The Dream Weavers by Barbara Erskine (best ereader for pc TXT) 📗

secrets?’ Her blue eyes were hard as agate as she met Bea’s gaze and held it. She raised her hand and made the sign of the cross. ‘Angel or demon, you are not wanted here.’

Then the rain clouds closed around her and she was gone.

The stone slipped from Bea’s fingers with a crash. She sat, not daring to move, her heart thudding under her ribs. The gardens and the shadowy figure of the princess had vanished and with her the scent of woodsmoke that hung over the settlement, the splash of rain and the distant barking of a dog.

Bea’s mouth was dry as she stared round the room, her own room, lit by the flickering candle. Outside, street lights from the town were casting shadows across the gardens behind the canons’ houses. She could hear the rain on the trees and on the rooftops. She stared down at the stone lying on the floor at her feet. Eadburh, daughter of Offa, King of Mercia had seen her, locked eyes with her and spoken to her.

She sat immobile for some time, hardly breathing, frozen with fear. That wasn’t supposed to happen. She should have been protected by her cocoon of light. She should have been safe.

When at last she stood up she stepped shakily over the stone without touching it; leaving it lying where it was and made her way to the door. They had gone. All those people in the past had gone, but even so, she had to get out of the room, had to distance herself from the memory of those angry blue eyes.

12

The house was nestled at the head of a hidden valley. As the car drew to a halt, Simon peered through the windscreen at the grey stone façade. Around them the gardens lay sprawled and tangled in a mass of unruly colour, daffodils everywhere, peering defiantly through collapsed mossy pergolas, stone balustrades, lichen-draped trees and on what might have once been a lawn around the edge of a grey stone fountain, long ago run dry. Simon had been afraid Jane would insist on blindfolding him, the woman’s paranoia about secrecy had been so intense, but now he saw why there had been no need. He hadn’t a clue where they were, whether they were in England or Wales, or Narnia itself.

‘What a fabulous place,’ he breathed. ‘What are they going to do with it?’

‘I don’t think they know themselves.’ Jane switched off the engine. ‘There are quite a few places like this around here in the Marches. Lost in time. Forgotten. Magical.’ She smiled at her companion. ‘It would need a fortune to put it right and I doubt if the young couple who have inherited it had any idea what they had been saddled with.’

That assumption was soon proved wrong. They had heard the car and the massive oak door had opened before Jane and Simon had reached the flagstone steps. They were, Simon reckoned, in their mid-thirties, Kate, obviously pregnant, was tall, with long dark hair, knotted back in a ponytail, framing an aquiline, attractive face with intense brown eyes. Her husband, Phil, was also tall. Slim and wiry, he wore glasses that gave him the look of an academic completely out of his comfort zone. Which he clearly wasn’t. Simon and Jane followed them into an enormous kitchen at the back of the house that looked as though it had last been modernised sometime in the early 1800s. There was however electricity, a small cooker and a kettle and a sink that had modern-day taps.

‘I don’t know if Jane has explained,’ Phil said to Simon as they sat down with cups of coffee. ‘Kate’s great aunt left her this place.’

‘I’ve been coming here every year since I was a child,’ Kate interrupted gently. ‘She knew how much I loved it. I was her only relative. My parents were killed in a car crash several years ago,’ her voice shook slightly but she swallowed hard and carried on, ‘and I have no brothers or sisters, so it’s up to me to try and look after it.’

‘The snag is, there’s no money,’ her husband went on bluntly. ‘So it’s a choice. Keep the stuff and sell the house, or sell the stuff and try and run the house in a way that will pay for itself, as a B & B or a retreat or for glamping, something like that.’

‘I’d never been into the library. It was always kept locked. I didn’t even know it existed.’ Kate took over the story again. ‘We contacted Jane in the hope that some of the old books in there might be valuable.’

‘And I,’ Jane looked over at Simon, ‘found what I suspect are treasures beyond imagining.’ She grinned. ‘I was wondering what to do. Ideally, I should take them back to the cathedral, where we have a strong room with the correct humidity and climate control, although, to be fair, they seem to have been safe here for a very long time. I was going to arrange to consult someone about a valuation when you walked into my office, and suddenly I had someone on the spot who can read Old English far more fluently than I can, which I suspect is what this one particular book is. Kate and Phil would love it if you could take a look and hopefully confirm my suspicions.’

Their coffee drunk, and their hands thoroughly washed on Jane’s instructions, Simon followed the others back up the broad oak staircase to a shadowy landing on the first floor. As they walked down it, the sun broke through outside, shining through the window at the far end of the corridor, illuminating the dust that rose from the wooden floorboards as they walked. He smiled. There was something about dust motes dancing in the sunlight that spelled magic. They were making their way towards what must have been one of the main bedrooms in the house. He had been