The Dragon Charmer Read Online Free Page A

Wicklow’s cooking with an appetite that belied his thinness.
    “Great-
Cousin
—?”
    “He left us this house,” Fern explained. “His relationship to Daddy was so obscure we christened him Great-Cousin. It seemed logical at the time. Anyway, he had several sisters who preceded him into this world and out of it: I’m sure the youngest was an E. Esme … no. No. Eithne.”
    “I don’t suppose there’s a romantic mystery attached to her?” Gaynor said, half-ironic, half-wistful. “Since I’ve got her room, you know.”
    “No,” Fern said baldly. “There isn’t. As far as we know, she was a fluttery young girl who became a fluttery old woman, with nothing much in between. The only definite information we have is that she made seedcake that tasted of sand.”
    “She must have had a lover,” Will speculated. “The family wouldn’t permit it, because he was too low class. They used to meet on the moor, like Heathcliff and Cathy only rather more restrained. He wrote bad poems for her—you’ll probably find one in your room and she pressed the wildflower he gave her in her prayer book. That’ll be around somewhere, too. One day they were separated in a mist, she called and called to him but he did not come—he strayed too far, went over a cliff, and was lost.”
    “Taken by boggarts,” Fern suggested.
    “So she never married,” Will concluded, “but spent the next eighty years gradually pining away. Her sad specter still haunts the upper story, searching for whichever book it was in which she pressed that bloody flower.”
    Gaynor laughed. She had been meaning to ask about Alison again, but Will’s fancy diverted her, and it slipped her mind.
    It was gone midnight when they went up to bed. Gaynor slept unevenly, troubled by the country quiet, listening in her waking moments to the rumor of the wind on its way to the sea and the hooting of an owl somewhere nearby. The owl cry invaded her dreams, filling them with the noiseless flight of pale wings and the glimpse of a sad ghost face looming briefly out of the dark. She awoke before dawn, hearing the gentleness of rain on roof and windowpane. Perhaps she wasstill half dreaming, but it seemed to her that her window stood high in a castle wall, and outside the rain was falling softly into the dim waters of a loch, and faint and far away someone was playing the bagpipes.
       In her room on the floor below, Fern, too, had heard the owl. Its eerie call drew her back from that fatal world on the other side of sleep, the world that was always waiting for her when she let go of mind and memory, leaving her spirit to roam where it would. In London she worked too hard to think and slept too deeply to dream, filling the intervals of her leisure with a busy social life and the thousand distractions of the metropolis; but here on the edge of the moor there was no job, few distractions, and something in her stirred that would not be suppressed. It was here that it had all started, nearly twelve years ago. Sleep was the gateway, dream the key. She remembered a stair, a stair in a picture, and climbing the stair as it wound its way from Nowhere into Somewhere, and the tiny bright vista far ahead of a city where even the dust was golden. And then it was too late, and she was ensnared in the dream, and she could smell the heat and taste the dust, and the beat of her heart was the boom of the temple drums and the roar of the waves on the shore. “I must go back!” she cried out, trapped and desperate, but there was only one way back and her guide would not come. Never again. She had forfeited his affection, for he was of those who love jealously and will not share. Nevermore the cool smoothness of his cloud-patterned flank, nevermore the deadly luster of his horn. She ran along the empty sands looking for the sea, and then the beach turned from gold to silver and the stars crisped into foam about her feet, and she was a creature with no name to bind her and no flesh to