Chapter 13: The Lady and the Lake
At school the next day, Eddy Moon was all I could think about. I knew he was at Levels somewhere and I wanted to be beside him. Lessons demanded otherwise, however, and all morning I spent in a diluted, faded kind of world, knowing that with Eddy everything would be rich and golden. He thought I couldn’t be his girlfriend but I didn’t believe him. So many things had happened that I thought impossible; the two of us being together was insignificant in comparison.
At lunch I ran to meet him in the fencing studio. The space was tall and narrow, only lit by small windows squashed beneath the ceiling. It should have seemed gloomy, but Eddy was there, and to me he filled the whole room with light.
Eddy gestured toward his coach, standing opposite him. I had barely even noticed he was there. “Mr. Deforge, this is Madeleine Bride.”
I winced. I wanted Eddy to myself. I wanted to talk to him about what he was, what he had to do. Ideas fizzed through my mind.
The instructor wore a helmet with a mask and his features were indistinguishable behind the face sized oval of dark mesh. He tweaked the base of the mask in greeting and turned back to Eddy. “Now Moon. Today the last of the parrying moves. Neuvieme, to protect the rear.” Turning, he invited Eddy to cut at his back, pushing Eddy’s blade away with a sweep of his own sword. “Now you.”
Eddy turned his own back. Deforge ran at him and Eddy parried him so forcefully that the instructor staggered a stride sideways.
After five minutes Eddy removed his helmet and mask. I almost drooled as I received my first glimpse of his face that day. Sweat stuck his hair to his head, accentuating the strength and beauty of his features as well as the breadth of his shoulders.
Mr. Deforge dropped his hands to his hips. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry Mr. Deforge. I’ve finished learning fencing.”
“But you’ve only been studying a week. You have so much potential to...”
“Thank you Mr. Deforge, I’m grateful for all your help, I really am. But I don’t have time to focus on it properly.” Eddy pulled off a heavy gauntlet and held out his hand for the instructor to shake.
He stepped towards me. “Maddie, I’ll just get changed. Five minutes.”
“I’ll go outside.”
I found a bench against the side of the studio. It started to rain, but I pressed myself back against the wall, under the eaves and stayed dry.
Eddy emerged. “Hey, you’re still here!” He held his new phone in one hand. “I thought you would have sent me a short message service telling me where you had gone.”
I giggled. “Everybody says text, silly. I’m fine. Dry as a bone.”
He examined me, then nodded. “Yes you are.”
“Come with me?” Jumping to my feet I took his arm.
“Where?” Eddy looked at his watch. “I was going to do some pistol shooting. It’s the other part of the modern pentathlon that I’ve never done before.”
“Ah, the modern pentathlon.” I remembered the meeting in Logres, trying to drum up competitors for the inter-house competition. “But I want to make it easier. Come to the library. Ten minutes, I promise.” I smiled at him as persuasively as I could. “It’s for your own good.”
“Um...” He scuffed his feet. “I don’t usually go to the library. There’s always a lot of people in there.”
I dragged at his forearm. “That’s something we’ve got to get you over. How can you help save the world if you don’t like crowds?”
He gritted his teeth. “Okay. Ten minutes.”
I led him along the flagged path to the library. “One quick question, first. Merlin is still alive now, how does he do that? Did he sleep as well?”
Eddy shook his head. “He did something to himself; he took some power from the grail. I don’t know how it worked, but he gets older, then reinvents himself as a young man. He’s done it more than twenty times.”
Trying to process the story, I stared at the library. It occupied a building that had once been the school auditorium and boasted a high domed ceiling and elegant, arched doorways and windows. We entered through the main doors and I guided Eddy between study desks to stairs leading to the mezzanine, which held the computers.
Over a hundred students sat at desks, stood at the counter, or looked at the shelves. One by one, as we passed through the library, their heads turned. They were like moored boats, all pushed in one direction by the current.
Beside me Eddy dropped his head, letting his hair slide around his face.
“Look back at them, Eddy,” I murmured. “Smile. They’ll look away.”
