The Puzzle Ring (13 page)

‘She didn't!'

‘She did. And of course, when Eglantyne found it, she was beside herself with grief. She cut down her dog and cradled it in her arms, weeping bitterly. The young gardener found her there and, deeply troubled, fetched his spade and dug a grave at the spot where the little hound and his mistress had most loved to sit. Eglantyne had decided she must bury her dog herself, and so she took off her satin kirtle and laid it on the stone seat and then carefully took off her wedding ring, not wishing to clog it with earth. She didn't notice how the ring fell apart into four separate circles of gold. She was too busy
cradling her beloved dog for the last time. She wrapped him in her kirtle, then laid him in the cold earth and, weeping all the while, buried him with her own hands.'

Hannah listened, rapt with interest, thinking of Lady Wintersloe's distress when her cat had been found poisoned. No wonder she had said it was just like Eglantyne and her dog all over again!

‘The gardener brought her a little bush of wild sweetbrier rose, and Eglantyne planted it upon her dog's grave, and then lay there sobbing a long time. At last the gardener raised her up and tried to comfort her. That was how Lord Montgomery found her, in the young gardener's arms, her petticoats stained with dirt, her wedding ring discarded. Lord Montgomery was maddened with jealous rage. He shot the young gardener dead.'

Hannah gasped in surprise. ‘Not really?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid he did, though Eglantyne was screaming and trying to explain. And then he drove her out of the castle, still in her dirt-stained petticoat, and tossed the puzzle ring after her. Tradition has it that she caught the four loops of the ring, still hanging together, and chanted: “Break, break, golden ring, like my heart, like his word, out, out, golden ring, to the four corners of the world.” And then the puzzle ring broke apart and was swept up into a whirlwind and flung in the four directions of the compass. And that was when Eglantyne cast the curse upon the house of Wintersloe.'

‘What was it again?' Hannah asked. ‘Something about fire and swords . . .'

‘By fever, fire, storm and sword, your blood shall suffer this bane. No joy or peace for Wintersloe's lord, till the puzzle ring is whole again. The thorn tree shall not bud, the green
throne shall not sing, until the child of true blood, is crowned the rightful king.' Lady Wintersloe spoke slowly and heavily. Her face was deeply graven with lines.

Hannah was silent. The words tolled like a funeral bell in her imagination.

‘It was Samhain Eve,' Lady Wintersloe said. ‘Samhain marks one of the two great doorways of the Celtic year, for the Celts divided the year into two seasons: the light and the dark. Samhain, of course, was the dark doorway.'

‘Halloween,' Hannah said, remembering what she had read in some of her books.

‘Yes. Samhain is a dangerous and mysterious time. The gateways between the worlds are thrown open, so that the Fair Folk can roam freely through the night and the spirits of the dead can return to earth. It was a powerful time to be casting a curse.'

There was a long silence, and then Hannah asked, ‘So what happened next?'

‘Exhausted and in tears, Eglantyne stumbled towards the fairy knowe, hoping to cross through the gateway to her own world. But her cousin, the black witch, rode out on the Wild Hunt with her host of wicked fairies and drove her away. Eglantyne could not reach the gateway. She could only run, searching for shelter. She tore the hag-stone from around her neck and flung it into the pool at the foot of the yew tree so the black witch could not steal it from her, and then ran to the village for help.'

Lady Wintersloe sighed. ‘In the time of Mary, Queen of Scots, the country folk of Fairknowe believed Halloween was a time when all the witches of Scotland gathered together to cast their spells. So when the strange elfin wife of the Earl
of Wintersloe came stumbling through the snowy darkness, they thought she must be a witch. They captured her and locked her up, and accused her of witchcraft.'

‘And they burnt her,' Hannah said sadly, remembering the tales she had heard.

‘It was the beginning of the Burning Times in Scotland,' her great-grandmother said. ‘Mary, Queen of Scots, had passed the first Witchcraft Act only three years earlier. Eglantyne was one of the first witches to be burnt alive. Lord Montgomery did not know. He had ridden out that very same night, to return to Queen Mary's court, and the black witch ensured no messengers reached him. By the time Lord Montgomery found out, it was too late. Eglantyne was burnt on the night of the winter solstice, near the spring they all call the witch's pool.'

‘That's so sad,' Hannah said.

‘Your father wanted to save her,' Lady Wintersloe said. ‘He thought that perhaps the cave in the fairy hill could be used as a gateway to another time, as well as another world. He thought if he could just work out how to go back to that midwinter night, he could save her from the pyre, and save her unborn child, and maybe find the lost parts of the puzzle ring. He had found the magical hag-stone, you see, in the witch's pool, soon after he brought your mother home to meet us. He thought it was the key that would unlock the fairy gateway. He dared not tell your mother—she does not believe in such things—and he was afraid she'd think him mad or a fool. But he told me . . . he told me everything.'

Lady Wintersloe's thin fingers plucked at her coverlet, and a tear slid down from under the heavy hoods of her eyelids. She dashed it away impatiently.

‘So he went through the gateway,' she continued in a low voice, ‘and he found one part of the puzzle ring, and came back determined to save Eglantyne and her baby. He had a plan . . .'

‘What? What was he going to do?'

‘I don't know. He would not tell me. Too many eyes, too many ears . . .' Her voice trailed away.

‘Belle! Tell me, what happened?'

Her great-grandmother heaved a deep sigh. When she spoke, her voice was so faint Hannah could hardly hear it.

‘He went to the fairy hill that terrible night . . .'

‘The night after I was born?' Hannah demanded.

‘Yes. You were born on the twenty-first of December, and the winter solstice is the twenty-second. He went . . . and he never came back.' Lady Wintersloe leant her head back on her pillow and shut her eyes.

