Saxon's Bane (3 page)

A
T SOME DEEP
, unconscious level Fergus knew that Kate was dead, long before they told him, but her death was part of the plot of this fictional world into which he had woken. You go to work one morning and you wake up in a living nightmare of fevered wrongness where you’re weighed down by plaster casts and trapped in a spider’s web of traction weights, a world of ritual indignity where you can’t even piss without help.

There had been days he would remember only as jumbled fragments of time, less ordered than the flashes of passing fluorescent lights as his trolley was wheeled along. There were glimpses of faces behind surgical masks, faces that made no eye contact as he lay passive at the focus of their urgency. Otherwise his existence was bounded by the starched comfort of fresh linen, and hanging drips delivering the blessed relief of morphine.

There came a day when a doctor stood by his bed, talking softly, watching Fergus’s face as he delivered the leaden fact that Kate died ‘at the scene’, but the knowledge was already there. It seeped out of a place his mind avoided without even acknowledging its existence. Fergus stared back, unable to respond, wondering if the doctor would interpret his lack of reaction as callousness. Kate’s death was part of this new world of waking dreams. She still lived in the other reality, the reality of sharp confidence, of sales targets and business objectives, the reality to which he also belonged and to which he must return. He managed a blank nod of acknowledgement, going along with the fiction that was fact and the fact that was fiction.

The police came, probing his memories, reaching into the fog. Yes, he and Kate were colleagues. His mind started to drift and they let him ramble.

“Kate. She becomes Katherine in front of customers, you know? Cool, professional. She charms them.”

“You fancied her, didn’t you?”

“Of course I fancy her. What man wouldn’t? But she won’t let a bloody good team be spoilt by a relationship. She’s ace, really ace, good enough to sell well even without her looks, but they sure help.” He stared up at the ceiling, smiling at a memory. “ She has –
had
– a way of tossing her hair out of her eyes in mid-conversation, as if she’s a bit irritated by it, like she’s throwing aside her femininity, but somehow that makes her seem even more sexy, you know? Sometimes the buying signals start right then.”

But a man can dream. You never stop noticing a woman like Kate.

“Mister Sheppard? Fergus?”

Had he slept for a moment?

“Can you tell us what you remember?”

“There was a traffic jam.” A horn-blasting, expletivespitting gridlock. That bit was clear. “We were late for a meeting, an important one. Tried a back road over the Downs.”

“And was Kate driving fast?”

More fragments of memory solidified in his head. Rain flattened by the slipstream.

“Kate’s a good driver. Was.” He hadn’t meant to sound defensive.

“Sure, but what speed were you doing?”

Fergus looked towards the place his mind avoided. There was something dark in there that he did not want to find, so he stayed on the edges, peering in, fearful.

“We swerved.” But it can’t have happened then. Working the GPS had given him a chance to admire the way her legs angled over the seat. GPS. He remembered the icon of a village. Allingley.

“Take your time.”

“Leaves. Wind.” And a road that curved down into the trees as if diving into the earth. Fergus could not force his mind around that corner. A horror lurked there. His memory disintegrated at that point like a damaged videotape. Losing patience, the police prompted him with what they knew. The marks by the roadside suggested high speed as the car left the road. They’d hit a tree, and tumbled further down the hill. The wreckage had been found some hours later by a couple on horseback, with Kate already dead at the wheel. They said that the emergency services had a difficult job to cut them free. The policemen placed slight emphasis on the plural ‘them’, watching him as if they were testing his knowledge of something which might trigger some extreme emotion. Fergus stared back, unsure what reaction they had expected. The facts they related were part of this new play in which he was acting. It was as if he had woken up in the middle of the first act and they were bringing him up to date on some of the lines he’d missed, but skipping others.

Fergus wasn’t curious. He was relieved that they’d stopped trying to push him round the corner, but he wished that this new reality would go away.

“V
ISITOR FOR YOU.”

Fergus stared at the woman left standing by his bed as the nurse turned away. The woman was dressed in jeans and a short, well-worn, waterproof jacket that gave off an acrid, farmyard smell. She clasped a small posy of dried flowers in front of her; a dusty, fragile clump of orange too untidy to be shop-bought. He pulled his face into a half-smile, aware that his blank look might be rude.

“Hello.” She spoke in the familiar tone of someone who already knew him, as if they already shared some history that needed no explanation. His puzzlement must have shown.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” Her voice had the slight rural burr of middle England. He shook his head as she pulled up a chair.

“Sorry.”

“I’m Eadlin.”

The name meant nothing. Eadlin’s smile was wide and confident, stretching freckles over her cheeks to give her a wholesome, polished-apple look. Her face was very slightly plump as if there was too much life inside to fit within the skin, the way a woman can look in the bloom of pregnancy. As she sat, Fergus flicked a glance downwards to where her anorak gaped open but there was no bulge to her belly. Early to midthirties, red hair, grey eyes, quite attractive. Whoever Eadlin was, he was glad she’d come. Her eyes held a gentle but intense focus, like some of the doctors, although he sensed she looked beyond the outward symptoms. More priestess than physician, perhaps.

