Prospero's Children Read online

  “Are you sure?” said Fern. “Couldn’t the manifestations be—well, haphazard?”

  “They could,” Ragginbone admitted. “But the sea lives. The planet feels. It is something we ignore too easily. Still, whatever is happening, it must be stopped. The crack in Time will widen the more the past forces a passage through, and what will follow we can only conjecture. Time is there for a purpose, to keep things in order. Once you change chronology you change history. The past could eat up the present, the crack could spread, fracturing the other dimensions, the very universe might collapse inward. Or the impact could remain localized. A dogwalker beside the river may be taken by a giant octopus, a leviathan may sink a fishing-boat near Whitby, a mermaid may be beached in Robin Hood’s Bay. None of the options are particularly healthy. We must do something.”

  “What?” asked Will, baldly. “Our efforts at doing something haven’t been very successful so far. Whenever one problem is out of the way we find ourselves with another. Javier was there this morning, threatening Fern. She won’t say what happened, but I know he frightened her.”

  “The Old Spirit is to be feared,” the Watcher said grimly.

  “He was after that picture,” Will continued. “The one Fern liked. She told him Rollo had it—Alison’s camp friend in the leather gear. Does it matter?”

  “It might,” he said. “Fernanda . . .”

  But Fern was abstracted, wrestling with a puzzle of her own. “I thought you said it was feasible for the Gifted to travel into the past,” she interjected. “Without the Door, without all these ramifications. These dreams I’ve had . . .”

  “That’s different,” said Ragginbone. “You can explore another person’s memory, and you can travel in spirit, as long as your body remains in the present, anchoring you in the right point in Time. The range of the spirit is limited only by imagination. It’s when you take your body with you that you’re in trouble. There are ways, without leaving the Door open, but they are perilous. Many have tried it, few returned. As I told you, if you meet yourself you are lost. And if you enter the past physically, it will absorb you, you lose track of the present: that is history’s defense mechanism. I did it once . . . only once. I thought the need was great enough. It was the coming back which drained me.” Briefly, lines they had not seen before netted his face, the handwriting of pain.

  Fern said eventually: “All right, so . . . we know the Door is open. The Door into the Forbidden Past. It’s been washed away, but the opening is still there, and it isn’t just a standard flaw in Time, it’s a kind of rupture which could spread if it isn’t sealed. Could we make a new Door, the way Alimond did, using a trompe l’oeil and magic, and then close it?”

  “Not without the key.” Ragginbone’s voice was faint, as if he were being slowly drawn back from some faraway place in his mind. “The power of the Lodestone unlocked it; the power of the Lodestone must lock it again. That’s why it’s so hard to close. And the key is in Atlantis. For good.”

  “Couldn’t—someone—go there in spirit,” said Fern, “in a dream—and find it?”

  “The spirit can only be a witness, never a participant,” said Ragginbone. “I thought I’d made that clear. To participate, you need to be there. In any case, Atlantis is Forbidden, even to dreamers. You would have to make the journey as your Self, your whole Self, going back through the Door that is not to the last days, back to the moment when the Door opened, stealing the key despite flood and tempest, rebuilding the Door in order to close it. The dangers are too obvious to enumerate. In any case, it’s probably impossible.”

  “How could you go back through the Door to a point before it opened?” Will wondered, frowning.

  “I told you it was impossible,” said Ragginbone. “However, the crack is widening. If your purpose was fixed, your heart brave—there are powers that respond to such things. So they say. And magic exists to break the rules.”

  “Could we do it?” said Will. “Go back—to Atlantis?” Eagerness crept unawares into his voice, and his eyes grew bright.

  “You couldn’t,” said Fern crushingly. “You’re too young— and you don’t have the Gift.” She had grown rather pale, like someone who sees an abyss opening in front of them, and fears to be sucked over the edge. “Even if you got the key, even if—somehow—you survived the tidal wave, you’d need power to reinvent the Door. And the Door is your only chance of getting back.”