He did as I suggested. I knew the grace of his stride and the easy swing of his arms would quickly suggest confidence. Upstairs I found a free computer and sat Eddy down.
“Um, I’m not very good with computers.”
“Well you need to get good. Put the headphones on, go to YouTube and search for Martin Luther King speech.”
The fingers of Eddy’s right hand almost covered the mouse, while those of his left jabbed at the keys.
“You’re left handed?”
“What? No. I can use either.”
Watching, I realised he actually moved the mouse at the same time as he typed. There was no reason why Eddy shouldn’t be formidable at using computers, just as he seemed to be formidable at every other physical task he attempted.
“Okay. Now listen to the clip of the speech, and make notes of what you think makes it brilliant, what makes it persuasive.” I pulled a notepad and pen from my bag and handed them to him.
When the MLK speech finished, I directed him to one from Ronald Reagan, then an after dinner speech by Phil Jackson, coach of the LA Lakers and Chicago Bulls basketball teams. Eddy wrote steadily as I watched the blurry figures speaking in silence. He filled three, four, five pages with quick, squared handwriting.
The Jackson speech ended and I eased the headphones from Eddy’s ears. My hands quivered slightly from the proximity to him, and the urge to run my finger tips down the bronze skin at the side of his neck
He wrote another line of notes on my pad. Considering the size of his hands he moved the pen with enormous delicacy and speed.
“Um...” I closed the YouTube page. “You don’t wonder why I’m asking you to do this stuff?”
Eddy shook his head. “Nope. Not really.”
“The point is, to be a leader; you have to use words like one. All the great leaders can speak well. They persuade people to agree with them. Even if they don’t have it as a natural skill, they learn it. Churchill used to stand in front of a mirror and practice for hours.”
Eddy stood up and pushed the chair under the desk. “How come you’re such an expert on all this stuff?”
“I don’t know.” I flushed. “For the last year or so I’ve been really interested in the stories of leaders, and you know, guys they call ‘Great Men’.”
“Very handy for me.”
“Stop it. Come on. You need to work out what you’re going to say at the Camelot House meeting.”
“What meeting?”
“The meeting you’re going to call, to fix the situation there.”
“They won’t come.”
“You have to find a way to make them. Think of it like a test. This is a step in your journey to who you’re going to be. It’s practice. You have to persuade a hundred and twenty students to come and listen to you, then persuade them of your point of view.”
“What point of view?”
“Eddy, come on, think about it. Representing Camelot in all the sports competitions, and winning as many of them as you can, is certainly impressive.”
He nodded.
“And I don’t doubt that you’ll succeed massively, within the constraints of time, and not having a team.”
He held up three big fingers. “The modern pentathlon is triple points, and it’s the one everybody cares about.”
“I know, I know, but that’s still not the way of legendary le
aders is it? The way of most success is to change everybody’s minds. To get them to work with you, to get yourself a team back again. Honestly, if you can’t do that, then how are you going to do whatever else it is you’ve got coming?”
He nodded. He looked so earnest and focused that my breath caught in my throat. I wanted nothing more in the world, at that moment, than to touch his skin, to place my palm on his cheek. Muscles jumped between his jaw and his cheekbone and I sensed he felt the same. Standing in the centre of the library, beneath its high dome, electricity seemed to arc and sizzle between us.
“Okay.” He turned back to the door. “I’ll go and put the speech together. I’ll talk to them at the end of school.”
“I’ve got swim practice. Send me a short message service and tell me how you got on. I wish I could come.”
When I finished swimming I hurried to the locker room and checked my phone. A message from Eddy. My heart, which I had just slowed with 800 metres of cooling down, sped up to fifty-metre-sprint speed.
“Meeting went fine. Everybody on board. Even 4H! Watch out for the house trophy. Camelot is coming.” I scrolled down, but that was it. Seventeen words. I may have showed him the way to talking like a statesman, but I guessed it didn’t mean that he would suddenly become a chatterbox.
At home I found Mum cleaning the oven.
