He stared at me. “And will I be able to walk away from that, Grace?”
Oh, damn him. “Yes. I promise she won’t touch you. Now, help me, curse it!”
He did. He transferred both of us into the crypt of St Paul’s, cloaking us in a glamour of invisibility.
Catling was waiting for us.
She didn’t say anything, merely watched with narrowed eyes as the Lord of the Faerie and I walked (well, the Faerie Lord walked; I hobbled, leaning heavily on his arm) over to her.
I wasn’t in the mood for long conversational niceties. “Don’t,” I said.
Catling raised an eyebrow.
“I have heard,” I said, very quietly, “that you have threatened to destroy the creatures of the Faerie, one by one. Do you not recall what happened when you thought to murder the Sidlesaghes?” At that I saw the Faerie Lord look sharply at me, but I couldn’t pause now for explanations.
“If you do that, Catling,” I said, “then I will be the stronger for every Faerie death you cause. Do you understand?”
She paled (if that is possible for someone who affected so white a face under normal circumstances). “Are you threatening me?” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“If I die,” Catling hissed, “so do you!”
“I know that.”
We fell into silence, staring unblinkingly at each other.
Then I turned my face slightly to the Lord of the Faerie. “I am tired,” I said. “Take me home, please.”
“If I die, so do you!” Catling seethed at me as the Lord of the Faerie removed us both back to the roadside at Leytonstone.
“What did you mean,” he said, “by saying that you would be the stronger if she destroyed any of the creatures of the Faerie?”
We were standing by his car. It was cold, fully light, and I was so drained I felt nauseated.
“Can I sit in the car, please?” I said.
“Grace?”
“May I call you Coel?”
He nodded.
“Coel, I want more than anything, need more than anything, to get some rest. Then I need to talk to Jack. Then we will talk to you. I promise.”
He looked at me for a long moment, his face unreadable. “Is there any hope, Grace?”
I smiled. “Yes, but it is a strange one, and thus my need to talk to Jack.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Where do you want to go?”
“Copt Hall.”
I stood on the porch of Copt Hall and knocked at the door. I’d drifted into the unreality of Jack’s Copt Hall and, while I was aware of the gardeners and caretakers who still lived and worked about the hall, there was no one and no reality for me save Malcolm’s unsurprised face as he opened the door.
“I knew you’d come here,” he said. Then, without asking, he stepped forward, picked me up in his arms, and carried me inside.
“I would really, really like a bath,” I said.
“I have one steaming,” he replied, and I was not surprised at all that he should be so considerate.
I sat in the bath and soaked, blissfully happy. For the moment there was nothing for me save the bath, its warmth and its comfort. Malcolm had carried me up the stairs to a little wood-panelled bathroom that opened off one of the bedrooms, and there, indeed, was a wonderful claw-footed bath, steaming with crystal-clear hot water. Malcolm helped me out of the coat—I was completely comfortable with him, and felt no awkwardness that he should see the horrors of my wasted body—then aided me into the bath.
There he left me, saying only that he would fetch some brandy, as he thought I could do with it.
There was a shelf sitting across the bath, with a flannel and a bar of clear brown soap, but I was too tired to be bothered washing. I just sat, soaking in all the comfort the bath could offer, and eventually I heard footsteps ascending slowly up the stairs.
They stopped just outside the bathroom, then entered.
Only then did I look up, and smile. “Hello, Jack.”
He looked almost as exhausted as I did, his fatigue underscored with uncertainty and dispiritedness. He was also terribly dirty, smudged with soot and ash, and he had several small abrasions on his face.
He was dressed in a coat as poor as mine had been, and I reflected that it had not been a good night in the sartorial elegance stakes.
I nodded at a stool. “Sit down, please.”
He did, with a thump, still staring at me. “Grace?”
“No,” I said, “merely a phantom passing through.”
