Fair Weather Read online

  THE LILITH

  CHRONICLES

  FAIR WEATHER

  By

  BARBARA GASKELL DENVIL

  Copyright © 2016 by Barbara Gaskell Denvil

  All Rights Reserved, no part of this book may be

  Reproduced without prior permission of the author

  except in the case of brief quotations and reviews

  Cover design by

  EVM

  For

  Sylvia

  Table of contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  ChapterForty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter FiftyFour

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Other Books

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Like the Marquis de Sade, Winnie the Pooh and many others, I had my own secret place to go to.

  But escapism is not always so easy. The mind does not always create an escape into joy or sunshine. Mine wasn’t a happy place, no shining pool for lotus dreaming nor garden of perfumes. Yet I slid often into its shadows, asleep or awake, when life’s expected attractions failed all their promises. Then my secret world sucked me in. I had not invented it for pleasure or meditative snooze. It had invented itself. Ever since I was born it had been there, whispering at me from the back of my head. Secrets, and my secret place, were in the background of all my daily routines. Sometimes, cuddled alone in my small bed, I heard voices. I smelled, when least expecting it, the stench of mould, of dirt, blood, sweat, and putrefaction. Believing them dreams, sometimes I even feared my bed. Of course, they weren’t dreams at all but I didn’t realise that at the time.

  The haunting of my imagination turned me, once I grew old enough to choose, into a writer of sorts. But it took me a long time before I understood.

  Every reader, in some small sense, writes the book he is reading. Now I, the author, found I was being written by the book I was writing. Perhaps I had been unwise to set my new novel in medieval London’s dark alleys. I soon recognised my own nightmares. Perhaps I had always known there were greater threats to come.

  It wasn’t always ugly. Now when I slept, I wandered the forest paths that looked down from their clearings onto the sprawl of ancient London and its shining ribbon river. The girl I saw there was very young, with huge grey eyes like bruises in a small narrow face and she was a lot more scared of me than I was of her. The woods around her were sun spangled. No conifers darkened the leaf flutter. Oaks, hazels and beeches entwined arms over gentle rises of moss, flower sprigged and mulched in old tangles of root and briar, raggy fern and many autumn’s rotted leaf fall. The scuffle of small animals crept deep as I passed. It was not a peaceful place but it was beautiful. How could I know then, that this distant past would one day be my home and that I would love it as I had never loved another?

  The girl was just a child that first time I saw her, a bedraggled waif, wretchedly thin. She was sitting on a stone amongst the bracken. Her feet were bleeding. I thought she had probably walked a long way and I knew she was hungry.

  That particular night I stood in the shadows and smelled the cool pungency of damp bark. Because I was asleep, I did not expect her to see me. Then she looked up and stared straight into my face for a moment. She gasped, her eyes widened and her hands twisted into the threadbare wool of her cloak. I smiled, to reassure her. She thought I was a ghost. I left her still running through the forest and I woke to a winter’s midnight and the sudden call of an owl outside my bedroom window. I was sweating but my nose above the quilt’s feather embrace felt like ice.

  For the next two weeks I took my laptop into the kitchen where it was warmer. I even baked bread, not to eat but to breathe in the scent of security and modern affluence. I shoved the instant powder onto a back shelf and unearthed the espresso machine from its bubble wrap, surrounding myself with reminders of success, machinery, and the conveniences of twenty-first century life. So I banished insecurities and continued writing. As proof of confidence, I forwarded the first pages to my agent. He sent me back an optimistic deadline. Then everything started to go wrong.

  My divorce was finalised as I began chapter five. I expected a further relaxation of the night terrors and at first daytimes seemed less stressful. Even the weather improved and lurking soft sunbeams hurried out from their late January clouds, burning the shadows sharp edged. The snow drops along the roadsides nodded and I nodded back. The first few early lambs in the fields, black nosed fluff dots across the Cotswolds, nuzzled complacent mothers, discovering after all that life had been worth the agonies of birth.

  But instead of dissipating, my night time hauntings darkened. Children crept from the shadows, begging help, whispering of starvation, and of worse. Someone else made his own shadow. He was very tall and very dark, so that I could not tell which was shadow and which was man. When he spoke, his voice was cold and so soft, I understood no words.

  Now frightened by the nightmare intensity, I abandoned my book, thinking instead to write a romantic comedy, a Victorian frivolity, a modern adventure. Of course it was too late. My characters were already writing me. Medieval London had drawn me in and I had finally discovered that my secret place, so familiar after nearly thirty years of lurking in its unnamed alleyways, had always been perfectly real.

  A few nights later I saw the girl again, though she was a little older now with the pinched face of growing maturity trapped in still fragile youth. She was crying. Someone was bending over her but I still did not see him clearly as once again his shadow preceded him. He was dressed in deepest red and dust-hung black. His hair was shoulder length and very dark, straggled and probably unwashed. I couldn’t see his face. He was talking to the girl and she seemed comforted by what he said. To me, he seemed a threat.

