From Fairies and Creatures of the Night, Guard Me Read online

  Magriet smiled a little. “I know. But then, I knew how things would go when I accepted your offer. I could have done the spinning myself, I suspect, for I had done it as a child – thought it would not have been easy. When I told you that I could not, I did not meant myself unable – only I did not wish the king to make of me his very own alchemist. But that is moot now.”

  The creature looked taken aback a moment. “Well, if you can do it, if you could then, why didn’t you?” His voice was like the wind again, more than ever, in fact. He smelled like earth and water.

  “Because… because then they would know that I can and I wouldn’t know a moment’s peace or liberty. What use keeping my life or earning a crown, if incarceration is all that would await me? But you brought peace with you, a world beyond these walls, and a myriad other things.” She glanced down at their hands still clasped.

  There were an awful lot of ways to twist bargains, if one only paid attention.

  Ice-bright eyes flashed in response.

  “Perhaps it is that you do not know my name at all and wish only to make the best of a bad situation?” he said idly.

  There was a knock on her door and the king’s voice outside, being commanding and ominous.

  Magriet cocked her head to the side, considering. Then she said his name, and the world tilted.

  Probably, he would have flown wildly out of the window like a blazing firework despite the fact that their game was over, but she held on to the spindly shape as hard as she could, fingers aching with the strain, while trying not to get dragged across the floor in his wake.

  That would have been one indignity too many, surely. She held on, scrunching her eyes stubbornly and hoping very much that she had the right of it, until the limbs she held were no longer spindly and sharp, though she could feel an elbow digging into her side painfully through the thin fabric of her nightdress.

  When Magriet opened her eyes at last, she saw his face was as it had been on this last night, timeless and handsome. Only now his expression was shaken and his complexion, ashen. His eyes, which were the same as they had been from their first meeting, started into hers, solidly obsidian, like endless dark pools. She saw eternity there and sighed.

  More knocking on her door, louder now.

  Magriet’s mouth was full of rotting leaves a moment. He was a wicked thing, who claimed a hundred names and answered to none if he could help it. He twisted words as deftly as he spun straw into gold and would shamelessly cheat at any bargain, given half the chance. (Though admittedly, she would too, when pressed.)

  But she had had a whole month of nights to speak and observe, and she knew that she had made the choice she wanted. And how good it felt to choose for herself.

  Then another thing occurred to her. She could taste the dark magic all around.

  “A curse,” she said, with a sinking feeling, because curses were a darker shade of magic than she had ever come across before and she did not know what to expect.

  It was not like the magic of spun gold and silvery gowns, which had featured so prominently in her own life and in the beautiful book of tales her mother had once brought her from Paris. This magic was a thing of peasant stories – the kind her nursemaid would tell from her chair near the fire. The kind of force that came with blood and bone and eternity.

  His arms were holding her now. “No. Not quite. Not anymore.” And it was as though, in his turn, he didn’t believe in her, either.

  There was a bevy of voices at her door now – they were trying to break it down.

  His eyes stared up at her in honest disbelief and he touched her hair with a hand that they both pretended was not trembling. He was still a wild magic thing, though perhaps now that she had claimed his name and returned it he no longer needed to wander the night through wind and rain.

  “Arachne. Magriet.”

  She read wonder and hope in his voice, which was still like reeds – such human things, she thought. As though he couldn’t quite comprehend what she had done and why. Her heart swelled like a wave, broke in a splash of relief, hope and love.

  It didn’t much matter that he did not understand her motive just yet: she’d had a month to watch him and learn his name, and he had all eternity to understand.

  Arachne… for certainly he had turned her into something out of the world just as surely as she’d turned him back into his own shape.

  “You’ve lost your crown for good, now.”

  “I’ve never much cared for gold anyway. Or crowns.”

  They stepped towards the window and Magriet savoured the taste of wind and the hint of future rain that blew in into the little room. It tasted of the world beyond.

  “Shall we?”