I regretted the jest as soon as the words left my
mouth, because his eyes filled with tears and he had
to bite his lip to keep the emotion contained.
“Grace,” he said again, this time the word emerging on a breath fraught with such emotion that now my eyes misted up.
I took a deep breath, rubbed at my eyes with the back of my hand, and managed to speak calmly. “Thank you for sitting beside my hospital bed for so long.”
“Your parents were there, too.” “I know, but right now I am thanking you, Jack.” He swallowed. “I can’t believe you’re here.” We fell silent. There was so much to say, and neither of us knew how to start. I began to feel a little bit awkward about sitting naked in a bath before him, and wished that my body didn’t look so awful.
“You look beautiful,” he said. Then he gave a soft laugh. “I can’t believe you are alive! Grace, how? What has happened? How did you manage to get out of that damn hospital bed? And get away from Catling? And the shadow has returned! What do you know about that? Do you know about the White Queen? Oh, I have so much to say to you, to ask you…And the Sidlesaghes, something has happened. Did you…oh, curse my damned mouth, I am sorry.” He grinned, finally relaxing. “I’m just glad you’re alive, Grace. And here.”
“Here is where I want to be,” I said, and before either of us could say anything really stupid, Malcolm made one of his fortuitous entrances with a tray bearing a decanter of brandy and two glasses.
He also had a pair of Jack’s trousers over one arm, and as he sat the tray down on the floor by the stool, Jack rose, shucked off the coat, discarded the hipwrap he had worn as Kingman, and slid the trousers on, buckling up the belt and then sitting down on the stool as Malcolm left. He reached for the tray, poured some brandy into the glasses, then handed one to me.
We sat for a while, saying nothing, sipping the brandy.
“I’m sorry I have been away so long,” I eventually said, handing Jack the empty glass.
He took it, raising his eyebrows to ask if I wanted a refill. I shook my head, and he set both our glasses on the tray.
“Where have you been?” he said. “Where did Catling take you?”
I shuddered. “Into hell, Jack. I will talk about it eventually, but not now, please.”
He nodded, his eyes downcast. “How did you escape?”
“I learned how to use what Catling sent against me. I have been silly, I should have learned earlier.”
He smiled, very gently. “Of all the silliness in this stupid adventure, Grace, you have been responsible for very little of it. Is that how you managed to escape her when she dragged you into the labyrinth after you stopped me?”
I nodded. “Everything she sends against me I can use.” I lifted my wrists a little out of the water, and for a moment the diamonds gleamed forth. “I learned how to take the pain she wrapped about my wrists, and use that. I learned how to take the hell she had sent me into, and use that. I can’t believe it took me so long to realise I had the ability.” I let my arms sink back into the water. “She can’t touch me now, unless to murder me, and she needs to murder herself to kill me. That she won’t do.”
I smiled suddenly. “I feel free of her, Jack, even though I’m not. She has no hold over me other than the threat of both our murders, and that is no hold at all.”
He looked at me very carefully at that. “No threat at all? Why not? Her fate is your fate. Whatever you have touched will sh
are your fate. I—”
“Jack, please, stop.” I thought of everything I had seen while in my coma, but I was too exhausted to try to explain it to him now. There was hope, I was certain of it.
Jack must have seen that hope in my face.
“Grace, what have you learned?”
I smiled, remembering, and Jack leaned forward.
“The shadow,” he said, “reappeared when you reappeared.”
Indeed it had. It manifested itself when Jack and I were together and present in London. We were the only reason it existed; the reason it had appeared for the first time was when Jack and I were both present and aware in London.
“Grace?”
“Jack, I will tell you, but I need to sleep first. Not only because I am so very tired, as I see you are, but because I need to mull things over in my head.”
And, I thought, because what I have to tell you is so very, very difficult, Jack.
“Of course.” He studied me, his eyes travelling down my body as it lay in the bath. “You’re not very well, are you?”