  “That is another difficulty,” Ragginbone sighed. “I fear— the Door must be locked from the other side. The key has to remain in the past. It was found on the bottom of the sea: remember? If you try to change history, you will surely perish. There is a natural flow in the progress of the universe, what the frivolous call a Current of Events. Go with the flow, and it will go with you. Try to redirect it, to alter what has been, and you will be overwhelmed. Magic breaks the rules of Science, but not the ultimate Laws of Being. If you went back to Atlantis, and by some elasticity in the zone of the probable you managed to obtain the key and lock the Door, you would have to stay on the wrong side of it. And there might be no way to return.”

  “You’d have to trust in Hope,” said Fern. “Is that it?”

  “No,” Ragginbone replied shortly. “Hope needs something tangible to sustain it. You would have to rely on Faith. Only Faith can endure in the teeth of the evidence.”

  The Capels walked home in the late afternoon to find a vaguely anxious Robin being soothed by Mrs. Wicklow in the kitchen. “Just as I told you,” she said as they came in. “They’re all right. Children don’t think you might be worrying: they just go their own way and then look all injured when you want to know where they’ve been. Anyhow, they had t’ dog along to take care of them. I wasn’t too fond of her to start with, but I reckon she’s not one to get lost, even on t’ moors, and no one’s going to give ’em any trouble when she’s around.” Lougarry had risen sufficiently in Mrs. Wicklow’s estimation to acquire gender, Fern noted.

  After supper she went early to her room, leaving Will and her father to argue over the mysteries of mah-jongg. The picture under the bed seemed to draw her: she wanted to take it out and study it, losing herself in that postage-stamp panorama of a city she had never seen, roaming sunlit street and shadowy alley in search of some unknown goal, neither the key nor the Door but something else, something she would not recognize until she found it, or until it found her. She resisted the urge, burying herself under the covers, craving sleep, afraid to dream.

  She awoke hours later, with the realization that she must have slept after all. The rectangle of window behind the curtains was just beginning to acquire a tinge of gray and a few birds were piping in the dawn. Her mind was very clear. She could remember no dreams but while she slept her doubts seemed to have rearranged themselves and a necessary resolve had taken over, not dismissing fear but putting it in its place. She got up and dressed, thinking in passing that her clothes would be all wrong and she didn’t speak the language, yet curiously confident that somehow these details would be taken care of. Then she took the picture out from under the bed.

  VIII

  It was Will who found she had gone. He had woken early with a vague feeling of wrongness, as if, only seconds before he opened his eyes, the entire world had slipped on its axis by a fraction of a degree, leaving everything slightly misplaced. Instinct told him he had missed something essential; if he had surfaced barely a moment beforehand he would have seen it—whatever it was—but now he was too late for all time. A horrible foreboding settled on his stomach. It was much too early for any sane adolescent to think about getting up un-prompted but after a brief attempt at a lie-in he scrambled out of bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and headed automatically for his sister’s room. When she did not answer his knock he tried the door and went in. The sight of the vacant bed was disproportionately shocking; after all, he told himself, there was no reason why Fern, too, should not have risen prematurely, maybe gone for a walk. There was no need to feel this awful black panic. Then
he saw the picture.

  She had propped it up on her dressing-table, in front of the mirror. Will, who had not looked closely at it before, found his gaze drawn inward until it was enmeshed in that tiny nest of details almost too fine for the human eye to distinguish. For an instant he imagined that microscopic vista was alive: he glimpsed the turning of wheels, the pacing of feet, the undulation of assorted robes, all on a scale so small it reached his brain as little more than a garbled message, magnified by some trick of his fancy into a fleeting reality. He rubbed his eyes, and the impression was gone. But it had been more than enough to alarm him. He raced downstairs and out into the garden, shoeless and wearing only pajama-bottoms under his dressing gown, calling for Lougarry. He might have run across the moor in search of Ragginbone just as he was if the she-wolf hadn’t leaped the low wall and come bounding to meet him. “She’s gone,” he said, dropping to a crouch on a level with her yellow gaze. Unusually, she licked his face, as if to steady him. “I think she’s gone into the past. There’s this picture—it was Alison’s but Fern kept it. I hadn’t realized what it was, the drawing is so minute, but when I looked just now it was a city, like Atlantis might have been, and it was moving. Fetch Ragginbone. She can’t manage alone. We’ve got to help her.” Lougarry licked him again, fixing him with her strangely calming stare. Then she turned, sprang back over the wall, and vanished up the hill toward the moor.