  When the door flew open at last, there was only an empty room and an open window. The new straw sat untouched in the middle of the chamber. The closed was full of gowns like jewels for a queen that would never be.

  Mrs Winifred

  It was with great reluctance that Mrs Mary Winifred inherited her cousin, Sir Percy Sutton’s, country pile, absurdly named Grimsford Croft.

  Mrs Winifred was of a very pronounced opinion that, at her time of life, estates simply weren’t worth the trouble. She much preferred her own little cottage, which was artfully covered with trailing lilac and which was walking distance from the village. It had grey roof tiles, a nice garden and a growth of ivy over the garden wall. It was equally cosy in the summer and winter, and in the tiny parlour was stood her favourite chair in all the world, inherited from the cottage’s original owners and covered in a pattern of faded blue and yellow flowers.

  She liked nothing better than to sit in it in the evenings and read novels: Mrs Winifred read widely and acerbically. She also owned a typewriter, conveniently placed on a table in the very same parlour. On it, she wrote equally acerbic reviews of the novels she’d read for the local paper. It was very fortunate for the careers and self-esteem of many best-selling novelists that they did not happen to read the Little Uppingstoke Enquirer, and a great loss for many leading London papers and industry journals that Mrs Winifred felt an acute loathing for big city life.

  Had Grimsford Croft, more commonly known simply as ‘Grims’ for the sake of expediency, been any further from Mrs Winifred’s cottage than fifteen minutes’ walk down the lane, that lady would never have been persuaded to set foot in the place at all. As it were, she reluctantly walked over there one balmy June evening and stood for some time examining the old architecture. She thought it dreary, inconveniently placed and full of other intolerable inconveniences of which she preferred not to think.

  Sir Percy had been just awful enough to leave enough funds for staff and maintenance, so that she did not have that perfectly respectable reason to get rid of the house for good. All she had to do, he’d stated jovially in his last will and testament, was take care of things.

  “The cheek of him!” she told her friend Sally Hearne, one of the very few fortunates permitted to address Mrs Winifred simply as ‘Mary’. “It is entirely his own affair that he completely failed to marry that Miss March of his and leave her the place – I see no reason why he should make a posthumous nuisance of himself by foisting the ridiculous house on my shoulders! As if I have nothing better to do with my time than sort out third-floor chandeliers. Some of us have work to do.”

  Mrs Hearne did not point out that Mrs Winifred worked remarkably flexible hours. The editor of the Little Uppingstoke Enquirer certainly would never have dared imply otherwise, or be so ill-bred as to pester Mrs Winifred with deadlines – he had a personal familiarity with the passing fury of Mrs Winifred’s umbrella. But Mrs Hearne had gone to school with Mrs Winifred, attended Mrs Winifred at her wedding, and been present at enough other social occasions to know that there was no point in trying to bring her friend around to anyone’s way of thinking but her own.

  Seated in the garden of her lovely cottage, with bees buzzing indolently in the flower beds, Mrs Winifred lit a cigarette in angry memory of her cousin
. Sir Percy had loathed her habit of smoking almost as much as the late Mr Winifred had. It made her feel a twinge of petty satisfaction as she took her time exhaling the smoke, which swirled up in languorous tendrils.

  “It is a very fine old house,” Sally Hearne suggested diplomatically. “You may enjoy it. You can always sell it and move back here, if you like – or leave it to the steward to maintain.”

  Mrs Winifred snorted scornfully at that, but didn’t explain. She and Mr Winifred had had a long and happy life together precisely because they had not lived at Grims. And there would be no selling the place, or giving it away. She’d feel too guilty doing that. Feeling guilty made her angry, and even her umbrella wouldn’t help her there.

  For the rest of the visit, they talked of local matters and of Mrs Hearne’s daughter, who was determined to crop her hair, and abandon the respectable career of a teacher at a school for girls to try her luck as a jazz singer in London. But even this impressive show of character from a girl Mrs Winifred had previously considered tolerably lacklustre did not distract from the looming shadow of Grims.