I shook my head, close to tears again because he understood that I did not wish to talk now, and because he understood that I was, indeed, “not very well”.
He smiled. “I see that both flannel and soap are yet dry. Would you like me to wash the stink of hospital from you?”
He must have been desperate to discover what I had learned, but he was willing to wait, and for that, at this very moment, I was indebted to him. “Thank you,” I said.
Jack sank to his knees by the bath, picked up the flannel and soap, and proceeded to wash me down.
He touched me as a father would a child. There was nothing sexual or even intimate about it. Frankly, we were both too tired to care, and I wondered only that he had the energy to bathe me in the first instance.
Malcolm came back carrying a tin urn of clean water, and Jack washed my hair. He massaged my scalp gently, exploratively, his fingertips moving over the spot where the concrete lintel had punctured my skull.
“The doctors thought you would die,” he whispered. “Grace, how did you survive this?”
“Because I wanted to live,” I said.
His fingers stilled, then the knuckle of one of them rapped against the plate in my skull. “Well, you have a tin head, now,” he said, and I laughed, and he with me, and I have never, never, been as happy as I was at that point.
Jack helped me out of the bath, and dried me off, his hands exploring the recently-knitted bones in my legs and left arm (oh, such lumpy devils they were now!), then he gave me a silk dressing gown that Malcolm had set out, and then, wordlessly, carried me to a bed in one of the spare rooms. He tucked me in between the sheets, leaving me in the dressing gown, then laid his mouth very softly against my forehead, and told me to go to sleep. He said he needed to bathe, but that he would be back, and he would watch over me.
I slept. I drifted off immediately, but, as is so often the case when you are so very tired, I did not sleep soundly. I woke every hour or so, dragging myself up from dreams that were vaguely unsettling but not threatening.
Every time I opened my eyes I saw Jack sitting in an armchair by the bed. Sometimes he was dozing, sometimes reading a book, sometimes sipping from a cup of tea that Malcolm had brought in to him.
Sometimes the lamp was on, and I saw him in a glow of warm, rosy light, and I knew that the entire day had passed and we were well into the night.
And still Jack watched.
I saw Malcolm with him on one occasion. He sat on a wooden chair he’d pulled close to Jack’s armchair, and was leaning forward on it, talking in a low but urgent voice. He was saying something about New Year’s Eve, and Jack was frowning, but as I watched the frown cleared and Jack nodded, to Malcolm’s undisguised relief.
“If Grace agrees,” said Jack, and Malcolm seemed to accept that.
After that I did not remember anything else, so I must have drifted off finally into a sound sleep.
After he had spoken with Jack, Malcolm went into the bathroom to clean it, and clear away the brandy decanter and glasses.
But while the towels were still there, and the damp patches where a wet Grace had stood, the decanter and glasses had gone.
Malcolm thought nothing of it. Jack must have taken them down to the kitchen himself.
TWELVE
The Dark Heart of the Labyrinth
Monday, 30th December, 1940
Catling huddled in the heart of the labyrinth and wondered what had gone so wrong.
She should have been completed by now, but instead she found herself still incomplete and more vulnerable than ever.
Who could have thought that Grace would have found the gumption to break free of her hellish prison? Who could have thought Grace would have found the courage to stop the Dance of the Flowers and then confront Catling?
And confront her with real power.
To say that Catling didn’t like it was a massive understatement.
Too many things were going wrong.
For the first time in her existence Catling wondered if she really needed completion at all. Surely she had enough power now? Why push for completion at all?
Because if left incomplete she was vulnerable. Catling simply could not allow herself to remain incomplete for too many more years, because then Jack, Noah (and Grace, curse her!) could grow even more powerful, and might discover the means to undo the hex that bound Grace. If that happened then Catling could look forward to nothing but a rapid unwinding into oblivion.
As much as Catling was sure Jack and Noah would use any subsequent Dance of the Flowers to somehow trick Catling, and try to unwind her, Catling needed to be completed. She would need to risk the Dance of the Flowers.
