February 13 — Saint Valentine’s Eve
I can sit up now without getting dizzy. The lump on my temple’s no bigger than a goose egg, and my brain no longer feels as though it’s been borrowed for a game of croquet. Tomorrow is a feast day, so I shall walk myself to the Cellar, the Cellar and the Folk. Mrs. Bains, who is my jailor (but says she is the housekeeper), has ordered me to stay in bed some days longer. But she doesn’t know Corinna Stonewall!
How improved I am from the night of the hounds, when I awoke to the taste of blood, my own small sea of water and salt. The infinite weight of my eyelids pressed me into darkness, but small sounds rose all around. The crunch of stone, the sound of striking flint, a chorus of soft, quick sighs.
“I warned Corin about the Hill Hounds.” It was Finian’s voice, but very strange, like a bead rattling down a metal cone into the shell of my ear. “I should also have told him they’re susceptible to the power of The Last Word.”
The Last Word? Could it work against the Hill Hounds? I tried to speak, but the furniture of my mind had all been rearranged, my words neatly folded and stored out of sight.
“He’s stirring!” said Sir Edward.
Yellow light swam through the tissue of my eyelids. I squinted them open.
Tall shadows stood behind the torchlight; panting shadows slid about their feet. “Silver eyes!” said Sir Edward. “He has silver eyes in the dark.”
“Corin!” said Finian as my eyes began to slide closed. “Don’t slip away again. Remember, you owe me a Conviction!”
“A what?” said Sir Edward.
“It’s our secret,” said Finian.
The moon still hung in the branches; loose stones pressed into my back. Everything was so very rocky here. The torchlight leaned closer; one of the shadows knelt and turned into white lace and black satin.
“At least they’ve not killed you!” said Sir Edward.
I found at last the place my words began. “I must tend to the Folk!”
“Don’t trouble yourself about the Folk,” said Finian.
“Never say that!” said Sir Edward.
The Finian shadow also knelt and turned itself into enormous fingers, which began very gently to feel my head.
“Where’s my Folk Bag?”
“I have it here.” Finian found the lump and hissed in sympathy. “Ouch! You’ll have a headache for a week. Why did you go walking about? I told you about the Hill Hounds.”
I smelled the salt spray in his hair. “The Last Word works against them?”
“You’ve been eavesdropping!” said Finian. “It’s actually a family secret for which I should charge you a Conviction. But I’ll give it to you free, as an apology for lingering so long on the beach. Yes, you can control our hounds with The Last Word, but mind you, they can be very fierce.”
“So can I,” I said, although it was hard to feel fierce on the long journey to the Manor. It comes back to me now as a jumble of pain sliced with a few vivid memories. A brisk, bossy voice saying Finian might carry me. A sickening surge as my head left the ground. Infinite tiny jolts over those infinite stones.
I bit at the inside of my mouth and squeezed my eyes shut, and all the while the owner of the bossy voice was urging Finian to be careful. “The boy weighs no more than a chicken, Mrs. Bains,” he said, irritated at last. “I shan’t drop him.”
There were more voices then, and the heat and light of many candles. I opened my eyes to a press of faces. Servants in powdered wigs, Sir Edward’s deep blue eyes, Finian’s wild-winged eyebrows. At the corners of his eyes were little lines from squinting. Mrs. Bains, not brisk and angular like her voice, but with a great white biscuit of a face, stuck with two black currants.
Someone poured something nasty in my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but a salt-spray hand wouldn’t let me. The stuff burned down my throat and set a fire in my head.
A sludge of time oozed by until Mrs. Bains tried to undress me. Oh, then I came to life again, shouting, biting, kicking, striking something too solid to be Mrs. Bains.
“The boy’s wild!” said Finian. “Let him be.” And somehow, there I was, fully dressed, between the starched and mangled sheets shouting, “I need my shears!” Was my hair growing? They mustn’t know it grows so fast.
“He’s wandering,” said Mrs. Bains. “I’ll bring him a sleeping draught.”