  “Oh, fine!” Mrs Winfred snapped two days later, at no one in particular. She put on her best purple hat, picked up some necessities, and walked up to the house, because, as she’d always told Sir Percy, it was ridiculous to send for an automobile when it was just a fifteen-minute walk.

  Geoffrey, Sir Percy’s butler, greeted the new mistress of Grimsford Croft with that extra degree of politeness that was customarily accorded Mrs Winifred, who always carried herself as though she might easily have been empress of the world, if only she’d found it worth the trouble.

  Returning the greeting, the lady looked critically around the marble entrance hall and handed Geoffrey the special equipment she had brought with her. The look in her gimlet eyes dared him to say something congratulatory. He didn’t.

  “Well then,” she said, satisfied at having made her position clear, and swept out of the hall into the nearest parlour, beginning her assessment of the old house.

  It was just as she remembered: grandiose and overdone, the way buildings tended to look after being at the mercy of generations of people who’d tried too hard and didn’t appreciate the modish value of a nice set of lace curtains and flowery upholstery.

  All the brown leather and velvet was making her even more irritable. Furthermore, the house was much too big and it was a wonder Percy had ever been able to locate his slippers.

  Staff edged nervously through the house and scattered like geese as the lady made an impassive inspection of mouldings, woodwork and the state of the furnishings, which she deemed sorry at best. Her grey curls, which had been carefully arranged atop her head, quivering with unmistakable impatience.

  She fixed each member of the Grims staff that she happened to meet on her way through the house with an evaluating, suspicious look. She felt strongly that one could never be too careful, given the nature of the inheritance, but they seemed to pass muster, because no one got introduced to the contents of her handbag.

  Like any person of good, sound sense, Mrs Winifred had taken special care in packing her bag for the occasion. As a result, it was quite heavy and might itself have been used as a very respectable weapon if the situation called for it. Mrs Winifred had read enough mystery novels in her life to know that one should always be on their guard.

  “The…er…houseguest is somewhere on the third floor, madam,” Geoffrey informed the lady carefully. “He has been fed.”

  This was said as though it warranted some sort of considerable praise.

  Mrs Winifred was unimpressed. She was, after all, very much the product of her family history. She tensed her jaw. “He is always on the third floor. That’s where all of grandmother’s best furniture’s kept.”

  She took her time making her way through the house, because she did not appreciate Sir Percy trying to strong-arm her from beyond the grave, and because she found the twitchy staff irritating.

  Really, of all the ridiculous…! she thought, as she stomped through the manor. How dare Percy leave it her! She had never wanted it, and they had a perfectly inane second cousin in Cornwall would have moved in at the drop of a hat!

  No one followed her up to the third floor. Whatever she had in mind, it was not something anyone felt they particularly wanted to witness. The stairs were steeper than she remembered, and her knees hurt just a bit. She took a moment longer to catch her breath than she had done on her last visit. This was somewhat unsettling, but she had no time to indulge in needless fits of the nerves.

  Setting her chin at her most challenging angle, Mrs Winifred struck on ahead, wishing she had her umbrella to hand, because it had always helped her conduct negotiations.

  The door she wanted looked perfectly inconspicuous in a corridor of identical doors, but she knew it instantly with the unfailing instinct of generations of Suttons.

  She flung the door open unceremoniously, and stalked in in a flurry of paisley skirts and petticoats.

  The lilac parlour had always been a very lived-in room – traditionally, it had belonged to the lady of the house. Countless generations of Sutton women had whiled away the years in it, writing letters and journals, and waiting for the rain to stop – which it hardly ever did. It had been a sort of floral refuge for those who’d wanted it.

  Mrs Winifred had always thought it insipid, but the furniture was antique and there was the matter of principle, which wouldn’t let her cede it without a fight.

  “Right,” she said, impatiently. “Where are you?”

  “Where am I ever? Ah. It’s you, Mary. And here I was hoping for fresh blood.” The voice was creaky and mocking.

  It grated her, which she suspected was completely intentional.