  Indoors, Will dressed, fidgeted, wandered into the kitchen to burn himself some toast. Ragginbone arrived in less than an hour but to Will, shoveling successive pieces of toast-shaped ash into the rubbish-bin, the waiting seemed interminable. They mounted the stairs very softly, hoping not to disturb Robin. “Ah, that picture,” said the Watcher, bending to examine the etching. “I should have studied it more carefully. Stupid of me. Still—who knows?—maybe it’s for the best. The Door is open: even without such a clear passage, she would have found a way. There is always a way, if the heart is sure.” He straightened up, massaging his back, as stiff as the oak-tree he sometimes chose to resemble. “Well, there’s nothing we can do now. She’s gone where we can’t follow. I’m afraid we’re condemned to wait.”

  “Wait?” Will’s face flushed with unexpected anger. “Just wait? B-but—we could go after her, we could help—”

  “No,” Ragginbone said quietly. “We haven’t the Gift. I’ve lost it, and you have yet to find it, if it is there to find. We must stay here.”

  “But the Door’s open!” Will said. “I can feel the picture, pulling me in. I can feel it—”

  “Maybe. But the key calls only to the Gifted. Even if we were allowed to pass we would have no chance of achieving the task, less than none of getting back. And we might be a burden to your sister. She has chosen to go alone because she knows she can act best alone. She showed that in the barn, for all her failure. She has courage, and steadfastness, and luck. What could we give her which is worth more?”

  “But it’s impossible!” Will insisted. “How can she find the key under a tidal wave? How can she lock the Door when it no longer exists? And you said yourself she won’t be able to get back. It’s impossible.”

  “Magic is impossible,” said Ragginbone.

  They went back downstairs to the kitchen and the Watcher dosed Will with sweet tea and prepared impeccable toast. “When will we know?” asked Will. “I mean, if she’s going to get back—somehow— when will she get back?”

  “That, I fear, is the crucial question. When you travel physically in time, there is nothing to hold you to the present, so the moment of your return can be rather imprecise. Although you maintain a certain sympathetic link with the time zone from which you came, it grows more tenuous the longer you stay in the past, and it tends to ignore specific hours and minutes. You might reappear an instant after your departure, even though you had been gone a month. Or a week later, or a year. You might miss the present altogether, and land in the future. It’s all somewhat haphazard.”

  “You’re really cheering me up,” said Will. “I’m beginning to realize why Fern didn’t always trust you.”

  “You should never trust anyone completely,” said Ragginbone, smiling a half-smile which snaked up one side of his face. “Unpredictability is a vital aspect of intelligence.”

  “I wish you’d stop being clever,” Will grumbled. “Look, there must be something we can do. I can’t just sit here . . .”

  “You could pray,” said the Watcher.

  When Robin came down to breakfast Ragginbone had gone. “Fern went out early,” said Will, wearing his customary insouciance as if it had shrunk in the wash. “She said she might be gone all day. She took some sandwiches.” He felt the sandwiches made the story more convincing. Anyway, enough toast had been burned to account for several slices of bread. His father would not have noticed any discrepancy but Mrs. Wicklow, when she arrived, undoubtedly would.

  Robin digested this information along with his desultory breakfast. “Is your sister—” he fished for words “—is she, well, you know, all right?” Will looked genuinely blank. “I mean, not in love or something, is she? All this mooning about—going for walks by herself—she’s never acted like this before.”