“Hi Mum!”
“Madeleine, I’ve been thinking. It’s about time you pulled your weight around here a bit more.”
“Okay.” It was going to be one of those evenings.
“The vacuum cleaner’s in the cupboard. You can do upstairs, then there’s a lot of ironing to do. I don’t think it’s fair that I do it all when you go through five changes of clothes in a single weekend.”
“Lovely to see you too, Mum.” I smiled at her over my shoulder. “I won’t ask about your day.”
“There’s no need for you to be cheeky, either.”
“Yes Countess.” I wrangled the vacuum and its seemingly endless cord from the cupboard. My phone beeped. Text message. I dropped the vacuum cleaner and cable on the floor and skipped across the room to my bag.
“Maddie!”
I flipped my hand “One minute Mum!”
The message was from Eddy. I blushed and grinned. He thanked me for my help, and suggested meeting later. He would tell me how he’d won Camelot over.
“Who is it?”
Too fluttery and distracted to think straight, I answered her. “It’s Eddy, sorry, Mum, I’ll do the chores tomorrow. I need to go out this evening.”
“With Eddy? Why?” She stood very straight, square on to me. Her hair hung loose around her broad shoulders. I was struck by how formidable she must seem to strangers.
I quailed. “He wants to meet, to talk, I want...”
“Is it a date?”
I didn’t know. I hoped so. “Maybe...”
“No, Maddie. No.”
I opened my hands, for mercy, for understanding. “What?”
“You can’t be with him. Speak to him, be his friend, of course. But nothing more. I forbid it.”
I stared at her. “You forbid it?” Mum had never used a phrase like that with me before. Not once.
She bit her lip and glanced at her fingernails. Her tone calmed. “I forbid it.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you. You’ll find out yourself.”
“Even if I do all the ironing and all the vacuuming first?”
“Oh Maddie, it’s not about the ironing and vacuuming.”
“But he’ll think I’m super rude, Mum. And you said he’s had a hard time and you’re absolutely right. Why should I go round now making his life even harder?”
She smoothed her hair. I saw the doubt in her eyes.
“Look, Mum, this is really embarrassing, but nothing’s happened between us. Honestly. How about if I just meet him this evening and, you know, explain how things are going to be. It’s the least I can do really.”
“Honestly? You don’t mind?”
I did mind. I minded so much I didn’t believe anything could stand in the way of me meeting the boy I wanted to see. Mum could forbid it all she liked. I wouldn’t take any notice. She wasn’t going to stop me from seeing Eddy Moon. I equivocated. “I’ll see what he says.”
“Okay.”
“So I can see him?”
Mum nodded. “And don’t worry about the vacuuming. Just iron the clothes you need for the next couple of days. I’m sorry for shouting at you.”
I headed to my room to change out of my school uniform. After three minutes Mum called from the bottom of the stairs.
“Maddie! Ask him if he wants to have fish and chips or something with you. I was going to get you to do the shopping as well, so you might as well have supper out. I’ll give you the money.”
“Okay Mum.” I smiled to myself. Mum could be in a bad mood more often, if her contrition was always this generous.
I called him. “Hey Eddy, Mum says I should invite you to fish and chips.”
“Really? Fantastic.” Once and future king he may have been, but when offered fish and chips Eddy Moon was just like any other sixteen-year-old boy.
We met at the glass front of Kevin’s Kebab Kingdom on Magdalene Street. Eddy jerked his chin at the illuminated menu above the counter inside. “They don’t do fish and chips.”
“Lovely to see you too.” What was it about people greeting me with complaints that evening?
We bought kebabs and French fries and took them to the foot of the Market Cross, where the wide pedestal made a fine seat.
As I ate I told Eddy, matter of factly, what Mum had said. “Why would she say that?” I asked. “Do you really know? What did she mean?”
He picked at his fries. “She said it because even before you knew my story, you were involved in it. In fact, before we even met you were involved in it.”
I frowned. “What are you on about?”
