Alchemy, Book Two of the Mercian Trilogy Read Online Free

disturbing him.
    “No, it’s not the cross.” She looked up and smiled. “Don’t worry, it’ll come to me.”
    Will nodded, but said, “I think we should stop for this evening.”
    “But it’s still early.” Eloise looked at her watch. “Oh. I can’t believe we’ve been down here an hour.
And
we have to get back.”
    “It won’t take us an hour to get back, but we should go. And you still haven’t told me your discovery.” As he spoke, he gestured for her to lead the way out, not wanting to leave her behind in the chamber, with that darkness and whatever it concealed. And he looked back a couple of times as they walked away, still expecting to see someone, or something, appearing out of the shadows.
    Eloise walked on, sensing none of his greater uneaseas she said, “Of course, I’d completely forgotten.” She waited until he was alongside her and said, “I found out who’s paying Marcus Jenkins’ fees.” She responded to Will’s look of surprise by saying, “Don’t worry, I haven’t been playing the detective – I just overheard him mentioning it to the boy he plays chess with, then researched it online. His fees are being paid by something called The Breakstorm Trust, and guess who one of the trustees is? Someone called Phillip Wyndham! OK, it’s possible it’s not our Wyndham, but …”
    The news hit Will hard, not because it confirmed that Marcus Jenkins had come here as Wyndham’s spy – that much he had never doubted – but because it spoke of another betrayal he’d suspected almost from the start.
    “Oh, I have a feeling it’s the same Wyndham. What time is it?”
    “Nearly nine.”
    “Good, there’s still time. I need to go back into the city tonight.”
    “Then I’ll come with you. We can call Rachel and Chris and ask them …”
    “No. It’s a risk, but we’ll call a taxi and ask it to collect us from here. There’s a telephone here and I have money.”
    “But it’ll take the taxi as long to get here as Racheland …” Eloise stopped herself and said, “How do you have money?”
    Will was bemused by the odd things she found exceptional about his life when she so readily accepted all the true strangeness that surrounded him.
    “Money comes to me here and there, and what belongs to the cathedral belongs to me – I give back whatever I have to the church each time I return to the earth.”
    “OK. But why do you want to take a taxi?”
    “I want to surprise them. There might be a rational explanation, but I want to surprise them nevertheless. I saw brochures and leaflets from The Breakstorm Trust at Chris and Rachel’s house, addressed to Chris. It was one of the occasions when I saw the spirits of the witches, and one of the leaflets blew to the floor – I should have known it was significant.”
    “Oh God, this isn’t good. You felt weird about them the first time we went to The Whole Earth – I should have listened!” Eloise sounded distraught, fearing the same as Will, that Chris and Rachel had betrayed them, clearly upset too at the thought that she had been their defender against Will’s suspicions. “But look, they’re rich, and it’s an educational charity, so they’re absolutely the kind of people who’d be approached to donate.”
    “True. And they did have good reason to act oddly around me.”
    She looked confused for a moment, then the penny dropped and she said, “You mean filming you all those years ago?”
    He thought of the middle-aged Arabella, collapsing at the sight of him, and set against that memory, Chris and Rachel’s behaviour had been much more reasonable.
    But he smiled, saying, “Yes, that’s what I mean. It also has to be said that I couldn’t have reached Asmund without them.”
    “And they’ve helped us so much these last couple of months. I mean, it would have been difficult getting you out here without them.”
    “Also true,” said Will again, while equally aware that it possibly suited Wyndham to have Will