‘But . . . you think maybe he did save her . . . somehow . . . and her baby is alive here and now.' Hannah spoke very slowly, trying to make sense of her great-grandmother's words.

‘All the old tales say that when Eglantyne was burnt, there was a great flash and when the smoke cleared, nothing was left but ashes. No remains at all, not even bones. Nothing but the twisted and melted remains of the iron chains they had used to bind her. Those of fairy kind cannot bear iron, you know, and so she had been kept chained the whole time to stop her from working her magic. It was always said the white flash of fire, the fact that nothing but ashes remained, was proof that she was not human . . . but now I wonder . . . three children as well as you were born that week, here in Fairknowe. Donovan, Max and Scarlett Shaw. And your
father always said he didn't believe in coincidences.' Lady Wintersloe's voice was very faint and she did not open her eyes.

‘But surely . . . surely it's impossible,' Hannah whispered. ‘You can't go back in time, it's just not . . .'

‘Logical?' Lady Wintersloe smiled wearily. ‘When is magic logical, Hannah?'

Hannah left her great-grandmother to sleep, and crept back to her room through the cold, dark, shadowy house, her breath short in her chest. The only sound was the wind and the rain. She changed in the darkness and crept into her bed, glad to find the hot-water bottle had taken the chill off the sheets. Hannah lay quietly for a long time, and then groped under her pillow till she found the hag-stone. She held it to her ear and heard, far away, the ghostly howling of a dog.

Hannah did not sleep well. All night in her dreams she heard the sobbing of the wind about her tower room, carrying words of pleading, and mocking laughter, and the pitiful howl of a long-dead dog. She woke early, jerked out of sleep by the flapping of wings and a staccato rapping on her window. The magpie was fluttering outside, banging against the glass as if trying to get in. Hannah clutched her eiderdown to her, staring in bemusement at the bird. She had seen birds fling themselves against windows before, but never trying to get
in
. Again and again it banged against the glass, staring at Hannah with beady black eyes. She got up and ran to the windows, dragging the curtains across, and at last the fluttering and banging stopped.

It was bitterly cold. Hannah dressed in jeans—the warmest clothing she owned—and put the old key and the hag-stone in her cardigan pockets. As she passed the spot where Jinx had attacked her yesterday morning, she wondered if the cat
had survived the night. It was very strange the way the cat had behaved. As strange as that magpie, banging against the glass. It was all very mysterious and unsettling, and Hannah was all too aware that she was meddling with dangerous things.

She no longer thought that her father's notebook was the scribbling of a madman, or that her great-grandmother was losing her marbles. Too many uncanny and unaccountable things had happened. So Hannah had decided she must somehow decipher her father's notebook, which must, she thought, have been written in some kind of code.

She would have liked to have spoken to her great-grandmother about the curse, and the hag-stone, and her father's notebook, but Roz was in the drawing room too, and Hannah knew she must not talk about the curse in front of her mother in case Roz wanted to leave Wintersloe Castle.

Lady Wintersloe was drinking tea and frowning over the cryptic crossword, as she did every morning. An idea came to Hannah. She sat down and said, ‘Belle, did my dad ever help you with the crossword?'

‘He did indeed, my dear,' Lady Wintersloe answered.

‘Could you teach me how to do it too?' Hannah asked. Roz looked up from her newspaper and frowned, but did not protest as the two heads—one silver and elegantly coiffured, the other copper-red and wild—bent over the newspaper.

‘Now, the first thing you need to know is that, unlike normal crosswords, the clues to the cryptic crosswords are actually hidden inside the sentence, which is why it can often sound a little strange,' Lady Wintersloe said. ‘Usually a cryptic clue has two pointers, or hints, one of which is fairly
understandable and the other one which is hidden. “Cryptic” means “hidden”, you see. So, here, this clue says “Oddball manages to break a saucepan”. What do you think the answer is? It's got eight letters.'

Hannah had no idea.

‘Well, lots of cryptic crosswords use synonyms. Can you think of any other word for “oddball”?'

‘Ummm. Weirdo? Strange? Not quite right in the head. Ummm. Flaky? Crackpot?' As soon as she said the last word, a favourite expression of her mother's, something clicked in Hannah's brain. She looked again at the clue. ‘Saucepan' was another word for ‘pot' and a cracked pot could conceivably be a broken pot. ‘That's it, isn't it? The answer is crackpot.' She quickly counted the letters on her fingers.

‘Well done! See, it's not so hard when you get the knack of it. There are lots of other kinds of word play, though, apart from synonyms. Sometimes the hidden clue is an anagram, which means the letters of the word have been rearranged. Usually you're given a clue like “mixed up” or “rearranged”. Let me see if I can find one for you. All right. Try this one. “The young girl in distress will mix medals.” You can tell the answer is an anagram because of “mix”.'

Hannah stared at the newspaper for ages, but she could not make any sense of the clue. Her great-grandmother picked up her fountain pen and wrote
medals
on the edge of the newspaper. Then underneath it she wrote
damsel
.

‘See? Isn't it clever? A “damsel” is a young girl, and an anagram of “medals”.' She smiled at Hannah's chagrined face. ‘I know, it seems easy when it's explained to you, but it's never so easy when you're trying to figure it out on your own. Some of these cryptics are fiendishly clever.'

She went through the crossword with Hannah, explaining each clue. Many of them still seemed like garbled nonsense to Hannah, but she began to see why her great-grandmother found cryptic crosswords so fascinating.

It was pouring with rain again, and so Roz was easily persuaded to have a morning at home. Hannah took a thermos of hot chocolate and some warm cinnamon rolls up to her father's tower room, and set herself to break her father's code.

She made some progress. Not all of the writing in the notebook was in code. Some pages were hastily scribbled notes, with references to the other books. There was a page of notes on hag-stones, which Hannah read with great interest.