“It’s what I meant when I was talking about fate. You already have a role in my story, in the story of the sleeper, but it’s not the...” He lowered his eyes. “The girlfriend’s role.” He looked back at me, his face locked into a frown. The tension in his gaze reminded me of when I accompanied a friend to a tattoo parlour. She had stared at me while the tattooist drilled into her back, and her eyes glowed with the private fight against pain and cutting.
I frowned at his pause and his tone. “How can I already have a role?”
“It’s about who you are, and your ancestry. Your mother has a role as well. Maybe an even more important one than you.”
I stood up, anger blossomed in my chest, like a jagged, iron flower. “My Mum! What are you on about? What’s she got to do with it?”
“When I was king, there were women who gave great support to my household, and to myself. They assisted Merlin, they healed the sick, they took care of my sword. They were a family, mothers and daughters, and they had abilities.”
“Magic?”
Eddy winced. “I’m still not sure how to explain the things that happened then, but, they could do things, yes.”
“So?”
“Well, the family survived, it continued and it’s here now, and you and your Mum are it.”
I pushed my kebab away from me, along the step of the Market Cross. “What?”
“You know yourself how long your title goes back Maddie. I realised it the first time I saw your name, written on that form in history.”
I remembered his shock and awkwardness, which I thought were a response to my own defensiveness.
“Your Mum is Countess Bride. She’s descended from the first Lady Brides, who were also known as the Lady of the Lake. Like them, she has an affinity with water. You must have seen it. You have it yourself.”
I grimaced. “I’m sorry Eddy, I don’t want to be horrible, but you’ve gone completely mental. I’m Maddie Bride, from London. I like reading and heavy metal music. I am not, I repeat, I am not, any flipping Lady of the Lake.” I cru
mpled up my kebab wrapper and dropped it on the sidewalk beside the Market Cross.
Eddy picked it up. “You shouldn’t litter.”
I knew I shouldn’t drop litter, but that wasn’t the point. The point was his absurd claim that my mother, my grandmother and I were all descended from the Lady of the Lake. That somehow ‘Lady of the Lake’ was a kind of inherited title, which ruled me out of any closeness with him except for the most platonic sort. Closeness that I craved all the time, except for when he was talking absolute nonsense. “You’re not going to argue with me?”
He shrugged. “What’s the point? I know the way things are. Your mother knows the way things are. It’s like trying to persuade people the world is round. Incidentally, learning the world is round is one of my first memories. Kieran told me when I was three years old. I had nightmares about falling off it for a month.”
“Take this seriously,” I snapped. He was trying to distract me.
He switched his full seriousness onto my face. Certainty blazed in his tawny eyes. “I do take it seriously. It’s as serious as gravity, night and day. It’s my world. It’s actually you who’s not taking it seriously. You’re the unbeliever.”
I stepped away. For a second I saw the two of us beside the Market Cross from high above, as if we were bystanders in Google Earth. Here was a boy who believed he was King Arthur, who had convinced me he was the king, finally awake after a thousand year sleep. And now he was telling me I was the Lady of the Lake and I had a problem with it. If I didn’t believe it, then I had to question whether Eddy was one of the Seven Sleepers. And if I questioned that, then I had to accept the possibility that Eddy had serious mental problems. How could I be in love with a lunatic? I bit my lip and turned away.
“Madeleine?” There was a vibration of unease in the deep, confident voice. “Madeleine, what are you thinking?”
I kept my eyes down. “I don’t know.” I kicked at a cigarette end, pushing it around the sidewalk with the toe of my shoe. I thought of all the times I’d decided to be a different kind of person, to be an athlete, a party girl, or an academic. All the times I’d lurched from one identity to another, never knowing which one fit. Now Eddy was offering me one off the peg. Certainty, identity, and a place in a story would be mine. The problem was that it was all too weird, and worse than that, it wasn’t the one I wanted. I looked inside myself. I didn’t want to be the adviser, the healer. I wanted to be the Queen. I looked up at the Market Cross. “Eddy, I have to go home.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” The note of unease sharpened in his voice.
“I guess.”