Freckles. Some echo started to tug at the fabric of his memory, pulling at a corner of his mind that was hidden, and forcing him to acknowledge it. Fergus recoiled from that place, smothering the line of thinking before the nightmare could inhale its first scream.

“I found you. And your poor friend.” Eadlin spoke matter-of-factly, reaching to put the dried flowers into an empty plastic water cup. “And if you don’t remember maybe it’s for the best. I brought you some flowers. Dried ones, I’m afraid, there’s not much blooming at this time of year. Midsummer marigolds; they’re supposed to be good for healing.”

She talked on, filling the silence with sound. Fergus muttered his appreciation for the flowers, wishing he could think of something intelligent to say, and fearing his quietness might be ungracious.

“I heard you was out of Intensive Care. They wouldn’t let me see you before, not being family, like.”

“You’re one of the riders.” He had finally found his voice. The smell must be horses. “The police told me I was found by riders.”

“That’s right. Me an’ Jake. He thought you was both dead. Luckily me and the ambulance men thought otherwise.”

Jake. Another rip in the fabric. It was like trying to hold disintegrating curtains together against the daylight.

“So how are you feeling?”

“Actually I’m not feeling much at all at the moment.” Fergus wiggled his fingertips at her from within their plaster casts, trying to keep the demons at bay with a joke.

“That’s a bummer.” Eadlin smiled at him again, with more humour than sentiment, but the smile was making the curtains in his mind crumble away. He replied unthinkingly, outrageously, anything to hold his head together.

“That’s another thing I can’t do for myself at the moment. Wipe my own bum.” Fergus screwed up his face, becoming agitated within his restraints as he tried to keep his thoughts away from the mess. A fading voice of reason told him that he was being gross to a stranger.

“Are you all right?” Eadlin put her hand on his arm above the plaster cast, in a touch that was disconcertingly familiar, and the sudden look of concern on her face ripped apart the final shreds of fabric in his mind. As the memories flooded back he squirmed in the bed, eyes staring at horrors only he could see. Traction equipment jangled around him with noisy irrelevance as he writhed.

“Nurse!” Her shout was urgent, bringing help running.

Minutes later, as the injected sedative took hold, Fergus saw her leave. In the moment of clarity before oblivion he realised he hadn’t even tried to thank her.

F
ERGUS DROVE A
long detour so as to arrive in Allingley from the south, avoiding the road over the Downs. He wasn’t yet ready for that road, not on his first outing in four months. He drove with white-knuckle caution, ignoring the tailback of cars stacking up behind him as he eased around the corners, palms slick with sweat against the leather of the steering wheel. As the road rose towards Allingley there was a straight stretch where a youth in an ageing Ford overtook noisily and gave him the finger as he passed.

Fergus pulled into the side of the road where a church and a cluster of houses around a green told him he had reached the village centre. His hands were shaking as he exhaled and turned off the engine, resting his head forward against the wheel, eyes closed, absorbing the sense of achievement. Life advanced in minuscule increments, a progression of milestones marking banal achievements. Get in car. Solo. Turn ignition. Drive from A to B without crashing or disintegrating into a gibbering wreck by the roadside. If he’d learned one thing in the past four months, it was to keep facing the pain, keep pushing. Pain is an obstacle not a boundary.

Fergus opened the car door to the air, staying seated for a moment to let the daffodil chill of an English spring flood the interior and cool his sweat before he pulled himself upright. He dragged his crutches out of the back and braced himself against the car while he took in his surroundings. A warm tide of blood flowed back into his legs as they adjusted to the new position. Being out and on his own, with no watching nurse or physiotherapist, made him feel vulnerable.

So far, so good. First test passed. He could still handle driving a car. Now to find the woman. Fergus cringed at the thought of his reaction when she’d come to visit him. He owed her his thanks, at least, but the only clues he had were that she was called Eadlin and rode a horse. That probably meant she lived nearby, and Allingley was the only village anywhere near to the crash.

Superficially it looked a picture-book English village. ‘Unspoilt’, the guide books would say, despite the Forge Garage and its collection of sick cars at the edge of the green. ‘Deathly quiet’ would be the verdict of anyone looking for any sort of night out, except a trip to the pub. The village stores had the same air of struggling optimism as the ‘Vacancies’ sign swinging under the ‘Bed and Breakfast’ board of a nearby cottage. Next to Fergus the church notice board announced Sunday service times in peeling paint, alongside a new poster in big, colourful letters inviting the village to ‘Worship With Us In Holy Week’.