  “Of course she’s not in love,” Will said scornfully. Fern, his tone implied, had her failings, but falling in love was not one of them. “She doesn’t moon, either. She’s just . . . thinking a lot. I expect it’s her age. Anyway, people are different in the country. In London, when you go out, you go to somewhere: to the cinema, to the shops, to see your friends. In the country there’s nowhere particular to go to and we don’t have many friends yet, so we go for walks. You should be pleased. It’s awfully healthy.”

  “You must be dreadfully bored,” said Robin, with a revival of his chronic guilt. “Maybe we could invite some of your friends down—”

  “Oh no,” said Will, adding hastily: “There isn’t much point, is there? Not if we’re going to France soon.”

  “Didn’t think you were very keen,” Robin said, accepting the reprieve with mistrust.

  “Well, I don’t know.” Will shrugged, vague before his time, switching moods with teenage unpredictability. “I daresay it would be a good idea. When Fern gets back.”

  “Gets back?” Robin jumped. “How long is this walk going to take?”

  Several millennia, I should think, Will said, but to himself. “I mean, I’ll talk to her when she gets back. Don’t be silly, Dad.”

  Quelled, Robin subsided into a silence punctuated only by his tea, departing presently to read a proposal, study some color-plates, and resort, inevitably, to the telephone. I wish he would go to London, Will thought, sighing over the paradox that his father’s presence, so desirable while he was absent, was now the bane of his life. I wish he would stop worrying. I’ve got enough to worry about, without having to worry about his worrying. I hope to God Fern’s okay . . .

  I wonder if that’s a kind of prayer, hoping to God.

  Just before lunchtime, a shout having elicited no response, Robin went looking for Will to summon him downstairs. He found his son in Fern’s room, staring at the picture on her dressing-table. Will started when he walked in, placing himself in front of the etching, but he was too slender to obscure it completely. “Haven’t I seen that at the gallery?” Robin exclaimed. “It must be the one Javier was looking for. Lost City—he mentioned it at the funeral. Fern must have stumbled on it after all. I’ll give him a call this afternoon. He said he’d be in York this week, visiting clients or artists; I’ve got the number somewhere. At least that’s one thing off my mind.”

  “No!” said Will. “I mean—it can wait, can’t it? What’s the urgency?”

  “Javier wants it back,” said Robin. “It doesn’t belong to us, you know. What’s the fuss about?”

  “I like it,” Will said desperately. “I—I’d like to keep it. Fern likes it.”

  “I suppose I could make him an offer . . .”

  He carried the picture downstairs, depositing it on o
ne of the armchairs in the drawing room. “Rather unusual,” he remarked, “a colored etching. Complicated process. Looks sort of ghostly, doesn’t it? What’s that bit in the middle?”

  “That’s supposed to be the city,” Will said. “It’s done awfully small: I don’t know how he managed it. Don’t stare at it so hard, Dad: you’re going cross-eyed.”

  “Funny thing,” said Robin. “Almost thought it was moving. Some kind of visual trick, I imagine. Clever stuff.” As he turned away his gaze skimmed the room automatically, and the mild anxiety-lines on his brow deepened. “Where’s that statue gone? The one Fern hated so much? Hasn’t put it in the cellar, has she?”

  “Well, no,” Will faltered, groping for a suitable explanation. “I’m afraid . . . it got broken.”

  “Broken? But it was solid stone!” Will, unable to think of any further elaboration, remained prudently silent. “It was an antique,” Robin went on. “Probably pretty valuable. How on earth did it get broken? I know Fern didn’t care for it, but—”

  “Alison did it,” Will said flatly. “I don’t know how, but she did it. The carpet must still be littered with the chips.”

  “Are you sure it was Alison?” Robin said. “I won’t be angry if . . . well, not very. So long as you tell me the truth . . .”