I turned away, heading down the High Street towards Bove Town.
“Maddie, wait!” Eddy called after me. “You never get wet in the rain!”
The walk through Bove Town felt very different to the day before, when Eddy had been beside me, striding along the road. The terraced houses had their curtains drawn against the night. I jammed my hands into my pockets. Walking away from Eddy I felt the threads that bound me to him stretching. They pulled at me, cutting and burning, but they held tight. Mum had chopped at them with her rulings. Now Eddy himself hacked at them with his absurd reliance on fate. All I knew was that I loved him, and the two people I cared about most in the world were trying to make that wrong. The night cold wrapped itself around me, seeming to reach to my heart and I shivered from head to toe. What was I going to do? Beside walk around sobbing?
In Chalice Drive a middle aged woman was taking rubbish from a metal shopping basket and putting it into a bin. “Good evening dear. You alright?”
I didn’t look at her. “I’m fine.”
At home I found Mum sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for me. “So? What did he say?”
I didn’t want to tell her. If I told her and she agreed, if she knew what Eddy had said, then that would be it. It would all be true and I was a witch.
“Nothing.” I kept walking.
“Maddie, wait. I would have told you. It’s just; I remember when Grandma told me. I thought I was going crazy.”
“You are crazy,” I said over my shoulder. “I’m going to bed.” Halfway up the stairs my trudge burst into a mad scramble. At the top I threw myself into the bathroom and flipped the toilet cover just in time to empty my kebab into it.
I wiped my mouth and sobbed.
“I felt exactly the same, Maddie. It’s okay.” Mum’s voice came from the bathroom doorway.
“It’s not okay,” I snarled. “You’re crazy. Leave me alone.”
“But...”
“Go away!”
When I was sure she had gone I got up, brushed my teeth and went to bed. I tried my left side, then my right, then back to my right again.
Mum moved about for half an hour, then the stairs creaked as she came back upstairs. “Goodnight Maddie,” she said to my bedroom door.
The street light outside cast the shadows of a tree’s bare branches across my curtains. I decided I was too cold, and fetched a blanket. After half an hour of writhing around underneath it I was too hot, and tossed the blanket on the floor. I turned on the light, downloaded the pod-cast of a radio programme about Richard the Lionheart and went back to bed. The pod-cast finished and I realised I hadn’t heard any of it. I played it three more times then threw my I-Pod across the room.
On the landing something scuffled and shuffled. I sat up in bed. The image of the cormorant in the dead tree flashed across my mind. The noise outside turned into a creak. Multiple creaks. Footsteps.
“Mum?”
“Maddie, can I come in?”
I sighed. “Oh, alright.”
She peered around the edge of the door for a moment, before opening it completely. “I can’t sleep.”
I rolled over, toward the wall. “Join the club.”
“Maddie, there’s something I want you to see.”
“I’m not interested.” I curled myself into a tight little ball.
“Look, it’s only three am, you’ve got five hours of dark still. What are you going to do? Come with me. We’ll go on a little expedition. I want to show you something.”
I uncurled a notch. “What?”
“You’ll see.”
Mum still knew how to play me, just as she did when I was four years old. I added a note of whine to my voice. “But what kind of a thing is it?”
“You’ll see when we get there. Come on, put a hoody on.”
“Oh Mum, bloody hell.” But I sat up, scratched my head, and threw my legs over the side of the bed.
“Good!” I heard the smile in her voice. “I’ll be in the kitchen. I’ll make us travel mugs of tea.” Even when Mum was trying to persuade me that life was completely weird she was still so predictable.
Three minutes later I took my travel mug from the kitchen counter and followed Mum out to the car. She drove with care and precision along the narrow country lanes.
“Wait.” I sipped from my tea. “I know this road. Are we going to the hives?”
“Maybe.”
“But Mum, that’s not exciting. I’ve been there, like a million times.”
“You haven’t seen it like I’m going to show it you tonight.”