It looked like the kind of place where the locals would make it their business to know everyone else’s. Already net curtains had twitched in a couple of the cottage windows as residents watched the stranger. A pub would be the place to start. Landlords knew their neighbourhoods and were professional talkers. On the opposite side of the green, a pub sign with a white, richly-antlered stag and a coat of arms swung outside the ‘White Hart’. It looked like a refurbished gastro pub with rooms, perhaps serving walkers and cyclists exploring the Downs. Maybe not that pub, today. Stags and Allingley were a bit close for comfort, but down a side street Fergus could see the sign of the ‘Green Man’. It looked unpretentious, even scruffy, a locals’ local.

Fergus swung towards the Green Man, persuading himself that this was a more likely place to start. He forced himself to walk as upright as possible and to use his crutches for balance rather than support. He’d get rid of the bloody things in a week or so, but at least they were a way of making people give him safe space. Today he didn’t want to take the risk of falling over, not this far from help.

The saloon bar of the Green Man was empty apart from a sallow, paunchy man behind the counter who was reading the pictures in a tabloid paper. He looked up as Fergus entered, lifted one nostril and sniffed in a way that said the interruption was unwelcome. Fergus nodded and looked around, not sure how to begin. On the walls there were photographs of the local hunt and recent but framed newspaper cuttings with headlines that proclaimed ‘Saxon Grave Found’. There was also a lethal-looking, two-handed sword padlocked to a wall. The sword had an oiled, newly-sharpened air as if it were more armament than ornament.

The man behind the bar made a noise with his newspaper and sniffed again to remind Fergus that he was expected to place an order.

“Do you serve coffee?”

“Nah. We only serve humans in here. No cats, dogs…” He looked Fergus up and down, staring at the crutches. “… or coffees. You could try the White Hart on the green.” The lift of the nostril suggested that Fergus was a fool to think it was the sort of place that offered coffee.

“Orange juice, then.” It arrived without comment. “Actually, I wonder if you could help me. I’m looking for someone, a woman.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“She might be local. Probably in her thirties, red hair, called Eadlin?” The man stiffened. “Rides a horse.”

“Now why would you be looking for someone called Eadlin?”

Fergus felt his fingers flexing around the handgrips of his crutches, and swallowed the urge to tell the man to mind his own bloody business. Fergus had seen the reaction to the name, and he forced himself to stay calm. This man knew her.

“She helped me, last year. I wanted to thank her.”

“You’d best ask the landlord. He may know.”

“You’re not the landlord?”

“Nah. Only helping out. Landlord’ll be back later.” Fergus stared at him, wondering why the surly manner was now almost hostile. Hanging behind the man’s shoulder was a mirror, partially obscured by bottles, reflecting the pub’s windows and the street outside. A woman was walking past, her long blonde hair flowing past her face in the breeze. There was something familiar in that hair and in the way the woman walked. He spun around, but too late to see her face.

“Who was that?”

“Who was what?”

“The woman who just walked past. Blonde hair.”

“I didn’t see no-one. And I thought you was looking for a redhead. Bit confused, are we?”

Fergus slammed some coins on the counter and grabbed his crutches, ignoring the snort of derision from behind the bar as he turned away.

The woman was turning the corner onto the green as he reached the street, disappearing from his view. Fergus swung after her but by the time he reached the corner, pulse racing at the burst of effort, she was half way across the green heading towards the Downs road. She was walking fast, faster than Fergus could manage, in the low-heeled stride of a woman with a mission and no time to spare. A stride like one he had seen many times before beneath a very similar cascade of yellow-gold hair.

“Kate?” At first Fergus saw nothing strange in his call. It was like catching sight of an old friend after months of absence, or an almost-certain glimpse of recognition in a foreign city. His shout was a cry of excitement and pleasure, which faded into hurt as the woman ignored his call and walked on without turning, hurrying her step. He followed in an awkward, limping gait that was the fastest he could manage, even with his crutches tapping either side to keep him steady. He willed her to turn around before she walked out of sight.

Fergus’s pace started to slow as the woman reached the edge of the green and passed out of sight up the Downs road, and the illogicality of the moment dawned on him. He came to a halt where he could see up the road, already wincing at his own foolishness. The woman was letting herself into one of the last cottages in the village. The stranger’s face that glared back at him from the safety of her own doorstep was middle-aged, old enough for the long, blonde hair to be an unsuitable vanity.

Fergus sagged as the reality of what he had done hit him, with the ache of unaccustomed exercise already tightening his limbs. He swore at himself and inhaled deeply, forcing himself to get a grip. His mind had tripped, the way he had stumbled at his first attempts to walk, and Fergus hung between his crutches, tossing his head as if insanity was a bothersome fly. The aches became welcome reference points of physical pain that mapped his healing body.

Beyond the cottages, the road climbed uphill between woods and a field for perhaps two hundred yards until it ran past a house standing alone in the narrowing valley. There were cars and a van parked outside the house and a bustle of activity. He focused on the hard reality of the people around the house ahead, welcoming the sounds of distant shouts and the solid thump of heavy tools being thrown into a van. It was as good a place to start as any. He launched himself at the hill, punishing himself with the effort.