  I knew she sat hunched over the kitchen table. There was no food and the barn-like room was cold. The frost swept under the door; the wind rattling and squealing into the
dirty straw within. She rested her face on her crossed wrists and I felt her little cold bones beneath my own cheek. I felt the soft dampness of her tears on my own fingers. She sat on a rough wooden stool and I felt it wobble beneath me. I also felt her hunger; a pain so violent that I shuddered. When she looked up at the man who spoke, I knew her hope and her trust.

  As it was with me, so it was with them. Winter, and the bitter wind that blew through their draughty windows seemed to be the same gale that blew down my valley with the same angry whine and glowering cloud. There was no fuel for their fire. But the man was untouched by weather and his hunger was just a passing inconvenience to him. As I woke, the faded pink roses on my bedroom walls transposed over the dream’s bleak grey, and for the first time I heard him speak.

  “There is nothing,” I heard him say. “Perhaps tomorrow I will find something. Patience, child. I shall do my best.” His voice was as soft as the leaves on the wind, but quite clear. It haunted me for the rest of the day.

  I was barely out of my pyjamas when Bertie turned up. Divorcing him hadn’t really got rid of him at all. What he said had rarely ever made much sense but it made none at all to me now. I was still lost in dream fragments.

  “She won’t let me stay,” he was saying. “Well, honestly, that’s gratitude for you. But when it comes down to it, better over and done with. So, what about it then, sweetie? Molly, are you listening? You wouldn’t mind, would you?”

  Behind Bertie’s rambling clichés the other man’s voice echoed, soft and insistent. He said he’d do his best but there was something wrong, some inherent danger in his words. I said, “But you never really do your best. Or your best isn’t enough.”

  Bertie stared at me. “What the devil are you talking about now Mol? Going off your head, I daresay. Always thought you would. Writers are all part balmy to start off with.”

  He brought modern reality bumping into garish focus. “Sorry.” I wished he’d go away. “I was thinking of something else. I’m busy. Can’t all this wait until another day?”

  “No, it damned well can’t. Want me to sleep on the street? It might even snow tonight.” He glared at me.

  I suddenly realised what he’d been saying. “You want the spare room? But we only got our decree nisi ten days ago. We’re officially divorced. Honestly Bertie, I thought you were staying with the skinny one with red hair.”

  “Juliette. No, she was last month. This one’s blonde. Buxom Paula. But she chucked me out last night. Says I snore. Well, O.K., a bit more than that. We had sort of an argument. I suppose you could say we more or less split up.”

  “Well, you can’t stay here. I couldn’t bear it. Bertie dear, I divorced you for a reason.”

  “Just a couple of nights on the sofa, then? Until I find a rental.”

  “I’m a spinster again, Bertie. It wouldn’t be proper. And spinster is such a beautiful word. I’ve fallen in love with it.”

  Bertie moved his suitcases into the hall after lunch and I disappeared into the kitchen with the laptop. I sat there over the blank screen and the man’s voice from my dream repeated over and over in my brain. “There is nothing. Perhaps tomorrow. Patience, child. I shall do my best.” I had no idea what it meant but I couldn’t get it out of my head. The voice was deep and low and very soft. I thought he had meant to be kind. But he wasn’t a man to whom kindness came naturally.

  Chapter Two

  Bertie was on the sofa with his big stubby toes sticking out from the end of the blanket. I was upstairs, snuggled in my feather bed with two hot water bottles and my nose under the quilt so I could warm my face with my own breath.

  But I was also somewhere else. I was someone else too. Sometimes I forgot which one was the dream. Even before I slept, I could feel her. The girl was alive inside me, or perhaps I was alive inside her. She was many years younger and lived hundreds of years in the past, and yet we were merging. Fantasy or lunacy, whatever it was, it was far more vivid than any imagination and whether she dreamed me or I dreamed her, I was becoming more than myself. And I found I was loving the girl. She was far sweeter than me. So sometimes I stopped struggling and without thought to madness and danger, slipped entirely into her mind. I knew her story.

  It was my story now. Asleep or awake, I could remember her memories and tell the tale of her life as if it was my life. But there was no ‘once upon a time’ and I did not expect any happy ending. And the story began on the day when this other me first came into her world. My world!

  ……

  The devil spat fire when I was born and my father was fried there in the field where he stood, like they burn heretics in the north. After the lightening that struck him and the thunder that threw him down, the rain came and his blackened body was soaked and all the terrible charring was washed away, so that when my poor mother came out to look for him and saw him curled there peacefully between the tall wheaten fronds, she thought he had fallen asleep, poor soul, and could not believe at first that he was dead.