I huffed and stared out the window at the dark windows of the cottages and farmhouses we passed. I hadn’t visited the hives since our first week in Glastonbury. Something about them bugged me. In part I didn’t think they were a proper occupation for my mother, but more than that, they reminded me of Grandma. She had always been the beekeeper. To see Mum filling her role emphasised the fact that Grandma had gone.
We pulled into the gateway and Mum got out and unlocked the gate. She sighed when she sat back in the car. “You know the old Bride House is over there?” She pointed to a clump of trees on a rise away to the west.
“Yes Mum.” I moaned. “You’ve only told me like a hundred times. The ancestral home of the Marquess of Beckerley, and Beckerley is an old word for beekeepers, and it’s the name of the title, and not the same as our
surname which is Bride, which is after Bride’s Hill, where the house is, blah, blah, blah, yawn.” I gabbled without breathing and the last words, with almost no air behind them, were little more than whispers.
Mum pulled the car up alongside the hut that served as an office and store for the beekeeping operation.
“Here we are. Now get out.”
I crunched my eyes closed in a long blink. “Mum, I swear, you really are losing your mind.”
“Maddie, you’ve come this far, you might as well.”
“All...” I pushed the passenger door open so hard it bounced back at me. “Right!”
“Careful dear. Now follow me.”
She walked between two long lines of silent hives. The bees were sleeping, hibernating until the spring time, when they would come back to life. A bit like a certain blond giant I knew. Or possibly like him, if he wasn’t a lunatic.
We stopped beside the last line of hives.
“You know the story of Excalibur?”
In the distance a dog barked.
I shivered. “Yeah, the sword in the stone. The boy Arthur pulled it out, and proved he was the king.”
“No dear. That was a trick of Merlin’s. A common or garden sword. A soldier’s sword. It broke, or something. That’s when we stepped in.”
“We?”
“The Lady of the Lake. The Ladies had been keeping a sword, a magic sword for him. When he needed it he came here, and got it from the lake.”
The ground fell away in front of us, to a line of bushes and a drainage ditch at the edge of the property. “There’s no lake Mum.”
“There used to be a lake here. They drained it three hundred years ago. But, before that, before Arthur died, or...”
“Don’t, Mum. You’re making it bad enough already.”
“Anyway, the last thing Arthur did was to have the sword returned to us, returned to the lake.” She waved a hand grandly towards the hollow, its fence and molehills.
“Mum, there’s no lake. I told you.”
“Not now, but Arthur has returned, he needs his sword, so the lake will return as well.”
“Oh. My. God.” I dropped to a crouch, head in hands. Through gaps between my fingers I watched Mum step forward. She half raised both arms, holding them in front of her waist. Crooking her fingers slightly she made a slow-motion, beckoning roll of her hands.
“See.” Her voice was monotone, as if she was speaking through clenched teeth.
“What? There’s nothing there.”
“Look.” Again she sounded muted, breathless.
I looked down the slope towards the drainage ditch. I saw a glimmer of movement around it. Glass stems bobbed and darkness expanded. “Mum, there’s nothing there. Can we go home.”
“No.” Her voice cracked. “I’m going to prove it to you.” Her fists clenched and her knuckles shone white in the moonlight.
At the bottom of the fence posts I caught a flash of silver, glinting slices of the moon refracted.
“Mum, there’s nothing there.” I turned away. “Can we go home now?” Scuffing my feet I trudged between the hives.
“No!” Mum’s voice was ragged.
I turned back.
“Mum?”
She swiped at the air in front of her. “Get away!”
I stepped towards her. “Mum?”
Her eyes stretched wide. “Mother?”
I jolted at the oddness of her saying her own name back to me. “What do you mean, Mum?”
“Mother, you have to help me. I don’t know what’s wrong. I need the sword, but...”
Nausea twisted my stomach. “Mum, Mum, it’s me Madeleine.”
“Oh.” Her face crumpled into confusion. “I thought...”
“Can we go home?” I took her arm and led her back to the car. My mind whirled. What had happened to her? And was I to blame? I had seen something happening in the meadow, but I denied it. Had she strained herself trying to prove herself right?