“I won’t sleep!” I cried, for it is only then my hair grows.
Finian wrapped my arms around my Folk Bag. “Everything you brought is safe here.”
“I still won’t sleep!”
I didn’t, either, although I could not quite stay awake. I was caught in a dim, cobwebbed place, my mind helpless against apprehension, fears breeding freely and multiplying.
I remember those days as a series of separate sketches. Finding myself lying on the dressing-room carpet for some reason, looking through the legs of the rosewood dressing stand. My memory is etched with an image of Cardomy Castle painted on the washing-up basin. And they had actually gilded the chamber pot!
Leaning against pillows, seeing my reflection in the mirror opposite. Broad, flat cheekbones, huge eyes set at a slant, a gray-yellow bruise on my temple, my hair grown a bit during unguarded fits of sleep.
Opening my eyes, thinking I’d been quite awake, but seeing that Finian had magically appeared. “Sleep, Corin. I’ll save you from an attack of the Mrs. Bains!”
Rummaging in my Folk Bag during one lucid moment. It was undisturbed. I still had the candles, the tinderbox, this Record and my bit of writing lead, all properly wrapped in oilcloth. Also the bits and crusts of bread and the smoked meat from that Mainland tavern. Out came the shears, off came the hair, back I went to dandelion fuzz. I dragged myself to the fireplace and tossed in the cuttings. There was a bright flare and sizzle, the acrid smell of burning hair, and I was safe once more.
Almost safe. Once I am in the Cellar, proving myself indispensable to the safety of Marblehaugh Park, they’ll never send me away. I will be safe then, absolutely safe.
February 14 — Feast of Saint Valentine
At last I am where I belong. It is still early morning, but I have already been on a long journey. It was raining when I awoke, and very dark. The grand staircase forked from itself at the landing and met itself in the great hall below. The sconces were unlit. I made my way down by a thin, watery starlight.
It should be easy for a Folk Keeper to sink to the Cellar, water finding its own level. But the Manor was tricky, sending me down corridors, round corners, with nothing but more corridors and corners ahead. There came finally the sound of someone laying a fire.
My feet followed my ears, past a half-dozen doorways breathing cold sighs on my shoulders, to a doorway through which hundreds of eyes shone from bodiless heads. There was a deer with branching antlers; a fox with bright, sad eyes; a fish longer than I, smiling grimly.
Guns and loud bangs, Finian had said. An amusement worthy of a lord.
Then another, most peculiar trophy. My eye glanced over a tall-backed chair to a mirror above the mantle. In the glass was reflected Sir Edward’s face. His lips opened. “Come in.”
The fire crackled; a glow slid round the chair and along the walls, illuminating other trophies. Here were the bodies without heads. Some I recognized — that shaggy skin was surely a bear! — but what could that enormous blue-black one have been? What about that silvery skin, the size of a small goat, or a large dog?
“That will do,” said Sir Edward, and the person lighting the fire shuffled round the chair and into sight.
Such a face I have never seen. One side of his mouth opened, stretched, smiled as mouths do, addressed me as Master Corin and said he was at my disposal. The other side was frozen, and the terrible paralysis didn’t stop there but ran up his face and into his eye, trapping it neither open nor shut. It must have been difficult to lay the fire, for his left arm hung limp at his side.
I knew him at once: the Folk Keeper before me. Old Francis.
He had not grown old, he had been made old.
“Breakfast is not laid until seven o’clock,” he added. The words fell from his stiff mouth like wooden blocks between us.
“I don’t eat,” I said, which is not quite what I meant, but close enough to the truth. “I’m looking for the way to the Cellar.”
“Old Francis will show you,” said Sir Edward, rising at last, his mirror image turning into flesh and blood as he, too, appeared around the chair. He clapped sharply. “Come, lads. Liquorice, Honeycomb, make your apologies to Master Corin.”
Two hounds slid past Sir Edward and sat at my feet, fawning in the contemptible way of dogs. Their heads rose past my waist; their eyes were yellow, their ears red.
