are talking of your hex? Afraid it will reach out to snatch them as well? Don’t fear. If that were so then my friends here would not come near you.”
The deer was now standing very close to Grace, close enough that it was leaning its body into the woman. The other two deer had also neared, and were sniffing curiously at Grace’s other wrist.
“Malcolm…Malcolm…who are you?”
“I was once a king, my dear, and these lovely creatures my warrior-priests.”
Jack was looking at Matilda. “Talk to me about Grace, Matilda. She is a puzzle to me.”
Matilda took her time in answering. “She’s lost, Jack. She was so loved and wanted by both her parents, but from babyhood she was lost to them, and perhaps even to herself. She has isolated herself within a ring of fire and of suffering, and can’t escape.”
Jack’s mouth gave a humourless twist. She is everyone’s “doom”, he thought.
“Grace has no friends,” Matilda continued. “She allows no one in, and besides…”
“Besides?”
“Jack, Grace has two extraordinary parents: one a goddess, a Darkwitch, and the most potent Mistress of the Labyrinth who has ever existed. The other is a creature so powerful and with such a dark, terrible past that he is, in his own way, as intimidating as Noah.”
“Intimidating?”
“Jack, Grace is intimidated by Noah, and by us, Eaving’s Sisters. We represent a past and a bond that she can’t share. You say that you are lost and dislocated, but so is Grace. Worst of all, Grace feels she disappoints Noah. Grace knows full well she can’t be the daughter Noah has always so desperately wanted.”
“Noah suffocates her.”
Matilda looked at him sharply. “Yes, she does, but can you blame her for it? If you had a child that suffered as Grace does—could you stand back and regard her with impartial coolness?” Then she looked down, and gasped. “Jack, look at that!”
Grace was laughing. Watching her, Malcolm had an enormous grin on his own face as he thought that it was possibly the first time Grace had laughed in scores, if not hundreds, of years.
The deer were crowding Grace, but she was not afraid. She patted and rubbed at them, and smiled and laughed, and seemed oblivious to Malcolm’s presence.
Suddenly Malcolm looked up, and saw Jack and Matilda watching from the heights of the hall.
She is accepted among the herd, he said in Jack’s mind.
So was Judas part of Christ’s herd, Jack replied, but there was no malignancy in his words, and they did not dampen Malcolm’s grin.
“You are welcomed within the glade, Grace,” he said, but he kept his eyes on Jack as he spoke.
The next moment Grace gave a cry, and twisted away from Malcolm and the deer.
THIRTEEN
Copt Hall
Thursday, 7th September 1939
NOAH SPEAKS
I was with Ecub and Erith, walking the gardens at the side of the house, when I felt Grace’s pain.
Catling!
As always, two emotions consumed me instantly: anger—fury—that Catling should so torment Grace, and a bleak impotence that was more devastating than the anger. What could I do? Nothing, really, for all I could do was fuss, and Grace so hated to be fussed over.
I knew from what I could feel that Grace was in the gardens at the back of Copt Hall, and I (as also Ecub and Erith) were with her within moments.
She was not alone. Jack’s valet, Malcolm, was standing by her side, and, as I ran towards Grace, Jack and Matilda materialised directly before my daughter.
I couldn’t look away from Grace. She was now half-crouched, bent over her wrists, and I could feel the suffering radiating out from her.
“Grace!” I cried, and ran the final few steps between us.
Before I could reach her, Jack stepped in front of me. “It’s all right, Noah,” he said. “Malcolm can take Grace into the kitchen where it is warm and quiet—”
Quiet? What was he trying to say?
“—until her pain has passed.”
With that he turned away from me, not even waiting for a response, and bent down and said something very quickly and quietly into Grace’s ear. She gave a tiny nod, then rose and, still half-crouched about herself, her wrists clutched to her chest, walked slowly towards the kitchen, Malcolm a half-step behind.
“Jack,” I began, irritated by the way he’d stepped in, but he motioned to me to wait.
“Malcolm can keep Grace company for the time being,” Jack said to me. “He can be quiet for her.”
I was grinding my teeth by this time, but I gave a jerk of my head.
“And while Grace endures,” Jack said, “you and I can talk.”
“Matilda and Erith and I,” said Ecub, “shall clear the tea things from the drawing room—no, do not worry, we shall not disturb Grace in the kitchen—and then wait in the car.” She looked at the other two women and winked. “I’m sure one of us has remembered to bring a flask of whisky with her, and we can spend the time quite pleasantly while waiting for Noah and Grace.”
Jack smiled his thanks, then took me by the elbow and guided me towards a stand of trees beyond the grass.
The trees hadn’t been there a few minutes previously.
Even this evidence of Jack’s power did nothing to quell my ill-temper.
“There was no need to step between us, Jack,” I said, none too gently pulling my elbow from his hand.
“She didn’t want you, Noah.”
That was too much. I stopped in my tracks and turned to him, my mouth opening to let him know what I thought…
“You said to me that she doesn’t like to be mothered,” he said. “Look, I know you want to help her, but…”
Oh, that “but”.
“Perhaps it is better to just let her be,” he finished. “Let her endure alone. She didn’t choose isolation by circumstance, Noah, but by choice.”
“It is easy to see that you are not a parent,” I said, and then wished I hadn’t. When he had been William, Jack had been an excellent parent to his and Matilda’s children, and he had been a loving father to our sons as well, even if he hadn’t been the best of husbands to me. And he’d been gone almost three hundred years since last I’d seen him—who knew what children he’d fathered in that time?
“Walk with me,” he said softly, and I briefly closed my eyes, and thought if he’d said that to me when he’d been Brutus, and I Cornelia, with that same measure of warmth and sweetness, then all of our troubles would never have had the chance to start.
So we walked. Twilight was thick about us now, and a heavy mist clung to our clothes and hair. I was glad for the coat I had put on earlier to walk in the garden, and slid my hands deep into its pockets. Above us the trees twisted, their branches mostly denuded of leaves, the earth to each side of our path humped into eerie misshapen swellings with the pressure of the roots below. Our feet crunched on dead leaves and forest litter, and as we walked deeper into the forest, and as the night settled about us, so all of the tension of the past minutes dissipated.
“It feels good,” I said eventually, “to be walking thus with you.”
From the corner of my eye I saw him smile slightly. “Aye, it does.”
I stopped, turning to look at him, thinking how handsome he was. I wish…oh, I could wish for so many things, and it couldn’t make the world any better a place, would it?
“We should have walked thus a long time ago,” I said.
The amusement dropped from his face, and he regarded me with an intensity that made my stomach twist with emotion.
“What we should have done a long time ago has been a hard and long lesson to learn,” he said.
We fell silent, neither of us able to look away from the other.
“I—” I began.
“We should—” he said at the same time, and we both laughed self-consciously.
Then he leaned forward, and kissed me.
Oh, my. This wasn’t that hard angry kiss he’d given me when I’d met him the night he’d arrived at Copt Hall. This was something altogether different, and far more unnerving.