But, oh, that day would be littered with trickeries.
Catling reviewed her weapons. She truly only had two. Her continued destruction of the Faerie, which meant the Lord of the Faerie would put incredible pressure on Jack and Noah to complete Catling, and the hex on Grace. Even if Jack and Noah might be prepared to risk losing the Faerie (and that was a major “if”), Catling was certain they would never risk losing Grace, particularly after that touching scene she’d witnessed in St Paul’s the night Jack and Grace pulled the bomb down atop her.
“All I have to be certain of,” whispered Catling in the desolation of the dark heart, “is that the hex can’t be broken. That it is so powerful that nothing can thwart it.”
She glanced upwards, looking through all the layers of earth and rock and masonry to the sky above.
She had time. Neither Jack nor Noah would move against her just yet—not while Grace was in such a pitiful condition. She had some weeks, perhaps even months, in which to wind down the bleakness and horror of the Blitz and use it to bolster the hex that bound Grace.
Bolster it so that no matter what happened, what Jack and Noah tried to do, nothing could possibly break it.
THIRTEEN
Copt Hall
Tuesday, 31st December, 1940
Jack sat on the side of the bed, watching Grace sleep. She looked terrible: dark shadows ringed her eyes, her flesh had shrunk and her skin tone was ashen and faintly yellowish where it stretched over bone. On the other hand her breathing was deep and slow and comfortable, and her face relaxed.
He still couldn’t quite believe she was alive. He kept thinking of the moment he had walked into the bathroom, and saw her sitting in the bath, enclosed in steam and serenity. He remembered the gut-wrenching sense of relief and joy, combined with a terror that somehow the vision wasn’t real and that any moment she would evaporate before his eyes.
Now, watching her sleep, Jack found it difficult to believe she would survive, or that she would not be snatched from him again.
There was a noise behind him, and Jack turned his head slightly.
It was Malcolm carrying a tray with two bowls of hot soup.
“Did you do this for Boudicca?” said Jack quietly as Malcolm set the tray down.
“Of course,” said Malcolm, “I adored her.” He looked at Grace. “She will need to wake soon.”
“She will wake when she is ready,” said Jack, but then he saw Malcolm’s smile, and looked back to Grace.
Her eyes had opened, and she was smiling at Malcolm and then at Jack as his eyes turned to her.
“Chicken soup,” she said, “with which to set the world to rights?”
“Chicken soup,” said Malcolm, “with which to set you on the road to rights. The world can look after itself.”
Jack helped Grace sit up, Malcolm plumping the pillows behind her, and Grace laughed and commented on what fine nurses they both had become.
Then Malcolm handed Grace and Jack their bowls of soup, told them he expected them to eat before they talked, and then departed.
“I wonder where he got these chickens,” said Grace. “Have the gardeners of Copt Hall missed one or two of their flock?”
Jack smiled, but did not answer, and, as instructed, they ate in silence.
Once they’d done, Jack took the bowls, set them aside, and sat once more on the side of the bed, taking Grace’s hand.
He opened his mouth to speak, but she forestalled him.
“I’m so sorry about Matilda,” she said.
Jack’s eyes filled with sudden tears, not merely at the loss of Matilda which still ate at the edges of his composure every moment he was awake, but at Grace’s care for his feelings. She was the one who had suffered alongside Matilda, she the one who had watched Matilda’s terrible dying, and yet she only thought of him.
He nodded, unable to speak.
“Have they recovered her body, or Erith’s and Ecub’s?” Grace asked.
Jack closed his eyes momentarily, forcing tears to slide down his cheeks. “No. The rescue teams got you out, but by the time they’d managed to clear out the entire basement almost three weeks had gone past. The basement had flooded—”
“I know,” Grace whispered.
“—and together with the weight of the rubble and debris, bodies were unrecognisable. They had…”