Free The Greenstone Grail by Jan Siegel Page A

the river again, only this time there was a face beneath the water, and rippled sunlight flowing over it, but he knew it wasn’t drowned. Then back to the cloaked man, raising his arm, and a sudden blaze of fire, fire in the chapel, fire in the wood – and lastly, for no reason that Bartlemy could understand, a shingle beach in the drear light of a winter’s morning, and the ebb and surge of grey waves, and a man who seemed to have come out of the water, wearing a hood that covered his entire head.
    Bartlemy rose from his chair: he had used few crystals, and he assumed the visions were over. ‘There is a pattern here,’ he told Hoover, ‘if only I could see it. Possibly the shadows that hounded Annie are connected to the Grimthorn Grail – but they pursued her
to
this place, not from it, and the Grail has not been here for nearly a century. Who sent them – if they were sent – and how? Such a sending would take power. Josevius Grimthorn is long dead; could his influence live on?’
    Hoover made a soft sound in his throat, almost a growl, and Bartlemy, who had bent to unblock the chimney, glancedback into the smoke. It was already thinning, but for a few seconds he saw another image there, too dim to identify, a woman with grey hair in a bun, leaning forward over a shallow basin full of some cloudy liquid, and briefly, very briefly, looking up at the woman, out of the basin, a reflection that he knew was his own face.
    For an instant his placidity vanished: he spoke one word, and the smoke was scattered into wisps which fled into every corner of the room. ‘Careless!’ he apostrophized himself. ‘I do these things so rarely – I never much liked conjuring – but there’s no excuse for such a slip.’ He removed the screen from the flue, and the smoke sneaked out. Then he took a bottle out of a cupboard – a bottle that was grimed with age rather than dirt, like something retrieved from a shipwreck – unstoppered the neck, and poured himself a very small glass, hardly more than a thimbleful. The liquor was almost black and it smelled darkly fruity and overpoweringly alcoholic. Bartlemy sat down again to savour it.
    Hoover raised his head hopefully.
    ‘No you can’t,’ said his master. ‘You know it won’t agree with you. Well, well. Euphemia Carlow … Where does she fit in, I wonder? Time was when her kind were happy to curdle the milk with a look and cure warts for a farthing, but now … the world changes. Still, she must always have known what I am, or guessed. She’s no fool, if less wise than she wishes to appear. Let’s hope that what she has seen will be a warning to her. Curiosity is no good for either cats or witches.’
    In April, Nathan turned thirteen. ‘You were a spring baby,’ Annie recalled. ‘You came with the swallows.’
    ‘I thought it was supposed to be a stork,’ Nathan said with mock innocence.
    Annie laughed.
    Michael had bought a boat, not an inflatable with an outboard motor but a twenty-six-foot sailboat which he said he would take down to the sea from time to time. He had done quite a bit of sailing when he was younger, he explained, and a boat this size he could handle on his own. For Nathan’s birthday he offered to take him, George and Hazel downriver, weather permitting. Nathan was obviously thrilled at the idea and Annie suppressed a tiny pang, which she knew to be unworthy, that he preferred an excursion without her. ‘Why don’t you come?’ Michael had said, but Annie declined.
    ‘I get seasick.’
    ‘On a river?’
    ‘I get seasick on a bouncy castle.’
    At the last moment Nathan said he would forgo the treat, he wanted to spend a family day after all, but Annie, undeceived, dealt summarily with that. She saw them all off around noon, sweater-clad and life-jacketed for the sea-going part of their trip, and then returned to Thornyhill with Bartlemy. A suitable birthday cake had been prepared, and the sailors had wrapped several slices in foil to take with