  “Well, isn’t that a shame? And I have never yet given you permission to address me by name.”

  “Oh, but you will. Names are such delicious things.”

  Mrs Winifred watched, temper rising, as the family curse dug its scaly claws into the back of her great-grandmother’s settee and ruffled its feathers insolently.

  They had always had a particular dislike of each other: conflict of character, Sir Percy had called it affably, which was neither here nor there. Really, it all came down to the fact that Mrs Winifred didn’t care for birds, and liked demons even less – a fact of which the demon in question was well aware.

  “Stop shredding my furniture or I’ll get out the holy water. You know I will if you push me. Percy has spoiled you, but don’t think you’ll get away with the same impudence with me.” She shifted her handbag for emphasis.

  The air sizzled a little at her words.

  The demon wanted to defy her: she could tell. It also wanted to breathe flames or devour her soul. Beady eyes flamed scarlet rage at her from the settee: on a more menacing specimen it might even have been intimidating.

  Then, with slow, deliberate intent, it removed its claws from the upholstery, one talon at a time.

  “Good boy,” said the new lady of the house with a patronising smile, and took a seat herself.

  As a girl, Mrs Winifred had heard it said many times that it was only right and proper that a certain kind of family should have a certain kind of curse. At Grims, the family curse had taken the form of the demon, who had been around almost as long as they had the estate.

  If family annals, and the demon itself, were to be believed – both arguably somewhat dubious sources, some idiot down in the dregs of Mrs Winifred’s family tree had decided it would be a grand and very sporting idea to conjure a demon.

  After all, it was what all the other sorcerers were doing, and he saw no reason why he was less of an alchemist than John Dee or Edward Kelly. Unfortunately, this long-dead Sutton, ironically nicknamed George the Intrepid for his undeniably inventive approach to alchemy, had had a very vague notion of sorcerers and an even vaguer notion of demons.

  So he’d bought the book and done all the bits with the chanting at midnight and burying things at crossroads, and w
hatever other fanciful tripe sorcerers indulged in. Only, he obviously wasn’t a very good sorcerer, because he’d made a dreadful mess of the whole business.

  Mrs Winifred had not the least interest in sorcery herself, because she generally felt it to be a rather tasteless occupation, but she felt sure that she would have done a much better job of it than her illustrious ancestor.

  He’d got the part with the portal right, and even got the demon to appear in what had then been the great hall. Unfortunately, he had rather floundered in the execution and instead of a great towering force of unholy malice, he had ended up with a fairly average yellow and red parrot, albeit still in possession of the full contingent of its demonic malice. In this shape, the demon was almost as inept as the sorcerer.

  To add insult to injury, his power had been lost somewhere along the way so that he was quite unable to grant wishes or even conjure suitably convincing illusions. George the Intrepid did not stop to ask questions before signing a contract (in red ink, because blood made him nauseous), trading his immortal soul for unbelievable power, endless riches and the hand of the young Queen Elizabeth I.

  Stuck as it was, the demon could not actually claim the soul, or fulfil its end of the bargain – nor could it get home until a soul had been claimed.

  All the sorcerer had got for his trouble, and an ounce of outrageously over-priced nutmeg used in the conjuring, was a temperamental new pet. One who always took the first opportunity to bite anyone who wasn’t paying attention, and who tried to trick you into giving it permission to go on rampages and wreak mayhem in the surrounding countryside.

  George never got his hands on the crown or the riches, though he took a great and spiteful pleasure in the many unpleasantries suffered by the Earl of Essex, George’s distant cousin Robert Dudley, and any other number of the queen’s favourites.

  The would-be sorcerer had eventually died, two years before the queen, and down went the parrot along the meandering line of inheritance, from heir to heir. The different owners of Grimsford Hall had taken diverse and creative means of dealing with the family demon, from trying to regain lost family fortunes by making an exhibition of him in the reign of Charles II, to being utterly mortified by the whole thing under the aegis of Queen Victoria. Nothing ever seemed to work out as intended.