“They won’t attack once they know you,” said Sir Edward. “Sniff him well, lads, take good note of our new Folk Keeper.”
I lifted my hands from the hounds’ warm breathing. I hid my fright, I think, hid how my heart leapt like a rabbit and staggered against the bony walls of my chest. “You didn’t tell me you keep Hill Hounds.”
“Finian likes to call them so,” said Sir Edward. “But he also likes to exaggerate. Their ancestors bred with our hounds, and this generation is rather less than more of the Otherfolk.”
But I wasn’t sure. I remembered the savage melancholy of their voices. I remembered they are subject to the power of The Last Word.
“They’re still wonderfully fierce,” said Sir Edward. “See here.” To my astonishment, he drew a pair of gloves from his pocket and flung them onto the carpet. “At it, lads!”
The hounds leapt upon them, savaging them silently. It seemed such a waste of good gloves, just as putting gold coins on Lord Merton’s dead eyes had also seemed a waste, when coppers would have done just as well.
A third hound came to stand by me, as though to replace the others. He was very old, with a grizzled muzzle and watery eyes. “Fall off, Taffy,” said Sir Edward. “You’ve no need to apologize.” The dog lay down, very stiff in the hindquarters.
“It is a feast day,” I said. “I cannot delay finding the Cellar.” It was already eleven minutes past six.
“Old Francis knows the way well enough,” said Sir Edward, which seemed rather cruel, but Old Francis merely bowed and said he’d be honored to escort me.
I could have found it on my own if I’d known to follow the smell of baking bread. The Cellar stairs were just outside the Kitchens. But Old Francis shuffled dutifully before me, then lit a candle from another candle, burning opposite the Cellar door. “This one’s always kept burning. Our Folk Keepers sometimes need to reach the Cellar in a hurry.”
The Cellar seemed like an old friend, although I was just now meeting it for the first time. The light from my taper illuminated the familiar rounded ceiling, the familiar wooden barrels — port, wine, brandy — the familiar whitewashed walls. The inner Cellar was smaller still, smelling damp and deep. Now I was home! I pressed my hand to the walls, felt the familiar homey chill, and also something peculiar etched into the stone.
I shone my light about. The walls were broken by words carved over and over again.
Over and over, they said the same thing:
Poor Rona: take pity on her.
Poor Rona: take pity on her.
Poor Rona: take pity on her.
Again and again. Poor Rona. Perhaps the Lady Rona was more than a boat. Not even the most clever boat built by Finian could have written these words. How long had it taken this mysterious woman? Months? Years? What did she use? A nail?
I touched my own necklet of nails.
The carvings had been made long ago, for they’d been whitewashed over, and the whitewash was not recent. But you could see them easily when you knew to look.
Poor Rona. I felt sorry for her, whoever she was. But her passion to make her mark on these Cellar walls must have been a great inconvenience to the Folk Keeper.
The curving top of the Folk Door reached the middle of my forehead. Its crosswise bands of iron were clean and free of rust, likewise the hasps and handle. Not that it matters. The Folk will resist passing the sign of the cross, whether rusted or no.
I laid bits of old bread and biscuit in a circle before opening the Folk Door. Inside the circle, I would be safe. The Folk cannot cross a circle of bread, the Bread of Life. I left my candles and tinderbox in my Folk Bag, for Old Francis had given me a whole candle! I set the smoked meat in front of the Folk Door, then opened it a crack. And there came something I’d never felt in the Rhysbridge Home, a hum of dark energy shivering from behind the Door. It must be a strong energy to reach me in the Cellar, for the Folk would have to have drawn far back into the Caverns where my light could not shine.
I was not afraid. I am never afraid.
I have finished writing. I will soon snuff my candle and release the Folk from the Caverns. My thoughts float above ground, first to a room of shining eyes, then sail out to sea, to the boat ride with Finian. He said he would take me sailing again. I feel almost sorry I haven’t the time.
The darkness is stirring behind the Door. The Folk are straining at the boundaries of my candlelight. I shall put it out now and meet the Folk of Marblehaugh Park.