  Then shock sent her gasping onto her knees and I was born there amongst the half gathered harvest, all wet and mud spattered beside my father’s corpse.

  She died of the belly worm when I was ten but she was worn out long before then, poor dear. Our Lord Rulfston took back our quarter virgate after he’d arranged for her burial in the churchyard, so then I set off walking for London. I doubt if the Master bothered looking for me, or even proclaimed me a runaway serf, for I could never have tilled those two strips of land on my own. He would have taken me into the big house, just another scullery brat and another useless mouth to feed.

  It was a fine long walk and took me about a month. Late spring was bright in the hedgerows when I arrived. I’d never seen such a host of people. London was as impressive as I had expected. The river was grand and busy with boats and the markets bustled with good smells and colour and noise. Then I met Vespasian. It is nearly six years now that he has looked after me.

  To run away and to head to the great city is a thing that seems to answer its own questions. If you have no life, then you go to where there is the most life of all, and that’s what I did. Arriving was no disappointment but I had neither plan nor friend and no idea what to do and where to go. The great London Bridge seemed a marvellous creation; lined with shops and houses and gates, a walkway built like a castle with slabs of solid stone replacing the old wooden platforms which had washed away. It was here I found my first bed on the bank with a stone pillar at my back. It was mighty damp and reeking of shit, the bloated corpses of animals and stagnant slime around the bases of the bridge’s arches – no meaty market smells here – and the effluent came sodden and thick down the drain runnels into the river just a few feet downstream. But I had my mother’s cloak to wrap around me and my own little hemp mantle for a pillow. I could curl my bare toes up under my tunic and sleep like a swan with its head tucked under its wing.

  I had loved the woods, walking from the West Country to London. The king’s woodland was not all trees but also copses and clearings, open pasture and soft meadowland, heath, scrub and stream. I had kept away from the main thoroughfares with oxcarts making huge ruts in the mud, filled with spring rain and heaps of ox droppings steaming in the sun’s reflections. Instead I’d kept to the country lanes and the paths between orchards and fields of buttercups. Once I saw a ghost in the forest and I ran, but nothing followed me, and perhaps there was no ghost after all, just the shadows of the birds.

  Then the city was exciting and I knew great things would come to pass. I could make my fortune, or marry a baron, for it was in London that anything could happen.

  I ate little for those first days. A few pear trees across the river had hard little fruits not yet ripe which gave me a belly cramp, but a flap of three nuns heading for the convent of The Little Sisters of Angelica out on the northern rise, stopped when I went begging and gave me a whole silver penny, not even cut, and almost too beautiful to spend.

  About a week after I arrived and while I was still l
iving under the bridge, Plantagenet John was crowned as king and, following the crowds just as if I had been invited to the ceremony myself, I saw him walk to Westminster Abbey under his bright cloth of gold canopy, his barons behind and around him. His nose was long and his shoulders narrow but he walked with a confident swagger and stared down that long nose at the world around him. The people cheered him though I heard some mutter under their breath once he passed. It was in the confusion and push of the crowd that I met Vespasian. He was stealing the purse of one of the minor nobles at the end of the procession. He saw me watch him and smiled. He was the first person who had smiled at me in such a long time and I thought it such a lovely smile.

  I have never seen the king again for he is mostly abroad, fighting to keep his French provinces, and failing constantly they say. Now they call him Softsword and laugh behind his back. It was King Richard they called hero, though he saw even less of the country he was king of, and never even learned to speak our common language. It’s the crusading blood they cheered him for, but now it’s all spilled and his little brother John sits on a throne far too big for his skinny arse.

  But now Vespasian is my life and kings and barons and great far off lands do not interest me in the least. Vespasian has taught me my living. I can cut a purse and disappear into the shadows as easily as the scruffy black rats that crawl out from the thatch at night to steal food if they can find any, and will nibble at our toes if we are not careful. Vespasian says I am the best thief of all of us, though it is Isabel whom he takes into his corner bed to sleep with and caress. He does not know I am in love with him. He calls me a child, and that is how he sees me for I was just ten years old when he found me, all bones I suppose, like a scarecrow half stuffed. But now at sixteen I am at least three years past marriageable age and the king’s wife was just fourteen when she became queen. Isabel is prettier than I and she is about nineteen, though she isn’t sure because, like all of us, she has no parents, though at least I know my birth week and she does not. Because she is beautiful and because she is older, she looks like a real lady and wears her hair up with a chin band and toque. I still feel like a country brat, with my hair long and loose but it is golden brown and when I wash it at one of the bathhouses, it shines and has little curls down my back. All the boys are in love with Isabel, though Richard, named for the late king, God rest his soul, says it is me he wants. This is small compensation, for Richard is just fifteen years old and has red hair which is an evil sign even though the king’s hair is almost red too. Kings are permitted what is quite shocking for the common folk, but secretly I think it is an evil sign for kings as well.